"Heather" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lights and blue shadows on their snow-clad summits, slanted obliquely into the rich plain before them, bathing with rosy splendour the leafless, snow-sprinkled trees, and fading gradually into shadow in the distance. To the south, too, they beheld a deep-shaded amphitheatre of heather and bracken; the course of the Esk, near Penicuik, winding about at the foot of its gorge; the broad, brown expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading into blue indistinctness in the south, the wild heath-clad Peeblesshire hills. In sooth, that scene was fair, and many a ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... royal family, and was otherwise meekly romantic. From this source she gathered much curious sentiment relating to some visionary world where young girls were held aloft in the sunshine of luxury and love and happiness. One day she was lying on her back on the heather of the Peel hill, with her head on her arms, thinking of a story that Aunt Rachel had told her. It was of a mermaid who had only to slip up out of the sea and say to any man, "Come," and he came—he left everything and followed her. Suddenly ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... the lake. My great interest in visiting Ambleside was to see the venerable poet, Wordsworth, who lived about a mile from the village. I happened, just before supper, to look out of the window of the traveller's room and espied an old man in a blue cloak and Glengarry cap, with a bunch of heather stuck jauntily in the top, driving by in a little brown phaeton from Rydal Mount. "Perhaps," thought I to myself, "that may be the patriarch himself," and sure enough it was. For, when I inquired about Mr. Wordsworth, ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... here and there with the snowy garlands of the wild cherry, and beneath with wide spaces covered with young green bracken, whose soft irregular masses on the undulating ground had somewhat the effect of the waves of the sea. These alternated with stretches of yellow gorse and brown heather, sheets of cotton-grass, and pools of white crowfoot, and all the vegetation of a mountain side, only that the ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Messenger, in the seclusion of his reserved compartment, read a novel at intervals and looked out of the window for familiar landmarks that recalled spells of leave in pre-war days, when he tramped on two feet through the heather behind the dogs, or, thigh deep in some river, sent a silken line out across the ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... wretched hat, Israel again beat a retreat, his wardrobe sorely the worse for his visits. Not only was his coat a mere rag, but his breeches, clawed by the dog, were slashed into yawning gaps, while his yellow hair waved over the top of the crownless beaver, like a lonely tuft of heather on the highlands. ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... but a great Part of the Lyric Poet still. What Beranger might have been, if born and bred among Banks, Braes, and Mountains, I cannot tell: Burns had that advantage over him. And then the Highland Mary to love, amid the heather, as compared to Lise the Grisette in a Parisian Suburb! Some of the old French Virelays and Vaux-de-vire come much nearer the Wild Notes of Burns, and go to one's heart like his; Beranger never gets so far as that, I ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... had ridden to King George. "Ay, and the next day!" Tam would cry. "The puir bonny Master, and the puir kind lads that rade wi' him, were hardly ower the scaur or he was aff—the Judis! Ay, weel—he has his way o't: he's to be my lord, nae less, and there's mony a cold corp amang the Hieland heather!" And at this, if Tam had been drinking, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... three-quarters of a mile away and sleep for the rest of the day, or, at any rate, until lunch time; and yet he looked another long look at the morning star, thrust his hands down into his trousers pockets and turned up a side path that led through the heather, and spent the rest of the morning walking and thinking—walking slowly, ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... the purple heather touched my heart; the majestic trees that shaded me, the delicate shrubs around, the astonishing variety of plants and flowers that I trod under foot, kept me alternately admiring ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... trees. Birds, startled by the horses' hoofs, rose here and there out of the bushes, pouring forth their caroling to the clear ether; and Marsa, spurring her thoroughbred, would dash in a mad gallop toward a little, almost unknown grove of oaks, with thickets full of golden furze and pink heather, where woodcutters worked, half buried in the long grass peppered with blue cornflowers and ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... fellows of the guards?—for of sailors, your lawful prince, as you call him, hasn't enough to stopper his conscience, or to whip the tail of his coat, to keep it from being torn to tatters by the heather of Scotland. If you do follow the adventurer, it must be in some such character, since I question if he can muster a seaman, to tell him the ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... England or Scotland. It has always been found impossible to rear grouse in the country. In the neighbourhood of Spa there are great stretches of moorlands reaching almost to the German frontier, covered with heather, which look as if they would be the ideal home of the grouse. Here M. Barry Herrfeldt, of the Chateau du Marteau at Spa, a real good sportsman, has tried his very utmost to rear grouse; first he laid down thousands ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... gathering small flowers among the heather). Oh, Hilde! Now do let Mr. Lyngstrand ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... qualifications for the task I had undertaken, and that the new matter I had brought to light was of little value. One of my critics, the Athenaeum, poured contempt upon me for having spoken of "the scent of the heather." The ingenuous writer evidently had seen heather nowhere save on the slab of a fishmonger's shop. But, in spite of the critics, the book sold, and sold rapidly. It went through three editions in this country ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... get round you because I was such a ripping girl. We arranged it all: he and I. We got Papa and Mamma and Johnny out of the way splendidly; and then Bentley took himself off, and left us—you and me!—to take a walk through the heather and admire the scenery of Hindhead. You never dreamt that it was all a plan: that what made me so nice was the way I was playing up to my destiny as the sweet girl that was to make your boy happy. And then! and then! [She ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... overtook them, however, recognised the capabilities of the man when he noticed the way he lifted his feet and how he set them down. This, he decided, was one accustomed to walking among the heather, but he was wrong; for it was the trick the bushman learns when he plods through leagues of undergrowth and fallen branches, or the tall grass of the swamps; and it is a memorable experience to make a day's journey with such a man. For the first hour the thing seems easy, for the ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... were fine enough. The Phoenicians slept under their piled grey rocks; the chimneys of the old mines pointed starkly; early moths blurred the heather-bells; cartwheels could be heard grinding on the road far beneath; and the suck and sighing of the waves sounded gently, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... the red-blossomed heather, Their green banners kissing the pure mountain air, Heads erect, eyes to front, stepping proudly together, Sure freedom sits throned in each proud spirit there! Down the hills twining, Their blessed steel shining Like rivers of beauty they flow from each glen, From mountain ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... silver mountings. A great silver brooch with a big cairngorm in the centre, took the place of the brass one, which henceforth was laid up among the precious things in the little armoury, and the badge of his clan in gold, with rubies and amethysts for the bells of the heather, glowed on his bonnet. And Malcolm's guests, as long as Duncan continued able to fill the bag, had to endure as best they might, between each course of every dinner without fail, two or three minutes of uproar and outcry from the treble throat of the powerful Lossie ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... a pretendin' to hae what I haena!—Is' be hame in guid time for yer tay, father.—I can gang a heap better withoot them!" she added, as she threw the bag over her shoulder. "I'll put them on whan I come to the heather," she concluded. ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... know the use of them, and the time of harvest never came for those who had sown nothing. Thus hunger was always in our midst. In winter, mosses and the bark of trees were our common food. A few green roots of dogs-bit or heather were a feast, and when men found beech-mast, nuts, or acorns, they danced for joy round the beech or oak, to the sound of some rude song, while they called the earth their mother and their nurse. This was their only festival, their only sport; ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... many descriptions of the Grand-master. At Forfar, in 1661, Helen Guthrie said that at several meetings the devil was present 'in the shape of a black iron-hued man'; Katherine Porter 'saw the divill and he had ane blacke plaid about him'; when Issobell Smyth was alone gathering heather, 'hee appeared to hir alone lik ane braw gentleman'; and on another occasion 'like a light gentleman'.[79] Jonet Watson of Dalkeith, also in 1661, said 'that the Deivill apeired vnto her in the liknes of ane prettie boy, in grein clothes.... Shoe was at a Meitting in Newtoun-dein ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... and aged, but a strong man still, with a more settled air of strength of purpose than he had worn in his wild youth. He found his little girl a pretty child, brilliantly healthy, brilliantly strong. The wind of the mountain, of the heather, of the woods, had quickened her with an enduring vitality very different from that of the delicate fair mother for whom his heart still grieved. Of course the little Helena did not remember her father, and was at first rather alarmed when Lady Edmond Herrington told her that a new papa ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... wi' a bawbee can'le stuck up again' the boddom o' the lookin'-gless, an' him maleengerin' aboot i' the flure afore't, wi' the shaft o' the heather bissam in his hand, whiskin't roond his lugs, progin' aboot wi't, an' lowpin' here an' there like a hen on a het girdle. He croonshed doon, an' jookit frae side to side, an' then jamp straucht up an' lut flee at something wi' the bissam shaft. Syne he stack the ...
— My Man Sandy • J. B. Salmond
... hear you say so, my dear Mary," said the literal-minded Grizzy. "Certainly nothing can be prettier than the heather when it's in flower; and there is something very manly—nobody can dispute that—in high cheek-bones; and besides, to tell you a secret, Lady Maclaughlan has a husband in her eye for you. We none ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... bleak north-wester. When she disappeared into a sheltered hollow, the wind, hushed and non-plussed for a minute, paused to meditate further mischief; then, with regathered rage, it tore across country, and boomed, with sullen roar, into a valley shut in by brackened and heather-covered hills. ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... the little earl, and watched with wistful eyes the tall Highlander striding across brushwood and heather, leaping dikes and clearing fences—the very embodiment of ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... "dookies," silver bangles, and glowing dark eyes of the vendors making a brave show above the massed glory of colour in their baskets. Huge bunches of pink proteas, spiked lilies of every hue, bales of heather and waxen white chinckerichees filled the air with heavy perfume. The sellers came pressing to the passing carriages, soliciting custom in the soft clipped speech of the Cape native. Bellew, for all he was so distrait, had the graceful inspiration ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... geek she gave her head, And sic a toss she gave her feather; Man, saw ye ne'er a bonnier lass Before, among the blooming heather?" ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... part of the island had been rock and heather not many generations since. Poor people had broken up the ground, and worn themselves out, one set after another, to keep it in cultivation. Round about Stone Farm lived only cottagers and men owning ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... been out the whole of this day with the keepers—heather burning—and was obviously "dead tired" when he went to bed. It is curious that even when not disturbed, he should have slept so badly, but sleepless and nameless discomfort has assailed most persons in No. 1, though the room ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... valley of Bekaa lay between the two great chains of the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon; the latter of whose varied hills and glens, speckled with forests and villages, lay beneath my feet. Nothing but lakes were wanting to the valleys, nothing but heather to the mountains. We caught some goats after a hard chase, and, milking them on the snow, drank eagerly from ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... and on each hand of me; there are waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley at my feet. The population here must be thin, and I see no passengers on these roads: they stretch out east, west, north, and south—white, broad, lonely; they are all cut in the moor, and the heather grows deep and wild to their very verge. Yet a chance traveller might pass by; and I wish no eye to see me now: strangers would wonder what I am doing, lingering here at the sign-post, evidently objectless and lost. I might be questioned: I could give no answer but what would sound incredible ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... made, not from briar, but from the root of heather, Fr. bruyere, of Celtic origin. A catchpole did not catch polls, i.e. heads, nor did he catch people with a pole, although a very ingenious implement, exhibited in the Tower of London Armoury, is catalogued ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... half-fed horses to pull carts through. There was the turf, pared up on the distant moors, and left out to dry, to be carried home and stacked; the brown fern was to be stored up for winter bedding for the cattle; for straw was scarce and dear in those parts; even for thatching, heather (or rather ling) was used. Then there was meat to salt while it could be had; for, in default of turnips and mangold-wurzel, there was a great slaughtering of barren cows as soon as the summer herbage failed; and good housewives stored up their Christmas piece of beef in pickle before Martinmas ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Julia, "I too—Desdemona slain by a blackamoor. To some it is the cold hills and the valleys 'green and sad,' and the sea-birds' wailing," she continued in a low, strange voice, "and to some the glens of heather, and the mountain-brooks, and the rowans. But, come to an end, what are we all? This man's eyes will tell ye! I would give white and red, nectar and snow and roses, and all the ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... sides, and across the undulating lowland, wall or hedge mapped his conquests of nature, little plots won by the toil of successive generations for pasture or for tillage, won from the reluctant wilderness, which loves its fern and gorse, its mosses and heather. Near and far were scattered the little white cottages, each a gleaming speck, lonely, humble; set by the side of some long-winding, unfrequented road, or high on the green upland, trackless save for the feet of ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... intimacy of country life. The meadows and parks of Thremdon Hall encompassed all about the heath where Valerie Upton's cottage stood among its trees. They were Sir Basil's woods that ran down to her garden walls and Sir Basil's lanes that, at the back of the cottage, led up, through the heather, to the little village, a mile or so away. She had met Sir Basil before coming to live there, once or twice in London, and once or twice for week-ends at country-houses; but he was not a person whom ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... from heaven? washed up from out the deep? They failed to trace him through the flesh and blood Of our old kings: whence then? a doubtful lord To bind them by inviolable vows, Which flesh and blood perforce would violate: For feel this arm of mine—the tide within Red with free chase and heather-scented air, Pulsing full man; can Arthur make me pure As any maiden child? lock up my tongue From uttering freely what I freely hear? Bind me to one? The wide world laughs at it. And worldling of the world am I, and know The ptarmigan that whitens ere his hour Woos ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... no wench, far or near, will be found who will take old Wolde's place, and she hopes, in return for this, that the sorceress will give her something from her herbal to cure her old father. Ha! what do I see? How her beautiful hair streams behind her upon the wind! How she runs like a deer over the heather, and looks back often, for her heart is trembling lest her father might send after her. Now she enters the wood; see, she kneels down, and prays for her father and for herself, that God will keep her steps. Let us pray ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... also considered a means of keeping away evil spirits. Joseph Train, writing in 1814, refers to another practice common in some parts of Scotland. Whenever the corpse is taken from the house, the bed on which the deceased lay is taken from the house, and all the straw or heather of which it was composed is taken out and burned in a place where no beast can get at it, and in the morning the ashes are carefully examined, believing that the footprint of the next person of the family who will die will ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... go—you and I together, Katie. We'll cross the sea, and wander through the countries that we read about in books, and among the great cities that have stood for hundreds and hundreds of years. Wouldn't you like to see Scotland, Katie, and the heather hills that grannie tells us about; and the great castles that they used to hold against all comers in the old times, and the parks, and the deer, and the gardens full of wonderful flowers, and the lakes and the mountains—only we can see lakes and ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... been sunk only to be abandoned, and the agriculturist has fared little better than the miner. Early in the last century, a Mr Knight made an heroic effort to enclose a large portion of the moor for the purposes of cultivation. The heather, however, is still triumphant. The only memorial of his ambition is a ruined mansion at Simonsbath. The hills are all of considerable altitude—well over 1200 ft.—but with the exception of Dunkery few can pretend to any marked individuality. ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... Toolis, with that love of fine words which marks the Irish peasant, said that the charred interior of the scattered remains proves that the trees were "desthroyed intirely by a grate confiscation." The heather, of two kinds, is brilliantly purple, and the Royal fern grows everywhere in profusion, its terra-cotta bloom often towering six feet high. The mountains are effectively arranged, and imposing by their massiveness, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... gratified in God's beautiful and diversified works. The grave and golden clouds, the dark and rosy tints of the sunset sky, the gorgeous rainbow and the modest Aurora, the flashing flower and the lowly heather, the towering pine and the creeping vine, the rich green field of summer and the calm gray forest of winter, the thousand million forms of the hill-and-dale landscape, and the equally diversified colors and forms of birds and beasts, confer the richest feasts of pleasure upon ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... front from his cover, perfectly satisfied that the only portions of him visible to a coming enemy were his face and hat, while to add to his protection, in case any of the Indians' advance-guard should suddenly ride into sight, Chris dismounted, cut a few tufts of heather-like brush, and stuck them at random through the band ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... Just my dog and pipe and I, underneath the vast sky; Trail to try and goal to win, white road and cool inn; Fields to lure a lad afar, clear spring and still star; Lilting feet that never tire, green dingle, fagot fire; None to hurry, none to hold, heather hill and hushed fold; Nature like a picture book, laughing leaf and bright brook; Every day a jewel bright, set serenely in the night; Every night a holy shrine, ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... delicious. Even Robie, notwithstanding the horse-shoe of angry disappointment on his brow, made a hearty repast; but that was natural to a growing laddie, and especially after such a tramp as we had had in the death and darkness of night, over moor and heather. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... gigantic iron rust-colored artichoke, like those put on portals of chateaux to foil wall climbers; the Cocos Micania, a sort of notched and slender palm surrounded by tall leaves resembling paddles and oars; the Zamia Lehmanni, an immense pineapple, a wondrous Chester leaf, planted in sweet-heather soil, its top bristling with barbed javelins and jagged arrows; the Cibotium Spectabile, surpassing the others by the craziness of its structure, hurling a defiance to revery, as it darted, through the palmated foliage, an enormous orang-outang tail, a hairy dark tail whose end was twisted ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... shall come, come again, calling up the moorfowl, Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and flowers, Red shall the heather bloom over hill and valley, Soft flow the stream thro' the even-flowing hours; Fair the day shine, as it shone upon my childhood— Fair shine the day on the house with open door; Birds come and cry there, and twitter in the chimney— But I go for ever ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... lifted to his—perhaps they were more expressive than she knew—I cannot say. They both started a little as we confronted them, and the colour deepened in Freda's face. The gardener, with what photographers usually ask for—'just the faint beginning of a smile,'—turned and gathered a bit of white heather growing near. ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... motoring, flashing through the wonders of the New Forest, where he lived. And then there was a long bit about what the New Forest must be looking like just then, all quiet in the spring sunshine, with lovely dappled bits of shade underneath the big beeches, and the heather just coming alive, and all the winding solitary roads so full of ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... enjoyment wealthy, Blithe as a beautiful bird she sings, For body and mind are hale and healthy. Her eyes they thrill with right goodwill - Her heart is light as a floating feather - As pure and bright as the mountain rill That leaps and laughs in the Highland heather! Go search the world and search the sea, Then come you home and sing with me There's no such gold and no such pearl As a bright and beautiful ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... joy of walking! Swinging down the tawny lanes with head held high; Striding up the green hills, through the heather stalking, Swishing through the woodlands where the brown leaves lie; Marveling at all things—windmills gaily turning, Apples for the cider-press, ruby-hued and gold; Tails of rabbits twinkling, scarlet berries ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... a Scotch shepherd boy who tended his flocks along the river Tweed near Melrose. Night and day he lived in the open air, drinking in the sunshine and sleeping on the heather. And he grew up big and strong and handsome,—the finest lad in all that part of the country. He could run faster than any one, and was always the champion in the wrestling matches to which he challenged the village boys for miles around. And you should ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... the coast, The beauty of Highland Heather,— How he and she, with night on the sea, Lay out on ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... father's men Three days we've fled together, For should he find us in the glen, My blood would stain the heather. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... However, as I say, I had for the time forgotten that pagan company, or, in my puritanic zeal, I might have thrown them all to be washed clean in the upland stream, whose pure waters one might fancy were fragrant from their sunny day among the ferns and the heather, fragrant to the eye, indeed, if one may so speak, with the shaken meal of the meadowsweet. This stream had been the good angel of my thoughts all the day, keeping them ever moving and ever fresh, cleansing and burnishing them, quite an open-air laundry ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... body.' She sat to-day, while preparations raged in the kitchen, placidly knitting. She always knitted—socks for Edward and shawls for herself. She had made so many shawls, and she so felt the cold, that she wore them in layers—pink, grey, white, heather ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... farms and fishing stations, the majority were uninhabited. Carpeted with moss and heather, their coast-lines showed a series of ravines and clefts and little sandy bays, with a growth of splendid pine-woods that came down to the water's edge and led the eye through unknown depths of shadow and mystery into the very heart ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... 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 over its pebbles brightly, or plunging into gloom of its own production; ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... precisely those which he had heard ascribed to the Cwn Wybir, and would have been truly appalling to a superstitious imagination. His quick ear at length caught the rush of pinions, and, in a short time, a large flight of curlews came sweeping down to the heather, so near his head, that some of their wings brushed his hat. They were no sooner settled, than the Cwn Wybir ceased to be heard. Mr. Young then recollected having noticed similar nocturnal cries from the curlew, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 30. Saturday, May 25, 1850 • Various
... trees, whose varied hues add so infinitely to the beauty and picturesque effect of a landscape. In the midst of this luxuriant nature, arises, with a grandeur heightened by contrast, a single long, black, bare range of mountains, clothed only with thick, dark heather," and from time to time skirting the high road. This magnificent road, which from London to Holyhead, is as even as a 'parquet,' here runs along the side of the left range of mountains, at about their middle elevation ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... drove to the station to take the Flying Scotsman, we indulged in floods of reminiscence over the joys of travel we had tasted together in the past, and talked with lively anticipation of the new experiences awaiting us in the land of heather. ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... auld Coila's plains an' fells, Her moor's red-brown wi' heather bells, Her banks an' braes, her dens an' dells, Where glorious Wallace Aft bure the gree, as ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... was covered, as with heather, with abundance of creeping dwarf juniper, Andromeda, and dwarf rhododendron. On arriving at the village, I refused to receive the Guobah, unless he opened a bazaar at daylight on the following morning, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... instant on my mind. The next, I was pricking Modestine forward, and guiding her like an unruly ship through the open. In a path, she went doggedly ahead of her own accord, as before a fair wind; but once on the turf or among heather, and the brute became demented. The tendency of lost travellers to go round in a circle was developed in her to the degree of passion, and it took all the steering I had in me to keep even a decently straight course through a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... join two words or sentences together; As, man and boy, or birds will fly and winds blow o'er the heather. ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... silence, during which the tide returned into Poole Harbour. "One would lose something," murmured Helen, apparently to herself. The water crept over the mud-flats towards the gorse and the blackened heather. Branksea Island lost its immense foreshores, and became a sombre episode of trees. Frome was forced inward towards Dorchester, Stour against Wimborne, Avon towards Salisbury, and over the immense displacement the sun presided, leading it to triumph ere he sank to rest. England was alive, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... [5614]Hierome relates of him in his life) "when the devil tempted him to any such foul offence." By this means those [5615]Indian Brahmins kept themselves continent: they lay upon the ground covered with skins, as the red-shanks do on heather, and dieted themselves sparingly on one dish, which Guianerius would have all young men put in practice, and if that will not serve, [5616]Gordonius "would have them soundly whipped, or, to cool their courage, kept in prison," and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... mighty blow, and his backbone also in divers places. Also they said: "One of the great brazen pillars which stand at the bridge head is bent awry, and the clean bronze denied with blood, and it was at the foot of that pillar we found the dog." So saying, they laid the body upon the heather in front of Culain's high seat, that it might be full in his eye, and when they did so and again sat down, there was a great silence in ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... of autumn was in the air that evening. The bracken had begun to turn, and its hue was intensified by the russet warmth of the evening sunlight, that touched each frond with fire, burnished the granite boulders, and turned the purple of the heather to a warm ruddiness. As Ishmael went along the hard pale road a hare, chased by a greyhound belonging to a couple of miners, came thudding down it, and the light turned its dim fur to bronze. It flashed past over a low ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... indeed I have understood America) brings her in no inconsiderable profit. In this country they arrive, and I have my account from an eye-witness, in large deal boxes, most curiously packed, relying solely on each other for support; since, set up perpendicularly on their ends, with no straw, heather, saw-dust, or any other material to fill the interstices between them, the fate of every box of this fragile ware depends, during its journey and unlading, on the safety or fracture of a single egg; but such is the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various
... seen upon some dreary moor, or at the foot of some 'scaur' on the hillside, the bleached bones of a sheep, lying white and grim among the purple heather. It strayed, unthinking of danger, tempted by the sweet herbage; it fell; it vainly bleated; it died. But what if it had heard the shepherd's call, and had preferred to lie where it fell, and to die where ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... or four hundredweight which I will try and push over. I tug, and push, and presently it nods, and nods, and rolls over and over, till gathering impetus down the steep side of the island, it crashes with irresistible force through the furze, and heather, and shrubs, clearing a path as it goes till it reaches the granite rocks, upon which it crashes and bounds, breaking off great splinters, till finally with a boom it buries itself in the foam, never more to be seen by ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... is sometimes made in that direction which then serves to bring down timber from the higher regions, but which is afterward overgrown again with grass. Proceeding along this way, which gently ascends, one arrives at last at a bare, treeless region. It is barren heath where grows nothing but heather, mosses, and lichens. It grows ever steeper, the further one ascends; but one always follows a gully resembling a rounded out ditch which is convenient, as one cannot then miss one's way in this extensive, treeless, monotonous ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... great glen, the sides of which were about as sheer as a railway-cutting. There were no trees or bushes about, but the green pasture along the bed of the valley wore its brightest colors in the warm sunlight, and far up on the hillsides the browns and crimsons of the heather and the silver-gray of the rocks trembled in the white haze of the heat. Over that again the blue sky, as still and silent as the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... was an inland village set in the midst of a rolling purple moor, isolated in a heather-clad gold of the land, distant from the sea, distant from the murmur of modern life; a sleepy, self-contented and serene abode of quiet women and ruminant men, living, loving, and dying with a greater calm than often pervades our modern life. A lazy divinity seemed to preside ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... is gilding all the heather of the moor, Down the basement stairs I'm creeping—till a widely open door Shows me Cook in heavy slumber on her cherished kitchen floor— And the Mutton Bone ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... head, my dear,' said grandmother; 'I believe if I could put you down on the top of the moors, and if you could get the breezes off the heather, why, my lass, I believe you'd ...
— Poppy's Presents • Mrs O. F. Walton
... dolefu' dream; I fear there will be sorrow! I dream'd I pu'd the heather green, Wi' my true love, ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... from the prevailing wind; but on the southern confines of the parish the soil became shallow and stony, the arable fields degenerated into a rough open pasturage full of gorse and foxgloves and gradually widening patches of heather, until finally the level monochrome of the Rhos absorbed the last vestiges of cultivation, and the ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... until near the dawn of day, when, one by one, the guests disappeared, and at last Shon was left alone. Perceiving a magnificent couch near, he laid himself thereon, and was soon fast asleep. He did not awake until mid-day, and then, to his surprise, he found himself lying on a heap of heather, the grand palace had vanished away, and the gold and silver, which he had transferred from his hat the night before into his bag, ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... utterly unlike anything she had ever seen that it possessed for her an intense fascination. Later, as she was approaching the end of her journey, her first view of the low heather-crowned hills made her ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... that night they plodded steadily. Once a horseman overtook them, riding furiously; shouted something which none could catch, and was gone in darkness. Their road led them over the downs and through the heather by the little station of Bibracte to Calleva, where four roads joined; and on through the level and open country around Corinium, where, to south and west, among shaded groves, they caught glimpses of palaces and stately homes. So, in time, ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... lover of beauty, he could not help being charmed by the scenery through which he passed: the purple heather, which was now in its glory, made the wild moorlands wondrous for their beauty, while the valleys through which the rushing streams ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... "Mademoiselle," he added, turning to Eugenie, after bowing to Madame Grandet, "you are always beautiful and good, and truly I do not know what to wish you." So saying, he offered her a little box which his servant had brought and which contained a Cape heather,—a flower lately imported into Europe and ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... the Douglas were by this time streaming homewards along every mountain pass. Over the heather and through the abounding morasses horse and foot took their way, no longer marching in military order, as when they came, but each lance taking the route which appeared the shortest to himself. North, east, and west spear-heads glinted and armour flashed ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... in the right when he described its master as "ane o' the auld gentry, wi' a tattie and herrin' to his dejeune, but a scholar's book open against the ale-jug." A poor Baron (of a vastly different state from the Baron of France), English spoken too, with not much of the tang of the heather in his utterance though droll of his idiom, hospitable (to judge from the proffered glass still being fumbled for in the cupboard), a man who had been in France on the right side, a reader of the beau langage, and a student ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... More frowns o'er the wave,' and where 'Ilka lassie has her laddie,' you will find a thousand romantic maidens ready to welcome you as Ellen welcomed Fitz-James! For centuries your heroic race has adorned the halls and trod the heather of Hechnahoul, and for centuries more we hope to see the offspring of your lordship and some winsome Celtic maid rule ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... eyne did the glamour of Faerie pass And the Rymour lay on Eildon grass. He lay in the heather on Eildon Hill; He gazed on the dour Scots sky his fill. His staff beside him was brash with rot; The weed grew rank in his unthatch'd cot: "Syne gloaming yestreen, my shepherd kind, What hath happ'd this cot we ruin'd find?" "Syne gloaming yestreen, and years twice three, Hath wind ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... equally curious. It was a wilderness, he says, with savannas of palm-trees, inhabited by savages. On horseback, he traversed a virgin forest, obliged to bend over his horse's neck to avoid the huge branches of holm-oaks and cork-trees, and laurels and heather that were thirty feet high. In one canton he found people naked, except for a waist-cloth, and living on coarse bread made from acorns mixed with clay. Their mud hovels had no chimney, the fire being lighted on the ground in the middle. There was no agriculture ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... cleverly, and entered upon a district still wilder and drearier than any he had traversed. Peewits screamed and hovered over land that seemed to grow little but rushes and water-grasses, with occasional heather. The ground poached and splashed as he went; worst of ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... are the very essence of the British spirit. They are, to literature, what the bloom of the heather is to the Scot, and the smell of the sea to the Englishman. All that is beautiful in the old word "patriotism" ... a word which, of late, has been twisted to such ignoble purposes ... is latent in these gay and ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... not so impressive when it is quite clear as when it contains and supports great clouds, and large blue spaces are seen between them. On the hillsides the fields here and there are yellow and the corn is in sheaves. The birds are mostly dumb, the glory of the furze and broom has passed, but the heather is in flower. The trees are dark, and even sombre, and, where they are in masses, look as if they were in solemn consultation. A fore-feeling of the end of summer steals upon me. Why cannot I banish this anticipation? Why cannot I rest and take ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... see the place where Lord Leitrim was done to death. Looked down on Milford Bay, dotted with little treeless and shrubless islands. Round it are round-shouldered hills, brown and bare now—purple with heather bells in summer time, I dare say. On a point stretching out into this bay stands his residence, Manor Vaughan. The road leading from Manor Vaughan to Milford is screened by a plantation of trees. On the opposite side of the bay the hills ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... when she had been wont to ring the Convent bell, she was walking swiftly over the moors and climbing the heather-clad hills. ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... were fain to go Forth in sunny weather, For love-laden bosoms throw Sleep off like a feather; Then with measured steps and slow To the fields together Went they, seeking pastime new 'Mid the flowers and heather. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... trim, apple-cheeked Scotch woman of about thirty years, with neat yellow-brown hair coiled on the top of her head, a cheerful tilt to her freckled nose, and eyes so blue that in company with her rosy cheeks one thought at once of a flag. Heather and integrity exhaled from her very being, flamed from her cheeks, spoke from her loyal, stubborn chin, and looked from her trustworthy eyes. She had been with the bank president's baby ever since the little star-eyed creature ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... great plains and rugged mountains of Canada from end to end, you will find many beautiful plants and flowers, but not a single spray of heather. Only in one spot in the whole vast Dominion will you find the plant that is so characteristically Scottish, growing naturally, and that is in Point Pleasant Park, Halifax. Tradition has it that on this spot, in 1757, the soldiers of ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... maiden, and the downy voice of the child, the managed accents of flattery or traffic, the shrill tones of woman's fretting, and the troubled gush of man's anger. The moory upland and the corn slopes, the glen where the rocks jut through mantling heather, and bright brooks gurgle amid the scented banks of wild herbs, the shivering cabin and the rudely-lighted farm-house are as plain in Carleton's pages as if he used canvas and colours with a skill varying from Wilson and ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... And draw the smile Of peace from those Who wept their woes Yet when the love Of Christ above To guilty men Was shown him—then He left the joys Of worldly noise, And humbly laid His drooping head Nor heather-bell Is there to tell Of gentle friend Who sought to lend A sweeter sleep To him who deep Beneath the ground Repose has found. No stone of woe Is there to show The name, or tell How passing well He ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... for many months had not elapsed since that brown creature had kicked up its little heels, and twirled its tail, and shaken its shaggy mane in all the wild exuberance of early youth and unfettered freedom on the heather ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... saw as I returned home across the moor from the station? The day was nearly over, and the clouds were gathering overhead. The wind was rising and falling as it swept across the moorland. The rich purple of the heather had gone, and was succeeded by dull brown—sometimes almost grey—each little floret of the ling, as Ruskin said, folding itself into a cross as it was dying. Poor little purply-pink petals! They had had their day, they had had their fill of sunshine, ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... moorlands in the keen air, Amroth striding cleanly and lightly over the heather. Then we began to descend into the valley, through a fine forest country, somewhat like the chestnut-woods of the Apennines. The view was of incomparable beauty and width. I could see a great city far out in the plain, with a river entering it and leaving it, like a ribbon ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... but over her grave Waved the desolate form of a storm-blasted yew, Around it no demons or ghosts dare to rave, But spirits of peace steep her slumbers in dew. 35 Then stay thy swift steps mid the dark mountain heather, Though chill blow the wind and severe is the weather, For perfidy, traveller! cannot bereave her, Of the tears, to the tombs ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... taken with a panic that they had been drowned going home through the bogs, and she was crying and wailing, and saying she must go to look for them. It was not thought fit for her to leave the house alone so late in the evening, so I went with her. As we passed down a steep hill of heather, where the nightjars were clapping their wings in the moonlight, she told me a long story of the way she had been frightened. Then we reached a solitary cottage on the edge of the bog, and as a light was ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... as he debated and determined in his mind, he was hastening through a country that in another mood would be demanding his attention almost at every step of the way. Ladyfield is at the barren end of the glen—barren of trees, but rich in heather, and myrtle, and grass—surrounded by full and swelling hills. The river, but for the gluttonous sea that must be sucking it down, would choose, if it might, to linger in the valley here for ever, and in summer it loiters on many pretences, twining out and in, hiding behind ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... century; close by it is the old cattle-pound. The heath, of some 400 acres, somewhat resembles that of Hampstead, and from the higher ground some excellent views are to be obtained, whilst the sandy hollows and surface are plentifully covered with heather, gorse, and brambles. On the northern side, facing the road which leads to Roehampton, are many fine houses—among others, Grantham House, the residence of Lady Grantham; Ashburton House; Exeter House, occupied by the second Marquis of Exeter, who, divorced from his Marchioness, wooed and ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... a clump of scrub oaks; sparsely scattered about were small pines. We found great numbers of Opuntia Missouriensis, called by the Mexicans nopal; small mesquite shrubs, too, are seen everywhere, while the resurrection plant covers great areas, like the heather on the Scotch hills. Here are also found century plants, or agaves, and many species of small ferns, such as the graceful maidenhair. In the larger water-courses are poplars and maples, now presenting their most ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz |
