"Vernal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... table was drawn up close to the open window, and vernal breezes found welcome in the chamber. A snowy cloth hung down to the well-polished floor, and tall white cups were placed upon it to rival it in purity and grace. Cakes of bread, such bread as is ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... to Ciconians call'd, Their neighbours summoning, a mightier host And braver, natives of the continent, Expert, on horses mounted, to maintain Fierce fight, or if occasion bade, on foot. 60 Num'rous they came as leaves, or vernal flow'rs At day-spring. Then, by the decree of Jove, Misfortune found us. At the ships we stood Piercing each other with the brazen spear, And till the morning brighten'd into noon, Few as we were, we yet withstood them all; But, when the sun verged westward, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... fond adieu to thee, O muse of rhyme— I do remand thee to the shades until that happier time When fields are green, and posies gay are budding everywhere, And there's a smell of clover bloom upon the vernal air; When by the pond out yonder the redwing blackbird calls, And distant hills are wed to Spring in veils of water-falls; When from his aqueous element the famished pickerel springs Two hundred feet into the air ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... in the background, just ready to come if she was wanted. But indeed it seemed as if no such precautions were necessary, for never had Lady Ashbridge been more amenable, more blissfully content in her son's companionship. The vernal hour, that first smell of the rejuvenated earth, as it stirred and awoke from its winter sleep had reached her no less than it had reached the springing grass and the heart of buried bulbs, and never perhaps in all her life ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... but still green in all, on I journeyed—my horse and I; on, by an old saw-mill, bound down and hushed with vines, that his grating voice no more was heard; on, by a deep flume clove through snowy marble, vernal-tinted, where freshet eddies had, on each side, spun out empty chapels in the living rock; on, where Jacks-in-the-pulpit, like their Baptist namesake, preached but to the wilderness; on, where a huge, cross-grain block, fern-bedded, showed where, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... with the Vernal Equinox, it must be remembered; and (howsoever the old Solar Year is practically superseded by the clumsy Lunar Year that dates from the Mohammedan Hijra) still commemorated by a Festival that is said to have been appointed by the very Jamshyd whom ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... seaweed upon his head, or a brown-brimmed hat adorned with eagle or heron plumes. As personification of the summer, he was invoked to still the raging storms which desolated the coasts during the winter months. He was also implored to hasten the vernal warmth and ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... and the tribes intended to leave at night; their kindred in Succoth must be ready to go forth with them. There was great rejoicing among the Hebrews, who like those of their blood in the city of Rameses, had assembled in every house at a festive repast on the night of the new moon after the vernal equinox when the harvest festival usually began. The heads of the tribes had informed them that the day of liberation had arrived, and the Lord would lead them into ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and Egyptian years appears in the fact that the Babylonian new year dates from about the period of the vernal equinox and not from the solstice. Lockyer associates this with the fact that the periodical inundation of the Tigris and Euphrates occurs about the equinoctial period, whereas, as we have seen, the Nile flood comes ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... are certain persons who seem to have required the stimulus of necessity to make them break through an initial indolence of nature. When Johnson found fault with Gray for having times of the year when he wrote more easily, from the vernal to the autumnal equinox, he added that a man could write at any time if he set himself doggedly to it. True, no doubt! But to write doggedly is not to court favourable conditions for artistic work. It may be a finer sight for a moralist to see ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... conceives it. Larger tasks are discharged by more important spirits, and everything natural thus becomes animated by supernatural beings. Thor was the god of thunder; Freia the goddess of spring and vernal awakening; Athena inspired the minds of men. Venus and Aphrodite played their special parts, also. But such powers as these, established by the untutored mind, needed to be accounted for, and so in the more advanced religions Jove and Jupiter were created as the more ultimate ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... vegetable is equally forward. The meadows are covered with violets, and the gardens with roses: the banks by the side of the road seem one continued bed of cowslips. In plain words, Spring here indeed seems to hold her throne, and to reign in all that vernal sweetness and loveliness which is imputed to ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... Adonis, with the hymeneal Fresh vernal buds half sunk between His youthful curls. [Footnote: A Vision ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... the sad heart's call, To empty summer bowers, Where still and dead are all The vernal ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... remains with pious care, Beneath the vernal turf we laid; Remembrance loves to linger there, And weep beneath ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... into a new and vernal world. He wanted to take her in his arms and press her to his heart. The difference between the glance she now gave him and that she had shot at him at the door of his office that evening came to him and decided him. It was ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... how intolerably sweet, Hover about its fat and unctuous fumes! Of Little England and a half-baked Fleet, Of German friendship pure as vernal blooms, And that dear country's hallowed right to dump Things on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... To return to the immobility of the terrestrial axis, the following is the result: if we were to spend a winter here, we should see the stars describing a circle about us. As for the sun, the day of the vernal equinox, March 23d, it would appear to us (I take no account of refraction) exactly cut in two by the horizon, and would rise gradually in longer and longer curves; but here it is remarkable that when it ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... just as the vernal equinox had blown a few ships into harbor, a stranger was announced, and immediately recognized by the master of the house as a 'Don' something—a Spanish merchant, whose kindness to a young member of the family had been often mentioned in his letters from Mexico. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... glorious morning. The air is fresh and cool. The sky lovingly smiles on the earth and her children. The deep woods are crowned in bright vernal leafage; the water of the Mkuti, rushing under the emerald shade afforded by the bearded banks, seems to challenge us for the race to Ujiji, with its ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Cardamines! Thine hour is when the thrushes sing, When gently stirs the vernal breeze, When earth and sky proclaim the spring; When all the fields melodious ring With cuckoos' calls, when all the trees Put on their green, then art thou king Of ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... is one of the most common of wild animals. In all parts you may meet with it. In the hot lowlands of Louisiana—in the tropical "chapparals" of Mexico—in the snowy regions of Canada—and in the vernal valleys of California. Unlike the deer, the wild cat, and the wolverine, it is never mistaken for any other animal, nor is any animal taken for it. It is as well-known in America as the red fox is in England, and with ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... ship's speed was, somehow or other, estimated; and though it was long before charts were made, or the set of currents taken into account, yet voyages were for the most part accomplished with very tolerable accuracy and safety. An ample commerce grew up under Sidonian auspices. After the vernal equinox was over a fleet of white-winged ships sped forth from the many harbours of the Syrian coast, well laden with a variety of wares—Phoenician, Assyrian, Egyptian[1430]—and made for the coasts and islands of the Levant, the AEgean, the Propontis, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... oh rose, the gem of flowers! Rose, the care of vernal hours! Rose, of every god the joy! With roses Venus' darling boy Links the Graces in a round With ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to property, education, or labor. The educated Jews, in particular, were smiled upon benevolently "from above": they were regarded by the Government as a factor making for assimilation and as a connecting link with the lower Jewish classes. The vernal sun of Russian liberty, which flooded with its rays the social life of the whole country, just then emerging from serfdom, shone also for the hapless Jewish people, and filled their hearts with cheer and hope. The blasts of the reveille which had been sounded in the best circles of Russian society ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... snowdrops will lift their heads; Ladyday may be expected, and the pecuniary duties peculiar to that feast; in place of bonbons, trees will have an eruption of light green knobs; the whitebait season will bloom ... as if one need go on describing these vernal phenomena, when Christmas is still here, though ending, and the subject of ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... From these documents I have even been able to establish the composition of the hay delivered by this officer. The words waistcoat, drawers, pocket handkerchief, collars, drink, tobacco, cigars, mean clover, meadowgrass, lucern, burnet, oats, rye-grass, vernal-grass, and common cat's tail grass. And these are precisely the constituents of the hay furnished by Count Maubec to the Penguin cavalry. In this way Pyrot mentioned his crimes in a language that he believed would always remain indecipherable. One is confounded by so much ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... the full moon at mid-autumn; his complexion, like morning flowers in spring; the hair along his temples, as if chiselled with a knife; his eyebrows, as if pencilled with ink; his nose like a suspended gallbladder (a well-cut and shapely nose); his eyes like vernal waves; his angry look even resembled a smile; his glance, even when stern, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... came forward once to sing one of his most famous and familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the first line of it;—he told his mishap to the audience, and they screamed it at him in a chorus of a thousand voices. Milton could not write to suit himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal equinox. One in the clothing-business, who, there is reason to suspect, may have inherited, by descent, the great poet's impressible temperament, let a customer slip through his fingers one day without fitting him with a new garment. "Ah!" said he to a friend of mine, who was standing ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the lane, now green with late April grass and enlivened with dandelions in which bumblebees were wallowing. The sun had dried the moisture sufficiently for them to pass on dry-shod, but everything had the fresh, vernal aspect that follows a warm rain. Spring had advanced with a great bound since the day before. The glazed and glutinous cherry buds had expanded with aromatic odors and the white of the blossoms ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... Cenchris rose Straight gliding to his prey, his belly tinged With various spots unnumbered, more than those Which paint the Theban (24) marble; horned snakes With spines contorted: like to torrid sand Ammodytes, of hue invisible: Sole of all serpents Scytale to shed In vernal frosts his slough; and thirsty Dipsas; Dread Amphisbaena with his double head Tapering; and Natrix who in bubbling fount Fuses his venom. Greedy Prester swells His foaming jaws; Pareas, head erect Furrows with tail alone his sandy path; Swift Jaculus ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... to-morrow's sun will show the outline of his gnarled limbs—all rose color with their soft snow burden; and again a few months, and spring will breathe on him, and he will draw a long breath, and break out once more, for the three hundredth time, perhaps, into a vernal crown of leaves. I sometimes think that leaves are the thoughts of trees, and that if we only knew it, we should find their life's experience recorded in them. Our oak! what a crop of meditations and ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... circumstance serves to decide the healthiness of climates in every latitude. Sudden changes from heat to cold are every where dangerous; but, in countries where little caution is used in dress, they must often prove fatal. The winds in Carolina are changeable and erratic, and, about the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, commonly boisterous. In summer, they are sultry and suffocating; in winter, cold and dry. Beyond doubt, the flat maritime part is a most unhealthy situation, and the first settlers could scarcely have been cast ashore in any quarter ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... smiled in admiration of its pure vernal freshness. The older trees, whose buds were still closed, whispered with their waving branches, "Welcome! welcome!" The fountain, throwing its jet of water high up in the air, to let it fall again in the wide stone basin, told the wind to sprinkle the new-comer with pearly ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... young saplings. Better even than just now, the sun shed on that white and red accumulation of mingled material an appearance of life and even an illusion of meditation. Its very stones seemed to feel the vernal revival. The beauty of sunshine heralded what would be, and revealed the future. The face of the watching soldier, too, shone with a glamour of reincarnation, and the smile on it was born of the springtime and of hope. His rosy cheeks and blue eyes ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... stony like her heart. That you may not doubt the fact, the statue still remains, and stands in the temple of Venus at Salamis, in the exact form of the lady. Now think of these things, my dear, and lay aside your scorn and your delays, and accept a lover. So may neither the vernal frosts blight your young fruits, nor furious winds ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; But clouds, instead, and ever-during ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... secession. Peaceable secession is an utter impossibility. Is the great Constitution under which we live, covering this whole country, is it to be thawed and melted away by secession, as the snows on the mountain melt under the influence of a vernal sun, disappear almost unobserved, and run off? No, sir! No, sir! I will not state what might produce the disruption of the Union; but, sir, I see as plainly as I see the sun in heaven what that disruption itself must produce; I see that it must produce war, and such a war as I ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur. Those gra-a-ate thoughts, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... Shaykhs and elders, who not only look upon the beard as one of man's characteristics, but attach a religious importance to the appendage. Hence the enormity of Kamar al-Zaman's behaviour. The Persian festival of the vernal equinox was called Kusehnishin (Thin-beard sitting). An old man with one eye paraded the streets on an ass with a crow in one hand and a scourge and fan in the other, cooling himself, flogging the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... outwear my present state of woe With one brief winter, and indue i' the spring Hues of fresh youth, and mightily outgrow The wan dark coil of faded suffering— Forth in the pride of beauty issuing A sheeny snake, the light of vernal bowers, Moving his crest to all sweet plots of flowers And watered vallies where the young birds sing; Could I thus hope my lost delights renewing, I straightly would commend the tears to creep From my charged lids; but inwardly I weep: Some vital heat as yet my heart is wooing: This ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... was! And yet this was only the day of the vernal equinox; it was most extraordinary. Everywhere the gutters ran streaming with water, the snow melting under the unexampled heat of the solar rays like wax in a candle flame. The trees growing in the square were leafless, and the tropic sun's rays blazed ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... great banks of gray and wintry clouds, While feathery snowflakes fill the frosty air, And after quiet sleep may wake next day To see it bathe green fields with floods of light, And dry the sparkling dew from opening flowers, And hear the joyful burst of vernal song, And breathe the ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... of the priesthood especially of Thebes; the other of a hawk, the symbol of Horus, holding in its claws a symbol of the universe.[75] It may symbolize by this form, the rising sun and the coming of the Spring sun of the vernal equinox in the zodiacal sign of the ram, but more likely has a much deeper religious meaning.[76] Represented with the head and legs of a man the scarab was ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... to Ninety-Two! A full half-century of story! And now, our Century's end in view. May's back once more in vernal glory, And with it brings your Jubilee, (Punch came to his one year before you!) "Many Returns," Ma'am, may you see, And honoured be the hour ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various
... objects," says Mr. Gosse,[36] "they substituted generalities and second-hand allusions. They no longer mentioned the gillyflower and the daffodil, but permitted themselves a general reference to Flora's vernal wreath. It was vulgar to say that the moon was rising; the gentlemanly expression was, 'Cynthia is lifting her silver horn!' Women became nymphs in this new phraseology, fruits became 'the treasures of Pomona,' a horse became 'the impatient courser.' The result of coining these conventional counters ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... well the striplings bore their fated parts (The heavens all parts assign)— Never felt life's care or cloy. Each bloomed and died an unabated Boy; Nor dreamed what death was—thought it mere Sliding into some vernal sphere. They knew the joy, but leaped the grief, Like plants that flower ere comes the leaf— Which storms lay low in kindly doom, And kill them in their ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... see how many immortal productions have, within a few months, been gathered to the poems of Blackmore and the novels of Mrs. Behn; how many "profound views of human nature," and "exquisite delineations of fashionable manners," and "vernal, and sunny, and refreshing thoughts," and "high imaginings," and "young breathings," and "embodyings," and "pinings," and "minglings with the beauty of the universe," and "harmonies which dissolve the soul in a passionate sense of loveliness and divinity," the world has contrived to forget. The ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the cliff, Ishmael, walking with Georgie, came on a patch of the most exquisite of spring flowers, the vernal squill. Georgie clapped her hands for joy at sight of the delicate blue blossoms, but Ishmael, lying beside them, buried his face in their rain-washed petals and drew a deep breath of that scent which is like ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... them and that sunset was a vast rock stretching out from a ponderous shore—a colossal stone lion, resting Sphinxlike, keeping its faith with the ages. Alone, the warder of the West, stormy, menacing, even the vernal sun could give it little cheerfulness. But to Iberville and his followers it brought no gloom at night, nor yet in the morning when all was changed, and a soft silver mist hung over the "great water," ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... whose every motion would be carefree. He had seen striding across mountain chains in the bright air of an eternal morning a youth irradiant with unbroken energy, before whom all the world lay open in vernal sunshine like a domain before its lord. He had seen one beside whom the other musicians would stand as convicts from Siberian prison camps who had stumbled upon a banquet of the gods. He had seen a ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, Rain-awakened flowers, All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... lost none of his sensitiveness to such impressions; but the sway of another mood turned his eye from the outstretched beauty of the city to the vernal solitude about him. It was the season when old memories of Donnaz worked in his blood; when the banks and hedges of the fresh hill-country about Turin cheated him with a breath of budding beech-groves and the fragrance of crushed ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... lap of spring." Snowdrops, crocuses, and little purple grape-hyacinths are blooming at the edge of the drifts. The thorny shrubs and bushes, and spiny herbs like astragalus and cousinia, are green-stemmed but leafless, and the birds that flutter among them are still in the first rapture of vernal bliss, the gay music that follows mating and precedes nesting. Big dove-coloured partridges, beautifully marked with black and red, are running among the rocks. We are at the turn of the year, the surprising season when the tide of light ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... in width, and is enclosed by the Mt. Holyoke and Mt. Tom ranges, and the abrupt cones of Toby and Sugar Loaf, while the Green Mountains lie to the north, whence the rich soils have been brought by thousands of vernal floods. Grove-like masses of elms mark well the townships of Northampton, Easthampton, Southampton and Westhampton, Hatfield, Williamsburg and Whately, ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... play. "Enter Robin Goodfellow, in a suit of leather, close to his body, his hands and face coloured russet colour, with a flail."—Grim, the Collier of Croydon, Act 4, Scene 1. At other times, however, he is presented in the vernal livery of ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... about the approach of the vernal equinox or the seedsman's catalogue, we wake up at 6 o'clock in the morning. This is an immediate warning and apprisement that something is adrift. Three hundred and sixty-four days in the year we wake, placidly enough, at seven-ten, ten minutes after the alarm clock has jangled. But on this ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... forth in the freshness of the morning, and the woods that had been so black and bewildering at my coming opened before us in easy paths, and all that tropical squalor that had been foul with sweat and insects seemed strangely vernal to me, so that I could hardly believe that I had trodden that way before. And for our companion all the way along—or, at least, for my other companion—was the Wonder of the World, the beautiful strangeness of living, ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... Kansas the Harris sparrows are said to be common winter sojourners, but in the north-eastern part of the state they disappeared in November or December, and did not return until the middle of February, or later if the weather happened to be severe. From the time of their vernal arrival they were to be seen in every ramble until they took flight for their breeding haunts in the North. One spring some of them were still loitering in Kansas on the eleventh of May, and were singing blithely, no doubt waiting for the winter cold of their summer homes ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... Behind them was the unbroken forest of tall green pines, with an occasional oak draperied with festoons of gray moss or the druidical mistletoe. A wide expanse of varied beauty was before them; an ample and lofty plain around them; and, though spring had not yet garnished the scene with her vernal glories, sprinkling the woods with gay wild-flowers and charming creepers, and making the atmosphere balmy with the bay, the jessamine, and the magnolia, yet, even in winter, were there sufficient charms in the spot ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... winter winds forget to blaw, An' vernal suns revive pale nature, A shepherd lad by chance I saw, Feeding his flocks by ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... fine, full of Milton's "vernal delight and joy," I determined on a saunter; the inclemency of the weather having, for more than a week, kept me a prisoner at home. Although now advanced into the heart of February, a great fall of snow had taken place; the roads were blocked up; the mails obstructed; ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... his body from the billows, Seats himself upon the eagle, On the eagle's feathered shoulders. Quick aloft the huge bird bears him, Bears the ancient Wainamoinen, Bears him on the path of zephyrs, Floating on the vernal breezes, To the distant shore of Northland, To the dismal Sariola, Where the eagle leaves his burden, Flies away to join his fellows. Wainamoinen, lone and weary, Straightway fell to bitter weeping, Wept and ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... lambkin lying on the grass So stiff and cold while strangers careless pass, Never again to frisk amongst the flowers, Never again to skip in vernal bowers. Oh, little lambkin, death is hard for thee, Though many a weary wight would gladly flee From all the trouble of this mortal life, And bid Farewell to grief, ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... long and sweet re-union, Where the bells of time shall cease; Oh, the greeting, endless greeting, On the vernal heights of peace; Where the hoping and desponding Of the weary heart are past, And we enter life eternal— Home at last, home ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... "Aprille with her showres sweet" and the "foules song," of "May with all her floures and her greene," of the new leaves in the wood, and the meadows new powdered with the daisy, the mystic Marguerite of his Legend of Good Women. A fresh vernal air blows through ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... was at hand, paralysed all political and social life. Churches were too small to contain the immense throngs of fearful penitents: legacies and donations from conscience-stricken worshippers poured wealth into their treasuries. But once the awe-inspiring night of the vernal equinox that began the year 1000 had passed, and the bright March sun rose again on the fair earth, unconsumed by the wrath of God, the old world "seemed to thrill with new life; the earth cast off her outworn garments and clothed ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... the Merrifield waggonette, which went up the hill at a foot's pace, and by the same hands, with her old friend the caretaker's wife going before, was taken upstairs to a beautiful large room, with a window looking out on vernal sky and sea. She was too much exhausted on her arrival to know anything but the repose on the fresh comfortable bed, whose whiteness was almost rivalled by her cheek, and Mrs. Halfpenny ordered off Alexis, who ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... renewal. He discovered the liquid light of her dark eyes in the rippling darkness of the streams; the lilies recalled the faintly tinted paleness of her cheeks; the silene roses, scattered throughout the hedges, called forth the remembrance of the young maiden's rosy lips, and the vernal odor of the leaves appeared to him like an emanation of her graceful ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... in the immediate neighbourhood of the Equator; but that, save on the small space concealed by the Earth's disc, I could, by moving from window to window, survey the entire heavens, looking at one minute upon the stars surrounding the vernal, and at another, by changing my position, upon those in the neighbourhood of the autumnal equinox. By little more than a turn of my head I could see in one direction Polaris (alpha Ursae Minoris) with the Great Bear, and in another the Southern Cross, ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... first sees his ruddy breast upon the lawn in spring, or his pert form outlined against a patch of lingering snow in the brown fields, or hears his simple carol from the top of a leafless tree at sundown, what a vernal thrill it gives one! What a train of pleasant ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... the sun and summer gale, In thy green lap was Nature's darling laid, What time, where lucid Avon stray'd, 85 To him the mighty mother did unveil Her awful face: the dauntless child Stretch'd forth his little arms and smil'd. "This pencil take (she said), whose colours clear Richly paint the vernal year: 90 Thine too these golden keys, immortal Boy! This can unlock the gates of joy; Of horror that, and thrilling fears, Or ope the sacred source of ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... the noxious weeds of passion, malice, envy, and strife? Are we picking away the cold, hard pebbles of [15] selfishness, uncovering the secrets of sin and burnishing anew the hidden gems of Love, that their pure perfection shall appear? Are we feeling the vernal freshness ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... why life unshared Was ordained me of yore. In pairing time, we know, the bird Kindles to its deepmost splendour, And the tender Voice is tenderest in its throat. Were its love, forever by it, Never nigh it, It might keep a vernal note, The crocean and amethystine In their pristine Lustre linger on its coat. [Footnote: Possibly this is characteristic only of the male singer. Christina Rossetti expresses the opposite attitude in ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Adriatic, is meditating; neither be fearfully solicitous for the necessaries of a life, which requires but a few things. Youth and beauty fly swift away, while sapless old age expels the wanton loves and gentle sleep. The same glory does not always remain to the vernal flowers, nor does the ruddy moon shine with one continued aspect; why, therefore, do you fatigue you mind, unequal to eternal projects? Why do we not rather (while it is in our power) thus carelessly reclining under a lofty plane-tree, or ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... Now was that vernal season of the year when winds are boon, the gentle rain never far off, the stars in heaven (like the flowers on earth) washed momently to a freshness which urges men to be pure. Riding day and night through the green breadth of France, ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... is no light in the rocky South that so tenderly touches the soul as this. Here the spurge drinks of the wine of heaven with golden lips wide open; but the hellebore, which has already lost all its vernal greenness, and is parched by the drought, ripens its drooping seeds sullenly on the shadowy side of the jutting crag, and seems to hate the sun. Higher and yet far below the plateau is a little field where the lately cut grass has been thrown into mounds. Here the light seems ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... periodus. The venereal orgasm of birds and quadrupeds commences or returns about the vernal or autumnal equinoxes, and thence seems in respect to their great periods to be governed by solar influence. But if this orgasm be disappointed of its object, it is said to recur at about monthly periods, as observed in mares and ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... and "lawns," and "level downs," and "flocks," and "irriguous valleys," and "umbrageous grots and caves of cool recess," and "murmuring waters," and "airs, vernal airs—" ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... Early and late; From the old world's divine and distant date, From the sublimer few, Down to the poet who but yester-eve Sang sweet and made us grieve, All come, assembling here in order due. And here I dwell with Poesy, my mate, With Erato and all her vernal sighs, Great Clio with her victories elate, Or pale Urania's deep and starry eyes. Oh friends, whom chance or change can never harm, Whom Death the tyrant cannot doom to die, Within whose folding soft eternal charm I love to lie, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array, But winter, lingering, chills the lap of May; No zephyr fondly sues the mountain's breast, But meteors glare, and stormy ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... forth with many smiles, But, once delivered, kills them with a frown. He therefore, timely warned, himself supplies Her want of care, screening and keeping warm The plenteous bloom, that no rough blast may sweep His garlands from the boughs. Again, as oft As the sun peeps and vernal airs breathe mild, The fence withdrawn, he gives them ev'ry beam, And spreads his hopes before the blaze ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... whispers use Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks; Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes That on the green turf suck the honey'd showers And purple all the ground with vernal flowers. Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine, The white pink, and the pansy freak'd with jet, The glowing violet, The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... involution. It is the undeveloped man. Infancy is the twilight of life,—the first morning of an endless being, the age of germ and of mere sense. As the first dawn of spring is the season of the undeveloped harvest, so childhood is manhood in possibility. The infant is the vernal bud of life; it is a being of promise and of hope,—the prophecy of the future man. Hence the age of education. The mother, in the nursery, is ever evolving into the strength of maturity those powers ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... in that vernal hour The sacred city is in shades reclining, With gilded turrets in the sunrise shining: From sainted Magdalene's aerial tower Sounds far aloof that ancient chant are singing, And round the heart again those ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... went floating under vernal arches, where a murmurous rustle seemed to whisper, "Stay!" along shadowless sweeps, where the blue turned to gold and dazzled with its unsteady shimmer; passed islands so full of birds they seemed green cages floating in the ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... beautiful morning, of that soft vernal temperature, that seems to thaw all the frost out of one's blood, and to set all nature in a ferment. The very fishes felt its influence: the cautious trout ventured out of his dark hole to seek his mate, ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... Latin tongue; and he himself, by annexing the dates to his first compositions, a boast of which the learned Politian had given him an example, seems to commend the earliness of his own proficiency to the notice of posterity. But the products of his vernal fertility have been surpassed by many, and particularly by his contemporary Cowley. Of the powers of the mind it is difficult to form an estimate: many have excelled Milton in their first essays, who never rose ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... my boyhood, from far vernal Bourns of being, came to me Dream-like, plangent, and eternal Memories ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... not contain a single suggestion for the equality of woman with man. Yet it is claimed that women owe their advancement to the Bible. It would be quite as true to say that they owe their improved condition to the almanac or to the vernal equinox. Under Bible influence woman has been burned as a witch, sold in the shambles, reduced to a drudge and a pauper, and silenced and subjected before her ecclesiastical and marital law-givers. "She was first in the transgression, ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... weather now, and vegetation shows signs of the return of the vernal season. We shall soon have blossoms and roses in abundance, and table vegetables too, to dispel the fears of famine. But we shall also have the horrid sounds of devastating war; and many a cheerful dame and damsel to-day, must soon put on ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... countenanced by frequent examples. Those that laugh at the portentous glare of a comet, and hear a crow with equal tranquillity from the right or left, will yet talk of times and situations proper for intellectual performances, will imagine the fancy exalted by vernal breezes, and the reason invigorated by ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... the year Seasons return; but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine. 1612 MILTON: Par. Lost, Bk. ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... at the vernal equinox, there is a representative council of the whole nation, which meets in a plain about twenty miles from our house, and continues about five or six days. Here they inquire into the state and condition of the several districts; whether ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... him. Shenstone, however, deeply colours the variable state of his own mind—"Recovering from a nervous fever, as I have since discovered by many concurrent symptoms, I seem to anticipate a little of that 'vernal delight' which Milton ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... are those points at which the Ecliptic and Equinoctial intersect, and when the sun occupies either of these two positions, the days and nights are of equal length. The Vernal Equinox is that one which the sun passes through or intersects in going from S to N declination, and the Autumnal Equinox that which it passes through or intersects in going from N to S declination. The Vernal Equinox (V in the illustration) is also designated as the First Point ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... The Vernal Equinox has all over the ancient world, and from the earliest times, been a period of rejoicing and of festivals in honor of the Sungod. It is needless to labor a point which is so well known. Everyone understands and appreciates the joy of finding that the long darkness ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... in the white, sunlit landscape spread before me that compelled my glance. To some it might compare but ill with the luxuriant splendour that is of the vernal season; but to me there was a wondrously impressive charm about that solemn, silent, virginal expanse of snow, expressionless as the Sphinx, and imposing and majestic by virtue of that very lack of expression. From Fabriano, at our feet, was spread to the east, the broad ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... enchantment all vernal and bright, In the days of delusion by fancy combined With the vanishing phantoms of love and delight, Abandon my soul, like a dream of the night, And leave but a ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... blows high, and the fine snow drifts, as it does about the vernal equinox, in these latitudes, the Indians smilingly say, "Ah! now Pup-puk-e-wiss is gathering his harvest," or words to this effect. There is a mythological tale connected with ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... poised thousands of concave disks, vernal green, enormous. They were like a border of gigantic, upthrust shields; and within each, emblazoned like a shield's device, was a blinding flower of flame—the reflected, dilated face of the sun. Below this diadem hung, pendent, clusters of other disks, swarmed like the globular hiving ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... hour already fixed When, mid the bathers (freely mixed), In a polite costume I mean to plunge beneath the spray And, washing from a soul at play The City's stain—three times a day— Restore its vernal bloom. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... 25 In whose beneficent keeping Earth, with her infinite beauty, Colour and fashion and fragrance, Glows like a flower with fervour Where woods are vernal! 30 ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... might be questioned. I am rather inclined to believe in 'the impulse from a vernal wood,' though of course the artistic value of such an impulse depends entirely on the kind of temperament that receives it, so that the return to Nature would come to mean simply the advance to a great personality. You would agree with that, I fancy. ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... interest increased as the hour approached for their return home. Only when that was decided did he discover how much he longed to be there. For the horror and suffering of the past were a little dimmed already; he thirsted to see his woods and meadows in their vernal dress, to hear the murmur of his river, and move again among familiar ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... multitude, Which in his own blood Christ espous'd. Meanwhile That other host, that soar aloft to gaze And celebrate his glory, whom they love, Hover'd around; and, like a troop of bees, Amid the vernal sweets alighting now, Now, clustering, where their fragrant labour glows, Flew downward to the mighty flow'r, or rose From the redundant petals, streaming back Unto the steadfast dwelling of their joy. Faces had they of flame, and wings of gold; The rest was whiter ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... sister had! too cruel Death! How sad Remembrance bids my bosom heave! Tranquil her soul, as sleeping Infant's breath; Meek were her manners as a vernal Eve. Knowledge, that frequent lifts the bloated mind, 5 Gave her the treasure of a lowly breast, And Wit to venom'd Malice oft assign'd, Dwelt in her bosom in a Turtle's nest. Cease, busy Memory! cease to urge the dart; Nor on my soul her love to me impress! 10 For oh I mourn in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... sons of Italy were surely blest. Whatever fruits in different climes were found, That proudly rise, or humbly court the ground; Whatever blooms in torrid tracts appear, 115 Whose bright succession decks the varied year; Whatever sweets salute the northern sky With vernal lives that blossom but to die; These here disporting own the kindred soil, Nor ask luxuriance from the planter's toil; 120 While sea-born gales their gelid wings expand To winnow fragrance round ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... seated in her rock-roof'd dell, Listening the secrets of the vernal grove, Breathes sweetest strains to thy symphonious shell, And gives new echoes to the ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... for wind and sunshine. No wonder that at sight of it even so heartless a person as the present writer is a little touched. But why at sight of those rubicund, full-grown, eupeptic Morris-dancers on the vernal highroad? No obvious pathos was diffusing itself from them. They were Merrie England in full flower. In part, I suppose, my tears were tears of joy for the very joyousness of these men; in part, of envy for their fine simplicity; in part, of sorrow in the thought that they were a survival of the ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... we know: new leaves and rain Anon shall crown the vernal scene, But dust of dynasts not again Blows up into a king ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... occasion in spring, and another in autumn, on which the day and the night are each twelve hours at all places on the earth. When the night and day are equal in spring, the point which the sun occupies on the heavens is termed the vernal equinox. There is similarly another point in which the sun is situated at the time of the autumnal equinox. In any investigation of the celestial movements the positions of these two equinoxes on the heavens are of primary importance, and Hipparchus, with the instinct of genius, ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... open on the west and north to a vast extent of ocean, and is cooled in the summer by perpetual ventilation, but by the same blasts is kept warm in winter. Their weather is not pleasing. Half the year is deluged with rain. From the autumnal to the vernal equinox, a dry day is hardly known, except when the showers are suspended by a tempest. Under such skies can be expected no great exuberance of vegetation. Their winter overtakes their summer, and their harvest lies upon the ground drenched with rain. The autumn struggles hard to produce ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... resorting from the vernal Heat Shall Old Acquaintance Old Acquaintance greet, Under the Branch that leans above the Wall To shed his Blossom over head ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... had, however, unsuspected reserves of vitality. He crept out into the sunshine again, basking in the vernal warmth with a sense of luxury, and entering into the gossip of the ditchers with an unwonted mental activity ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... an early anxiety I felt to explore that part of the world, and also, strange and paradoxical as it may appear, for the benefit of my health. That a man should visit Sierra Leone for the benefit of his health, seems to be as unreasonable as if he were to seek for the vernal airs of the south in the inclement region of Siberia. But, I am strongly inclined to believe, that the apprehensions of European travellers on this subject are often as fatal as the climate that produces them. In my own case, I was not only free from any apprehensions concerning ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... the Griffin, "I never eat between the equinoxes. At the vernal and at the autumnal equinox I take a good meal, and that lasts me for half a year. I am extremely regular in my habits, and do not think it healthful to eat at odd times. But if you need food, go and get it, and I will return to the soft ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... growth of the grass anew, the bursting of the bud, or the soft awakening of the zephyr. Even within the house, the languors of the fire drowsing on the hearth, the broad bar of sunshine across the puncheon floor, so slowly creeping away, the sense of the vernal lengthening of the pensive afternoon, the ever-flitting shadow of the wren building under the eaves, and its iterative gladsome song breaking the fireside stillness, partook of the serene beatitude of the season and the hour. The visitor's ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... new-fallen snow,' and ere the sun has gained his noontide height, will appear an 'unillumined, blank, and dreary plain, with more than wintry cheerlessness and gloom saddening the heart;' whereas, if it be regarded from the quarter whence the lord of light dispenses his beams, 'then will a vernal prospect greet ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... ages lowly bend, But the young unpolluted heart His gusts should fertilize, amend, As vernal storms the fields athwart. Youth freshens beneath Passion's showers, Develops and matures its powers, And thus in season the rich field Gay flowers and luscious fruit doth yield. But at a later, sterile age, The solstice of our earthly years, ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... Saviour! plant within each bosom The seeds of holiness, and bid them blossom In fragrance and in beauty bright and vernal, And spring eternal. ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... a fine, warm afternoon, and already the crocuses were thrusting their heads out of the neat flower-beds as if to ascertain whether the spring had really arrived. There was, indeed, a pleasant vernal scent in the air. ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... when leaves are vernal, Wearies of the blackbird's tunes, So we weary of eternal Rice ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 27, 1892 • Various
... to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summer's rose, Or flocks, or herds, ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... tower, Who with her love-lorn melody So bewitched thee in the vernal hour: When she ceased to love, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... cutlasses. The trains "turned off," as the account in Bell's Life in London puts it, at Reigate, took water near Guildford, and ran into Farnborough station "after a most pleasant journey through one of the prettiest countries in England, which, illumined by a glorious sun, and shooting forth in vernal beauty, must have inspired all with intense gratification." Thus Bell's eloquent reporter. Thirty-seven rounds were fought, in most of which Sayers was knocked down; his right arm was bruised and ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... one evening about this time—the vernal equinox had just passed—that from some small cause Richling, who was generally detained at the desk until a late hour, was home early. The air was soft and warm, and he stood out a little beyond his small front door-step, lifting his head to inhale the universal fragrance, and looking in every ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... speedwell's sapphire blue: Was there anything more true To the vernal season still? Here it decks the bank alone, Where the milkmaid throws a stone At noon, to cross the ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... the genial morning dews of former days that used to glisten upon and bespangle the vernal-leaved ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... night of the Norris party, the party which is to Woodbridge what the Mardi Gras is to New Orleans, the Carnival to Rome, and what the Feast of the Ygquato Bloom was to the ancient Aztecs. It is always held on the twenty-first of March, Sunday of course excepted, and it is known as the Vernal. Not to be seen at it is too bad. Not to be invited—unlike the lupercals before mentioned it requires invitations—is a blight mercifully spared all but the most painfully outre. Of these the Coogans, who live in Center and whose connubial infelicities are proverbial, are an ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... She came out for the purpose of sitting for the picture. I first saw her in an apartment of one of the sumptuous palaces of Genoa. She stood before a casement that looked out upon the bay, a stream of vernal sunshine fell upon her, and shed a kind of glory round her as it lit up the rich crimson chamber. She was but sixteen years of age—and oh, how lovely! The scene broke upon me like a mere vision of spring and youth and beauty. I could have fallen down and worshipped ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... memories indulged of the past or the dead, of incidents when life was young and promised to be happy,—gave generous sketches of his rivals,—the high contention now hidden by the handful of earth,—hours passed fifty years ago with great authors, recalled for the vernal emotions which then they made to live and revel in the soul. And from these conversations of friendship, no man—no man, old or young—went away to remember one word of profaneness, one allusion of indelicacy, one impure thought, one unbelieving ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... spring, loitering along the shadow-flecked vistas, with the red maple-blooms overhead and violets underfoot, was the only traveler to be seen on the deserted road. And the pensive dusk was wont to deepen into the serene vernal night, sweet with the scent of the budding wild cherry, and astir with timorous tentative rustlings as of half-fledged breezes, and illumined only with the gentle lustre of the white stars; for never again was the darkness emblazoned with that haggard incandescence ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... o'er, impatient to destroy, And shuts up all the passages of joy: In vain their gifts the bounteous seasons pour, The fruit autumnal, and the vernal flow'r; With listless eyes the dotard views the store, He views, and wonders that they please ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron |
