"Gorse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one, ten, twenty paces, my eyes almost starting from my head, as though I expected to see the thing roll up from the bottom of the pit under my very gaze. At last I turned my back to the pit and strode out across the gorse-covered moorland toward my home. As I reached the road that winds from St. Gildas to St. Julien I gave one hasty glance at the pit over my shoulder. The sun shone hot on the sod about the excavation. There was something white and bare and round on ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... the gurgling waters which beat an echo to the stormy breezes—those breezes which will never more fan his cheek—that water where he has often bathed his limbs will be his rippling monument. The shady moonlight of an August evening is gilding the rich pastures of Hertfordshire; the gorse bushes have not yet lost their beauty, the pheasants are playing in the woods—woods that so lately resounded with laughter—laughter ringing like a bell—the music of a merry heart. Withdraw those curtains which ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... Andrew's love for her, were revealed to me one day when, with Deborah's master, his lumbering sons and comely daughters, and my chum Fred Harcourt, an artist from "across the water," we were cutting some early grass in May, just before the full bloom of the gorse had begun to fade from the hillsides and from the tops of the hedges where it had made borders of gold for the green of the fields all ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... hours later Newbury set out to walk to Coryston. The day was sultry, and June in all its power ruled the countryside. The hawthorns were fading; the gorse was over; but the grass and the young wheat were rushing up, the wild roses threw their garlands on every hedge, and the Coryston trout-stream, beside which Newbury walked, brimming as it was, on its chalk bed, would soon be almost masked from sight by the lush growths which overhung its narrow ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... be an encumbrance when crossing the heather, and there are many places where a horse would be a source of danger. The sides of the valley are closely wooded for the first seven or eight miles north of Pickering, but the surrounding country gradually loses its cultivation, at first gorse and bracken, and then heather, taking the place of the ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... was everywhere. In the distance it lay upon the dark hillside, played upon the deep yellow gorse and purple heather of the moorland, and, further away still, flashed upon a long silver streak of the German Ocean. In the old-fashioned gardens of the court it shone upon luscious peaches hanging on the time-mellowed red-brick walls; lit up the face and gleamed upon the hands of the stable ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... still clinging to the friendly goat, came near the edge of the field, which here sloped more steeply to the mountain top. Great boulders, slightly covered with lichen and moss, were strewn about, and around them the bracken and gorse were growing, and in every crevice of these rocks there were plants whose little, tight-fisted roots gripped a desperate, adventurous habitation in a soil scarcely more than half an inch deep. At some time these rocks had been smitten so fiercely ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... talker, with a hundred schemes for the improvement of his fortunes, and, incidently, for the benefit of his neighbours and the world at large; but nothing came of it all and he was now fast sinking into the lowest depths of poverty. Yet who would blame him? 'Tis the nature of the gorse to be "unprofitably gay." All that, however, is a question for the moralist; the point now is that in walking, even in that poor way, when, on account of physical weakness, it was often a pain and weariness, there are alleviations which may be more to us than positive pleasures, ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... lights of which they could see in the valley below them. In the grey sky above, a waning moon gave them just sufficient light to see their immediate surroundings—a grass-covered track, no longer used, and the yawning mouths of the old quarries, no longer worked, the edges of which were thick with gorse and bramble. It was the very place for secret work, and Pratt was certain that secret work was ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... man saw in his own mind a whole world, and he peopled it. He wandered in the shade of those Norman groves; he saw the Breton hero and Madame Bryond among the gorse and shrubbery; he inhabited the old chateau of Saint-Savin; he shared in the diverse acts of all those many personages, picturing to himself the notary, the merchant, and those bold Chouans. His mind conceived the state of that wild country where lingered still the memory of the Comtes de Bauvan, ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... commas. He had seen a white admiral circling higher and higher round an oak tree, but he had never caught it. An old cottage woman living alone, high up, had told him of a purple butterfly which came every summer to her garden. The fox cubs played in the gorse in the early morning, she told him. And if you looked out at dawn you could always see two badgers. Sometimes they knocked each other over like ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... beneath the sunlight. Albine took advantage of a widening of the path to let Serge go on in front; for the warmth of his breath upon her neck troubled her. All around them the rocks arose in broad tiers, storeys of huge flags, bristling with coarse vegetation. They first came upon golden gorse, clumps of sage, thyme, lavender, and other balsamic plants, with sour-berried juniper trees and bitter rosemary, whose strong scent made them dizzy. Here and there the path was hemmed in by holly, that grew in quaint forms like ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... into the world to try their luck, and each took his own way; but when the youngest had gorse a while, the ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... of the Misses Blake racing through rushes and gorse after a rabbit strikes Kit as so comical that she forgets everything, and laughs aloud. And then the Misses Blake, who are not altogether without a sense of fun, catching "the humor of it," laugh too, and, drying ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... it through gorse and heather, occasionally leaping a deep drain. At last I reached it. It was a small lake. Wearied and panting, I flung myself on its bank, and gazed ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... passively like sheep to the slaughter; I saw the fearful orgy of massacre and rapine around the open tumulus, the wild priest shattering with his gleaming tomahawk the skulls of his victims, the fire of gorse and low brushwood prepared to roast them, the heads and feet flung carelessly on top of the yet uncovered stone chamber, the awful dance of blood-stained cannibals around the mangled remains of ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... is a mile nearer Newport: and affords an instance within a few years of a wild tract of gorse and brambles being profitably converted to tillage and garden. Here too are several scattered dwellings forming an improving hamlet; and in one of them (called in courtesy Landscape Cottage,) was produced in all its stages the present ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon
... "Necropolis," where London, in the black and sandy soil, deposits the myriads of its dead. All around, the ground is olive-coloured with unblossomed heath, bright and golden here and there with the flowerets of the prickly gorse. Dense and dismal plantations of black-looking Scotch firs are enlivened at intervals by the delicate and tender green spikelets of a sprouting larch. On we rush for miles through this sombre region, through dank morasses, and past dark and gloomy pools, from one of which a heron ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... the lead, the chain stretched taut, and the boy had all his work cut out to keep up with the dog. Up the hill they went on to the downs, and in and out among the furze bushes. The night was no longer dark to Edred. His eyes had got used to the gentle starlight, and he followed the dog among the gorse and brambles without stumbling and without hurting himself against the million sharp ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... little inn that she might see the china figures that were certain to be on the chimney-piece, as indeed they were, where she drank a whole tumbler of new milk before we lifted her to carry her back, we came upon a wide high moorland country the roads through which were lined with gorse in full golden bloom, while patches of heather all about were showing their bells, though not yet in their autumnal outburst of purple fire. Here I began to be reminded of Scotland, in which I had ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... peace My soul was nurst, amid the loveliest scenes Of-unpolluted nature. Sweet it was, As the white mists of morning roll'd away, To see the mountain's wooded heights appear Dark in the early dawn, and mark its slope With gorse-flowers glowing, as the rising sun On the golden ripeness pour'd a deepening light. Pleasant at noon beside the vocal brook To lay me down, and watch the the floating clouds, And shape to Fancy's wild similitudes Their ever-varying forms; and ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... wondered whether I dared begin. It is always an eerie sensation to be alone in the forest, what with the whispering leaves overhead, the stir and hum of insects, the rustle of ghostly foot-falls, and (in my case) the uneasy sense of green-liveried keepers sneaking up at one through the clumps of gorse. However, I was not the man to belie the blood of Revolutionary heroes and meanly carry my unexploded crackers beyond the scene of danger, so I remembered the brave days of old and touched a whitey off. It burst with the roar of a cannon ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... for which Turgeneff and Tolstoy are famous. Dostoevsky even ridicules Turgeneff for his feminine portraits, in "Devils," under the character of the writer Karmazinoff, with his passion for depicting kisses not as they take place with all mankind, but with gorse or some such weed growing round about, which one must look up in a botany, while the sky must not fail to be of a purplish hue, which, of course, no mortal ever beheld, and the tree under which the interesting pair is seated must infallibly be orange-colored, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... meadow, with a view of the hills and clumps of gorse in it, and, since there were clumps of gorse, many, many of those alluring little creatures which live in the ground and provide man with numbers of benefits—such as sweet flesh to put into pies; and cheap, soft, warm fur to wrap Baby Buntings in; and stubby tails, or scuts, to be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various
... the west, and the town ended on the east in a plain of short grass called the Links, on which the townspeople had the right of pasturing their cows and geese. The Links were bounded on each side by low hills covered with gorse and heather, and on the east by a beautiful bay with a sandy beach, which, beginning at a low rocky point, formed a bow and then stretched for several miles to the town of Kinghorn, the distant part skirting a range of ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... a large piece of uncultivated ground covered with gorse, over which the wind rustled and blew day and night. Then the coast suddenly fell a hundred yards, forming a high, white cliff, the foot of which was washed by the sea; and Jeanne gazed at the vast, watery expanse ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... charming it was! The air seemed so fresh, and the prospect on every side so free and unbounded! Then it was all covered with gay flowers, many of which I had never observed before. There were, at least, three kinds of heath (I have got them in my handkerchief here), and gorse, and broom, and bell-flower, and many others of all colors that I will beg you presently to ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... the women waving their handkerchiefs, the men putting on all sorts of airs, jetting like gamecocks. When we got up to the top of the hill, I saw the old lame puppet-man, sitting on the edge of the wild, unenclosed, gorse-covered common-land which stretches away towards the town of Axminster. He was watching us with deep interest. Our men were spreading out into line upon this common. The horse was ranging on, bobbing about, ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... stimuli, stings, as in the nettles, which are armed with a venomous fluid for the annoyance of naked animals. The shrubs and trees, which have prickles or thorns, are grateful food to many animals, as goosberry, and gorse; and would be quickly devoured, if not thus armed; the stings seem a protection against some kinds of insects, as well as the naked mouths of quadrupeds. Many plants lose their thorns by cultivation, ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... golden gorse, and tufts of broom. Tall pines with branches like steps to tempt you to climb. Regular precipices after climbing above the sand-pit, from which you could jump into the soft sand, and then slide and roll down to the bottom. Once I jumped upon a little promontory high above the ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... shrubs. The woods are full of anemones and primroses; narcissus grows wild in the lower fields; a lovely creamy stream of flowers flows along the lanes, and lies hidden in the levels; hyacinth-pools of blue shine in the woods; and then with a later burst of glory comes the gorse, lighting up the country round about, and blazing round about the beacon hill. The beacon hill stands behind Farringford. If you follow the little wood of nightingales and thrushes, and follow the lane where the blackthorn hedges shine ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... after an unusually long march, I flopped down and went to sleep in an overgrown ditch, surrounded by gorse and broom. The sun was just rising when I awoke with the idea that I was lying on a bed of pins. The idea grew to a firm conviction when an involuntary movement of mine considerably increased my discomfort. As I lay trying to solve the problem in a semi-conscious ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... even better idea of the woman my aunt had been than even the panic of her solicitor. The thing went as smoothly as the disappearance of a caravan of gypsies, camped for the night on a heath beside gorse bushes. We went to the ball that night as if from a household that had its roots deep in the solid rock, and in ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... dales, the month was rainier than elsewhere, but if possible, milder. Yellow buds were already foolishly breaking on the gorse, and weak primroses, as though afraid to venture, and yet venturing, were to be found in the depths ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it instead for some distance, finally turning off down a narrow lane without any sign of a hedge. After following this for a length of time, we took the road at right angles leading between fields covered with gorse, and later, descending one or two steep hills with trees on either side, we reascended and entered the ancient town of Lescar, only to dip under the tottering walls of the ancient castle—a few minutes later—and mount again under a ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... larger or smaller divisions of the crowd. The greatest attraction apparently lay in the direction of Dog Lane, the outlet towards Paddiford Common, whither the caricatures were moving; and you foresee, of course, that those works of symbolical art were consumed with a liberal expenditure of dry gorse-bushes and vague shouting. ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... Gorse and heather riot over the moorland. There is a charm and peace about this too little known country that compels health ...
— Legend Land, Vol. 1 • Various
... she die, her grave should be Upon the bare top of a sunny hill, Among the moorlands of her own fair land, Amid a ring of old and moss-grown stones In gorse and heather all embosomed. There should be no tall stone, no marble tomb Above her gentle corse;—the ponderous pile Would press too rudely on those fairy limbs. The turf should lightly he, that ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... boil up as if the valleys smoked after a destroying fire, and through flying mists flush the ruddy earth, turning the white film to pinkish gauze. Crimson and purple stones shine like uncut jewels, and cascades of yellow gorse, under red-flowering trees, pour down over low-growing white flowers, which embroider ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... but overclouded and decidedly dark. Every now and then Bennett, to call the stranger by what was almost confessedly a nom-de-guerre, flashed a powerful electric torch on the roadway. "Don't want to walk into a gorse-bush," ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... new or old, In idle moments idly told; Flowers of the field with petals thin, Lilies that neither toil nor spin, And tufts of wayside weeds and gorse Hung in the parlor of the inn Beneath the sign of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... this strange volume," I continued, "the most beautiful ethical maxims exist in unexampled profusion. After reading Aristotle's ethics, I feel, when I turn to the New Testament, as Linnaeus is said to have felt when he first saw growing wild the masses of blooming gorse, which he had never seen in his cold North, except as a sheltered exotic. Whether it was likely that contemporaries of the Pharisees, who were sunk in formalism, and who had glossed away every moral and spiritual the Law, could reach and maintain such ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... built itself in such a way that it made a wide avenue from the common at one end to the Meeting-house on the gorse- grown upland at the other. With a demure resistance to the will of its makers the village had made itself decorative. The people were unconscious of any attractiveness in themselves or in their village. There were, however, a few who felt the beauty stirring around ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the Berkshire side, leaving the cottage to his right. Fold after fold of dim wooded country fell away to the south of the ridge; bare branching trees were all about him; a patch of open common in front where bushes of winter-blossoming gorse defied the dusk. It was the English winter at its loveliest—still, patient, expectant—rich in beauties of its own that summer knows nothing of. But Falloden was blind to it. His pulses were full of riot. She had been ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The sticks had been piled too thickly over the gorse that was under them; the fire smouldered round his legs, and the sensation of suffering was unusually protracted. "I cannot burn," he called; "Lord have mercy on me; let the fire come to me; I cannot burn." His brother-in-law, with ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... of 1916 that the American Navy came into very close relationship with the submarine activities of the German Admiralty. The morning of October 7 of that year was one of those days for which Newport is famous—a tangy breeze sweeping over the gorse-clad cliffs and dunes that mark the environment of Bateman's Point the old yellow light-ship which keeps watch and ward over the Brenton reefs rising and falling on a cobalt sea. From out of the seaward mists there came shortly before ten o'clock ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... awning above it, is enshrined in a spacious half hemisphere of glass which forms a pavilion commanding the garden, and, beyond it, a barren but lovely landscape of hill profile with fir trees, commons of bracken and gorse, and wonderful ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... spines, which tear the skin of would-be assailants. In the brambles, the hairs on the stem have thickened into pointed prickles, which answer the same purpose as the spines of their neighbors. In the thistles, the gorse and the holly, once more, it is the angles of the leaves themselves, which have grown into needle-like points so as to deter animals from browsing upon them. But the nettle probably carries the same tendency to the furthest possible limit. Not content with mere defense, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the gorse the raspberry Red for the gatherer springs, Two children did we stray and talk Wise, ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... absolutely no trees on these islands, although Tierra del Fuego is covered by one large forest. The largest bush in the island (belonging to the family of Compositae) is scarcely so tall as our gorse. The best fuel is afforded by a green little bush about the size of common heath, which has the useful property of burning while fresh and green. It was very surprising to see the Gauchos, in the ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... once upon a time— Just the same time, of course, There also lived a Wicked Old Fox Among the heath and gorse. ...
— All About the Little Small Red Hen • Anonymous
... destructive now than I was then. The moral passion has taken my destructiveness in hand and directed it to moral ends. I have become a reformer, and, like all reformers, an iconoclast. I no longer break cucumber frames and burn gorse bushes: I shatter creeds ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... he heard the bracken stirring and something scraping the gorse below. They were coming; they were among the rocks! He straightened up and hurled a great slab of rock down through darkness; heard them scrambling upward still; seized slab after slab and smashed them downward at the flashes ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... sport to singe the beard o' the King of Spain! Brave sport, but in the end dreamed he of home— Of where the trout-brook lisped among the reeds, Of great chalk cliffs and leagues of yellow gorse, Of peaceful lanes, of London's roaring streets, The crowds, the shops, the pageants in Cheapside, And heard the trumpets blaring for the Queen When 't was the wind that whistled in the shrouds Off Cadiz. Ah, ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... leaf; and below were several fine sycamores, already green and umbrageous, intermingled with elms, ashes, and horse-chestnuts, and overshadowing brakes, covered with maples, alders, and hazels. The other spaces among the trees were enlivened by patches of yellow flowering and odorous gorse. Mixed with the warblings of innumerable feathered songsters were heard the cheering notes of the cuckoo; and the newly-arrived swallows were seen chasing the flies along the plain, or skimming over the surface of the river. ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... riding men. It was always presumed that Manor Cross itself was preserved for foxes, and the hounds were carefully run through the belt of woods. But half an hour did that, and then they went away to Price's Little Holt. On that side there were no more gentlemen's places; there was a gorse cover or two and sundry little spinnies; but the county was a country for foxes to run and men to ride; and with this before them, the members of the Brotherton Hunt were pleased to be summoned to ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... the blackberry bough, The scent of the gorse in the air! I shall love them ever as I love them now, I shall weary ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... after his too long absence, never for a moment ceased to be murmured. And the earth wore an under-robe of scent, delicious, very finely woven of the young fern sap, heather buds; larch-trees not yet odourless, gorse just going brown, drifted woodsmoke, and the breath of hawthorn. Above Earth's twin vestments of sound and scent, the blue enwrapping scarf of air, that wistful wide champaign, was spanned only ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... also a liveliness of manner in hunting, which, joined to its musical and melodious note, will always afford pleasure to the lovers of the chase, or at least to those who are unable to undertake the more exciting sport of fox-hunting. In rabbit-shooting, in gorse and thick cover, nothing can be more cheerful than the beagle; and they have been called rabbit-beagles from this employment, for which they are peculiarly qualified, especially those dogs which are ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... end of a bad day! A huntsman often has a very bad time out hunting, and it is sometimes a marvel that he does not take the advice which Job got from his wife. But now all things were smiling, and it was soon known that his lordship intended to draw Craigattan Gorse. Now in those parts there is no surer find, and no better chance of a run, than Craigattan ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... terror of travellers on that road. Did Pitt know that libellers likened him to the highwayman; for "Jerry took purses with his pistols, and Pitt with his Parliaments"? Lower down Pitt and Ryder found Tierney and his second, General Walpole, in a charming dell radiant with golden gorse and silver birches.[472] ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... world and to his fellows had slipped very easily from his unresisting shoulders. The glory of a perfect English midsummer lay like a golden spell upon the land. The moors were purple with heather, touched here and there with the fire of the flaming gorse, the wind blew always from the west, the gardens were ablaze with slowly bursting rhododendrons. Every gleam of coloring, every breath of perfume, seemed to carry him unresistingly back to the days of his boyhood. He fished once more in the trout ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... bank the green flags wave and rustle, and, all about, the meadows shine in pure gold of buttercups. The hawthorn hedges are a mass of gleaming blossom, which scents the breeze. There above rises the heath, yellow-mantled with gorse, and beyond, if I walk for an hour or two, I shall come out upon the sandy cliffs of Suffolk, and look over the ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... is the bluebell, a bulb, which also grows in deep shades. It is a little purple bell, with a narrow green leaf, like a ribbon. We often read in English stories, of the gorse and furze; these are two names for the same plant, a low bush, with strong, prickly leaves, growing much like a juniper. The contrast of its very brilliant yellow, pea-shaped blossoms, with the dark green of its leaves, is very beautiful. It grows here in ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... presents from the sea a remarkable and magnificent picture. Each house being at a different elevation, commands sunshine all the day. Sheltered from the cold wind, trees and flowers flourish and retain their beauty during the winter. When the golden gorse and purple heather are in bloom upon the downs it forms a most attractive scene. Steamboat trips daily during the summer furnish the visitors with abundant opportunities of enjoying this vision of beauty. The Railway Station lies between the hills behind the Church spire. ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various
... frowsty comfort if they chose. But they never lift a finger to make themselves comfortable. They will not sleep under a roof. They will not clothe themselves: a girdle with a few pockets hanging to it to carry things about in is all they wear: they will sit down on the wet moss or in a gorse bush when there is dry heather within two yards of them. Two years ago, when you were born, I did not understand this. Now I feel that I would not put myself to the trouble of walking two paces for all the ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... can't be got rid of without some little difficulty. Most of them, you will find on examination, belonged to confirmed hedgerow or woodside plants: they grow among bushes or low scrub, and thickets of gorse or bramble. Now, to such plants as these, it is obviously useful to have adhesive fruits and seeds: for when sheep or other animals get them caught in their coats, they carry them away to other bushy spots, and there, to get rid of the annoyance ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... her lightest behest; she was her prettiest, her most charming self. The American whispered to her that a picnic without her would be a desolation and he had half a mind to stop another week at his aunt's—but Gertrude was not enjoying herself. From behind the gorse bushes, from between the moss-grown boulders, from beneath the dark foliage of the Scotch firs, there peeped at ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... an affectionate manner of a fore pad of the fox which Bean had clutched by the two hind legs. Poor Tony Tuppett almost shed tears as he looked at the dead animal, and thought what might have been the fate of the pack. "It's him, my lord," he said, "as we run through Littleton gorse Monday after Christmas last, and up to Impington Park where he got away from us in a hollow tree. He's four year old," added Tony, looking at the animal's mouth, "and there warn't a finer dog ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... "Whin" is from the Welsh cwyn, meaning "weed." Whin is gorse or furze, and the sound Stevenson alludes to is frequently heard ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... But long since the Milesians had come into Ireland, and the Danaans had passed into the hills and the unseen; and with the old centuries of their enchantment heavy on them, their eyes had grown no better than the eyes of mortals: gorse-grown hills they saw, and green nettles growing, and no sign of the walls and towers of the palace of Lir. And they heard the bells ringing from a church, and were frightened at the "thin, dreadful sound." But afterwards, in ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... dead body of John Slater, driver of the special train, has just been found among the gorse bushes at a point two and a quarter miles from the Junction. Had fallen from his engine, pitched down the embankment, and rolled among the bushes. Injuries to his head, from the fall, appear to be cause of death. Ground has now been carefully examined, and there ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... man—not of the South, but fit to have been the godlike son of Spain—suddenly translated from soft and leafy North Aston to a bleak fell-side in the most desolate corner of Cumberland—where for lush hedges were cold, grim gray stone walls, and the sole flowers to be seen gorse which she could not gather, and heather which had no perfume—to a house set so far under the shadow that it saw the sun only for three months in the year, and where her sole companion was old Keziah Gryce, ill-favored in person, rough of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... marshland solitudes, lonely heaths and sandhills sloping downward to the sea; wildfowl-haunted shores and flats, rivers and lagoons through which the wherries glide, the calling of the herdman and the sighing of the sea-wind through bracken, gorse, and fir ridge—these are East Anglia, and, like voices heard in childhood, they are with her children wherever they may wander, until all earthly voices are for ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... busy with their cooking to notice her. As she passed behind some bushes she suddenly caught the gleam of a steel helmet within a few yards of her. She crouched down under the shelter of a clump of gorse. But in doing so she ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... tended his sheep might easily keep them from the plantation for this season, and the next spring he purposed to dig such a ditch round the whole as should secure it for ever. He was now extremely busy, making jackets for his sheep, providing willows for his decoy, and gorse and corn for his geese: the geese, of which he had a prodigious flock, were not yet turned into their fen, because a new scheme had occurred to Marvel, relative to some reeds with which a part of this fen was covered; on these reeds myriads of starlings were accustomed ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... April. The gorse was fast extending its golden empire over the commons. On the sunny slopes of the copses primroses were breaking through the hazel roots and beginning to gleam along the edges of the river. On the grass commons between Murewell and Mile End the birches rose ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lanes wreathed with dog-roses and white with May, looking over grass-fields with silvery ripples in the breeze into woods all golden and olive-green above with young foliage, and pink below with campion flowers, while the moorland beyond was in its glory of gorse near at hand, and purple hills closing the distance. I remember the drive especially, because Harold looked at the wealth of gay colouring so lovingly, comparing it with the frequently parched uniformity of the Bush, regretting somewhat the limited range, but ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the slope lay a stretch of pasture ground, some parts covered by "lady-smocks, all silver white," with the course of the little stream through the midst indicated by a perfect golden river of shining kingcups interspersed with ferns. Beyond lay tracts of brown heath and brilliant gorse and broom, which stretched for miles and miles along the flats, while the dry ground was covered with holly brake, and here and there woods of oak and beech made a sea of verdure, purpling ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... eye of the eagle soaring in the clouds, or that of the screech-owl piercing the darkness, to distinguish these men among the gorse and heather and underbrush where they ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... reasonably calm, she started out, meaning to go to the South Kensington Museum and wander the time away there; but once out-of-doors the sky seemed what she wanted, and, turning down the hill on the north side, she sat down under a gorse bush. Here tramps, coming in to London, passed the night under the stars; here was a vision, however dim, of nature. And nature alone could a little soothe ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... tier the Delectable Mountains arose, the higher peaks shining in the new sunlight. I must have felt like Linnaeus when for the first time he saw a field of gorse in bloom. ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... family want her to marry. She really wants to marry him, too, but she does not discover that till chapter fifteen. Listen: 'Far as the eye could stretch rolled the mauve and purple billows of heather, lit up here and there with the glowing yellow of gorse and broom, and edged round with the delicate greys and silver and green of the young birch trees. Tiny blue and brown butterflies fluttered above the fronds of heather, revelling in the sunlight, and overhead the larks were singing ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... low waste of unenclosed land, with sedge and gorse pricking up everywhere through the snow, and with long lines of pollards marking the bed of a frozen stream. Near the line was a deserted brick-kiln, surrounded by long uneven mounds and ridges of ice, with three poplars ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... the wide blue hill views and pleasant valleys one saw on either hand from the sandscarred roadway, even the sides of the road itself set about with grey heather scrub and prickly masses of gorse, and pine trees with their year's growth still bright green, against the darkened needles of the previous years, were fresh and delightful to Mr. Hoopdriver's eyes But the brightness of the day and the day-old sense of freedom fought an uphill fight against ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... scrambled up the bank, climbed to the top, and stood looking round for him. But he was gone, and there was not much chance for anyone not gifted with the tracking power of an Indian to follow the fugitive through the rough tangle of scrub oak, ferns, brambles and gorse which spread away right to the borders of ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... houses: Polperro had the eerie beauty of a dream or of a little foreign port. Such beauty and charm are on the edge of pain; you cannot disentangle them from it. They intoxicate, and pierce to tears. The warm morning sun sparkled on a still blue sea, and burned the gorse and bracken by the steep path's edge to fragrance. So steep the path was that they had to push their bicycles up it with bent backs and labouring steps, so narrow that they had to go in single file. It was never meant for cyclists, only for ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... likewise guarded, but by a yeoman who well knew the young Talbots, and made no difficulty about letting them out into the broken ground beyond the garden, sloping up into a little hill. Up bounded the boy and girl, like young mountaineers, through gorse and fern, and presently had gained a sufficient height to look over the country, marking the valleys whence still were rising "fragrant clouds of dewy steam" under the influence of the sunbeams, gazing ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Although there was much heather, broom and furze, trees and pasture broke the monotony of the moorland. Here was the better Limousin landscape—every knoll and mamelon covered with heather and other moor-plants, woods and meadows in the dells and dips. The numerous clumps of silver birches, and the gorse arrayed in its new flowers of bright gold, added to the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... would hint at an abandonment of the search having come thus far, even were he of the mind to run counter to the wish of the young lady from the Castle. None dares to do this, and the party follows her across the stretch of gorse and bracken called the Warren to the wood beyond. There the dog has stopped, waiting eagerly, showing by half-starts and returns that he knows he would be lost to sight if he were too quick afoot. For the wood is dark in front of him and the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... show us old England all silver and gold, With the flame o' the gorse and the flower o' the thorn; We long for lush meadow-lands where we were foaled And boast of great runs with the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... the country had materially changed since their descent of the hill. In place of the richly-cultivated district which lay on the other side, a broad brown tract of waste land spread out before them, covered with scattered patches of gorse, stunted fern, and low brushwood, presenting an unvaried surface of unbaked turf. The shallow coat of sod was manifested by the stones that clattered under the horse's hoofs as he rapidly traversed the arid soil, clearing with ease to himself, though not without discomfort ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... near the shore, and looks straight south over the Atlantic to the island of Colonsay. The entire surroundings are a delight to the eye: great towering mountains behind, the sea in front, and in the space between, green lawns, rocks, gorse, and many-tinted garden-plots. ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... Wells are numerous. The common, with its mixture of springy turf, golden gorse, with here and there a bold group of rocks, is one of the most beautiful in the home counties, and in whatever direction one wanders there are long views over far-stretching wooded ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... thing I want you to arrange is the purchase of those twenty acres of rough pasture and gorse, right in the centre of the property," said John, "rented by the man who lives outside Youlestone, at what they call Pott's farm, for his wretched, half-starved beasts to graze upon. He's saved us the trouble of exterminating the rabbits ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... wild, irregular turf soil,—soil poor for pasturage, but pleasant to the eye; with dell and dingle, bosks of fantastic pollards; dotted oaks of vast growth; here and there a weird hollow thorn-tree; patches of fern and gorse. Hoarse and loud cawed the rooks; and deep, deep as from the innermost core of the lovely woodlands came the mellow note of the cuckoo. A few moments more a wind of the road brought the house in sight. At its rear lay a piece of water, scarcely ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... around her the land lay brown and still; dead heather, and sometimes dead bracken, a shade paler, and, more rarely, gorse bushes, nearly brown, too, in their sober winter dress. It was almost flat, a wonderful illimitable place, very remote, very silent, unbroken except for occasional pine-trees. These were not scattered but grew in clumps, miles apart, though looking near in this ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... espied a thin wreath of smoke issuing from a small clay-built hut thatched with furze, built against the steepest part of the hill, of which it seemed a mere excrescence, about half way down the declivity; and, on calling aloud, two children, who had been picking up dry stumps of heath and gorse, and collecting them in a heap for fuel at the door of their hovel, first carefully deposited their little load, and then came running to ...
— The Ground-Ash • Mary Russell Mitford
... lonely moor, where the heather and gorse bloomed so bravely, so lonely that even along the road which skirted it the number of those who passed by in a day could be counted on the fingers of your hand; and as for the moor itself, it seldom had any visitors but the cows from the little ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... were to be shot for dinner, the lower rocks places where ormers and limpets and vraie might be found. But to little Nance the rabbits were playfellows whose sudden deaths she lamented and resented; the cliff-sides were glorious gardens thick with sweet-scented yellow gorse and honeysuckle and wild roses, carpeted with primroses and bluebells; and, in their season, rich and juicy with blackberries beyond the possibilities ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... high [20] upon the down, Alone amid a prospect wide; There's neither Johnny nor his Horse Among the fern or in the gorse; 220 There's neither Doctor nor ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... the breezy hill-side which overhung the sea; away through the furze, the gorse, and the large brake-ferns; away until they had left the pretty villa far behind them, and found themselves in the small sheltered bay where Mr. Smith's boat, the White Lily, ...
— The Boy Artist. - A Tale for the Young • F.M. S.
... their abodes in the earth.] Wylde worme[gh] to her won wrye[gh] i{n} e ere, [Sidenote: The fox goes to the woods.] e fox & e folmarde to e fryth wynde[gh], [Sidenote: Harts to the heath, and hares to the gorse.] Hertt{es} to hy[gh]e hee, hare[gh] to gorste[gh], [Sidenote: Lions and leopards go to the lakes.] & lyou{n}e[gh] & lebarde[gh] to e lake ryft{es}, 536 [Sidenote: Eagles and hawks to the high rocks.] Herne[gh] & haueke[gh] to e hy[gh]e roche[gh]; e hole-foted ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various |
