"Heather" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lads in couples run To pleasure, a wicked fay: 'Tis ours on the heather to bound, old hound, Over the hills ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... patriotic followers at Thermopylae left an impress upon Greek life and character that did not fade for centuries. The spirit of Robert Bruce still lingers among the crags and heather-clad hills of Scotland. The patriotic devotion of Garibaldi has imparted a new character to the Italian race. Two hundred million of the world's inhabitants still bear the imprint of the fiery faith and fanaticism ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... of year when the heather is red. It grew over the sand-hills in thick clumps. From low tree-like stems close-growing green branches raised their hardy ever-green leaves and unfading flowers. They seemed not to be made ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... term nature only comprehends the people with sleek coats and full stomachs. Nature abhors a vacuum,—therefore has nought to do with empty bellies. Happy are the men whose fate, or better philosophy, has kept them from the turnips and the heather—fortunate mortals, who, banned from the murder of partridges and grouse, have for the last few days of our contemporary, been dwellers in merry London! What exulting faces! What crowds of well-dressed, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... come again, calling up the moorfowl, Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and flowers, Red shall the heather bloom over hill and valley, Soft flow the stream thro' the even-flowing hours; Fair the day shine, as it shone upon my childhood— Fair shine the day on the house with open door; Birds come and cry there, and twitter in the chimney— But I go for ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... heather, and far alang the glen, The road rins southward, southward, that grips the souls o' men, That draws their fitsteps aye awa' frae hearth and frae fauld, That pairts ilk freen' frae ither, and the young frae the auld. And whiles I stand at mornin' and whiles I stand at nicht, To see it through the ...
— Songs of Angus and More Songs of Angus • Violet Jacob
... here he was wi' a bawbee can'le stuck up again' the boddom o' the lookin'-gless, an' him maleengerin' aboot i' the flure afore't, wi' the shaft o' the heather bissam in his hand, whiskin't roond his lugs, progin' aboot wi't, an' lowpin' here an' there like a hen on a het girdle. He croonshed doon, an' jookit frae side to side, an' then jamp straucht ...
— My Man Sandy • J. B. Salmond
... and for an instant her heart leapt with a wild glad hope. It was not Erskine Fanshawe who confronted her, however, but a girl clad in a tweed costume with a cloth cap to match, on the side of which a sprig of heather was fastened by a gold brooch fashioned in the shape of a thistle. In bewildered surprise Claire recognised the brown eyes and round freckled face of Janet Willoughby, whom she had believed to be hundreds of miles away, in the ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and high squalls were overhead; the mountains loomed up black; and I could have fancied I had slipped ten thousand miles away and was anchored in a Highland loch; that when the day came, it would show pine, and heather, and green fern, and roofs of turf sending up the smoke of peats; and the alien speech that should next greet my ears must be Gaelic, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Ireland the Dulverton property included a few acres of shingle, rock, and heather, too barren to support even an agrarian outrage, but embracing a small and fairly deep bay where the lobster yield was good in most seasons. There was a bleak little house on the property, and for those who liked lobsters and solitude, and were able to accept an Irish ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... until it is lost in the many miles of woodland that surge up to the walls of Windsor. East and south is that beautiful and still lonely country that lies between the oldest Wessex and the sister, and ultimate vassal, kingdom of Sussex; the country of the Meonwaras, a region of heather hills and quiet pine combes that stretch down to the Solent Sea and the maritime ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... troop rode on to Camelot. He asked no questions for some fairy spell Made light his heart, and told him all was well; And as these two rode through the land together, By dappled greenwood shade and sunlit heather, Her soft voice in his ears, the innocent charm Of her light, steady touch upon his arm, Wrought magic in his soul. That day, I ween, Sir Launcelot well-nigh forgot his queen. And Elfinhart (you knew those eyes were hers!) Laughed with the silvery jingle ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... in visiting Ambleside was to see the venerable poet, Wordsworth, who lived about a mile from the village. I happened, just before supper, to look out of the window of the traveller's room and espied an old man in a blue cloak and Glengarry cap, with a bunch of heather stuck jauntily in the top, driving by in a little brown phaeton from Rydal Mount. "Perhaps," thought I to myself, "that may be the patriarch himself," and sure enough it was. For, when I inquired about Mr. Wordsworth, the landlord said to me, "A ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... was Janet McDonald. She was a sad, sweet-faced young teacher whom Miss Allison always called her "Scotch lassie Jane." "I don't suppose she'd care to get a letter from a little girl like me," thought Lloyd, "but I know she'd love to have a piece of heather from the hills near her home. I'll send her a piece when we get up ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... own winter time, And though the hills blossom with heather, If you are not near, 'tis December, my dear, For the heart makes its ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... its elevation averages seventeen hundred feet, though some of its tors, the enormous rocks of granite crowning its hills, rise considerably higher, the loftiest of these, the Yes Tor, near Okehampton, being two thousand and fifty feet high. The moor is composed of vast stretches of bog and stunted heather, with plenty of places where peat is cut, and having its streams filled with trout. Legend tells us that all manner of hill-and water-spirits frequent this desolate yet attractive region, and that in Cranmore Pool and its surrounding ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... he came out upon a moorland reaching towards the hills. A few lofty Scotch firs grew hard by upon a knoll; a clear fountain near the foot of the knoll sent up a miniature streamlet which meandered in the heather. A shower had just skimmed by, but now the sun shone brightly, and the air smelt of the pines and the grass. On a stone under the trees sat a young lady sketching. We have learned to think of women in a sort of symbolic transfiguration, based on clothes; and ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inviolably." Such was the commencement of that compact which, held together by the word of Scotchmen, was in few instances broken; but was maintained with as scrupulous a regard to honour and fidelity by the poorest Highlander that ever trod down the heather, as by the great nobleman within his ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... as it may," she answered him with spirit, "this folly transcends all bounds. Master Stewart may return to his Scottish heather; at Castle Marleigh ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... to be abandoned, and the agriculturist has fared little better than the miner. Early in the last century, a Mr Knight made an heroic effort to enclose a large portion of the moor for the purposes of cultivation. The heather, however, is still triumphant. The only memorial of his ambition is a ruined mansion at Simonsbath. The hills are all of considerable altitude—well over 1200 ft.—but with the exception of Dunkery few can pretend to any marked individuality. ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... the church fatally wounded one of Campbell's men, and so enraged were the besiegers at this that they set fire to the heather-thatched building. Of the one hundred and sixty human beings who are supposed to have been in the church, only one young lad escaped, and this was effected by the help of one of the Killearns, who caught the ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... meetings in which the collegians at the Marshalsea[18] used to indulge. Occasionally a vocal strain more sonorous than the generality informed the listener that some boastful bass was in blue water or the hunting field, or with the reindeer, or on the mountain, or among the heather, but the Marshal of the Marshalsea knew better, and had got him ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... no obstacle in the way of men devoted to the duty of self-culture. Professor Alexander Murray, the linguist, learnt to write by scribbling his letters on an old wool-card with the end of a burnt heather stem. The only book which his father, who was a poor shepherd, possessed, was a penny Shorter Catechism; but that, being thought too valuable for common use, was carefully preserved in a cupboard for the ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... "One of the great brazen pillars which stand at the bridge head is bent awry, and the clean bronze denied with blood, and it was at the foot of that pillar we found the dog." So saying, they laid the body upon the heather in front of Culain's high seat, that it might be full in his eye, and when they did so and again sat down, there was a great silence ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... the heather and kept hold of my hand, looking and talking watchfully, doctor-like, doubting me to be as sound in body as I assured him I was, despite aches and pains. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... list extends from the imposing and sometimes gigantic oaks, elms, beeches, and willows to shrubs and heather growth of the most ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... bonny lay above the Scottish heather; It sprinkles down from far away like light and love together; He drops the golden notes to greet his brooding mate, his dearie; I only know one song more ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke
... mesilla [obs3][U.S.], playa; shaking prairie, trembling prairie; vega[Sp]. meadow, mead, haugh[obs3], pasturage, park, field, lawn, green, plat, plot, grassplat[obs3], greensward, sward, turf, sod, heather; lea, ley, lay; grounds; maidan[obs3], agostadero[obs3]. Adj. champaign[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... thousand feet from the level of the sea. Time and springs and summers have silenced and soothed away the startling crags and chasms, the threatening gestures of the earth at infinity, and clothed them over with a mantle of quietness and green fern and heather and dreams. When the Fifth Race was younger, its language was Alpine: in Gothic, in Sanskrit, in Latin, you can see the crags and chasms. French, Spanish and Italian are Pyrenean, much worn down. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... was never a musical critic who did not now and then attempt it: musicians themselves never do, because music is to them nothing to see or to describe, but the air they breathe, and in fact a state of being. Do you remember that tone-wreath of heather and honeysuckle? "It was a movement of such intense meaning that it was but one sigh of unblended and unfaltering melody isolated as the fragrance of a single flower, and only the perfumes of Nature exhale a bliss as sweet, how far more unexpressed! This short ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... there," he said, smiling; "only I had first to settle Lady Temple, little guessing who was her treasure of a governess! Last night I had nearly opened, on another false scent; I fell in with a description that I could have sworn was yours, of the heather behind the parsonage. I made a note of the publisher in case all else ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... heather, my pippin, or partial to feather and fur, So long as yer never kills nothink? Sech tommy-rot gives me the spur. Yah! Scenery's all very proper, but where is the genuine pot Who'd pad the 'oof over the Moors, if it weren't for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... of soul's wing! What lies above? Sunshine and Love, Skyblue and Spring! Body hides—where? Ferns of all feather, Mosses and heather, ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... without difficulty. Elverston was situated some distance from the coast, within the borders of the New Forest. They were laughing and talking merrily together as they made their way along an uncultivated tract, covered with heather and occasional clumps of trees, here and there paths crossing the main ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... Government land about Woking and Bisley—the first sand and firs that we have seen in Holland. It has an odd and unexpected appearance; but as a matter of fact hundreds of square miles of Holland in the south and east have this character; while there are stretches of Dutch heather in which ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... Willing hands hauled the Cock Robin up the beach: we had fish to give away for help. The mackerel made elevenpence a dozen to Jemima Caley, the old squat fishwoman who wears a decayed sailor hat with a sprig of heather in it. "Yu don' mean to say yu've a-catched all they lovely fish!" she said with a rheumy twinkle, in the hope of getting them ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... are now making explosives out of heather. Fortunately the secret of making Highlanders out of the same material ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... hamlets (as the rest all are), not above two miles from Kunersdorf. The August day is windless, shiny, sultry; man and horse are weary with the labors, and with the want of sleep: we decide to bivouac here, and rest on the scrubby surface, heather or whatever it ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... vapors, Mountains, Bleak, foreboding, Mountains, Stark and overpowering. Torrents, Tumbling, crashing, Dragging boulders In their rushing, Lakes, Forlorn and lonesome Heather In magenta patches, Sheep, and cattle Black and somber, Winding roads Through massive passes. Rain, Sun, Flowers, Mist, ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... land, not real bog, but damp places where grow little clumps of rushes, and here and there among the rocks sorely- afflicted shrubs of broom, and the yellow-flowered shrub I have mentioned before, and quantities of very sticky heather, feeling when you catch hold of it as if it had been covered with syrup. One might fancy the entire race of shrubs was dying out; for one you see partially alive there are twenty skeletons which fall to pieces as you brush ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... Highland tartans were dyed with bark of alder for black, bark of willow for flesh colour. A lichen growing on stones supplied their violets and crimson.[311] The lichen on the birch-tree gives a good brown; heather gives red, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... antagonism to the world and to his fellows had slipped very easily from his unresisting shoulders. The glory of a perfect English midsummer lay like a golden spell upon the land. The moors were purple with heather, touched here and there with the fire of the flaming gorse, the wind blew always from the west, the gardens were ablaze with slowly bursting rhododendrons. Every gleam of coloring, every breath of perfume, seemed ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... wooded for some two miles from its outlet; beyond that was a moorland covered with heather. They determined to encamp near the upper edge of the wood, and at once set to with their swords to cut down branches and construct a hut. This was completed before dusk, and Malcolm then started for the village on the seashore. Ronald besought him ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... take her course, merely adopting such simple precautionary measures as would suggest themselves to anyone possessed of average common sense. We provided for our patient a comfortable, fragrant, springy bed of a species of heather; cleansed and dressed his wounds as often as seemed necessary; kept him as cool as possible, and fed him entirely upon fruits of a mild and agreeable acid flavour. During that fortnight Smellie was undoubtedly hovering on the borderland between life and death, and but for the tireless and tender ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... and built a castle with his profits. The memory of this fallacious Caledonian Morris would revile daily, as he sat in the private office opening his mail, with old Joseph at another table, sullenly awaiting orders, or savagely affixing signatures to he knew not what. And when the man of the heather pushed cynicism so far as to send him the announcement of his second marriage (to Davida, eldest daughter of the Revd. Alexander McCraw), it was really supposed that Morris would ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... great-great-grandson was Irish, and the only thing that was left to remind him of his ancestry was the house of Roscarna, the sullen Connaught stone fixed in an alien design, and the huge belt of timber through which the gorse and heather were slowly creeping down from the mountain and settling in the valley bottom that they had once inhabited. But the foreign woods that trailed along the shore of the ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... maiden, and the downy voice of the child, the managed accents of flattery or traffic, the shrill tones of woman's fretting, and the troubled gush of man's anger. The moory upland and the corn slopes, the glen where the rocks jut through mantling heather, and bright brooks gurgle amid the scented banks of wild herbs, the shivering cabin and the rudely-lighted farm-house are as plain in Carleton's pages as if he used canvas and colours with a skill varying from Wilson and Poussin to Teniers ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... continued, "with its rugged simplicity and marvelous description—one can almost smell the heather on the heath ...
— Good Stories from The Ladies Home Journal • Various
... blowing Over hill-flower and peat, Where the bell heather's growing, And the brown burn flowing, And the ghost-shadows going Down the glen on stealthy feet. There's a clean wind blowing, And the breath ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... the most astonishing journeys about that fag end of the universe in the pursuit of knowledge. We read of his walking thirty-two miles in a soaking rain to the top of a mountain, and bringing home only a plant of white heather. On another day he walked thirty-six miles to find a peculiar kind of fern. Again he walked for twenty-four hours in hail, rain, and wind, reaching home at three o'clock in the morning. But at seven he was up and ready for work as usual. He carried heavy loads, too, when he went searching for ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... heather-clad hills which form the broad dividing barrier between England and Scotland, the little river Esk brawls and bickers over its stony bed through a wild land of barren braesides and brown peat mosses, forming altogether some of the ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... green native braes of the Nith, He pluck'd the wild bracken, a frolicsome boy; He sported his limbs in the waves of the Frith; He trod the green heather in gladness and joy;— On his gallant grey steed to the hunting he rode, In his bonnet a plume, on his bosom a star; He chased the red deer to its mountain abode, And track'd the wild roe to its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... upon the lip of a heather-edged bluff which fell sheer for perhaps two hundred feet into a pinewood. Beyond, by mammoth terraces, the glory of the forest sank step by colossal step into the purple distance, from which distant in turn a thread of silver argued the ocean. There never was ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... together, and went on softly: "Shall I tell you what I saw as I returned home across the moor from the station? The day was nearly over, and the clouds were gathering overhead. The wind was rising and falling as it swept across the moorland. The rich purple of the heather had gone, and was succeeded by dull brown—sometimes almost grey—each little floret of the ling, as Ruskin said, folding itself into a cross as it was dying. Poor little purply-pink petals! They had had ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... tragic figure amongst the statesmen of Europe. For three years he has borne a crushing burden, a burden which even Bismarck, the man of blood, was unable to bear in the piping days of peace; a burden from which the Iron Chancellor had to seek periodical liberation amidst the heather and the pine-forests of his native Brandenburg. As Prime Minister of Prussia, as Chancellor of the German Empire, as Foreign Secretary of the Teutonic Alliance, he has to keep a firm grip of all the threads, both of internal and of external policy. Distracted between ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... getting hidden by the black throng, and still the crowds arrived, seating themselves row behind row on the wild thyme and heather. The topmost corner of the field merged into a rocky wilderness of stunted heath and patches of burnt grass, studded with harebells, and this unapportioned piece of ground stretched away into the adjoining corner of the ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... I look along the years And see the flowers you threw... Anemones And sprigs of gray Sparse heather of the rocks, Or a wild violet Or daisy of a daisied field... But each ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... father's men Three days we've fled together, For should he find us in the glen, My blood would stain the heather. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... There were trees on the nearer hills too, sugaries, and thick pine groves, and a circle of them round the margin of the pond. Over all the great Magician of the season had waved his wand, and decked them in colours dazzling to the eyes accustomed to the grey rocks and purple heather, and to the russet garb of ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... anything she had ever seen that it possessed for her an intense fascination. Later, as she was approaching the end of her journey, her first view of the low heather-crowned hills ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... cast anchor off the Bay of Rangihoua. From her deck the mission families could now gaze upon the scene of their future home. The bracken and manuka with which the farther slopes were clad might remind them of the fern and heather of old England, but their gaze would be chiefly attracted to an isolated hill of no great height which rose steeply from the sea on the left side of the little bay. To this hill had come the remnant of Te Pahi's people after the slaughter on ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... days, my old friends, and others, more recent acquaintances, all are here, hunting, foraging, building in close proximity. Besides, should we wish to vary the scene of observation, the mountain [Ventoux] is but a few hundred steps away, with its tangle of arbutus, rock roses and arborescent heather; with its sandy spaces dear to the Bembeces; with its marly slopes exploited by different wasps and bees. And that is why, foreseeing these riches, I have abandoned the town for the village and come to Serignan to weed my turnips and water ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... southward to Loch Swin and Taivalich. After ascending so far, we strike off by a scarcely discernible track, and climb upwards among the curiously broken mountains of South Knapdale. When we are high enough up we look on the other side of the first ridge, and see the brown heather dappled with tiny lakes, looking like molten silver dropped into their hollows; while far below, one of the countless branches of Loch Swin winds through a narrow inlet, among rocks cushioned to the water's edge with deep green foliage. We are not ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... it were barren "dunes," grudgingly covered by straggling heather and gorse, and to the South, at a little distance, rolled the ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... the moorlands in the keen air, Amroth striding cleanly and lightly over the heather. Then we began to descend into the valley, through a fine forest country, somewhat like the chestnut-woods of the Apennines. The view was of incomparable beauty and width. I could see a great city far out in ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... established, the bright head "dookies," silver bangles, and glowing dark eyes of the vendors making a brave show above the massed glory of colour in their baskets. Huge bunches of pink proteas, spiked lilies of every hue, bales of heather and waxen white chinckerichees filled the air with heavy perfume. The sellers came pressing to the passing carriages, soliciting custom in the soft clipped speech of the Cape native. Bellew, for all he was so distrait, had the graceful inspiration to stop and take on a load of ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... thought himself in a sepulchre, into which a ray of sunlight in pity scarcely penetrated. He stretched forth his hand, and touched stone; he rose to his seat, and found himself lying on his bournous in a bed of dry heather, very soft and odoriferous. The vision had fled; and as if the statues had been but shadows from the tomb, they had vanished at his waking. He advanced several paces towards the point whence the light came, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Polly sang away in a fresh little voice, that went straight to the listener's heart and nestled there. The sweet old tunes that one is never tired of were all Polly's store; and her favorites were Scotch airs, such as, "Yellow-Haired Laddie," "Jock o' Hazeldean," "Down among the Heather," and "Birks of Aberfeldie." The more she sung, the better she did it; and when she wound up with "A Health to King Charlie," the room quite rung with the stirring music made by the big piano and ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... by a little orchard they worked and sang the ropemaker's song, with a lingering, dragging melody. And then, after passing a little wood, the island itself came into view. It was covered with gorse, like a series of Oriental carpets dotted with the gold of the broom in bloom, woven with rose heather, and red heather, and purple heather. The bright green foliage of the wild roses "appeared" like arabesques. The sky, hanging low, bluish green, without a cloud, seemed as a silken film stretched to filter the heat of the sun. At a turn in the road the plain disappeared to give ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... informed the public that when he met an immense dog in strolling round the ruins above Monte Moro, he stooped till his chin nearly touched his knee and looked the animal full in the face, "and, as John Leyden says, in the noblest ballad which the Land of Heather has produced:— ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... mist hangs, increasing the sense of distance, and softening back one hill and wood behind another, till the great brown moor which backs it all seems to rise out of the empty air. For a thousand feet it ranges up, in rude sheets of brown heather, and grey cairns and screes of granite, all sharp and black-edged against the pale blue sky; and all suddenly cut off above by one long horizontal line of dark grey cloud, which seems to hang there motionless, and yet is growing to windward, and ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... are the very essence of the British spirit. They are, to literature, what the bloom of the heather is to the Scot, and the smell of the sea to the Englishman. All that is beautiful in the old word "patriotism" ... a word which, of late, has been twisted to such ignoble purposes ... is latent in these gay ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... yielded the earth To the only god peace cannot disarm. Beneath serener skies see all revive, All grow tender, all take fire. On the oak, beneath the heather, See, yielding to the call of love, The proud eagle itself forgetting ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... leather Gaed through the heather, Through a rock, through a reel, Through an auld spinning-wheel, Through a sheep-shank bane. Sic a man was never seen. Wha had he been? ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... rose, wild rose, sing me thy song, Come, let us sing it together!— I hear the silver streamlet call From his home in the dewy heather." ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... plain field, shut in by hedgerows four, Contentment sweet to yield. For I am not fastidious, And, with a proud demeanour, I Will not affect invidious Distinctions about scenery. I sigh not for the fir trees where they rise Against Italian skies, Swiss lakes, or Scottish heather, Set off with glorious weather; Such sights as these The most exacting please; But I, lone wanderer in London streets, Where every face one meets Is full of care, And seems to wear A troubled air, Of being late for some affair Of life or death:—thus I, ev'n I, Long for a field of grass, ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... me, lassie, Will you, will you? Sail the sounding sea, lassie, Will you, will you? Where the Sacramento flows, 'Twixt the peaks of sifted snows, Past the fadeless Southron rose, Sweeter than the heather-blows, Lassie, lassie? ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... a long drive through green stretches of park, with a heather fell for background—and then the motor, leaving to one side a huge domed pile with the Union Jack floating above it, ran through a wood, and drew up in front of Carton Cottage, a low building on the steps of which ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... did not come on deck. The doctor profited by this forced delay to examine Beechey Island; he collected a few plants which a comparatively high temperature let grow here and there on some rocks which projected from the snow, such as heather, a few lichens, a sort of yellow ranunculus, a plant like sorrel with leaves a trifle ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... years in dark vaults," said Friedel; "and, when I think that so may he have wasted for the whole of our lives that have been so free and joyous on his own mountain, it irks me to bound on the heather or gaze ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... become. However, as I say, I had for the time forgotten that pagan company, or, in my puritanic zeal, I might have thrown them all to be washed clean in the upland stream, whose pure waters one might fancy were fragrant from their sunny day among the ferns and the heather, fragrant to the eye, indeed, if one may so speak, with the shaken meal of the meadowsweet. This stream had been the good angel of my thoughts all the day, keeping them ever moving and ever fresh, cleansing and burnishing them, quite an ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... buffetting of the bleak north-wester. When she disappeared into a sheltered hollow, the wind, hushed and non-plussed for a minute, paused to meditate further mischief; then, with regathered rage, it tore across country, and boomed, with sullen roar, into a valley shut in by brackened and heather-covered hills. ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... down by yon hills of the heather sae green, And down by the corrie that sings to the sea, The bonnie young Flora sat sighing her lane, The dew on her plaid and the tear in ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... big cairngorm in the centre, took the place of the brass one, which henceforth was laid up among the precious things in the little armoury, and the badge of his clan in gold, with rubies and amethysts for the bells of the heather, glowed on his bonnet. And Malcolm's guests, as long as Duncan continued able to fill the bag, had to endure as best they might, between each course of every dinner without fail, two or three minutes ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... stern, and solitary about it. When I have been for some time in the rich scenery of Edinburgh, which is ornamented garden land, I begin to wish myself back again among my honest gray hills, and if I did not see the heather at least once a year I think I ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... had catched a bullet with his ankle over in the north at Culloden. So it was no wonder that he liked to crack about these times, though they had brought him muckle and no little mischief, having obliged him to skulk like another Cain among the Highland hills and heather, for many a long month and day, homeless and hungry. Not dauring to be seen in his own country, where his head would have been chacked off like a sybo, he took leg-bail in a ship over the sea, among the ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... purple weaving on the heather, Night drops down starry gold upon the furze; Wild rivers and wild birds sing songs together, ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... whortle-berries droop above my head, And a large flint-stone weighs upon my feet; Around me beeches and high chestnuts shed 300 Their leaves and prickly nuts; a sheep-fold bleat Comes from beyond the river to my bed: Go, shed one tear upon my heather-bloom, And it shall comfort me ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... might be in or about the house. To obviate this publication of what it might be desirable to keep secret, Miss Bronte used to take her out for a walk on the solitary moors; where, when both were seated on a tuft of heather, in some high lonely place, she could acquaint the old woman, at leisure, with all that ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... foreign smells, and I've seen me that I could gaily march a handful of leagues to get a sniff of the salt sea. Not that I was one who craved for wrack and bilge at my nose all the time. What I think best is a stance inland from the salt water, where the mountain air, brushing over gall and heather, takes the sting from the sea air, and the two blended give a notion of the fine variousness of life. We had a herdsman once in Elrigmore, who could tell five miles up the glen when the tide was ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... was in Scotland, and in a year he was back once more on the heather calling upon the papal heathen ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... could not possibly reach the station in time to catch the train. Now that the deed was done, a sensation of fatigue stole over him, and with a sigh of relief he flung himself down on the soft tussocks of purple heather, and covered his eyes with his straw hat. For half-an-hour he lay there motionless and deep in thought. No suspicion that he had acted wrongly disturbed him for a moment. Of course it was a pity that poor Aunt Charlotte should have been disappointed, and certainly that locking of her up in her bedroom ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... round him, and then, with a sudden quickening of the heart, walked on over the springy heather to where she sat. She turned when the rustling his footsteps made through the bracken was near enough to arrest her attention, and looked up at him as he came. Then she rose slowly and stood waiting for him. He came up to her ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... set; it began to grow dark, and I felt in the air the spreading cold of the chamber of death. My heart sank lower and lower. I began to lose sight of the lean, long-coated figure, and at length could no more hear his swishing stride through the heather. But then I heard instead the slow-flapping wings of the raven; and, at intervals, now a firefly, now a gleaming butterfly rose into ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... consoled by the prospect of beholding him blaze in complete uniform. Edward Waverley himself received with animated and undefined surprise this most unexpected intelligence. It was, as a fine old poem expresses it, 'like a fire to heather set,' that covers a solitary hill with smoke, and illumines it at the same time with dusky fire. His tutor, or, I should say, Mr. Pembroke, for he scarce assumed the name of tutor, picked up about ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... velvet lavalavas bordered with plush furniture fringe! And they looked very fine, too. Once arrived on the mountain top we stood looking at the magnificent view of the sea, and the coral reef, and the distant mountains. We banked the grave with flowers and the wreath of heather that you sent. Chief Justice Ide and his ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... of the Douglas were by this time streaming homewards along every mountain pass. Over the heather and through the abounding morasses horse and foot took their way, no longer marching in military order, as when they came, but each lance taking the route which appeared the shortest to himself. North, east, and west spear-heads glinted and armour flashed against the ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... years since he had seen heather in bloom—or was it five decades? The sight of it recalled that other July day, when he had tramped the length of the ridge with his head full of dreams and the ache of parting in ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... said, "with what?" They had gone up and down the sloping sides of the combe, through the rustling copse, sometimes where there was a path, sometimes where there was none, treading over the big bushes of ling and the bell-heather, all bursting into bloom, past groups of primeval firs and seedling beeches, self-sown, over little hillocks and hollows formed of rocks or big old roots of trees covered with the close glittering green foliage and dark blue clusters of the dewberry, ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... bond was signed, and for three years the sons of Usna dwelt in peace and great joy. In the north they rested while yet the mountain-sides were aglow with the purple and gold of heather and bracken, but ever before the first frosts came would they sail south to the land that the brave Usna had ruled, where now they could dwell in ...
— Celtic Tales - Told to the Children • Louey Chisholm |
