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Brier   /brˈaɪər/   Listen
Brier

noun
1.
Tangled mass of prickly plants.  Synonyms: brier patch, brierpatch.
2.
A thorny stem or twig.
3.
Eurasian rose with prickly stems and fragrant leaves and bright pink flowers followed by scarlet hips.  Synonyms: briar, eglantine, Rosa eglanteria, sweetbriar, sweetbrier.
4.
A very prickly woody vine of the eastern United States growing in tangled masses having tough round stems with shiny leathery leaves and small greenish flowers followed by clusters of inedible shiny black berries.  Synonyms: briar, bullbrier, catbrier, greenbrier, horse-brier, horse brier, Smilax rotundifolia.
5.
Evergreen treelike Mediterranean shrub having fragrant white flowers in large terminal panicles and hard woody roots used to make tobacco pipes.  Synonyms: briar, Erica arborea, tree heath.



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"Brier" Quotes from Famous Books



... was slow and painful. Dangling brier vines drew blood from arms and face, and sharp thorns repeatedly lacerated hands and knees. At each move forward he had to pause and remove the dead branches and twigs from his path lest their cracking should betray him ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... queer little garden and puzzling to a stranger, the few flowers being put at a disadvantage by so much greenery; but the discovery was soon made that Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett

... close at hand. At that instant the stone I had put faith in failed me basely and rolled: one foot went in, a dead twig caught my hair, part of my dress remained with the sharp end of a broken branch, I came to one knee (but not in a devotional spirit); I struck the ground with one hand and a brier-bush with the other, but I did not drop my glass, and I reached my ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller

... through these set the sun, so that on the hottest days the garden was in sufficient shadow by the time the morning's work was done. There was a little grass-plot, large enough for a basket-chair and a rug. There was a hedge of Penzance sweet-brier opposite the backdoor and the window at which Langholm wrote, and yet this hedge broke down in the very nick and place to give the lucky writer a long glimpse across a green valley, with dim woods upon the opposite hill. And then there were the roses, planted by the last cottager—a ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung

... blew three blasts upon his horn; His men did make reply, And came all quickly to his call, Through brake and brier ...
— The Story and Song of Black Roderick • Dora Sigerson

... say you'll be very comfortable. There's a little window at one end, but it don't give much air, and this August sun is apt to get a little warm on the clapboards. And I don't suppose it smells very well in there; but the coon can't help that; it's the way nature scented him; she hadn't any sweet brier handy at the time. And be careful not to step on him. He's not very good-tempered, but I reckon he won't bite you if ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells

... the glen there was very little snow, only a few veins and patches here and there, threading and seaming the steep, as if a white-footed hare had been coursing about. Little stubby brier shoots, and clumps of russet bracken, and dead heather, ruffling like a brown dog's back, broke the dull surface of withered herbage, thistle stumps, teasels, rugged banks, and naked brush. Down in the bottom the noisy brook was scurrying ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... to darn. Jest let me lay my stitches in colors, in the shape of a flower, an' I can darn ez well ez the next one, but I do despise to fill up holes jest to be a-fillin'. Yes, ez you say, them silver-mounted brier-wood pipes is mighty purty, but he smokes so much ez it is, I don't know ez I want to encourage him. Besides, it seems a waste o' money to buy a Christmus gif' thet a person has to lay aside when company comes in, an' a silver-mounted pipe ain't ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart

... Let him that is a true-born gentleman, And stands upon the honour of his birth, If he suppose that I have pleaded truth, From off this brier pluck a ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... thorns, which is rare, and not so commonly seen: "As the lily among thorns," saith Christ, "so is my love among the daughters." (Cant 2:2) By thorns, we understand the worst and best of men, even all that are destitute of the grace of God, for "the best of them is a brier, the most upright" of them "as a thorn-hedge." (Micah 7:4, 2 Sam 23:6) I know that she may be called a lily amongst thorns also, because she meets with the pricks of persecution. (Eze 2:6, 28:24) She may also ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... of his queer green eye over his shoulder he sauntered by a devious path out of the dell. Forgetful of thorn and brier, trickery and wantonness, we clambered down after him, out of the moonlight, into a dark, clear alley, soundless and solitary amid ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare

... wefts, has got into my head; not "bee-bonneted," but bird-bonneted, I go. Yes, this day shall be given to the king, as our country-folk say, when they go a-pleasuring. I am off with the little wool-gatherers, to see what thorn and brier and fern-stalk and willow-catkin will give me. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... a little patch of garden ground with a brier hedge all round it, in that byway which lies between Laeken and Brussels, in the heart of flat, green Brabant, where there are beautiful meadows and tall, flowering hedges, and forest trees, and ...
— Bebee • Ouida

... a great dumb dinner-party. A cold suck of wind just proved its existence, by toothaches on the north side of all faces. The spiders, having been weather-be-witched the night before, had unanimously agreed to cover every brake and brier with gossamer-cradles, and never a fly to be caught in them; like Manchester cotton-spinners madly glutting the markets in the teeth of 'no demand.' The steam crawled out of the dank turf, and reeked off the flanks ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... ready. The boys were nothing loath to fall to on the sea banquet the old salt spread before them, and so busy were they despatching the sailor's cooking, that it was not till after they concluded the meal and Bluewater Bill had his old brier pipe going that they came down to the discussion of what each of the boys had uppermost in his mind—namely, the history of Bluewater Bill's discovery of the lost treasure galleon of the ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... second time, when nearly dead, cut down and questioned as before: but still asserted his ignorance. The same inhuman part was acted on him a third time, but with no better success; for the brave fellow still continued faithful to his master, who squatted and trembled in his place of torment, his brier bush, and saw and heard all that ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... bedchambers, where men had been born, and died; where royal guests had lain in long-ago summer nights, with big bow-pots of elder-flowers set on the hearth to ward off fever and evil spells. The terrace, where in old days dames in ruffs had sniffed the sweet-brier and southern-wood of the borders below, and ladies, bright with rouge and powder and brocade, had walked in the swing of their hooped skirts the terrace now echoed to the sound of brown boots, and the tap-tap ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit

... alone by brier and stone I ran that road unshod, So I might know instead of her The pains ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various

... cabin. When it came night and the hemlocks began to sob they had not returned. The little man sat close to his companion, the campfire, and encouraged it with logs. He puffed fiercely at a heavy built brier, and regarded a thousand shadows which were about to assault him. Suddenly he heard the approach of the unknown, crackling the twigs and rustling the dead leaves. The little man arose slowly to his feet, his clothes refused to fit his back, his pipe dropped from his mouth, his knees smote ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane

... over dale, Through brush, through brier, Over park, over vale, Through flood, through fire, I do wander everywhere, Swifter than the moon's sphere; And I serve the fairy queen, To dew her orbs upon ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb

... come, white moons may go— She sleeps where early blossoms blow: Around her headstone many a seed Shall sow itself; and brier and weed Shall grow to hide it from men's heed, And none ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein

... is practical, and merits consideration. In this working-day world of ours there is so much unavoidable pain, and so much annoyance which we cannot overlook, that sensible people cushion corners and shrink aside from brier-pricks. We do ourselves actual physical harm when we lose temper; the tart speech takes virtue out of us. A woman would better fatigue herself by righting an untidy chamber than scold a servant for neglecting it. Foreigners comment surprisedly upon the "anxious faces" of American ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... Pussy Cat, and she went away down by a brookside. There she saw a wee Robin Redbreast hopping on a brier bush. ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various

... of delicacies," he said aloud, addressing the wide silence complainingly. He drew a faded tobacco-bag and a brier pipe from his coat pocket and filled and lit the pipe. "One taste—and they quit," he finished, gazing solemnly upon the shining little town down the road. He twirled the pouch mechanically about his finger, and then, suddenly regarding it, patted it caressingly. ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington

... From "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush." Illustrated from drawings made by Frederic C. Gordon. With a new portrait, and an introduction by the author. 12mo, ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren

... as I looked in from the porch of the doctor's residence upon the doctor's family gathered together in the library after dinner. The doctor himself, snuggled down in a vast easy-chair, was dividing his attention between a brier pipe and the odes of Propertius; his wife, beside him in her rocker, smiled and smiled again over the quaint humor of Mrs. Gaskell's "Cranford"; upon yonder settee, Francis Mahony Methuen, the oldest son, was deep in the perusal of Wilson's ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field

... the West Gallery the first picture that meets the eye is Mr. Watts's Love and Death, a large painting, representing a marble doorway, all overgrown with white-starred jasmine and sweet brier-rose. Death, a giant form, veiled in grey draperies, is passing in with inevitable and mysterious power, breaking through all the flowers. One foot is already on the threshold, and one relentless hand is extended, while Love, a beautiful boy with lithe brown limbs and ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... The Bonnie Brier Bush, by Mr. Ian Maclaren—a work too popular to excite suspicion; and arranged the method of secret correspondence with great rapidity. Logan then rushed up to Merton's room, hastily communicated the ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... the cleverest setter in the country. My master himself was a capital sportsman, and I was as proud of him as he was of me. When I had become sufficiently perfect to be his companion, we used to range together untired "over hill, over dale, through bush, through brier," he doing his part and I mine, and bringing home between us such quantities of game as no one else could boast. This was my real business, but it was no less my pleasure. I entered into it thoroughly. To point ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland

... which had been subscribed for a few days previous by the persistent, efforts of an indefatigable canvasser. A white tidy covered the back of the rocking-chair, and another the back of the lounge. An old-fashioned pitcher filled with sweet-brier and some of the old-time flowers, such as bachelors' buttons, London pride, blue rocket and jump-up-johnnie stood on a kind of sideboard and showed a desire to make the ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... the dew-bedabbled wretch Turn, and return, indenting with the way; Each envious brier his weary legs doth scratch, Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay: For misery is trodden on by many, And being ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin

... breeze is delicious," she said, as the wind whirled the aromatic smoke of his cigarette up into her face. "Don't move, Mr. Siward; I like it; there is to me always a faint odour of sweet-brier in the melange. ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... butterfly-weed, like a coal of fire, Blurs orange-red through bush and brier; Where the pennyroyal and mint smell sweet, And blackberries ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein

... She came off on the high tide!" cried Pierce; and instantly there was a stampede from the hillside towards the beach. Pell-mell the mutineers tumbled down over bush and brier at a breakneck speed to reach the boat that tossed idly on the ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson

... swinging on brier and weed, Near to the nest of his little dame, Over the mountain-side or mead, Robert of Lincoln is telling his name: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink, Snug and safe is this nest of ours, Hidden among the summer flowers, ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various

... bucket, and a diamond-paned dairy-window swinging to and fro in the faint breeze. Around the irregular door-stone, the grass grew close and green; while nodding in at the window, and waving from the low eaves, and clambering upon the roof, a tangle of white and sweet-brier roses, of woodbine and maiden's-bower, lent a rare grace to the simple home, and loaded the air with ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin

... and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. And instead of the thorn shall come up the fir-tree; and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and man shall nowhere crush man on all the holy earth. Tomorrow's sun shall rise," said the stranger, "and it shall flood these dark kopjes with light, and the rocks shall glint in it. ...
— Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland • Olive Schreiner

... people, maybe she will feed you. She is tall and slim, her eyes are brownish purple and her hair is green, and by this you may know her—she has five fingers on one hand and seven on the other. Her house is in the brier thicket; she climbs to the roof and stands there all day waving her hands, and shouting out in wood-talk, 'There are cocoanuts ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson

... to yonder howe, bonnie Peggie, O! Down ayont the gowan knowe, bonnie Peggie, O! When the siller burn rins clear, When the rose blooms on the brier, An' where there is none to hear, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... nothing round his neck. Round his waist there was a strap or belt, from the front of which hung a small pouch, and, behind, a knife in a case. And stuck into a loop in the belt, made for the purpose, there was a small brier-wood pipe. As he dashed his hat off, wiped his brow, and threw himself into a rocking-chair, he certainly was rough to look at, but by all who understood Australian life he would have been taken to be a gentleman. He was a young squatter, well known west of the Mary River, in Queensland. Harry ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope

... love through the air! I will not lend that savage groom, To break his fall, one downy plume! No!—deep amid disjointed stones, The wolves shall batten on his bones, And then shall his detested plaid, By bush and brier in mid-air stayed, Wave forth a banner fail and free, ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... stepping softly that the old man might not hear him. Margret, in the room, watched them as they went, seeing how gentle the rough, burly man was with her father, and how, every time they passed the sweet-brier, he bent the branches aside, that they might not touch his face. Slow, childish tears came into her eyes as she saw it; for the school-master was blind. This had been their regular walk every evening, since it grew too cold for them to go down under the lindens. The Doctor ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis

... and corporeally redundant, sat in the hammock fanning herself and uttering screams of laughter at jests emanating from the boarding-house cut-up—a blonde young man with rah-rah hair and a brier pipe. ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers

... music growing nearer that quickened her breathing, or only the closeness of the night, shut in between the wild grape-vine curtains, swung from one dark cedar column to another? She caught the sweet-brier breath as she hurried by, and now, a loop in the leafy curtain revealed the pond lying black in a hollow of the hills, with a whole heaven of stars reflected in it. Old John stumbled along over the stones, ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... season was spent in learning the lay of the land, and the bramble and brier mazes. And Rag learned them so well that he could go all around the swamp by two different ways and never leave the friendly briers at any place for ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton

... Thomas Cadge was darkened with disapproval, he shifted his stubby brier pipe to the other corner of his mouth, edged a little from his seat on the sunny front stoop and, craning his neck around the corner of his house, revealed an unwashed area extending ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various

... and the neglected bramble nigh, Offers its berries to the schoolboy's hand, In vain—they grow too near the dead. Yet here, Nature, rebuking the neglect of man, Plants often, by the ancient mossy stone, The brier rose, and upon the broken turf That clothes the fresher grave, the strawberry vine Sprinkles its swell with blossoms, and lays forth Her ruddy, pouting fruit. * * ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant

... charming wild roses, not natives, but naturalized immigrants from foreign lands, that have escaped from gardens, is Shakespeare's CANKER-BLOOM, the lovely DOG ROSE or WILD BRIER (R. canina), that spreads its long, straggling branches along the roadsides and banks, covering the waste lands with its smooth, beautiful foliage, and in June and July with pink or white roses. Because it lacks the fragrance ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... evening, snow was falling at Medicine Bend, but Callahan, as he studied the weather bulletins, found consolation in the fact that it was not raining, and resting his heels on a table littered with train-sheets he forced the draft on a shabby brier and meditated. ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman

... (syn R. Eglanteria).—The Austrian Brier, or Yellow Eglantine. South Europe, 1596. This belongs to the Sweet Brier section, and is a bush of from 3 feet to 6 feet high, with shining dark-green leaves, and large, cup-shaped flowers that are yellow or sometimes tinged with reddish-brown within. The Scarlet Austrian ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster

... my head that I would kiss one handsome young girl before I died, and now was my chance. She never would know it, and I should carry the remembrance of it with me into the grave, and a rose perhaps grow out of my dust, as a brier did out of Lord Lovers, in memory of that immortal moment! Would it wake her from her trance? and would she see me in the flush of my stolen triumph, and hate and despise me ever after? Or should I carry ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)

... in them, that we should be particularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which on minds of a different cast makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the fox-glove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers (p. 101) in an autumnal ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... Come I will fasten on this sleeue of thine: Thou art an Elme my husband, I a Vine: Whose weaknesse married to thy stranger state, Makes me with thy strength to communicate: If ought possesse thee from me, it is drosse, Vsurping Iuie, Brier, or idle Mosse, Who all for want of pruning, with intrusion, Infect thy sap, and liue on ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... imitator, and may be said to owe his literary existence to Mr. J. M. Barrie, is both artistic and sympathetic. His work conveys to the reader the impression of an encounter with Barrie in a dream. The keen edges of the original are blurred and partly lost, but the author of 'Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush' has many excellent qualities, and if he had had the good fortune or the initiative to be first in the field, his work would have been almost wholly charming. As it is, he still shows much faculty of intuition and of heart, and his work is all sympathetically honest His emotions are genuine, ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray

... leguminosae of the insect kingdom. This floweriness is maintained with delightful variety all the way up through rocks and bushes to the snow—violets, lilies, gilias, oenotheras, wallflowers, ivesias, saxifrages, smilax, and miles of blooming bushes, chiefly azalea, honeysuckle, brier rose, buckthorn, and eriogonum, all meeting and blending ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir

... its gray branches, I seemed to see my poor little blue-ginghamed, pigtailed self crouched at Judge Crittenden's feet on the front steps, sobbing my lonely heart away while he smoked his sorrow down with a long brier pipe, and the Byrd chirped his little three-year-old protest in concert with us both. Most eighteen-year-old men would have resented having a motherless little brother and a long-legged girl neighbor eternally at their heels, but Sam never had; or, ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess

... you walk, sir?" She turned into a narrow path in the shadow of arches, clothed by a great Austrian brier, on which here and there a yellow flame still glowed. "Mr. Boyce—when I meet you in company you shrink and cower detestably; when I meet you alone, you fence with me impudently enough and shrewdly; and always you avoid me while you ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey

... piece of marshy ground with an abundance of skunk cabbage and a fairly dense growth of saplings, and near by a tangle of green brier and blackberry, and you will be pretty sure to have it tenanted by a pair of yellowthroats," says Dr. Abbott, who found several of their nests in skunk-cabbage plants, which he says are favorite cradles. No animal cares to touch this plant if it can be avoided; ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan

... Landor filled the brier bowl and pressed the brown flakes tight with his little finger. The match he lit crackled explosively, and he started at the unexpected sound as one whose nerves were on edge. The pipe aglow, he still sat for a moment ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge

... the ghastly stillness, like an awkward guest at a great dumb dinner-party. A cold suck of wind just proved its existence, by toothaches on the north side of all faces. The spiders having been weather-bewitched the night before, had unanimously agreed to cover every brake and brier with gossamer- cradles, and never a fly to be caught in them; like Manchester cotton-spinners madly glutting the markets in the teeth of 'no demand.' The steam crawled out of the dank turf, and reeked off the flanks and ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley

... cigar stubs in the spittoon, the solemn man laid the brier wood pipe where he got it, and ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck

... to match the sky, Columbine with horn of honey, Scented fern, and agrimony, Clover, catchfly, adder's tongue, And brier-roses, dwelt among." ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs

... with enormous strides, Rebellious mutterings and oaths besides, O'er clover-field and fallow, bank and brier, Pursu'd the nearest cut, and fann'd the fire That burnt within him.—Soon the Hall he spied, And the grey willows by the water side; Nature cried "halt!" nor could he well refuse; Stop, Gilbert, breathe awhile, and ask the news. "News?" cried a stooping grandame ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield

... began, with greater zeal than before. He was hungry now; his nose grew keen as a brier for every trail. A faint smell stopped him, so faint that the keenest-nosed dog or fox would have passed without turning, the smell of a brooding partridge on her eggs. There she was, among the roots of a pine, sitting close and blending perfectly ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long

... They were well trained, swift, fresh, keen-scented, 'excellent' men-hunters, and though the poor fugitive in his frenzied rush for liberty, strained every muscle, yet they gained upon him, and after dashing through fens, brier-beds, and the tangled undergrowth till faint and torn, he sinks, and the blood-hounds are upon him. What blood-vessels the poor struggler burst in his desperate push for life—how much he was bruised and lacerated in his plunge through the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... thenceforward all summer, in the sound of the sea, And at night, under the full of the moon, in calmer weather, Over the hoarse surging of the sea, Or flitting from brier to brier by day, I saw, I heard at intervals, the remaining one, the he-bird, The solitary guest ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... across his forehead, brushing the sweat away from above his quiet eyes. He moistened the tip of his thumb and slid it along the blade of his hemp hook—he was using that for lack of a scythe. Turning, he walked back to the edge of the brier thicket, sat down in the shade of a black walnut, threw off his tattered head-gear, and, reaching for his bucket of water covered with poke leaves, lifted it to his lips and drank deeply, gratefully. Then he drew a whetstone from his pocket, ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen

... Green Mountains south to central Vermont, New Brunswick and to Minnesota. Found also in Alaska and Greenland. This much-coveted fern has a singularly sweet and lasting fragrance, compared by some to strawberries, by others to new-mown hay and sweet brier leaves. We have seen herbarium specimens that were mildly and pleasantly odorous after several years. When growing the fern may be tested "by its fragrance, its stickiness and its beautiful brown curls." Evergreen. Spores ripen ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton

... the end of the house beside the brier bush, where George was to sit on summer afternoons before he died, and a flash passed between Domsie and the lad's mother. Then she knew that it was well, and fixed her eyes on the letter, but Whinnie, his thumbs in his ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren

... To be with Mrs. Tyrrell one whole day, Mrs. Levice said was a liberal education,—so bright, so uncomplaining, so ambitious for her children was she, and such a help and inspiration to her hard-worked husband. Mr. Levice tramped about the woods with Tyrrell and brier-wood pipes, and appreciated the moral bravery of a man who struggled on with a happy face and small hope for any earthly rest. But the children!—Floy with her dreamy face and busy sketch-book, Will with his halo of golden hair, his ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf

... house were exactly suited to each other, and seemed to share the same fragrant atmosphere, so that wherever her courtiers met her, and flung their arms round her neck, they were instantly reminded of sweet-brier and honeysuckle, jars of dried rose leaves, and all the other delicious scents of Brenlands. The children never noticed that there were streaks of silver in her hair, or that on her left hand she wore a mourning ring; ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery

... Repentance. With the speed of fire Orlando followed where the enchantress fled, Rending and scattering tree and bush and brier, And leaving wide the vestige of his tread. Nearer he drew, with feet that could not tire, And strong in hope to seise her as she sped. How vain the hope! Her form he seemed to clasp, But soon as seized, she vanished ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock

... the recital of his own misfortunes. Mount and Murphy looked up with sympathetic grins; Elerson had fallen asleep against the side of the shack, a bit of pie, half gnawed, clutched in his brier-torn fist. ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers

... muscles stood out like brass, and whose eyes burned like fire. He sprang upon the boy king and stabbed him in the back. The affrighted horse dashed away, dragging the bleeding body by the stirrup,—on, on, on, over rut and rock, bush and brier. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth

... the brier and thorn, The barley and the wheat shall spring, And valleys standing thick with corn (Praise God, my ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... Clay-Randolph came to Idlewild to stay, how long I did not dream. Nor did I dream how often he was to come, for he was like an erratic comet. Fresh he would arrive, and cleanly clad, from grand folk who were his friends as I was his friend, and again, weary and worn, he would creep up the brier-rose path from the Montanas or Mexico. And without a word, when his wanderlust gripped him, he was off and away into that great mysterious underworld he called ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London

... the thing whereto I sent it. For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace. The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, And all the trees of the fields shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, And instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: And it shall be to the Lord for a name, For an everlasting sign that ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... nothing in the tangle of brier and saw-palmetto, but after a while he became aware of a wild-cat, tufted ears flattenend, standing in the shadow of a striped bush and looking at him out of the greenest eyes ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... hundred miles of barren hills, swampy kevirs, brier-covered wastes, and salty deserts, with here and there some kanot-fed oases. To the south lay the lifeless desert of Luth, the "Persian Sahara," the humidity of which is the lowest yet recorded on the face of the globe, and compared with which "the Gobi of China and the Kizil-Kum ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... direction of Jacksonboro, and camped thirteen miles beyond Lumpkin's Station. On this same day, Baird and Kilpatrick, after some fighting with Wheeler's cavalry, drove the enemy from Waynesboro and across Brier creek. ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear

... the berry, On spray of haw and tuft of brier, Then, wandering incendiary, You set the maple ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser

... wind came lumbering in, Bearing a faint Pacific din, Our evening mail, swift at the call Of its Postmaster General; Laden with news from Californ', Whate'er transpired hath since morn, How wags the world by brier and brake From hence ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... O where, what can that be? Weedio-weedio: there again! So tiny a trickle of song-strain; And all round not to be found For brier, bough, furrow, or green ground Before or behind or far or at hand Either left either right Anywhere in the sunlight. Well, after all! Ah but hark— 'I am the little woodlark. . . . . . . . To-day the ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins

... waste-basket of La Ferte, which means that he wrote because he liked to; which again means that he was essentially an artist—for which reason I liked him more than a little. He lumbered off one day—I hope to his brier-patch, and to his children, and to his confreres, and to all things excellent and livable and highly desirable to ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... leaped on his horse, exclaiming, "I must catch my enchanted princess;" and giving his steed the rein, away they flew on the track of the doe; away they flew over fallen trunks and through brier and copse, until the panting steed would have recoiled before a wide hedge—but the emperor cried, "Over it! over it! The princess is beyond!" and the foaming horse gathered up his forelegs for the leap. He made a spring, but missed, and with a loud crash, horse and rider fell into the ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... In Shakespeare's time the "Brier" was not restricted to the Sweet Briar, as it usually is now; but it meant any sort of wild Rose, and even it would seem from No. 9 that it was applied to the cultivated Rose, for there the scene is laid in the Temple Gardens. In some of the passages ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... was buried in Marie's kirk, The tither in Marie's quire, And out o' the tane there grew a birk, And out o' the tither a brier. ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)

... little buttery, and therein A little bin, Which keeps my little loaf of bread Unchipt, unflead; Some little sticks of thorn or brier Make ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... enfiladed, left-faced, and left the spot. After enticing the enemy for three miles or so we struck a brier-patch and had to sit down. When we were ordered to throw up our toes and surrender we obeyed. Five of my best staff-officers fell, ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... upon the bench they found a little old man, his legs extended, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, and a look of calm meditation upon his round and placid face. Between his teeth was a black brier pipe, ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne

... through half-closed eyes. Occasionally he opened them a little wider and glanced round the comfortable, well-furnished room, or stared with a cold gleam of hatred at Fletcher as he sat sucking stolidly at his brier pipe. It was a comfortable room and a valuable house, half of which belonged to Trayton Burleigh; and yet he was to leave it in the morning and become a rogue and a wanderer over the face of the earth. James Fletcher had said so. James Fletcher, with the ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs

... aristocracy did not do well on this soil. Baronial castles, with hot and cold water in them, were often neglected, because the colonists would not forsake their own lands to the thistle and blue-nosed brier in order to come and cook victuals for the baronial castles or sweep out the baronial halls and wax the baronial floors for a journeyman juke who ate custard pie with a knife and drank tea from his saucer through a ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye

... had climbed the summit of the hill, descended on the other side, and followed the road through the woods until they reached the brier patches, fruit trees; and the garden of vegetables, with big beds of sage, rue, wormwood, hoarhound, and boneset. From there to the lake sloped the sunny fields of mullein and catnip, and the earth was molten gold with ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter

... coaxing, delicate, And arts that never tire, They tie the rose-trees each to each, The lilac to the brier, Making for graceless things a grace, ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge

... profit, or pleasure, or honor, or the like. Therefore why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me? And if any man should do wrong merely out of ill-nature, why, yet it is but like the thorn or brier, which prick and scratch, because ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey

... good, till their patrimonies be consumed, and that they have spent more in seeking than the thing is worth, or they shall get by the recovery." So that he that goes to law, as the proverb is, [516]holds a wolf by the ears, or as a sheep in a storm runs for shelter to a brier, if he prosecute his cause he is consumed, if he surcease his suit he loseth all; [517]what difference? They had wont heretofore, saith Austin, to end matters, per communes arbitros; and so in Switzerland ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... mountains. They believed the range might yet show a rift at this end which their wagons could traverse. But the Jayhawkers turned to the north, seeking some outlet through the Panamints at that end of the range. One family followed them. J. W Brier, a minister from a little frontier community in the Middle West, left the other section with his wife and three children in the hope that the young men might find a route ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt

... turn at de een' er de row, one er de plough-lines got under de mule's hin' leg. Dan retch' down ter git de line out, sorter keerless like, w'en de mule haul' off en kick him clean ober de fence inter a brier-patch on ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt

... you do wid me, Brer Fox," sezee, "so you don't fling me in dat brier-patch. Roas' me, Brer Fox," sezee, "but don't fling me in dat ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson

... mad as with store of new wine; Oh, they cheered him, they capped him, they roared as he rode down the line: He that fled us at Worcester, the boy, the green brier-shoot, the son Of the Stuart on whom for his sin the ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone

... put him into the right way, and when he got to the Castle it was full of folk and horses; so full it made one giddy to look at them. But Halvor was so ragged and torn from having followed the West Wind through bush and brier and bog, that he kept on one side, and wouldn't show himself till the last day when the bridal feast ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent

... little left for our increasing wants; and the difficulty of securing anything from the houses without danger of detection was almost insurmountable. But we felt encouraged as we thought of what we were striving for, and sped on our way. But the way was hard, for sometimes we got completely stuck in brier patches, and had to turn and go back, in order to find a way out. Old logs and driftwood, that had been piled up year after year, were other obstacles in our way; and one can imagine how hard it was ...
— Thirty Years a Slave • Louis Hughes

... hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander ever where, Swifter than the moones sphere; And I serve the Fairy Queen, To dew her orbs upon the green: The cowslips tall her pensioners be; In their gold coats spots you see; Those be rubies, fairy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various

... lost opportunities lifting to me their wistful faces, and dumbly pleading with me to accept them and their promises; yet I carelessly passed them by. I see worse. I see the rents in the hedge, where I forced my wilful way into forbidden fields, and only regained my path after weary wandering, brier-torn, and none the better for my folly. Lost faces come before me which I might have gladdened oftener. Voices sound in my ear whose tones I might have made happier if I would. Withheld sympathy rises up before me deploring its wasted treasure. How can any one be happy in looking back? The ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell

... him a long-handled affair with a weichsel-wood bowl and a cherry stem that has a kind of rakish, good-natured curve to it. Then he sits down and grinds out copy that will make an Englishman laugh at first sight. A big, dumpy brier, with a shorter stem and a celluloid end, is responsible for general descriptive work, sporting news, etc., while a trim little meerschaum with a carved bowl engenders excellent criticisms of music and drama. Occasionally, too, this bright fellow, ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman

... this was a swamp surrounded by a luxuriant growth of asters of every hue, and white and pink spirea and golden rod, and blue iris, and the delicate, rose-colored arethusa, and the blue fringed gentian abounded on every hand; also shrubs of the bayberry, wild rose and sweet brier, ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul

... seed and apple thorn, Wire, brier, limber lock, Three geese in a flock; Along came Tod, With his long rod, And scared them all to Migly-wod. One flew east, one flew west, One flew over the cuckoo's nest.— Make ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... himself to a sitting posture, as if to reply, fumbled in his watch-pocket for a match, instead; shook the ashes from his brier-wood, filled the bowl with some tobacco from his rubber pouch, drew the lucifer across his shoe, waited until the blue smoke mounted skyward and resumed his former position. He was too happy mentally—the girl in the steamer chair ...
— A Gentleman's Gentleman - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith

... on the terrace of Sir Henry Marquis' villa at Cannes. The members of the little party were in conversation over their tobacco—the Englishman, with his brier-root pipe; the American Justice, with a Havana cigar; and the aged Italian, with his cigarette. The last ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post

... my guide as he pulled aside the stem of a leafy brier red with roses. "Jest read ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller

... suggestions on the part of my companions as to what had become of Colonel Gaylord, but as I did not respond very freely to their bantering, they finally fell silent with only an occasional imprecation as someone stubbed his toe or caught his clothing on a brier. After a half hour or so of plodding we came to a clear path through the woods and in a few minutes reached the ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster

... to pursue the subject of woods beyond the few kinds mentioned. Woods such as ebony, sandalwood, cherry, brier, box, pear-tree, lancewood, and many others, are all good for the carver, but are better fitted for special purposes and small work. As this book is concerned more with the art of carving than its application, it will save confusion ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack

... blown out and trampled out by a blind and deaf world. But we of America are loath to admit this. And if we do not think of genius as an unquenchable flame, we are apt to think of it as an amazingly hardy plant, more tough than horse-brier or cactus. Only a few of us have yet begun to realize that the flower of genius is not the flower of an indestructible weed, but of a fastidious exotic, which usually demands good conditions for bare existence, and ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... Mo. 15th, 1838. I want to give up every thing, every thought, every affection, in short, my whole self, to my offered Saviour. Then would His kingdom come, and His will be done. Instead of the thorn would come up the fir-tree, and instead of the brier the myrtle-tree. How precious, how holy, how peaceful, that kingdom! Oh! if I may yet hope; if mercy is left, I beseech Thee, hear and behold me, and bring me "out of the miry clay, and set ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall

... vigorous, the most fun-loving of the women, and the larger boys, with only a negligible sprinkling of really little children. Every woman and child in the two rows was armed with a savage-looking whip of willow, hickory, or even green brier, and the still more savage intention of using these whips to the utmost extent of their speed and ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... picturesque uncouthness, while each began to unravel his own lively miscellany of information or invention. There was jest, laughter, spinning of yarns, singing of songs. As Peter lay in the fire-light, smoking his brier-wood, he noticed that the man next him spent a great deal of time poring over a letter, holding it close to the blaze, now at arm's-length, which was hardly surprising, considering the penmanship of the more common variety of billet-doux. ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... fast as he can. An' byme-by somefin' grab' li'l' Mose by de aidge of he coat, an' he fight' an' struggle' an' cry out: "Dey ain't no ghosts. Dey ain't no ghosts." An' dat ain't nuffin' but de wild brier whut grab' him, an' dat ain't nuffin' but de leaf ob a tree whut brush' he cheek, an' dat ain't nuffin' but de branch ob a hazel-bush whut brush' he arm. But he downright scared jes de same, an' he ain't lose no time, 'ca'se de wind an' ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough

... pale brown ring, plucked a honeysuckle bough and brought it back to the silver column of the beech; and lastly, glancing up from the rosy sprig within her hand, she saw a man coming toward her, down the path that she had thought hidden, holding his arm before him for shield against brier and branch, and looking curiously about him as for a thing which he ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... Paradise. Oh, looking from some heavenly hill, Or from the shade of saintly palms, Or silver reach of river calms, Do those large eyes behold me still? With me one little year ago:— The chill weight of the winter snow For months upon her grave has lain; And now, when summer south-winds blow And brier and harebell bloom again, I tread the pleasant paths we trod, I see the violet-sprinkled sod, Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak The hillside flowers she loved to seek, Yet following me where'er ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck

... fishing him out, pulled down the shirts, and pushed up the cap, he began vigorously rubbing the bare young legs with the palm of his hand, spitting upon it, the better, as he said, to draw out the smarting and the stinging of the brier-scratches. Then setting his idol, still howling, upon his own panel of the fence, Burl began looking about him with wide-open eyes, as if in quest of something lost, wondering the while what could have ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady

... the sluggard; I hear him complain, You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again. I passed by his garden, I saw the wild brier, The thorn, and the thistle, grow broader and higher; The clothes that hang on him are turning to rags; And his money he wastes, till he starves or ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter

... the three stories in the volume entitled "Three Hundred Dollars" are first studied because of their simplicity, and these are followed by parts of "The Bonnie Brier Bush," and then by the stories from Bret Harte. Mrs. Phelps Ward's "Loveliness" is especially valuable for illustrating methods and devices for making a simple theme dramatically interesting. Students are required to mark stories with the symbols ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith

... hands in his pockets and his short brier pipe clenched firmly between his teeth, Gardiner, Hillton's head coach, watched grimly the tide of battle. Things had gone worse than he had anticipated. He had not hoped for too much—a tie would have satisfied him; a victory ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour

... flesh had gone away, leaving the bones standing up. This boy whom Dick contemplated was quite a different being. His face was no longer white, it was instead a mixture of red and brown, and both tints were vivid. Across one cheek were some brier scratches which he had acquired the day before, but which he had never noticed. The red-brown cheeks were filled out with the effects of large quantities of good food digested well. As he bent over the fire, a chest of good width seemed to puff out with muscle and wind expansion. ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler

... feeding upon the seeds of various weedy growths in a large market-garden well into town.) "Pressing on, the walk became exhilarating. Followed a little brook, the eastern branch of the Tiber, lined with bushes and a rank growth of green-brier. Sparrows started out here and there, and flew across the little bends and points. Among some pines just beyond the boundary, saw a number of American goldfinches, in their gray winter dress, pecking the pinecones. ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... temples of the peppergrass—all these have shed, or are shedding, myriads of seeds to be silently sepulchred under the snow until earth's easter April mornings. The withered berries of the bittersweet, the cat-brier, and the sumac, like the drupes of the early fall, are scattered far and wide by the birds. All these speak not of death, but of ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell

... wind, so there was nothing to be read, if indeed there had ever been any letters on it. It had looked many a storm in the face, and many a red sunset. I suppose the woods near by had grown and been cut, and grown again, since it was put there. There was an old sweet-brier bush growing on the short little grave, and in the grass underneath I found a ground-sparrow's nest. It was like a little neighborhood, and I have felt ever since as if I belonged to it; and I wondered then if one of the young ground-sparrows ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... me by the bracken bush, Beneath the blumin' brier; Let never living mortal ken That a ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)

... stuck up. In the sequel Brer Rabbits begs Brer Fox that he may "drown me as deep ez you please, skin me, scratch out my eyeballs, t'ar out my years by the roots, en cut off my legs, but do don't fling me in dat brier patch;" which, of course, Brer Fox does, only to be informed by the cunning Brer Rabbit that he had been "bred en bawn in a brier patch." The story is a favourite one with the negroes: it occurs in Col. Jones' Negro Myths of the Georgia Coast (Uncle Remus is from S. Carolina), ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs

... heart is given, In mystic fold do they entwine, So bound in one that, were they riven, Apart my soul would life resign. Thou art my song and I the lyre; Thou art the breeze and I the brier; The altar I, and thou the fire; Mine the deep love, the beauty thine! As fleets away the rapid hour While weeping—may My sorrowing ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... charlotte, Bavarian creams, Biscuit Glace, Blanc-mange, Bombe Glacee, Brier Hill Dessert, Charlotte russe, Chocolate whips, Cream a la versailles, Cream meringues, Fanchonettes, Frozen apricots, peaches, pudding, raspberries, strawberries, Fruit Glace, Gateau St. Honore, ...
— Miss Parloa's New Cook Book • Maria Parloa

... until he had bitten clean through the amber mouthpiece, so that the brier bowl fell clattering to the floor. By that time it was full daylight; but Gerald was still asleep. He slept late into the afternoon; but that evening, when Selwyn and Lansing came in to persuade him to go with them to Silverside, Gerald ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers

... Vivian's hair, Which play'd on her flush'd cheek, and her blue eyes Sparkled with mocking glee and exercise. Her palfrey's flanks were mired and bathed in sweat, For they had travell'd far and not stopp'd yet. A brier in that tangled wilderness Had scored her white right hand, which she allows To rest ungloved on her green riding-dress; The other warded off the drooping boughs. But still she chatted on, with her blue eyes Fix'd full on Merlin's ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... the forget-me-nots, and up the bluebell bank they struggled, with never a thought for the flowers; and they were just about to scramble over some felled trees when Raymonde, who was a yard in advance, caught her foot in a tangle of brier and fell on her hands and knees among the springing bracken. Fauvette, unable to stop herself, collided heavily and collapsed by her side. Too much out of breath to stir, the girls lay for a few ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil

... wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago, And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow; But on the hill the goldenrod, and the aster in the wood, And the yellow sunflower by the brook in autumn beauty stood, Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education

... if he had found anything eatable. No, that he hadn't, he replied, and then she tried to help him. She couldn't find any nuts either, but she discovered a couple of dried blossoms that hung on a brier-bush. These the boy ate with a good relish. But he wondered what mother would say, if she knew that he had lived on raw fish ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof

... Mr. B., considerately undertook to initiate me into some of the mysteries of this race, which has proved minatory, though not destructive, to his blushing crop,—and accordingly led me through brake and brier, past wild and gloomy cedar-swamps, over brooks insecurely bridged with fallen logs, or, perchance, with stepping-blocks of pine-stumps, far into the silent forest, and to a little dell or dingle,—a natural ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... grimly, with a condescending nod, and putting away the cigar, took out a brier pipe and began to fill it from his tobacco-pouch. "The Captain is a man of few words and extremely modest about himself," Clay continued, lightly; "so I must tell you who he is myself. He is a promoter of revolutions. That is his business,—a professional promoter of revolutions, ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis

... but he stopped at every wild brier to study the pink satin of the petals. She was not of his world, and better than any other he knew it; but she might be his Angel, and he was dreaming of naught but blind, silent worship. He finished the happiest day of his life, and that night ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter

... the earliest literary version of the drowning-turtle motif (undoubtedly the prototype of the brier-patch punishment) is Buddhistic: Jataka, No. 543. This motif occurs in a Sinhalese story otherwise wholly unrelated to the cycle of which this punishment is usually a part (Parker, No. 150, 2 : 339-340; ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler

... early life in New England in his political addresses, and had spoken more than once of going to find the cows at nightfall in the autumn evenings, and being glad to warm his bare feet in the places where the sleepy beasts had lain, before he followed their slow steps homeward through bush and brier. The Honorable Mr. Laneway had a touch of true sentiment which added much to his really stirring and effective campaign speeches. He had often been called the "king of the platform" in his adopted State. He had long ago grown used to saying "Go" to one man, and "Come" to another, like the ruler ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett



Words linked to "Brier" :   vine, true heath, genus Smilax, branchlet, erica, twig, rosebush, vegetation, brier-wood, smilax, bullbrier, briarroot, rose, botany, flora, sprig



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