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More "Fen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 'twas not one but ten —- Rank on rank of ghostly soldiers marching o'er the fen, Marching in the misty air they showed in dreams to me, And behind me was the shouting and the shattering of ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... Over bog, and fen, and boulder, I must bear it on my shoulder, Beaten of wind, torn of briar, Smitten of ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... The dim land that gives shelter to the wolf, The windy headlands, perilous fen paths, Where, under mountain mist, the stream flows down And floods the ground. Not far hence, but a mile, The mere stands, over which hang death-chill groves, A wood fast-rooted overshades the flood; There every night a ghastly miracle Is seen, fire ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... conception what an ugly place Plaistow is. The land isn't actual fen now, but it was once. And it's quite flat. And there is a great dike, twenty feet wide, oozing through it just oozing, you know; and lots of little dikes, at right angles with the big one. And the fields are all square. And there are no hedges ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... breeze sweeps over the trees, and the mists lie low on the fen, From grey tombstones are gathered the bones that once were women and men, And away they go, with a mop and a mow, to the revel that ends too soon, For cockcrow limits our holiday - the dead of the ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... passage through his dominions to the Ostrogoths; if they would go by that road they must first fight with the unconquered Gepidae" Traustila then took up a strong position near the Hiulca Palus, whose broad waters, girdled by fen and treacherous morass, made the onward march of the invaders a task of almost desperate danger. But the Ostrogoths could not now retreat; famine and pestilence lay behind them on their road; they must go forward, and with a reluctant heart Theodoric gave ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... often gold, and fair rosy cheeks. They seem a very Saxon type. I have been wondering whether they are descendents of the Danes and Saxons, who took refuge in the fens in Norman times, a memory of Hereward the Wake. The fen men have always been a separate race; they must have very little Norman blood in their veins. They have the Saxon stolidity also. I am very glad I am not in a town battalion like the Northumberlands and such regiments. They are not nearly ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... from all brother-men, in the weird of the fen, With God's creatures I bide, 'mid the birds that I ken; Where the winds ever dree, where the hymn of the sea Brings a message of peace ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... glens From the secret heart of the mountains, Where the red fox hath its dens And the gods their crystal fountains; Up runnel and leaping cataract, Boulder and ledge, I climbed and tracked, Till I came to the top of the world and the fen That drinks up the clouds and cisterns the rain, And down through the floors of the deep morass The procreant woodland essences drain— The thunder's home, where the eagles scream And the centaurs pass; But, where it was born, I ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... shorter an' the air a keener snap; Apples now are droppin' into Mother Nature's lap; The mist at dusk is risin' over valley, marsh an' fen An' it's just as plain as sunshine, winter's ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meager hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost That breaks his magic chains ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... two men, as in the case of a thousand others in the gold-camp, it seemed as if easy, unhoped-for affluence was to prove their undoing. On the trail they had been supreme; in fen or forest, on peak or plain, they were men among men, fighting with nature savagely, exultantly. But when the fight was over their arms rested, their muscles relaxed, they yielded to sensuous pleasures. It seemed as if to ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... is der. wos kinde we hauen told gu her. for he is faier, ouer alle men. so euen sterre o'uer ere fen. 630 ful 'wel he taunede his luue to man. wan he urg 'holi spel him wan. [&] longe he lai her i{n} an hole. wel him dat he it wulde olen. re daies slep he al on on. 635 anne he ded was in blod [&] bon. vp he ros [&] rmede i{}wis. of helle pine of ...
— Selections from early Middle English, 1130-1250 - Part I: Texts • Various
... that mountain peak, 'in the spirit and power of Elias' (after whom it was long named), fasting, like Elias, forty days and forty nights, wrestling with the demons of the storm, and the snakes of the fen, and the Peishta-more (the monstrous Python of the lakes), which assembled at the magic ringing of his bell, till he conquered not by the brute force of a Hercules and Theseus, and the monster-quellers of old Greece, but by the ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... sooth, Whether to give thee joy, or bid thee blind Thine eyes with tears,—that thou hast not resign'd The passionate fire and freshness of thy youth: For as the current of thy life shall flow, Gilded by shine of sun or shadow-stain'd, Through flow'ry valley or unwholesome fen, Thrice blessed in thy joy, or in thy woe Thrice cursed of thy race,—thou art ordain'd To share beyond the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... that the Lincolnshire Flinders were amongst the people taken over to England by Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, a Dutch engineer of celebrity in his day, who undertook in 1621 to drain 360,000 acres of fen in Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. He was financed by English and Dutch capitalists, and took his reward in large grants of land which he made fit for habitation and cultivation. Vermuyden and his Flemings ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... roads, and drift the fields with snow; I chase the wild fowl from the frozen fen; My frosts congeal the rivers in their flow, My fires light up the hearths ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... Pestilence, and his footsteps were so soft that neither scout nor picket could bar his entrance. His paths were subterranean,—through the tepid swamp water, the shallow graves of the dead; and aerial,—through the stench of rotting animals, the nightly miasms of bog and fen. His victims were not pierced, or crushed, or mangled, but their deaths were not less terrible, because more lingering. They seemed to wither and shrivel away; their eyes became at first very bright, and afterward lustreless; their skins grew hard and sallow; their lips faded ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Nwyf i loesau anfelusol, Ond pa'm beiaf rhagluninethol Anorffennol ffyrdd Dyma law 'madawiad, A'r llall mi sychaf lygad; Mae'r fen gerllaw, i'm cludo draw,— Ofer—ofer siarad; Yn iach bob dengar gwm a chlogwyn,— Yn iach, yn iach, gyfeillion ...
— Gwaith Alun • Alun
... washed with vast and rapid rivers, whose peculiar qualities strike horror into mortals. Cocytus falls with an impetuous roaring; Phlegethon rages with a torrent of flames; the Acharusian fen is dreadful for its stench and filth: nor does Charon, the ferryman, who wafts souls over, occasion any less horror; Cerberus, the triple-headed dog, stands ready with open mouths to receive them; and the Furies shake at them ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... north of Peterborough the ruins of Crowland Abbey arise out of the flat fen country like a lighthouse out of the sea. With only the nave and north aisle standing, it breathes the very spirit of romance even in its decay. It is easy to picture the time when four streams surrounded the monastery and church and ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... the last stand of the great English leader, Hereward, against the advance of the Normans. The scene is largely laid in the Fen country, and every page is a record of fierce strife. The fall of Hereward is one of the greatest death ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... of Oliver having died, as before truthfully stated, first prophesying that his son would grow up a ne'er-do-well, this son took his new-found wife up to the Fen Country to live with his mother and sister. That he would be Lord Protector of the Farm seems quite the proper thing to say, but that he was dutiful, modest, teachable, is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... civ'il cul'prit al'to hec'tic dit'ty clum'sy can'ter helm'et gid'dy dul'cet mar'ry fen'nel fil'ly fun'nel ral'ly ken'nel sil'ly gul'ly nap'kin bel'fry liv'id buck'et hap'py ed'dy lim'it gus'set pan'try en'try lim'ber sul'len ram'mer en'vy riv'et sum'mon mam'mon test'y lin'en hur'ry ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... the sweet and solemn music of the monastery choir that floated out to them over the tranquil water. The monks of Ely, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of King Canute, tell us that he had a strong affection for the fen country and for their church, and gave the following story in that connection. It is at ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... the shaggy bear, The tiger with velvet feet, The lion, crept to the light Whining for bullock meat. We fed them and stroked their necks . . . They took their way to the fen Where they hunted or hid all night; No ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... the prairie; Ho, north wind off the pine; Ho, myriad azure lakes, hill-clasped, Like cups of living wine; Ho, mighty river rolling; Ho, fallow, field and fen; By a thousand voices nature calls, To fire ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... Thorold[2] freely holds What his stout sires held before— Broad lands for plough, and fruitful folds,— Though by gold he sets no store; And he saith, from fen and woodland wolds, From marish, heath, and moor,— To feast in his hall, Both free and thrall, Shall come as ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... earth we live And weigh the various Qualities of men, Seeing how most are fugitive, Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then, Wind-wavered corpse-lights, daughters of the fen, The more we feel the high stern-featured beauty Of plain devotedness to duty, 290 Steadfast and still, nor paid with mortal praise, But finding amplest recompense For life's ungarlanded expense In work done squarely and unwasted days. For this we honor him, that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... lonely sublimity, like the everlasting granite of the Alps or the Himalaya, as compared with the changing alluvium of the Nile or the Ganges. As the serene air that ever surrounds the head of Mont Blanc excels in purity the mists of the fen, so does the lofty theism of the Mosaic account rise high above the nature-worship of the Egyptian and Hesiodean theogonies. "In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth. And the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God brooded over ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... the fate of the elves is nearly the same As the terrible fate of men; To love, to rue, to be, and pursue A flickering wisp of the fen. We must play the game with a careless smile, Though there's nothing in the hand; We must toil as if it were worth our while Spinning our ropes of sand; And laugh, and cry, and live, and die At the waft of an ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... so frightful then? I live; though they call it death; I am only cold—say dear again"— But scarce could he heave a breath; The air felt dank, like a frozen fen, And he a ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... do with the general statements in the book. They occur with reference only to my own idiosyncrasy. I was much surprised when I found first how individual it was, by a Pre-Raphaelite painter's declaring a piece of unwholesome reedy fen to be ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... the nameless dead,—the men Who perished in fever swamp and fen, The slowly-starved of the prison pen; And, marching beside the others, Came the dusky martyrs of Pillow's fight, With limbs enfranchised and bearing bright; I thought—perhaps 'twas the pale moonlight— They looked ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... wide, Jungle, thicket, pasture, fen, Not another dared him then, Dared him and again defied; Not a sovereign buck or boar Came ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... protruded, his forehead receded obliquely; his ears formed one solid piece with head and neck—a horrible man. The other, Manteca, was so much human refuse; his eyes were almost hidden, his look sullen; his wiry straight hair fen over his ears, forehead and neck; his scrofulous lips hung eternally agape. Once more, Luis Cervantes felt his ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... formidable work were in many respects a remarkable class. The "railway navvies," as they are called, were men drawn by the attraction of good wages from all parts of the kingdom; and they were ready for any sort of hard work. Some of the best came from the fen districts of Lincoln and Cambridge, where they had been trained to execute works of excavation and embankment. These old practitioners formed a nucleus of skilled manipulation and aptitude, which rendered them of indispensable utility in the immense undertakings of the ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... only his Creator and ours knows—had found his way to her grave over two hundred miles of fen, field, and forest. Not finding her there, he had tracked me to the room where she had last played with him. When carried to other parts of the house, he cried piteously all day and all night. When the north wing was locked against him, ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... and the sleep That wrapped the stalwart frame so deep, Was woke by guard and sign; The forest sounded with the tramp Of rushing steeds, until the camp Was reached by foremost line Of the brigade of fearless men, Who rode through wood, and brake, and fen, As speeds the red deer to his glen. No gorgeous suit of war array, No uniform of red or gray In that rude band were seen; The ploughman's dress, but coarse and plain, And marred by toil with many a stain, Betrayed no gilded sheen; Their only badge the white cockade, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... afar the city spires, and thence Came the deep murmur of its throng of men, And as its grateful odors met thy sense, They seemed the perfumes of thy native fen. Fair lay its crowded streets, and at the sight Thy tiny song ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... and black, &c. Drink; thick, thin, sour, &c. Water unclean, milk, oil, vinegar, wine, spices &c. Flesh Parts: heads, feet, entrails, fat, bacon, blood, &c. Kinds: Beef, pork, venison, hares, goats, pigeons, peacocks, fen-fowl, &c. Herbs, Fish, &c. Of fish; all shellfish, hard and slimy fish, &c. Of herbs; pulse, cabbage, melons, garlic, onions, &c. All roots, raw fruits, hard and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... shaking fen Fix'd me, in dark tempestuous night; There never trod the foot of men, There flock'd the fowl in wint'ry flight; There danced the moor's deceitful light Above the pool where sedges grow; And when the morning-sun shone bright, It shone upon a ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe
... balmy and beautiful, with a bright array of stars, and a golden harvest moon, which seemed to diffuse even warmth with its radiance; but now Turpin was approaching the region of fog and fen, and he began to feel the influence of that dank atmosphere. The intersecting dykes, yawners, gullies, or whatever they are called, began to send forth their steaming vapors, and chilled the soft and wholesome air, obscuring the void, and in some instances, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... to forego the glory and delight of creation even of fantastic types. He is only told never to pretend to see what he has not seen. He is urged to follow Imagination in her most erratic course, though like a will-o'-wisp she lead over marsh and fen away from the haunts of mortals; but not to pretend that he is following a will-o'-wisp when his vagrant fancy never was allured by one. It is idle to paint fairies and goblins unless you have a genuine vision of them which forces you ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... trade and poulation The Thames St. Katherine's Docks Tewkesburg Bridge Gloucester Bridge Dean Bridge, Edinburgh Glasgow Bridge Telford's works of drainage in the Fens The North Level The Nene Outfall Effects of Fen drainage ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... Chinaman," he replied promptly, referring to his documents. "Set down as cook—I'm told most of those coasting steamers in that part of the world carry Chinamen as cooks. Chuh Fen—that's the name. And why it's significant to me, when all the rest aren't, is this—during the course of my inquiries at Lloyds, I learnt that about three years ago a certain Chinaman, calling himself Chuh Fen, dropped in at Lloyds and was very anxious to know if the steamer Elizabeth ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... of a conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and that prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady. We have the malady, whatever may be the cure or the cause. We drove in a body to Science the other day for an antidote; which was as if tired pedestrians should mount the engine-box of headlong trains; and Science ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... confidence to ask you.... Isn't the reason, Fen ... isn't the reason she will not come here to pour out ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... desolate reedy swamp, with pools, and stunted alder-like trees, reminding us again of the Deep Fens, while the tall chimneys of the sugar-works, and the high woods beyond, completed the illusion. One might have been looking over Holm Fen toward Caistor Hanglands; or over Deeping toward the remnants of ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... called; His hood was full of holes, And his hair out; With his knopped[9] shoon Clouted full thick; His toes totedun[10] out As he the land treaded; His hosen overhung his hockshins On every side, All beslomered in fen[11] As he the plow followed. Two mittens as meter Made all of clouts, The fingers were for-werd[12] And full of fen hanged. This wight wallowed in the fen Almost to the ankle. Four rotheren[13] him before That feeble were worthy, Men might reckon each rib So rentful[14] they were. His wife ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... glorious part To check their pride; and when the brazen voice Of war is hushed (as erst victorious Rome) To employ his stationed legions in the works Of peace; to smoothe the rugged wilderness, To drain the stagnate fen, to raise the slope 440 Depending road, and to make gay the face Of nature, with the embellishments of art. How melts my beating heart! as I behold Each lovely nymph our island's boast and pride, Push on the generous ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... we dwelt in a vale By a misty fen that rang all night, And thus it was the maidens pale I knew so well, whose garments trail Across the reeds to a window light. The fen had every kind of bloom, And for every kind there was a face, And a voice that has sounded in my room Across ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... nation to collect and preserve their ancient folklore. In the seventeenth century we meet men of literary tastes like Palmskold who tried to collect and interpret the various national songs of the fen-dwellers of the North. But the Kalevala proper was collected by two great Finnish scholars of our own century, Zacharias Topelius and Elias Lonnrot. Both were practising physicians, and in this capacity came into frequent ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... evil thing that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost That breaks his magic chains at curfew time, No goblin, or swart fairy of the mine, Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity. 797 MILTON: ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... prose translation of this passage, given in his Deeds of Beowulf, at p. 44, is a description of two mysterious monsters, of whom it is said that "they inhabit unvisited land, wolf-crags, windy bluffs, the dread fen-track, where the mountain waterfall amid precipitous gloom vanisheth beneath—flood under earth. Not far hence it is, reckoning by miles, that the Mere standeth, and over it hang rimy groves; a wood with clenched roots overshrouds ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... lower reaches of the river. The "sweet sedge," so called—the smell is rather sickly to most tastes—is now found on the Thames near Dorchester, and between Kingston and Teddington among other places, though it was once thought only to flourish on the Norfolk and Fen rivers. It is not a sedge at all, but related to the common arum, and its flower, like the top joints of the little finger, represents the "lords and ladies" of the hedges. So the burr reed, among the prettiest of ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore; Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen where the serpent feeds, And man ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... county; both the wet half and the dry half, both the Fen district and the Wold district, are treeless; and the Wolds are only a line of molehills, of great utility, but no special beauty. But it is the greatest producing county in England, and the produce, purely agricultural, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... presumed, knows where Shelford Fen is, and that it is famous for rearing geese. A luckless wight, who had the misfortune to be plucked at his examination for the degree of B.A., when the Rev. T. Shelford was his examiner, made ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... sadness is pardonable to one who watches the destruction of a grand natural phenomenon, even though its destruction bring blessings to the human race. Reason and conscience tell us, that it is right and good that the Great Fen should have become, instead of a waste and howling wilderness, a garden of ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... "Moor and fen." While these words seem new and unusual to us, we must remember that in England they are as common as the terms marsh ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... at St. James's the other day more people were invited than there was room for, and some half-dozen were forced to sit at a side table. He said to Lord Brownlow, 'Well, when you are flooded (he thinks Lincolnshire is all fen) you will come to us at Windsor.' To the Freemasons he was rather good. The Duke of Sussex wanted him to receive their address in a solemn audience, which he refused, and when they did come he said, 'Gentlemen, if my love ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... the Earl now proceeded toward the more important city which he had determined to besiege. Zutphen, or South-Fen, an antique town of wealth and elegance, was the capital of the old Landgraves of Zutphen. It is situate on the right bank of the Yssel, that branch of the Rhine which flows between Gelderland and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Madame de Blacy, je crains bien que le Fils de l'Homme ne soit la porte; que la venue d'Elie ne soit proche, et que nous ne touchions au rgne de l'Anti-christ. Tous les jours, quand je me lve, je regarde par ma fentre, si la grande prostitue de Babylone ne se promne point dj dans les rues avec sa grande coupe la main et s'il ne se fait aucun des signes prdits ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... pretty mess!" said Osbert. "There's Orme of the Fen run off, because I gave him a scolding for his impudence: and it is his turn to watch to-night. I have not a minute to go after him; I don't know ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... blood, you English men! From misty hill and misty fen, From cot, and town, and plough, and moor, Come in—before I shut the door! Into my courtyard paved with stones That keep the names, that keep the bones, Of none but English men who came Free of their lives, to ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... no escape by the river, There is no flight left by the fen; We are compassed about by the shiver Of the night of their marching men. Give a cheer! For our hearts shall not give way. Here's to a dark to-morrow, And here's ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... a spy for the FBI—the Fantasy Bureau of Investigation! Learning of a monster meeting of science fiction "fen" in New York, I teleported myself 3,000 miles from the Pacificoast to check the facts on the monsters. And it was true—the 14th World ...
— Out of This World Convention • Forrest James Ackerman
... our mortal antics. Indeed, there was always something more than human in her loveliness, though, to be frank, it savored less of chilling paradisial perfection than of a vision of some great-eyed queen of faery, such as those whose feet glide unwetted over our fen-waters when they roam o' nights in search of unwary travellers. Lady Adeliza was a fair beauty; that is, her eyes were of the color of opals, and her complexion as the first rose of spring, blushing at her haste to snare men's hearts with beauty; and her loosened hair rippled in such a burst ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... and modern writers. Some claim that the best reeds for pen purposes formerly grew near Memphis on the Nile, near Cnidus of Caria, in Asia Minor, and in Armenia. Those grown in Italy were estimated to have been of but poor quality. Chardin calls attention to a kind to be found, "in a large fen or tract of soggy land supplied with water by the river Helle, a place in Arabia formed by the united arms of the Euphrates and Tigris. They are cut in March, tied in bundles, laid six months in a manure heap, where they assume a beautiful color, mottled ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... gradually encroaching bog and marsh in his land, and realises that with drainage he could reclaim this as good farm land. On the other hand some of the locals would rather see the fen remain, along with their various occupations, and the wonderful and fragile wet-land natural history. When digging begins there are a number of nasty incidents—torching of houses, malicious woundings of horses and cows, gunshot wounds to ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... poultry, of which these countries particularly abound, they have within these few years found it practicable to make the geese travel on foot too, as well as the turkeys, and a prodigious number are brought up to London in droves from the farthest parts of Norfolk; even from the fen country about Lynn, Downham, Wisbech, and the Washes; as also from all the east side of Norfolk and Suffolk, of whom it is very frequent now to meet droves with a thousand, sometimes two thousand in a drove. They begin to drive them generally in August, by which time ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... Twigs. Fensalir (fen sa ler'). The home of Frigga. forget-me-not (for get'-me-not). A small herb bearing a blue flower, and considered the emblem of fidelity. Frigga (frig' ga). The supreme goddess of the Northland, ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... rogue, sharply, "a pullet in the pen is worth a hundred in the fen. Come, we will deal kindly with thee: give us ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... man is foolish who comes here alone in the dark shade of night: fire is flickering, howes are opening, field and fen are aflame," and flees into the woods, but Hervoer is dauntless and goes on alone. She reaches the howes, and calls on the ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... you a fact, sir," replied Fen-ton, "which I have witnessed with my own eyes; but we have still stranger and worse ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... from my moorland home, Nymph of Torridge, proud I come; Leaving fen and furzy brake, Haunt of eft and spotted snake ... Nursling of the mountain sky, Leaving Dian's choir on high, Down her cataracts laughing loud, Ockment leapt from crag and cloud, Leading many a nymph, who dwells Where ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... prophetess and bride, When truth and thou trod under time and chance? What latter light of what new hope shall guide Out of the snares of hell thy feet, O France? What heel shall bruise these heads that hiss and glide, What wind blow out these fen-born fires that dance Before thee to thy death? No light, no life, no breath, From thy dead eyes and lips shall take the trance, Till on that deadliest crime Reddening the feet of time Who treads through blood and passes, time shall glance Pardon, and ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... is well— And let him shun the spot, The damp and dismal brake, That skirts the shallow lake, The brown and stagnant pool[A], The dark and miry fen, And let him never at nightfall spread His blanket among the isles that dot The surface of that lake; And let my brother tell The men of his race that the wolf hath fed Ere now on warriors brave and true, In the fearful Lake of ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... FEN. Low tracts inundated by the tides, capable, when in a dry state, of bearing the weight of cattle grazing upon them; differing therein from bog or quagmire. When well drained, they form some of the best ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... and ghastly, for the scorn of men! Begone forever. Go where terrors spread Their sea and forest mouths to crush you dead. Oh, how the clouds shall crimson from each glen, A roar with blaze, and flame search out each fen, If back to us, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... I did see the good woman's eyes fill with tears: but she wiped them away, and took advantage of the additional persuasion they gave to her natural whine to say, "If, Sir, you know of any young gentleman who likes fen-shooting, and wants a ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... than her eyes could see. Behind the happiest hours the dark cloud hung Distant or nearing, and its dullness flung On the south meadows of her thought, the fairest Shrinking in shadow; aspirations rarest Falling, like shot birds in a reedy fen, Slain by the old Enemy of men. Life ebbed while men strove for the means of life; The grudging earth turned labour into strife. The moving hosts within the heavy clod Seemed infinite in malice; frost and flood, Season and inter-season, were conspired ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... plea. There would the daughter of the Sea God dive, And thither came the Land Nymphs every eve To wait upon her: bringing for her brows Rich garlands of sweet flowers and beechy boughs. For pleasant was that pool, and near it then Was neither rotten marsh nor boggy fen, It was nor overgrown with boisterous sedge, Nor grew there rudely then along the edge A bending willow, nor a prickly bush, Nor broad-leaved flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush. But here well-ordered was a grove with bowers, There grassy plots ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... clear'd the groun' vor grass to teaeke The pleaece that bore the bremble breaeke, An' drain'd the fen, where water spread, A-lyen dead, a beaene to men; An' built the mill, where still the wheel Do grind our meal, below the hill; An' turn'd the bridge, wi' arch a-spread, Below a ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... meeting of the Board of Baptist Ministers, specially convened at Fen Court, Nov. 25th, 1834, the Rev. F. A. Cox, LL.D. in the Chair, the above communication having been read, the following ...
— The Baptist Magazine, Vol. 27, January, 1835 • Various
... onward up the gentle slope (the rise is one hundred and thirty-eight feet in rather more than a mile), the ground became more and more full of pitch, and the vegetation poorer and more rushy, till it resembled, on the whole, that of an English fen. An Ipomoea or two, and a scarlet flowered dwarf Heliconia, kept up the tropic type, as does a stiff brittle fern about two feet high. We picked the weeds, which looked like English mint or basil, and found ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... hand to him; but being in no humour to join the cavalcade, he remained seated, and the riders soon passed out of sight. As he sat there sombre thoughts came to him, stealing up like exhalations from the fen. He saw his life stretched out before him, full of broken purposes and ineffectual effort. Public affairs were in so perplexed a case that consistent action seemed impossible to either party, and their chief efforts were bent toward directing the choice of a regent. It was ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... of England. All his early poetry is suffused with tints, sombre or bright, and breathes of sounds that recall the landscape of the Lincolnshire in whose sunniest spot he was born, but in near neighborhood to "the level waste, the rounding gray" of "the dark fen," and within sight and sound of the "sandy tracts" and "the ocean roaring into cataracts." Later, we find in some of the poems that have made for themselves a place in the heart of all English-speaking people, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... and learn to run on foot," he counselled him. "Thou shalt go with me to the greenwood through mire and moss and fen. Thou shalt go with me to the forest, and dwell with me there, until I have got our pardon from Edward, ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... day. Monasteries unnumbered lifted their towers above the forests of a land in which the streams still ran unstained and the air of which had not yet been dimmed by smoke, imparting a dignity to fen and flat morass. Round them ere long cities gathered, as at St. Albans, Malmesbury, Sherborne, and Wimborne; the most memorable of those monasteries being that at Canterbury, and that at Westminister, dedicated to St. Peter, as the cathedral church near it had been ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... which P. has evidently witnessed in the case of his father, and which lawyers call livery of seisin; nor is there on Dartmoor any such word as ven signifying peat, or as fail, signifying turf. No doubt a fen on the moor would probably contain "black earth or peat," like most other mountain bogs; and if (as K. says) fail means a "turf or flat clod" in Scotland, I think it probable that a Scotchman on Dartmoor might now and then ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 79, May 3, 1851 • Various
... my men, Fittest for sunless work; Old Night is steaming from her den, And her children gather and lurk; Bad things are creeping from the fen, And sliding down ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... side of the marble mountains of Carrara, looking out on the stars and ocean; and Manto, daughter of Tiresias (her hind tresses over her bosom), who wandered through the world till she came and lived in the solitary fen, whence afterwards arose the city of Mantua; and Michael Scot, the magician, with his slender loins;[28] and Eurypylus, the Grecian augur, who gave the signal with Calchas at Troy when to cut away the cables for home. He came stooping along, projecting his face over ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... are small, and no ridging or hurdling is yet practised. From time to time appears a patch of barren moorland, which has been planted with forest-trees, in accordance with the suggestions of Mr. Evelyn, and under the wet sky the trees are thriving. Wide reaches of fen, measured by hundreds of miles, (which now bear great crops of barley,) are saturated with moisture, and tenanted only by ghost-like ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... the mast-high run of the seas Of traffic shall hide thee, Never the hell-colored smoke of the factories Hide thee, Never the reek of the time's fen-politics Hide thee, And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee, And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee, Labor, at leisure, in art, — till yonder beside thee My soul shall float, friend Sun, ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... Macbeth, more suo, continued to mutter like a man in a troubled dream, now humming a bar of the tune, now drawling out a phrase from the words, "O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till the night is gone"—this, I believe, he repeated several times, lighting his pipe in the intervals and spitting out of the door. Then he went on more articulately: "Rum ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... drew Me on I knew not, till I saw in you The treasure I had blindly sought in vain. I praise Him, who our love has lifted thus To noble rank by sorrow,—licensed us To a triumphal progress, bade us sweep Thro' fen and forest to our castle-keep, A ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... Mirth's my trade and follies fond, Methinks a fair name were Joconde; And for thy sake I travail make Through briar and brake, O'er fen and lake, The Southward ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... Isles-men carried at their backs The ancient Danish battle-axe. They raised a wild and wondering cry As with his guide rode Marmion by. Loud were their clamouring tongues, as when The clanging sea-fowl leave the fen, And, with their cries discordant mix'd, Grumbled and yell'd the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... of the breeze sweeps over the trees, and the mists lie low on the fen, From grey tomb-stones are gathered the bones that once were women and men, And away they go, with a mop and a mow, to the revel that ends too soon, For cockcrow limits our holiday—the dead ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... our Lorde 1402. certaine of the Hans, of Rostok, and of Wismer, tooke vpon the coast of England, neere vnto Plimmouth a certaine barge called the Michael of Yarmouth (whereof Hugh ap Fen was the owner, and Robert Rigweys the master) laden with bay salt, to the quantitie of 130. wayes, and with a thousand canuasse clothes of Britaine, and doe as yet detaine the saide goods in their possession, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... days, comrades. The last time I followed the old chief, of honored memory, we held our war-council standing knee-deep in a fen. We had neither eaten nor drunk for two days, and three days' blood was ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... In the fen country of Lincolnshire, there lived, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, a wealthy Saxon franklin named Leofric, Lord of Bourn. He was related to the great Earls of Mercia, and his brother Brand was Abbot of Peterborough, so that he, and his wife Ediva, ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the fen-lights flit! Ignoble sediment of loftier lands, Thy humour clings about our hearts and hands And solves us to its softness, till we sit As we ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... poison on the ground Harmless; the silvery veil of fog went up From mouldering fen and cold, malarial pool, But brought no taint and threatened ill to none. Far off adown the mountain's craggy side From time to time the avalanche thundered, sounding Like sport of giant children, and the rocks Whereon it smote re-echoed innocently. Then in a pause of silence Lucifer Struck music ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... dark night it was, and bitter cold; the east wind blowing bleak, and bringing with it stinging particles from marsh, and moor, and fen - from the Great Desert and Old Egypt, may be. Some of the component parts of the sharp-edged vapour that came flying up the Thames at London might be mummy-dust, dry atoms from the Temple at Jerusalem, camels' ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... is Afric but the home Of burning Phlegethon? What the low beach and silent gloom, And chilling mists of that dull river, Along whose bank the thin ghosts shiver, The thin, wan ghosts that once were men, But Tauris, isle of moor and fen; Or, dimly traced by seaman's ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... bequeath my farm of West Woldland to my eldest nephew, Grimes Goodenough; my farm of Holland Fen to my dear nephew, John Wright, and my farm of Clover-hill to my youngest nephew, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... healthy-looking them days. Always was strong, never took a dollars worth of medicine in fifty year or more till I had these last sick spells. But we had good living in slave days. In one sense we were better off then than after the war, 'cause we had plenty to eat. Nowadays, everybody has to fen' for himself, and they'd kill a man ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... measure, and dive into. They will invent, for all that is incomprehensible, words and numbers; and heap system upon system, till they have brought deeper darkness upon the earth, through which doubt, like the fen-fire, will only shine to allure the wanderer into the morass. Only then will they think to see clearly, and then I expect them. After they have shovelled away religion, and are forced, out of the ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... Dismal Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore; Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen where the serpent feeds, And man ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... boy lost in the lonely fen, Led by the wandering light, Began to cry, but God, ever nigh, Appeared ...
— Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience • William Blake
... very luxuriance, as it has crushed the savages of the tropics. They saw enough of its strength to respect it; not enough to cower before it: and they and it have fought it out; and it seems to me, standing either on London Bridge or on a Holland fen-dyke, that they are winning at last. But they had a sore battle: a battle against their own fear of the unseen. They brought with them, out of the heart of Asia, dark and sad nature-superstitions, some of which linger among our peasantry till this day, of elves, trolls, nixes, and ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... justice when Henry came to the throne. The wretched freeholders summoned to the Shire Court from farm and cattle, from mill or anvil or carpenter's bench, knew well the terrors of the journey through marsh and fen and forest, the dangers of flood and torrent, and perhaps of outlawed thief or murderer, the privations and hardships of the way; and the heavy fines which occur in the king's rolls for non-attendance show how anxiously great numbers of the suitors avoided joining in the troublesome and ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... as e'er my mother brush'd With raven's feather from unwholesome fen Drop on you both! a south-west blow on ye, And blister ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... a foul stream from a festering fen Is met and scattered by a mountain brook Leaping along its beautiful, bright course, So now the force Of these new Followers of the camp has come Straight from God's Source To cleanse the world and cleanse the minds of men. Good women, of ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Falerii Rushed on the Roman Three; And Lausulus of Urgo, The rover of the sea; And Aruns of Volsinium, Who slew the great wild boar, The great wild boar that had his den Amid the reeds of Cosa's fen. And wasted fields and ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... Ocnus of Falerii Rushed on the Roman Three; And Lausulus of Urgo, The rover of the sea; And Aruns of Volsinium, Who slew the great wild boar, The great wild boar that had his den Amidst the reeds of Cosa's fen, And wasted fields and ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... Winkelried it was Who slew the dragon in the fen at Weiler, And lost his life in the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... which our suffering heroine occupied, to New-York, was not very great, yet the snow fen so fast, and the cold so intense, that, being unable from her situation to walk quick, she found herself almost sinking with cold and fatigue before she reached the town; her garments, which were merely suitable to the summer season, being an undress ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... boys began playing, but they made so much noise, crying "Fen!" and "Ebbs!" and "Knuckle down!" that Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, the muskrat lady housekeeper, went to ...
— Uncle Wiggily in the Woods • Howard R. Garis
... would paddle down the river as far as the edge of the sea to get mussels and lobsters to sell. And out there on the cold lonely marshes we would see wild geese flying, and curlews and redshanks and many other kinds of seabirds that live among the samfire and the long grass of the great salt fen. And as we crept up the river in the evening, when the tide had turned, we would see the lights on Kingsbridge twinkle in the dusk, reminding us of tea-time ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... Do you think you could arouse the people in the fen-country? You might raise and drill an army in those wilds without the Government knowing ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... longer need us who needed us of yore? We stood not still aforetime when England marched to war; Like those our wind-driven brothers, far seen o'er weald and fen, We ground the wheat and barley to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... fen." While these words seem new and unusual to us, we must remember that in England they are as common as the terms marsh and swamp are ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... mallard—roared out lustily that I had killed him. I saw that the drake was knocked over as dead as a stone, and consequently laughed at the fellow, and set it down as a cool trick to extort money, not uncommon among the fen men, as applied to members of the University. I had just finished loading, and my retriever had just brought in the dead bird, which was quite riddled, cut up evidently by the whole body of the charge—both the wings broken, one in ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... boughs curiously twisted, the foliage compact, like thatch. The thicket stretched down from the top of one of the sandy knolls, spreading and growing taller as it went, until it reached the margin of the broad, reedy fen, through which the nearest of the little rivers soaked its way into the anchorage. The marsh was steaming in the strong sun, and the outline of the Spy-glass trembled ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with man's? Where art thou that wast prophetess and bride, When truth and thou trod under time and chance? What latter light of what new hope shall guide Out of the snares of hell thy feet, O France? What heel shall bruise these heads that hiss and glide, What wind blow out these fen-born fires that dance Before thee to thy death? No light, no life, no breath, From thy dead eyes and lips shall take the trance, Till on that deadliest crime Reddening the feet of time Who treads through blood and passes, time shall glance Pardon, and Italy forgive, ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... desolation dwells, By grots and caverns shagged with horrid shades, She may pass on with unblenched majesty, Be it not done in pride, or in presumption. Some say no evil thing that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost, That breaks his magic chains at curfew time, No goblin or swart faery of the mine, Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity. Do ye believe me yet, or shall I call Antiquity from the old schools of Greece To testify the arms of chastity? Hence had the ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... people, belonging to the said parish, being no less than six or seven miles distant from their own kirk; for which and other reasons the heritors and others procured a disjunction, and called the new parish Fen wick or ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... their land, exceeding quickly, with innumerable folk. Then were they fearfullest, who ere were boldest, and gan to flee exceeding quickly into the water, where wonders are enow! That is a marvellous lake, set in middle-earth, with fen, and with reed, and with water exceeding broad; with fish, and with fowl, with evil things! The water is immeasurably broad; nikers therein bathe; there is play of elves in the hideous pool. Sixty islands ...
— Brut • Layamon
... forms the northern portion, with a jurisdiction partially separate; within its bounds there are, besides the city of Ely, several towns and villages, as Wisbech, March, Chatteris, &c. and the former great waste of marsh and fen has become, by means of drainage, a fertile corn-growing district of great importance. Ely is believed to have taken its name from Elig in the Saxon tongue, signifying a willow; or from Elge in the Latin of Bede the historian, from the abundance ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... the block, and raise her features, then, Bloodless and ghastly, for the scorn of men! Begone forever. Go where terrors spread Their sea and forest mouths to crush you dead. Oh, how the clouds shall crimson from each glen, A roar with blaze, and flame search out each fen, If back to us, yea ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... are the two magnificent gold torcs found in the side of one of the raths at Tara, and these belong to a type that has been found in England and France, of which the best known examples are those found at Yeovil, Somerset,[28] and Grunty Fen, Cambridge.[29] A torc of this type was also found by Schliemann in the royal treasury in the second city of Troy. This find has led to a good deal of speculative opinions varying as to whether the model of the torc was imported into Ireland from the south, or whether the Irish gold ...
— The Bronze Age in Ireland • George Coffey
... to the fen lands—the Campagna that so greatly needs the magic and glamour of the Roman sunshine, the vault of the blue sky above, and the sound of larks singing to adorn it. It seemed a desolate and dreary waste, wind-swept, and shivering under the lash ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... this formidable work were in many respects a remarkable class. The "railway navvies," as they are called, were men drawn by the attraction of good wages from all parts of the kingdom; and they were ready for any sort of hard work. Some of the best came from the fen districts of Lincoln and Cambridge, where they had been trained to execute works of excavation and embankment. These old practitioners formed a nucleus of skilled manipulation and aptitude, which rendered them of indispensable utility in the immense ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... you English men! From misty hill and misty fen, From cot, and town, and plough, and moor, Come in—before I shut the door! Into my courtyard paved with stones That keep the names, that keep the bones, Of none but English men who came Free of their lives, ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... tears,—that thou hast not resign'd The passionate fire and freshness of thy youth: For as the current of thy life shall flow, Gilded by shine of sun or shadow-stain'd, Through flow'ry valley or unwholesome fen, Thrice blessed in thy joy, or in thy woe Thrice cursed of thy race,—thou art ordain'd To share beyond the lot of ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... though be, 'twas borne on me that land had lived of old, And men had crept and slain and slept where now they toiled for gold; Through jungles dim the mammoth grim had sought the oozy fen, And on his track, all bent of back, had crawled ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... the eye could see, even to the faint blue distance, in the haze of which the glaciers and clouds and mountain tops seemed to commingle, troops of armed men could be seen pouring down from gorge and glen, through wood and furze and fen. On the fiord, too, the same activity and concentration prevailed, though not quite to the same extent. Constantly there swept round the promontories to the north and south, boat after boat, and ship after ship, until the bay close below Ulfstede was crowded ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... 's a flower in garden fair, Her beauty charms the sicht o' men; And I 'm a weed upon the wolde, For nane reck how I fare or fen'. She blooms in beild o' castle wa', I bide the blast o' povertie; My covert looks are treasures stown— Sae how culd my luve think ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... went onward up the gentle slope (the rise is one hundred and thirty-eight feet in rather more than a mile), the ground became more and more full of pitch, and the vegetation poorer and more rushy, till it resembled, on the whole, that of an English fen. An Ipomoea or two, and a scarlet flowered dwarf Heliconia, kept up the tropic type, as does a stiff brittle fern about two feet high. We picked the weeds, which looked like English mint or basil, and found that most of them had three longitudinal nerves in each leaf, and ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... be attempted in calm weather. The sea-line is marked with wrecks. The sunken rocks are dismally named after the vessels they have destroyed. The air is chill and moist, the soil prolific only in prickly undergrowth and noxious weeds, while foetid exhalations from swamp and fen cling close to the humid, spongy ground. All around breathes desolation; on the face of nature is stamped a perpetual frown. The shipwrecked sailor, crawling painfully to the summit of basalt cliffs, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... hood was full of holes, And his hair out; With his knopped[9] shoon Clouted full thick; His toes totedun[10] out As he the land treaded; His hosen overhung his hockshins On every side, All beslomered in fen[11] As he the plow followed. Two mittens as meter Made all of clouts, The fingers were for-werd[12] And full of fen hanged. This wight wallowed in the fen Almost to the ankle. Four rotheren[13] him before That feeble were worthy, Men might reckon each ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... Saint Guthlac was an abbot of Croyland, and many conflicts did he have with the devils of the fen country, whose presence could generally be ascertained by the hissing which took place when they settled with their fiery hoofs and claws on the wet swamps ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... the spot very lately, but, according to the best of my recollection, it has not now any feature in keeping with the mythological character of the fiend of the moor and fen. The neighbouring district of down and common land would not be an inappropriate habitat for such a personage. It has few trees of any pretension to age, and is still covered in great part with a dark and scanty vegetation, which is sufficiently dreary except at those seasons when ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... of the crews had complexions described as light, fair, fresh, ruddy or freckled, and the same proportion had blue or gray eyes. They would have contrasted strongly with Cromwell's regiment of Ironsides, who were recruited from the dark-haired men of the fen districts, and who are said to have left the impression on contemporary observers as being men of a peculiar breed. They would also probably have contrasted with any body of thoroughgoing Puritan soldiers taken ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... gravestones stood grim and ghostly in the white light, and out across the meadows down to where the waters of the Nene, rippling on, were touched with silver. The river-path was wide, running by the winding bank away to the fen-lands and beyond. As I gained the river's edge and walked beneath the willows I heard now and then a sharp, swift rustling in the sedges as some water-rat or otter, disturbed by my presence, slipped away into hiding. The rural peace of that brilliant ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Oh! raise us up, return to us again; And ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... always something more than human in her loveliness, though, to be frank, it savored less of chilling paradisial perfection than of a vision of some great-eyed queen of faery, such as those whose feet glide unwetted over our fen-waters when they roam o' nights in search of unwary travellers. Lady Adeliza was a fair beauty; that is, her eyes were of the color of opals, and her complexion as the first rose of spring, blushing at her haste to snare men's hearts ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... to come here to me soon?" Her voice had the steadiness of despair—that steadiness coming to those upon whose nerves has fallen a great numbness, upon whose sensibilities has settled a cloud that stills them as the thick mist stills the ripples on the waters of a fen. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... through glade and fen, 'Till passing near a rocky glen, Mild Patience came and sweetly smiled Upon the ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... cul'prit al'to hec'tic dit'ty clum'sy can'ter helm'et gid'dy dul'cet mar'ry fen'nel fil'ly fun'nel ral'ly ken'nel sil'ly gul'ly nap'kin bel'fry liv'id buck'et hap'py ed'dy lim'it gus'set pan'try en'try lim'ber sul'len ram'mer en'vy riv'et sum'mon mam'mon test'y lin'en ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... anchor, and buildings along the flat shore, marked Port of Spain, destined hereafter to stand, not on the seaside, but, like Lynn in Norfolk, and other fen-land towns, in the midst of some of the richest ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... sob of the breeze sweeps over the trees, and the mists lie low on the fen, From grey tombstones are gathered the bones that once were women and men, And away they go, with a mop and a mow, to the revel that ends too soon, For cockcrow limits our holiday - the dead of ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... the city spires, and thence Came the deep murmur of its throng of men, And as its grateful odors met thy sense, They seemed the perfumes of thy native fen. Fair lay its crowded streets, and at the sight Thy tiny song grew ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... transformed from sex to sex; and Aruns, who lived in a cavern on the side of the marble mountains of Carrara, looking out on the stars and ocean; and Manto, daughter of Tiresias (her hind tresses over her bosom), who wandered through the world till she came and lived in the solitary fen, whence afterwards arose the city of Mantua; and Michael Scot, the magician, with his slender loins;[28] and Eurypylus, the Grecian augur, who gave the signal with Calchas at Troy when to cut away the cables for home. He came stooping along, projecting ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... wan crescent scarcely gleams, Ghost-like she fades in morning beams; Hie hence each peevish imp and fay, That scare the pilgrim on his way:— Quench, kelpy! quench, in bog and fen, Thy torch that cheats benighted men; Thy dance is o'er, thy reign is done, For Benyieglo hath ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... was young, we dwelt in a vale By a misty fen that rang all night, And thus it was the maidens pale I knew so well, whose garments trail Across the reeds to a window light. The fen had every kind of bloom, And for every kind there was a face, And a voice that has sounded in my room Across the sill from the outer gloom. Each came singly unto ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... ymadawiad ysol, Nwyf i loesau anfelusol, Ond pa'm beiaf rhagluninethol Anorffennol ffyrdd Dyma law 'madawiad, A'r llall mi sychaf lygad; Mae'r fen gerllaw, i'm cludo draw,— Ofer—ofer siarad; Yn iach bob dengar gwm a chlogwyn,— Yn iach, yn ...
— Gwaith Alun • Alun
... James Oliver was a Scotchman, and this being so, the fires of his theological nature were merely banked. When Death was at the door an hour before his passing, this hardy son of heath and heather, of bog and fen and bleak North Wind, roused himself from stupor, and in his deep, impressive voice, soon to be stilled forever, startled the attendants with the stern order, "Let us pray!" Then he repeated slowly the Lord's Prayer, and with the word "Amen" sank back upon his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... Like all pretentious frauds, she shortly came to grief; She was found out, you know, and took a strange belief Which none could heal, and faded like a leaf. Then, slyly fled the town!—was never seen again, Though faithful search was made o'er mountain, moor and fen. ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... author of Ulalume. In Professor Earle's prose translation of this passage, given in his Deeds of Beowulf, at p. 44, is a description of two mysterious monsters, of whom it is said that "they inhabit unvisited land, wolf-crags, windy bluffs, the dread fen-track, where the mountain waterfall amid precipitous gloom vanisheth beneath—flood under earth. Not far hence it is, reckoning by miles, that the Mere standeth, and over it hang rimy groves; a wood with clenched roots overshrouds the water." The ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... bird of night flies past them, and they hear the whooping of the owl, and see him skimming like a ghost over the waste. Then more fen fires arise, showing that other treacherous quagmires are at hand; but Crouch skirts them safely. Now the bull-frog croaks in the marsh, and a deep booming tells of a bittern passing by. They see the mighty bird above them, with his wide heavy wings and long neck. Grip howls at him, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Roger, shivering and glancing about him, "here is Hangstone Waste, and yonder the swamps of Hundleby Fen—you can smell them from here! And 'tis an evil place, this, for 'tis said the souls of murdered folk do meet here betimes, and hold high revel when the moon be full. Here, on wild nights witches and warlocks ride shrieking upon ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... Sir Frederick Hamilton's men Were hungry for the fray, And it was a son of the bog and fen Would guide them on ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... sails spread like the great white wings of birds, and the craft glides among the islands and hovers about every gulf and bay and rocky coast of that beautiful sea. Under her dashing young French captain, Raoul Yvard, Le Fen Follet (Jack-o'-Lantern or fire-fly, as you will) glides like a water-sprite here, there, and everywhere, guided by Cooper's sea phrases,—for which he had an unfailing instinct,—that meant something "even to the land-lubber who does not know the lingo." It is ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... the skirts of gray forest o'erhung with wild vine; Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood, And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood, And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will In the fen where the wild ass ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... swept by at the end of a long glade. He fancied she waved her hand to him; but being in no humour to join the cavalcade, he remained seated, and the riders soon passed out of sight. As he sat there sombre thoughts came to him, stealing up like exhalations from the fen. He saw his life stretched out before him, full of broken purposes and ineffectual effort. Public affairs were in so perplexed a case that consistent action seemed impossible to either party, and ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... circled a great arc of the foul fen, between the dry bank and the slough, with eyes turned on those who guzzle the mire. We came at length to the ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... the Wisbech parliamentary division of Cambridgeshire, England, 25-1/2 m. N. by W. of Cambridge by the Great Eastern railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 4711. It lies in the midst of the flat Fen country. The church of St Peter is principally Decorated; and there are fragments of a Benedictine convent founded in the 10th century and rebuilt after fire in the first half of the 14th. The town has breweries, and engineering and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... and embrasures, outlying scarps and counterscarps, remarkably suggests the deliberate and calculated creation of man. It stands upon a little solitary hill at the head of Taw Marsh, and wins its name from the East Okement River which runs through the valley on its western flank. Above wide fen and marsh it rises, yet seen from Steeperton's vaster altitude, Oke Tor looks no greater than some fantastic child-castle built by a Brobding-nagian baby with granite bricks. Below it on this July day the waste of bog-land was puckered with brown tracts of naked soil, and seamed and ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Nature, is thy face; * * * all that grows, has grace. All are appropriate. Bog and moss and fen Are only poor to undiscerning men. Here may the nice and curious eye explore How Nature's hand adorns the ruby moor; Beauties are these that from the view retire, But will repay th' ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... had more acres of fen than any man on this coast: but what are fens to love? What are dykes and windmills ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... serves as an incantation authorizing the speaker to deliver his fire from any point other than that where his marble lies, equally distant from the objective point; "clearings," in like manner, authorizing the preparation of a reasonably unobstructed line of fire; and "fen ebs," "fen clearings," and "fen everythings," to be pronounced before the other player speaks, and which, by virtue of the prohibitory syllable "fen" (defendre, Fr.), prevent respectively ebs, clearings, and everything,—that is to say, any elusion or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... in my mind such thoughts awake, By lone Saint Mary's silent lake; Thou know'st it well,—nor fen, nor sedge, Pollute the pure lake's crystal edge; Abrupt and sheer, the mountains sink At once upon the level brink; And just a trace of silver sand Marks where the water ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... thing that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meager hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost That breaks his ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... alfa-grass which surround it, with its quadrangular enclosure, its roads on the projection of the walls behind the battlements, its squat turrets, it has a look as archaic, as strange, as our own Aigues-Mortes amid its marshy fen. Nothing can be more rich and joyous to the eye than the rust which covers its ruins—a complete gilding that one would say had been laid on by the hand ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... bought at thousands, what with better wit You purchase as you want, and bit by bit; Now, or long since, what difference will be found? You pay a penny, and he paid a pound. Heathcote himself, and such large-acred men, Lords of fat E'sham, or of Lincoln fen, Buy every stick of wood that lends them heat, Buy every pullet they afford to eat. Yet these are wights, who fondly call their own Half that the Devil o'erlooks from Lincoln town. The laws of God, as well as of the land, Abhor, a perpetuity should ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... bog, and fen, and boulder, I must bear it on my shoulder, Beaten of wind, torn of briar, Smitten ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... woke, and there, as in a dream, Which holds some boding fear of wrong, By fog-bound fen and sluggard stream I dragged my leaden steps along. My blood ran ice; I turned and spied A ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... precious, as heavenly breath. Loss of a bridegroom dear; such whirling passion in eddies Suck'd thee adown, so drew sheer to a sudden abyss, 110 Deep as Graian abyss near Pheneos o'er Cyllene, Strainer of ooze impure milk'd from a watery fen; (110) Hewn, so stories avouch, in a mountain's kernel; an hero Hew'd it, falsely declar'd Amphytrionian, he, When those monster birds near grim Stymphalus his arrow 115 Smote to the death; such task bade him a dastardly lord. So that another God might tread that portal ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... "Fen says that these animal drawings of yours show promise and he wants to know whether you ever thought of trying something ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... as Newton Dale, with its precipitous sides rising to a height of 300 or even 400 feet, must have assumed its present proportions principally during the glacial period when it formed an overflow valley from a lake held up by ice in the neighbourhood of Fen Bogs and Eller Beck. This great gorge is tenanted at the present time by Pickering Beck, an exceedingly small stream, which now carries off all the surface drainage and must therefore be only remotely related ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... inviting Noozak and Neewa to the feast. All these things Noozak smelled with the experience and the knowledge of twenty years of life behind her—the delicious aroma of the spruce and the jackpine; the dank, sweet scent of water-lily roots and swelling bulbs that came from a thawed-out fen at the foot of the ridge; and over all these things, overwhelming their individual sweetnesses in a still greater thrill of life, the ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... him o'er the seas, To the drear antipodes; There he saw a felon band, Chains on neck, and spade in hand, Orators, all sworn to die In "Old Ireland's" cause—or fly! Now, divorced from pike and pen, Digging ditch, and draining fen, Sky their ceiling, sand their bed, Fed and flogged, and flogged and fed. "Operatives!" he harangued; "Ere ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... The northern quadrant was a great fen of colour and cloud, that spread ribs of feathery pink, fleece-frilled, from the horizon to the zenith. It was all amazing. Four sunsets at the one time in the sky! Each quadrant glowed, and burned, and pulsed with ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... Patricia not far but straight, and Merle, after impressive preliminaries that should have intimidated any golf ball, far but not straight. After his shot he lectured instructively upon its faults. When he had done they knew why he had sliced into the miry fen on the right. Then with an expert eye he studied his brother's stance and swing. The ball of Wilbur went low and straight and far, but the shot was prefaced, apparently, by no nice adjustment of the feet or by any preliminary ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... ancient fabric, receiving education there, or devoting their lives to piety within its walls. It was here that Guthlac, a Saxon warrior, disgusted with the world, sought solitude and repose; and for ten long years he led a hermit's life in that damp and marshy fen; in prayer and fasting, working miracles, and leading hearts to God, he spent his lonely days, all which was rewarded by a happy and peaceful death, and a sanctifying of his corporeal remains—for many wondrous miracles were wrought by ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... of the night, Waking she heard the night-fowl crow: The cock sung out an hour ere light: From the dark fen the oxen's low Came to her: without hope of change, In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn, Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn About the lonely moated grange. She only said, 'The day is dreary, He cometh not,' she said; ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... over a considerable amount of ground, but the work was not heavy. The church was one of the fine edifices for which the fen country is so famous, and the vicarage was a comfortable house, with large and very beautiful gardens and paddock, and with outlying fields. The people were farmers and laborers, with a sprinkling of shopkeepers; the only "society" was that of the neighboring ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... Ingelow (1820-1897) was an English poet, novelist, and writer of stories for children, who lived in the fen district of Lincolnshire. Her most noted poem deals with a terrible catastrophe that happened there more than three centuries ago. It is called "The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire." Many reading books for the third or fourth grade contain her dainty and melodious ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... "far from home", he trusts to the light shining through the darkness to keep his feet from stumbling; he does not trouble himself about what lies far before him, he attends only to his footsteps one by one. He feels he can pass safely over the "moor", the "fen", the "crag", and the "torrent", by trusting to the guidance of the light. With the dawning of the day will come the reunion with his loved ones from whom he has ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... she drops down, she lies flat at your feet— Take her then!" Well, I knew it—what fools are men! Take the bee by her horns, will your honey prove sweet? Sweet is grass—will you pasture your cows in a fen? Oh, if contraries ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Valens, are found everywhere below ground, while above the Romans left a yet nobler memento of their sojourn in the shape of good roads. Except the modern iron highways, these old Roman roads form still the chief means of intercommunication at this border of the fen regions. For many generations after Durobrivae had been deserted by the imperial legions, the country went downward in the scale of civilization. Stipendiary and other unhappy knights came in shoals; monks and nuns settled in swarms, like crows, upon the fertile marsh lands; but the number ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... enables them to make their way through dense herbage with facility. I can't find anything clear about its country, except that it 'occasionally visits' Sweden in summer, and Smyrna in winter, and that it has been found in Corfu, Sicily, Crete,—Whittlesea Mere,—and Yarley Fen;—in marshes always, wherever it is; (nothing said of its behavior on ice,) and not generally found farther north than Cumberland. Its food is rather nasty—water-slugs and the like,—but it is itself as fat as an ortolan, "almost melts in the ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... coast-line to the north of the East Saxons was seized at some unascertained dates by different groups of Angles. The land between the Stour and the great fen which in those days stretched far inland from the Wash was occupied by two of these groups, known as the North folk and the South folk. They gave their names to Norfolk and Suffolk, and at some later time combined under the name of East Anglians. North of the Wash were the Lindiswara—that is to ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... wavelets dash, We see the summer lightning flash; While now and then, In marsh and fen Too muddy for ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... preserved the memory of the more extended settlement which gradually formed round the Palatine. Suburbs grew up one after another, each protected by its own separate though weaker circumvallation and joined to the original ring-wall of the Palatine, as in fen districts the outer dikes are joined on to the main dike. The "Seven Rings" were, the Palatine itself; the Cermalus, the slope of the Palatine in the direction of the morass that extended between it and the Capitol towards the river (-velabrum-); the Velia, the ridge which connected ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Most of them have very fair hair, often gold, and fair rosy cheeks. They seem a very Saxon type. I have been wondering whether they are descendents of the Danes and Saxons, who took refuge in the fens in Norman times, a memory of Hereward the Wake. The fen men have always been a separate race; they must have very little Norman blood in their veins. They have the Saxon stolidity also. I am very glad I am not in a town battalion like the Northumberlands ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... it becomes known what a splendid abode it is. The first who settled there were the wild ducks; and they still live there by thousands. But they no longer own the entire lake, for they have been obliged to share it with swans, grebes, coots, loons, fen-ducks, ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... on the lower reaches of the river. The "sweet sedge," so called—the smell is rather sickly to most tastes—is now found on the Thames near Dorchester, and between Kingston and Teddington among other places, though it was once thought only to flourish on the Norfolk and Fen rivers. It is not a sedge at all, but related to the common arum, and its flower, like the top joints of the little finger, represents the "lords and ladies" of the hedges. So the burr reed, among the prettiest of all the upright plants growing out of the ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... certain hill in Phrygia stands a linden tree and an oak, enclosed by a low wall. Not far from the spot is a marsh, formerly good habitable land, but now indented with pools, the resort of fen-birds and cormorants. Once on a time Jupiter, in, human shape, visited this country, and with him his son Mercury (he of the caduceus), without his wings. They presented themselves, as weary travellers, at many a door, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... back, puts out their eyes, Turns them to tears and words? Ah my sweet knight, You have the better of us that weave and weep While the blithe battle blows upon your eyes Like rain and wind; yet I remember too When this last year the fight at Corrichie Reddened the rushes with stained fen-water, I rode with my good men and took delight, Feeling the sweet clear wind upon my eyes And rainy soft smells blown upon my face In riding: then the great fight jarred and joined, And the sound stung me right ...
— Chastelard, a Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... fox. She on a leafless tree; he in a cloud on the hill. Dark, panting, trembling, sad, the traveller has lost his way. Through shrubs, through thorns he goes, along the gurgling mill. He fears the rock and the fen. He fears the ghost of night. The old tree groans to the blast; the falling branch resounds. The wind drives the weathered burs, clung together, along the grass. It is the light tread of a ghost! He trembles amidst the night. Dark, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... sharp and keen, And laid on the Sheriff's men And drived them down bydene. ROBIN started to that Knight, And cut a two his bond; And took him in his hand a bow, And bade him by him stand. "Leave thy horse thee behind, And learn for to run! Thou shalt with me to green wood Through mire, moss, and fen! Thou shalt with me to green wood Without any leasing, Till that I have got us grace Of ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... the groom of General Harrison Had news denied to ordinary men, How the Brigade was going home to garrison A restful corner of the Lincoln fen; But weeks have passed and we are as we were; And possibly, when Peace is in the air And these dear myths have died of sheer despair, They may come true—but not, I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, July 25, 1917 • Various
... as beauteous, Nature, is thy face,' Exclaim'd Orlando: 'all that grows has grace: All are appropriate—bog, and marsh, and fen, Are only poor to undiscerning men; Here may the nice and curious eye explore How Nature's hand adorns the rushy moor, Here the rare moss in secret shade is found, Here the sweet myrtle of the shaking ground; Beauties are these that from the view ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... in hidden glens From the secret heart of the mountains, Where the red fox hath its dens And the gods their crystal fountains; Up runnel and leaping cataract, Boulder and ledge, I climbed and tracked, Till I came to the top of the world and the fen That drinks up the clouds and cisterns the rain, And down through the floors of the deep morass The procreant woodland essences drain— The thunder's home, where the eagles scream And the centaurs pass; But, where it was born, I lost ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... my lay is yet not sweet enough, I'll bid a gentler, subtler strain awake, And sing of fights with Jackson on the Gulf And Perry's hard-fought battle on the Lake! Of fights in fen and moor and hoary brake, On Lookout Mountain and the rolling main— Through searing blasts of bleak December's flake, And drenching torrents of fair April's rain: Their valiant deeds are springing ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones
... Still like some huge monster winding downward through the prairie plains, Seeking rest but never finding, till the tropic gulf he gains. In his mighty arms he claspeth now an empire broad and grand; In his left hand lo he graspeth leagues of fen and forest land; In his right the mighty mountains, hoary with eternal snow. Where a thousand foaming fountains singing seek the plains below. Fields of corn and feet of cities lo the mighty river laves, Where the Saxon sings his ditties o'er the swarthy warriors' graves. Aye, before ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... they sitting, All the gods and lords of time, Whence they watched as fen-fires flitting Years and names of men sublime, When their counsels found it fitting One should stand where none might climb— None of man begotten, none Born of men beneath the sun Till the race of time be run, Save this ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
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