"Sere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... feelings, that this great man does not love her as formerly! The great man denies, ready to deny on the Gospels, to her and to himself; and yet, at bottom, if we read with the microscope, there are symptoms, and it is not deniable. How should it? Leafy May, hot June, by degrees comes October, sere, yellow; and at last, a quite leafless condition,—not Favonius, but gray Northeast, with its hail-storms (jealousies, barren cankered gusts), your main wind blowing. "EMILIE FAIT DE L'ALGEBRE," sneers he once, in an inadvertent moment, to some Lady-friend: "Emilie ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... all the things in the room their greeting strikes me as sincere. They are still here simply because it was not felt worth while even to remove them. Never mind; let me welcome truth, albeit in such sere and sorry garb, and look forward to the time when I shall be able to do so unmoved, as does ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... fragrance, and the ruby fire Of maple-buds along the misty hills, And that immortal call which fills The waiting wood with songs? The snow-drops came so long ago, It seemed that Spring was near! But then returned the snow With biting winds, and earth grew sere, And sullen clouds drooped low To veil the sadness of a hope deferred: Then rain, rain, rain, incessant rain Beat on the window-pane, Through which I watched the solitary bird That braved the tempest, buffeted and tossed With rumpled feathers down the wind again. Oh, were the seeds all ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... fields of battle, Honored names in senate chamber. And the sacred pile was cherished, By each absent son and daughter. Many years beyond this period, (Well I ken the oft told story,) On a sunny day in autumn, When the leaves were "sere and yellow," When the woods were melancholy, There were little children clustered In this notable old school-room; There were little children striving, For the prize-book and the medal, Children conning words in ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... warm haze floating above them, which, though clear enough in our neighbourhood, became impenetrably blue in the far distance. Woods, woods, woods, leafy branches, foliage globes, or parachutes, green, brown, or sere in colour, forests one above another, rising, falling, and receding—a very leafy ocean. The horizon, at all points, presents the same view, there may be an indistinct outline of a hill far away, or here and there a tall tree higher than the rest conspicuous in its outlines ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... to some desert place! Here let us all for death prepare, Or on the last great journey fare;(320) Of Rama our dear lord bereft, What profit in our lives is left? Huge trunks of trees around us lie, With roots and branches sere and dry, Come let us set these logs on fire And throw our bodies on the pyre. What shall we speak? How can we say We followed Rama on his way, The mighty chief whose arm is strong, Who sweetly speaks, who thinks no wrong? Ayodhya's town ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... sere recusent Quid valeant humeri. And, Ego nec studium sine divite vena, Nec rude ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... childishness again. For while the sap of youth is green, And, yet unripened, leaps within, The young are weakly as the old, And each alike unmeet to hold The vantage post of war! And ah! when flower and fruit are o'er, And on life's tree the leaves are sere, Age wendeth propped its journey drear, As forceless as a child, as light And fleeting as a dream of night ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... highway curved and they were suddenly fronted by a desert of sere desolation, a desert floored by glassy slag which sent back the sun beams in a furnace glare. Varta shaded her eyes and tried to see the end of this, but, if there was a distant rim of green beyond, the heat distortions in the ...
— The Gifts of Asti • Andre Alice Norton
... "the intense eagerness and delight, with which everybody in this establishment hails your departure. Four dirty little Darrells run about the passages with their war-whoop, 'Dithy's going—hooray! Now we'll have fun!' Your step-mother's sere and yellow visage beams with bliss; even the young gentlemen who are lodged and boarded, Greek-ed and Latin-ed here, wear faces of suppressed relief, that tells its own tale to the student of human nature. Your welfare must be unspeakably ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... residence; and, touching these balls, I have a grievance to ventilate, at the request of Mrs. Quartermaster Damages. She specially imported frilled petticoats from England to display in the mazy dance, and she assured me they were turning sere and yellow in her boxes. She never gets a chance of bringing them out except once in the twelvemonth, when she is asked to the "Quartermasters' Ball." But there is a reason for everything, and Mrs. Quartermaster Damages is fat and forty, and not fair, and—tell ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... along the misty hills, And that immortal call which fills The waiting wood with songs? The snow-drops came so long ago, It seemed that Spring was near! But then returned the snow With biting winds, and all the earth grew sere, And sullen clouds drooped low To veil the sadness of a hope deferred: Then rain, rain, rain, incessant rain Beat on the window-pane, Through which I watched the solitary bird That braved the tempest, ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... previously when Matthew Cuthbert had driven down over the hill with what Mrs. Rachel called "his imported orphan." But that had been in springtime; and this was late autumn, and all the woods were leafless and the fields sere and brown. The sun was just setting with a great deal of purple and golden pomp behind the dark woods west of Avonlea when a buggy drawn by a comfortable brown nag came down the hill. Mrs. Rachel peered ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... opera it was so exciting and so wonderful that everything else was wiped out of her mind. In the front of the box she sat—its sole ornament—against a background of Mrs. Kirkham's contemporaries, withered and sere in contrast with her lily-pure freshness. In the entr'actes the hostess recalled the opera house in its heyday when the Bonanza Kings occupied their boxes with the Bonanza Queens beside them, when everyone was rich, and all the women wore diamonds. The old ladies cackled over their ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... is a general practice of the hacienderos to drive down their herds to the low grounds of the coasts and rivers, during the dry season, and as soon as the grass on the hills or highlands begins to grow sere and yellow. We observed also occasional heaps of oyster-shells on the banks, or half washed away by the river; and on the sand-spits at the bends of the stream, and in all the little shady nooks ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... huntsman and horn, Shall scare your heaths and coverts lorn, Braying 'em shrill and clear, O; But lone and still Shall lift each hill, Each valley wan and sere, O. ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... It is like a fairy dwelling, a gnomic palace built of the aether of dreams. It is tiny and delicate and lovely, and replete with memories of sere leaves in November and of lilies in April. It is a castle of vanished hopes, of dimly-remembered dreams, of sad memories older than the deluge. The dead years circle slowly and solemnly around its low white walls, and clothe it in a mystic veil of unseen tears. And many marvellous ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... I breathe upon the forests, And the leaves fall sere and yellow; Then I shake my locks and snow falls, Covering all the ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... mounted the bear and the elk and the deer, And eagles gigantic, aged and sere, They rode long-horn cattle, they cried "A-la-la." They lifted the knife, the bow, and the spear, They lifted ghost-torches from dead fires below, The midnight made grand with the cry "A-la-la." The midnight made grand with a red-god ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... as Pantomime was concerned, made such inroads as at the present time it has done into the dramatic profession. Clown, to pater and materfamilias, and others, was a source of genuine enjoyment; and though they may have passed the sere and yellow leaf of age, the laughs and hearty merriment of their grand-children gathered around them made them think of other days, when they were young themselves. Picture them all, dear reader, sitting ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... When, in the sere And autumn leaves decayed, The mournful forest tells how quickly fade The glories of the year! When in the silent tomb oppressed, Frail man, with weight of days, Sinks to his tranquil rest; Contented nature but obeys Her everlasting law,— The general doom awakes ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... glory, Shaking all their banners bright From the mill, eaves hoary. Swallows turn'd glossy throats, Timorous, uncertain, When to hear their matin notes, Peep'd she thro' her curtain, Shook the mill-stream sweet and clear, With its silver laughter— Shook the mill from flooring sere Up to oaken ratter. "Bouche-Mignonne" it cried "come down! "Other flowers are stirring; "Pierre with fingers strong and brown ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... host am I of lovers sad and sere For waiting long drawn out and expectation drear. My patience underneath the loss of friends and folk With pallor's sorry garb hath clad me, comrades dear. Abasement, misery and heart-break after those I suffer who endured before me many a ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... a clent[14] hille. Eft dump in the depe as all drowne wolde. Was no stightlyng with stere ne no stithe ropes, Ne no sayle, at might serue for unsound wedur. But all the buernes in the bote, as hom best liked, Besoght unto sainttes & to sere goddes; (p.65) ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... body-tints, yet beautiful. There were no maples here, as in the East, to add a glorious crimson to the scene; this was given by shrubs, not by trees. The tints were certainly, in the larger growths, less delicate here than there; the poplar's chrome was darker, the willow's mottled chrome more sere. But there was the exquisite pale canary of the birch, the blood-red and yellow of the wild rose, which glows in both hues, the rich crimson of the red willow, with its foil of ivory berries, and the ruddy copper of the high-bush cranberry. These, with many other of the berry ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... still greater changes. He had seen his threescore and ten years; and was fast falling into the "sere and yellow leaf." His hair was getting grey, and his frame, though still active and sinewy, would have yielded under the extraordinary marches he had once made. In dress, there was nothing to remark; his ordinary ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... away the dancing girls, quench the lights, remove Golden cups and garlands sere, all the feast; away Lutes and lyres and Lalage; close the gates, above Write upon the lintel this; Time is done for play! Thou hast had thy fill of love, eaten, drunk; the show Ends at last, 'twas long enough—time it is ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... Pleasant Cemetery, on Wednesday, the 22nd February. During the day large numbers visited the sorrowing house, and gazed for the last time on the features of the revered dead. As was to be expected, the larger number were, like the venerable deceased, far into "the sere and yellow leaf," and many who had known him for a long time could scarce restrain the unbidden tear as a flood of recollections surged up at the sight of the still form ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... and midnight shall at once be seen: Trees, at one time, shall be both sere and green: Fire and water shall together lie In one self-sweet-conspiring sympathy: Summer and winter shall at one time show Ripe ears of corn, and up to th' ears in snow: Seas shall be sandless; fields devoid of grass; Shapeless ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... friend. But the fields were bare, the frosts began to pinch, and the young ones longed to see the world; so they must go. The day they started, the whole flock flew to the great house, to say good-by. Some dived and darted round and round it, some hopped to and fro on the sere lawn, some perched on the chimney-tops, and some clung to the window ledges; all twittering ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... the colour riot, the dominant tone of which was green. It was green, green, green—the blue-green of the springing year, and sere and yellow green and tawny-brown green of autumn. There were orange green, gold green, and a copper green. And all these greens were rich green beyond description; and yet the richness and the greenness passed even as we gazed upon it, going out of the gray clouds and into the sea, which assumed ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... see, And what let be, While on earth we tarry, We shall cast Like leaves at last Which the sere oaks carry. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... the hair is left in its original jet, and the dingy lower limbs contrast violently with the ghostlike absence of colour above. The dress is a crinoline of palm-fronds, some fresh and green, others sere and brown; a band of strong mid-rib like a yellow hoop passed round the waist spreads out the petticoat like a farthingale, and the ragged ends depend to the knees; sometimes it is worn under the axillae, but in all cases the chalked ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... spring, And over-long was green, and early sere, And never gathered gold in the late year From autumn suns, and moons of harvesting, But ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang
... words, we proceeded to a closer examination. All the trees along the hill-side had been cut down, and little piles of wood were put up, to carry away. The May flowers were all dried up in the sun, and the ground pine and bear's grass were as sere and yellow as the autumn leaves. Down in the bottom of the hollow, the turf had been cut up and carried off, and there lay the bones of an old horse bleaching in the sun. There was only a little stump left of the ...
— No and Other Stories Compiled by Uncle Humphrey • Various
... day for our picnic. November dreamed that it was May. The air was soft and mellow, with pale, aerial mists in the valleys and over the leafless beeches on the western hill. The sere stubble fields brooded in glamour, and the sky was pearly blue. The leaves were still thick on the apple trees, though they were russet hued, and the after-growth of grass was richly green, unharmed ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... cannot, nor I will not hold me still. My tongue, though not my heart, shall haue his will. He is deformed, crooked, old, and sere, Ill-fac'd, worse bodied, shapelesse euery where: Vicious, vngentle, foolish, blunt, vnkinde, Stigmaticall in ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... The chill east wind is sighing, The autumn tints are sere, The summer flowers are dying. The river's sullen way Winds on through vacant meadows, The dying light of day ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... long parched, long lifting to the blue Of summer's brilliant sky but russet hue Of sere grass shivering in the trade-wind's sweep. Soon, with light footfalls, from their tranced sleep The first rains bid the poppies rise anew, And trills the lark exultant summons, too. How swift at Fancy's beck those gay crowds leap To ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... absence at the castle would be subject of remark, if not of alarm. As they arose to leave the fountain which had been witness of their mutual engagement, an arrow whistled through the air, and struck a raven perched on the sere branch of an old oak, near to where they had been seated. The bird fluttered a few yards and dropped at the feet of Lucy, whose dress was stained with some ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the wither'd leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread. The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrub the jay And from the wood-top calls the crow, ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... gather together at King's, or Hall's, and industriously promulgate small talk and tobacco-smoke. All is gay and bustling. Although the feet of the strollers in the Christ Church meadows rustle through the sere and yellow leaf, yet rich masses of brown and russet foliage still hang ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... Dr. George William Bagby, read us his lecture on these cheerful comestibles. We were the first to see the frost that "lies heavy on the palings and tips with silver the tops of the butter-bean poles, where the sere and yellow pods are chattering in ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... beginning to be seen, for what it is; a thing that Nature does not own. On the one side is dreary Cant, with a reminiscence of things noble and divine; on the other is but acrid Candour, with a prophecy of things brutal, infernal. Hurd and Warburton are sunk into the sere and yellow leaf; no considerable body of true-seeing men looks thitherward for healing: the Paine-and-Hume Atheistic theory, of 'things well let alone,' with Liberty, Equality and the like, is also in these days declaring itself nought, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... is, where that fair goddess strays; Then follow, till around thee all be sere. Lose not a vision of her passing face; Nor miss the sound of her soft robes, that here Sweep over the wet ...
— Primavera - Poems by Four Authors • Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps
... thoughts ruled wide on that sweet day, Their dignity installing In gentle bosoms, while sere leaves Were on the bough or falling; But breezes play'd, and sunshine gleam'd The forest to embolden, Redden'd the fiery hues, and shot Transparence ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... on the next verse viciously, and came a cropper over the clash of two sibilants, as the distant clamour increased. "Brutes!" said I, disapprovingly. "Sere, clear, dear—Now they have finished, 'Jamais, monsieur', and begun crying, 'Fire!' Oh, this would draw more than three souls out of a weaver, you know! Mere, near, hemisphere—no, but the Greeks thought it was flat. By Jove! ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... dinner parties grow dim, Masters of Horses and Hounds go to battle, the plate is melted down, and all is sad and sere. The young lord is sent by King Charles abroad, and Parliamentary Fairfax comes thundering at the gate, where admittance is refused by the venerable old marquis. Fairfax besieges boldly and is gallantly attacked by repeated sallies. I had rather the Puritans, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a man bring his sweet to woo But here, where such hundreds were lovers too? Where lie the dead lips that thirst to kiss, The empty hands that their fellows miss, Where the maid and her lover, from sere to green, Sleep bed by bed, with the worm between? For it's turn of the year and All Souls' night, When the dead can hear and the dead ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... beard almost touched the ground, as he crept onward. Hester gazed after him a little while, looking with a half-fantastic curiosity to see whether the tender grass of early spring would not be blighted beneath him, and show the wavering track of his footsteps, sere and brown, across its cheerful verdure. She wondered what sort of herbs they were, which the old man was so sedulous to gather. Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs, of species hitherto ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the reason. So long as the boiling witch-fire turned their wake to golden vapor, he could not be sure; but whenever the heat-lightning ran, and through the sere, phantasmal sail, the lookout in the bow flashed like a sharp silhouette through wire gauze,—then it seemed to Rudolph that another small black shape leapt out astern, and vanished. He stood by ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... Spring, the flying feet of youth Spurning the present as it passed, and me, I thought the world a mere environment To hold my wishes and my happiness. I have forgot that foolish, vain belief, Now in my sere and yellow leaf, serene, I offer Autumn all my homage now. The eddies, whirling, rustling in my path, Lure me like sprites, and from the leaves a voice: "Say not our lesson is decay; we fall, And lo, the naked trees in beauty lift Their delicate tracery against ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... the cold and stormy North, With a rush and a roar I hurry forth, I toss from the trees the dead leaves down, The withered leaves all sere and brown, And sway the branches to and fro As on my way I whirling go. At crack and crevice I slip in, And make a lively sounding din. Swift I come and swift away, With you I can no longer stay, For I am wanted elsewhere now, And so good-bye, I ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... the sere and yellow," declared Eunice, laughing at the idea. "Why, even Aunt Abby, in spite of the family record, is about as young as any ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... exhibit our bonds. Indeed, we sedulously conceal them from every eye; we cover up the marks upon our scarred hearts with such jealous care, that none, not even our bosom friends, can ever see them. They hold us where the sweet herbage of life has become dry and sere, where no shelter offers us a grateful retreat. Vanitas can bear away with him his "lengthening chain" to his leafy groves; but Scripsit is confined to the torrid regions of his scanty garret. In vain he gazes afar, beyond the smoky haze of his stony prison, upon the green slopes and shady ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... of the church and entered his house, the street was empty; the people were afraid of what they had done and of their own ingratitude. He crossed the threshold of the presbytery. The sere vine veiled his study casement; in the silence he could hear the sound of the Edera water; he sat down at his familiar table, with the dog upon his knees. His eyes were wet, and his heart was sick; ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... [2] Joseph Sere de la Colombiere, vicar-general and archdeacon of Quebec, pronounced Mgr. de Laval's ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... black imp, and suddenly The black one bit himself into my heart; And lo, at once the earth lay void and barren, And sun and stars were straightway drenched in gloom. The landscape, glad erewhile, lay dark, autumnal; Each grove was sere, each flower stem was broken; Within the frozen sense my strength lay dead, All joy, all courage ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... I went to the window and looked out. I perceived a strip of pale, watery blue through a rift in the storm-laden clouds, and I chose to see that, and that only, ignoring the wind-lashed trees of the allee; the leaves, wet, and sodden and sere, hurrying panic-stricken before the gale, ignoring, too, the low wail promising a coming hurricane, which sighed and soughed beneath the ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... were ashen and sober, and the leaves they were crisped and sere, as I sat in the porch chair and regarded our neighbor's patch of woodland; and I thought: The skies may be ashen and sober, and the leaves may be crisped and sere, but in a maple wood we may dispense with the sun, such irradiation is there from the gold of the ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... sirris-shaws were sere, An' the nichts were lang and mirk, In braw new breeks, wi' a gowden ring, Oor Jock gaed to ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... briars and nettles, the heaps of broken masonry and plaster, among which shone beneath the darting lizards, scraps of vermilion wall-fresco, the chips of purple porphyry or dark-green serpentine; long avenues of trees early sere, closed in by arum-fringed walls, or by ditches where the withered reeds creaked beneath the festoons of clematis and wild vine; solemn and solitary wildernesses within the city walls, where the silence was broken ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... serious and sober, Officials look palsied and sere— They indulge in rhetoric small-beer (Instead of sound sparkling October) They're frightened about you, my dear— (You, at present in two senses, dear!) They would scan the far future, and probe her, But can't—and it makes them feel queer; As you sit by the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... heard a roaring wind: It did not come anear; But with its sound it shook the sails, That were so thin and sere. ...
— The Rime of the Ancient Mariner • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... again from the roots, a new enemy made its appearance—an insect of the coccus family, with a kind of shell on its back, which enables it to withstand all the common applications for destroying insects, and the ravages of which are shown by the leaves becoming black and sere, and the twigs perishing. In October last, a gale drove in the spray from the ocean, stripping the trees, except in sheltered situations, of their leaves, and destroying the upper branches. The trunks are now putting out new sprouts and new leaves, but there is no hope of fruit ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... when nature Is all in the sere, When her snow-showers are hailing, Her rain-sleet assailing, Her mountain ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... province of verse, if not exactly of poetry, in which Byron reigns undisputedly, though it is far distant from the land of lyrics. In his latest and longest production, Don Juan, he tells us that his 'sere fancy has ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... craze for sporting, the lusty Tarascon race cherishes one love: ballad-singing. There's no believing what a quantity of ballads is used up in that little region. All the sentimental stuff turning into sere and yellow leaves in the oldest portfolios, are to be found in full pristine lustre in Tarascon. Ay, the entire collection. Every family has its own pet, as is known to ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... package wrapped in a threadbare shawl and carefully bound with home-twisted twine and this she deposited on her knees and began to unfasten with trembling fingers of expectancy. When she had opened up the thing she rose eagerly and shook out a gown that was as brittle and sere as a leaf in autumn and that rustled frigidly as ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... to the flesh, O youth? Have you turned your back upon the truth? Are you scattering seeds of evil From the garner of the devil? Are you thinking of the harvest By and by? Soon will spring and summer pass, Brown and sere will grow the grass; No time then for good seed-sowing: You and I Must gather what we've sown, forsooth. Are you sowing to the flesh, ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... myself a clever fellow, And wish'd that others held the same opinion; They took it up when my days grew more mellow, And other minds acknowledged my dominion: Now my sere fancy 'falls into the yellow Leaf,' and Imagination droops her pinion, And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk Turns what was once ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... silent for some time, too lazy to speak, almost to think. The beautiful flower-garden which lay before us, sloping towards the river, looked rather brown and sere, after the hot winds, although the orange-trees were still green enough, and vast clusters of purple grapes were ripening rapidly among the yellowing vine-leaves. On the whole, however, the garden was but a poor subject of contemplation for one who remembered it in all its full November beauty, ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... early old, this "child of hate," as Wotan long ago called him, sere and pallid, totally unglad and hating the glad. He is the tool created by Alberich—even as Siegmund was Wotan's tool,—to win back for him the Ring. From his Nibelung father he has more than human powers ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... over their mess fires. Jacques looked down a cove not quite as steep as the rest of the cliff, yet as nearly perpendicular as any surface on which trees and bushes can take hold. It was clothed with a thick growth of sere weeds, cut by one hint of a diagonal line. Perhaps laborers at a fulling mill now rotting below had once climbed this rock. Rain had carried the earth from above in small cataracts down its face, making a thin alluvial coating. A strip of land separated the rock from the St. ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... thou no divine Vision of thine own? Didst thou not see the Object of thy Love Clothed with a Beauty to dull clay unknown? And could not that bright Image, far above The Reach of sere Decay, content thy Thought? Which with its glory would have wrapp'd thee round, To the Gravesbrink, untouched by Age or Pain! Alas! we mar what Fancy's Womb has brought Forth of most beautiful, and to the Bound Of Sense reduce the Helen of ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... a stranger magic than this in my Spanish estates. The lawny slopes on which, when a child, I played, in my father's old country place, which was sold when he failed, are all there, and not a flower faded, nor a blade of grass sere. The green leaves have not fallen from the spring woods of half a century ago, and a gorgeous autumn has blazed undimmed for fifty years, among the trees ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... I have here? ye lese my lyff: Alas! dere God, xuld I now rave? An old man may nevyr thryff With a yonge wyff, so God me save! Nay, nay, sere, lett bene, Xuld I now in age begynne to dote, If I here chyde she wolde clowte my cote, Blere myn ey, and pyke out a mote, And thus oftyn ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... the sexes are indistinguishable up to the period of fertility, but when the male plants have shed their pollen, and thus fulfilled their duty of fertilising the female plants, they cease to grow, turn yellow and sere, and if at all crowded wither and die. Many other examples might be cited, but the question is too wide to enter on here. See Lester Ward, op. ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... pride: "Exegi monumentum sere perennius." He is not the least afraid to say that. He did it; knew he had done it; said he had done it; and ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... Persica is my favorite above all. She is the true sibyl. All the grandeur of that wasted frame comes from within. The life of thought has wasted the fresh juices of the body, and hardened the sere leaf of her cheek to parchment; every lineament is sharp, every tint tarnished; her face is seamed with wrinkles,—usually as repulsive on a woman's face as attractive on a man. We usually feel, on looking at a woman, as if Nature had given them their best dower, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of thirty-two Elvira, to the budding younger Lawrences, was hopelessly aged and sere, and Eulalie, in particular, a lately opened blossom of eighteen, made it a matter of daily duty to keep Elvira's soul from closing its eyes, even in the ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... the great expanse below them with eager eyes. It spread remoter and remoter, with only a few clusters of sere thorn bushes here and there, and the dim suggestions of some now waterless ravine to break its desolation of yellow grass. Its purple distances melted at last into the bluish slopes of the further hills—hills it might be of a greener kind—and above them, invisibly supported, and seeming indeed ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... of all the odours which summer has stored up in wood and field. There were few flowers now; most of the lilies, which had queened it so bravely along the central path a few days before, were withered. The grass had become ragged and sere and unkempt. But in the corners the torches of the goldenrod were kindling and a few misty purple asters nodded here and there. The orchard kept its own strange attractiveness, as some women with youth long passed still ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of our love what children fair were born To rapture! ere thy last wild song was sung. I deem thy day is Night and thou the Moon— So feeble is thy kiss, so cold thy light,— Lamp of my life, alas!—how soon, how soon— O speak! comes thy last greeting and good-night? My breasts are sere as sand, no flowers bloom, No grass, no forests hide my misery bare; The reaches of the tyrannous poles consume Those gardens of delight we made so fair, And men lie dark in caves, a sullen race, Framed of ray daughter's flesh but ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... lay with its long looks sere On the breast of the open plain; She loosened the matted hair of the slain, And cried, as she filled each juicy vein: "Awaken! for ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... Sanzio were still fresh in the memory of his surviving pupils. Michael Angelo was in the zenith of his fame, bending his energies to the beautifying of the great cathedral. Martin Luther was in the sere old age of his life, waiting for the command of the Master, which should bid him lay down his armor. A hundred years were to elapse before Charles I. of England must pay with his life the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... of this incomparable sorcerer was upon her imagination; the sluggish, lurid tarn of Usher; the pale, gigantic water lilies, nodding their ghastly, everlasting heads over the dreary Zaire; the shrouding shadow of Helusion; the ashen skies, and sere, crisped leaves in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir, hard by the dim lake of Auber—all lay with grim distinctness before her; and from the red bars of the grate the wild, lustrous, appalling eyes of Ligeia looked out ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... they turned to cross a makeshift bridge—beside one of stone that had spanned the little river but now lay broken in its shallow bed. Beyond this stream they followed a white road that wound gently up a sere hill between rows of blasted poplars. At the top of the rise two shining lines of helmets undulated rhythmically below ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... purpose of keeping it within limits; but the three or four feet of space between the walls had become obstructed by roots, bushes, vines and debris in general. With the exception of the stony bed where it entered the farm, most of its course was obscured by overhanging bushes and the sere, rank herbage of autumn. ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... the turf awakens all about as if in the spirit of friendliness. See the old barn on the meadow slope; the green seems to have oozed out from it, and to have flowed slowly down the hill; at a little distance it is lost in the sere stubble. One can see where every spring lies buried about the fields; its influence is felt at the surface, and the turf is early quickened there. Where the cattle have loved to lie and ruminate in the warm summer twilight, there the April sunshine loves ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... of Summer, And the forest robes grew sere; Still in darkness knelt the maiden, Pleading, ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... to be sure, are the brown stems of the pasture goldenrod standing stiffly as if to state with grim definiteness that all rainbow hopes are folly and there will be no more blossoming for them. Their leaves are dun and sere where they have not already fallen and their tops that in early September were such soft cumulus clouds of golden yellow are but scrawny clots of brown, draggled by the tears in which the sudden sun has drowned the pasture. ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... 'mong the fern-stalks green,— Or dreameth of elves 'neath the forest treen: He wrappeth him up when the oak leaves sere And the ripe acorns fall, at the wane o' the year; And he tippleth at Yule, by the log's cheery glow.— Come, jollily trowl The brown round bowl, And pledge the ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... no sudden changes of season here. Spring comes gradually day by day, a perceptible hourly waking to life and color; and this glides into a summer which never ceases, but only becomes tired and fades into the repose of a short autumn, when the sere and brown and red and yellow hills and the purple mountains are waiting for the rain clouds. This is according to the process of nature; but wherever irrigation brings moisture to the fertile soil, the green and bloom are perpetual the year round, only the green is powdered with ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... Winds Blow moist and keen, shattering the graceful locks Of these fair spreading Trees; which bids us seek Som better shroud, som better warmth to cherish Our Limbs benumm'd, ere this diurnal Starr Leave cold the Night, how we his gather'd beams 1070 Reflected, may with matter sere foment, Or by collision of two bodies grinde The Air attrite to Fire, as late the Clouds Justling or pusht with Winds rude in thir shock Tine the slant Lightning, whose thwart flame driv'n down Kindles the gummie bark of Firr or Pine, And sends ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... strip of meadow between them and the water. Many hills were covered with a thin forest of oaks and very little underbrush. At a distance the ground appeared as if carefully trimmed for occupation, especially as it had a few open places like fields. In the sere and yellow leaf of autumn these groves were charming, and I presume they are equally so in the ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... this bit of country for two months"—with a shrug of the shoulders. "I should have sought your bright eyes could see all what sere is to see ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... many of the flowers were also new to us. On the uplands the herbage was short and dry and the plants stiff and woody, but in the swales the wild oat shook its quivers of barbed and twisted arrows, and the crow's foot, tall and sere, bowed softly under the feet of the wind, while everywhere, in the lowlands as well as on the ridges, the bleaching white antlers of by-gone herbivora lay scattered, testifying to "the herds of deer and buffalo" which once fed there. We were just a few years too ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... beast—I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that forty's just the right age for me. You're reminding me that I'm a trifle passe myself and ought to marry something sere and yellow. But I tell you I don't feel any older than twenty-five—never have, it's my affliction—while you've never been younger than forty in all your life. It's you who ought to marry middle-age"—and ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... princes, duchesses, queens—all are real to me now, and all are infinitely pathetic, in the dignity of their fallen and forgotten greatness. With what inalienable majesty they wear their rusty velvets and faded silks, flaunting sere ruffles of point-lace, which at a touch now would be shivered like cobwebs! My heart goes out to them through the glass that divides us. I wish I could stay with them, bear them company, always. I think they like me. I am afraid they will miss ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... in limitless rolling swells of prairie until they met the blue sky that on every hand bent down to touch them. In spring brightly green, and spangled with wild flowers, by midsummer this prairie had grown sere and yellow. Clumps of dark green cottonwoods marked the courses of the infrequent streams—for most of the year the only note of color in the landscape, except the brilliant sky. On the wide, level river bottoms, sheltered by the enclosing hills, the Indians pitched their conical ...
— When Buffalo Ran • George Bird Grinnell
... marvel for his soul was filled With true poetic fire; and oft sweet song Of purest praise spontaneously has welled From his enraptured heart. Then he would long To leave a world where misery and wrong So much prevail, but yet content to stay And sere his master, his poor saints among; Would try to save those led from God astray, That he might aid Christ's cause while ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... spiritual communions made by him sometimes at the close of some visit to the Blessed Sacrament. The book which he used for these visits was an old neglected book written by saint Alphonsus Liguori, with fading characters and sere foxpapered leaves. A faded world of fervent love and virginal responses seemed to be evoked for his soul by the reading of its pages in which the imagery of the canticles was interwoven with the communicant's prayers. An inaudible voice seemed to caress the soul, telling her names and glories, ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... of a great, rambling, old house, set in the midst of a wide lawn, brown and sere now with approaching winter, and surrounded by huge, knotted, gnarled, old oaks, whose dry leaves still clung to the twisted branches and rustled in the crisp air. A fat, sleek, black Tabby lay asleep on the warm porch-rail; ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... not dream that any other than his Maker (and his Maker's works, if ever they have any sympathy) listened to the wild outpourings of an aged but still very natural heart, which had always been proud of controlling itself. I could see his great frame through a willow-tree, with the sere grass and withered reeds around, and the faint gleam of fugitive water beyond. He was kneeling toward his shattered mill, having rolled his shirt sleeves back to pray, and his white locks shone in the starlight; then, after trying ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... charms, The leaves will soon be sere, And Autumn folds his jewelled arms Around the dying year; So, ere the waning seasons claim Our leafless groves awhile, With golden wine and glowing flame We 'll crown ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Ingam, qui cur Madoc Camber esse nequeat quem in eos partes delatum domestica evincunt Monumenta, ratio nulla reddi potest. Ad antiquitatem, quinque illa Secula sussiciunt quousque altissima Americanorum Memoria, nec sere ultra, adscendit.[k] ...
— An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the - Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 • John Williams
... haue Tribute of mee: the aduenturous Knight shal vse his Foyle and Target: the Louer shall not sigh gratis, the humorous man shall end his part in peace: the Clowne shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickled a'th' sere: and the Lady shall say her minde freely; or the blanke Verse shall halt for't: what Players are they? Rosin. Euen those you were wont to take delight in the Tragedians of ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... seen before. At the end of the passage, below the dark staircase, was a door opening into the Paradou, and he could see the vast garden spreading there beneath the pale sunlight, with all its autumn melancholy, its sere and yellow foliage. The doctor hurried through the doorway and took a few steps ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... imbued my soul With aught of natural piety to feel Your love, and recompense the boon with mine; If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even, 5 With sunset and its gorgeous ministers, And solemn midnight's tingling silentness; If autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood, And winter robing with pure snow and crowns Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs; 10 If spring's voluptuous pantings when she breathes Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me; If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast I consciously ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... like a tree In bulk, doth make men better be, Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere: A lily of a day, Is fairer far, in May, Although it fall and die that night; It was the plant and flower of light. In small proportions we just beauty see; And in short measures, life ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... out this morning, and I did not like to intrude again," he laughed. "Growing modest in my sere and yellow days, you see; so I thought I should perhaps find you here, as I saw your numerous ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... as he might have been, were it not for the example of Plutina's grandfather, who, somewhat beyond four-score, was still scandalously lively, to the delectation of local gossip. But, though after the departure of Jones at a junction, Zeke reflected half-amusedly on the rather sere romances of these two ancient Romeos, he was far from surmising that, at the last, their amorous ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... lands of the outer world were born of the sea, before even the Land of the Sun (Mu) and the Land of the Sea (Atlantis) arose from molten rock and sand, there was land here in the far south. A sere land of rock plains, and swamps where slimy life mated, lived ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... compared him to the silver and graceful ash, with its pensile branches, and leaves of gentle green, reflecting gleams of happy sunshine. The fall of its leaf, too, is like the fall of his,—it is green to-night and gone to-morrow, it does not sere ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... en tu busca, y ni veo el corcel que te trae a estos lugares, ni a los servidores que conducen tu litera. Rompe de una vez el misterioso velo en que te envuelves como en una noche profunda, yo te amo, y, noble o villana, sere tuyo, ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... deglat palms which grow here in great abundance—the finest in the world—with their lower leaves pendent, sere and yellow; the figs, lemons, apricots and pomegranates clustering in savage meshes of unpruned boughs among which the vine, likewise unkempt, writhes and clambers liana-fashion, in crazy convolutions—all these things conspire ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... had seated myself during his narrative), my heart was stirred with pity; I took down the Cicero, and lit on a sheet of yellow paper covered with faded manuscript, which, of course, I did not read. I turned to the hearth, tossed on the fire the sere old paper, which blazed at once, and then, hearing the words pax vobiscum, I looked round. But I was alone. After a few minutes, devoted to private ejaculations, I returned to the dining-room; and that is all my story. Your maids need no longer dread ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... little flickering patches of morning sunlight met his gaze, as they played and quivered on the forest moss or over the sere pine-spills. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... tienda roof as if they were undergoing a second burning. The black shadow of a chimney on the whitewashed adobe wall was like a door or cavernous opening in the wall itself; the tops of the olive and pear trees seen above it were russet and sere already in the fierce light. Even the moist breath of the sea beyond had quite evaporated before it crossed the plaza, and now rustled the leaves in the Mission garden with a ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the course of nature, of that dignified leisure for which every public man must have sighed in the midst of his triumphs, and though we cannot say of him that his "way of life is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf," yet we can say that he has prematurely obtained "that which should accompany old age, as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends;" and postponing for this night all selfish regret, not thinking of the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... erect cross. The upper fields harmonise with the lower. The Christian painting displays a vigorous and stately tree between two younger palm-trees; the pagan picture has the same symbols; but the middle tree is in the sere and yellow leaf, whilst a Dryad issuing from the roots flourishes an axe to cut it down. The allusion is not to be mistaken. The sun of paganism has set: the axe is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... The grass was getting sere, there was new-fallen snow on Lizard Head, and winter was coming. He had the animal's instinct to den up, to seek winter quarters. Certain ties other than those of Mary's love combined to draw him ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... The wind, with its chilly fingers, picked off the sere leaves, and made mounds of them in the garden walks. The boom of the sea was heavier, and the pale moon fell oftener on stormy waves than in the summer months. Change and decay had come over the face of Earth even as they come over the features ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... grayling fishing up to my colonial interlude is of a wet, muggy November day in Herefordshire. It was late in the month, and as the previous week had been marked by early frost, the sere leaves, having lost their grip, were rattling down on the water with every gust, and, indeed, from the mere weight of the rain. It was pretty practice, dropping the flies so as to avoid these little impediments; but it wasted time and strained the temper, for, ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... will not, hold me still; My tongue, though not my heart, shall have his will. He is deformed, crooked, old, and sere, Ill-faced, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere; 20 Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind; Stigmatical in making, ...
— The Comedy of Errors - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... his, the young, the stalwart, rather than mine, the mouldering, the sere. I love life. Not yet am I ready to weigh anchor, and reeve halliard, and turn my prow over the watery paths of the wine-brown Deeps. Oh no. Not yet. Let him die. Many and many are the days in which I shall yet see the light, walk, think. I am averse to end ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... nears the door: a frosty rime Is branching over it, and drifts are deep Against the wall. He knocks, and there is time,— (For none doth open),—time to list the sweep And whistle of the wind along the mere Through beds of stiffened reeds and rushes sere. ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... "merry cross-counters," and we cannot afford to go about with black eyes, except as an occasional indulgence. Then it is that single-stick comes in. Boxing is the game of youth, and fencing with foils, we have been assured, improves as men fall into the sere and yellow leaf. Single-stick, then, may be looked upon as a gentle exercise, ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... Henry was takene byside a howse of religione [i.e. Whalley] in Lancashyre, by the mene of a blacke monke of Abyngtone [Abingdon] in a wode called Cletherwode [the wood of Clitheroe], besyde Bungerly hyppyngstones, by Thomas Talbott, sonne and heyre to sere Edmunde Talbot of Basshalle, and Jhon Talbott, his cosyne, of Colebry [i.e. Salebury, in Blackburn], withe other moo; which discryvide [him] beynge at his dynere at Wadyngton halle: and [he was] carryed to London on horsebake, and his leges ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 45, Saturday, September 7, 1850 • Various
... which shocked contemporaries, and which, by the way, has the very large first title of Woman, could only bring a blush to cheeks very tickle of that sere: a yawn might come much more easily. The most shocking thing that the heroine, who is "an attempt to delineate woman in her natural state," does (and that not of malice) is to receive her lover in a natural bathroom. But her adventures ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... beneath the naked trees, Where wild streams shiver as they pass, Yet in the sere and sighing grass I hear a murmur as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... in the drear month of October, The leaves were all crisped and sere, Adown by the Tarn of Auber, In the ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... followed golden corn; The leaves are few and sere; My thoughts are old as soon as born, And chill ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... of rest, and I sit here Among the trees, green mounds, and leaves as sere As my own blasted hopes. There was a time When Love and perfect Happiness did chime Like two sweet sounds upon this blessed day; But one has flown forever, far away From this poor Earth's unsatisfied desires To love eternal, and the sacred fires With which the other lighted ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... substance,[159] by virtue of the onehead to our Lord that lieth in knowing and loving of God, in light and ghostly brenning of Him, in transforming of the soul in to the Godhead; but also many other comforts, savours, sweetnesses, and wonderful feelings on sere[160] or sundry manners, after that our Lord vouchethsafe to visit His creatures here in earth, and after that the soul profiteth and waxeth in charity. Some soul, by virtue of charity that God giveth it, is so cleansed, ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... on her words came the doctor, emerging slowly, for he was weak and unsteady. In the garish light of the afternoon he looked singularly white and bleached, like a man whose warm, red-veined life is dried into a sere grayness of blood and tissue. He was out of harmony with the glad living colors around him, ghostlike amid the brightness of the flowering earth and the deep-dyed heaven. He met his daughter's ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... I thought myself a clever fellow, And wished that others held the same opinion; They took it up when my days grew more mellow, And other minds acknowledged my dominion: Now my sere Fancy "falls into the yellow Leaf,"[232] and Imagination droops her pinion, And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk Turns what was once romantic ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... who chooses to jump down cataracts, Why should the sternest moralist be severe? Judge not the dead by prejudice—but facts, Such as in strictest evidence appear. Else were the laurels of all ages sere. Give to the brave, who have passed the final goal— The gates that ope not back—the generous tear; And let the muse's clerk upon her scroll In coarse, but honest verse, ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... he rose from his rug, went into the conservatory (he was very thin then), walked around it deliberately, looking at all the plants he knew, and then went to the bay-window in the dining-room, and stood a long time looking out upon the little field, now brown and sere, and toward the garden, where perhaps the happiest hours of his life had been spent. It was a last look. He turned and walked away, laid himself down upon the bright spot in the rug, ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... forth its mouse, and a sufficiently small mouse it is, God knows. And my three weeks' hard work have got to go into the ignominious pigeon-hole. Confound it, I could have earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble. However, I shouldn't have done it, for I am too lazy, now, in my sere and yellow leaf, to be willing to work for anything but love..... I kind of envy you people who are permitted for your righteousness' sake to dwell in a boarding house; not that I should always want to live in one, but I should like the change occasionally ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the road ill-formed, leading for the most part across a sere and desolate country, with nothing to relieve its barrenness except long stretches of the great spear-headed reeds. At noon the heat was intense; the little cavalcade halted for half an hour under the shade of some black towering rocks which broke the monotony of the district, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... bright when the year is new, Nor changes, when its frosts appear: For the star still shines in its ground of blue, And the pine tree lives when the rest are sere. From the pine my thoughts ascend above To the Tree of LIfe that Heaven adorns; From the star to the Star of my Saviour's Love, That grandly shone in a crown ...
— The American Missionary, October, 1890, Vol. XLIV., No. 10 • Various
... evident that either our distinguished friend here has reached that condition described by Shakespeare as 'the sere and yellow leaf,' or has suffered some premature abatement of his mental and physical faculties. Whether ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... "Twenty is nothing but the 'sere and yellow leaf' of infantile caprice! But thirty is the jocund youth of character! On land or sea the Lord Almighty never made anything as radiantly, divinely young as—thirty! Oh, but thirty's the darling age in a woman!" he added with ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... thee betide When thou hast handled been awhile, With sere flowers to be thrown aside; And I shall sigh, while some will smile, To see thy love to every one Hath brought thee to be loved ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... rose in a gradual slope, and the highest part of the ridge for which I made was about two miles from the starting-point—a parched brown plain, with nothing growing on it but scattered tussocks of sere hair-like grass. ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... Sere'na, allured by the mildness of the weather, went into the fields to gather wild flowers for a garland, when she was attacked by the Blatant Beast, who carried her off in its mouth. Her cries attracted to the spot Sir Calidore, who compelled ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... lone one stood, With dauntless words and high, That shook the sere leaves from the wood As if a ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... because they have confuted it, but because, like witchcraft or astrology, it has ceased to interest them. The great ship of your Church, once so stout and fair and well laden with good destinies, is become a skeleton ship; it is a phantom hulk, with warped planks and sere canvas, and you who work it are no more than ghosts of dead men, and at the hour when you seem to have reached the bay, down your ship will sink like lead or like stone to ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... into the west, leaving behind him a deep red glow that illuminated the hills, and burnished the windows of the sick-chamber. The wind moaned, and, sweeping the sere leaves at intervals, threatened a tempest. There was a solemn stillness in the parsonage, around whose gate—weeping in silence, without heart to speak, or wish to make their sorrow known—were collected a host of humble creatures—the poorest but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... so many here Of the yellow leaf and sere, Who are anxious, aye, and ready To respond unto Your call; Yet You pass them by unheeding, And You set our hearts to bleeding! "O," you mutter, "God, how cruel Do ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... While one sere leaf, that parting Autumn gilds, Trembles upon the thin, and naked spray, November, dragging on his sunless day, Lours, cold and fallen, on the watry fields; And Nature to the waste dominion yields, Stript her last robes, with gold and purple gay.— So droops my life, of your soft beams ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... get into—a struggle has to be made before you can fairly take possession; others are broader and easier to enter: a few are very capacious and might be legitimately licensed to carry a dozen inside with safety; nearly all or them are lined with green baize, much of which is now getting into the sere and yellow leaf period of life; many of them are well-cushioned—green being the favourite colour; and in about the same number Brussels carpets may be found. There is a quiet, secluded coziness about the pews; the sides are high; the ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... stride four and a-half feet without the smallest effort, he can't be quite in the sere and yellow. That was the breadth of a puddle on the garden walk which he had evidently walked across. Patent-leather boots had gone round, and Square-toes had hopped over. There is no mystery about it at all. I am simply applying to ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle |
