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More "Sere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with high, intellectual hips, one white eye and a big red nostril that you could set a Shanghai hen in. This horse, as soon as the pack broke into full cry, climbed over a fence that had wrought-iron briers on it, lit in a corn field, stabbed his hind leg through a sere and yellow pumpkin, which he wore the rest of the day, with seven yards of pumpkin vine streaming out behind, and away we dashed 'cross country. I remained mounted not because I enjoyed it, for I did not, but because I dreaded to dismount. I hated ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... worse, the fodder in store was, in prospect of a long siege, scanty. But the worst of all, indeed the only weak and therefore miserable fact, was, that the spirit, I do not mean the courage, of the castle was gone; its enthusiasm had grown sere; its inhabitants no longer loved the king as they had loved him, and even stern-faced general Duty cannot bring up his men to a hand-to-hand conflict with the same elans as ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... the courtesy of our rulers, the marked attentions paid us in society, and the many enthusiastic letters we daily receive, we are led to believe that woman's suffrage is becoming very popular. As both the editor and proprietor of The Revolution are in the sere and yellow leaf, the many attentions and compliments showered upon us are of course from no personal considerations, but so many tributes of respect to the ideas we represent; as such we gratefully accept ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... was dropping slowly 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... that darted through The dewy leaves of richest hue; While round the huge trunks many a vine, Had bade its graceful tendrils twine; The blossoming grape and jessamine pale, Loading with sweets the summer gale. Not long with hasty step he trod The narrow path and flowery sod, Ere gently o'er the sere leaves' bed A maiden passed ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... hills, streamed down into the little valley, casting long stripes of alternate light and shadow over the smoothly shaven lawn, sparkling upon the ripples of the streamlet, and gilding the embrowned or yellow foliage of the sere hill-sides, with ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... deep upon the ground, And winter's brightness all around Decks bravely out the forest sere, With jewels of the brave old year. The coasting crowd upon the hill With some new spirit seems to thrill; And all the temple bells achime. Ring out the glee ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... guides her must protect their new evolving creatures. A too sudden revelation and they might perish from sheer wonder.... Yes, truth must come softened, as a dream, to the man child's brain. Its naked light would sere and blind him forever.... But to me it has been given to see—to hear—and keep sane in the light. Oh, from what planet is the call? From what one of the hundred million spheres? How many centuries has it ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... across her brow, She went into the garden fading now; Vanity of vanities the Preacher saith— And if one sighed to think that it was sere, She smiled to think that it would bloom next year! She ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... and Colonel, Sere Generals, Ensigns vernal, Were there; of neighbour-natives, Michel, Smith, Meggs, Bingham, Gambier, Cunningham, roused by the hued nocturnal Swoop on ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... now led in triumph from town to town through the winter woods. The James was behind him, the Chickahominy also; he was upon new great rivers, the Pamunkey and the Rappahannock. All the villages were much alike, alike the still woods, the sere patches from which the corn had been taken, the bear, the deer, the foxes, the turkeys that were met with, the countless wild fowl. Everywhere were the same curious, crowding savages, the fires, the rustic cookery, the covering skins of deer ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... in saying that charges of any kind were difficult of digestion: Yet, even at that moment, Elizabeth had no more attached subjects in England than sere the burghers of the Netherlands; who were as anxious ever to annex their ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... head sat a raven, On a sere bough, a grown great bird, and hoarse! Who, all the while the deer was breaking up So croaked and cried for it, as all the huntsmen, Especially old Scathlock, thought it ominous; Swore it was Mother Maudlin, whom he met At the day-dawn, just as he roused ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... 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 triumph, Down the line of b-a-baker, Children frowning o'er the ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... clasp the military cloak O'er thy right shoulder, and with legs astride Await the onward rush of shielded men: Hie thee to Egypt. Age overtakes us all; Our temples first; then on o'er cheek and chin, Slowly and surely, creep the frosts of Time. Up and do somewhat, ere thy limbs are sere. ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... 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 ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 world, as when all chaos was, ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... troops. Ophthalmia and rheumatism are common complaints. Thus Mourzuk is not quite one of those oases, or Hesperian gardens, where the happy residents quaff the elixir of immortal health and virtue. Contrarily, it is a sink of vice and disease within, and a sere foliage of palms and vegetation without, overhung with an ever forbidding ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... 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 ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... Irfon, thine oaks in the drear Red eve of December are wind-swept and sere, Where a king by the stream in his agony lies, And the life of a land ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... the winds Blow moist and keen, shattering the graceful locks Of these fair spreading trees; which bids us seek Some better shroud, some better warmth to cherish Our limbs benummed, ere this diurnal star Leave cold the night, how we his gathered beams Reflected may with matter sere foment; Or, by collision of two bodies, grind The air attrite to fire; as late the clouds Justling, or pushed with winds, rude in their shock, Tine the slant lightning; whose thwart flame, driven down Kindles the gummy bark of fir or pine; And sends a comfortable heat from far, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... the demolished abode, made his way through a press of sere cabbage palmettos, and emerged suddenly on the blinding expanse of the sea. The limpid water lay in a bright rim over corrugated and pitted rock, where shallow ultramarine pools spread gardens of sulphur-yellow and rose anemones. ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... No hastening night that knows, She hath a never-ending year Which feels no blight of autumn sere, Nor chill ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... justice in the world. When Time has worked his inexorable will, and powder, paint, and crafty clothing can no longer hide his ravages, then the virtuous woman triumphs, probably for the first time in her life. They are both old, she and the courtesan, but she is sometimes beautiful—old, grey, and sere, but venerable, charming—and little children love her, and younger women bring their troubles—ay, and their joys, reverently to her, feeling a benediction in the touch of the pure, withered hand. ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... lay, with the men crowding together in front of me, to see at all was no easy matter. But this I saw clearly. The Captain stood in the corner, his blade raised to strike. BLUENOSE never stirred, but his breath came and went, and his eyelids blinked strangely, like the flutter of a sere leaf against the wall. There came a roar of voices, and, in the tumult, the Captain's sword flashed quickly, and fell. Then, with a broken cry like a sheep's bleat, the great seamed face fell separate from the body, and a fountain of blood rose into the air from ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 22, 1890 • Various
... rocky defile. The stream, level at first, soon came tumbling down amongst huge boulders; the path disappeared; out of the oaks and alder high cliffs of limestones began to lift themselves. The morning was unusually dark and grey, even for October, and as leaves, brown and sere though they were, still clustered thickly on the trees, Copplestone quickly found himself in a gloom that would have made a nervous person frightened. He also found that his forward progress became increasingly difficult. At ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... and sweet is the love of young hearts! How little does it contain of earth—how much of heaven! No selfish passions mar its beauty. Its tenderness, its pathos, its devotion, who does not remember, even when the sere leaves of autumn are rustling beneath his feet? How little does it regard the cold and calculating objections of worldly-mindedness. They are heard but as a passing murmur. The deep, unswerving confidence of young love, what a blessed thing it is! Heart answers to heart ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... stretched out 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 skin ...
— When Buffalo Ran • George Bird Grinnell
... barley grain First duly sprinkling, the sharp steel infix'd Deep in the victim's neck reversed, then stripp'd 510 The carcase, and divided at their joint The thighs, which in the double caul involved They spread with slices crude, and burn'd with fire Ascending fierce from billets sere and dry. The spitted entrails next they o'er the coals 515 Suspended held. The thighs with fire consumed, They gave to each his portion of the maw, Then slash'd the remnant, pierced it with the spits, And managing with culinary skill ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... dull, cold, gray, hopeless desolation of the approach of minter. The hard, wiry grass that thinly covered the once and sand, the occasional stunted weeds, and the sparse foliage of the gnarled and dwarfish undergrowth, all were parched brown and sere by the fiery heat of the long Summer, and now rattled drearily under the pitiless, cold rain, streaming from lowering clouds that seemed to have floated down to us from the cheerless summit of some great iceberg; the tall, naked pines moaned and shivered; dead, ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... his 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 feared ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... back to Oregon And sit on the lawn, and look at the dawn. Oh motheruh dear, don't leavuh me here, The leaves are so sere, in the fallothe year, I wanta go back to Oregugon, To dearuh ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... 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 fallen into the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... glad I was a-comin' by," said the man, grinning. "There: don't scold the youngster, missus. It was all an accident, wasn't it, squire? But, I say, next time you climb a tree don't you trust them poplars, for they're as brittle as sere-wood. There: you're all right now, ...
— Brave and True - Short stories for children by G. M. Fenn and Others • George Manville Fenn
... 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 the beast to drop its prey.—Spenser, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... 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 failed in ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang
... defeated husband drove home along the leafy borders of the beautiful Central Park—the one lovely oasis in New York's scattered maze of brick and iron monstrosity—he saw his life lying sere and yellow around him, his bare uplands scorched ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... 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 crisped leaves. Jack Frost ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... sere the slim sycamore sighs; Lushly the lithe leaves lie low o'er the land; Whistles the wind with its whisperings wise, Grewsomely gloomy and garishly grand. So doth the sycamore solemnly stand, Wearily watching in wondering wait; ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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
... rose a dread 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
... crowd up around it; 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, ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... pouting lips And shook his curly head, "Farewell, old man, the forest calls; I like you not," he said. "Your flesh is dried, your ribs are lean, You are too lank and sere, Your voice is harsh, your words are grim And do not please mine ear. The great god Pan is all I need And all I wish to know, My Father Pan, the shepherd's god, And now, ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... was right before him. But seen thus closely, the terror of it was lessened. Fleshless indeed it was. But a parchment skin was tightly drawn over the bones, and Allan could see that its true shade was a sere yellow. It was the bluish light that had given it the green of decay. The deep-sunk eyes were kindly; they gleamed with pleasure as Allan's ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... little on that score. In short, no words can convey an adequate impression of the gorgeousness of the forest tints in North America during the autumn. The foliage is inconceivably beautiful and varied, from the broad and brightly dark purple leaf of the maple, to the delicate and pale sere leaf of the poplar, all blending harmoniously with the deep green of their brethren in whom the vital sap still flows in full vigour. I have heard people compare the Hudson and the Rhine. I cannot conceive ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... ashen and sober; The leaves they were crisped and sere— The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year; It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir— It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... sang when ye were here, Are singing in another clime; Have left the hedge and forest sere, And gone where all is summer-time. The frail bright flowers that bloom'd around, When ye were blooming bright as they, Lie crushed and withered on the ground, Their fragrance heavenward ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... 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 ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... a willow keeps A patient watch over the stream that creeps Windingly by it, so the quiet maid Held her in peace: so that a whispering blade Of grass, a wailful gnat, a bee bustling 450 Down in the blue-bells, or a wren light rustling Among sere leaves and ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... all about at the unwinding view up Winterbottom Road—so familiar to Ken, who was trying to see it all with fresh eyes. They climbed out at the gate of the farm, and Hop turned his beast and departed. Half-way up the sere dooryard, Ken touched his wondering mother's arm and drew her to a standstill. There lay Applegate Farm, tucked like a big gray boulder between its two orchards. Asters, blue and white, clustered thick to its threshold, honeysuckle ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... tranquillities were all about them in land and sea and sky. Silvery gulls were soaring over them. The horizons were laced with long trails of frail, pinkish clouds. The hushed air was threaded with a murmurous refrain of minstrel winds and waves. Pale asters were blowing in the sere and misty meadows ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... clyffe, or 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
... to dwell upon a phase of life that was like autumn and sere and drifting leaves. It bothered him that the thought of Hannah and Hughie had driven him to think it out. He liked best in heart things to think back, not too far, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... the Countess de Saldar, the behaviour of this well-born English maid was anything but well-bred. She absolutely shrugged her shoulders and marched a-head of him into the conservatory, where she began smelling at flowers and plucking off sere leaves. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... thin, shrill cry: "Maman!—oh! maman!" Then Carmen lifted her from the bed to her lap, and caressed her, and rocked her gently to and fro, as she had done many a night for Concha,—murmuring,—"Yo sere tu madre, angel mio, dulzura mia;—sere tu madrecita, palomita mia!" (I will be thy mother, my angel, my sweet;—I will be thy little mother, my doveling.) And the long silk fringes of the child's eyes overlapped, shadowed ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... little pine table close to the heap of failing embers, and aided by what light the sulky candle gave, was bending over and trying to arrange a patch on my old hunting-coat. It was an old, old hunting-coat, far gone in the sere and yellow leaf. It was old-fashioned now, though once of proper cut and comeliness. It was disfigured, stained and worn. The pockets were torn down. The bindings were worn out. It was quite willing to be left alone now, hung by upon a forgotten nail, and subject to no further requisition. ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... common men can love a flower Unto Lanciotto was Francesca dear, 'Tis not on such Love wields his jealous power; And therefore Paolo moved him not to fear, Though he so green with youth and he so sere. Nor yet indeed was wrong, the hidden thing Grew at each heart, unknown of each, a year,— Two eggs still silent in the nest through spring, May draws so near to June, and ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... days are 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 autumn 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 shrubs, the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through all ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... it so much as if he had used it in less quantity. His eye is jaded and satiated, and the blue and red have life in them no more. He tries to paint them bluer and redder, in vain: all the blue has become grey, and gets greyer the more he adds to it; all his crimson has become brown, and gets more sere and autumnal the more he deepens it. But the great painter is sternly temperate in his work; he loves the vivid color with all his heart; but for a long time he does not allow himself anything like it, nothing but sober browns and dull greys, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... horn, Shall scour 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. ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... ceased and the old man halted in his tracks, his gaze riveted upon the wood. For several minutes he saw no sign of what was transpiring behind that screen of sere and yellow autumn leaves, and then a man came running out, and after ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the 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 ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... before, and Will was power-fully moved to glance often toward the house, but feared somehow the jokes of his companions. He worked on, therefore, methodically, eagerly; but his thoughts were on the future-the rustle of the oak tree nearby, the noise of whose sere leaves he could distinguish beneath the booming snarl of the machine; on the sky, where great fleets of clouds were sailing on the rising wind, like merchantmen bound to some land of ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... spent by most educated people anywhere rather than among birds and flowers. They do not escape into the country till the elm hedges are growing black, and the song-birds silent, and the hay cut, and all the virgin bloom of the country has passed into a sober and matronly ripeness—if not into the sere and yellow leaf. Our very landscape painters, till Creswick arose and recalled to their minds the fact that trees were sometimes green, were wont to paint few but brown autumnal scenes. As for the song of birds, of which in the middle age no poet could say ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... bloom, and 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 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, buffeted and tossed, With rumpled feathers, down the wind again. Oh, were ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... in a rift of the hills and look wistfully upon the bed of sere leaves and feathery snow, tempting her to sink down and die, with the grim hemlock boughs, plumed with snow wreaths drooping over her, and lulled by the gurgle of unseen waters wandering to the river, under their jewelled network of ice, but she resisted the impulse, and still ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... Struck with palsy, sere and old, Waiting at the gates of gold, Spake he with his dying breath: "Life is done, but what is death?" Then, in answer to the king, Fell a sunbeam on his ring, Showing by a heavenly ray: ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... 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
... line, and a desk at an insurance office. This sounded best, but had the smallest salary to begin with, and locality had to be taken into account. Mr. Dutton's plan was, that as soon as Mark was no longer necessary for what Annaple was pleased to call the fall of the sere and withered leaf, the pair should come to stay with him, so that Mark could see his possible employers, and Annaple consider of the situations. They accepted this gratefully, Mark only proposing that she should go either to his ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... VIII C. 5. Habemus Matec Zungam et Mat 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
... necks, bodies and arms, are ghastly white with chalk or ashes; 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 arms must be outside. The favourite ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... grassy openings, and here and there a vaquero's hut of branches; for it 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 of the shore, we saw thousands of water-fowl, ducks of almost every variety, including ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... of you in 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 ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... his bed of withered and sere leaves and as one distraught, wandered through the shadows of the misty, weird night. In the wood and by the waters he wandered, while the night wore on and the moon held its way—still a ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... picture, we behold a tall and 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 already ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... in her sight. And earth was bitter, and heaven, and even the sea Sorrowful even as he. And the wind helped not, and the sun was dumb; And with too long strong stress of grief to be His heart grew sere ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of low hills, with a jagged fringe of bluish firs and a solitary windmill. It must be a good mile and a half since we had passed a house, and there was none to be seen in the distance—nothing but the undulation of sere grass, sopped brown beneath the huge blackish oak-trees, and whence arose, from all sides, a vague disconsolate bleating. At last the road made a sudden bend, and disclosed what was evidently the home of my sitter. It was not what I had expected. In a dip in the ground a large red-brick house, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... scowling tempest hurls Our world into a chaos, and still it whirls and whirls. It is the Boreal blast of sin, else all were meek and calm, And Creation would be singing still its old primeval psalm. Woe for the leaf of human life! it flutters in the sere, And what avails its dance in air, with dust and down-come near? That airy dance, what signifies the madness that inspires? The king, the clown, alike is borne along, alike expires. Come let us try another weird—the tempest let us chain; A bridle for the passions ho! ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... scanned 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, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... and finally to look very pretty, lying stiff and cold, to the one pair of human eyes that were destined to see you! The little birds that come and go and return to us over such vast distances, they perish like this in myriads annually; flying to and from us they are blown away by death like sere autumn leaves, "the pestilence-stricken multitudes" whirled away by the wind! They die in myriads: that is not strange; the strange, the astonishing thing is the fact of death; what can they tell us of it—the ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... resting-place in Mount 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 ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never-sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forced fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear, Compel me to disturb your season due; For Lycidas is dead, dead ere ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... except such as the trees cast upon the green moss beds and the black rocks. The tops of the tall elms were sere and rusty, but the leaves of the rugged oaks that fringed the canyon's lips shone a rich and glossy brown. All down the sides the poplars and delicate birches, pale yellow, but sometimes flushing into orange and red, stood shimmering in the golden light, while here and there ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... Lord Jasper continued, coming over to Henry and taking hold of his arm. "Thirty-one. I'm getting on in years, ole f'la, that's what I'm doing ... sere and yellow, so to speak ... and a chap my age doesn't want to be bothered with a damn play. He wants something ... something substansl!..." He fumbled over the word "substantial" and then fell on it. "Something substansl," he repeated. "Now, if you ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... Athens, for instance, 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 are told in a style which is the oddest compound of Romantesque ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... the 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 year. All through the day its light and when ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... in the later year, I sought, but found thee there no more; Only a rigid stalk and sere A withered head in silence bore, Or swung, responsive to the sigh Of the stray wind that passed ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... took the track straight across the wilderness, going back. The path was a narrow groove in the turf between high, sere, tussocky grass; it was scarcely more than a rabbit run. So she moved swiftly along, watching her footing, going like a bird on the wind, with no thought, contained in motion. But her heart had a small, living seed of fear, as she went through the ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... 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 ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... the lane The while the day is warm and clear, And ne'er a thought of bitter rain Or the road-side sere. ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... my grandfather's comfort in any way. Isn't it dreadful, Jennie, to be in this lovely world with so much around you to charm and please, and yet the sense of enjoyment gone, and brightness and beauty all the same as if it were brown and sere? You'll find me a dull companion, I fear, Jennie, for I've grown old and thoughtful by seeing so ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... Rhymed with the bean-flower scent in June. One unforgotten day at Rye They sang a love-song in July; In August, hard by Lewes town, They sang of joy 'twixt sky and down; And in September's golden spell We heard them singing on Scaw Fell. October's leaves were brown and sere, But skylarks sang by Teston Weir; And in November, at Mount's Bay, They ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... 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, that all creatures, and all that he heareth, or ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... became aware, as the year advanced towards the sere and yellow leaf, that in opposing her wayward will in single combat against a simple little association in the public mind she was undertaking a somewhat ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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 ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... England spring, though the unseasonable warmth of the day made it seem summer. The landscape bore the coloring of autumn rather than that of the earlier year. The trees were red and brown and yellow in their incipient leafage. Now and then, among the sere fields, there was a streak of vivid green, or a mound of rich brown, freshly turned earth; but for the most part they were bare. Here and there was the crimson of a new maple; in the distance were ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... 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, according ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... termed Proposals—i.e., advertisements of the projected volume, calling for pledges of subscription—and, still more important, securing the permission of some prominent person to accept a dedication of the book. The jolly old days of literary patronage were then in the sere and saffron, but it was still esteemed an aid to the sale of a volume if it might be dedicated to some marquis of Carabas. Accordingly the manuscript was despatched to London, and Neville, the philistine brother, was called upon to leave ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... friend hast thou found in me, And rest in my little home." Then, deep in its quiet mossy bed, Sheltered from sun and shower, The grateful worm spun its winter tomb, In the shadow of the flower. And Clover guarded well its rest, Till Autumn's leaves were sere, Till all her sister flowers were gone, And her winter sleep drew near. Then her withered leaves were softly spread O'er the sleeping worm below, Ere the faithful little flower ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... 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 ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... pastures with their countless kine: For this o'erhead the arching vault springs clear, Sunlit and cloudless for one half the year; For this no snowflake, e'er so lightly pressed, Chills the warm impulse of our mother's breast. Quick to reply, from meadows brown and sere, She thrills responsive to Spring's earliest tear; Breaks into blossom, flings her loveliest rose Ere the white crocus mounts Atlantic snows; And the example of her liberal creed Teaches the lesson ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... Franz Lachner] in accordance with "classical" custom, permitted this concise and concentrated theme, a contrast of power and gentle self-content, to be swept away by the rush of the Allegro, like a sere and withered leaf; so that, whenever it caught the ear at all, a sort of dance pace was heard, in which, during the two opening bars the dancers stepped forward, and in the two following bars twirled about in "Laendler" [Footnote: Laendler—an Austrian peasant's dance, in triple time, from ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... whose verse concise yet clear Tunes to smooth melody unconquer'd sense, May your fame fadeless live, as 'never-sere' The Ivy wreathes yon Oak, whose broad defence Embowers me from Noon's sultry influence! 5 For, like that nameless Rivulet stealing by, Your modest verse to musing Quiet dear Is rich with tints heaven-borrow'd: ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... well-known case is that of the hemp-plant, where 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, ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... made the long transition state from his manhood's noon to its gathering eve. And in that pause there came from afar off a melodious, melancholy strain—softly, softly borne over the cold blue waters—softly, softly through the sere autumnal leaves—the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mountain of Ytaioa, and of the cloud-like summits beyond it in the distance. From the stream the ground 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
... made on either side. Two large boats and two small ones held them all, and away they went, first up through the three bridges and round the bend, then, turning, they floated down to the green island, where a grove of oaks rustled their sere leaves and the squirrels were still gathering acorns. Here they often met to keep their summer revels, and here they now spread their feast on the flat rock which needed no cloth beside its own gray lichens. ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... growing 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 ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... 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
... knows, are among the most short-lived of all volumes. This is more especially true of those with illustrations, for their extra attractiveness serves but to degrade a comely book into a dog-eared and untidy thing, with leaves sere and yellow, and with no autumnal grace to mellow their decay. Long before this period, however, the nursery artist has marked them for his own, and with crimson lake and Prussian blue stained their pictures in all too permanent pigments, ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... about in savage delight. Only once on a Saturday afternoon when her father was not with them, did she get Dutch Debby to break through her retired habits and accompany them, and then it was not summer but late autumn. There was an indefinable melancholy about the sere landscape. Russet refuse strewed the paths and the gaunt trees waved fleshless arms in the breeze. The November haze rose from the moist ground and dulled the blue of heaven with smoky clouds amid which the sun, a red sailless ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... shall be welcome; his Maiesty shall haue Tribute of mee: [Sidenote: on me,] the aduenturous Knight shal vse his Foyle and Target: the Louer shall not sigh gratis, the humorous man[6] shall end his part in peace: [7] the Clowne shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickled a'th' sere:[8] and the Lady shall say her minde freely; or the blanke Verse shall halt for't[9]: [Sidenote: black verse] what Players ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... in the drear month of October, The leaves were all crisped and sere, Adown by the Tarn of Auber, In the misty mid ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... wede away;" Her forest trees are sere; Her Royal Oak is gane for aye, The young Chevalier! O Charlie is my darling, My darling, my darling; O Charlie is ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... 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
... someone deck thee, over and down, Up and about, with blossoms and leaves? Fix his heart's fruit for thy garland-crown, Cling with his soul as the gourd-vine cleaves, Die on thy boughs and disappear 640 While not a leaf of thine is sere? Or is the other fate in store, And art thou fitted to adore, To give thy wondrous self away, And take a stronger nature's sway? 645 I foresee and could foretell Thy future portion, sure and well: But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true, Let them ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... exiguous, is called in the nomenclature of New York a "hall bedroom." The sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and they both commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than Ransom's own habitation—houses built forty years before, and already sere and superannuated. These were also painted red, and the bricks were accentuated by a white line; they were garnished, on the first floor, with balconies covered with small tin roofs, striped in different colours, and with ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... yourself," was the contemptuous reply; "you are already in the sere and yellow leaf; while I seem to have a green ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the clear-cut edge of a fact in a blur of misty vision. No longer did the memory of Nora Burke irritate him. Had he associated her with Kitty the betrayer, the irritation would never have passed; but as it was Kitty the charmer her voice brought to him, he drifted, in the sere and yellow age, down the stream of fantasy upon which he had turned his back in scorn when the blood of youth ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... strung with intent less Of sound than of words, In lands where bright blossoms are scentless, And songless bright birds; Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses, Insatiable summer oppresses Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses, And ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... multiplied with time And added blessings, year by year; She came to me in youthful prime And still remains, though in the sere. ...
— Grandfather's Love Pie • Miriam Gaines
... once resolved, the peasants were enjoin'd Sere-wood, and firs, and dodder'd oaks to find. With sounding axes to the grove they go, Fell, split, and lay the fuel on a row, Vulcanian food: a bier is next prepared, On which the lifeless body should be rear'd, Cover'd ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... bright, bleak skies, sere leaves tossing, sad winds sobbing, and rains that wept for days and nights together, on dead flowers and dying grasses, moaned itself away at last, and December swept into its place with a good rousing snow-storm, merry sleigh-bells, and bright promises of coming Christmas. The girls coasted ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... out 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
... lay sere and brown like a piece of faded tapestry beneath the November sun that, peering through the dust-laden air, seemed old and worn with his efforts to warm ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... the year when day gives place to night so suddenly, that the sober calm of twilight even appears denied to us. The streams rushed by, turbid and swollen from the heavy autumnal rains. A rude wind had robbed most of the trees of their foliage; the sere and withered leaves, indeed, yet remained on the boughs, beautiful even in, their decay, but the slightest breath would carry them away from their resting-places, and the mountain passes were incumbered, ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... 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 preserve an atmosphere ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... chill and drear, December's leaf is dun and sere; No longer Autumn's glowing red Upon our forest hills is shed; No more beneath the evening beam The wave reflects their crimson gleam; The shepherd shifts his mantle's fold And wraps him closely from the cold: His dogs no merry circles wheel, But ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... your horse treads down alone The sere damp fern, night after night you sit Holding the bridle like a man of stone, Dismal, unfriended: what thing comes ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... every change of the night, the promise of the day came almost as a personal wrong. That the glare of the sunshine should fall on her pain—that the necessity for meeting mere acquaintances with the same face as yesterday should exist, now that her life lay so scorched and sere before her, filled her with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the sere, yellow skeletons of last summer's ferns, if haply winter have forgotten one green leaf for our home vase—in vain we rake, freezing our fingers through our fur gloves—there is not one. An icicle has pierced every ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to assist us: such as those of Emile Begin, Elzear Blaze, Depping, Benjamin Guerard, Le Roux de Lincy, H. Martin, Mary-Lafon, Francisque Michel, A. Monteil, Rabutau, Ferdinand Sere, Horace de Viel-Castel, A. de la ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... the people watching me feed - a woman in an airy, fairy costume, that is little better than no costume at all, comes forward, and contributes a small bowl of yaort; but, unfortuntaely, this is old yaort, yaort that is in the sere and yellow stage of its usefulness as human food; and although these people doubtless consume it thus, I prefer to wait until something more acceptable and less odoriferous turns up. I miss the genial hospitality of the gentle Koords to-day. Instead of heaping plates ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... together, Richling, is the one great light place in my life; and to me, to-day, sere as I am, the sweet—the sweetest sound—on God's green earth"—the corners of his mouth quivered—"is the name of Alice. Take care of Mary, Richling; she's a priceless treasure. Don't leave the making and sustaining of the home sunshine ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... and the windy sycamore and hastened across the sere grass. "Father, father!" he cried. "Do you know who that is?" In his young voice there was both warning and appeal. Adam Gaudylock, he knew, had spoken to his father, but Gideon had given no sign. Suppose, no matter who spoke, his father ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... the diminished autumn day. The schoolroom windows—darkened with creeping plants, from which no high October winds had as yet swept the sere foliage—admitted scarce a gleam of sky; but the fire gave light ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... centres—powdering in the fingers, if one breaks it off, like dry tea. Is it a black species?—or a black-parched state of other species, perishing for the sake of Velasquez effects, instead of accumulation of earth? and, if so, does it die of drought, accidentally, or, in a sere old age, naturally? and how is it related to the rich green bosses that grow in deep velvet? And there again is another matter not clear to me. One calls them 'velvet' because they are all brought to an even surface at the top. Our own velvet is ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... the river and the windy sycamore and hastened across the sere grass. "Father, father!" he cried. "Do you know who that is?" In his young voice there was both warning and appeal. Adam Gaudylock, he knew, had spoken to his father, but Gideon had given no sign. Suppose, no matter who spoke, his ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... 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
... pursed his pouting lips And shook his curly head, "Farewell, old man, the forest calls; I like you not," he said. "Your flesh is dried, your ribs are lean, You are too lank and sere, Your voice is harsh, your words are grim And do not please mine ear. The great god Pan is all I need And all I wish to know, My Father Pan, the shepherd's god, And now, old ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... "The sere wounded one, O sweetest Dulcinea of Toboso, sends thee the health which he wants himself. If thy beauty disdain me, I cannot live. My good Squire Sancho will give thee ample account, O ungrateful fair one, of the penance ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... with mingled respect and curiosity as he continued to the inner shut space. It was a large light room with windows on Charter Street. William's expansive flat-topped desk with its inked green baize was on the left, and, under a number of framed sere ships' letters and privateersmen's Bonds of the War of 1812, Gerrit saw the heavy body extended on a broad wooden bench, a familiar orange Bombay handkerchief ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 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, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 hills. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... crossed again at Dedham. Most of the road lay through a growth of young oaks principally. They still retain their verdure, though, looking closely in among them, one perceives the broken sunshine falling on a few sere or bright-hued tufts of shrubbery. In low, marshy spots, on the verge of the meadows or along the river-side, there is a much more marked autumnal change. Whole ranges of bushes are there painted with many variegated hues, not of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... ... that fadeth not away." It shall not be as the garlands offered by men—green to-day and to-morrow sere and yellow. "Its leaf also shall not wither." It shall always retain its freshness, and shall offer me a continually fresh delight. And these are ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... 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 ...
— The American Missionary, October, 1890, Vol. XLIV., No. 10 • Various
... expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.[3] Events, actions arise that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... my belief that that larger Self whom they will call protecting Saint or heavenly Guardian takes hand in affairs oftener than we think! Leaving the Palos road, I went to the sea as I had done yesterday and again sat under heaped sand with about me a sere grass through which the wind whined. At first it whined and then it sang in a thin, outlandish voice. Sitting thus, I might have looked toward Africa, but I knew now that I was not going to Africa. Often, perhaps, in the unremembered past I ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... rather than among birds and flowers. They do not escape into the country till the elm hedges are growing black, and the song-birds silent, and the hay cut, and all the virgin bloom of the country has passed into a sober and matronly ripeness—if not into the sere and yellow leaf. Our very landscape painters, till Creswick arose and recalled to their minds the fact that trees were sometimes green, were wont to paint few but brown autumnal scenes. As for the song of birds, of which in the middle age no poet could say enough, our modern ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... leaves were sere, Or scattered by the Autumn wind, Fierce lightnings struck its glories down, And left ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... X, pp. 321-322: 'Ultimamente veanse mis leturas: y si en ellas se hallare rastro de novedades, sino antes inclinacion a todo lo antiguo y lo sancto, yo sere mentiroso, si no es que este testigo llama novedad todo lo que ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... 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 ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... had never 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 over ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... Passage lay; Mocking me with its undeveloped truth, Wealth unappropriated, glory lost! Cruel is she who took from me that substance With which I might have conquered an escape, Leaving me, a forlorn old spirit, sere and grey. Musing through barren hours upon the past, I think with bitterness on those who once Were friends and lovers—Queen, companions, Wife! Forgotten! yes, forgotten by them all! The luxuries of the ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... me feed - a woman in an airy, fairy costume, that is little better than no costume at all, comes forward, and contributes a small bowl of yaort; but, unfortuntaely, this is old yaort, yaort that is in the sere and yellow stage of its usefulness as human food; and although these people doubtless consume it thus, I prefer to wait until something more acceptable and less odoriferous turns up. I miss the genial hospitality of the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... and horn, 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
... had all begun came back to him, a March night, quiet and dark but for the periodical fanbeam of an enemy searchlight from the slope of an opposite hill: a mild rain had been falling, falling, ceaselessly, plashingly, over muddy ploughland or sere grass, over the intricacy of trenchwork behind the firing lines and the dreary expanse of no man's land between them: falling over wire entanglements from which dangled rags of uniform and rags of flesh: falling on faces of the unburied dead that it was helping ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... games, on colonisation, on winds, on birds, on the rivers of the world, and— ominous subject—a sort of comprehensive history of Greek literature, with a careful classification of all authors, each under his own heading. Greek literature was rather in the sere and yellow leaf, be sure, when men thought of writing that sort of thing about it. But still, he is an encyclopaedic man, and, moreover, a poet. He writes an epic, "Aitia," in four books, on the causes of the myths, religious ceremonies, and so forth—an ominous sign for the myths also, and ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... our rulers, the marked attentions paid us in society, and the many enthusiastic letters we daily receive, we are led to believe that woman's suffrage is becoming very popular. As both the editor and proprietor of The Revolution are in the sere and yellow leaf, the many attentions and compliments showered upon us are of course from no personal considerations, but so many tributes of respect to the ideas we represent; as such we gratefully accept all that come to us, and thank our hosts of friends for ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... discouragement. He looked hungry—hungry for food, hungry for change, hungry for the words of men. His long gray mustache hung far below his stubble-covered chin; there was a pallor of a lingering sickness in his skin, which the hot sun could not sere out of it. He sat dispiritedly on his broken seat, sagging forward with forearms ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... ye laurels, and once more, Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forced fingers rude, Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... 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 ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... (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 several times, ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... 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 ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... have fallen upon our people. Why is our age so sad? Has Schopenhauer carried the judgment of mankind by his favorite motto, "It is safer to trust fear than faith?" Is it because our age has lost faith in God? Have doubt and skepticism burned the divine dew off the grass, and left it sere and brown? Nay, ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... 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 Indian attire being in as good condition as was usual for the ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... the cannonading ceased and the old man halted in his tracks, his gaze riveted upon the wood. For several minutes he saw no sign of what was transpiring behind that screen of sere and yellow autumn leaves, and then a man came running out, and after him ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... skies they were ashen and sober; The leaves they were crisped and sere— The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year: It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir:— It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... 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 he ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... first wood down is sere and small, From the hills, the brishings off the hills; And then come by the bats and all We cut last year in the hills; And then the roots we tried to cleave But found too tough and had to leave— Polting through the lowlands, ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... 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
... and it would last while the emotions, its object, were left in a human soul. It would turn the eye of America hitherwards with love, gratitude and tears, such as those with which we turn to the walk of Socrates beneath the plane-tree, now sere, the summer hour of Cicero, the prison into which philosophy descended to console the spirit of Boethius,— that room through whose opened window came into the ear of Scott, as he died, the murmur of the gentle Tweed,—love, gratitude, and tears, such as we all yield to those whose immortal ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... of disruption told to a turn. The Island did not hold more loyal devotion than his for Dictator Jaffier, to hear Monkhouse tell it; and how Celestino Rey had reached his ripe years, with such hatred in the world, was by no means the least of Equatorian novelties.... Here was a desperado in the sere, shaking for the need of drink, when he first appeared to Bedient. On the final forenoon of the latter's stay at the Inn, he sat with Monkhouse in the big carriage doorway on the street-level. The old man was elaborating a winsome plan to capture ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... would pause in a rift of the hills and look wistfully upon the bed of sere leaves and feathery snow, tempting her to sink down and die, with the grim hemlock boughs, plumed with snow wreaths drooping over her, and lulled by the gurgle of unseen waters wandering to the river, under their jewelled network of ice, but she resisted the impulse, ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... endeavoring to picture the positions of the troops,—how they look, how they act, how they stand amid the terrible storm, braying death, how they rush into the thickest fire, how they fall like the sere leaves of autumn,—you will fail in your conceptions of the conflict. You must see it, and be in it, to ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... days before the 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
... put a finish to these poor habiliments. So we gradually flung them all aside, and took to honest homespun and linsey-woolsey, as preferable, on the whole, to the plan recommended, I think, by Virgil,—"Ara nudus; sere nudus, "—which as Silas Foster remarked, when I translated the maxim, would be apt to astonish ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had already deepened into night. Along the sere and melancholy wood, the autumnal winds crept, with a lowly, but gathering moan. Where the water held its course, a damp and ghostly mist clogged the air, but the skies were calm, and chequered only by a few clouds, that swept in long, white, spectral ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The prairie lay sere and brown like a piece of faded tapestry beneath the November sun that, peering through the dust-laden air, seemed old and worn with his efforts to warm the ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... refused to dwell upon a phase of life that was like autumn and sere and drifting leaves. It bothered him that the thought of Hannah and Hughie had driven him to think it out. He liked best in heart things to think back, not too ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... hour more firm, from time to time Following where I heard my call from heaven, And guided ever by a soft clear light, I turn'd, devoted still, to those first boughs, Or when on earth are scatter'd the sere leaves, Or when the sun restored makes green ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... green was an effective antidote against these destructive worms, and I have ordered a barrel of it from the city. I intend to spread a layer of this Paris green over all our flower and vegetable beds; the contrast thus presented to the dull, sere brown of our lawn will be very pleasing to the eye. In fact, I am not sure that it would not be cheaper to color our whole lawn with Paris green than to attempt to revise it with water, which can be used with legal liberality only between ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... [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
... Lachner] in accordance with "classical" custom, permitted this concise and concentrated theme, a contrast of power and gentle self-content, to be swept away by the rush of the Allegro, like a sere and withered leaf; so that, whenever it caught the ear at all, a sort of dance pace was heard, in which, during the two opening bars the dancers stepped forward, and in the two following bars twirled about in "Laendler" [Footnote: Laendler—an ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... that we are a good deal hampered with 'old blood.' Sir Allan {44} will not be in our way, however. He is very reasonable, and requires only that we should not in his 'sere and yellow leaf' offer him the indignity of casting him aside. This I would never assent to, for I cannot forget his ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... handful of withered flowers, mere dust and ashes, from the secret drawer of her work-box, and, wrapping them in the paper which had enclosed them, held them in the flame of the lamp until they were consumed? Why? Because love, unwatched for, unbidden had entered her heart, which she thought sere as the rose-leaves, and restored light to the sunshine and ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... that leads Somewhere, cold, austere; And I follow a shadow that heeds My coming, and points, not in wrath, Out over: we tread the sere path Up to the summit; recedes All gloom; and at last The beauty a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... often toward the house, but feared somehow the jokes of his companions. He worked on, therefore, methodically, eagerly; but his thoughts were on the future-the rustle of the oak tree nearby, the noise of whose sere leaves he could distinguish beneath the booming snarl of the machine; on the sky, where great fleets of clouds were sailing on the rising wind, like merchantmen bound to some ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... good luck holding on to the few eligible young bachelors who had seemed, for a brief period, to regard them with serious intent. The poor soul was worried about the girls, as well she might be, since the strides of time were rapidly bearing both into the sere-and-yellow-leaf period of life. For her son, she had earnest, passionate mother love, but since, like all mothers, she was obsessed with the delusion that every girl in the world, eligible and ineligible, was busy angling for her darling, she had left his matrimonial ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... said one of the boatmen, pointing to a dark object which floated among the tangled debris of sere weeds and woodwork collected against ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... 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, ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... A snowdrop. And thou shalt complete his lot And bloom as fair as now when they are not. Thou art the wonder of the seasons, O First-born of Beauty. As the Angel near Gazed on that first of living things which, when The blast that ruled since Chaos o'er the sere Leaves of primeval Palms did sweep the plain, Clung to the new-made sod and would not drive, So gaze I upon thee amid the reign Of Winter. And because thou livest, I live. And art thou happy in thy ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... 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, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... their horses were now comparatively few, and, which was worse, the fodder in store was, in prospect of a long siege, scanty. But the worst of all, indeed the only weak and therefore miserable fact, was, that the spirit, I do not mean the courage, of the castle was gone; its enthusiasm had grown sere; its inhabitants no longer loved the king as they had loved him, and even stern-faced general Duty cannot bring up his men to a hand-to-hand conflict with the same ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... 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 and knowledge. In ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... black Monday for me when school began again after that ideal vacation. The skies they were ashen and sober, and the leaves they were crisped and sere. But anyhow I was still en quatrieme, and Barty was in it too—and we sat next to each ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... with intent less Of sound than of words, In lands where bright blossoms are scentless, And songless bright birds; Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses, Insatiable summer oppresses Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses, And ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... young. Out 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 ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... 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 Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... gorgeousness of the forest tints in North America during the autumn. The foliage is inconceivably beautiful and varied, from the broad and brightly dark purple leaf of the maple, to the delicate and pale sere leaf of the poplar, all blending harmoniously with the deep green of their brethren in whom the vital sap still flows in full vigour. I have heard people compare the Hudson and the Rhine. I cannot conceive two streams more totally dissimilar—the distinctive features of one being wild forest ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... men can love a flower Unto Lanciotto was Francesca dear, 'Tis not on such Love wields his jealous power; And therefore Paolo moved him not to fear, Though he so green with youth and he so sere. Nor yet indeed was wrong, the hidden thing Grew at each heart, unknown of each, a year,— Two eggs still silent in the nest through spring, May draws so near to June, and not yet time ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... will, and powder, paint, and crafty clothing can no longer hide his ravages, then the virtuous woman triumphs, probably for the first time in her life. They are both old, she and the courtesan, but she is sometimes beautiful—old, grey, and sere, but venerable, charming—and little children love her, and younger women bring their troubles—ay, and their joys, reverently to her, feeling a benediction in the touch of the pure, withered hand. While the courtesan—alas! a ridiculous garish absurdity, ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... Coradine, which seems barren and desolate to our sight, accustomed to the deep verdure of woods and valleys, and the blue mists of an abundant moisture. There a stony soil brings forth only thorns, and thistles, and sere tufts of grass; and blustering winds rush over the unsheltered reaches, where the rough-haired goats huddle for warmth; and there is no melody save the many-toned voices of the wind and the plover's wild cry. There dwell the children of Coradine, on the threshold of the ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... playes the King shall be welcome; his Maiesty shall 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 First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... already pushing. Even if it were not, the beasts could live upon what herbage remained over from last summer and on the leaves of trees, neither of which in this winter veld ever become quite lifeless, whereas on the sere and fire-swept plains beyond the mountains they might find nothing at all. So we determined to risk the savages and the lions which followed the game into these hot districts, especially as it was not yet the fever season or that of the heavy ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... Then there were no holes at all, but only clouds breaking up the clear view of the ground beneath. And presently again even the clouds were left behind and the air was clear—but still there was no horizon—and there was brownish earth with small green patches and beyond was sere brown range. At seventeen thousand feet there were ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... 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 ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... and, as its name denotes, is evergreen; not, let me add, as a tall plant, for the stems wither or at least become very sere, only the large leaves of the root remaining fresh; and though it has many points of difference from A. Italica, such as shorter growth, darker flowers and foliage, and more oval leaves—these form the distinctions most observable. By its evergreen quality it is easily identified ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... night your horse treads down alone The sere damp fern, night after night you sit Holding the bridle like a man of stone, Dismal, unfriended: what ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... sixty-five years of age, of stately, unbending form and face radiant and genial with the florid flush of that Indian Summer which so many Englishmen wear late in those autumnal years that bend and pale American forms and faces to "the sere and yellow leaf" of life. But the sequel proved that he did not abdicate his position too early. In a little more than a year from this event, his spirit was raised to higher fellowships and folded with those of the pure and blest of bygone ages. The incidents ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... brown,— The picture must not be over-bright,— Yet all in the golden and gracious light Of a cloud, when the summer sun is down. Alway and alway, night and morn, Woods upon woods, with fields of corn Lying between them, not quite sere, And not in the full, thick, leafy bloom, When the wind can hardly find breathing-room, Under their tassels,—cattle near, Biting shorter the short green grass, And a hedge of sumach and sassafras, With bluebirds ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... must be bravely recognised that any statement of truth which is so framed as to be falsely understood conveys a lie. If the dramatist says quite truly, "This particular leaf is sere and yellow," and if the audience quite falsely understands him to say, "All leaves are sere and yellow," the gigantic lie has illogically been conveyed that the world is ever windy with autumn, that spring is but ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... 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
... hills 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 ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... it in less quantity. His eye is jaded and satiated, and the blue and red have life in them no more. He tries to paint them bluer and redder, in vain: all the blue has become grey, and gets greyer the more he adds to it; all his crimson has become brown, and gets more sere and autumnal the more he deepens it. But the great painter is sternly temperate in his work; he loves the vivid color with all his heart; but for a long time he does not allow himself anything like it, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Comedy of Errors - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... the plain more majestic than the world of the Coulee.—The grasses and 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 ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... 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 only by the lowing of the herds driven along ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... 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, suitable ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... the cardinal principle and the curse of Shakerism; it is slowly but surely bringing the sect to an end. It takes a lot of fanaticism to remain single, and fanaticism is in the sere and yellow leaf. In Massachusetts, where so many women are compelled to remain single, there ought to be many Shakers; there are a few, and Mt. Lebanon is just ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... more dear, O, little city, grey and sere, Though shrunken from thine ancient pride And lonely by thy lonely sea, Than these fair halls on Isis' side, Where Youth an hour came ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... a heart so sere as not to feel Pleasures innumerable o'er it stead, In sweet surroundings of earth's lovely flowers, Which cheer and elevate man's ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... loosed and rioted through the lonely recesses of the craggy ravines and the valley with a wild and eerie blare; the leaves, rustling shrilly, all sere now, so long the weather had held dry, fled in myriads before the gusts. Soon they lay on the ground in dense masses, and in the denudation of the trees the brilliant tints of the little coat, swinging so high in the blast, caught the eye of a wandering hunter. At first sight, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... with a sneer at fate, (Spring and the sea and the sun) Let the bird fly free to find her mate, Ere the year of love grow sere and late. Sweet ladye, my song ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... from his bed of withered and sere leaves and as one distraught, wandered through the shadows of the misty, weird night. In the wood and by the waters he wandered, while the night wore on and the moon held its way—still a lustrous blur ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... said Berry, "are proof against its malignity. Don't you come too near. And look at this sere and yellow leaf. Now, that represents one franc. When I think that, upon offering that to a bar-tender, I shall not only not be assaulted, but shall actually receive a large bottle of beer and be lent a two-and-sixpenny glass from which to imbibe the same, I feel the deepest ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... 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 fronts come up well; nobody can see ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... autumn's wind and rain, Through husks that, dry and sere, Unfolded from their ripened charge, Shone out the yellow ear; Beneath, the turnip lay concealed 5 In many a verdant fold, And glistened in the slanting light The ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... branches. And the men for a while doubted and denied—they thought it was the accident of the seasons; and then a branch fell, and they said it was a storm, and such a storm as came but once in a thousand years. At last there could be no doubt that the leaves were thin and sere and scanty—that the sun shone through them—that the fruit was tasteless. But the generation was gone away which had known the tree in its beauty, and so men said it was always so—its fruits were never better—its foliage never ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... 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 back to Marmion for the winter. If he could only shake off his burdening notoriety ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... the several visitors who thereafter came to Wreckers' Head continued to amuse the girl immensely. Nor did the visits cease. The Ball homestead was no longer a lonely habitation. Somebody was forever "just stopping by," as the expression ran; and the path from the port was trodden brown and sere as autumn ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... long been green on the graves of Shepherd Fennel and his frugal wife; the guests who made up the christening party have mainly followed their entertainers to the tomb; the baby in whose honour they all had met is a matron in the sere and yellow leaf. But the arrival of the three strangers at the shepherd's that night, and the details connected therewith, is a story as well known as ever in the country about ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... the love of young hearts! How little does it contain of earth—how much of heaven! No selfish passions mar its beauty. Its tenderness, its pathos, its devotion, who does not remember, even when the sere leaves of autumn are rustling beneath his feet? How little does it regard the cold and calculating objections of worldly-mindedness. They are heard but as a passing murmur. The deep, unswerving confidence ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... they scanned 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 ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... this splendid weather very much. The moors are in glory, I never saw them fuller of purple bloom. I wanted you to see them at their best; they are just turning now, and in another week, I fear, will be faded and sere. As soon as ever you can leave home, be sure to write and let ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... the day dawns, my Rose, I will go and look for herbs. I marked some sorrel on the hill yester e'en, albeit something dry and sere." ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... sometimes 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 nor wither." ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... melancholy days are 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, through all ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... head cool and his feet warm; and here again the noble enterprise of a newspaper has provided the exact desideratum in its happily-named Corkolio detachable soles, which are absolutely invaluable when roads are dark and ways are foul, when the reeds are sere, when all the flowers have gone and the carrion-crow from the vantage of a pollard utters harsh notes of warning to all the corvine ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... as every collector knows, are among the most short-lived of all volumes. This is more especially true of those with illustrations, for their extra attractiveness serves but to degrade a comely book into a dog-eared and untidy thing, with leaves sere and yellow, and with no autumnal grace to mellow their decay. Long before this period, however, the nursery artist has marked them for his own, and with crimson lake and Prussian blue stained their pictures in all too permanent pigments, that in some cases resist every chemical the amateur ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... first sere leaves of the year were falling, I heard, with a heart that was strangely thrilled, Out of the grave of a dead Past calling, A voice I ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... have to ask," returned the boy; and hastily preceding Rogers, he put his head in at Lapham's door, and then withdrew it. "Please to sit down," he said; "he'll see you pretty soon;" and, with an air of some surprise, Rogers obeyed. His sere, dull-brown whiskers and the moustache closing over both lips were incongruously and illogically clerical in effect, and the effect was heightened for no reason by the parchment texture of his skin; the baldness extending to the crown of his head was like a baldness made up for the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... growing lighter outside. Stars faded in a paling blue and the desert showed faint colorings. He tied his necktie. A deep-toned keening set up off to the southward, over the sere and dreary landscape. It was a faraway noise, something like the lament of a mountain-sized calf bleating for its mother. Joe took a deep breath. He looked, but saw nothing. The noise, though, told him ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... acres, was a dense circular thicket composed of every sort of thorny bush and shrub, matted with cat-briers and wild vines, and overshadowed by a clump of tall and leafy ashes, which had not as yet lost one atom of their foliage, although the underwood beneath them was quite sere and leafless. ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... 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; ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... 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 Your vaunted ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... window, knitting a quilt, just as she had been sitting one evening several years 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 at ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... denied—they thought it was the accident of the seasons; and then a branch fell, and they said it was a storm, and such a storm as came but once in a thousand years. At last there could be no doubt that the leaves were thin and sere and scanty—that the sun shone through them—that the fruit was tasteless. But the generation was gone away which had known the tree in its beauty, and so men said it was always so—its fruits were never better—its foliage ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Rome lay open my face, yea, wide open as the lips of a crying child. And on my back, most noble mistress, thou mightest hide thy white fingers in the welts cut by the stinging thong. And seest thou my arm? Here is flesh cooked sere as the shell of a tortoise. Thus have blade and thong and branding iron of Rome marked me with wounds and commanded my lips to silence. Yet have these scars each one a thousand silent tongues crying ever 'Hate! Hate! Hate!' But here," ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... Guahutemallis, Dec. VIII C. 5. Habemus Matec Zungam et Mat 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
... pale land, before my sight In devious tracery that Passage lay; Mocking me with its undeveloped truth, Wealth unappropriated, glory lost! Cruel is she who took from me that substance With which I might have conquered an escape, Leaving me, a forlorn old spirit, sere and grey. Musing through barren hours upon the past, I think with bitterness on those who once Were friends and lovers—Queen, companions, Wife! Forgotten! yes, forgotten by them all! The luxuries of the world-taxing city, The kisses of their children, smiles of men Renowned of ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... public games, on colonisation, on winds, on birds, on the rivers of the world, and— ominous subject—a sort of comprehensive history of Greek literature, with a careful classification of all authors, each under his own heading. Greek literature was rather in the sere and yellow leaf, be sure, when men thought of writing that sort of thing about it. But still, he is an encyclopaedic man, and, moreover, a poet. He writes an epic, "Aitia," in four books, on the causes of the myths, religious ceremonies, and so forth—an ominous sign for the myths also, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... and morn, Woods upon woods, with fields of corn Lying between them, not quite sere, And not in the full, thick, leafy bloom, When the wind can hardly find breathing-room Under their tassels,—cattle near, Biting shorter the short green grass, And a hedge of sumach and sassafras, With bluebirds ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... cradle. For the gentle, domestic old man was often now, as in his docile childhood, charged to "mind the baby," and one of the quiet pleasures of his latter days was the sight of the little floweret, that grew so sweetly beside his sere and withered life. An uncultured sense of beauty within him was appealed to by the rounded limbs, the silent, dimpled laugh, the tottering feet feeling their unknown way, and all the sweet curves and softnesses, the innocent surprises and naive desires, which made ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... replying: "Nah![20] 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
... while the winds Blow moist and keen, shattering the graceful locks Of these fair spreading trees; which bids us seek Some better shroud, some better warmth to cherish Our limbs benummed, ere this diurnal star Leave cold the night, how we his gathered beams Reflected may with matter sere foment; Or, by collision of two bodies, grind The air attrite to fire; as late the clouds Justling, or pushed with winds, rude in their shock, Tine the slant lightning; whose thwart flame, driven down Kindles the gummy bark of fir or pine; And sends a comfortable heat from ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... who had no rest that night. An upper window of the house of Morelos looked out upon a court in which two palm trees grew. They had been tall and flourishing. One might see them from the court-room. But for a year they had been shedding their leaflets and turning sere. Tonight their yellow stems had clashed and whispered until the wind was down, leaving the night sullen, brooding, thick, starless, with dashes of rain and a raw chill on the ground that brought out all the malefic odors of the pavement. The window ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... airy, fresh, and spring-like as yourself. And for you, aunt, I will arrange an autumn arraying,—a costume soft, yet bright, like the autumn days which the Americans call 'Indian summer,'—something which will almost make one wish to fall into the sere and yellow leaf of life in the ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... 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
... 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
... rustles by the crisp leaf sere, Sadly wail the lonely night-winds, sweeping sea-ward, chill and drear, Sullen dash the restless waters 'gainst a bleak and rock-bound shore, While the sea-birds' weird voices ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... 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, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... vellemus morari in terra? Ego dixi, Si bene intellexistis literas domini regis, potestis scire, quod sic. Tunc dixit, quod oporteret nos esse patientes multum, et humiles. Sic discessimus ab eo illo sere. In crastino mane misit vnum sacerdotem Nestorinum pro bigis, et nos duximus omnes quatuor. Tunc occurrens nobis frater ipsius Coiacis, separauit omnia nostra ab ipsis rebus quas tuleramus pridie ad curiam, et ilia ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... 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
... 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. Yet these least of all should ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... that sang when ye were here, Are singing in another clime; Have left the hedge and forest sere, And gone where all is summer-time. The frail bright flowers that bloom'd around, When ye were blooming bright as they, Lie crushed and withered on the ground, Their fragrance heavenward ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... more, O ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forced fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear Compels me to disturb your season due: For Lycidas is dead, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... 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, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... much as common men can love a flower Unto Lanciotto was Francesca dear, 'Tis not on such Love wields his jealous power; And therefore Paolo moved him not to fear, Though he so green with youth and he so sere. Nor yet indeed was wrong, the hidden thing Grew at each heart, unknown of each, a year,— Two eggs still silent in the nest through spring, May draws so near to June, and not yet time ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... stately 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... bloom, and 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 ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... you young 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
... down utterly. These figures—kings, 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 ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... which we passed did not seem so very unlike that which I had left, except that it was more level and less wintry. In summer time the wide fields would have shown me new sights, and the way-side hedges blossomed with new flowers; now, everything was sere and sodden, and a general air of shiftlessness prevailed, which would have caused a New England farmer much disgust, and a strong desire to "buckle to," and "right up" things. Dreary little houses, with chimneys built outside, with ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... 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
... now, at the beginning of spring, in this part of Africa it was already pushing. Even if it were not, the beasts could live upon what herbage remained over from last summer and on the leaves of trees, neither of which in this winter veld ever become quite lifeless, whereas on the sere and fire-swept plains beyond the mountains they might find nothing at all. So we determined to risk the savages and the lions which followed the game into these hot districts, especially as it was not yet the fever season or that of the heavy rains, so that ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... the 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)
... one rival—Fear; Who follows ever on his footsteps, sent By jealous Fate who calls great joy a crime. While in far ways 'mong leaves just turning sere, With gaze serene and placid, walks Content. No heart ere held these ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... and the old man halted in his tracks, his gaze riveted upon the wood. For several minutes he saw no sign of what was transpiring behind that screen of sere and yellow autumn leaves, and then a man came running out, and after him another ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... side, and over the broad lake, that glared like a sheet of burnished steel under its flashes of dazzling blue. Wild and fitful blasts sweeping down the hollows and cloughs of the fells of Golden Friars agitated the lake, and bent the trees low, and whirled away their sere leaves in melancholy drift in their tremendous gusts. And from the window, looking on a scene enveloped in more than the darkness of the night, you saw in the pulsations of the lightning, before "the speedy gleams the darkness swallowed," ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... mingled respect and curiosity as he continued to the inner shut space. It was a large light room with windows on Charter Street. William's expansive flat-topped desk with its inked green baize was on the left, and, under a number of framed sere ships' letters and privateersmen's Bonds of the War of 1812, Gerrit saw the heavy body extended on a broad wooden bench, a familiar orange Bombay handkerchief ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... vale is yellow and sere, The ancient elms seem withered and bare, The river asleep in its rushy bed, The waters are green, and the grass is red, The roses are dead in the sylvan bowers, Where oft in the dewy evening hours, Ere yet the fairies had sought the dell, And the merle was singing her day-farewell, The Lady Etheline ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... in far days Of Music's dim beginning—even so, Truth was at full within thee long ago, Alive as now it takes what latest shape May startle thee by strangeness. Truths escape Time's insufficient garniture; they fade, They fall—those sheathings now grown sere, whose aid Was infinite to truth they wrapped, saved fine And free through March frost: May dews crystalline Nourish truth merely,—does June boast the fruit As—not new vesture merely but, to boot, Novel creation? Soon shall fade and fall Myth after myth—the husk-like ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... when her love lay cold in death, Sunk in the black and silent tomb, All sere and withered was the wreath That ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... truly that we are a good deal hampered with 'old blood.' Sir Allan {44} will not be in our way, however. He is very reasonable, and requires only that we should not in his 'sere and yellow leaf' offer him the indignity of casting him aside. This I would never assent to, for I cannot forget his ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... the clouds of obscurity have long since cast a darkening hue. Even the "Elegaic Sonnets" of Charlotte Smith, which first appeared in 1784, and formed a sort of poetical era in point of popularity, have long since "fallen into the sere and yellow leaf," as it was discriminately hinted by Burns would be the case with his soul-breathing Letters; the Sonnets by the Rev. W.L. Bowles, although emanating from a beautiful fountain-spring of thought and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... 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, that all creatures, and all that he heareth, or seeth, or feeleth by any ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... with fair remembrances of summer, and the earth was golden and red; and the sky was folded in lawny clouds, which the breeze was lifting, revealing beautiful spaces of blue. All the abundant hedgerows were red with the leaf of the wild cherry, and the oak woods wore masses of sere and russet leafage. Spreading beeches swept right down to the road, shining in beautiful death; once a pheasant rose and flew through the polished trunks towards the yellow underwood. Sprays trembled on naked rods, ferns ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... 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
... poverty of its occupant, who put it to the additional use of sitting-room and study, made the lack of space particularly noticeable. The window afforded a prospect pleasant enough to eyes such as theirs. Above the lower houses on the opposite side of the way appeared tall trees, in the sere garb of later autumn, growing by old Westminster School; and beyond them, grey in twilight, rose the towers of the Abbey. From this point of view no vicinage of modern brickwork spoilt their charm; the time-worn monitors stood alone against a sky of ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... 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 glowing life! The eager green ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... of a gal—runned arter the gypsies! But she'm sobered now. Funny to think her mother, as seemed like a woman robbed of her right hand when Chris went, an' beginned to graw into the sere onusual quick for a widow, took new life as soon as her gal comed back. Just shaws what strength lies in a ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... the winter! When the snow is all about; It may seem a time of trouble for the blossoms peeping out, And the sere leases of the forest and the dead grass of the hills Bring a set-back to the roses and the lilies have the chills; But the world is rolling onward! and the spring is drawing nigh, When the birds will spill their music through the blossoms ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... summer floweret 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 ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... my memory. If they'd come from somebody else they mightn't have meant so much. But from one's own husband—Wow!—they go in like a harpoon. And they have given me a great deal to think about. There are times, I find, when I can accept that intimation of slipping into the sere and yellow leaf without revolt. Then the next moment it fills me with a sort of desperation. I refuse to go up on the shelf. I see red and storm against age. I refuse to bow to the inevitable. My spirit recoils at the thought ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... in 't: Like mistletoe on sere elms spent by weather, Let him cleave to her, and both rot ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... few soldiers remaining busied themselves 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, ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... summer passed away, and the forest put on the sere and sombre robes of autumn, and yet no visible change—none at least more favorable to the wishes of William Hinkley—took place in the character and conduct of the maiden. Her mind, on the contrary, seemed to take something ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... oppressed her; she put on her thickest wrappings, and took the street leading to the nearest park. A steel-grey sky, with slowly-trailing clouds, looked down on her, and the keen, chilly wind wafted a fine snow-powder in her face as she pressed against it. The trees were bare, and the sere grass grew hoary as the first snow-flakes of the season came down softly and shroud-like. The walks were deserted, save where a hurrying form crossed from street to street, homeward bound; and Electra passed slowly along, absorbed in thoughts colder than the frosting that gathered on shawl ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Shall win man's praise and woman's love; Shall be a wisdom that we set above All other skills and gifts to culture dear, 215 A virtue round whose forehead we enwreathe Laurels that with a living passion breathe When other crowns are cold and soon grow sere. What brings us thronging these high rites to pay, And seal these hours the noblest of our year, 220 Save that our ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Before her lay sere, brooding fields sloping down to a sandy shore, where long foamy ripples were lapping with a murmur that threaded the hushed air ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... is a deeper story of what may be performed by brave hearts when they leave the fruitful fields behind them and turn with all their hearts to woo the desert that turns her forbidding face to them at their coming, and holds, closely hidden within her sere ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... eventful future. Mary Queen of the Scots was a tiny infant in swaddling clothes. The labors of Rafael 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 price ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... life is called a jaunt, In sadness rife, in sunshine scant, Though mundane joys, the wisest grant, Have no enduring basis: 'Tis something in this desert drear, For thee so fresh, for me so sere, To find in Puss, our daughter dear, ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... to redeem his forlorn failure. Mitchel, who shared his Australian imprisonment, left a fine picture of "this noblest of Irishmen, thrust in among the off-scourings of England's gaols, with his home desolated and his hopes ruined, and defeated life falling into the sere and yellow leaf. A man, who cannot be crushed, or bowed, or broken; anchored immovably upon his own brave heart within; his clear eye and soul open as ever to all the melodies and splendors of heaven and earth, and calmly waiting for the ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... hopeless desolation of the approach of minter. The hard, wiry grass that thinly covered the once and sand, the occasional stunted weeds, and the sparse foliage of the gnarled and dwarfish undergrowth, all were parched brown and sere by the fiery heat of the long Summer, and now rattled drearily under the pitiless, cold rain, streaming from lowering clouds that seemed to have floated down to us from the cheerless summit of some great iceberg; ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... low by autumn's wind and rain, Through husks that, dry and sere, Unfolded from their ripened charge, Shone out the yellow ear; Beneath, the turnip lay concealed 5 In many a verdant fold, And glistened in the slanting light The pumpkin's sphere ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... you could not come on the day I mentioned. I have grudged this splendid weather very much. The moors are in glory, I never saw them fuller of purple bloom. I wanted you to see them at their best; they are just turning now, and in another week, I fear, will be faded and sere. As soon as ever you can leave home, be sure to write ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... So from his barren poll one hoary lock Over his wrinkled front fell far adown, Well nigh to where his frosty brows did frown Like jagged icicles at cottage eaves; And for his coronal he wore some brown And bristled ears gather'd from Ceres' sheaves, Entwined with certain sere and russet leaves." ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... 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; a gaunt, ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... Maiesty shall haue Tribute of mee: [Sidenote: on me,] the aduenturous Knight shal vse his Foyle and Target: the Louer shall not sigh gratis, the humorous man[6] shall end his part in peace: [7] the Clowne shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickled a'th' sere:[8] and the Lady shall say her minde freely; or the blanke Verse shall halt for't[9]: [Sidenote: black verse] what Players ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... right in saying that charges of any kind were difficult of digestion: Yet, even at that moment, Elizabeth had no more attached subjects in England than sere the burghers of the Netherlands; who were as anxious ever to annex their territory ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... was mild, yet somewhat overcast by tho mists which announce coming winter in London, and Helen walked musingly beneath the trees that surrounded the garden of Lord Lansmere's house. Many leaves were yet left on the boughs; but they were sere and withered. And the birds chirped at times; but their note was mournful and complaining. All within this house, until Harley's arrival, had been strange and saddening to Helen's timid and subdued spirits. Lady Lansmere had received her kindly, but with a certain restraint; and the loftiness of ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... jetted steam, dead clouds awoke And quivered on the Western rim. Then the singing started: dim And sibilant as rime-stiff reeds That whistle as the wind leads. The South whispered hard and sere, The North answered, low and clear; And thunder muffled up like drums Beat, whence the East wind comes. The heavy sky that could not weep Is loosened: rain falls steep: And thirty singing furies ride To split the sky from side ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... season when nature Is all in the sere, When her snow-showers are hailing, Her rain-sleet assailing, Her mountain ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of this. In the contemporary gloss which an anonymous friend of Spenser's furnished to his Shepherd's Calendar, first published in 1579, "for the exposition of old words", as he declares, he thinks it expedient to include in his list, the following, 'dapper', 'scathe', 'askance', 'sere', 'embellish', 'bevy', 'forestall', 'fain', with not a few others quite as familiar as these. In Speght's Chaucer (1667), there is a long list of "old and obscure words in Chaucer explained"; including 'anthem', ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... the blue horizon to the shore, Casting faint silver pathways like the moon's Across the Ocean's glassy, mottled floor, Far clouds uprear their gleaming battlements Drawn to the crest of some bleak eminence, When autumn twilight fades on the sere hill And autumn winds are still; To watch the East for some emerging sign, Wintry Capella or the Pleiades Or that great huntsman with the golden gear; Ravished in hours like these Before thy universal shrine To feel the invoked presence hovering near, He stands enthusiastic. Star-lit ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... look'd hot and like to fade. Sere, in the garden of the Tuileries, Sere with September, droop'd the chestnut-trees. 'Twas dawn; a brougham roll'd through the streets ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the conscientious studies of our old associates in the great work of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to assist us: such as those of Emile Begin, Elzear Blaze, Depping, Benjamin Guerard, Le Roux de Lincy, H. Martin, Mary-Lafon, Francisque Michel, A. Monteil, Rabutau, Ferdinand Sere, Horace de Viel-Castel, A. de ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... too, of woodlands lover, Dusk October, berry-stained; Wailed about of parting plover,— Thou then, too, of woodlands lover. Fading now are copse and cover; Forests now are sere and waned. ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... of the Coulee.—The grasses and 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. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... and a big red nostril that you could set a Shanghai hen in. This horse, as soon as the pack broke into full cry, climbed over a fence that had wrought-iron briers on it, lit in a corn field, stabbed his hind leg through a sere and yellow pumpkin, which he wore the rest of the day, with seven yards of pumpkin vine streaming out behind, and away we dashed 'cross country. I remained mounted not because I enjoyed it, for I did not, but because I dreaded to dismount. I hated to get off in pieces. ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... bad, Colonel! But to tell the truth, I wouldn't miss what we used to call the shindy, and these boys of yours term the 'scrap' for a pile of Kruger sovereigns. And—I can shoot better than most men, if I am in the sere and yellow sixties." The Mayor was slightly ruffled; the diplomatic touch smoothed ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... effect, neither too many nor too few. The treatment had to be mainly provocative—an appeal in some cases by very coarse means indeed to very coarse nerves, in others by finer devices addressed to senses more tickle o' the sere. And so grew up that unsurpassed and hardly matched product the French short story, where, if it is in perfection, hardly a word is thrown away, and not a word missed ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... 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 bownde ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 45, Saturday, September 7, 1850 • Various
... branches whined in the light night breeze; You led me down to the water's brink, "The Spring where the Panthers come to drink At night; there is always water here Be the season never so parched and sere." Have we souls of beasts in the forms of men? I fain would have ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... spite of the flowers scattered round it having been withered black! Of 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, ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... the bearers bore him across the sere plateau towards a stone that lay almost in its centre. Presently they halted, and, pointing to this mass, the ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... "Sol-monath," from the returning sun. March "Rhede, or Rhede monath," rough, or rugged month. April "Easter monath," from a favourite Saxon goddess, whose name we still preserve. May was "Trimilchi," from the cows being then milked thrice in the day. June "Sere monath," dry month. July "Maed monath," the meads being then in their bloom. August was "Weod monath," from the luxuriance of weeds. September "Haerfest monath." October they called "Winter fylleth," from winter approaching ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... 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 the ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... called in the nomenclature of New York a "hall bedroom." The sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and they both commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than Ransom's own habitation—houses built forty years before, and already sere and superannuated. These were also painted red, and the bricks were accentuated by a white line; they were garnished, on the first floor, with balconies covered with small tin roofs, striped in different colours, and with an elaborate iron lattice-work, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... if she Autumn were, Or they dead leaves; since her delight is flown, For whom should she have waked the sullen Year? To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear, 5 Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both Thou, Adonais; wan they stand and sere Amid the faint companions of their youth, With dew all turned to ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... them; and on reflection he was not deeply concerned, for what earthly woman, going off in a freak as Marcia had done, and keeping silence so long, would care for a belated friendship with him now in the sere, even if he were to take ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... continued—and something of the pathos which belongs to deep emotion vibrated in the eloquent voice, accustomed to command and persuade—"we strip not the green leaves for our yulehearths—we gather them up when dry and sere. Leave youth on the bough—let the bird sing to it—let it play free in the airs of heaven. Smoke comes from the branch which, cut in the sap, is cast upon the fire, and regret from the heart which is severed from the world while the world ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Philanor, verily even the glory of thy fleet feet would have fallen into the sere leaf unrenowned, abiding by the hearth of thy kin, as a cock that fighteth but at home, had not the strife of citizen against citizen driven thee from Knosos ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... as the year advanced towards the sere and yellow leaf, that in opposing her wayward will in single combat against a simple little association in the public mind she was undertaking ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... in Sloane Square is really a Home for Superannuated Horses. It is a sort of equine Athenaeum. No horse is ever seen there till it has passed well into the sere and yellow. A Sloane Square cab-horse may be distinguished by the dignity of its movements. It is ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... obliged. I do not think I shall take any arsenic; shall send partridges to Mr. Yarrell; much obliged. Ask Edward to BARGAIN WITH Clemson to make for my gun—TWO SPARE hammers or cocks, two main-springs, two sere-springs, four nipples or plugs—I mean one for each barrel, except nipples, of which there must be two for each, all of excellent quality, and set about them immediately; tell Edward to make inquiries about prices. I go on Sunday per packet to Plymouth, shall stay one or ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... Only once on a Saturday afternoon when her father was not with them, did she get Dutch Debby to break through her retired habits and accompany them, and then it was not summer but late autumn. There was an indefinable melancholy about the sere landscape. Russet refuse strewed the paths and the gaunt trees waved fleshless arms in the breeze. The November haze rose from the moist ground and dulled the blue of heaven with smoky clouds amid which the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and 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 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, buffeted and tossed, With rumpled feathers, down the wind again. Oh, were the seeds all lost ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... last; he had a long spear of sere grass in his mouth and he chewed at it argumentatively, "d'you think,—I couldn't adzackly tell whut that writin' wuz a-aimin' at, but simlike f'm the way it goes on that ef the sort of thing it makes aout to happen happens onst, it ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... and young. Out 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
... wind and rain, Through husks that, dry and sere, Unfolded from their ripened charge, Shone out the yellow ear; Beneath, the turnip lay concealed 5 In many a verdant fold, And glistened in the slanting light The ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... vaquero's hut of branches; for it 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 of the shore, we saw thousands of water-fowl, ducks of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... and ashes, from the secret drawer of her work-box, and, wrapping them in the paper which had enclosed them, held them in the flame of the lamp until they were consumed? Why? Because love, unwatched for, unbidden had entered her heart, which she thought sere as the rose-leaves, and restored light to the sunshine and joy to ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... come from 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, ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... peach tree showed her thousand cheeks of down, kissed often by the wooing winds; here, in swarms; the yellow apples hived, like golden bees upon the boughs; here, from the kneeling, fainting trees, thick fell the cherries, in great drops of blood; and here, the pomegranate, with cold rind and sere, deep pierced by bills of birds revealed the mellow of its ruddy core. So, oft the heart, that cold and withered seems, within yet hides ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... visibly quivered over the dark red tiles of the 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 ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the beauty of nature departs: the sere and yellow leaves fall from the trees, while a thick autumn fog hangs suspended like a bier over the lifeless fields. Solitary, I wander through the melancholy country. I call aloud your name, and am irritated that my Raphael ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... 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 ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... leaves now whirling fast from the trees, By Autumn's chill blast are tossed yellow and sere; And soon, with the breath of his nostrils to freeze Each thing he can puff ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... neu{er} vnhonestly of woma{n} kynde, Ne let hit neu{er} renne in y mynde; 260 e boke hym call{es} a chorle of chere, That vylany spekes be weme{n} sere: For all{e} we ben of wymme{n} bor, And oure fadurs vs be-forne; 264 {er}for{e} hit is a vnhonest thyng To speke of hem in ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... 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 ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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; ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... on entering the vestibule, he saw something that he had never 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 over the ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... 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 ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... 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 fire, looking sober, You ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... root-stock of the flag, which shows additional bulbs from year to year; (2) the joints in the flower stalks, of which some half-dozen may be found on each stalk; (3) the large seed-pods that terminate in stalks, a very noticeable feature when the plant is sere; (4) the various bunches or knots of iris in a bed of the plants, so that the whole phrase suggests a thickly matted bed of flags. I favour the last interpretation, though Tennyson's fondness of technical accuracy in his references makes the ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... 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 autumn 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 shrubs, the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... in prospect of a long siege, scanty. But the worst of all, indeed the only weak and therefore miserable fact, was, that the spirit, I do not mean the courage, of the castle was gone; its enthusiasm had grown sere; its inhabitants no longer loved the king as they had loved him, and even stern-faced general Duty cannot bring up his men to a hand-to-hand conflict with the ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... 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
... the curtains Of branched evergreen; Change cannot touch them With fading fingers sere: 60 Here the first violets Perhaps will bud unseen, And a dove, may be, ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... dimitteremus ei. Tunc quasiuit si vellemus morari in terra? Ego dixi, Si bene intellexistis literas domini regis, potestis scire, quod sic. Tunc dixit, quod oporteret nos esse patientes multum, et humiles. Sic discessimus ab eo illo sere. In crastino mane misit vnum sacerdotem Nestorinum pro bigis, et nos duximus omnes quatuor. Tunc occurrens nobis frater ipsius Coiacis, separauit omnia nostra ab ipsis rebus quas tuleramus pridie ad curiam, et ilia accepit tanquam sua, scilicet libros et vestimenta: ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... boy, 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 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... spirited steed with high, intellectual hips, one white eye and a big red nostril that you could set a Shanghai hen in. This horse, as soon as the pack broke into full cry, climbed over a fence that had wrought-iron briers on it, lit in a corn field, stabbed his hind leg through a sere and yellow pumpkin, which he wore the rest of the day, with seven yards of pumpkin vine streaming out behind, and away we dashed 'cross country. I remained mounted not because I enjoyed it, for I did not, but because ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... they 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, ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... the grotesque but graceful branches which never shed their honours under the tyrant pruning-hook; the soft green sward; the chequered light and shade; the wild luxuriant weeds; the lichen and the moss—all, all are beautiful alike in the green freshness of spring, or in the sadness and sere of autumn. Their beauty is of that kind which makes the heart full with joy—appealing to the affections with a power which belongs to nature only. This wood runs up, from below the base, to the ridge of a long line of irregular hills, having perhaps, in primitive times, formed but the skirting ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... hemp-plant, where 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, ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... tinged with the chill breath of coming snow. Thompson missed the sun that had cheered and warmed those hushed solitudes. Just to look at that dull sky and to hear the wind that was fast stripping the last sere leaves from willow and maple and birch, and to feel that indefinable touch of harshness, the first frigid fingerings of the frost-gods in the air, gave him a swift touch of depression. He shivered ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... before him. But seen thus closely, the terror of it was lessened. Fleshless indeed it was. But a parchment skin was tightly drawn over the bones, and Allan could see that its true shade was a sere yellow. It was the bluish light that had given it the green of decay. The deep-sunk eyes were kindly; they gleamed with pleasure as Allan's opened; and the ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... his he always should, He had said, and wed me he vowed he would In his prime or sere Most verily do, ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... poor, shalt thou roam, For a loving friend hast thou found in me, And rest in my little home." Then, deep in its quiet mossy bed, Sheltered from sun and shower, The grateful worm spun its winter tomb, In the shadow of the flower. And Clover guarded well its rest, Till Autumn's leaves were sere, Till all her sister flowers were gone, And her winter sleep drew near. Then her withered leaves were softly spread O'er the sleeping worm below, Ere the faithful little flower lay Beneath ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... will 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 ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... aqueduct, rose crowned with wall-flower and weeds out of the rank grass, the 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 only by the lowing of the herds driven along ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... palsy, sere and old, Waiting at the gates of gold, Spake he with his dying breath: "Life is done, but what is death?" Then, in answer to the king, Fell a sunbeam on his ring, Showing by a heavenly ray: "Even ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... distance, blurred by the sheets of rain, was a line of low hills, with a jagged fringe of bluish firs and a solitary windmill. It must be a good mile and a half since we had passed a house, and there was none to be seen in the distance—nothing but the undulation of sere grass, sopped brown beneath the huge blackish oak-trees, and whence arose, from all sides, a vague disconsolate bleating. At last the road made a sudden bend, and disclosed what was evidently the home of my sitter. It was not what I had expected. In a dip in the ground a large red-brick ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... rudely strung with intent less Of sound than of words, In lands where bright blossoms are scentless, And songless bright birds; Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses, Insatiable summer oppresses Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses, ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... 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, suitable for early ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... the corner of the demolished abode, made his way through a press of sere cabbage palmettos, and emerged suddenly on the blinding expanse of the sea. The limpid water lay in a bright rim over corrugated and pitted rock, where shallow ultramarine pools spread gardens of sulphur-yellow and rose anemones. The land curved in upon the left; a ruined landing ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... o'er head sat a raven, On a sere bough, a grown great bird, and hoarse! Who, all the while the deer was breaking up So croaked and cried for it, as all the huntsmen, Especially old Scathlock, thought it ominous; Swore it was Mother Maudlin, whom he met At the day-dawn, just as he roused the deer Out ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... that anyone passed. Out of the window Sylvia could see a line of raw, red-brick villas, and sometimes a spurt of steam, denoting the presence of the railway station. Also, she saw the green fields and the sere hedges with the red berries, giving promise of a hard winter. The day was sunny but cold, and there was a feeling of autumnal dampness in the air. Deborah had lighted a fire before she went, that her mistress might be comfortable, so Sylvia sat down before this and read for ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... 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, and Experience could prove little ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of the strong fatality which hurried him to his end. It is by mixing somewhat of this feeling in the character of Macbeth, that Shakspeare has excited a momentary interest even for a murderer and usurper, who perceives "his life fallen into the sere and yellow leaf," and pauses for a moment in melancholy reflection as he rushes to "die with harness ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... the autumn twilight, rustles by the crisp leaf sere, Sadly wail the lonely night-winds, sweeping sea-ward, chill and drear, Sullen dash the restless waters 'gainst a bleak and rock-bound shore, While the sea-birds' weird voices mingle ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... when nature Is all in the sere, When her snow-showers are hailing, Her rain-sleet assailing, Her mountain winds ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... 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 fronts ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... was long; 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 ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... wane, And turns to 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
... your king that shall ride to-night, But a child that is fast asleep; And the horse he shall ride is the Dream-horse white— Aha, he shall speed through the ghostly light Where the ghostly shadows creep! "My eyes are dull and my face is sere, Yet unto the word he gave I cling, For he was a Pharaoh that set me here— And, lo! I have waited this many a ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... "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 feared ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... Jaffier, to hear Monkhouse tell it; and how Celestino Rey had reached his ripe years, with such hatred in the world, was by no means the least of Equatorian novelties.... Here was a desperado in the sere, shaking for the need of drink, when he first appeared to Bedient. On the final forenoon of the latter's stay at the Inn, he sat with Monkhouse in the big carriage doorway on the street-level. The old man was elaborating a winsome plan to capture the Spaniard at sea; and though Bedient ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... had made the long transition state from his manhood's noon to its gathering eve. And in that pause there came from afar off a melodious, melancholy strain—softly, softly borne over the cold blue waters—softly, softly through the sere autumnal leaves—the music ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... leave their 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
... I 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 making worse ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... sword of Rome lay open my face, yea, wide open as the lips of a crying child. And on my back, most noble mistress, thou mightest hide thy white fingers in the welts cut by the stinging thong. And seest thou my arm? Here is flesh cooked sere as the shell of a tortoise. Thus have blade and thong and branding iron of Rome marked me with wounds and commanded my lips to silence. Yet have these scars each one a thousand silent tongues crying ever 'Hate! Hate! Hate!' But here," and he threw back his tunic and placed three fingers ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... When the first sere leaves of the year were falling, I heard, with a heart that was strangely thrilled, Out of the grave of a dead Past calling, A voice I fancied ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... night and morn, Woods upon woods, with fields of corn Lying between them, not quite sere, And not in the full, thick, leafy bloom, When the wind can hardly find breathing-room Under their tassels,—cattle near, Biting shorter the short green grass, And a hedge of sumach and sassafras, With bluebirds twittering all around,— (Ah, good painter, you can't paint ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... blanched the flowers of Summer, And the forest robes grew sere; Still in darkness knelt the ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... different aspect! The murky heavens reflected the red glare of the flames upon every object for miles around, tinging each with a lurid gleam like nothing in nature. The dark neutrals of the far-off mountains, the gray-green of the pines, the sere colors of the parched valley, the dark dull-green of the oaks, garlanded with hoary moss, and the gay foliage of the wild grape; all came out distinctly in this furnace-glow, but with quite new effects. In the ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... in 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
... sighing among the branches. And the men for a while doubted and denied—they thought it was the accident of the seasons; and then a branch fell, and they said it was a storm, and such a storm as came but once in a thousand years. At last there could be no doubt that the leaves were thin and sere and scanty—that the sun shone through them—that the fruit was tasteless. But the generation was gone away which had known the tree in its beauty, and so men said it was always so—its fruits were never ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... from man; a scowling tempest hurls Our world into a chaos, and still it whirls and whirls. It is the Boreal blast of sin, else all were meek and calm, And Creation would be singing still its old primeval psalm. Woe for the leaf of human life! it flutters in the sere, And what avails its dance in air, with dust and down-come near? That airy dance, what signifies the madness that inspires? The king, the clown, alike is borne along, alike expires. Come let us try another weird—the tempest let us chain; A bridle for the passions ho! ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... to the window and stood for some minutes looking out at the plain. Its sere grasses, protruding out of the snow, hissed and bent in the wind. In its cheerless winter colors it was a dreary ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... would last while the emotions, its object, were left in a human soul. It would turn the eye of America hitherwards with love, gratitude and tears, such as those with which we turn to the walk of Socrates beneath the plane-tree, now sere, the summer hour of Cicero, the prison into which philosophy descended to console the spirit of Boethius,— that room through whose opened window came into the ear of Scott, as he died, the murmur of the gentle ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... Passage! When the day Glinted o'er this pale land, before my sight In devious tracery that Passage lay; Mocking me with its undeveloped truth, Wealth unappropriated, glory lost! Cruel is she who took from me that substance With which I might have conquered an escape, Leaving me, a forlorn old spirit, sere and grey. Musing through barren hours upon the past, I think with bitterness on those who once Were friends and lovers—Queen, companions, Wife! Forgotten! yes, forgotten by them all! The luxuries of ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... strewed with the pale yellow leaves of the elm, just beginning to fall; hedgerows glowing with long wreaths of the bramble in every variety of purplish red; and overhead the unchanged green of the fir, contrasting with the spotted sycamore, the tawny beech, and the dry sere leaves of the oak, which rustle as the light wind passes through them; a few common hardy yellow flowers (for yellow is the common colour of flowers, whether wild or cultivated, as blue is the rare ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... and brooks of the Spring, Chanting your lays in the morn of the year, Though Armenia, my country, be wasted and sere, And mourns for her maidens who never shall sing, Yet a storm, did it come from that desolate land, Would awaken a joy that ye ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... we are a good deal hampered with 'old blood.' Sir Allan {44} will not be in our way, however. He is very reasonable, and requires only that we should not in his 'sere and yellow leaf' offer him the indignity of casting him aside. This I would never assent to, for I cannot forget his services in days ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... 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, ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... forest-trees on one hand grew near together, and the spaces between, though cleared, looked hardly less wild; for vines and sumach and ferns had taken possession. The sun's rays yet lay warm on the rolling downs, the sere grass and the purplish blackberry vines, and sparkled on the waves beyond; but when Mr. Simlins and Faith struck into the woods for a 'short cut,' the shadowy solitude closed them in on all sides. Softly their steps moved over the fallen pine leaves, ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... infallible, or that the taste of Mr. Lance Harriott, her patron, was fastidious; enough that it was picturesque, and perhaps not more glaring and extravagant than the color in which Spring herself had once clothed the sere hillside where Flip was now seated. The phantom mirror in the tree fork caught and held her with the sky, the green leaves, the sunlight and all the graciousness of her surroundings, and the wind gently tossed her hair and the gay ribbons of her gypsy ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... 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 ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... When Time has worked his inexorable will, and powder, paint, and crafty clothing can no longer hide his ravages, then the virtuous woman triumphs, probably for the first time in her life. They are both old, she and the courtesan, but she is sometimes beautiful—old, grey, and sere, but venerable, charming—and little children love her, and younger women bring their troubles—ay, and their joys, reverently to her, feeling a benediction in the touch of the pure, withered hand. While the courtesan—alas! a ridiculous ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... inheritance ... that fadeth not away." It shall not be as the garlands offered by men—green to-day and to-morrow sere and yellow. "Its leaf also shall not wither." It shall always retain its freshness, and shall offer me a continually fresh delight. And these are all ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... Whose habit rude, and manners blunt and plain. Presageth naught; yet inly beautified With bounty's riches, and fair hidden pride; For where the golden ore doth buried lie, The ground, undecked with nature's tapestry, Seems barren, sere, unfertile, fruitless, dry; And where the upper turf of earth doth boast His pride, perfumes, {239} and particoloured cost, Delve there, and find this issue and their pride To spring from ordure and corruption's ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Paris green was an effective antidote against these destructive worms, and I have ordered a barrel of it from the city. I intend to spread a layer of this Paris green over all our flower and vegetable beds; the contrast thus presented to the dull, sere brown of our lawn will be very pleasing to the eye. In fact, I am not sure that it would not be cheaper to color our whole lawn with Paris green than to attempt to revise it with water, which can ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... somewhere, my dear, In the midnight black or the midday blue: The robin pipes when the sun is here, And the cricket chirrups the whole night through; The buds may blow and the fruit may grow, And the autumn leaves drop crisp and sere: But whether the sun or the rain or the snow, There is ever a song ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... the dim purple-blue distance —with a 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 ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... birthday without feeling that an event has happened. Fifty! Why, the Psalmist's limit is only seventy. Fifty from seventy. An easy sum, but what an impressive answer! Twenty years, and they the years of the sere, the yellow leaf. Only twenty more times to hear the cuckoo calling over the valley and see the dark beech woods bursting into tender green. I look back twenty years, and it seems only a span. And yet how remote fifty seemed in those days! It was so remote as to be hardly worth ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... March day, with a steely sun going down in a pale-gray sky. Patches of snow lingered in sheltered brushy places. This bit of woodland had a floor of soft sand that dragged at Carley's feet. There were sere and brown leaves still fluttering on the scrub-oaks. At length Carley came out on the edge of the bluff with the gray expanse of sea beneath her, and a long wandering shore line, ragged with wreckage ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... supposed to have been a dark russet colour. Bayard, a derivative of bay, was the name of several famous war-horses. Cf. Blank and Blanchard. The name Soar is from the Old French adjective sor, bright yellow. It is of Germanic origin and cognate with sere. ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... ground 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
... wake up again, and with better clarity of mind, I found that I could extend my esper as far as the wall and through the door by a few inches. It was strictly hospital all right; sere white and stainless steel as far as ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... Sleep Sister Snow The Contrast A Mystery Triumph In Winter, with the Book we had in Spring Sere Wisdom Isolation The Lost Dryad The Gifts of the Oak The ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... years of age, of stately, unbending form and face radiant and genial with the florid flush of that Indian Summer which so many Englishmen wear late in those autumnal years that bend and pale American forms and faces to "the sere and yellow leaf" of life. But the sequel proved that he did not abdicate his position too early. In a little more than a year from this event, his spirit was raised to higher fellowships and folded with those of the pure and blest of bygone ages. The incidents ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... followed golden corn; The leaves are few and sere; My thoughts are old as soon as born, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
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