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Dryad   Listen
noun
Dryad  n.  (Class. Myth.) A wood nymph; a nymph whose life was bound up with that of her tree.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Dryad" Quotes from Famous Books



... she might have had was lost long ago; however little she might have meant to range so far, she was now beyond any turning. No wood creature, no skipping faun or startled dryad dancing under the moon could have belonged more utterly than she to the fragrant, mysterious world around her. The bright, bustling life of every day, its clatter of food and drink, its smarts ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... I sat in the dormitory window-seat. It was a fine frosty afternoon; the winter sun, already setting, gleamed pale on the tops of the garden-shrubs in the "allee defendue." One great old pear-tree—the nun's pear-tree—stood up a tall dryad skeleton, grey, gaunt, and stripped. A thought struck me—one of those queer fantastic thoughts that will sometimes strike solitary people. I put on my bonnet, cloak, and furs, and went ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... "my birth was amidst the freshness of the world, when the flush of the universal life coloured all things with divinity; when not a tree but had its Dryad, not a fountain that was without its Nymph. I sat by the gray throne of Saturn, in his old age, ere yet he was discrowned (for he was no visionary ideal, but the arch monarch of the pastoral age), and heard from his lips the history of the world's birth. ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... earth; their marriage is celebrated by marking them with vermilion, and they are sacrificed. The villagers then accompany the Pahan or Baiga, the village priest, to the sarna or sacred grove, a remnant of the old sal forest in which is located Sarna Burhi or 'The old women of the grove.' "To this dryad," writes Colonel Dalton, "who is supposed to have great influence over the rain (a superstition not improbably founded on the importance of trees as cloud-compellers), the party offer five fowls, which are afterwards eaten, and the remainder of the day is spent in feasting. ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... said nothing at all about trespassers. He did tell me, though, about a wonderful creature that comes every day to visit the garden. A nymph, he thought it was—a beautiful Oread from away up there among the silver peaks and purple canyons—or, perhaps, a lovely Dryad from among the oaks and pines. I felt quite sure, though, that the nymph must be an Oread; because he said that she comes to gather colors from the roses, and that every morning and every evening she uses these ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright

... here," he thought. His footfall was nothing on the soft mold. Portly trunks of the hemlocks began to bar his way. The thick shade entreated secrecy; he stood still, and saw his dryad, a green apparition, kneeling at the foot of a beech tree, and looking down. In the stillness, which absorbed all but the beating of his heart, he heard the dry tick, tick of a beech leaf falling. Those that ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... sweet poet bespeaks the dryad; and therefore it was not call'd Quercus, (as some etymologists fancy'd) because the Pagans (quaeribantur responsa) had their oracles under it, but because they sought for acorns: But 'tis in another{58:2} place where I shew ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn

... the germ of all the passions? On the right, on the left, below, on the horizon, everywhere some voice which calls him. All is desire, all is reverie. There is no reality which holds him when the heart is young; there is no oak so gnarled that it may not give birth to a dryad; and if one had a hundred arms one need not fear to open them; one has but to clasp his mistress and all ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset

... Dryad's green alcove, Half-islanded by hill-brook's seaward rush, My lovers still bower, where none may come but I! Where in clear morning prime and high noon hush With only some old poet's book I lie! Sometimes ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett

... branches of the poplars, rounded as are the sun and moon in Michelangelo's 'Creation.' But, forced for so many years now, by a sort of grafting process, to share the life of feminine humanity, they called to my mind the figure of the dryad, the fair worldling, swiftly walking, brightly coloured, whom they sheltered with their branches as she passed beneath them, and obliged to acknowledge, as they themselves acknowledged, the power of ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... the king, who, full of happiness, hurried Saint-Aignan down the stairs. Madame had not anticipated this termination, and neither the Naiad nor the Dryad had ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... happier, thought that perhaps she might stand upright. She tried the experiment cautiously and found that she could. Her head and shoulders appeared dryad-like above the young green of the leaves beneath her, and leaves and branches framed her face all around. She waved her hand energetically, and called, to attract the stooping Timothy's attention to her present ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox

... Liber and Ceres mild, If by your bounty holpen earth once changed Chaonian acorn for the plump wheat-ear, And mingled with the grape, your new-found gift, The draughts of Achelous; and ye Fauns To rustics ever kind, come foot it, Fauns And Dryad-maids together; your gifts I sing. And thou, for whose delight the war-horse first Sprang from earth's womb at thy great trident's stroke, Neptune; and haunter of the groves, for whom Three hundred snow-white heifers ...
— The Georgics • Virgil

... The nymph who has bewitched Aristaeus is Euridice and the second scene shows us the shepherd pursuing her. It appears that in trying to escape from the shepherd she was bitten by a deadly snake, for in the third scene a dryad tells the story of the tragedy to her sisters. In the first edition, "dei codici chigiano e Riccardiano," the next scene introduces Orpheus, who sings a song ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson

... life, suggested so strangely by the merely visible presence of one who was unconscious of it all; the silent spirit that dwelt in dim woodland, and walked unseen in open field, suddenly showing herself, Dryad-like and not afraid, because in his soul who sought for her there had been wakened that wonderful vision to which alone are wonderful things revealed; the mere shapes and patterns of things becoming, as it were, refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical value, as though they were ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde

... dryad was coming toward him, lance straight, slender, buoyantly youthful in the light tread and in the ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine

... a fragrant breeze comes floating by, And brings, you know not why, A feeling as when eager crowds await Before a palace gate Some wondrous pageant; and you scarce would start If, from a beech's heart, A blue-eyed Dryad, stepping forth, should say, "Behold me! I ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey

... fairy,—that, from term to term, Month after month, belov'd of all good things, Thou'rt seen in forests and in meadow rings Girt for the dance? or like an Oread queen Array'd for council? For the woods convene Their dryad forces when the nights are clear, And nymphs and fawns ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay

... later M. Dumaresque stood in the Caron reception room staring with some dissatisfaction across the breadth of green lawn where the dryad and faun statues held vases of ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan

... his song back from the graves we dig for ourselves. Probably the ancients realized this neither more nor less than we moderns. Mankind has not changed. The civilized being still hides the faun and the dryad within its broadcloth and its silk. And yet"—[He stops, with a dried-up air-rather impatiently] Go on, my ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... The two great groups of forces vaguely known as the Renaissance and the Revolution have both contributed to this result. Men who were weary of conventionality and of the weight of custom 'heavy as frost and deep almost as life,' have longed for the vision of 'Oread or Dryad glancing through the shade,' or to 'hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.' Meanwhile, that in which the Greeks most resembled us, 'the human heart by which we live,' for the very reason that it lies so near to us, is too apt to be lost from our conception of them. Another ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles

... changed into a bird. If, to avoid pursuit, a person hid himself in a cave, he was said to be transformed into a serpent; and if he burst into tears, from excess of grief, he was reported to have changed into a fountain; while, if a damsel lost herself in a wood, she became a Nymph, or a Dryad. The resemblance of names, also, gave rise to several fictions: thus, Alopis was changed into a fox; Cygnus into a swan; Coronis into a crow; and Cerambus into a horned beetle. As some few of the stories here alluded to by Ovid, refer to historical events, it may be remarked, that the account ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso

... Kedzie was the wettest dryad that ever was. She stumbled forward, groping. Jim Dyckman bent, slipped his hands under her arms, and hoisted her to land. He felt ludicrous, but his ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... little faster as the lithe figure swayed and bent and curved into wonderful lines, which melted ever into new ones. It was young, elemental joy, every step of it; sexless, no Bacchante dance, but rather a paeon of ecstasy, such as a dryad might have danced in the woods. At the climax she stood poised, her arms lifted in exultation. Then ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke

... an air over those mighty arches; but Memory can find no reminiscence worthy of the spot. The amphitheatre was not built until history had become a record of the vice and debasement of the human race. The Faun and the Dryad had deserted the earth, no sweet superstition, the faith of the grotto and the green hill, could stamp with a delicate and undying spell the labours of man. Nor could the ruder but august virtues of the heroic age give to the ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... that he was tired, and sprang to his feet. "This must be a Dryad-tree!" he exclaimed. "If it is, ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... and "Aunt" Diana's children. They knew all the spots their mother had loved so well in her girlhood at old Green Gables—the long Lover's Lane, that was pink-hedged in wild-rose time, the always neat yard, with its willows and poplars, the Dryad's Bubble, lucent and lovely as of yore, the Lake of Shining Waters, and Willowmere. The twins had their mother's old porch-gable room, and Aunt Marilla used to come in at night, when she thought they were asleep, to gloat over them. But they all ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... you scarce would start, If from a beech's heart, A blue-eyed [v]Dryad, stepping forth, should say, "Behold ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various



Words linked to "Dryad" :   hamadryad, nymph



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