"Sedge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... assume Their vernal garb of bud and bloom. How fair they look, how bright and gay With tasselled flowers on every spray! While each to each proud challenge flings Borne in the song the wild bee sings. That mallard by the river edge Has bathed amid the reeds and sedge: Now with his mate he fondly plays And fires ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... minutes Pete stopped at the edge of a hollow, where, half covered by sedge rushes and bog plantain, there lay a good-sized pool of clear water, down to which Tom made his way, followed by his companion, and after taking a hearty draught, which was wonderfully clear and refreshing, ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... of England it is today—rich, luxuriant, slow. The great colonies of rabbits that I saw at Charlcote seemed too fat to frolic, save more than to play a trick or two on the hounds that blinked in the sun. Down toward Stratford there are flat islands covered with sedge, long rows of weeping-willows, low hazel, hawthorn, and places where "Green Grow the Rushes, O." Then, if the farmer leaves a spot untilled, the dogrose pre-empts the place and showers its petals on the vagrant winds. Meadowsweet, forget-me-nots and wild geranium snuggle themselves ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... gleaming surface, are the orange sails of trailing market-boats; we skirt the great hay-barges of Mazorbo, whose boatmen bandy lazzi and badinage with our gondolier; we glide by a lonely cypress into a broader reach, and in front, across a waste of brown sedge and brushwood, the tower of Torcello rises sharply against the sky. There is something weird and unearthly in the suddenness with which one passes from the bright, luminous waters of the lagoon, barred with soft lines of violet light and broken with ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... first lay along Thibert Creek, now on gravel benches, now on bed rock, now close down on the bouldery edge of the stream. Above the mines the stream is clear and flows with a rapid current. Its banks are embossed with moss and grass and sedge well mixed with flowers—daisies, larkspurs, solidagos, parnassia, potentilla, strawberry, etc. Small strips of meadow occur here and there, and belts of slender arrowy fir and spruce with moss-clad roots grow close to the water's edge. ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... glance among the tree-stems that you were looking through open air; you find that you are looking through a labyrinth of wire-rigging, and must use the cutlass right and left at every five steps. You push on into a bed of strong sedge-like Sclerias, with cutting edges to their leaves. It is well for you if they are only three, and not six feet high. In the midst of them you run against a horizontal stick, triangular, rounded, smooth, green. You take a glance along it right and left, and see no end to it ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... ail thee, wretched wight, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge is wither'd from the lake, And ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... to enjoy—creations which the floods covered with their secret veils of silver; and now these noble monuments sparkle below, stately and solemn, and bedewed by the water, which loves them, and calls forth from their crevices delicate moss-flowers and enwreathing tufts of sedge. ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... by without a whimper from the pack. There was not a sound save the eager rustling of the dogs through the sedge and undergrowth. The ground was familiar to Flora, and I watched her with pride as with powerful strides she circled around. Suddenly she paused and flung her head in the air, making a beautiful picture where she stood poised, ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... in all, and all in Thee, Oh still"—He spoke, and lo, the charm accurst Fled whence it came, and the broad barrier burst! A vain illusion! (such as mocks the eyes Of fearful men, when mountains round them rise From less than nothing [Footnote 4]) nothing now beheld, But scatter'd sedge—repelling, and repell'd! And once again that valiant company Right onward came, ploughing the Unknown Sea. Already borne beyond the range of thought, With Light divine, with Truth immortal fraught, From world to world their ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... as I sat there in the loneliness of this big nature which worked around me. The dog dignified the situation—he was a part of nature's belongings—while I somehow did not seem to grace the solitude. The grays slowly grew into browns on the sedge-grass, and the water to silver. A bright flash of fire shot out of the dusk far up in the gloom, and the dull report of a shot-gun came over the tank. Black objects fled across the sky—the ducks were flying. I missed one or two, and grew weary—none came near enough to my lair. Presently it ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... roar more loud, And the sails did sigh like sedge; And the rain poured down from one black cloud; The Moon was ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... winding and straightening through serene and shining pastures. There is nothing quieter in all Surrey than this little path by the tiny river, with the bank on one side rich with roses and elderflower, and on the other the sunlight gleaming on the chestnut coats of the cattle moving slowly through the sedge. Here is an old oak bridge, solid and lichened; here, facing the stream, a high bank of white sand, bored and tunnelled by sand-martins; a little further, and the brushwood flames with the pink and crimson spires ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... lower end of Bogue Sound amid the sedge grass they hoped to make their next camp, when this question would be debated from every side, and the plan of campaign adopted ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... composition is marvellous. It would be curious to trace in detail the remnants of classical treatment which may be discerned—Jordan, for instance, pours his water from an urn like a river-god crowned with sedge—or to show what points of ecclesiastical tradition are established these ancient monuments. We find Mariolatry already imminent, the names of the three kings, Kaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, the four evangelists as we now recognise them, and many of the rites and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... learn that the infernal persistence of the Old Man of the Sea of Arabian origin could find its match in youth. A week slipped by. Philip wove an unsatisfactory mat of sedge upon a loom of cord and stakes, whittled himself a knife and fork and spoon which he initialed gorgeously with the dye of a boiled alder, invented a camp rake of forked branches, made a broom of twigs, and sunk a candle in the floor of his tent which he covered with a bottomless milk bottle. All ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... rightly classed by F. and Y. with the Warblers. Gould strangely puts it with his rock-birds, 'saxicolinae,'—in which, however, he also includes the sedge warbler. ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... canoe, so cunningly hidden by its owner under a heap of brush and sedge-grass, that only the explicit directions they had received enabled them to find it. It was in good condition, about eighteen feet in length and two paddles lay in the bottom. Tom got in, pushed off from the shore, and with deft strokes brought ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... back toward the station. The Indians up the creek had crossed, but were riding away from the station and toward the ranch, evidently bent on attacking it next. The flames from the burning train rose high above the creek. There seemed no place to escape to and Bucks, creeping through the sedge grass, got back to his ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... a vapour of amethyst, rose the mountains; while at my feet, in mid-stream, there were two mills which might have been untouched since Moorish days. There had been no rain for months, the water stood very low, and here and there were little islands of dry yellow sand, on which grew reeds and sedge. In such a spot might easily have wandered the half-naked fisherman of the oriental tale, bewailing in melodious verse the hardness of his lot; since to his net came no fish, seeking a broken pot or a piece of iron wherewith to buy himself a dinner. There might he find a ring half-buried ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... pause. Season by season the patch of tilled ground seemed to shrink at the wish of the greedy black land that girdled it about. The outlying fields grew first garish with golden ragweed and scarlet poppies, and then dull green again with the brown-knotted rushes and sombre sedge, and all other marish growths, until the re-annexation was complete, and they once more were homogeneous part and parcel of the conquering bog. Old Michael used to trudge heavily round his dwindling territories, which were haunted by memories of better days. There ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... was pink on the mists, a gunshot had sent the echoes clamouring across the still lake waters, and a flock of ducks, flapping up and fleeing with frightened cries, had left one of its members sprawling motionless among the flattened sedge, a heap of bright feathers spattered with blood. Later in the morning a rifle had cracked sharply on the hillside, and a little puff of white smoke had blown across the dark front of the fir groves. The truce had come ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... science, it must pass through the understanding of the scientist. Or one may say, it is with the thoughts and half thoughts that the walker gathers in the woods and fields, as with the common weeds and coarser wild flowers which he plucks for a bouquet,—wild carrot, purple aster, moth mullein, sedge, grass, etc.: they look common and uninteresting enough there in the fields, but the moment he separates them from the tangled mass, and brings them indoors, and places them in a vase, say of some choice glass, amid artificial things,—behold, ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... breaks on yonder sedge, And broadens in that bed of weeds; A bright disk shows its radiant edge, All things bespeak the coming morn, ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... fortunes! A little brook was now before them; and Alan said, "This river must be crossed, and I hope that none of us will be carried away by the current. What we shall do if an Indian springs from behind the bushes, or a crocodile comes out of the sedge, I don't know. Here is the narrowest part of the river. I will lay my stick across it; and, if we make believe very much, it will ...
— The Nursery, July 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 1 • Various
... nearly currentless, the night air and tree shadows keep them cool. Their shores curve in and out in bay and promontory, giving the appearance of miniature lakes, their banks in most places embossed with brier and azalea, sedge and grass and fern; and above these in their glory of autumn colors a mingled growth of alder, willow, dogwood and balm-of-Gilead; mellow sunshine overhead, cool shadows beneath; light filtered and strained in passing through the ripe leaves like ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... man's footsteps died away along the quiet road. The peace of the evening was not broken by the notes of the sedge-warblers or by the voice of the woman in the barge, singing her baby to sleep. It was a sad song she sang. Something about Bill Bailey and how she ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... pleasure 'tis to hedge My temples here with heavy sedge, Abandoning my lazy side, Stretched as a bank unto the tide, Or to suspend my sliding foot On the osier's undermined root, And in its branches tough to hang, While at my lines the fishes twang? But now away, my hooks, my quills, And angles, idle ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... it) with a whipping of silver round the top, and a darker grey silk tag to fasten it. It is marked 5-3/4 inside, and has a delicious scent about it, to keep off moths, I suppose; naphthaline is better. It reminds me of a 'silver-sedge' tied on a ten hook. I startled the good landlady of the little inn (there is no village fortunately) when I arrived with the only porter of the tiny station laden with traps. She hesitated about a private sitting-room, but ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... Nest. "Slight, of leaves and strips of flags" (Gould); "of sedge and grass, rarely ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... daubbed with mud which soon dried. The joists were thrown on top of them and gable ends of the same kind of boards that made the room. Bunks three or four feet wide made in two tiers were at rear end and sides bottomed with small poles, and broom-sedge and oak and pine leaves, with a blanket spread over. Four-legged slabs made good benches, but many split bottom chairs were obtained from country chair makers. With a good log fire three or four feet long in the fire place and an old blanket hung in the doorway, ...
— A History of Lumsden's Battery, C.S.A. • George Little
... me more than toil? Can swaying of sere sedge along the slope, Or the dull lisp of oaken limbs that foil The sun's ensheathing fervor, interfuse My vacant being with far meanings whose Soft airs blow from the hidden seas of Hope? Or can the wintry sumac sably stooping So charm ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... azure shells of the fresh-water clams to be found so often upon the premises of this builder. Does he sup on them, or are they only the cups and saucers of his vegeto-aquarian menage? Blue and yellow all,—the sky and the sedge-rows, the calm lake and the canoe, the plashing basswood-leaves and the oval, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the country broadened out into a great marsh, vast and spreading widely over the land, dotted with eyots, where birds flew low among the sedge. Away to west and east were low grim hills, with a sense of unending space and loneliness upon them. And at the foot of the street was the ford, crowded here with men,—soldiers and serfs and freedmen,—with horses and mules and heavy carts. ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... boars that eat like tame Gets his from Umbria, genuine mast-fed game: For the Laurentian beast, that makes its fat Off sedge and reeds, is flavourless and flat. The flesh of roes that feed upon the vine Is not to be relied on when you dine. With those who know what parts of hare are best You'll find the wings are mostly in request. Fishes and fowls, their nature and their ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... a present of them to any one who would father them, he allowed his life to slip by until his seventieth year was reached, before he would print them, and when they appeared, he could not find the courage to put his name on the title-page. Not one of his own titlarks or sedge-warblers could be more shy of public observation. Even the fact that his own brother was a publisher gave him no real ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... Spoon Island he went into raptures over it, for it was a rarity, even among the many beautiful ones he had visited. As its name implied, it was shaped like a spoon, about five hundreds rods long and formed of white sand, with a growth of green sedge grass all over it. On the broadest part was a cluster of spruce forming a little thicket and beside this, and entered by a narrow inlet the tiniest bit of a harbor, just large enough to shelter a small sloop. The seagulls had also discovered its beauty, for thousands hovered about it, and the ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... North Rona; and the Beehive Cells, in Eilan na Naoimh (Nun's Island.) These old Strathearn churches would seldom be larger than 12 feet wide by 20 long, built of undressed land stones (like a field dyke), and thatched with heather, bracken, or sedge. The great storehouse of reliable material with minimum of controversy relative to the early Christianity of Scotland is Warren's Liturgy and Ritual of the ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... stood holding on by a tuft of coarse sedge, watching him as he threw himself on his side, and went off pretty close to the bank, where the water was eddying; and the next minute he was beyond a clump of sedge that projected into the river, and I ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... Shakespeare's vision, a flower of her kin forsaken, Lay in her golden raiment alone on the wild wave's edge, Surely by no shore else, but here on the bank storm-shaken, Perdita, bright as a dew-drop engilt of the sun on the sedge. Here on a shore unbeheld of his eyes in a dream he beheld her Outcast, fair as a fairy, the child of a far-off king: And over the babe-flower gently the head of a pastoral elder Bowed, compassionate, hoar as the hawthorn-blossom in spring, And kind as ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the trees with scarlet, 135 Stained the leaves with red and yellow; He it was who sent the snow-flakes, Sifting, hissing through the forest, Froze the ponds, the lakes, the rivers, Drove the loon and sea-gull southward, 140 Drove the cormorant and curlew To their nests of sedge and sea-tang In the realms of Shawondasee. Once the fierce Kabibonokka Issued from his lodge of snow-drifts, 145 From his home among the icebergs, And his hair, with snow besprinkled, Streamed behind him like a river, Like a black and wintry river, As he howled and hurried southward, 150 Over frozen ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... were charmed with an old field given up to sedge, its deep rain-gullies as red as gaping wounds, its dead trees in tatters of long gray moss. Estelle became a student of flowers, Cecile of birds, Camille of trees. All my explanations were alike enchantingly strange. To their ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... dwelling-house on the part of the farm looking over Clew Bay towards Clare Island, and all was apparently smooth and pleasant. No sooner, however, was Mr. Hunter established there than a difficulty arose. The inhabitants of the surrounding country had been in the habit of cutting turf and pulling sedge on parts of the mountain and bog included within the limits of Mr. Hunter's farm. It is only fair to the memory of the deceased gentleman to state that such rights are frequently paid for, and that he had not taken the farm subject to any "turbary" rights or local customs. Accordingly ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... this statement and Joe plucked up spirit, as was his habit when another arduous task confronted him. Cautiously they made their way from one quaking patch of sedge to another or scrambled to their middles. There came a ridge of higher ground thick with brambles and knotted vines and they traversed this with less misery. A gleam of water among the trees and they took it to be the creek which they sought ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... him and he hides his books, his Cato's Maxims, or perchance his Confabulationes Pueriles, under the garden hedge, and skirting the town, makes his way along the river. And there, hidden among the willows and green alders and rustling sedge, he spends the morning; and when in the heat of the day the fish refuse to nibble, he takes his hunk of bread out of his pocket and lies on his back among the rushes, while lazy dreams flit across his consciousness as the light summer ...
— A Warwickshire Lad - The Story of the Boyhood of William Shakespeare • George Madden Martin
... Alabama, who tells us that, in his State, "we may behold numerous fine houses, once the abode of intelligent freemen, now occupied by slaves, or else tenantless and dilapidated; that we may see fields, once fertile, covered with foxtail and broom-sedge—moss growing on the walls of once thrifty villages, and may find that 'one only master grasps the whole domain' which once furnished homes ...
— Slavery: What it was, what it has done, what it intends to do - Speech of Hon. Cydnor B. Tompkins, of Ohio • Cydnor Bailey Tompkins
... withering swamp grass is blended with these smells. To-day is Trinity. In accordance with an olden custom, the chambermaids of the establishment, while their ladies were still sleeping, had bought a whole waggon of sedge on the market, and had strewn its long, thick blades, that crunch underfoot, everywhere about—in the corridors, in the private cabinets, in the drawing room. They, also, had lit the lamps before all the images. The girls, by tradition, dare not do this with their hands, which have ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... I'll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece;— Where painted carpets o'er the meads are hurled, And Bacchus' vineyards overspread the world; Where woods and forests go in goodly green;— I'll be Adonis, thou shalt be Love's Queen;— The meads, the orchards, and the primrose-lanes, Instead of sedge and reed, bear sugar-canes: Thou in those groves, by Dis above, Shalt live with ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... spoke. So did he draw Full-manned, flat-bottomed for the shallowest shore, Dropped down to west, and crossed our frontage here. Seen from above they specked the water-shine As will a flight of swallows toward dim eve, Descending on a smooth and loitering stream To seek some eyot's sedge. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... finished milking we searched about for water. Towards the northeast the clearing narrowed and here we came upon a tiny rill trickling through a fringe of sedge. It came from a clear and abundant spring in a cleft of rock against the sharp up slope which rose there under the pines. At the lower edge of that part of the clearing, near the margin of the more nearly level ground, just before ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... Joshua heavily. He perceived his father's walking-stick on the bank; hastily picking it up he stuck it into the mud among the sedge. Then they went on. ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... the little crazy brooks, where love and sorrow run Crowned with sedge and singing wild, Like a sky-lark—or a child!— Old blind Moone, he knew their springs, and played 'em every one; Stood there, in the darkness, blind, And sang them into Shakespeare's mind.... Old blind Moone of London, O now his songs are done, ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... gleam of the distant dawn lighted up only her eyes, dull as those of a corpse. He plucked her by the sleeve, and both went on together, glancing back continually. At length they descended the slope of a small ravine, almost a hole, along the bottom of which a brook flowed lazily, overgrown with sedge, and strewed with mossy boulders. Descending into this ravine, they were completely concealed from the view of all the plain occupied by the Zaporovian camp. At least Andrii, glancing back, saw that the steep slope rose behind him higher than a man. On its summit appeared ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... The richest treasures of Davy Jones's Locker lie open to view, as the boat glides through the ever-changing scenery mirrored in the transparent sea. Opalescent berries resemble heaps of pearls, and the lemon stalks of marine sedge gleam like wedges of gold in the crystalline depths. The long oars detach pinnacles of coral like tongues of flame, and a cargo of seaweed, shells, and anemones, fills the boat as each enchanted grotto contributes a quota of treasure trove, but the vivid colouring fades apace when the sea-born ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... said Martin, pulling up on the brow of a slope at the bottom of which lay Lawford brook, and pointing to the top of the opposite slope; "the nest is in one of those high fir-trees at this end. And down by the brook there I know of a sedge-bird's nest. We'll go and look at ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... golden, and golden-green—and now and then encountering and making their wings rustle as they touched in rapid flight. Then as he stood with his hand resting against a tree trunk, peering forward, a curious little head with bright crimson eyes divided the sedge or reeds growing in the water, its owner looking out to see if there was any danger; and as it looked, Robin could see that the bird's beak seemed to be continued right up into a fiat red ...
— Young Robin Hood • G. Manville Fenn
... though his head and his arms and his legs were all trying to get inside of his jacket, and then he came sputtering to the top of the water and scrambled ashore. To his astonishment he saw that the spring had spread itself out into a little lake, and that the sedge-grass had grown to an enormous height, and was waving far above his head. Then he was startled by a tremendous roar of laughter, and, looking around, he saw the Goblin, who was now apparently at least twenty feet ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... would growl like a small thunderstorm. The seat was well chosen, for the cowering trees are like a shed over it, and there is a pleasant landscape in front (though that mattered little to Andy), a landscape of dim green moors—with brown stains on them where sedge grows and black shadows where bushes huddle in clefts—chequered by a grey net of low walls, dotted with the white gables of cabins, and framed by a ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... reclaimed by drainage, the armies found some of these marshes extending continuously for over 200 miles. In the upper Pripet basin the woods were everywhere full of countless little channels which creep through a wilderness of sedge. Along the right bank of the Pripet River the land rises above the level of the water and is fairly thickly populated. Elsewhere extends a great intricate network of streams with endless fields of bulrushes and ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... ail thee, knight at arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge is withered from the ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... country round the gulf was well-grassed, particularly before we crossed the Nicholson; and on the plains and approaches to the rivers and creeks. The large water-holes were frequently surrounded with a dense turf of Fimbristylis (a small sedge), which our horses liked to feed upon. Some stiff grasses made their appearance when we approached the sea-coast, as well on the plains as in the forest. The well-known kangaroo grass (Anthisteria) forms still one of the principal ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... loved to wander over unknown spots, {and} to see unknown rivers, his curiosity lessening the fatigue. He went, too, to the Lycian[46] cities, and the Carians, that border upon Lycia. Here he sees a pool of water, clear to the {very} ground at the bottom; here there are no fenny reeds, no barren sedge, no rushes with their sharp points. The water is translucent; but the edges of the pool are enclosed with green turf, and with grass ever verdant. A Nymph dwells {there}; but one neither skilled in hunting, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... on grass and bush and hedge, Reddening the road and deepening the green On wide, blurred lawn, and in close-tangled sedge; Veiling in gray the landscape stretched between These low broad meadows and the pale hills seen But dimly on the far ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... blue slate roof, which was adorned by dormers and gables. In front of the house, on its southern side, lay the garden, with its paths and clipped hedges, and the little pond half overgrown by sedge and thick bushes. On the northern side, towards the sea, he could discern the carriage drive, and the extensive level yard with the ancient lime tree standing in the middle of it. Beyond that came four warehouses standing in a row, all painted yellow, with brown doors; and ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... they reached it, and glanced up and down, it was a picture indeed. The river made little bends, and wound around tiny points, edged with the greenest of sedge grass in some places, then grey stones with mossy sea-growth, or willows dipping their branches in the lightly ruffled water. Not a soul to be seen anywhere, not a sound save the voices of birds; but while they looked, a flock of geese came floating ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... the current carried me to the end of the lake, and I found myself at the debouchure of the bayou. Here, to my great delight, I saw my boat in the swamp, where it had been caught and held fast by the sedge. A few minutes more, and I had swung myself over the gunwale, and was sculling with eager strokes down the ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... she said, indignantly, and maintained a dangerous silence until they drifted into the still waters of the outlet where the starlight silvered the sedge-grass and feathery ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... the waters of the bayou, as motionless as a sleeping snake under its misty covert—to continue the poetical language or thought. The ripples ran frightened and shivering into the rooty thicknesses of the sedge-grown banks, startling the little birds bathing there into darting to the nearest, highest rush-top, where, without losing their hold on their swaying, balancing perches, they burst into all sorts of incoherent songs, in their excitement to ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... author of the Journaal mentions that the song of the 'Nachtegael' was heard. There are no nightingales in Australia, but the bird to which the writer of the Journaal alludes may have been the Long-billed Reed Warbler, the Australian representative of the Sedge Warbler and a denizen of the reed-beds of the Swan River. Two species of geese are also mentioned by the same writer under the names of European geese. It is somewhat difficult to determine to which geese the author of the Journaal alludes under ...
— Essays on early ornithology and kindred subjects • James R. McClymont
... rescuing them from the danger of falling over rocks or becoming buried in snowdrifts. The sun by day and the stars by night were for him both clock and compass, and if these failed him he directed his homeward course by observing how the cotton-grass or withered sedge swayed ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... Among the sedge were flying the three snipe they had seen before, and in their plaintive cries there was a note of alarm and vexation at having been driven away from the stream. The horses were steadily munching and snorting. Deniska walked about by them and, trying to appear ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the evening shore, At once a lovely isle before me lay, Smooth and with tender verdure covered o'er, As if just risen from its calm inland bay; Sloped each way gently to the grassy edge, And the small waves that dallied with the sedge. ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... warbles soft and runs With fuller curve and sleeker line, Though on the winter-blackened hedge Twigs of unbudding iron shine, And trampled still the river sedge. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... I have hedged me with a thorny hedge, I live alone, I look to die alone: Yet sometimes when a wind sighs through the sedge, Ghosts of my buried years and friends come back, My heart goes sighing after swallows flown On sometime ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... but the heavy guns opened fire upon them and swept them off in files as they rushed on, and in the intervals of reloading the cavalry charged into their midst. By this time the Tlascalans had come up, having by order of Cortes bound wreaths of sedge about their heads that they might be the more easily distinguished from the Cholulans, and they fell upon the rear of the wretched townsmen, who, thus harassed on all sides, could no longer maintain their ground. ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... a deer looked at him from sedge, furry ears forward; stamped, winded him, and, not frightened very much, trotted into the dwarf willows, halting once ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... reeds, and the only two musical instruments which we observed were of an exceedingly rude kind. One of them does not produce a melody exceeding that of a child's rattle. It consists of what may be called a conic cap inverted, but scarcely hollowed at the base above a foot high, made of a coarse sedge-like plant, the upper part of which, and the edges, are ornamented with beautiful red feathers, and to the point, or lower part, is fixed a gourd-shell larger than the fist. Into this is put something to rattle, which is done by holding the instrument by the small part, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... blue, sunlit arch overhead, the waving trees that sent dancing shadows like troops of elfin sprites over the water, the fret in one place where a rock broke the murmurous lapping, the swish somewhere else, where grasses and weeds and water blooms rooted in the sedge rocked back and forth with the slow tide—how peaceful it ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... eye as though, instead of making thirty-two miles an hour, he were posing for his photograph. For full two hundred yards he sustained the race, until, finding that his competitor had the better wind, he gave it up and shot suddenly into the sedge. How much longer the match had lasted I could not say. He must have got up near the engine—of course losing some time in the act of rising—and fallen back gradually to my place, which was in a rear car. But when a schedule for birds comes to be framed, it is safe ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... beside the reedy Nile Thou hast ever held thy way, Where the embryo crocodile In the damp sedge lay; When the river monster's eye Kindled at thy passing by, And the pliant reeds were bending Where his blackened form was wending, And the basking serpent started Wildly when ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... for the most part of series of sandhills, one of which, Mount Tempest, is said to be 910 feet in height; on the north-west portion a large tract of low ground, mostly swampy, with several lagoons and small streams. The soil is poor, and the grass usually coarse and sedge-like. All the timber is small, and consists of the usual Eucalypti, Banksiae, etc. with abundance of the cypress-pine (Callitris arenaria) a wood much prized for ornamental work. The appearance along the shores of the ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... torn from the hedge, And trailing the highway over, The dreamy-eyed mistresses circled the sedge, And called for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to bear it no longer,' and directly threw himself into the water. I immediately started, and ran towards the place, calling at the same time as loudly as I could for assistance. An angler happened luckily to be a-fishing a little below me, though some very high sedge had hid him from my sight. He immediately came up, and both of us together, not without some hazard of our lives, drew the body to the shore. At first we perceived no sign of life remaining; but having held the body up by the heels (for we soon had assistance enough), it discharged a vast ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... the coming wind did roar more loud, And the sails did sigh like sedge:[45-35] And the rain poured down from one black cloud: The ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... but, ah! how seldom pledges Given to the dying, to the dead, are held! The Esquire reach'd the shore, where sand and sedge is O'er melancholy hills, by paths of eld; Treeless and houseless was the prospect round, Rock-strewn and boisterous the lake before; A Charon-shape in a skiff a-ground— The pilgrim turned, and left the ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... like the flower? Yet, when I trod, with footsteps wild and free, The crackling leaves beneath yon linden-tree, Panting from play or dripping from the stream, How bright the visions of my boyish dream Or, modest Charles, along thy broken edge, Black with soft ooze and fringed with arrowy sedge, As once I wandered in the morning sun, With reeking sandal and superfluous gun, How oft, as Fancy whispered in the gale, Thou wast the Avon of her flattering tale! Ye hills, whose foliage, fretted on the skies, Prints shadowy ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... listeners up for their final choice; As if a strong hand rent apart The veils of sense from soul and heart, Showing in light ineffable The joys of heaven and woes of hell All about in the misty air The hills seemed kneeling in silent prayer; The rustle of leaves, the moaning sedge, The water's lap on its gravelled edge, The wailing pines, and, far and faint, The wood-dove's note of sad complaint,— To the solemn voice of the preacher lent An undertone as of low lament; And the note of the sea from its sand coast, On the easterly wind, now heard, now lost, Seemed the murmurous ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... and there were little cottages, and picturesque beer-houses with the vivid brewers' boards of blue and scarlet, and once a broad green and a church, and an expanse of some hundred houses or so. Then he came to a pebbly rivulet that emerged between clumps of sedge loosestrife and forget-me-nots under an arch of trees, and rippled across the road, and there he dismounted, longing to take off shoes and stockings—those stylish chequered stockings were now all dimmed with dust—and paddle his lean legs in the chuckling cheerful water. ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... out, that, on account of their continued alarms, they would end their lives. So they repaired to a certain pond, into which, in their despondency, they were going to throw themselves. Alarmed at their approach, some Frogs fled distractedly into the green sedge. "Oh!" says one {of the hares}, "there are others too whom fear of misfortune torments. Endure ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... river's slippery edge, Witching to deeper calm the drowsy tide, Whispers and leans the breeze-entangling sedge; 115 Through emerald glooms the lingering waters slide, Or, sometimes wavering, throw back the sun, And the stiff banks in eddies melt and run Of dimpling light, and with the current seem ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... As before stated, we had no blankets, and how we suffered with the cold! I shall never forget that night of December 18th, 1862. We would form little columns of twenty or thirty men, in two ranks, and would just trot round and round in the tall weeds and broom sedge to keep from chilling to death. Sometimes we would pile down on the ground in great bunches, and curl up close together like hogs, in our efforts to keep warm. But some part of our bodies would be exposed, which soon would be stinging with cold, then ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... ail thee, wretched wight, Alone and palely loitering; The sedge is wither'd from the ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... sedge! Strip bare a circle to the land!" That done, he hastened to its edge, And grasped a rifle in his hand: Dried weeds he held beside the pan, Which kindled at a flash the mass! "Now fire fight fire!" he said, as ran The ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... considered a durable article. However, when treated to a boiling process or when rolled, as explained for sabutan and the pandan of Majayjay, the leaves yield straw which is stronger and more durable than most palm or sedge straw used for the ...
— Philippine Mats - Philippine Craftsman Reprint Series No. 1 • Hugo H. Miller
... out now upon another high field, carpeted with yellowing sedge, dotted over with young pines. The 65th headed the column. Lieutenant Coffin of Company A was a busy officer, active as a jumping-jack, half liked and half distasted by the men. The need of some breathing time, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... Claymores have asked us for a week; after that, Hot Springs for another two weeks or so; after that, to Oyster Bay. ... Mr. Quarrier opens his house on Sedge Point," she added demurely, "but I don't think he expects to invite you to ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... regular in shape than they, lay upon the margin of the brook, partly concealed by a clump of sedge. A letter, with the address uppermost! Rosa's optics were keen. She easily made out the direction upon the envelope from where she stood. It was Frederic Chilton's name in Mrs. Sutton's quaint, old-fashioned "back-hand" chirography. An hour before, as Rosa now recollected, she had seen, from her ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... according to system. Those which lie exposed are quite brown and rotten now, or perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and there amid the wet leaves. Nevertheless, with experienced eyes I explore amid the bare alders, and the huckleberry bushes, and the withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under the fallen and decaying ferns which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... for ruffian winds to shake; And as the bold intruders press around, At once she starts and rises with a bound; With bristles raised the sudden noise they hear, And ludicrously wild and winged with fear, The herd decamp with more than swinish speed, And snorting dash through sedge and rush and reed; Through tangled thickets headlong on they go, Then stop and listen for their fancied foe; The hindmost still the growing panic spreads, Repeated fright the first alarm succeeds, Till Folly's wages, wounds and thorns, they reap; ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... laughing, at his heels The clamor of his fifty deep-tongued hounds, Actaeon. I beheld him not far off, But unto bath and bathers hid from view, Being beyond that mighty rock whereon His wont was to be stretched at dip of eve, When frogs are loud amid the tall-plumed sedge In marshy spots about Asopus' bank,— Deeming his life was very sweet, his day A pleasant one, the peopled breadths of earth Most fair, and fair the shining tracts of sea; Green solitudes, and broad low-lying plains Made brown with frequent labors of men's hands, And salt, ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... skirting the bolder bank where the pines bent heavy heads over the water, the holly crowded close to the shore, and pale tinted reeds made border at the water's edge. Now in rounding a curve, we passed close to the cypress wood fringed with bush and sedge. Delicate brown festoons of vines hung from the branches; and, high out of reach, mats of mistletoe clung. It seemed one with our mood and our fancy when two round yellow eyes stared out of the shadows, two wide lazy wings were spread, and ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... flat-bottomed boats, but were foiled by Hereward and his men, their boats sunk, and hundreds of stout warriors drowned in the oozy river-bed. There still broods for me a certain horror over the place, where the river in its confined channel now runs quietly, by sedge and willow-herb and golden-rod, between its high flood banks, to join the Cam to ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Below the plateau a wide marsh extended, intersected by crooked creeks, which gnawed into the black earth like worms. A rim of sea bordered the tongue of the marsh, but it was too far off to add life to the scene. The sedge, giving up all hope of being moistened by the salt waves, had died in great circles, which looked like mats of gray hair on some pre-Adamite ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... rested. Far and nigh All slept, the cattle and the fowls of air. Stretched on a bank, beneath the cold, clear sky, Lay good AEneas, fain at length to share Late slumber, troubled by the war with care. When, 'twixt the poplars, where the fair stream flows, With azure mantle, and with sedge-crowned hair, The aged Genius of the place uprose, And, standing by, thus spake, and ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... became a broad surface of gold, beautiful to look down upon, with islands of tenderest birch green interspersed, and willows in which the sedge-reedling chattered. They used to say in the country that cuckoos were getting scarce, but here the notes of the cuckoo echoed all day long, and the birds often flew over the house. Doves cooed, blackbirds whistled, thrushes sang, jays called, wood-pigeons uttered ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... deliberately undressed himself under the willows, and unhesitatingly plunged into the basin. The water was four or five feet deep, and its extreme length afforded an excellent swimming bath, despite the water-lilies and a few aquatic plants that mottled its clear surface, or the sedge that clung to the bases of the statues. He disported for some moments in the delicious element, and then seated himself upon one of the half-submerged plinths, almost hidden by reeds, that had once upheld a river god. Here, lazily resting himself upon his elbow, half ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... The coup d'oeil from our carriage-window is not inspiriting. It rests upon a bare, bleak landscape, rolling away to the horizon, of waves of drab and dirty-green land, unbroken save for here and there a pool of stagnant water, rotting in a fringe of sedge and rush, or an occasional flock of wild-fowl. At rare intervals we pass, close to the line, a Tartar encampment. Half a dozen dirty brown tents surrounded by horses, camels, and thin shivering cattle, the latter covered with coarse sack-clothing tied ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... And his robes of rank glitter like the young sedge. Do I not think of you? But I am afraid of this officer, and dare not ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... more melodious note of a trumpeter swan; or from the top of a tall cottonwood, or cypress, the sharp saw-filing shriek of the white-headed eagle, angered by some stray creature coming too close, and startling it from its slumbers. Below, out of the swamp sedge, rises the mournful cry of the quabird—the American bittern—and from the same, the deep sonorous bellow of that ugliest animal on ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... force. Hugh fed it with fingers of bread he sliced with his own hand. This went on for nearly all Hugh's episcopate. But in his last Easter the swan seemed ill and sullen, and kept to his pond. After some chase they caught him in the sedge, and brought him in, the picture of unhappiness, with drooping head and trailing wing, before the bishop. The poor bird was to lose its friend six months after, and seemed to resent the cruel severance of coming death, though it was itself ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... peaty marshes on the opposite side of the district, belonging to an alluvial soil, washed down from the chalk hills. The great reed-mace adorns the Itchen, and going along the disused towing path of the canal there is to be found abundance of the black and golden spikes of the sedge, and the curious balls of the bur-reed, very like the horrid German weapon called a morning star. Also meadow-sweet, meadow-rue, and comfrey of every shade of purple, the water avens and forget-me-not, also that loveliest plant the bog-bean, with trefoil ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... of Grecian sculptors which, in moments of despondency, we sometimes believe to be ideal. Her full eyes were of the same deep blue as the mountain lake, and gleamed from under their long lashes as that purest of waters beneath its fringing sedge. Her brown light hair was braided from her high forehead, and hung in long full curls over her neck; the mass gathered up into a Grecian knot, and confined by a bandeau of cameos. She wore a dress of black velvet, whose folding drapery was confined round a waist which was ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... the moss-grown log in the rank cedar-swamp, or under his hand, when about to grasp with it a ledge of the rocks among which he is clambering, unknowing of the serpent's dens. With clenched teeth, and hair that rustled like the sedge-grass, I rose and woke up the obedient gas, which flashed tremulously on the scales of an enormous rattlesnake coiled round the mice's cage, tightening his folds as he whizzed his infernal warning, and darting out his lightning tongue with baffled ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... on my canoe. I was down to a mighty small allowance of crackers and cheese then, but I parcelled it out in rations for three days and started once more along the shore for Yakutat. The next night I was traveling by a sort of sedge when I heard ptarmigan. It sounded good to me, and I brought my canoe up and stepped out. I couldn't see, but I could hear those birds stirring and cheeping all around. I lay down and lifted my gun ready to take the first that came between me and the sky." His voice ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... the creek I would pass a muskrat's slide. Here was one at the butt of a tulip-poplar, its platform wet and freshly trodden, its "dive" shooting sheer over a root into the stream. Farther on stood a large tussock whose top was trampled flat and covered with sedge-roots. I could not resist putting my nose down for a sniff, so good is the smell of a fresh trail, so close are we to the rest of the pack. In the thick of the swamp I stopped a moment to examine the footprints of an otter at a shallow, shelving place along ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... simpler flowers, such as those of a grass, sedge, or rush among the monocotyledons, or an oak, hazel, or plantain, among dicotyledons, the flowers are extremely inconspicuous and often reduced to the simplest form. In such plants, the pollen is conveyed from the male flowers to the female by the wind, and to this end the former are usually ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... fierce Day-star's blazing ball their sight Sears with excess of light; Or through dun sand-clouds the blue scimitar's edge Slopes down like fire from heaven, Mowing them as the thatcher mows the sedge. ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave |
