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More "Fen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a British tribe which takes a prominent part in the insurrection under Boadicea: and after the defeat of that heroic queen he continues the struggle in the fen-country. Ultimately Beric is defeated and carried captive to Rome, where he succeeds in saving a Christian maid by slaying a lion in the arena, and is rewarded by being made the personal protector of Nero. Finally, he escapes and returns to Britain, where he becomes ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... in hidden glens From the secret heart of the mountains, Where the red fox hath its dens And the gods their crystal fountains; Up runnel and leaping cataract, Boulder and ledge, I climbed and tracked, Till I came to the top of the world and the fen That drinks up the clouds and cisterns the rain, And down through the floors of the deep morass The procreant woodland essences drain— The thunder's home, where the eagles scream And the centaurs pass; But, where it was ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... I found by thee unawed, On that thrice hallow'd eve abroad. When goblins haunt from flood and fen, The steps of men. COLLINS'S ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... answer: "He would yield no passage through his dominions to the Ostrogoths; if they would go by that road they must first fight with the unconquered Gepidae" Traustila then took up a strong position near the Hiulca Palus, whose broad waters, girdled by fen and treacherous morass, made the onward march of the invaders a task of almost desperate danger. But the Ostrogoths could not now retreat; famine and pestilence lay behind them on their road; they must go forward, and with a reluctant heart Theodoric ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... night it was, and bitter cold; the east wind blowing bleak, and bringing with it stinging particles from marsh, and moor, and fen - from the Great Desert and Old Egypt, may be. Some of the component parts of the sharp-edged vapour that came flying up the Thames at London might be mummy-dust, dry atoms from the Temple at Jerusalem, camels' foot-prints, crocodiles' ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... tradition relates that the Lincolnshire Flinders were amongst the people taken over to England by Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, a Dutch engineer of celebrity in his day, who undertook in 1621 to drain 360,000 acres of fen in Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. He was financed by English and Dutch capitalists, and took his reward in large grants of land which he made fit for habitation and cultivation. Vermuyden and his Flemings were not allowed ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... Castle. In every direction the country is spread out green and flat, and, except for the towers and spires of the churches, it is practically featureless. To the north the horizon is brought closer by the rounded outlines of the wolds; everywhere else you seem to be looking into infinity, as in the Fen Country. ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... words? Ah my sweet knight, You have the better of us that weave and weep While the blithe battle blows upon your eyes Like rain and wind; yet I remember too When this last year the fight at Corrichie Reddened the rushes with stained fen-water, I rode with my good men and took delight, Feeling the sweet clear wind upon my eyes And rainy soft smells blown upon my face In riding: then the great fight jarred and joined, And the sound stung me right through heart and all; For I was here, see, gazing off the hills, In ...
— Chastelard, a Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... my blood, you English men! From misty hill and misty fen, From cot, and town, and plough, and moor, Come in—before I shut the door! Into my courtyard paved with stones That keep the names, that keep the bones, Of none but English men who came Free of their lives, ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... a different world which has its own life, its settled inhabitants and its passing travelers, its voices, its noises, and above all its mystery. Nothing is more disturbing, nothing, more disquieting, more terrifying occasionally, than a fen. Why should this terror hang over these low plains covered with water? Is it the vague rustling of the rushes, the strange Will-o'-the-wisps, the profound silence which envelops them on calm nights, or is it the strange mists, which hang over ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... is thy face; * * * all that grows, has grace. All are appropriate. Bog and moss and fen Are only poor to undiscerning men. Here may the nice and curious eye explore How Nature's hand adorns the ruby moor; Beauties are these that from the view retire, But will repay ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... to the Dismal Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore; Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen where the serpent feeds, And ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... Rushed on the Roman Three; And Lausulus of Urgo, The rover of the sea; And Aruns of Volsinium, Who slew the great wild boar, The great wild boar that had his den Amid the reeds of Cosa's fen. And wasted fields and slaughtered ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... wasting their lives in unprofitable wildernesses, what shall we say to many a hermit of Protestant, and so-called civilised times, who hides his head in a solitude in Yorkshire, and buries his probably fine talents in a Lincolnshire fen? Have I genius? Am I blessed with gifts of eloquence to thrill and soothe, to arouse the sluggish, to terrify the sinful, to cheer and convince the timid, to lead the blind groping in darkness, and to trample the audacious sceptic in the dust? My own conscience, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... before midnight they plunged into a narrow, miry road that traversed wastes and low coppices; the plash of the horses' feet showed the tract to be marshy and full of pools. Her ladyship looked out across the dreary fen and exclaimed,— ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... stream from a festering fen Is met and scattered by a mountain brook Leaping along its beautiful, bright course, So now the force Of these new Followers of the camp has come Straight from God's Source To cleanse the world and cleanse the minds of men. Good women, of great courage and large hearts, Women whose slogan ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Of honour tied her tongue from self-defence. A marshy ground commodiously was near, Thither she ran, and held her breath for fear; Lest if a word she spoke of any thing, That word might be the secret of the king. Thus full of counsel to the fen she went, Griped all the way, and longing for a vent; 190 Arrived, by pure necessity compell'd, On her majestic marrow-bones she kneel'd: Then to the water's brink she laid her head, And as a bittour[79] ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... lion, rushing from his den, Amidst the plain of some wide-water'd fen, (Where numerous oxen, as at ease they feed, At large expatiate o'er the ranker mead) Leaps on the herds before the herdsman's eyes; The trembling herdsman far to distance flies; Some lordly bull (the rest dispersed and fled) He singles ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... at St. James's the other day more people were invited than there was room for, and some half-dozen were forced to sit at a side table. He said to Lord Brownlow, 'Well, when you are flooded (he thinks Lincolnshire is all fen) you will come to us at Windsor.' To the Freemasons he was rather good. The Duke of Sussex wanted him to receive their address in a solemn audience, which he refused, and when they did come he said, 'Gentlemen, if my love for you ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... arable land and pasture land were not supposed by the best political arithmeticians of that age to amount to much more than half the area of the kingdom. [62] The remainder was believed to consist of moor, forest, and fen. These computations are strongly confirmed by the road books and maps of the seventeenth century. From those books and maps it is clear that many routes which now pass through an endless succession of orchards, cornfields, hayfields, and beanfields, then ran through nothing but heath, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... scattered over a considerable amount of ground, but the work was not heavy. The church was one of the fine edifices for which the fen country is so famous, and the vicarage was a comfortable house, with large and very beautiful gardens and paddock, and with outlying fields. The people were farmers and laborers, with a sprinkling of shopkeepers; the only "society" was that of the neighboring ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... musing, 'twas not one but ten —- Rank on rank of ghostly soldiers marching o'er the fen, Marching in the misty air they showed in dreams to me, And behind me was the shouting and the ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... to soil her virgin purity. Yea, there where very desolation dwells, By grots and caverns shagged with horrid shades, She may pass on with unblenched majesty, Be it not done in pride, or in presumption. Some say no evil thing that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost, That breaks his magic chains at curfew time, No goblin or swart faery of the mine, Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity. Do ye believe me yet, or shall I call Antiquity from the old schools of Greece To testify ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... Thy power hath blest me, sure it still Will lead me on O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till The night is gone, And with the morn those angel faces smile, Which I have loved long since, and lost ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... European nation to collect and preserve their ancient folklore. In the seventeenth century we meet men of literary tastes like Palmskold who tried to collect and interpret the various national songs of the fen-dwellers of the North. But the Kalevala proper was collected by two great Finnish scholars of our own century, Zacharias Topelius and Elias Lonnrot. Both were practising physicians, and in this capacity came into frequent contact with ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Loss of a bridegroom dear; such whirling passion in eddies Suck'd thee adown, so drew sheer to a sudden abyss, 110 Deep as Graian abyss near Pheneos o'er Cyllene, Strainer of ooze impure milk'd from a watery fen; (110) Hewn, so stories avouch, in a mountain's kernel; an hero Hew'd it, falsely declar'd Amphytrionian, he, When those monster birds near grim Stymphalus his arrow 115 Smote to the death; such task bade him a dastardly lord. So that another God might tread that portal of heaven ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... stream in front of him were perhaps fen feet high and sloped sharply to the water's edge, fairly free from tangle. Presently, McTavish localized the sound of bells as coming from the opposite bank, and expected to watch the equipage, preceded or accompanied by trapper or hunter, speed past, following the direction ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... right of the mallard—roared out lustily that I had killed him. I saw that the drake was knocked over as dead as a stone, and consequently laughed at the fellow, and set it down as a cool trick to extort money, not uncommon among the fen men, as applied to members of the University. I had just finished loading, and my retriever had just brought in the dead bird, which was quite riddled, cut up evidently by the whole body of the charge—both the wings broken, one in three places, one leg almost dissevered, and several shots in the ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... living at this hour And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby; England has need of thee, and so have I— She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour, League after grassy league from Lincoln tower To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen. Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men, Like a tall ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... walked along the dark fen-meadow he watched the moon and did not speak. She plodded beside him. He hated her, for she seemed in some way to make him despise himself. Looking ahead—he saw the one light in the darkness, the window of their ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... lowly fen, Soared up in stately flight; But, striking 'gainst the gilded vane, He fell in sorry plight: And as, with wounded wing, he lay Down in the marsh below, He thus addressed the glittering thing, The cause of ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... From them that till the black and crumbling plain, Where the sweet waters of Aegyptus glide, To those that on the Northern marches ride, And the Ceteians, and the blameless men That round the rising-place of Morn abide, And all the dwellers in the Asian fen. ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... raising high to heaven her hands, she cry'd,— "Be this your home for ever!—Gracious heard, "Her prayer was granted. Now they joy to plunge, "Beneath the waters; now they deep immerge "Their bodies in the hollow fen; now raise "Their heads, and skim the surface of the pool, "Often they rest upon the margin's brink, "And oft light-springing, in the cool lake plunge. "Now still their rude contentious tongues they use, "Still squabbling, lost to shame beneath ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... last dear drops of the blood in the hearts that love you, Filling those hearts till the love is more than the heart can hold? Therefore the song breaks forth from the depths of the hidden fountain Singing your least frail flower, your raiment of seas and skies, Singing your pasture and cornfield, fen and valley and mountain, England, desire of my heart, England, delight of mine eyes! Take my song too, my country: many a son and debtor Pays you in praise and homage out of your gifts' full store; Life of my life, my England, many will praise ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... sob of the breeze sweeps over the trees, and the mists lie low on the fen, From grey tombstones are gathered the bones that once were women and men, And away they go, with a mop and a mow, to the revel that ends too soon, For cockcrow limits our holiday - the dead ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... St. Katherine is now. Beyond that, and only marshes show, with Stebonhithe Church and a few other signs to mark recognizable country. On the south side the marshes were very extensive, stretching from the River inland for a considerable distance. The north shore was fen also, but a little above the tides was a low eminence, a clay and gravel cliff, that sea-wall which now begins below the Albert Dock and continues round the East Anglian seaboard. Once it serpentined ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... run of the seas Of traffic shall hide thee, Never the hell-colored smoke of the factories Hide thee, Never the reek of the time's fen-politics Hide thee, And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee, And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee, Labor, at leisure, in art, — till yonder beside thee My soul shall float, friend Sun, The ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... Browning for years and are used to the monologues are better pleased to find the old ideas than new ones, which they could not understand so readily. When the later Browning takes us on one of those long afternoon rambles through his mind,—over moor and fen, through jungle, down precipice, past cataract,—we know just where we are coming out in the end. We know the place better than he did himself. Nor will posterity like Browning's manners,—the dig in the ribs, the personal application, and de te fabula of ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... north of Pickering, known as Newton Dale, with its precipitous sides rising to a height of 300 or even 400 feet, must have assumed its present proportions principally during the glacial period when it formed an overflow valley from a lake held up by ice in the neighbourhood of Fen Bogs and Eller Beck. This great gorge is tenanted at the present time by Pickering Beck, an exceedingly small stream, which now carries off all the surface drainage and must therefore be only remotely related to its great precursor that carved this enormous trench out of the limestone ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... by, Upon the plow hanging. His coat was of a clout That cary[8] was called; His hood was full of holes, And his hair out; With his knopped[9] shoon Clouted full thick; His toes totedun[10] out As he the land treaded; His hosen overhung his hockshins On every side, All beslomered in fen[11] As he the plow followed. Two mittens as meter Made all of clouts, The fingers were for-werd[12] And full of fen hanged. This wight wallowed in the fen Almost to the ankle. Four rotheren[13] him before That feeble were worthy, Men might ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... frightful then? I live; though they call it death; I am only cold—say dear again"— But scarce could he heave a breath; The air felt dank, like a frozen fen, ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... me a copy of Cipriano de Valera's New Testament for a peseta. The villages of Spain that Borrow visited could even at that time compare favourably morally and educationally, with the villages of his own county of Norfolk at the same period. The morals of the agricultural labourers of the English fen country eighty years ago were a scandal, and the peasantry read nothing; more than half of them could not read. They had not, moreover, the humanising passion for song and dance that Andalusia knew. But this is not to deny that the Bible Society under Borrow's instrumentality did ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... my bosom then, Still as a stagnant fen! Hateful to me were men, The sun-light hateful. In the vast forest here, Clad in my warlike gear, Fell I upon my ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... music of the monastery choir that floated out to them over the tranquil water. The monks of Ely, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of King Canute, tell us that he had a strong affection for the fen country and for their church, and gave the following story in that connection. It is at once ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... in the Oldtown fen, Or the gray earth-flax of the Devil's Den, Or swam in the wooded Artichoke, Or coiled by the Northman's Written Rock, Nothing on record is left to show; Only the fact that he lived, we know, And left the cast of a "double head" In the scaly mask which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... Medicine Men Who consult the Australian bear, And 'tis he, with his lights on the fen, Who helps Jack o' Lanthorn to snare The peasants of Devon, who swear Under Commonwealth, Stuart, or Guelph, That they never had half such a scare - It is just the ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... unwilling: "The man is foolish who comes here alone in the dark shade of night: fire is flickering, howes are opening, field and fen are aflame," and flees into the woods, but Hervoer is dauntless and goes on alone. She reaches the howes, and calls on the ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... Beard (TVAESKAEG, Double-beard, "TWA-SHAG") was not born; and the Monks of Ely had not yet (by about a hundred years) begun that singing, (Without note or comment, in the old, BOOK OF ELY date before the Conquest) is preserved this stave;—giving picture, if we consider it, of the Fen Country all a lake (as it was for half the year, till drained, six centuries after), with Ely Monastery rising like an island in the distance; and the music of its nones or vespers sounding soft and far over the solitude, eight hundred years ago ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... and low o'er field and fen, Like gloom above the souls of men; And through the forest solitudes The fitful night-wind rustles by, Breathing ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... county; both the wet half and the dry half, both the Fen district and the Wold district, are treeless; and the Wolds are only a line of molehills, of great utility, but no special beauty. But it is the greatest producing county in England, and the produce, purely agricultural, is the ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... unequal tasks to run, Thus Nature disciplines her son: Meeter, she says, for me to stray, And waste the solitary day, In plucking from yon fen the reed, And watch it floating down the Tweed; Or idly list the shrilling lay With which the milkmaid cheers her way, Marking its cadence rise and fail, As from the field, beneath her pail, She trips it down ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... gettin' shorter an' the air a keener snap; Apples now are droppin' into Mother Nature's lap; The mist at dusk is risin' over valley, marsh an' fen An' it's just as plain as sunshine, winter's ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... no such blood as theirs for the shedding, In the veins of Cavaliers was its heading. You have no such stately men In your abolition den, To march through foe and fen, nothing dreading. ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... the Ely Fen District in 1815, which the 'Westminster Gazette' calls 'a powerful drama of human passion'; and the 'National Observer' 'a ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... seen Caernarvon's towers, And well he knew the spire of Sarum; And he had been where Lincoln bell Flings o'er the fen that ponderous knell— ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... "Moor and fen." While these words seem new and unusual to us, we must remember that in England they are as common as the terms marsh and swamp are ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... these, who dearly love to walk for hours in pursuit of game in the autumn, on the chance of bagging an occasional brace of partridges or a wild pheasant (for everything here is wild), or, in winter, when lake and fen are frostbound, by the river and its withybeds after snipe and wildfowl—for the Cotswold stream has ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... and virtuous," spake Peter in the drone of an ancient fortune-teller, "one keeps her eyes pinned on the front. One hears nothing; and one becomes as discreet of tongue as the little blue sphinx at Chow-Fen-Chu." ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... are the two magnificent gold torcs found in the side of one of the raths at Tara, and these belong to a type that has been found in England and France, of which the best known examples are those found at Yeovil, Somerset,[28] and Grunty Fen, Cambridge.[29] A torc of this type was also found by Schliemann in the royal treasury in the second city of Troy. This find has led to a good deal of speculative opinions varying as to whether the model of the torc was ...
— The Bronze Age in Ireland • George Coffey
... village churchyard, where the moss-grown gravestones stood grim and ghostly in the white light, and out across the meadows down to where the waters of the Nene, rippling on, were touched with silver. The river-path was wide, running by the winding bank away to the fen-lands and beyond. As I gained the river's edge and walked beneath the willows I heard now and then a sharp, swift rustling in the sedges as some water-rat or otter, disturbed by my presence, slipped away into hiding. The rural peace of that ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... in the glare Of the moon's dying light. As a fen-fire's beam On a sluggish stream Gleams dimly, so the moon shone there; And it yellowed the strings of thy tangled hair, That shook in the wind ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... to you a fact, sir," replied Fen-ton, "which I have witnessed with my own eyes; but we have still stranger and ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... who through a fen Of filthy darkness grope: We did not dare to breathe a prayer, Or to give our anguish scope: Something was dead in each of us, And what was ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... invaders. He was known as Pestilence, and his footsteps were so soft that neither scout nor picket could bar his entrance. His paths were subterranean,—through the tepid swamp water, the shallow graves of the dead; and aerial,—through the stench of rotting animals, the nightly miasms of bog and fen. His victims were not pierced, or crushed, or mangled, but their deaths were not less terrible, because more lingering. They seemed to wither and shrivel away; their eyes became at first very bright, and afterward lustreless; ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Saint Guthlac was an abbot of Croyland, and many conflicts did he have with the devils of the fen country, whose presence could generally be ascertained by the hissing which took place when they settled with their fiery hoofs and claws on the ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... embarked on board of a privateer which was employed by the Jacobites as a regular packet boat between France and England. This vessel conveyed him to a desolate spot in Romney Marsh. About half a mile from the landing place a smuggler named Hunt lived on a dreary and unwholesome fen where he had no neighbours but a few rude shepherds. His dwelling was singularly well situated for a contraband traffic in French wares. Cargoes of Lyons silk and Valenciennes lace sufficient to load thirty packhorses had repeatedly ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... upas dripped its poison on the ground Harmless; the silvery veil of fog went up From mouldering fen and cold, malarial pool, But brought no taint and threatened ill to none. Far off adown the mountain's craggy side From time to time the avalanche thundered, sounding Like sport of giant children, and the rocks Whereon it smote re-echoed innocently. Then in a pause of silence Lucifer Struck music ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... boys began playing, but they made so much noise, crying "Fen!" and "Ebbs!" and "Knuckle down!" that Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, the muskrat lady housekeeper, went to the bungalow door ...
— Uncle Wiggily in the Woods • Howard R. Garis
... block, and raise her features, then, Bloodless and ghastly, for the scorn of men! Begone forever. Go where terrors spread Their sea and forest mouths to crush you dead. Oh, how the clouds shall crimson from each glen, A roar with blaze, and flame search out each fen, If back to us, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... afar the city spires, and thence Came the deep murmur of its throng of men, And as its grateful odors met thy sense, They seemed the perfumes of thy native fen. Fair lay its crowded streets, and at the sight Thy tiny song grew ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... daylight died out quickly, leaving him faced by a broken bridge. He descended into the ravine, forded a narrow stream by the last gleam of rapid water, and clambering out on the other side was met by the night which fen like a bandage over his eyes. The wind sweeping in the darkness the broadside of the sierra worried his ears by a continuous roaring noise as of a maddened sea. He suspected that he had lost the road. Even in daylight, with its ruts and mud-holes and ledges of outcropping stone, it was difficult ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... Guelderland outspreads Her green wide water-meads Laced by the silver of the parted Rhine; Where round the horizon low The waving millsails go, And poplar avenues stretch their pillar'd line; That morn a clinging mist uncurl'd Its folds o'er South-Fen town, ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... dans la chambre, toute mon me en feu, j'entendis bientt un heurt en quelque sorte plus fort qu'auparavant. Srement, dis-je, srement c'est quelque chose la persienne de ma fentre. Voyons donc ce qu'il y a et explorons ce mystre—que mon coeur se calme un moment et explore ce mystre; c'est le vent et ...
— Le Corbeau • Edgar Allan Poe
... is yet not sweet enough, I'll bid a gentler, subtler strain awake, And sing of fights with Jackson on the Gulf And Perry's hard-fought battle on the Lake! Of fights in fen and moor and hoary brake, On Lookout Mountain and the rolling main— Through searing blasts of bleak December's flake, And drenching torrents of fair April's rain: Their valiant deeds are springing ever ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones
... would be emptying the cup to the dregs. The lost magnificence always in view—for, you must know, the manor-house of Helenenthal exactly overlooks it. It is surrounded by moor and fen—wellnigh two hundred acres. Perhaps one could cultivate some of it—one might be the pioneer of progress. What ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... that most melancholy of processions, a curate's furniture en route, filed slowly through the village, and out along the highroad, that led through bog and fen, and by lake borders to the town of N——. First came three loads of black turf, carefully piled and roped; then two loads of hay; a cow with a yearling calf; and lastly, the house furniture, mostly of rough deal. The articles, that would be hardly good enough for one ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... General increase in trade and poulation The Thames St. Katherine's Docks Tewkesburg Bridge Gloucester Bridge Dean Bridge, Edinburgh Glasgow Bridge Telford's works of drainage in the Fens The North Level The Nene Outfall Effects of Fen drainage ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... thing that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meager hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost That breaks his magic chains at ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... cushion, a reliable earth-stopper and an anise-seed bag, a man must indeed be thoroughly blase who cannot enjoy a scamper across country, over the Pennsylvania wold, the New Jersey mere, the Connecticut moor, the Indiana glade, the Missouri brake, the Michigan mead, the American tarn, the fen, the gulch, the buffalo wallow, the cranberry marsh, the glen, the draw, the canyon, the ravine, the forks, the ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... Not here, Not among modern kinds of men; But in the stony fields, where clear Through the thin trees the skies appear; In delicate spare soil and fen, And ...
— Later Poems • Alice Meynell
... saw Ulfkytel's men breaking and taking to the marshes, where the Danes cared not to follow them. More than one I could see sinking under the weight of arms in the fen slime among the green tussocks of grass that he had slipped from, and I saw that the flying ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... wi' sic a braw fellow, In poortith I might make a fen'; What care I in riches to wallow, If I ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... gave; Came Susiskanes, warrior wild, And Pegastagon, Egypt's child: Thee, brave Arsames! from afar Did holy Memphis launch to war; And Ariomardus, high in fame, From Thebes the immemorial came, And oarsmen skilled from Nilus' fen, A countless crowd of warlike men: And next, the dainty Lydians went— Soft rulers of a continent— Mitragathes and Arcteus bold In twin command their ranks controlled, And Sardis town, that teems with gold, Sent forth its squadrons ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... accompanied by Beadle of A Battery, still dressed in overcoat and pyjamas. The stream of retreating traffic on the road between Bethancourt and Caillouel was thicker than ever; the centre of Caillouel was as packed as a Fen village during a hiring fair; the divisional horse-master, the C.R.E., and the D.A.Q.M.G. were among the officers trying to sort out the muddle; and in front of the Mairie, like a policeman on point duty, stood a perspiring staff captain. "That'll mean the Military ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... they're able, Or drainin' a fen, They'll muck out a stable As well as the men. Their praises I'm hymnin', For where would ha' bin, If it weren't for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various
... my moorland home, Nymph of Torridge, proud I come; Leaving fen and furzy brake, Haunt of eft and spotted snake, Where to fill mine urns I use, Daily with Atlantic dews; While beside the reedy flood Wild duck leads her paddling brood. For this morn, as Phoebus gay Chased through heaven the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... sooth, Whether to give thee joy, or bid thee blind Thine eyes with tears,—that thou hast not resign'd The passionate fire and freshness of thy youth: For as the current of thy life shall flow, Gilded by shine of sun or shadow-stain'd, Through flow'ry valley or unwholesome fen, Thrice blessed in thy joy, or in thy woe Thrice cursed of thy race,—thou art ordain'd To share beyond ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... a year be over ox and horse shall go free in Essex, and man and woman shall draw the team and the plough; and north away in the east countries dwell men in poor halls of wattled reeds and mud, and the north-east wind from off the fen whistles through them; and poor they be to the letter; and there him whom the lord spareth, the bailiff squeezeth, and him whom the bailiff forgetteth, the Easterling Chapman sheareth; yet be these stout men and ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... the Earl now proceeded toward the more important city which he had determined to besiege. Zutphen, or South-Fen, an antique town of wealth and elegance, was the capital of the old Landgraves of Zutphen. It is situate on the right bank of the Yssel, that branch of the Rhine which flows between Gelderland and Overyssel into ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... in number, close bordering the water, embracing about an acre each, and situated in a low fen, draining several valleys. The excavated soil was thrown up in dykes, made tight by being beaten all over, while in a soft state, with the heavy, flat ends of Palm stalks. Lving side by side, by three ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... they—But the marplot Time stands by, With a knowing wink in his funny old eye. He grasps by the top an immense fool's cap, Which he calls a philosophaster-trap: And rightly enough, for while these little men Croak loud as a concert of frogs in a fen, He first singles out one, and then another, Down goes the cap—lo! a moment's pother, A spirit like that which a rushlight utters As just at the last it kicks and gutters: When the cruel smotherer is raised again Only snuff, and but ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... away on and on till she came to a fen, and there she gathered a lot of rushes and made them into a kind of a sort of a cloak with a hood, to cover her from head to foot, and to hide her fine clothes. And then she went on and on till she came ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... of Highlanders, both in these islands and elsewhere, have been told in verse and prose, and not more often, nor more loudly, than they deserve. But we must remember, now and then, that there have been heroes likewise in the lowland and in the fen. Why, however, poets have so seldom sung of them; why no historian, save Mr. Motley in his "Rise of the Dutch Republic," has condescended to tell the tale of their doughty deeds, is a question ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... somewhat among themselves, had been kept at the monasteries in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere. The yearly entries were mostly brief, dry records of passing events, though occasionally they become full and animated. The fen country of Cambridge and Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries. Here were the great abbeys of Peterborough and Croyland and Ely minster. One of the earliest English songs tells how the savage heart of the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... should'st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters; altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower 5 Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Oh! raise us up, return to us again; ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... latter are small, and no ridging or hurdling is yet practised. From time to time appears a patch of barren moorland, which has been planted with forest-trees, in accordance with the suggestions of Mr. Evelyn, and under the wet sky the trees are thriving. Wide reaches of fen, measured by hundreds of miles, (which now bear great crops of barley,) are saturated with moisture, and tenanted only by ghost-like ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... the sob of the breeze sweeps over the trees, and the mists lie low on the fen, From grey tomb-stones are gathered the bones that once were women and men, And away they go, with a mop and a mow, to the revel that ends too soon, For cockcrow limits our holiday—the dead of the ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... sedges of the fen Open their hearts and blossom to the sky; The wild thyme on the mountain's knees Unrolls its purple market to the bees; Unharvested of men The Traveller's Joy can only smile and die. Joy, joy alone the throbbing whitethroats bring, Joy to themselves and heaven! They were ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the wailings of the frogs. "What shall we do, should he have progeny?" Said they to Destiny; 'One sun we scarcely can endure, And half-a-dozen, we are sure, Will dry the very sea. Adieu to marsh and fen! Our race will perish then, Or be obliged to fix Their dwelling in the Styx!' For such an humble animal, The frog, I take ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... board of her, and to transfer it to the steam-vessels. They then began to sail up the Nun branch of the Niger. This part of the river is most unhealthy; it is one entire swamp, covered with mangrove, cabbage, and palm trees. "The fen-damp rose in the morning cold and clammy to the feeling, and appeared like the smoke of a damp wood fire." The bodies of the natives are covered with ulcers and cutaneous eruptions; they spend a short and miserable life in profligacy. After they had gone up about thirty miles, the banks had an ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... bequeath my farm of West Woldland to my eldest nephew, Grimes Goodenough; my farm of Holland Fen to my dear nephew, John Wright, and my farm of Clover-hill to my youngest ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... Frederick Hamilton's men Were hungry for the fray, And it was a son of the bog and fen Would guide them ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... strong while soul and mind matured. When nothing more adventurous befell, he chopped down trees for the cloister hearths. But oftener the clash of arms echoed in the quiet halls, or the peaceful brethren crossed themselves as they watched him break an unruly horse in the cloister fen. Saxo tells us that he swam easily in full armor, and in more than one campaign in later years saved drowning comrades who ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... edge of the Fen Country, where the Conqueror found the toughest opposition to his completed sovereignty in England, the patch of raised ground just outside modern Cambridge was a suitable spot for the erection of a castle, and from here he conducted his operations against the English, who held out under Hereward ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... beer, and smoke disgusting short pipes; and when we established the Coverley Club in Trinity, they set up an opposition, and called themselves the Navvies. And they used to make piratical expeditions down to Lynn in eight oars, to attack bargemen, and fen girls, and shoot ducks, and sleep under turf-stacks, and come home when they had drank all the public-house taps dry. ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... him, too, whether St. Patrick did, or did not stand on that mountain peak, 'in the spirit and power of Elias' (after whom it was long named), fasting, like Elias, forty days and forty nights, wrestling with the demons of the storm, and the snakes of the fen, and the Peishta-more (the monstrous Python of the lakes), which assembled at the magic ringing of his bell, till he conquered not by the brute force of a Hercules and Theseus, and the monster-quellers of old Greece, but by the ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... of Axholme, in the midst of a long stretch of fen country bounded by four rivers, and for a great part under water, Epworth was at that epoch dreariness itself. The Rev. Samuel's spirits must have sunk within him as the carts bearing his already large family and his few household belongings toiled ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... closed, and which are run entirely for the benefit of seafaring men. It would be easy to make inquiries at some of these and discover what vessels were leaving by the next tide, and a bargain could be struck immediately, go far as Fen wick was concerned, he inclined towards a sailing ship bound for the Argentine. His spirits rose slightly at the prospect before him; his step was fairly light and buoyant as he proceeded in the direction of his bedroom. There was no light in the room, so that he ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... suggests the deliberate and calculated creation of man. It stands upon a little solitary hill at the head of Taw Marsh, and wins its name from the East Okement River which runs through the valley on its western flank. Above wide fen and marsh it rises, yet seen from Steeperton's vaster altitude, Oke Tor looks no greater than some fantastic child-castle built by a Brobding-nagian baby with granite bricks. Below it on this July day the waste of bog-land was puckered ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Ocnus of Falerii Rushed on the Roman Three: And Lausulus of Urgo, The rover of the sea; And Aruns of Volsinium, Who slew the great wild boar, The great wild boar that had his den Amidst the reeds of Cosa's fen, And wasted fields, and slaughtered men, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the house which our suffering heroine occupied, to New-York, was not very great, yet the snow fen so fast, and the cold so intense, that, being unable from her situation to walk quick, she found herself almost sinking with cold and fatigue before she reached the town; her garments, which were merely suitable to the ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... French water-craft of peculiar Italian rig—the lateen sail. These sails spread like the great white wings of birds, and the craft glides among the islands and hovers about every gulf and bay and rocky coast of that beautiful sea. Under her dashing young French captain, Raoul Yvard, Le Fen Follet (Jack-o'-Lantern or fire-fly, as you will) glides like a water-sprite here, there, and everywhere, guided by Cooper's sea phrases,—for which he had an unfailing instinct,—that meant something "even to the land-lubber who does not know the lingo." It is said many down-east fishermen ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... their cabins, The fields of their corn, Unwarned and unweaponed, The victims were torn,— By the whirlwind of murder Swooped up and swept on To the low, reedy fen-lands, The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... up the gentle slope (the rise is one hundred and thirty-eight feet in rather more than a mile), the ground became more and more full of pitch, and the vegetation poorer and more rushy, till it resembled, on the whole, that of an English fen. An Ipomoea or two, and a scarlet flowered dwarf Heliconia, kept up the tropic type, as does a stiff brittle fern about two feet high. We picked the weeds, which looked like English mint or basil, and found that most of them had three longitudinal nerves in each leaf, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... j'entends, moi aussi. Tu veux me jouer centre elle. La Grangeur—pah! Consoles-toi avec elle, mon vieux. Je ne veux plus de toi. Tu m'as donne de tes sales rentes Groenlandoises, et je n'ai pas pu les vendre. Ah, vieux farceur, tu vas voir ce que fen vais faire." ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... sitting at his meat, In a farm-house they call Spelunca, sited By the sea-side, among the Fundane hills, Within a natural cave; part of the grot, About the entry, fen, and overwhelm'd Some of the waiters; others ran away: Only Sejanus with his knees, hands, face, O'erhanging Caesar, did oppose himself To the remaining ruins, and was found In that so labouring posture by the soldiers That came to succour him. With which adventure, He hath so fix'd ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... winds A voice came murmuring, 'We must work and wait'; And every echo in the far-off fen Took up the utterance: 'We must work and wait.' Her spirit felt it, 'We must work ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... far as the edge of the sea to get mussels and lobsters to sell. And out there on the cold lonely marshes we would see wild geese flying, and curlews and redshanks and many other kinds of seabirds that live among the samfire and the long grass of the great salt fen. And as we crept up the river in the evening, when the tide had turned, we would see the lights on Kingsbridge twinkle in the dusk, reminding us of ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... his face set homeward this same hour, Why lingers he? Ill news, 't is said, flies fast, And good news creeps; then his must needs be good That lets the tortoise pass him on the road. Ride, Dawkins, ride! by flashing tarn and fen And haunted hollow! Look not where in chains On Hounslow heath the malefactor hangs, A lasting terror! Give thy roan jade spur, And spare her not! All Devon waits for thee, Thou, for the moment, most important man! A sevennight later, when the rider sent ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... great size, but built of stone, picturesque, and of considerable antiquity; and it stood, as we have already said, on the opposite side of the road to the church, looking towards the west end, where its handsome tower stands, with lofty well-proportioned spire, a conspicuous object to all the fen country for miles around. It was about a mile from the ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... the Romans landed, is supposed to have been little other than 'a collection of huts set down on a dry spot in the midst of the marshes;' a forest nearly bounded this spot, at no great distance from the Thames; and a lake or fen existed, outside London, at or near the site now occupied by Finsbury Square. The area of London, at this early period, is supposed to have been bounded by—to use their modern designation—Tower Hill on the east, Dowgate ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee; she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Oh! raise us up, return to us again; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thy soul was like a Star, ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... the comforts which surround me; it is I who am the author of my own happiness; a safe dwelling, convenient clothing, abundant and wholesome nourishment, smiling fields, fertile hills, populous empires, all is my work; without me this earth, given up to disorder, would have been but a filthy fen, a wild ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... and the expressions used are universal. Boys usually have one shooter made from agate which they call a "real." To change the position of the shooter is called "roundings," and to object to this or to any other play is expressed by the word "fen." The common game of marbles is to make a rectangular ring and to shoot from a line and endeavour to knock the marbles or "mibs" of one's opponents out of the square. A similar game is to place all the mibs in a line in an oval and ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... hm. An adverbial dative singular without an inflectional ending is found with hm, dg, morgen, and :fen. ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... soft days, comrades. The last time I followed the old chief, of honored memory, we held our war-council standing knee-deep in a fen. We had neither eaten nor drunk for two days, and three days' blood was ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... what instinct only his Creator and ours knows—had found his way to her grave over two hundred miles of fen, field, and forest. Not finding her there, he had tracked me to the room where she had last played with him. When carried to other parts of the house, he cried piteously all day and all night. ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... wird Schwefel zu schwefliger Sure[4] verbrannt (SO{2}SO{2}) oder es[5] werden in geeigneten Rostfen natrlich vorkommende Metallsulfide, z. B. Schwefelkies (FeS{2}), Zinkblende (ZnS), Bleiglanz (PbS) in der Glhhitze bei Luftzutritt oxydiert, wobei sich der Schwefel der Sulfide ganz oder teilweise in schwefligsaures Gas verwandelt, ...
— German Science Reader - An Introduction to Scientific German, for Students of - Physics, Chemistry and Engineering • Charles F. Kroeh
... and succour all them who in this transitory life are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity!" And still less able are we to realize the countless answers to our feeble prayers already winging their way to every portion of the inhabited globe; o'er moor and fen, o'er lake and sea and prairie, in the crowded town and in the vast wilderness. Was it in blessed England, where the sun has long past the meridian; while here in the far North-West, there are but the first faint tints of ...
— Owindia • Charlotte Selina Bompas
... which is low down in the fen country, he found a sullen girl. She met him at the bridge of the Galland fen and her grey eyes flashed fire. She was a tall maid, very fair to look upon, and the blue tunic which she wore over her russet gown was cunningly embroidered. ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... characters. The dialect these people talk, without editorial comment, delights and amuses from its strangeness, and also from the conviction that it is as real as the landscape. They tell wonderful tales of moor and fen as they tramp the woods or sail on moonlit waters, and sitting by a peat fire of a stormy night, discuss, between deep pulls of Scotch whisky, the Erastianism that vitiates modern theology. We must look in the pages of Scott for a more charming picture ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... himself into New England, now become the retreat of the more zealous among the Puritanical party; and it was an order of council which obliged them to disembark and remain in England. The earl of Bedford, who possessed a large estate in the fen country near the Isle of Ely, having undertaken to drain these morasses, was obliged to apply to the king; and by the powers of the prerogative, he got commissioners appointed, who conducted that work, and divided the new-acquired land among the several proprietors. He met with ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... July 1. Today Inspector General Chang Hsun entered the city with his troops and actually restored the monarchy. He stopped traffic and sent Liang Ting-fen and others to my place to persuade me. Yuan-hung refused in firm language and swore that he would not recognize such a step. It is his hope that the Vice- President and others will take effective means to protect ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... Macbeth, more suo, continued to mutter like a man in a troubled dream, now humming a bar of the tune, now drawling out a phrase from the words, "O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till the night is gone"—this, I believe, he repeated several times, lighting his pipe in the intervals and spitting out of the door. Then he went on more articulately: "Rum go, ain't it—me singing that hymn in a place like this? Sung ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... Delta, where the fen-lights flit! Ignoble sediment of loftier lands, Thy humour clings about our hearts and hands And solves us to its softness, till we sit As ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... Gods! Fulvia," he replied, "I am but a sorry epicure, and I love the boar better in his reedy fen, or his wild thicket on the Umbrian hills, with his eye glaring red in rage, and his tusks white with foam, than girt with condiments and spices ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... nursed in Tiber's fen, Did all the world with hideous shape affray; That fill'd with costly spoil his gaping den, And trod down all the rest to dust and clay: His battering horns pull'd out by civil hands, And iron teeth lie scatter'd on the ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... cowed by the approaching storm. I saw their boats with many a light, Floating the livelong yesternight, Shifting like flashes darted forth By the red streamers of the north; I marked at morn how close they ride, Thick moored by the lone islet's side, Like wild ducks couching in the fen When stoops the hawk upon the glen. Since this rude race dare not abide The peril on the mainland side, Shall not thy noble father's care Some safe retreat ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... and tends to hang out with other fans. Many hackers are fans, so this term has been imported from fannish slang; however, unlike much fannish slang it is recognized by most non-fannish hackers. Among SF fans the plural is correctly 'fen', but this usage is not automatic to hackers. "Laura reads the stuff occasionally ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... Pearson? Do you think you could arouse the people in the fen-country? You might raise and drill an army in those wilds without the Government knowing any thing ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... had developed in her own way, as wild and wayward as the gulls which swooped around the rocks where she was sitting. Nature revealed her heart to her in long solitary walks by sea and fen. But of the world of men and women Sisily knew nothing whatever. The secrets of the huddle of civilization are not to be gathered from books or solitude. Sisily was completely unsophisticated in the ways of the world, and her deep passionate temperament was full of latent ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... pretty mess!" said Osbert. "There's Orme of the Fen run off, because I gave him a scolding for his impudence: and it is his turn to watch to-night. I have not a minute to go after him; I ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... Norman days, were connected with this ancient fabric, receiving education there, or devoting their lives to piety within its walls. It was here that Guthlac, a Saxon warrior, disgusted with the world, sought solitude and repose; and for ten long years he led a hermit's life in that damp and marshy fen; in prayer and fasting, working miracles, and leading hearts to God, he spent his lonely days, all which was rewarded by a happy and peaceful death, and a sanctifying of his corporeal remains—for many wondrous miracles were wrought by ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... and black, &c. Drink; thick, thin, sour, &c. Water unclean, milk, oil, vinegar, wine, spices &c. Flesh Parts: heads, feet, entrails, fat, bacon, blood, &c. Kinds: Beef, pork, venison, hares, goats, pigeons, peacocks, fen-fowl, &c. Herbs, Fish, &c. Of fish; all shellfish, hard and slimy fish, &c. Of herbs; pulse, cabbage, melons, garlic, onions, &c. All roots, raw fruits, hard and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... Earle's prose translation of this passage, given in his Deeds of Beowulf, at p. 44, is a description of two mysterious monsters, of whom it is said that "they inhabit unvisited land, wolf-crags, windy bluffs, the dread fen-track, where the mountain waterfall amid precipitous gloom vanisheth beneath—flood under earth. Not far hence it is, reckoning by miles, that the Mere standeth, and over it hang rimy groves; a wood with clenched roots ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... for us that live as the fen-fires live, As stars that shoot and shudder with life and die, Can death make dark that lustre of life, or give The grievous gift of trust in oblivion's lie. Days dear and far death touches, and draws them nigh, And bids the grief that broods on their graves forgive ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... FEN. Low tracts inundated by the tides, capable, when in a dry state, of bearing the weight of cattle grazing upon them; differing therein from bog or quagmire. When well drained, they form some of the best ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... A Winkelried it was Who slew the dragoon in the fen at Weiler, And lost his life in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... sees the gradually encroaching bog and marsh in his land, and realises that with drainage he could reclaim this as good farm land. On the other hand some of the locals would rather see the fen remain, along with their various occupations, and the wonderful and fragile wet-land natural history. When digging begins there are a number of nasty incidents—torching of houses, malicious woundings of horses and cows, gunshot wounds ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... end of a long glade. He fancied she waved her hand to him; but being in no humour to join the cavalcade, he remained seated, and the riders soon passed out of sight. As he sat there sombre thoughts came to him, stealing up like exhalations from the fen. He saw his life stretched out before him, full of broken purposes and ineffectual effort. Public affairs were in so perplexed a case that consistent action seemed impossible to either party, and their chief efforts were bent toward directing the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore, Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen, where the serpent feeds, And ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... some bird of night flies past them, and they hear the whooping of the owl, and see him skimming like a ghost over the waste. Then more fen fires arise, showing that other treacherous quagmires are at hand; but Crouch skirts them safely. Now the bull-frog croaks in the marsh, and a deep booming tells of a bittern passing by. They see the mighty bird above them, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... it—was never saved up for Sunday; he used it in his business. But James Oliver was a Scotchman, and this being so, the fires of his theological nature were merely banked. When Death was at the door an hour before his passing, this hardy son of heath and heather, of bog and fen and bleak North Wind, roused himself from stupor, and in his deep, impressive voice, soon to be stilled forever, startled the attendants with the stern order, "Let us pray!" Then he repeated slowly the Lord's Prayer, and with the word "Amen" sank back ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... Delphis lost; that now I shred and cast into the cruel flame. Ah, ah, thou torturing Love, why clingest thou to me like a leech of the fen, and drainest all the ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... thousand forms, by pining Fancy view'd, Dissolve. Above the sparkling flood When Phoebus rears his awful brow, From lengthening lawn and valley low The troops of fen-born mists retire. Along the plain The joyous swain Eyes the gay villages again, And gold-illumined spire; While, on the billowy ether borne, Floats the loose lay's jovial measure; And light along the fairy Pleasure, Her green robes glittering to the morn, Wantons on silken wing. ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... had more acres of fen than any man on this coast: but what are fens to love? What are ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... spreading trees. The hedgerow timber of Cheshire is beautiful, and to a great extent makes up for the want of tracts of wooded land. This country is not, like the Midland counties and the great Fen district, violently or exclusively agricultural, and these hedges and trees, which are gratefully kept up for the sake of the shade they afford to the cattle, show a very different temper among the farmers from that utilitarianism which marks the men of Leicester shire, Lincoln, Nottingham, Norfolk, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... thing that quick on earth wendeth. So liv'd on all happy the host of the kinsmen In game and in glee, until one wight began, 100 A fiend out of hell-pit, the framing of evil, And Grendel forsooth the grim guest was hight, The mighty mark-strider, the holder of moorland, The fen and the fastness. The stead of the fifel That wight all unhappy a while of time warded, Sithence that the Shaper him had for-written. On the kindred of Cain the Lord living ever Awreaked the murder ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous
... authorizing the speaker to deliver his fire from any point other than that where his marble lies, equally distant from the objective point; "clearings," in like manner, authorizing the preparation of a reasonably unobstructed line of fire; and "fen ebs," "fen clearings," and "fen everythings," to be pronounced before the other player speaks, and which, by virtue of the prohibitory syllable "fen" (defendre, Fr.), prevent respectively ebs, clearings, and everything,—that is to say, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... see the good woman's eyes fill with tears: but she wiped them away, and took advantage of the additional persuasion they gave to her natural whine to say, "If, Sir, you know of any young gentleman who likes fen-shooting, and wants a nice, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Do you think you could arouse the people in the fen-country? You might raise and drill an army in those wilds without the Government knowing any thing about ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... spy for the FBI—the Fantasy Bureau of Investigation! Learning of a monster meeting of science fiction "fen" in New York, I teleported myself 3,000 miles from the Pacificoast to check the facts on the monsters. And it was true—the 14th World SciFi Con ...
— Out of This World Convention • Forrest James Ackerman
... and on till she came to a fen, and there she gathered a lot of rushes and made them into a kind of a sort of a cloak with a hood, to cover her from head to foot, and to hide her fine clothes. And then she went on and on till she came ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... power has blest me, sure it still Will lead me on O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent till The night is gone, And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since, and lost ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... should be called—which grew low along the sand like brambles, the boughs curiously twisted, the foliage compact, like thatch. The thicket stretched down from the top of one of the sandy knolls, spreading and growing taller as it went, until it reached the margin of the broad, reedy fen, through which the nearest of the little rivers soaked its way into the anchorage. The marsh was steaming in the strong sun, and the outline of the Spy-glass ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... otherwise have ascribed to the influence of mountain scenery. Such causes, however, affect the lowland as much as the highland religious character in all districts far from cities; but they do not produce the same effects. The curate or hermit of the field and fen, however simple his life, or painful his lodging, does not often attain the spirit of the hill pastor or recluse: we may find in him a decent virtue or a contented ignorance, rarely the prophetic vision or the martyr's ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... Thames, though not on the lower reaches of the river. The "sweet sedge," so called—the smell is rather sickly to most tastes—is now found on the Thames near Dorchester, and between Kingston and Teddington among other places, though it was once thought only to flourish on the Norfolk and Fen rivers. It is not a sedge at all, but related to the common arum, and its flower, like the top joints of the little finger, represents the "lords and ladies" of the hedges. So the burr reed, among the prettiest ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... no escape by the river, There is no flight left by the fen; We are compassed about by the shiver Of the night of their marching men. Give a cheer! For our hearts shall not give way. Here's to a dark to-morrow, And ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... nimble lightnings, dart your blinding flames Into her scornful eyes! Infect her beauty, You fen-suck'd fogs, drawn by the powerful sun, To ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... year be over ox and horse shall go free in Essex, and man and woman shall draw the team and the plough; and north away in the east countries dwell men in poor halls of wattled reeds and mud, and the north-east wind from off the fen whistles through them; and poor they be to the letter; and there him whom the lord spareth, the bailiff squeezeth, and him whom the bailiff forgetteth, the Easterling Chapman sheareth; yet be these stout men and valiant, ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... Fell faligi. Fellow, a good karulo. Fellow-citizen samurbano. Felly (felloe) radrondo. Felon krimulo. Felt felto. Female virino, ino. Feminine virinseksa, ina. Feminism feminismo, inismo. Fen marcxejo. Fence skermi. Fencing skermo. Fence palisaro. Fend defendi. Fender fajrgardo. Fennel fenkolo. Ferment fermenti. Ferment (disturbance) tumulto. Fern filiko. Ferocious kruelega. Ferocity kruelego, kruelegeco. Ferret ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... our road from Somersby to Boston ran on the crest of a hill, from which we had a far-reaching view over the lovely Lincolnshire country. Shortly after, we left the hills and found ourselves again in the fen country. Many miles before we reached Boston we saw the great tower of St. Botolph's Church, in some respects the most remarkable in England. They give it the inartistic and inappropriate appellation ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... case of these two men, as in the case of a thousand others in the gold-camp, it seemed as if easy, unhoped-for affluence was to prove their undoing. On the trail they had been supreme; in fen or forest, on peak or plain, they were men among men, fighting with nature savagely, exultantly. But when the fight was over their arms rested, their muscles relaxed, they yielded to sensuous pleasures. It seemed as if to them ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... sure, sir, we had more acres of fen than any man on this coast: but what are fens to love? What are dykes and windmills ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... counterscarps, remarkably suggests the deliberate and calculated creation of man. It stands upon a little solitary hill at the head of Taw Marsh, and wins its name from the East Okement River which runs through the valley on its western flank. Above wide fen and marsh it rises, yet seen from Steeperton's vaster altitude, Oke Tor looks no greater than some fantastic child-castle built by a Brobding-nagian baby with granite bricks. Below it on this July day the waste of bog-land was ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... heaven, ere change and time set odds Between them, light and darkness know not when, And fear, grown strong through panic periods, Crouched, a crowned worm, in faith's Lernean fen, And love lay bound, and hope was scourged with rods, And death cried out from desert and from den, Seeing all the heaven above him dark with gods And all the world about him marred of men. Cities that nought might purge Save the sea's whelming surge From all the pent pollutions ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... from all brother-men, in the weird of the fen, With God's creatures I bide, 'mid the birds that I ken; Where the winds ever dree, where the hymn of the sea Brings a message of peace ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... as an angel's breath, Swift as the wings of death, Through all the haunts of men, By lake and by river, Across forest and fen, Onward they sped, paused they never. By hamlet or hall, Mystic their pall, Hied as a spirit hidden from view, Faithless nor wavering, ever more true. Onward these words sped— "Your mother is dead." Quick as a dart, ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... Forest, though all of it, I believe, has now become private property, and is converted into fertile fields, except where the owners of estates have set out plantations. We have now passed out of the fen-country, and the land rises and falls in gentle swells, presenting a pleasant, but not striking, character of scenery. I remember no remarkable object on the road,—here and there an old inn, a gentleman's ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... croaking race around: "A wooden king!" the banks resound. Fear once remov'd they swim about him, And gibe and jeer and mock and flout him; And messengers to Jove depute, Effectively to grant their suit. A hungry stork he sent them then, Who soon had swallow'd half the fen. Their woes scarce daring to reveal, To Mercury by night they steal, And beg him to entreat of Jove The direful tyrant to remove. 'No,' says the God, 'they chose their lot, And must abide what they have got:' So you, ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... shorter an' the air a keener snap; Apples now are droppin' into Mother Nature's lap; The mist at dusk is risin' over valley, marsh an' fen An' it's just as plain as ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... world in 1756, at Wisbech, in the Fen country, with the moral atmosphere of a dissenting home for inheritance. His father and grandfather were Independent ministers, who taught the metaphysical dissent of the extreme Calvinistic tradition. ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... days, comrades. The last time I followed the old chief, of honored memory, we held our war-council standing knee-deep in a fen. We had neither eaten nor drunk for two days, and three days' blood was on ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... man is foolish who comes here alone in the dark shade of night: fire is flickering, howes are opening, field and fen are aflame," and flees into the woods, but Hervoer is dauntless and goes on alone. She reaches the howes, and calls on the sons ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... men Lay in the fen, By sword down hewed, So thickly strewed, That Norsemen say They paved a way Across the fen For the ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... the hero fell to the ground; and as he was struck his comrades flocked together with answering cry. And quickly Peleus with his hunting spear aimed at the murderous boar as he fled back into the fen; and again he turned and charged; but Idas wounded him, and with a roar he fell impaled upon the sharp spear. And the boar they left on the ground just as he had fallen there; but Idmon, now at the last gasp, his comrades bore to the ship in sorrow ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... England. All his early poetry is suffused with tints, sombre or bright, and breathes of sounds that recall the landscape of the Lincolnshire in whose sunniest spot he was born, but in near neighborhood to "the level waste, the rounding gray" of "the dark fen," and within sight and sound of the "sandy tracts" and "the ocean roaring into cataracts." Later, we find in some of the poems that have made for themselves a place in the heart of all English-speaking ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... fen." While these words seem new and unusual to us, we must remember that in England they are as common as the terms marsh and swamp ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... whole attempt to locate accurately any but the chiefest tribes found by the Romans in Britain is too conjectural to be worth the infinite labour that has been expended upon the subject by antiquaries. All we can say with certainty is that forest and fen must have cut up the land into a limited number of fairly recognizable districts, each so far naturally separated from the rest as to have been probably a separate or quasi-separate political entity also. Thus, ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... increase in trade and poulation The Thames St. Katherine's Docks Tewkesburg Bridge Gloucester Bridge Dean Bridge, Edinburgh Glasgow Bridge Telford's works of drainage in the Fens The North Level The Nene Outfall Effects of Fen drainage ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... though it is, and full of memories, what can be said of this vast ruined forest of stone pines with its mystery of mere and fen, its coolness and shadow, its astonishing silence? Only this I think, that if once you find it, nothing else in Ravenna will seem half so precious as this green wood. You will love it always and for its own sake more than anything else in Ravenna, and in this you will not be alone; ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... Council held, triune, When soon The boon The son foresaw: Fulfilled the law That we might draw Salvation's prize. God then An angel sent cross moor and fen, ('Twas Gabriel, heaven's denizen,) To Mary, purest maid 'mongst men. He greeted her With ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... went Panther and the Raven, Searched the forest and the marshes, Searched for leagues along the lake-shore, But they found no trace or tidings, Found no track in marsh or meadow, Found no trail in fen or forest, On the shore-sand found no footprints. Many days they sought and found not. Then to Panther spoke the Raven: "She is in the Land of Spirits— Surely in the Land of Spirits. High at midnight I beheld her— Like a flying star beheld her— To the waves of Gitchee Gumee ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... away the giant hills Blencatha, Skiddaw, and Borrowdale rear their heads. It cost the Trust L7000, but no one would deem the money ill-spent. Almost the last remnant of the primeval fenland of East Anglia, called Wicken Fen, has been acquired by the Trust, and also Burwell Fen, the home of many rare insects and plants. Near London we see many bits of picturesque land that have been rescued, where the teeming population of the great city can find rest and recreation. ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... England in the olden time could return, few things would surprise them more than the condition of the land. Many a field now bearing good crops each year, was in "the good old times" moorland or fen. Sheep and cattle graze where once only wild birds could live. Drainage has made the change. The land, once too cold and wet to allow anything valuable to grow, has been by grips and drain pipes, made to produce ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... me confidence to ask you.... Isn't the reason, Fen ... isn't the reason she will not come here to pour out tea, ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... house which our suffering heroine occupied, to New-York, was not very great, yet the snow fen so fast, and the cold so intense, that, being unable from her situation to walk quick, she found herself almost sinking with cold and fatigue before she reached the town; her garments, which were merely suitable to the summer season, being an undress robe of plain white muslin, ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... I frightful then? I live, though they call it death; I am only cold! Say dear again." But scarce could he heave a breath; Over a dank and steaming fen He floated astray from the world of men, A ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... remarkable class. The "railway navvies," as they are called, were men drawn by the attraction of good wages from all parts of the kingdom; and they were ready for any sort of hard work. Some of the best came from the fen districts of Lincoln and Cambridge, where they had been trained to execute works of excavation and embankment. These old practitioners formed a nucleus of skilled manipulation and aptitude, which rendered them of indispensable utility in the immense undertakings of the period. Their ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... gazelle, and the hartebeest graze, And the kudu and eland unhunted recline By the skirts of gray forest o'erhung with wild vine; Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood, And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood, And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will In the fen where the wild ass is ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... herrliche Degenschaft, 5 Den Thron hier in Franken; so brauch' er ihn lange! Das teilte er dann sofort mit Karlmann, Seinem Bruder, die Flle der Wonnen. Als das alles geendet ward, wollte Gott ihn prfen, Ob er Mhsal so jung dulden knnte. 10 Er liess heidnische Mnner ber See kommen, Das Volk der Franken ihrer Snden zu mahnen. Einige wrden bald verloren, einige erkoren. Zchtigung duldete, wer frher misgelebet. Wer dann ein Dieb war, und von dannen sich rettete, 15 Nahm seine Fasten; danach ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... calm weather. The sea-line is marked with wrecks. The sunken rocks are dismally named after the vessels they have destroyed. The air is chill and moist, the soil prolific only in prickly undergrowth and noxious weeds, while foetid exhalations from swamp and fen cling close to the humid, spongy ground. All around breathes desolation; on the face of nature is stamped a perpetual frown. The shipwrecked sailor, crawling painfully to the summit of basalt cliffs, or the ironed convict, dragging his tree trunk to the edge of some beetling plateau, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... to the Trumpington of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale." All that Cambridge country is flat and comparatively uninteresting; patchworked with chalky fields bright with poppies; slow, shallow streams drifting between pollard willows; it is the beginning of the fen district, and from the brow of the Royston downs (thirteen miles away) it lies as level as a table-top with the great chapel of King's clear against the sky. It is the favourite lament of Cambridge men that their "Umgebung" is so dull and monotonous compared with ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... gentlemen, swept by at the end of a long glade. He fancied she waved her hand to him; but being in no humour to join the cavalcade, he remained seated, and the riders soon passed out of sight. As he sat there sombre thoughts came to him, stealing up like exhalations from the fen. He saw his life stretched out before him, full of broken purposes and ineffectual effort. Public affairs were in so perplexed a case that consistent action seemed impossible to either party, and their chief efforts were bent toward directing the choice of a regent. It was this, rather than the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... of Pickering, known as Newton Dale, with its precipitous sides rising to a height of 300 or even 400 feet, must have assumed its present proportions principally during the glacial period when it formed an overflow valley from a lake held up by ice in the neighbourhood of Fen Bogs and Eller Beck. This great gorge is tenanted at the present time by Pickering Beck, an exceedingly small stream, which now carries off all the surface drainage and must therefore be only remotely related to its great ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... run and ask Maitresse Aimable to come here to me soon?" Her voice had the steadiness of despair—that steadiness coming to those upon whose nerves has fallen a great numbness, upon whose sensibilities has settled a cloud that stills them as the thick mist stills the ripples on the waters of a fen. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... small subsidiary tells round about it, the sites of small isolated buildings or villages connected with the central settlement. Originally the settlements were built upon natural rises of the ground which stood up as islands in the fen-country. ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... stirrup-cup!" exclaimed the landlord, who at that moment appeared at the door with a tankard in his hand. "Such doings are never allowed at my house, however early in the morning my guests depart. It will do thee good, man, and help to keep the cold mists of our fen-country out of thy throat this morning; and thou, lad, must not break through our rules, either," he said, turning to Jack, who, it must be confessed, took the proffered tankard and drained its contents, then touching the flank of his horse with his spur, and giving a farewell wave ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... field-driver of Bedford, the herd, the nolts-herds, the town swine-herds of Alnwick, Newcastle, Shrewsbury, and Doncaster, the pasture-masters of Beverley and York, the moss-grieves of Alnwick, the moormen and mossmen of Lancaster, the moor-wardens of Axbridge, the fen-reeves of Beccles and Southwold, and the ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meager hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost That breaks his ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... he had seen Caernarvon's towers, And well he knew the spire of Sarum; And he had been where Lincoln bell Flings o'er the fen that ponderous knell— ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... Jason, when he sought the fleece of gold, Or change from man to beast three years entire, As King Nebuchadnezzar did of old; Or else have times as shameful and as bad As Trojan folk for ravished Helen had; Or gulfed with Proserpine and Tantalus Let hell's deep fen devour him dolorous, With worse to bear than Job's worst sufferance, Bound in his prison-maze with Daedalus, Who could wish evil to ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... before found the country endurable, except during the season when the marshes were full of birds; or when, at the Christmas holidays, the ice was firm as marble and smooth as glass, and the wind blowing fair from behind. Then he had liked well a race with the famous fen-skaters. ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... most melancholy of processions, a curate's furniture en route, filed slowly through the village, and out along the highroad, that led through bog and fen, and by lake borders to the town of N——. First came three loads of black turf, carefully piled and roped; then two loads of hay; a cow with a yearling calf; and lastly, the house furniture, mostly of rough deal. The articles, that would be hardly good enough ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... happiness; a safe dwelling, convenient clothing, abundant and wholesome nourishment, smiling fields, fertile hills, populous empires, all is my work; without me this earth, given up to disorder, would have been but a filthy fen, a wild wood, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... name. A Winkelried it was Who slew the dragoon in the fen at Weiler, And lost his ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... fair hair, often gold, and fair rosy cheeks. They seem a very Saxon type. I have been wondering whether they are descendents of the Danes and Saxons, who took refuge in the fens in Norman times, a memory of Hereward the Wake. The fen men have always been a separate race; they must have very little Norman blood in their veins. They have the Saxon stolidity also. I am very glad I am not in a town battalion like the Northumberlands and such ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... horse was loose he 'gan to race Unto the wild mares wandering in the fen, With WEHEE! WHINNY! right through thick and thin! This Miller then returned; no word he said, But doth his work, and with these clerks he played, Till that their corn was well and fairly ground. And when the meal is sacked ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... Pool; and near it, then, Was neither rotten marsh nor boggy fen. It was not overgrown with boisterous sedge, Nor grew there rudely, then, along the edge A bending willow, nor a prickly bush, Nor broad-leafed flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush: But here, well ordered, was a grove with bowers; There, grassy plots, set round about with flowers. Here, you might, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... e'er my mother brush'd With raven's feather from unwholesome fen Drop on you both! a south-west blow on ye ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... kept at the monasteries in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere. The yearly entries were mostly brief, dry records of passing events, though occasionally they become full and animated. The fen country of Cambridge and Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries. Here were the great abbeys of Peterborough and Croyland and Ely minster. One of the earliest English songs tells how the savage heart of the Danish {16} king Cnut was softened by the singing ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Ciminus' lake and hill, and the groves of Capena. They marched in even time, singing their King; as whilome snowy swans among the thin clouds, when they return from pasturage, and utter resonant notes through their long necks; far off echoes the river and the smitten Asian fen. . . . Nor would one think these vast streaming masses were ranks clad in brass; rather that, high in air, a cloud of hoarse birds from the deep gulf was ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... waren frh auf, um dem Wetter nachzuspren und den Schnee zu prfen. Mit einiger Vorsicht konnte man es schon wagen, weiter zu ziehen. Der Assessor war schon munter und wartete auf Frulein Milla, sie hatten sich[39-1] ja noch so viel zu sagen! Milla erschlo ihr ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... troop of others less familiar, have disappeared and are disappearing under the human blight. Even some beautiful insects—the great copper butterfly and the swallow-tail butterfly—have been exterminated in England by human "progress" in the shape of the drainage of the Fen country. ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... phase—low undulating hills and moist, rich meadows divided by luxuriant hedges and dotted with single spreading trees. The hedgerow timber of Cheshire is beautiful, and to a great extent makes up for the want of tracts of wooded land. This country is not, like the Midland counties and the great Fen district, violently or exclusively agricultural, and these hedges and trees, which are gratefully kept up for the sake of the shade they afford to the cattle, show a very different temper among the farmers from that utilitarianism which marks the men of Leicester shire, Lincoln, Nottingham, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... watch the ways of wild things! White of Selborne did not care much for killing anything in particular; he enjoyed himself in a beautiful way for years, merely because he had learned to love the pretty creatures of fen and meadow and woodland. Mr. Russell Lowell can spend a happy day in watching through his glass the habits of the birds that haunt his great garden; he does not want a gun; he only cares to observe the instincts which God has implanted in the harmless ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... intensity of shade; Where the rough wind alone was heard to move In this, the pause of nature and of love When now the young are reared, and when the old, Lost to the tie, grow negligent and cold: Far to the left he saw the huts of men, Half hid in mist that hung upon the fen: Before him swallows gathering for the sea, Took their short flights and twittered o'er the lea; And near the bean-sheaf stood, the harvest done, And slowly blackened in the sickly sun; All these were sad in nature, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... merchandize on board of her, and to transfer it to the steam-vessels. They then began to sail up the Nun branch of the Niger. This part of the river is most unhealthy; it is one entire swamp, covered with mangrove, cabbage, and palm trees. "The fen-damp rose in the morning cold and clammy to the feeling, and appeared like the smoke of a damp wood fire." The bodies of the natives are covered with ulcers and cutaneous eruptions; they spend a short and miserable life in profligacy. After they had gone up about thirty miles, the ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... or, the intellectual endowments being mediocre, we shall have merely a man of superficial taste; or, the moral regents being ineffective, an intellectual sybarite, or a refined voluptuary. Like the sun, the beautiful shines on healthful field and poisonous fen; and her warmth will even make flowers to bloom in the fen, but it is not in her to make them bear refreshing odors or ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... bleak moor, and quaking fen, Or depth of labyrinthine glen; Or into trackless forest set With trees, whose lofty umbrage met; World-wearied Men withdrew of yore; (Penance their trust, and prayer their store;) And in the wilderness were bound To such apartments as they found; Or with a new ambition raised; That ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... rude circles scratched in the mud, and there is talk of "pureys," and "reals," and "aggies," and "commies," and "fen dubs!" There is a rich click about the bulging pockets of the boys, and every so often in school time something drops on the floor and rolls noisily across the room. When Miss Daniels asks: "Who did that?" the boys all look so astonished. Who did what, pray ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... civ'il cul'prit al'to hec'tic dit'ty clum'sy can'ter helm'et gid'dy dul'cet mar'ry fen'nel fil'ly fun'nel ral'ly ken'nel sil'ly gul'ly nap'kin bel'fry liv'id buck'et hap'py ed'dy lim'it gus'set pan'try en'try lim'ber sul'len ram'mer en'vy riv'et sum'mon mam'mon test'y lin'en ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... with marbles and the expressions used are universal. Boys usually have one shooter made from agate which they call a "real." To change the position of the shooter is called "roundings," and to object to this or to any other play is expressed by the word "fen." The common game of marbles is to make a rectangular ring and to shoot from a line and endeavour to knock the marbles or "mibs" of one's opponents out of the square. A similar game is to place all the mibs in a line in an oval and to roll the ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... colonel, kindly allowed L.-Sergt. Piercy of the 7th N.F. to come and assist in the training at the Brigade Bombing School. After the heavy fighting the Brigade was supplied with large drafts of new men. They came chiefly from the Fen country and were only partially trained. I found them far more difficult to instruct in bombing than the Northumberland miners. I had between forty and fifty of these men each day, and they had to throw two live grenades before they left. One exciting ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... in Phrygia stands a linden tree and an oak, enclosed by a low wall. Not far from the spot is a marsh, formerly good habitable land, but now indented with pools, the resort of fen-birds and cormorants. Once on a time Jupiter, in, human shape, visited this country, and with him his son Mercury (he of the caduceus), without his wings. They presented themselves, as weary travellers, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... matters both more mighty and more near, Are waxing dim to us. I, who have seen So many lands, and midst such marvels been, Clearer than these abodes of outland men, Can see above the green and unburnt fen The little houses of an English town, Cross-timbered, thatched with fen-reeds coarse and brown, And high o'er these, three gables, great and fair, That slender rods of columns do upbear Over the minster doors, and imagery Of kings, ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... were connected with this ancient fabric, receiving education there, or devoting their lives to piety within its walls. It was here that Guthlac, a Saxon warrior, disgusted with the world, sought solitude and repose; and for ten long years he led a hermit's life in that damp and marshy fen; in prayer and fasting, working miracles, and leading hearts to God, he spent his lonely days, all which was rewarded by a happy and peaceful death, and a sanctifying of his corporeal remains—for many wondrous miracles were wrought by those ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... for a plain and particular reason. Many voteless women regard a vote as unwomanly. Nobody says that most voteless men regarded a vote as unmanly. Nobody says that any voteless men regarded it as unmanly. Not in the stillest hamlet or the most stagnant fen could you find a yokel or a tramp who thought he lost his sexual dignity by being part of a political mob. If he did not care about a vote it was solely because he did not know about a vote; he did not understand the word any better than Bimetallism. His opposition, if it existed, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... last, and turns, and eyes the Pile Huge in the gloom, across in Thorney Isle, King Sebert's work, the wondrous Minster new. —'Tis Lambeth now, where then They moor'd their boats among the bulrush stems; And that new Minster in the matted fen The world-famed Abbey by ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... freshness brought to weary men, When, o'er the meadows wet, a boy did sing, And whistled o'er a tune, and carroll'd-it, again, In youthful happiness unconscious then Of aught which time might bring, of pain or woe, But careless, pitching stones in bog or fen, It seem'd as if he buried there, also, All worldly cares, so blithely did ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... a fact, sir," replied Fen-ton, "which I have witnessed with my own eyes; but we have still stranger and worse usages ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... indicate that the realistic method of a conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and that prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady. We have the malady, whatever may be the cure or the cause. We drove in a body to Science the other day for an antidote; which was as if tired pedestrians should mount ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... hardest matter wrought: But he forgot this truth in time of need; And so upon his head this ruin brought, Ah! would that he in proof, like me, a deed Done in this neighbouring city had been taught, His country and mine own; which lake and fen, Brimming ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... kinds of men; Gracing the mountain or hid in the fen; Never adorning the brow of the fair; Seldom deemed worthy some corner to share In the bouquets that are cast in the way Princely feet tread on reception's proud day; The glory of roses do not attain; Beautiful mosses, ye grow not ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... hath cloth, Burdeus hath store of wine, Cornewall hath tinne, and Lymster wools fine. London hath scarlet, and Bristowe pleasaunt red, Fen lands hath fishes, ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... fly they move 'cursu undoso,' rising and falling in curves, like the other species mentioned before. In different parts of this kingdom people call them fen-crickets, churr-worms, and eve-churrs, all very ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... cloak Delphis lost; that now I shred and cast into the cruel flame. Ah, ah, thou torturing Love, why clingest thou to me like a leech of the fen, and drainest all the black blood from ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... peering out of Heaven at our mortal antics. Indeed, there was always something more than human in her loveliness, though, to be frank, it savored less of chilling paradisial perfection than of a vision of some great-eyed queen of faery, such as those whose feet glide unwetted over our fen-waters when they roam o' nights in search of unwary travellers. Lady Adeliza was a fair beauty; that is, her eyes were of the color of opals, and her complexion as the first rose of spring, blushing at her haste ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... very reeds and sedges of the fen Open their hearts and blossom to the sky; The wild thyme on the mountain's knees Unrolls its purple market to the bees; Unharvested of men The Traveller's Joy can only smile and die. Joy, joy alone the throbbing whitethroats ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... breaking and taking to the marshes, where the Danes cared not to follow them. More than one I could see sinking under the weight of arms in the fen slime among the green tussocks of grass that he had slipped from, and I saw that the flying men ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... a Yarmouth barque, Michael (master, Robert Rigweys), while off Plymouth, the owner, Hugh ap Fen, losing 800 nobles. In 1394 these Hanseatic pirates, with a large fleet, attacked the town of Norbern in Norway, plundering the town and taking away all they could carry, as well as the merchants, who they held for ransom. The houses ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... pu'd me the crawberry, ripe frae the boggy fen: He pu'd me the strawberry, red frae the foggy glen; He pu'd me the row'n frae the wild steeps sae giddy, O! Sae loving and kind was my dear ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... evidence could be found for the relationship of Sussex to this great event. All the chapters in Mr. Freeman's great history do not impress the imagination so strongly as this one fact, that William the Conqueror has always been Duke William to the Sussex folk. He was Duke William to the fen folk, too. They fought for their belief and were compelled to accept his kingship. The Sussex folk fought, too, and they handed down their conception of the great fight ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... What strong compulsion drew Me on I knew not, till I saw in you The treasure I had blindly sought in vain. I praise Him, who our love has lifted thus To noble rank by sorrow,—licensed us To a triumphal progress, bade us sweep Thro' fen and forest to our castle-keep, A noble pair, ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... in each blade of grass, Each towering peak and mountain pass; Each forest, river, lake and fen Reveals the God of worlds and men; His works of wisdom prove to me, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... middle of the night Waking she heard the night-fowl crow; The cock sang out an hour ere light: From the dark fen the oxen's low Came to her: without hope of change, In sleep she seemed to walk forlorn, Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn About ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Dismal Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore; Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen where the serpent feeds, And ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... England was invaded by the Danes under King Sweyn, in revenge of a massacre of his subjects by the order of King Ethelred. They landed in the north, and, having gained some advantages, proceeded southward to the fen country, which they plundered and laid waste with fire and sword. Heavy fines were extorted from the rich abbeys; that on Crowland amounting to L64,000 of the present value of ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... to the eyes, Sweating it deep in their ditches, swining it stark in their styes, Hulling down forests before me, spanning tumultuous streams; Down in the ditch building o'er me palaces fairer than dreams; Boring the rock to the ore-bed, driving the road through the fen, Resolute, dumb, uncomplaining, a man in a world of men. Master, I've filled my contract, wrought in Thy many lands; Not by my sins wilt Thou judge me, but by the work of my hands. Master, I've done Thy bidding, and the light is low in the ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... top of Peter-house highest Tower? And come we back unto our native home, For want of skill to lose the wench thou lov'st? We'll first hang Envill in such rings of mist As never rose from any dampish fen: I'll make the brind sea to rise at Ware, And drown the marshes unto Stratford bridge; I'll drive the Deer from Waltham in their walks, And scatter them like sheep in every field. We may perhaps be crost, but, if we be, He shall cross the devil, that ...
— The Merry Devil • William Shakespeare
... of Falerii Rushed on the Roman Three; And Lausulus of Urgo, The rover of the sea; And Aruns of Volsinium, Who slew the great wild boar, The great wild boar that had his den Amidst the reeds of Cosa's fen, And wasted fields and slaughtered ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... in the shire of Ayr, being large, and many of the people, belonging to the said parish, being no less than six or seven miles distant from their own kirk; for which and other reasons the heritors and others procured a disjunction, and called the new parish Fen ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... garden walk. The path sloped gently from the back of the house to the water side, from which it was parted by a low wooden fence. After pacing backward and forward slowly for some little time, he stopped at the lower extremity of the garden, and, leaning on the fen ce, looked down listlessly at the smooth flow of ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... was employed by the Jacobites as a regular packet boat between France and England. This vessel conveyed him to a desolate spot in Romney Marsh. About half a mile from the landing place a smuggler named Hunt lived on a dreary and unwholesome fen where he had no neighbours but a few rude shepherds. His dwelling was singularly well situated for a contraband traffic in French wares. Cargoes of Lyons silk and Valenciennes lace sufficient to load thirty packhorses had repeatedly ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
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