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More "Sere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brown,— The picture must not be over-bright,— Yet all in the golden and gracious light Of a cloud, when the summer sun is down. Alway and alway, night and morn, Woods upon woods, with fields of corn Lying between them, not quite sere, And not in the full, thick, leafy bloom, When the wind can hardly find breathing-room, Under their tassels,—cattle near, Biting shorter the short green grass, And a hedge of sumach and sassafras, With bluebirds twittering all around,— (Ah, good painter, you can't paint ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... thou yet more dear, O, little city, grey and sere, Though shrunken from thine ancient pride And lonely by thy lonely sea, Than these fair halls on Isis' side, Where Youth an ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... splendid weather very much. The moors are in glory, I never saw them fuller of purple bloom. I wanted you to see them at their best; they are just turning now, and in another week, I fear, will be faded and sere. As soon as ever you can leave home, be sure to write ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread. The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... spreading trees; which bids us seek Some better shroud, some better warmth to cherish Our limbs benummed, ere this diurnal star Leave cold the night, how we his gathered beams Reflected may with matter sere foment; Or, by collision of two bodies, grind The air attrite to fire; as late the clouds Justling, or pushed with winds, rude in their shock, Tine the slant lightning; whose thwart flame, driven down Kindles the gummy bark of fir or pine; And sends ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... I breathe upon the forests, And the leaves fall sere and yellow; Then I shake my locks and snow falls, Covering all ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... I of lovers sad and sere For waiting long drawn out and expectation drear. My patience underneath the loss of friends and folk With pallor's sorry garb hath clad me, comrades dear. Abasement, misery and heart-break after those I suffer who endured before ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... had seated myself during his narrative), my heart was stirred with pity; I took down the Cicero, and lit on a sheet of yellow paper covered with faded manuscript, which, of course, I did not read. I turned to the hearth, tossed on the fire the sere old paper, which blazed at once, and then, hearing the words pax vobiscum, I looked round. But I was alone. After a few minutes, devoted to private ejaculations, I returned to the dining-room; and that is all my story. Your maids need no longer dread the ghost of the ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... growing like a tree In bulk, doth make men better be, Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere: A lily of a day, Is fairer far, in May, Although it fall and die that night; It was the plant and flower of light. In small proportions we just beauty see; And in short measures, ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... vellemus morari in terra? Ego dixi, Si bene intellexistis literas domini regis, potestis scire, quod sic. Tunc dixit, quod oporteret nos esse patientes multum, et humiles. Sic discessimus ab eo illo sere. In crastino mane misit vnum sacerdotem Nestorinum pro bigis, et nos duximus omnes quatuor. Tunc occurrens nobis frater ipsius Coiacis, separauit omnia nostra ab ipsis rebus quas tuleramus pridie ad curiam, et ilia accepit tanquam sua, scilicet ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... Habemus Matec Zungam et Mat Ingam, qui cur Madoc Camber esse nequeat quem in eos partes delatum domestica evincunt Monumenta, ratio nulla reddi potest. Ad antiquitatem, quinque illa Secula sussiciunt quousque altissima Americanorum Memoria, nec sere ultra, adscendit.[k] ...
— An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the - Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 • John Williams
... sere as not to feel Pleasures innumerable o'er it stead, In sweet surroundings of earth's lovely flowers, Which cheer and elevate ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... far behind the invading rout These two were left alone; And in the waste their wildest shout Seemed but a smothered groan. Like sheeted wanderers from the grave They moved, and yet seemed not to stir, As icy gorge and sere-leaf'd grove Of withered oak and shrouded fir Were passed, and onward still they strove; While the loud wind's artillery clave The air, and furious sleety rain Swung like a ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... thou shalt complete his lot And bloom as fair as now when they are not. Thou art the wonder of the seasons, O First-born of Beauty. As the Angel near Gazed on that first of living things which, when The blast that ruled since Chaos o'er the sere Leaves of primeval Palms did sweep the plain, Clung to the new-made sod and would not drive, So gaze I upon thee amid the reign Of Winter. And because thou livest, I live. And art thou happy in thy loneliness? ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... was long; the road ill-formed, leading for the most part across a sere and desolate country, with nothing to relieve its barrenness except long stretches of the great spear-headed reeds. At noon the heat was intense; the little cavalcade halted for half an hour under the shade of some black towering rocks which broke the monotony of the district, and commenced a more ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... finished and dropped upon her lap. The spell of this incomparable sorcerer was upon her imagination; the sluggish, lurid tarn of Usher; the pale, gigantic water lilies, nodding their ghastly, everlasting heads over the dreary Zaire; the shrouding shadow of Helusion; the ashen skies, and sere, crisped leaves in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir, hard by the dim lake of Auber—all lay with grim distinctness before her; and from the red bars of the grate the wild, lustrous, appalling eyes of Ligeia looked out ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... a personal wrong. That the glare of the sunshine should fall on her pain—that the necessity for meeting mere acquaintances with the same face as yesterday should exist, now that her life lay so scorched and sere before her, filled ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... weeds out of the rank grass, the briars and nettles, the heaps of broken masonry and plaster, among which shone beneath the darting lizards, scraps of vermilion wall-fresco, the chips of purple porphyry or dark-green serpentine; long avenues of trees early sere, closed in by arum-fringed walls, or by ditches where the withered reeds creaked beneath the festoons of clematis and wild vine; solemn and solitary wildernesses within the city walls, where the silence was broken only by the lowing of the herds driven along by the shaggy herdsman on his shaggy ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... outside. Stars faded in a paling blue and the desert showed faint colorings. He tied his necktie. A deep-toned keening set up off to the southward, over the sere and dreary landscape. It was a faraway noise, something like the lament of a mountain-sized calf bleating for its mother. Joe took a deep breath. He looked, but saw nothing. The noise, though, told him that there'd been ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... patria? ?En donde habitas? Yo vengo un dia y otro en tu busca, y ni veo el corcel que te trae a estos lugares, ni a los servidores que conducen tu litera. Rompe de una vez el misterioso velo en que te envuelves como en una noche profunda, yo te amo, y, noble o villana, sere tuyo, ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... was right before him. But seen thus closely, the terror of it was lessened. Fleshless indeed it was. But a parchment skin was tightly drawn over the bones, and Allan could see that its true shade was a sere yellow. It was the bluish light that had given it the green of decay. The deep-sunk eyes were kindly; they gleamed with pleasure as Allan's opened; and the ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... more majestic than the world of the Coulee.—The grasses and many of the flowers were also new to us. On the uplands the herbage was short and dry and the plants stiff and woody, but in the swales the wild oat shook its quivers of barbed and twisted arrows, and the crow's foot, tall and sere, bowed softly under the feet of the wind, while everywhere, in the lowlands as well as on the ridges, the bleaching white antlers of by-gone herbivora lay scattered, testifying to "the herds of deer and buffalo" which ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... was the autumn of the year; The strawberry-leaves were red and sere; October's airs were fresh and chill, When, pausing on the windy hill, The hill that overlooks the sea, You talked confidingly to me, Me, whom your keen artistic sight Has not yet learned to read aright, Since I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... getting sere, there was new-fallen snow on Lizard Head, and winter was coming. He had the animal's instinct to den up, to seek winter quarters. Certain ties other than those of Mary's love combined to draw him back to Marmion for the winter. If he could only shake off his ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... I have thought worthy of inclusion. I can only say that the fact that an artist has created one work of high merit makes him a good composer in my opinion, whether or no he has ever written another, and whether or no he has afterward fallen into the sere and yellow school of trash. So Gray's fame is perennial,—one poem among ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... carefully bound with home-twisted twine and this she deposited on her knees and began to unfasten with trembling fingers of expectancy. When she had opened up the thing she rose eagerly and shook out a gown that was as brittle and sere as a leaf in autumn and that rustled frigidly as the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... skies they were ashen and sober; The leaves they were crisped and sere— The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year: It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir:— It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to weave her nest, She seeks and gathers there or here; But spins it from her faithful breast, Renewing still, till leaves are sere. ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... once resolved, the peasants were enjoined Sere-wood, and firs, and doddered oaks to find. With sounding axes to the grove they go, Fell, split, and lay the fuel in a row; Vulcanian food: a bier is next prepared, On which the lifeless body should be reared, Covered with cloth of gold; on which was laid The corps ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... nor I will not, hold me still; My tongue, though not my heart, shall have his will. He is deformed, crooked, old, and sere, Ill-faced, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere; 20 Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind; Stigmatical in making, ...
— The Comedy of Errors - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forced fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear Compels me to disturb your season due: For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... its height now. For weeks there had been no rain, and the Pacific side of the Isthmus was growing sere and yellow beneath the ceaseless glare of the sun. The musty dampness of the rainy season had disappeared, the steady trade-winds breathed a dreamy languor, and the days fled past in one long, ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... not escape into the country till the elm hedges are growing black, and the song-birds silent, and the hay cut, and all the virgin bloom of the country has passed into a sober and matronly ripeness—if not into the sere and yellow leaf. Our very landscape painters, till Creswick arose and recalled to their minds the fact that trees were sometimes green, were wont to paint few but brown autumnal scenes. As for the song of birds, of which in the middle age no ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... wrinkles of shadow; and new and unexpected clumping of colors in monotone and halftone appear. From the massed-up bulk of things small detached bits stand vividly out: a flower girl whose flowers and whose girlhood are alike in the sere and yellow leaf; a soldier swaggering by, his red coat lighting up the grayish mass about him like a livecoal in an ashheap; a policeman escorting a drunk to quarters for the night—not, mind you, escorting him in a clanging, ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... the demolished abode, made his way through a press of sere cabbage palmettos, and emerged suddenly on the blinding expanse of the sea. The limpid water lay in a bright rim over corrugated and pitted rock, where shallow ultramarine pools spread gardens of sulphur-yellow and rose anemones. The land curved ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the Robin's shrill yet mellow pipe, That in the voiceless calm of the young morn, Commingles with my dreams:—lo! as I draw Aside the curtains of my couch, he sits, Deep over-bower'd by broad geranium leaves, (Leaves trembling 'neath the touch of sere decay,) Upon the dewy window-sill, and perks His restless black eye here and there, in search Of crumbs, or shelter from the icy breath Of wild winds rushing from the Polar sea: For now November, with a brumal robe, Mantles the moist and desolated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... after night your horse treads down alone The sere damp fern, night after night you sit Holding the bridle like a man of stone, Dismal, unfriended: ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... visitors who thereafter came to Wreckers' Head continued to amuse the girl immensely. Nor did the visits cease. The Ball homestead was no longer a lonely habitation. Somebody was forever "just stopping by," as the expression ran; and the path from the port was trodden brown and sere as autumn ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... I thought myself a clever fellow, And wish'd that others held the same opinion; They took it up when my days grew more mellow, And other minds acknowledged my dominion: Now my sere fancy 'falls into the yellow Leaf,' and Imagination droops her pinion, And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk Turns what was ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... short grass nibbled away by the frost, may be found even at Christmas a bright sheen of budding wheat beneath the olives on the slope, a yellow haze of sun upon the grass in which the little aromatic shoots of fennel and mint and marigold pattern with greenness the sere brown, the frost-burnt; where the very leafless fruit trees have a spring-like rosy tinge against the blue sky, and the tufted little osiers flame a joyous orange against the greenness ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... lips And shook his curly head, "Farewell, old man, the forest calls; I like you not," he said. "Your flesh is dried, your ribs are lean, You are too lank and sere, Your voice is harsh, your words are grim And do not please mine ear. The great god Pan is all I need And all I wish to know, My Father Pan, the shepherd's god, And ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... carpet bag when I arrived all right, and much obliged. I do not think I shall take any arsenic; shall send partridges to Mr. Yarrell; much obliged. Ask Edward to BARGAIN WITH Clemson to make for my gun—TWO SPARE hammers or cocks, two main-springs, two sere-springs, four nipples or plugs—I mean one for each barrel, except nipples, of which there must be two for each, all of excellent quality, and set about them immediately; tell Edward to make inquiries about prices. I go on Sunday per packet to Plymouth, shall stay one ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... rusted in their bony hands; in plague and famine some. Earth's cities had no sound or tread, and ships were drifting with the dead to shores where all was dumb. Yet, prophet-like, that Lone One stood, with dauntless words and high, that shook the sere leaves from the wood as if a storm passed by, saying—"We are twins in death, proud Sun! thy face is cold, thy race is run, 'tis mercy bids thee go; for thou ten thousand years hast seen the tide of human tears—that ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... accusation! Is any healthily intelligent and progressive human being ever the same for many weeks together? Change—readjustment—is the keynote of life; the very breath of it. When you can accuse me of not changing I shall know that I have fallen into the sere and withered leaf past redemption. And now that I have expiated myself—(probably to your more complete confusion!)—we'll have a short canter to blow away cobwebs. The road is rather ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... There are no balls at the Convent, which is the Governor's residence; and, touching these balls, I have a grievance to ventilate, at the request of Mrs. Quartermaster Damages. She specially imported frilled petticoats from England to display in the mazy dance, and she assured me they were turning sere and yellow in her boxes. She never gets a chance of bringing them out except once in the twelvemonth, when she is asked to the "Quartermasters' Ball." But there is a reason for everything, and Mrs. Quartermaster Damages is fat and forty, and not ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... it is a general practice of the hacienderos to drive down their herds to the low grounds of the coasts and rivers, during the dry season, and as soon as the grass on the hills or highlands begins to grow sere and yellow. We observed also occasional heaps of oyster-shells on the banks, or half washed away by the river; and on the sand-spits at the bends of the stream, and in all the little shady nooks of the shore, we saw thousands of water-fowl, ducks of almost every variety, including ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... leaves were sere, Or scattered by the Autumn wind, Fierce lightnings struck its glories down, And left a blasted ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... mutual love only the night before, and Will was power-fully moved to glance often toward the house, but feared somehow the jokes of his companions. He worked on, therefore, methodically, eagerly; but his thoughts were on the future-the rustle of the oak tree nearby, the noise of whose sere leaves he could distinguish beneath the booming snarl of the machine; on the sky, where great fleets of clouds were sailing on the rising wind, like merchantmen bound to some ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... decoring with a band Of mildest pearls Amelia's milder hand. 'Nay, I will wear it for her sake,' she said: For dear to maidens are their rivals dead. And so, She seated on the black yew's tortured root, I on the carpet of sere shreds below, And nigh the little mound where lay that other, I kiss'd her lips three times without dispute, And, with bold worship suddenly aglow, I lifted to my lips a sandall'd foot, And kiss'd it three times thrice without dispute. Upon my head her fingers fell like snow, Her lamb-like ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... rug, went into the conservatory (he was very thin then), walked around it deliberately, looking at all the plants he knew, and then went to the bay-window in the dining-room, and stood a long time looking out upon the little field, now brown and sere, and toward the garden, where perhaps the happiest hours of his life had been spent. It was a last look. He turned and walked away, laid himself down upon the bright spot in the rug, and ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... little flickering patches of morning sunlight met his gaze, as they played and quivered on the forest moss or over the sere pine-spills. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... No sere yo, hombre de ley y legislador, quien me oponga a que esta aspiracion fuera satisfecha. La considero tan natural como el derecho a la vida y el derecho a la propia defensa. Y por ser natural no considero prematuro el que la mujer ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... his bed of withered and sere leaves and as one distraught, wandered through the shadows of the misty, weird night. In the wood and by the waters he wandered, while the night wore on and the moon held its way—still a lustrous ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... from the cold and stormy North, With a rush and a roar I hurry forth, I toss from the trees the dead leaves down, The withered leaves all sere and brown, And sway the branches to and fro As on my way I whirling go. At crack and crevice I slip in, And make a lively sounding din. Swift I come and swift away, With you I can no longer stay, For I am wanted elsewhere now, And so ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... days before the lands of the outer world were born of the sea, before even the Land of the Sun (Mu) and the Land of the Sea (Atlantis) arose from molten rock and sand, there was land here in the far south. A sere land of rock plains, and swamps where slimy life mated, lived ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... sweet-breathing, mournful, slow-eyed kine With hazel-shielded horns, and gave their milk Gravely to merry maidens. Low the sun Had fallen, when, Patrick near the summit now, There burst on him a wandering troop, wild-eyed, With scant and quaint array. O'er sunburnt brows They wore sere wreaths; their piebald vests were stained, And lean their looks, and sad: some piped, some sang, Some tossed the juggler's ball. "From far we came," They cried; "we faint with hunger; give as food!" Upon them Patrick bent ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... upon the void in silent grief, The world is drear; I've lived and loved, but now the verdant leaf Of life is sere. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... sad the grassy mounds Its graceful growth had veiled!— How sere and faded was their life, Its ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... a blur of misty vision. No longer did the memory of Nora Burke irritate him. Had he associated her with Kitty the betrayer, the irritation would never have passed; but as it was Kitty the charmer her voice brought to him, he drifted, in the sere and yellow age, down the stream of fantasy upon which he had turned his back in scorn when the blood of youth ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... Queen of the Scots was a tiny infant in swaddling clothes. The labors of Rafael Sanzio were still fresh in the memory of his surviving pupils. Michael Angelo was in the zenith of his fame, bending his energies to the beautifying of the great cathedral. Martin Luther was in the sere old age of his life, waiting for the command of the Master, which should bid him lay down his armor. A hundred years were to elapse before Charles I. of England must pay with his life the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... bear and the elk and the deer, And eagles gigantic, aged and sere, They rode long-horn cattle, they cried "A-la-la." They lifted the knife, the bow, and the spear, They lifted ghost-torches from dead fires below, The midnight made grand with the cry "A-la-la." The midnight made grand with ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... amongst huge boulders; the path disappeared; out of the oaks and alder high cliffs of limestones began to lift themselves. The morning was unusually dark and grey, even for October, and as leaves, brown and sere though they were, still clustered thickly on the trees, Copplestone quickly found himself in a gloom that would have made a nervous person frightened. He also found that his forward progress became increasingly difficult. At the foot of a tall cliff which suddenly rose up before ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... whose metrical effusions, with the exception of the fifth and sixth, the clouds of obscurity have long since cast a darkening hue. Even the "Elegaic Sonnets" of Charlotte Smith, which first appeared in 1784, and formed a sort of poetical era in point of popularity, have long since "fallen into the sere and yellow leaf," as it was discriminately hinted by Burns would be the case with his soul-breathing Letters; the Sonnets by the Rev. W.L. Bowles, although emanating from a beautiful fountain-spring of thought and feeling, which should ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... the sere, yellow skeletons of last summer's ferns, if haply winter have forgotten one green leaf for our home vase—in vain we rake, freezing our fingers through our fur gloves—there is not one. An icicle has pierced every heart; ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... adjusted for best effect, neither too many nor too few. The treatment had to be mainly provocative—an appeal in some cases by very coarse means indeed to very coarse nerves, in others by finer devices addressed to senses more tickle o' the sere. And so grew up that unsurpassed and hardly matched product the French short story, where, if it is in perfection, hardly a word is thrown away, and not a word missed that ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... palsy, sere and old, Waiting at the gates of gold, Spake he with his dying breath: "Life is done, but what is death?" Then, in answer to the king, Fell a sunbeam on his ring, Showing by a heavenly ray: "Even ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... heaven's wrath sere his brain and scorch his heart!' she said—'had he not, disguised as the Italian, won my love and driven me to desperation, I now should be happy and comparatively guiltless. But, by his infernal means, I have become a murderess and an outcast—perhaps doomed ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... here, The chill east wind is sighing, The autumn tints are sere, The summer flowers are dying. The river's sullen way Winds on through vacant meadows, The dying light of day ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... either our distinguished friend here has reached that condition described by Shakespeare as 'the sere and yellow leaf,' or has suffered some premature abatement of his mental and physical faculties. Whether ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... sober, Officials look palsied and sere— They indulge in rhetoric small-beer (Instead of sound sparkling October) They're frightened about you, my dear— (You, at present in two senses, dear!) They would scan the far future, and probe ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... far to redeem his forlorn failure. Mitchel, who shared his Australian imprisonment, left a fine picture of "this noblest of Irishmen, thrust in among the off-scourings of England's gaols, with his home desolated and his hopes ruined, and defeated life falling into the sere and yellow leaf. A man, who cannot be crushed, or bowed, or broken; anchored immovably upon his own brave heart within; his clear eye and soul open as ever to all the melodies and splendors of heaven and earth, and calmly ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... ladies seated next each other, both young and handsome; but one, owing to the freshness of her robe, which was of simple organdie, looked infinitely better than the other, who was quite as pretty, but who, wearing a robe of expensive lace, whose whiteness had fallen into "the sere and yellow leaf," ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... principle and the curse of Shakerism; it is slowly but surely bringing the sect to an end. It takes a lot of fanaticism to remain single, and fanaticism is in the sere and yellow leaf. In Massachusetts, where so many women are compelled to remain single, there ought to be many Shakers; there are a few, and Mt. Lebanon is ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... the old man's hopes as he might have been, were it not for the example of Plutina's grandfather, who, somewhat beyond four-score, was still scandalously lively, to the delectation of local gossip. But, though after the departure of Jones at a junction, Zeke reflected half-amusedly on the rather sere romances of these two ancient Romeos, he was far from surmising that, at the last, their amorous ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... adequate impression of the gorgeousness of the forest tints in North America during the autumn. The foliage is inconceivably beautiful and varied, from the broad and brightly dark purple leaf of the maple, to the delicate and pale sere leaf of the poplar, all blending harmoniously with the deep green of their brethren in whom the vital sap still flows in full vigour. I have heard people compare the Hudson and the Rhine. I cannot conceive two streams more totally dissimilar—the distinctive ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... away, and the forest put on the sere and sombre robes of autumn, and yet no visible change—none at least more favorable to the wishes of William Hinkley—took place in the character and conduct of the maiden. Her mind, on the contrary, seemed to take something of its hue from the cold sad tones of the ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... see you turn a listening ear To hear The quail upon the flower-pied heather; But, doggie, wait till uplands sere, And then the autumn's waning weather Will bring the sport we hold ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... great man denies, ready to deny on the Gospels, to her and to himself; and yet, at bottom, if we read with the microscope, there are symptoms, and it is not deniable. How should it? Leafy May, hot June, by degrees comes October, sere, yellow; and at last, a quite leafless condition,—not Favonius, but gray Northeast, with its hail-storms (jealousies, barren cankered gusts), your main wind blowing. "EMILIE FAIT DE L'ALGEBRE," sneers he once, in an inadvertent moment, to some Lady-friend: "Emilie ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... when the year is new, Nor changes, when its frosts appear: For the star still shines in its ground of blue, And the pine tree lives when the rest are sere. From the pine my thoughts ascend above To the Tree of LIfe that Heaven adorns; From the star to the Star of my Saviour's Love, That grandly shone in a crown ...
— The American Missionary, October, 1890, Vol. XLIV., No. 10 • Various
... colour riot, the dominant tone of which was green. It was green, green, green—the blue-green of the springing year, and sere and yellow green and tawny-brown green of autumn. There were orange green, gold green, and a copper green. And all these greens were rich green beyond description; and yet the richness and the greenness passed even as we gazed upon it, going out ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... Of maple-buds along the misty hills, And that immortal call which fills The waiting wood with songs? The snow-drops came so long ago, It seemed that Spring was near! But then returned the snow With biting winds, and earth grew sere, And sullen clouds drooped low To veil the sadness of a hope deferred: Then rain, rain, rain, incessant rain Beat on the window-pane, Through which I watched the solitary bird That braved the tempest, buffeted and tossed With ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... Southern Tuscany, is reached from one side through windings of barren valleys, where the dried-up brooks are fringed, instead of reed, with the grey, sand-loving tamarisk; and from the other side, across a high-lying moorland of stunted heather and sere grass, whence the larks rise up scared by only a flock of sheep or a mare and her foal, and you journey for miles without meeting a house or a clump of cypresses. In front, with the white road zigzagging along their ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... And what let be, While on earth we tarry, We shall cast Like leaves at last Which the sere oaks carry. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... fast from the trees, By Autumn's chill blast are tossed yellow and sere; And soon, with the breath of his nostrils to freeze Each thing he can puff at, will ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... the flowers of Summer, And the forest robes grew sere; Still in darkness knelt the maiden, Pleading, "Mary! ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... wilderness of Coradine, which seems barren and desolate to our sight, accustomed to the deep verdure of woods and valleys, and the blue mists of an abundant moisture. There a stony soil brings forth only thorns, and thistles, and sere tufts of grass; and blustering winds rush over the unsheltered reaches, where the rough-haired goats huddle for warmth; and there is no melody save the many-toned voices of the wind and the plover's wild cry. There dwell the children of Coradine, on the threshold ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... of the pathos which belongs to deep emotion vibrated in the eloquent voice, accustomed to command and persuade—"we strip not the green leaves for our yulehearths—we gather them up when dry and sere. Leave youth on the bough—let the bird sing to it—let it play free in the airs of heaven. Smoke comes from the branch which, cut in the sap, is cast upon the fire, and regret from the heart which is severed from the world while the ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... own. On the one side is dreary Cant, with a reminiscence of things noble and divine; on the other is but acrid Candour, with a prophecy of things brutal, infernal. Hurd and Warburton are sunk into the sere and yellow leaf; no considerable body of true-seeing men looks thitherward for healing: the Paine-and-Hume Atheistic theory, of 'things well let alone,' with Liberty, Equality and the like, is also ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Of maple-buds along the misty hills, And that immortal call which fills The waiting wood with songs? The snow-drops came so long ago, It seemed that Spring was near! But then returned the snow With biting winds, and all the earth grew sere, And sullen clouds drooped low To veil the sadness of a hope deferred: Then rain, rain, rain, incessant rain Beat on the window-pane, Through which I watched the solitary bird That braved the tempest, buffeted and tossed, With rumpled feathers, down the wind ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... his gathered beams Reflected may with matter sere foment, Or by collision of two bodies grind The ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... is sere and small, From the hills, the brishings off the hills; And then come by the bats and all We cut last year in the hills; And then the roots we tried to cleave But found too tough and had to leave— Polting through the lowlands, ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... "The sere wounded one, O sweetest Dulcinea of Toboso, sends thee the health which he wants himself. If thy beauty disdain me, I cannot live. My good Squire Sancho will give thee ample account, O ungrateful fair one, of the penance I do for love of thee. Should it be thy pleasure ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... His soul sustained his sorrows in her sight. And earth was bitter, and heaven, and even the sea Sorrowful even as he. And the wind helped not, and the sun was dumb; And with too long strong stress of grief to be His heart grew sere and numb. ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and his slant beams, falling through a gap in the western hills, streamed down into the little valley, casting long stripes of alternate light and shadow over the smoothly shaven lawn, sparkling upon the ripples of the streamlet, and gilding the embrowned or yellow foliage of the sere hill-sides, with brighter ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... at the unwinding view up Winterbottom Road—so familiar to Ken, who was trying to see it all with fresh eyes. They climbed out at the gate of the farm, and Hop turned his beast and departed. Half-way up the sere dooryard, Ken touched his wondering mother's arm and drew her to a standstill. There lay Applegate Farm, tucked like a big gray boulder between its two orchards. Asters, blue and white, clustered thick to its threshold, honeysuckle swung buff trumpets from the vine about the windows. The smoke ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... in the sere And autumn leaves decayed, The mournful forest tells how quickly fade The glories of the year! When in the silent tomb oppressed, Frail man, with weight of days, Sinks to his tranquil rest; Contented nature but obeys Her everlasting ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... exiguous, is called in the nomenclature of New York a "hall bedroom." The sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and they both commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than Ransom's own habitation—houses built forty years before, and already sere and superannuated. These were also painted red, and the bricks were accentuated by a white line; they were garnished, on the first floor, with balconies covered with small tin roofs, striped in different colours, and with ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... on reflection he was not deeply concerned, for what earthly woman, going off in a freak as Marcia had done, and keeping silence so long, would care for a belated friendship with him now in the sere, even if he were to take ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... of Yellow Old Bald up came the sun, bannered and glorious; the distant ranges glowed in his splendours; the sere fields about the place were all gilded. The small-paned eastern window of the sick-room let in a flood of morning light. Gone was the bird choir that used to welcome his earliest rays, swept south by the great tide ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... o'er head sat a raven, On a sere bough, a grown great bird, and hoarse! Who, all the while the deer was breaking up So croaked and cried for it, as all the huntsmen, Especially old Scathlock, thought it ominous; Swore it was Mother Maudlin, whom he met At the day-dawn, just ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... her were a sweet relief, The bride of a single year. Oh! would she might, with her weight of grief, Lie down in the dust, with the autumn leaf Now trodden and brown and sere! ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... a brook, descending in long, steep steps from the hillside; water perfectly clear, bubbling along the yellow stones between the grassy banks and making now and then a little leap into a lower basin; along the stream great screens of reeds, sere, pale, with barely a pennon of leaves, rustling ready for the sickle; and behind, beneath the watery sky, rainy but somehow peaceful, the russet oak-scrub of the hill. Of spring there was indeed visible only the green of the young wheat beneath the olives; not a bud as yet ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... the bear and the elk and the deer, And eagles gigantic, aged and sere, They rode long-horn cattle, they cried "A-la-la." They lifted the knife, the bow, and the spear, They lifted ghost-torches from dead fires below, The midnight made grand with the cry "A-la-la." The midnight made grand ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... loosed and rioted through the lonely recesses of the craggy ravines and the valley with a wild and eerie blare; the leaves, rustling shrilly, all sere now, so long the weather had held dry, fled in myriads before the gusts. Soon they lay on the ground in dense masses, and in the denudation of the trees the brilliant tints of the little coat, swinging so high in the blast, caught the eye of a wandering hunter. At first sight, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... to her were a sweet relief, The bride of a single year. Oh! would she might, with her weight of grief, Lie down in the dust, with the autumn leaf Now trodden and brown and sere! ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... metrical effusions, with the exception of the fifth and sixth, the clouds of obscurity have long since cast a darkening hue. Even the "Elegaic Sonnets" of Charlotte Smith, which first appeared in 1784, and formed a sort of poetical era in point of popularity, have long since "fallen into the sere and yellow leaf," as it was discriminately hinted by Burns would be the case with his soul-breathing Letters; the Sonnets by the Rev. W.L. Bowles, although emanating from a beautiful fountain-spring of thought and feeling, which should have screened their writer from the venomous shaft of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... ... that fadeth not away." It shall not be as the garlands offered by men—green to-day and to-morrow sere and yellow. "Its leaf also shall not wither." It shall always retain its freshness, and shall offer me a continually fresh delight. And these ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... different. One cannot pass over one's fiftieth birthday without feeling that an event has happened. Fifty! Why, the Psalmist's limit is only seventy. Fifty from seventy. An easy sum, but what an impressive answer! Twenty years, and they the years of the sere, the yellow leaf. Only twenty more times to hear the cuckoo calling over the valley and see the dark beech woods bursting into tender green. I look back twenty years, and it seems only a span. And yet how remote fifty seemed in those days! It was so remote as to be hardly ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... who waked the world to speak, And voiceless hangs the world beside his bier, Our words are sobs, our cry or praise a tear: We are the smitten mortal, we the weak. We see a spirit on earth's loftiest peak Shine, and wing hence the way he makes more clear: See a great Tree of Life that never sere Dropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak; Such ending is not death: such living shows What wide illumination brightness sheds From one big heart,—to conquer man's old foes: The coward, and the tyrant, and the force Of all those weedy monsters ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... tinged with the chill breath of coming snow. Thompson missed the sun that had cheered and warmed those hushed solitudes. Just to look at that dull sky and to hear the wind that was fast stripping the last sere leaves from willow and maple and birch, and to feel that indefinable touch of harshness, the first frigid fingerings of the frost-gods in the air, gave him a swift touch of depression. He shivered a little. Turning ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... unbending form and face radiant and genial with the florid flush of that Indian Summer which so many Englishmen wear late in those autumnal years that bend and pale American forms and faces to "the sere and yellow leaf" of life. But the sequel proved that he did not abdicate his position too early. In a little more than a year from this event, his spirit was raised to higher fellowships and folded with ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... distance. From the stream the ground rose in a gradual slope, and the highest part of the ridge for which I made was about two miles from the starting-point—a parched brown plain, with nothing growing on it but scattered tussocks of sere hair-like grass. ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... He had seen his threescore and ten years; and was fast falling into the "sere and yellow leaf." His hair was getting grey, and his frame, though still active and sinewy, would have yielded under the extraordinary marches he had once made. In dress, there was nothing to remark; his ordinary Indian attire being in as good condition as was usual for the man. Willoughby ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... even the glory of thy fleet feet would have fallen into the sere leaf unrenowned, abiding by the hearth of thy kin, as a cock that fighteth but at home, had not the strife of citizen against citizen driven thee from Knosos ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... with the bean-flower scent in June. One unforgotten day at Rye They sang a love-song in July; In August, hard by Lewes town, They sang of joy 'twixt sky and down; And in September's golden spell We heard them singing on Scaw Fell. October's leaves were brown and sere, But skylarks sang by Teston Weir; And in November, at Mount's Bay, They sang ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... finally to look very pretty, lying stiff and cold, to the one pair of human eyes that were destined to see you! The little birds that come and go and return to us over such vast distances, they perish like this in myriads annually; flying to and from us they are blown away by death like sere autumn leaves, "the pestilence-stricken multitudes" whirled away by the wind! They die in myriads: that is not strange; the strange, the astonishing thing is the fact of death; what can they tell us of it—the wise men who live or have ever lived on the earth—what can they say now of the ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... prayer how Jacob paid The patient price of Rachel; them, Of that calm grace Tobias said, And Sarah's innocent 'Amen.' Without avail! O'erwhelming wealth, The wondrous gift of God so near, Which should have been delight and health Made heart and spirit sick and sere. Until at last the soul of love, That recks not of its own delight, Awoke and bade the mists remove, And then once more I breathed aright; And I rehears'd my marriage vow, And swore her welfare to prefer To all things, and for aye as now To live, not for myself, but her. Forth, from ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... Versate diu quid sere recusent Quid valeant humeri. And, Ego nec studium sine divite vena, Nec rude quid ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... they were ashen and sober, and the leaves they were crisped and sere, as I sat in the porch chair and regarded our neighbor's patch of woodland; and I thought: The skies may be ashen and sober, and the leaves may be crisped and sere, but in a maple wood we may dispense with the sun, such irradiation is there ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... when ye were here, Are singing in another clime; Have left the hedge and forest sere, And gone where all is summer-time. The frail bright flowers that bloom'd around, When ye were blooming bright as they, Lie crushed and withered on the ground, Their ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... you flown, bright dreams? Has that rude hand Sufficed to dash to naught your frail creations? Sad thoughts and humors black now fill my soul. So his rough foot hath bruised the dewy grass, And left it sere. Why should his harsh words touch me? The truth of yesterday is false to-day. How could I know, dear God! How might I guess The bitter sweetness, the delicious pain! A new heart fills my breast, as soft and weak And melting as a tear, unto ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... knitting a quilt, just as she had been sitting one evening several years previously when Matthew Cuthbert had driven down over the hill with what Mrs. Rachel called "his imported orphan." But that had been in springtime; and this was late autumn, and all the woods were leafless and the fields sere and brown. The sun was just setting with a great deal of purple and golden pomp behind the dark woods west of Avonlea when a buggy drawn by a comfortable brown nag came down the hill. Mrs. Rachel peered at ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the season when nature Is all in the sere, When her snow-showers are hailing, Her rain-sleet assailing, Her mountain winds ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... was very beautiful. The cold November day was dying into night. Clear, clear was the sky save for some black and heavy snow clouds that floated on it driven before the easterly wind that piped through the sere grasses and blew the plovers over him as though they were dead leaves. Where the sun had vanished long bars of purple lay above the horizon; to his excited fancy they looked like the gateway of another and a better ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... that leads Somewhere, cold, austere; And I follow a shadow that heeds My coming, and points, not in wrath, Out over: we tread the sere path Up to the summit; recedes All gloom; and at last The ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... pleasure, yet under the influence of the strong fatality which hurried him to his end. It is by mixing somewhat of this feeling in the character of Macbeth, that Shakspeare has excited a momentary interest even for a murderer and usurper, who perceives "his life fallen into the sere and yellow leaf," and pauses for a moment in melancholy reflection as he rushes to "die ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... Countess de Saldar, the behaviour of this well-born English maid was anything but well-bred. She absolutely shrugged her shoulders and marched a-head of him into the conservatory, where she began smelling at flowers and plucking off sere leaves. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... memory, never sere, But fresh as after fallen rain, Of those who learned their lesson here And may not ever come again, Gives to this garden, bruised and browned, A greenness as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... queens—all are real to me now, and all are infinitely pathetic, in the dignity of their fallen and forgotten greatness. With what inalienable majesty they wear their rusty velvets and faded silks, flaunting sere ruffles of point-lace, which at a touch now would be shivered like cobwebs! My heart goes out to them through the glass that divides us. I wish I could stay with them, bear them company, always. I think they like me. I am afraid they will miss me. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... tell me not yon gilded hell That has from boyhood soothed my grief Must fall into the sere and yellow leaf; ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... our distinguished friend here has reached that condition described by Shakespeare as 'the sere and yellow leaf,' or has suffered some premature abatement of his mental and physical faculties. Whether he ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... of Somis, was born at Turin and became one of the foremost violinists in Europe. In 1750 he went to England where he made his first appearance at a benefit concert for Cuzzoni, the celebrated opera singer, then in the sere and yellow leaf of her career. His performance was so brilliant that he became established as the best violinist who had yet appeared in England, and in 1754 he was placed at the head of the opera orchestra, succeeding Festing. Soon afterwards he joined with the singer Mingotti in the management ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... was growing lighter outside. Stars faded in a paling blue and the desert showed faint colorings. He tied his necktie. A deep-toned keening set up off to the southward, over the sere and dreary landscape. It was a faraway noise, something like the lament of a mountain-sized calf bleating for its mother. Joe took a deep breath. He looked, but saw nothing. The noise, though, told him that there'd been no cancellation of orders ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... I heard a roaring wind: It did not come anear; But with its sound it shook the sails, That were so thin and sere. ...
— The Rime of the Ancient Mariner • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... than in our latitudes, but the fall is a long, slow decline from the temperature of October to the lowest level of January without the vicissitudes of other autumns. The embrowning or reddening or yellowing leaves turn sere, but drop or cling to their parent boughs as they choose, for there is seldom a frost to loosen their hold, and seldom a storm to ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... by this time they are married. Where have they gone? The continent is unsettled, and they have often already been there. Perhaps they have gone to Scotland? No doubt they have. And perhaps before the leaves are sere we may find them out among the sea lochs of the beautiful Frith of Clyde, or under the ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... smoke, As jetted steam, dead clouds awoke And quivered on the Western rim. Then the singing started: dim And sibilant as rime-stiff reeds That whistle as the wind leads. The South whispered hard and sere, The North answered, low and clear; And thunder muffled up like drums Beat, whence the East wind comes. The heavy sky that could not weep Is loosened: rain falls steep: And thirty singing furies ride To split the ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... soul sustained his sorrows in her sight. And earth was bitter, and heaven, and even the sea Sorrowful even as he. And the wind helped not, and the sun was dumb; And with too long strong stress of grief to be His heart grew sere and numb. ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... wreaths will look unseemly. Here, perhaps, an everlasting Amaranth, and, close by its side, some weed of an hour, sere, yellow, and shapeless. Their very beauties will lose half their effect, from the bad company they keep. They rely too much on story and event, to the neglect of those lofty imaginings that are peculiar to, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... will thee betide, When thou hast handled been a while; Like sere flowers to be thrown aside;— And I will sigh, while some will smile, To see thy love for more than one Hath brought thee to be loved ...
— Tudor and Stuart Love Songs • Various
... man bring his sweet to woo But here, where such hundreds were lovers too? Where lie the dead lips that thirst to kiss, The empty hands that their fellows miss, Where the maid and her lover, from sere to green, Sleep bed by bed, with the worm between? For it's turn of the year and All Souls' night, When the dead can hear and the ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, on Wednesday, the 22nd February. During the day large numbers visited the sorrowing house, and gazed for the last time on the features of the revered dead. As was to be expected, the larger number were, like the venerable deceased, far into "the sere and yellow leaf," and many who had known him for a long time could scarce restrain the unbidden tear as a flood of recollections surged up at the sight of the ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... Amidst the sere and arid fields, and the woods, black and gray, of ilex and of olive, the great old square house rose before us, pale, solitary, mysterious—a mausoleum that shut in living ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... strung with intent less Of sound than of words, In lands where bright blossoms are scentless, And songless bright birds; Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses, Insatiable summer oppresses Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses, ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... rival—Fear; Who follows ever on his footsteps, sent By jealous Fate who calls great joy a crime. While in far ways 'mong leaves just turning sere, With gaze serene and placid, walks Content. No heart ere held these two guests ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... at once be seen: Trees, at one time, shall be both sere and green: Fire and water shall together lie In one self-sweet-conspiring sympathy: Summer and winter shall at one time show Ripe ears of corn, and up to th' ears in snow: Seas shall be sandless; fields devoid ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... words. It was still spring, a late New England spring, though the unseasonable warmth of the day made it seem summer. The landscape bore the coloring of autumn rather than that of the earlier year. The trees were red and brown and yellow in their incipient leafage. Now and then, among the sere fields, there was a streak of vivid green, or a mound of rich brown, freshly turned earth; but for the most part they were bare. Here and there was the crimson of a new maple; in the distance were the reds and brown ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... then, too, of woodlands lover, Dusk October, berry-stained; Wailed about of parting plover,— Thou then, too, of woodlands lover. Fading now are copse and cover; Forests now are sere ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... cross-road through the woods, parallel with the river, which I crossed again at Dedham. Most of the road lay through a growth of young oaks principally. They still retain their verdure, though, looking closely in among them, one perceives the broken sunshine falling on a few sere or bright-hued tufts of shrubbery. In low, marshy spots, on the verge of the meadows or along the river-side, there is a much more marked autumnal change. Whole ranges of bushes are there painted with many variegated hues, not of the brightest tint, but of a sober cheerfulness. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... the cannonading ceased and the old man halted in his tracks, his gaze riveted upon the wood. For several minutes he saw no sign of what was transpiring behind that screen of sere and yellow autumn leaves, and then a man came running out, and ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... branches, little flickering patches of morning sunlight met his gaze, as they played and quivered on the forest moss or over the sere pine-spills. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... vesture, that has lain Yet all unvisited, the silken gown: Bring out the bracelets, and the golden chain Her dearer friends provided: sere and brown Bring out the festal crown, And set it on her forehead lightly: Though it be withered, twine no wreath again; This only is the crown ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... substance,[159] by virtue of the onehead to our Lord that lieth in knowing and loving of God, in light and ghostly brenning of Him, in transforming of the soul in to the Godhead; but also many other comforts, savours, sweetnesses, and wonderful feelings on sere[160] or sundry manners, after that our Lord vouchethsafe to visit His creatures here in earth, and after that the soul profiteth and waxeth in charity. Some soul, by virtue of charity that God giveth it, is so cleansed, ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... through the noonday glow, That crazy fiddler of the hot mid-year, The dry cicada plies his wiry bow In long-spun cadence, thin and dusty sere: From the green grass the small grasshoppers' din Spreads soft and silvery thin: And ever and anon a murmur steals Into mine ears of toil that moves alway, The crackling rustle of the pitch-forked hay ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... suddenly, that the sober calm of twilight even appears denied to us. The streams rushed by, turbid and swollen from the heavy autumnal rains. A rude wind had robbed most of the trees of their foliage; the sere and withered leaves, indeed, yet remained on the boughs, beautiful even in, their decay, but the slightest breath would carry them away from their resting-places, and the mountain passes were incumbered, and often slippery from the fallen leaves. ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... this "child of hate," as Wotan long ago called him, sere and pallid, totally unglad and hating the glad. He is the tool created by Alberich—even as Siegmund was Wotan's tool,—to win back for him the Ring. From his Nibelung father he has more than human powers and knowledge. In the conversation which we overhear ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... steel under its flashes of dazzling blue. Wild and fitful blasts sweeping down the hollows and cloughs of the fells of Golden Friars agitated the lake, and bent the trees low, and whirled away their sere leaves in melancholy drift in their tremendous gusts. And from the window, looking on a scene enveloped in more than the darkness of the night, you saw in the pulsations of the lightning, before "the speedy gleams the darkness swallowed," the tossing trees and the ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... choked highway curved and they were suddenly fronted by a desert of sere desolation, a desert floored by glassy slag which sent back the sun beams in a furnace glare. Varta shaded her eyes and tried to see the end of this, but, if there was a distant rim of green beyond, the heat distortions ...
— The Gifts of Asti • Andre Alice Norton
... children dear,— How can the pride of Raghu's race Fly from us to some desert place! Here let us all for death prepare, Or on the last great journey fare;(320) Of Rama our dear lord bereft, What profit in our lives is left? Huge trunks of trees around us lie, With roots and branches sere and dry, Come let us set these logs on fire And throw our bodies on the pyre. What shall we speak? How can we say We followed Rama on his way, The mighty chief whose arm is strong, Who sweetly speaks, who thinks no wrong? ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... "Exegi monumentum sere perennius." He is not the least afraid to say that. He did it; knew he had done it; said he had done it; and feared no ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... effective antidote against these destructive worms, and I have ordered a barrel of it from the city. I intend to spread a layer of this Paris green over all our flower and vegetable beds; the contrast thus presented to the dull, sere brown of our lawn will be very pleasing to the eye. In fact, I am not sure that it would not be cheaper to color our whole lawn with Paris green than to attempt to revise it with water, which can be used with legal liberality only between the first of November ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... the Isis on the pagan picture, we behold a tall and erect cross. The upper fields harmonise with the lower. The Christian painting displays a vigorous and stately tree between two younger palm-trees; the pagan picture has the same symbols; but the middle tree is in the sere and yellow leaf, whilst a Dryad issuing from the roots flourishes an axe to cut it down. The allusion is not to be mistaken. The sun of paganism has set: the axe is already ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... standards offer. We trust, however, for the sake of old friendship, that you will overlook our shortcomings. A lesson in manners might not be lost on us," she added with a withering glance and tone that would have reduced any other man to a sere and yellow leaf. ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... Of mildest pearls Amelia's milder hand. 'Nay, I will wear it for her sake,' she said: For dear to maidens are their rivals dead. And so, She seated on the black yew's tortured root, I on the carpet of sere shreds below, And nigh the little mound where lay that other, I kiss'd her lips three times without dispute, And, with bold worship suddenly aglow, I lifted to my lips a sandall'd foot, And kiss'd it three times thrice without ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... have our curfews, only they are not proclaimed from some ancient tower; and, alas, they are, like Easter, a movable institution; whereby it comes to pass that we too often waste the midnight oil and burn the candle at both ends, and before our time fall into the "sere and yellow leaf." ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... ladies at table to-night, each of whom sat by her husband's side. Though they were all in what Dr. Spinks afterwards termed the sere and yellow leaf, both he and the good captain really vied with each other in paying kindly attention to ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... not, however, the reason. So long as the boiling witch-fire turned their wake to golden vapor, he could not be sure; but whenever the heat-lightning ran, and through the sere, phantasmal sail, the lookout in the bow flashed like a sharp silhouette through wire gauze,—then it seemed to Rudolph that another small black shape leapt out astern, and vanished. He stood ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... with me? The year Declined; in the still air the thrush piped clear, The languid sunshine did incurious peer Among the thinned leaves of the forest sere. ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... larger knowledge. Nature and the Divinity that guides her must protect their new evolving creatures. A too sudden revelation and they might perish from sheer wonder.... Yes, truth must come softened, as a dream, to the man child's brain. Its naked light would sere and blind him forever.... But to me it has been given to see—to hear—and keep sane in the light. Oh, from what planet is the call? From what one of the hundred million spheres? How many centuries has it been sent outward to the deaf, the dumb, and the blind? And what is the word? Is it Hail? ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... on your system, not because they have confuted it, but because, like witchcraft or astrology, it has ceased to interest them. The great ship of your Church, once so stout and fair and well laden with good destinies, is become a skeleton ship; it is a phantom hulk, with warped planks and sere canvas, and you who work it are no more than ghosts of dead men, and at the hour when you seem to have reached the bay, down your ship will sink like lead or like stone to ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... may use all your powers of imagination in endeavoring to picture the positions of the troops,—how they look, how they act, how they stand amid the terrible storm, braying death, how they rush into the thickest fire, how they fall like the sere leaves of autumn,—you will fail in your conceptions of the conflict. You must see it, and be in it, to know what ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... pine table close to the heap of failing embers, and aided by what light the sulky candle gave, was bending over and trying to arrange a patch on my old hunting-coat. It was an old, old hunting-coat, far gone in the sere and yellow leaf. It was old-fashioned now, though once of proper cut and comeliness. It was disfigured, stained and worn. The pockets were torn down. The bindings were worn out. It was quite willing to be left alone now, ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... season was at its height now. For weeks there had been no rain, and the Pacific side of the Isthmus was growing sere and yellow beneath the ceaseless glare of the sun. The musty dampness of the rainy season had disappeared, the steady trade-winds breathed a dreamy languor, and the days fled past in one long, unending procession of brilliant ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... boy, I thought myself a clever fellow, And wish'd that others held the same opinion; They took it up when my days grew more mellow, And other minds acknowledged my dominion: Now my sere fancy 'falls into the yellow Leaf,' and Imagination droops her pinion, And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk Turns what ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... the voiceless calm of the young morn, Commingles with my dreams:—lo! as I draw Aside the curtains of my couch, he sits, Deep over-bower'd by broad geranium leaves, (Leaves trembling 'neath the touch of sere decay,) Upon the dewy window-sill, and perks His restless black eye here and there, in search Of crumbs, or shelter from the icy breath Of wild winds rushing from the Polar sea: For now November, with a brumal robe, Mantles the moist and desolated earth; Dim sullen clouds ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... the day dawns, my Rose, I will go and look for herbs. I marked some sorrel on the hill yester e'en, albeit something dry and sere." ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make man better be; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere: A lily of a day Is fairer far in May, Although it fall and die that night— It was the plant and flower of Light. In small proportions we just beauties see; And in short measure ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... They came to a sere, bare hillside on which neither trees nor brushwood grew. It amounted to a natural clearing, acres in extent. Lockley swept his eyes around. There were many thick-foliaged small trees attempting to advance into the clear ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... until the discoverer of that ethnological fact. Dr. George William Bagby, read us his lecture on these cheerful comestibles. We were the first to see the frost that "lies heavy on the palings and tips with silver the tops of the butter-bean poles, where the sere and yellow pods are chattering in the ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... horse treads down alone The sere damp fern, night after night you sit Holding the bridle like a man of stone, Dismal, unfriended: what ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... constantly covered with a piece of lint wetted with glycerine or spread with spermaceti ointment, the part being at the same time carefully preserved from dirt, cold, and wind. It is said that a once favorite actress, celebrated for the beauty of her hands, even when in the "sere and yellow leaf," covered them nightly with the flare of a calf or lamb, with the fat attached, over which was drawn a glove or mitten of soft leather. The application of a little glycerine or fatty matter, in the way just indicated, would have ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... not come on the day I mentioned. I have grudged this splendid weather very much. The moors are in glory, I never saw them fuller of purple bloom. I wanted you to see them at their best; they are just turning now, and in another week, I fear, will be faded and sere. As soon as ever you can leave home, be sure to write and ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... sought thee in the later year, I sought, but found thee there no more; Only a rigid stalk and sere A withered head in silence bore, Or swung, responsive to the sigh Of the stray wind ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... insurance office. This sounded best, but had the smallest salary to begin with, and locality had to be taken into account. Mr. Dutton's plan was, that as soon as Mark was no longer necessary for what Annaple was pleased to call the fall of the sere and withered leaf, the pair should come to stay with him, so that Mark could see his possible employers, and Annaple consider of the situations. They accepted this gratefully, Mark only proposing that she should go either to his stepmother or her own relations ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... frosty rime Is branching over it, and drifts are deep Against the wall. He knocks, and there is time,— (For none doth open),—time to list the sweep And whistle of the wind along the mere Through beds of stiffened reeds and rushes sere. ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... dread black imp, and suddenly The black one bit himself into my heart; And lo, at once the earth lay void and barren, And sun and stars were straightway drenched in gloom. The landscape, glad erewhile, lay dark, autumnal; Each grove was sere, each flower stem was broken; Within the frozen sense my strength lay dead, All joy, all courage withered ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... thousands of other piratical craft which pillage the public with the aid of the taximeter clock on the port beam! Soon they were at the big Broadway playhouse, where Shirley floundered out first, after the ungallant manner of many sere-and-yellow beaux. He swayed unsteadily, teetering on his cane, as Helene leaped lightly to the sidewalk beside him. The driver stood by the door of the car, ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... before him. But seen thus closely, the terror of it was lessened. Fleshless indeed it was. But a parchment skin was tightly drawn over the bones, and Allan could see that its true shade was a sere yellow. It was the bluish light that had given it the green of decay. The deep-sunk eyes were kindly; they gleamed with pleasure as Allan's opened; and ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... upon us, the courtesy of our rulers, the marked attentions paid us in society, and the many enthusiastic letters we daily receive, we are led to believe that woman's suffrage is becoming very popular. As both the editor and proprietor of The Revolution are in the sere and yellow leaf, the many attentions and compliments showered upon us are of course from no personal considerations, but so many tributes of respect to the ideas we represent; as such we gratefully accept all that come ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... was in the drear month of October, The leaves were all crisped and sere, Adown by the Tarn of Auber, In the misty mid ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... head sat a raven, On a sere bough, a grown great bird, and hoarse! Who, all the while the deer was breaking up So croaked and cried for it, as all the huntsmen, Especially old Scathlock, thought it ominous; Swore it was Mother Maudlin, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... wife, though life is called a jaunt, In sadness rife, in sunshine scant, Though mundane joys, the wisest grant, Have no enduring basis: 'Tis something in this desert drear, For thee so fresh, for me so sere, To find in Puss, our daughter dear, A little ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... midwinter now, and the long stretches of pasturage and meadow land outside the walls were blasted and sere when the old mute, whom I had seen twice before, let me out of the big gate. When I returned he was there to open the gate for me and ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... iron lids and fill the postponed expectations of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce shall one day be the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... its brilliant leaves were sere, Or scattered by the Autumn wind, Fierce lightnings struck its glories down, And left ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... saying that charges of any kind were difficult of digestion: Yet, even at that moment, Elizabeth had no more attached subjects in England than sere the burghers of the Netherlands; who were as anxious ever to annex their ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... face—"here is where the sword of Rome lay open my face, yea, wide open as the lips of a crying child. And on my back, most noble mistress, thou mightest hide thy white fingers in the welts cut by the stinging thong. And seest thou my arm? Here is flesh cooked sere as the shell of a tortoise. Thus have blade and thong and branding iron of Rome marked me with wounds and commanded my lips to silence. Yet have these scars each one a thousand silent tongues crying ever 'Hate! Hate! Hate!' But here," and he threw back his tunic and placed three fingers ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... was dry; in dust. The dead grass and the dead leaves made a sere, yellow world. It looked like a land of unending summer, but a breath of chill came out of the ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... day for our picnic. November dreamed that it was May. The air was soft and mellow, with pale, aerial mists in the valleys and over the leafless beeches on the western hill. The sere stubble fields brooded in glamour, and the sky was pearly blue. The leaves were still thick on the apple trees, though they were russet hued, and the after-growth of grass was richly green, unharmed as yet by the ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... young beast—I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that forty's just the right age for me. You're reminding me that I'm a trifle passe myself and ought to marry something sere and yellow. But I tell you I don't feel any older than twenty-five—never have, it's my affliction—while you've never been younger than forty in all your life. It's you who ought to marry middle-age"—and he grimaced ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... question arises: Was Philippe d'Orleans seen, this day, 'in the Bois de Boulogne, in grey surtout;' waiting under the wet sere foliage, what the day might bring forth? Alas, yes, the Eidolon of him was,—in Weber's and other such brains. The Chatelet shall make large inquisition into the matter, examining a hundred and seventy witnesses, and Deputy Chabroud publish his Report; but disclose nothing further. (Rapport ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... clothes. The labors of Rafael Sanzio were still fresh in the memory of his surviving pupils. Michael Angelo was in the zenith of his fame, bending his energies to the beautifying of the great cathedral. Martin Luther was in the sere old age of his life, waiting for the command of the Master, which should bid him lay down his armor. A hundred years were to elapse before Charles I. of England must pay with his life the price of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... termed Proposals—i.e., advertisements of the projected volume, calling for pledges of subscription—and, still more important, securing the permission of some prominent person to accept a dedication of the book. The jolly old days of literary patronage were then in the sere and saffron, but it was still esteemed an aid to the sale of a volume if it might be dedicated to some marquis of Carabas. Accordingly the manuscript was despatched to London, and Neville, the philistine brother, was called upon to leave it at the residence of the Duchess of Devonshire. A very ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... opera it was so exciting and so wonderful that everything else was wiped out of her mind. In the front of the box she sat—its sole ornament—against a background of Mrs. Kirkham's contemporaries, withered and sere in contrast with her lily-pure freshness. In the entr'actes the hostess recalled the opera house in its heyday when the Bonanza Kings occupied their boxes with the Bonanza Queens beside them, when everyone was rich, and all the women wore diamonds. The ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... wrong. That the glare of the sunshine should fall on her pain—that the necessity for meeting mere acquaintances with the same face as yesterday should exist, now that her life lay so scorched and sere before her, filled her ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the briars and nettles, the heaps of broken masonry and plaster, among which shone beneath the darting lizards, scraps of vermilion wall-fresco, the chips of purple porphyry or dark-green serpentine; long avenues of trees early sere, closed in by arum-fringed walls, or by ditches where the withered reeds creaked beneath the festoons of clematis and wild vine; solemn and solitary wildernesses within the city walls, where the silence was broken ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... the girl-wife. Under these genial suns, with such companionship, such daily food, she rushed towards maturity like some half-wild colt brought suddenly from the sere range into abundant and peaceful pasture, the physical side of her being rounded out, glowing with the fires of youth, at the same time that the poor old Captain sank slowly but surely into inactivity and feebleness. She did not perceive his decline, for he talked bravely of his future, ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... deep upon the ground, And winter's brightness all around Decks bravely out the forest sere, With jewels of the brave old year. The coasting crowd upon the hill With some new spirit seems to thrill; And all the temple bells achime. Ring out the glee of ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... bag when I arrived all right, and much obliged. I do not think I shall take any arsenic; shall send partridges to Mr. Yarrell; much obliged. Ask Edward to BARGAIN WITH Clemson to make for my gun—TWO SPARE hammers or cocks, two main-springs, two sere-springs, four nipples or plugs—I mean one for each barrel, except nipples, of which there must be two for each, all of excellent quality, and set about them immediately; tell Edward to make inquiries about prices. I go on Sunday per packet to Plymouth, shall stay one or two days, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... steeping in the dews overnight, exhaled a faint fragrance; a poor remnant of the midsummer multitudes trailed itself along to the various cafes of the valley, its pink paper bags of bread rustling like sere foliage as it moved. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... often by the wooing winds; here, in swarms; the yellow apples hived, like golden bees upon the boughs; here, from the kneeling, fainting trees, thick fell the cherries, in great drops of blood; and here, the pomegranate, with cold rind and sere, deep pierced by bills of birds revealed the mellow of its ruddy core. So, oft the heart, that cold and withered seems, within yet hides ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... nobility—lonely, silent, fallen upon evil days, and haunted here and there by ghosts of departed Marquises and Abbes of the vieille ecole. There was the debateable land to the rear of the Invalides and the Champ de Mars. There was the Faubourg St. Germain, fast falling into the sere and yellow leaf, and going the way of the Ile de Saint Louis. There was the neighborhood of the Boulevart d'Aulnay, and the Rue de la Roquette, ghastly with the trades of death; a whole Quartier of monumental sculptors, makers of iron crosses, weavers of ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... who put it to the additional use of sitting-room and study, made the lack of space particularly noticeable. The window afforded a prospect pleasant enough to eyes such as theirs. Above the lower houses on the opposite side of the way appeared tall trees, in the sere garb of later autumn, growing by old Westminster School; and beyond them, grey in twilight, rose the towers of the Abbey. From this point of view no vicinage of modern brickwork spoilt their charm; the time-worn monitors stood alone against a sky of ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... had to be adjusted for best effect, neither too many nor too few. The treatment had to be mainly provocative—an appeal in some cases by very coarse means indeed to very coarse nerves, in others by finer devices addressed to senses more tickle o' the sere. And so grew up that unsurpassed and hardly matched product the French short story, where, if it is in perfection, hardly a word is thrown away, and not a word missed that is ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... which we passed did not seem so very unlike that which I had left, except that it was more level and less wintry. In summer time the wide fields would have shown me new sights, and the way-side hedges blossomed with new flowers; now, everything was sere and sodden, and a general air of shiftlessness prevailed, which would have caused a New England farmer much disgust, and a strong desire to "buckle to," and "right up" things. Dreary little houses, with chimneys built outside, with clay and ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... matter, from Columbus's discovery in 1492. It's my opinion, I asserted, that some of us had been there thousands of years before, but nobody had had the sense to discover us. We couldn't discover ourselves,—though if we could have foreseen how the sere and yellow nations of the earth would taunt us with youth and inexperience, we should have had ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Noel! Cease, cease, each Christmas bell! Under the holly bough, Where the happy children throng and shout, What shadow seems to flit about? Is it the mother, then, who died Ere the greens were sere last Christmas-tide? Hush, falling chimes! Cease, cease, my rhymes! The guests are ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... and, touching these balls, I have a grievance to ventilate, at the request of Mrs. Quartermaster Damages. She specially imported frilled petticoats from England to display in the mazy dance, and she assured me they were turning sere and yellow in her boxes. She never gets a chance of bringing them out except once in the twelvemonth, when she is asked to the "Quartermasters' Ball." But there is a reason for everything, and Mrs. Quartermaster Damages is fat and forty, and not fair, and—tell ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... that blaze by wrath Divine, Lost branches of the once-loved vine, Now withered, spent, and sere, See Israel's sons, like glowing brands, Tossed wildly o'er a thousand lands ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... that he had never seen before. At the end of the passage, below the dark staircase, was a door opening into the Paradou, and he could see the vast garden spreading there beneath the pale sunlight, with all its autumn melancholy, its sere and yellow foliage. The doctor hurried through the doorway and took a few steps ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... loving friend hast thou found in me, And rest in my little home." Then, deep in its quiet mossy bed, Sheltered from sun and shower, The grateful worm spun its winter tomb, In the shadow of the flower. And Clover guarded well its rest, Till Autumn's leaves were sere, Till all her sister flowers were gone, And her winter sleep drew near. Then her withered leaves were softly spread O'er the sleeping worm below, Ere the faithful little flower ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... Sere'na, allured by the mildness of the weather, went into the fields to gather wild flowers for a garland, when she was attacked by the Blatant Beast, who carried her off in its mouth. Her cries attracted to the spot Sir Calidore, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... I went back to the woods. It was pleasant to be surrounded again by the ever-living earth that feels no loss and has no memory; that was sere yesterday, is green to-day, will be sere again to-morrow, then green once more; that pauses not for wounds and wrecks, nor lingers over death and change; but onward, ever onward, along the groove of ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen
... mid-aged, with lips thin-drawn, And tissues sere, Are they the ones we loved in years agone, And ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... who shared his Australian imprisonment, left a fine picture of "this noblest of Irishmen, thrust in among the off-scourings of England's gaols, with his home desolated and his hopes ruined, and defeated life falling into the sere and yellow leaf. A man, who cannot be crushed, or bowed, or broken; anchored immovably upon his own brave heart within; his clear eye and soul open as ever to all the melodies and splendors of heaven and earth, and calmly waiting ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... somewhat overcast by tho mists which announce coming winter in London, and Helen walked musingly beneath the trees that surrounded the garden of Lord Lansmere's house. Many leaves were yet left on the boughs; but they were sere and withered. And the birds chirped at times; but their note was mournful and complaining. All within this house, until Harley's arrival, had been strange and saddening to Helen's timid and subdued spirits. Lady ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... For bloom, and fragrance, and the ruby fire Of maple-buds along the misty hills, And that immortal call which fills The waiting wood with songs? The snow-drops came so long ago, It seemed that Spring was near! But then returned the snow With biting winds, and earth grew sere, And sullen clouds drooped low To veil the sadness of a hope deferred: Then rain, rain, rain, incessant rain Beat on the window-pane, Through which I watched the solitary bird That braved the tempest, ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... in spring, And over-long was green, and early sere, And never gathered gold in the late year From autumn suns, and moons of harvesting, But failed in frosts ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang
... in number. Then there were no holes at all, but only clouds breaking up the clear view of the ground beneath. And presently again even the clouds were left behind and the air was clear—but still there was no horizon—and there was brownish earth with small green patches and beyond was sere brown range. At seventeen thousand feet there were simply ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... on her words came the doctor, emerging slowly, for he was weak and unsteady. In the garish light of the afternoon he looked singularly white and bleached, like a man whose warm, red-veined life is dried into a sere grayness of blood and tissue. He was out of harmony with the glad living colors around him, ghostlike amid the brightness of the flowering earth and the deep-dyed heaven. He met ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... foamed and tumbled, was surrounded by magnificent old oaks, some with hollow trunks, others with branches gnarled and twisted in a thousand fantastic shapes, some yet retained a portion of their leaves—brown and sere, one or two were enveloped with ivy, and here and there the mistletoe could be seen, thick and verdant. It was a spot the Druids must have delighted to haunt in the times gone by, and one a painter might like to hap upon now in his ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... the road ill-formed, leading for the most part across a sere and desolate country, with nothing to relieve its barrenness except long stretches of the great spear-headed reeds. At noon the heat was intense; the little cavalcade halted for half an hour under the shade of some black towering rocks which broke the monotony of the district, and ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... species of borrowed light, seem like scenery which one has seen in the glance of a mid-day sun, presented again to the dreamy "evening sense" under the soft blue effulgence of the waning harvest-moon; the trees with the sere leaf rustling under the fluttering wing of the night bird; and the dead silence, which is not broken by the internal voice speaking the words that have been spoken by those who lie under the yew tree. In an early leaf ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... sure to put a finish to these poor habiliments. So we gradually flung them all aside, and took to honest homespun and linsey-woolsey, as preferable, on the whole, to the plan recommended, I think, by Virgil—"Ara nudus; sere nudus,"—which, as Silas Foster remarked, when I translated the maxim, would be apt ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... mild, change thou thy cheer, Cease from thy sorrow and sighing sere, It syttes[373] unto my heart full sore; The sorrow is sharp, I suffer here; But the dole thou drees,[374] my mother dear, Me martyrs mickle more. Thus wills my father I fare To loose mankind from bands His son will he not spare, To loose that bond was e'er Full fast in fiends' ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... discovering the whereabouts of Goodge—the Goodge we want—and at eight o'clock was comfortably seated in that gentleman's parlour, talking over the affair of the letters. Tolerably quick work, I think you will allow, my dear sir, for a man whose years have fallen into the sere and yellow leaf. ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... threads to weave her nest, She seeks and gathers there or here; But spins it from her faithful breast, Renewing still, till leaves are sere. ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... but no less A snowdrop. And thou shalt complete his lot And bloom as fair as now when they are not. Thou art the wonder of the seasons, O First-born of Beauty. As the Angel near Gazed on that first of living things which, when The blast that ruled since Chaos o'er the sere Leaves of primeval Palms did sweep the plain, Clung to the new-made sod and would not drive, So gaze I upon thee amid the reign Of Winter. And because thou livest, I live. And art thou happy in thy loneliness? Oh couldst thou hear the shouting of the floods, Oh couldst thou ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... dwell upon a phase of life that was like autumn and sere and drifting leaves. It bothered him that the thought of Hannah and Hughie had driven him to think it out. He liked best in heart things to think back, not ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... and water, which is hardly made more palatable by the appearance of the people watching me feed - a woman in an airy, fairy costume, that is little better than no costume at all, comes forward, and contributes a small bowl of yaort; but, unfortuntaely, this is old yaort, yaort that is in the sere and yellow stage of its usefulness as human food; and although these people doubtless consume it thus, I prefer to wait until something more acceptable and less odoriferous turns up. I miss the genial hospitality of the gentle Koords to-day. Instead of heaping plates of pillau, and bowls of wholesome ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... weight, like those old cedars yonder by the way-side, beneath their weight of snow. Wherever the eye can pierce their white vesture, all is still deep spring-green beneath; unchanged at heart—strong and true. So I like to look on you, Sere Leaf.' ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... group of clerks watched him with mingled respect and curiosity as he continued to the inner shut space. It was a large light room with windows on Charter Street. William's expansive flat-topped desk with its inked green baize was on the left, and, under a number of framed sere ships' letters and privateersmen's Bonds of the War of 1812, Gerrit saw the heavy body extended on a broad wooden bench, a familiar orange Bombay handkerchief ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... sweet flowers, tho' sere and dead, Can by their fragrance bring Remembrance of the days long fled Again on Memory's wing. So many a kindly smile I'll mourn With deep and fond regret; For though I never may return, I ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... formerly! The great man denies, ready to deny on the Gospels, to her and to himself; and yet, at bottom, if we read with the microscope, there are symptoms, and it is not deniable. How should it? Leafy May, hot June, by degrees comes October, sere, yellow; and at last, a quite leafless condition,—not Favonius, but gray Northeast, with its hail-storms (jealousies, barren cankered gusts), your main wind blowing. "EMILIE FAIT DE L'ALGEBRE," sneers ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... summits. The pleasant rambles among hills and glens, and the pleasanter restings by the burn-side, were all at an end now. The swollen waters of the burn hid the stone seat where the children had loved to sit, and the sere leaves of the rowan-tree lay scattered in the glen. Even when a blink of sunshine came, they could not venture out among the dripping heather, but were fain to content themselves with sitting on the turf seat at ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... blowing, and long plumes of dust whisked up out of the curving street and swept over the ill-kept yards, past the cabins, and toward the sere fields and chromatic woods. The wind beat at the brown man; the dust whispered against his clothes, made him squint his eyes to a crack and tickled his nostrils at ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... circled around a young pine lying across the trail. Roy remembered the tree. It had stood on a little knoll, strong and graceful, reaching straight toward heaven with a kind of gallant uprightness. Now its trunk was snapped, its boughs crushed, its foliage turning sere. An envious wind had brought it low. Somehow that pine reminded Beaudry poignantly of the girl they were seeking. She, too, had always stood aloof, a fine and vital personality, before the eyes of men sufficient to herself. But as the evergreen ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... distance, blurred by the sheets of rain, was a line of low hills, with a jagged fringe of bluish firs and a solitary windmill. It must be a good mile and a half since we had passed a house, and there was none to be seen in the distance—nothing but the undulation of sere grass, sopped brown beneath the huge blackish oak-trees, and whence arose, from all sides, a vague disconsolate bleating. At last the road made a sudden bend, and disclosed what was evidently the home of my sitter. It was not what I had expected. In a dip in the ground ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... When Time has worked his inexorable will, and powder, paint, and crafty clothing can no longer hide his ravages, then the virtuous woman triumphs, probably for the first time in her life. They are both old, she and the courtesan, but she is sometimes beautiful—old, grey, and sere, but venerable, charming—and little children love her, and younger women bring their troubles—ay, and their joys, reverently to her, feeling a benediction in the touch of the pure, withered hand. While the courtesan—alas! a ridiculous garish ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... fragrance, and the ruby fire Of maple-buds along the misty hills, And that immortal call which fills The waiting wood with songs? The snow-drops came so long ago, It seemed that Spring was near! But then returned the snow With biting winds, and all the earth grew sere, And sullen clouds drooped low To veil the sadness of a hope deferred: Then rain, rain, rain, incessant rain Beat on the window-pane, Through which I watched the solitary bird That braved the tempest, buffeted and tossed, With rumpled feathers, down the wind again. Oh, were the ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... thought it was the accident of the seasons; and then a branch fell, and they said it was a storm, and such a storm as came but once in a thousand years. At last there could be no doubt that the leaves were thin and sere and scanty—that the sun shone through them—that the fruit was tasteless. But the generation was gone away which had known the tree in its beauty, and so men said it was always so—its fruits were never better—its foliage ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the young ones longed to see the world; so they must go. The day they started, the whole flock flew to the great house, to say good-by. Some dived and darted round and round it, some hopped to and fro on the sere lawn, some perched on the chimney-tops, and some clung to the window ledges; all ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... bathed in blood From sunset light in a crimson flood, We wandered under the young teak trees Whose branches whined in the light night breeze; You led me down to the water's brink, "The Spring where the Panthers come to drink At night; there is always water here Be the season never so parched and sere." Have we souls of beasts in the forms of men? I fain would have ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... my pipe, shall my dream be as fair When it changes to dreams of the past? When autumn's chill winds make this leaf look as sere As the leaves on the beech-tree that shelters me here, Will the tree's heart ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... winter. The trees turned into naked black ghosts; or, rather, into many-stringed harps whereon the northwest gales alternately shrieked and roared. The fire-blue lake was a sheet of leaden ice, twenty inches thick. The fields showed sere and grayly lifeless in the patches between sodden snow-swathes. Nature had flown south, with the birds; leaving the northern world a lifeless and empty husk, as deserted as last ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... he gently bends beneath their weight, like those old cedars yonder by the way-side, beneath their weight of snow. Wherever the eye can pierce their white vesture, all is still deep spring-green beneath; unchanged at heart—strong and true. So I like to look on you, Sere Leaf.' ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... that rives The image of the sun from man; a scowling tempest hurls Our world into a chaos, and still it whirls and whirls. It is the Boreal blast of sin, else all were meek and calm, And Creation would be singing still its old primeval psalm. Woe for the leaf of human life! it flutters in the sere, And what avails its dance in air, with dust and down-come near? That airy dance, what signifies the madness that inspires? The king, the clown, alike is borne along, alike expires. Come let us try another weird—the tempest ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... and the water. Many hills were covered with a thin forest of oaks and very little underbrush. At a distance the ground appeared as if carefully trimmed for occupation, especially as it had a few open places like fields. In the sere and yellow leaf of autumn these groves were charming, and I presume they are equally so in the fresh verdure ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... be gladdened by the sight of living green, and interspersed with these are deciduous trees of every kind, to make a fantastic tracery of bare branches against the wintry sky and furnish a series of beautiful contrasts, from the earliest tender bud to the last sere autumn leaf. And the ferns! Did the Great Artist have any left after planting the fence-corners, roadsides and deep woods of Peterboro? Overarch these features with a fair dome of fleece-scattered blue and waft abroad throughout the place a ...
— Edward MacDowell • Elizabeth Fry Page
... ole f'la," Lord Jasper continued, coming over to Henry and taking hold of his arm. "Thirty-one. I'm getting on in years, ole f'la, that's what I'm doing ... sere and yellow, so to speak ... and a chap my age doesn't want to be bothered with a damn play. He wants something ... something substansl!..." He fumbled over the word "substantial" and then fell on it. "Something ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... quantity. His eye is jaded and satiated, and the blue and red have life in them no more. He tries to paint them bluer and redder, in vain: all the blue has become grey, and gets greyer the more he adds to it; all his crimson has become brown, and gets more sere and autumnal the more he deepens it. But the great painter is sternly temperate in his work; he loves the vivid color with all his heart; but for a long time he does not allow himself anything like ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... mellow pipe, That in the voiceless calm of the young morn, Commingles with my dreams:—lo! as I draw Aside the curtains of my couch, he sits, Deep over-bower'd by broad geranium leaves, (Leaves trembling 'neath the touch of sere decay,) Upon the dewy window-sill, and perks His restless black eye here and there, in search Of crumbs, or shelter from the icy breath Of wild winds rushing from the Polar sea: For now November, with a brumal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... anhungered and athirst, Blank miles of moor sweep inland, sere and blind, Where summer's best rebukes not ...
— A Century of Roundels • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of Poe! It is like a fairy dwelling, a gnomic palace built of the aether of dreams. It is tiny and delicate and lovely, and replete with memories of sere leaves in November and of lilies in April. It is a castle of vanished hopes, of dimly-remembered dreams, of sad memories older than the deluge. The dead years circle slowly and solemnly around its low white walls, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... the dancing girls, quench the lights, remove Golden cups and garlands sere, all the feast; away Lutes and lyres and Lalage; close the gates, above Write upon the lintel this; Time is done for play! Thou hast had thy fill of love, eaten, drunk; the show Ends at last, 'twas long enough—time it ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... pinch, and the young ones longed to see the world; so they must go. The day they started, the whole flock flew to the great house, to say good-by. Some dived and darted round and round it, some hopped to and fro on the sere lawn, some perched on the chimney-tops, and some clung to the window ledges; all twittering ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... many a poet's page The blest reverse he proved: How sweet to pass life's pilgrimage, From purple youth to sere old age, ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... sirris-shaws were sere, An' the nichts were lang and mirk, In braw new breeks, wi' a gowden ring, Oor ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... before the lands of the outer world were born of the sea, before even the Land of the Sun (Mu) and the Land of the Sea (Atlantis) arose from molten rock and sand, there was land here in the far south. A sere land of rock plains, and swamps where slimy life mated, ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... a raven, On a sere bough, a grown great bird, and hoarse! Who, all the while the deer was breaking up So croaked and cried for it, as all the huntsmen, Especially old Scathlock, thought it ominous; Swore it was Mother Maudlin, whom he met At the day-dawn, just as he roused ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... black imp, and suddenly The black one bit himself into my heart; And lo, at once the earth lay void and barren, And sun and stars were straightway drenched in gloom. The landscape, glad erewhile, lay dark, autumnal; Each grove was sere, each flower stem was broken; Within the frozen sense my strength lay dead, All joy, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... on the day I mentioned. I have grudged this splendid weather very much. The moors are in glory, I never saw them fuller of purple bloom. I wanted you to see them at their best; they are just turning now, and in another week, I fear, will be faded and sere. As soon as ever you can leave home, be sure to write ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... was an old, gabled, lower town at Cassel, I felt the special gladness of the touch of Germany. It was an autumn morning, bright yet tender. I sped along the wide, empty streets, across the sanded square, with hedges of sere lime trees, where a big, periwigged Roman Emperor of an Elector presides, making one think of the shouts of "Hurrah, lads, for America!" of the bought and sold Hessians of Schiller's "Cabal and Love." At the other end was a promenade, terraced above the yellow tree-tops of a park, above a gentle ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... verse concise yet clear Tunes to smooth melody unconquer'd sense, May your fame fadeless live, as 'never-sere' The Ivy wreathes yon Oak, whose broad defence Embowers me from Noon's sultry influence! 5 For, like that nameless Rivulet stealing by, Your modest verse to musing Quiet dear Is rich with tints heaven-borrow'd: the charm'd eye Shall gaze undazzled there, and love ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Through many a day toward many a wearier night His soul sustained his sorrows in her sight. And earth was bitter, and heaven, and even the sea Sorrowful even as he. And the wind helped not, and the sun was dumb; And with too long strong stress of grief to be His heart grew sere and numb. ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and good man were to be so few on earth. He was then about sixty-five years of age, of stately, unbending form and face radiant and genial with the florid flush of that Indian Summer which so many Englishmen wear late in those autumnal years that bend and pale American forms and faces to "the sere and yellow leaf" of life. But the sequel proved that he did not abdicate his position too early. In a little more than a year from this event, his spirit was raised to higher fellowships and folded with those of the pure and blest of bygone ages. The incidents and coincidents ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... Coradine, which seems barren and desolate to our sight, accustomed to the deep verdure of woods and valleys, and the blue mists of an abundant moisture. There a stony soil brings forth only thorns, and thistles, and sere tufts of grass; and blustering winds rush over the unsheltered reaches, where the rough-haired goats huddle for warmth; and there is no melody save the many-toned voices of the wind and the plover's wild cry. There dwell the children of Coradine, on ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... everywhere was the dull, cold, gray, hopeless desolation of the approach of minter. The hard, wiry grass that thinly covered the once and sand, the occasional stunted weeds, and the sparse foliage of the gnarled and dwarfish undergrowth, all were parched brown and sere by the fiery heat of the long Summer, and now rattled drearily under the pitiless, cold rain, streaming from lowering clouds that seemed to have floated down to us from the cheerless summit of some great iceberg; the tall, naked pines moaned and shivered; dead, sapless leaves fell wearily to the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... clothing can no longer hide his ravages, then the virtuous woman triumphs, probably for the first time in her life. They are both old, she and the courtesan, but she is sometimes beautiful—old, grey, and sere, but venerable, charming—and little children love her, and younger women bring their troubles—ay, and their joys, reverently to her, feeling a benediction in the touch of the pure, withered hand. While the courtesan—alas! ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... called in the nomenclature of New York a "hall bedroom." The sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and they both commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than Ransom's own habitation—houses built forty years before, and already sere and superannuated. These were also painted red, and the bricks were accentuated by a white line; they were garnished, on the first floor, with balconies covered with small tin roofs, striped in different colours, and ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... vault springs clear, Sunlit and cloudless for one half the year; For this no snowflake, e'er so lightly pressed, Chills the warm impulse of our mother's breast. Quick to reply, from meadows brown and sere, She thrills responsive to Spring's earliest tear; Breaks into blossom, flings her loveliest rose Ere the white crocus mounts Atlantic snows; And the example of her liberal creed Teaches the ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... our poor eyes fall, Nor how our cheeks are sunk and sere . . . Dear, when you waken, will you call? . . . Alas! we are ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... is my favorite above all. She is the true sibyl. All the grandeur of that wasted frame comes from within. The life of thought has wasted the fresh juices of the body, and hardened the sere leaf of her cheek to parchment; every lineament is sharp, every tint tarnished; her face is seamed with wrinkles,—usually as repulsive on a woman's face as attractive on a man. We usually feel, on looking at a ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... wood down is sere and small, From the hills, the brishings off the hills; And then come by the bats and all We cut last year in the hills; And then the roots we tried to cleave But found too tough and had to leave— Polting through the lowlands, lowlands, Lowlands ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... in a park-like fashion, and beyond this lay a stretch of open plain running down to a dry pan, or water-hole, which covered about an acre of ground, and was densely clothed with reeds, now in the sere and yellow leaf. From the further edge of this pan the ground sloped up again to a great cleft, or nullah, which had been cut out by the action of the water, and was pretty thickly sprinkled with bush, amongst which grew some large trees, ...
— Long Odds • H. Rider Haggard
... only the poverty of its occupant, who put it to the additional use of sitting-room and study, made the lack of space particularly noticeable. The window afforded a prospect pleasant enough to eyes such as theirs. Above the lower houses on the opposite side of the way appeared tall trees, in the sere garb of later autumn, growing by old Westminster School; and beyond them, grey in twilight, rose the towers of the Abbey. From this point of view no vicinage of modern brickwork spoilt their charm; the time-worn monitors stood alone against a sky of ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... in direct opposition to the Isis on the pagan picture, we behold a tall and erect cross. The upper fields harmonise with the lower. The Christian painting displays a vigorous and stately tree between two younger palm-trees; the pagan picture has the same symbols; but the middle tree is in the sere and yellow leaf, whilst a Dryad issuing from the roots flourishes an axe to cut it down. The allusion is not to be mistaken. The sun of paganism has set: the axe is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... autumn's wind and rain, through husks that, dry and sere, Unfolded from their ripened charge, shone out the yellow ear; Beneath, the turnip lay concealed, in many a verdant fold, And glistened in the slanting light ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... are the brown stems of the pasture goldenrod standing stiffly as if to state with grim definiteness that all rainbow hopes are folly and there will be no more blossoming for them. Their leaves are dun and sere where they have not already fallen and their tops that in early September were such soft cumulus clouds of golden yellow are but scrawny clots of brown, draggled by the tears in which the sudden sun has drowned the pasture. Yet these least of all should be pessimistic in November, ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... were loosed and rioted through the lonely recesses of the craggy ravines and the valley with a wild and eerie blare; the leaves, rustling shrilly, all sere now, so long the weather had held dry, fled in myriads before the gusts. Soon they lay on the ground in dense masses, and in the denudation of the trees the brilliant tints of the little coat, swinging so high in the blast, caught the eye of a wandering ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... world's history, and the wealth of political and literary and social and artistic traditions it abandoned had subsequently to be revived and assimilated to it fragment by fragment from the past it had submerged. Now, I do not see that the world to-day presents any fair parallelism to that sere age of stresses in whose recasting Christianity played the part of a flux. Ours is on the whole an organizing and synthetic rather than a disintegrating phase throughout the world. Old institutions are neither hard nor obstinate to-day, and the immense and various constructive ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... in leisurely fashion and sought the way to the front entrances of the villas. Under the shade of the horse-chestnuts, which his critical eye decided to be, like himself and Margaret, approaching the season of the sere and yellow leaf, he loitered, smoking and watching, and counting up the years since he had waited and watched ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... the parapet, finding rest in a mild melancholy, his thoughts chiefly occupied with the decay of Prepimpin who sat by his heels gazing at the roadway, occupied possibly by the same sere reflections. Presently the flea-catching antics of a ragged mongrel in the middle of the roadway disturbed Prepimpin's sense of the afternoon's decorum. He rose and with stiff dignity stalked towards him. He stood nose to nose with the mongrel, his tufted ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... inheritance ... that fadeth not away." It shall not be as the garlands offered by men—green to-day and to-morrow sere and yellow. "Its leaf also shall not wither." It shall always retain its freshness, and shall offer me a continually fresh delight. And these are all mine ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... our age so sad? Has Schopenhauer carried the judgment of mankind by his favorite motto, "It is safer to trust fear than faith?" Is it because our age has lost faith in God? Have doubt and skepticism burned the divine dew off the grass, and left it sere and brown? Nay, a ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... colonisation, on winds, on birds, on the rivers of the world, and— ominous subject—a sort of comprehensive history of Greek literature, with a careful classification of all authors, each under his own heading. Greek literature was rather in the sere and yellow leaf, be sure, when men thought of writing that sort of thing about it. But still, he is an encyclopaedic man, and, moreover, a poet. He writes an epic, "Aitia," in four books, on the causes of the myths, religious ceremonies, and so forth—an ominous sign for the myths also, and the ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... yet more dear, O, little city, grey and sere, Though shrunken from thine ancient pride And lonely by thy lonely sea, Than these fair halls on Isis' side, Where Youth an hour came back ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... state from his manhood's noon to its gathering eve. And in that pause there came from afar off a melodious, melancholy strain—softly, softly borne over the cold blue waters—softly, softly through the sere autumnal leaves—the music of the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... arises: Was Philippe d'Orleans seen, this day, 'in the Bois de Boulogne, in grey surtout;' waiting under the wet sere foliage, what the day might bring forth? Alas, yes, the Eidolon of him was,—in Weber's and other such brains. The Chatelet shall make large inquisition into the matter, examining a hundred and seventy witnesses, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... much as common men can love a flower Unto Lanciotto was Francesca dear, 'Tis not on such Love wields his jealous power; And therefore Paolo moved him not to fear, Though he so green with youth and he so sere. Nor yet indeed was wrong, the hidden thing Grew at each heart, unknown of each, a year,— Two eggs still silent in the nest through spring, May draws so near to June, and not ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... and the curse of Shakerism; it is slowly but surely bringing the sect to an end. It takes a lot of fanaticism to remain single, and fanaticism is in the sere and yellow leaf. In Massachusetts, where so many women are compelled to remain single, there ought to be many Shakers; there are a few, and Mt. Lebanon is just ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... one sere leaf, that parting Autumn gilds, Trembles upon the thin, and naked spray, November, dragging on his sunless day, Lours, cold and fallen, on the watry fields; And Nature to the waste dominion yields, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... green on the graves of Shepherd Fennel and his frugal wife; the guests who made up the christening party have mainly followed their entertainers to the tomb; the baby in whose honour they all had met is a matron in the sere and yellow leaf. But the arrival of the three strangers at the shepherd's that night, and the details connected therewith, is a story as well known as ever in ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... himself for expiation. It is ordinarily a moment when the unprepared guest abandons himself to despair, and when even the more prophetic spirit finds memory forsaking it, or the treacherous ideas committed to paper withering away till the manuscript in the breast-pocket rustles sere and sad as the leaves of autumn. But let no one at this table be under a fearful apprehension. This were to little purpose an image of the great republic of letters, if the mind of any citizen might be invaded, and his right to hold his peace ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... long lifting to the blue Of summer's brilliant sky but russet hue Of sere grass shivering in the trade-wind's sweep. Soon, with light footfalls, from their tranced sleep The first rains bid the poppies rise anew, And trills the lark exultant summons, too. How swift at Fancy's beck those gay crowds leap To glowing life! The eager green leaves creep For ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... and progressive human being ever the same for many weeks together? Change—readjustment—is the keynote of life; the very breath of it. When you can accuse me of not changing I shall know that I have fallen into the sere and withered leaf past redemption. And now that I have expiated myself—(probably to your more complete confusion!)—we'll have a short canter to blow away cobwebs. The road is ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... rose from yesterday; Flowers are so fresh from the wayside and wood, Sorrows are blessings but half understood. Say! Let's not mind it, however it seems, Hope is so sweet and holds so many dreams; All of the sere fields with blossoms shall blaze ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... a sere, bare hillside on which neither trees nor brushwood grew. It amounted to a natural clearing, acres in extent. Lockley swept his eyes around. There were many thick-foliaged small trees attempting to advance into the clear space. He ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... works up his mound In the mouldered piny soil, And above the busy ground Takes the joy of earnest toil: Dropping pine-cones, dry and sere, Warn him 'tis the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the host am I of lovers sad and sere For waiting long drawn out and expectation drear. My patience underneath the loss of friends and folk With pallor's sorry garb hath clad me, comrades dear. Abasement, misery and heart-break after those ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... Rome lay open my face, yea, wide open as the lips of a crying child. And on my back, most noble mistress, thou mightest hide thy white fingers in the welts cut by the stinging thong. And seest thou my arm? Here is flesh cooked sere as the shell of a tortoise. Thus have blade and thong and branding iron of Rome marked me with wounds and commanded my lips to silence. Yet have these scars each one a thousand silent tongues crying ever 'Hate! Hate! Hate!' But here," and he threw back ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... borders it, strewed with the pale yellow leaves of the elm, just beginning to fall; hedgerows glowing with long wreaths of the bramble in every variety of purplish red; and overhead the unchanged green of the fir, contrasting with the spotted sycamore, the tawny beech, and the dry sere leaves of the oak, which rustle as the light wind passes through them; a few common hardy yellow flowers (for yellow is the common colour of flowers, whether wild or cultivated, as blue is the rare one), ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... fair were born To rapture! ere thy last wild song was sung. I deem thy day is Night and thou the Moon— So feeble is thy kiss, so cold thy light,— Lamp of my life, alas!—how soon, how soon— O speak! comes thy last greeting and good-night? My breasts are sere as sand, no flowers bloom, No grass, no forests hide my misery bare; The reaches of the tyrannous poles consume Those gardens of delight we made so fair, And men lie dark in caves, a sullen race, Framed of ray daughter's flesh but now ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... spiritual communions made by him sometimes at the close of some visit to the Blessed Sacrament. The book which he used for these visits was an old neglected book written by saint Alphonsus Liguori, with fading characters and sere foxpapered leaves. A faded world of fervent love and virginal responses seemed to be evoked for his soul by the reading of its pages in which the imagery of the canticles was interwoven with the communicant's prayers. An inaudible voice seemed to caress the soul, telling her names ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... season when nature Is all in the sere, When her snow-showers are hailing, Her rain-sleet assailing, Her mountain winds wailing, Her ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... along the misty hills, And that immortal call which fills The waiting wood with songs? The snow-drops came so long ago, It seemed that Spring was near! But then returned the snow With biting winds, and all the earth grew sere, And sullen clouds drooped low To veil the sadness of a hope deferred: Then rain, rain, rain, incessant rain Beat on the window-pane, Through which I watched the solitary bird That braved the tempest, buffeted and tossed, With rumpled ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... beard almost touched the ground as he crept onward. Hester gazed after him a little while, looking with a half fantastic curiosity to see whether the tender grass of early spring would not be blighted beneath him and show the wavering track of his footsteps, sere and brown, across its cheerful verdure. She wondered what sort of herbs they were which the old man was so sedulous to gather. Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs of species hitherto ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Zungam et Mat Ingam, qui cur Madoc Camber esse nequeat quem in eos partes delatum domestica evincunt Monumenta, ratio nulla reddi potest. Ad antiquitatem, quinque illa Secula sussiciunt quousque altissima Americanorum Memoria, nec sere ultra, adscendit.[k] ...
— An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the - Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 • John Williams
... under his fingers, the long, ruddy cone of fruition. The heap of maize on one side burned like hot sunshine, she felt it really gave off warmth, it glowed, it burned. On the other side the filmy, crackly, sere sheaths were also faintly sunny. Again and again the long, red-gold, full ear of corn came clear in his hands, and was put gently aside. He looked up at ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... early old, this "child of hate," as Wotan long ago called him, sere and pallid, totally unglad and hating the glad. He is the tool created by Alberich—even as Siegmund was Wotan's tool,—to win back for him the Ring. From his Nibelung father he has more than human powers and knowledge. In the conversation ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... spoiled in spring, And over-long was green, and early sere, And never gathered gold in the late year From autumn suns, and moons of harvesting, But failed in frosts ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang
... showed her thousand cheeks of down, kissed often by the wooing winds; here, in swarms; the yellow apples hived, like golden bees upon the boughs; here, from the kneeling, fainting trees, thick fell the cherries, in great drops of blood; and here, the pomegranate, with cold rind and sere, deep pierced by bills of birds revealed the mellow of its ruddy core. So, oft the heart, that cold and withered seems, within yet hides ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... the colour riot, the dominant tone of which was green. It was green, green, green—the blue-green of the springing year, and sere and yellow green and tawny-brown green of autumn. There were orange green, gold green, and a copper green. And all these greens were rich green beyond description; and yet the richness and the greenness passed even as we gazed upon it, going out of the gray clouds ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... the year is new, Nor changes, when its frosts appear: For the star still shines in its ground of blue, And the pine tree lives when the rest are sere. From the pine my thoughts ascend above To the Tree of LIfe that Heaven adorns; From the star to the Star of my Saviour's Love, That grandly shone in ...
— The American Missionary, October, 1890, Vol. XLIV., No. 10 • Various
... seemed nothing to distinguish it from the thousands of other piratical craft which pillage the public with the aid of the taximeter clock on the port beam! Soon they were at the big Broadway playhouse, where Shirley floundered out first, after the ungallant manner of many sere-and-yellow beaux. He swayed unsteadily, teetering on his cane, as Helene leaped lightly to the sidewalk beside him. The driver stood by the door of the car, ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... a better idea of the land about the river. It was sere, the vegetation dwindling except for some rough spikes of things pushing through the parched ground like flayed fingers, their puffed redness in contrast to the usual amethystine coloring of Warlock's ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... No hastening night that knows, She hath a never-ending year Which feels no blight of autumn sere, Nor chill of ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... never seen before. At the end of the passage, below the dark staircase, was a door opening into the Paradou, and he could see the vast garden spreading there beneath the pale sunlight, with all its autumn melancholy, its sere and yellow foliage. The doctor hurried through the doorway and took a few steps ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... William Bagby, read us his lecture on these cheerful comestibles. We were the first to see the frost that "lies heavy on the palings and tips with silver the tops of the butter-bean poles, where the sere and yellow pods are chattering in ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... above another until they receded in the dim purple-blue distance —with a warm haze floating above them, which, though clear enough in our neighbourhood, became impenetrably blue in the far distance. Woods, woods, woods, leafy branches, foliage globes, or parachutes, green, brown, or sere in colour, forests one above another, rising, falling, and receding—a very leafy ocean. The horizon, at all points, presents the same view, there may be an indistinct outline of a hill far away, or here and there a tall tree higher than the rest conspicuous in its outlines ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... centres—powdering in the fingers, if one breaks it off, like dry tea. Is it a black species?—or a black-parched state of other species, perishing for the sake of Velasquez effects, instead of accumulation of earth? and, if so, does it die of drought, accidentally, or, in a sere old age, naturally? and how is it related to the rich green bosses that grow in deep velvet? And there again is another matter not clear to me. One calls them 'velvet' because they are all brought to an even surface at the top. Our own velvet is reduced to such ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... into—a struggle has to be made before you can fairly take possession; others are broader and easier to enter: a few are very capacious and might be legitimately licensed to carry a dozen inside with safety; nearly all or them are lined with green baize, much of which is now getting into the sere and yellow leaf period of life; many of them are well-cushioned—green being the favourite colour; and in about the same number Brussels carpets may be found. There is a quiet, secluded coziness about the pews; the sides are high; the ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... verily even the glory of thy fleet feet would have fallen into the sere leaf unrenowned, abiding by the hearth of thy kin, as a cock that fighteth but at home, had not the strife of citizen against citizen driven thee from Knosos ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... still remains to protect the poet's family place of interment, which opens to the sides in lofty Gothic arches, and is defended by a low rail of enclosure. At one extremity of it, a tall, thriving young cypress rears its spiral form. Creeping plants of different kinds, "with ivy never sere," have spread themselves very luxuriantly over every part of the Abbey. Amongst other decorations, we observed a plum-tree, which was, perhaps, at one period, a prisoner, chained to the solid masonry, but which having long since been emancipated, now threw ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various
... October's leaf was sere; The day was dark and drear. Wild war was loosed in rage o'er our quiet country then; When at Moravian town, Where the little Thames flows down, In the net of battle caught was Proctor ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... skies, sere leaves tossing, sad winds sobbing, and rains that wept for days and nights together, on dead flowers and dying grasses, moaned itself away at last, and December swept into its place with a good rousing snow-storm, merry sleigh-bells, and bright promises of coming Christmas. The girls coasted ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... fostering love is found, And the Hagi tree is dead and sere, The motherless deer lies on the ground, Helpless and weak, no ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... pressure. And as a willow keeps A patient watch over the stream that creeps Windingly by it, so the quiet maid Held her in peace: so that a whispering blade Of grass, a wailful gnat, a bee bustling 450 Down in the blue-bells, or a wren light rustling Among sere leaves and twigs, might all ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... mild, yet somewhat overcast by tho mists which announce coming winter in London, and Helen walked musingly beneath the trees that surrounded the garden of Lord Lansmere's house. Many leaves were yet left on the boughs; but they were sere and withered. And the birds chirped at times; but their note was mournful and complaining. All within this house, until Harley's arrival, had been strange and saddening to Helen's timid and subdued spirits. Lady Lansmere had received her kindly, but with a certain restraint; and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... was so exciting and so wonderful that everything else was wiped out of her mind. In the front of the box she sat—its sole ornament—against a background of Mrs. Kirkham's contemporaries, withered and sere in contrast with her lily-pure freshness. In the entr'actes the hostess recalled the opera house in its heyday when the Bonanza Kings occupied their boxes with the Bonanza Queens beside them, when ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... hard work have got to go into the ignominious pigeon-hole. Confound it, I could have earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble. However, I shouldn't have done it, for I am too lazy, now, in my sere and yellow leaf, to be willing to work for anything but love..... I kind of envy you people who are permitted for your righteousness' sake to dwell in a boarding house; not that I should always want to live in one, but I should like the change occasionally from ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the large number of composers I have thought worthy of inclusion. I can only say that the fact that an artist has created one work of high merit makes him a good composer in my opinion, whether or no he has ever written another, and whether or no he has afterward fallen into the sere and yellow school of trash. So Gray's fame is perennial,—one ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... often toward the house, but feared somehow the jokes of his companions. He worked on, therefore, methodically, eagerly; but his thoughts were on the future-the rustle of the oak tree nearby, the noise of whose sere leaves he could distinguish beneath the booming snarl of the machine; on the sky, where great fleets of clouds were sailing on the rising wind, like merchantmen bound to some land ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... one of the boatmen, pointing to a dark object which floated among the tangled debris of sere weeds and woodwork collected against the base ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... Piney at last; he had a long spear of sere grass in his mouth and he chewed at it argumentatively, "d'you think,—I couldn't adzackly tell whut that writin' wuz a-aimin' at, but simlike f'm the way it goes on that ef the sort of thing it makes aout to happen happens ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... in several grassy openings, and here and there a vaquero's hut of branches; for it is a general practice of the hacienderos to drive down their herds to the low grounds of the coasts and rivers, during the dry season, and as soon as the grass on the hills or highlands begins to grow sere and yellow. We observed also occasional heaps of oyster-shells on the banks, or half washed away by the river; and on the sand-spits at the bends of the stream, and in all the little shady nooks of the shore, we saw thousands of water-fowl, ducks of almost ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... the day Glinted o'er this pale land, before my sight In devious tracery that Passage lay; Mocking me with its undeveloped truth, Wealth unappropriated, glory lost! Cruel is she who took from me that substance With which I might have conquered an escape, Leaving me, a forlorn old spirit, sere and grey. Musing through barren hours upon the past, I think with bitterness on those who once Were friends and lovers—Queen, companions, Wife! Forgotten! yes, forgotten by them all! The luxuries of ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... more, oh, ye laurels, and once more, Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forced fingers rude, Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... side, and over the broad lake, that glared like a sheet of burnished steel under its flashes of dazzling blue. Wild and fitful blasts sweeping down the hollows and cloughs of the fells of Golden Friars agitated the lake, and bent the trees low, and whirled away their sere leaves in melancholy drift in their tremendous gusts. And from the window, looking on a scene enveloped in more than the darkness of the night, you saw in the pulsations of the lightning, before "the speedy gleams the ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... to add a glorious crimson to the scene; this was given by shrubs, not by trees. The tints were certainly, in the larger growths, less delicate here than there; the poplar's chrome was darker, the willow's mottled chrome more sere. But there was the exquisite pale canary of the birch, the blood-red and yellow of the wild rose, which glows in both hues, the rich crimson of the red willow, with its foil of ivory berries, and the ruddy ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... days for the girl-wife. Under these genial suns, with such companionship, such daily food, she rushed towards maturity like some half-wild colt brought suddenly from the sere range into abundant and peaceful pasture, the physical side of her being rounded out, glowing with the fires of youth, at the same time that the poor old Captain sank slowly but surely into inactivity and feebleness. She did not ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... rustles by the crisp leaf sere, Sadly wail the lonely night-winds, sweeping sea-ward, chill and drear, Sullen dash the restless waters 'gainst a bleak and rock-bound shore, While the sea-birds' weird voices ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... experiences, now invested with a species of borrowed light, seem like scenery which one has seen in the glance of a mid-day sun, presented again to the dreamy "evening sense" under the soft blue effulgence of the waning harvest-moon; the trees with the sere leaf rustling under the fluttering wing of the night bird; and the dead silence, which is not broken by the internal voice speaking the words that have been spoken by those who lie under the yew tree. In an early leaf of my journal, I find some broken ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... hast thou found in me, And rest in my little home." Then, deep in its quiet mossy bed, Sheltered from sun and shower, The grateful worm spun its winter tomb, In the shadow of the flower. And Clover guarded well its rest, Till Autumn's leaves were sere, Till all her sister flowers were gone, And her winter sleep drew near. Then her withered leaves were softly spread O'er the sleeping worm below, Ere the faithful little flower lay Beneath ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... are serious and sober, Officials look palsied and sere— They indulge in rhetoric small-beer (Instead of sound sparkling October) They're frightened about you, my dear— (You, at present in two senses, dear!) They would scan the far future, and probe her, But can't—and it makes them feel ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... a heart so sere as not to feel Pleasures innumerable o'er it stead, In sweet surroundings of earth's lovely flowers, Which cheer and elevate ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... heart that longs For bloom, and fragrance, and the ruby fire Of maple-buds along the misty hills, And that immortal call which fills The waiting wood with songs? The snow-drops came so long ago, It seemed that Spring was near! But then returned the snow With biting winds, and earth grew sere, And sullen clouds drooped low To veil the sadness of a hope deferred: Then rain, rain, rain, incessant rain Beat ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke
... and stood for some minutes looking out at the plain. Its sere grasses, protruding out of the snow, hissed and bent in the wind. In its cheerless winter colors it was a dreary ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... Documentos ineditos, vol. X, pp. 321-322: 'Ultimamente veanse mis leturas: y si en ellas se hallare rastro de novedades, sino antes inclinacion a todo lo antiguo y lo sancto, yo sere mentiroso, si no es que este testigo llama novedad todo lo que no ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... has followed golden corn; The leaves are few and sere; My thoughts are old as soon as born, And chill with ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... a flower by frost made sere Long before the sun breaks through, Feeleth him, I know ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... day of rest, and I sit here Among the trees, green mounds, and leaves as sere As my own blasted hopes. There was a time When Love and perfect Happiness did chime Like two sweet sounds upon this blessed day; But one has flown forever, far away From this poor Earth's unsatisfied desires To love eternal, and the sacred fires With which the other lighted up my mind Have faded ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... Struck with palsy, sere and old, Waiting at the gates of gold, Spake he with his dying breath: "Life is done, but what is death?" Then, in answer to the king, Fell a sunbeam on his ring, Showing by a heavenly ray: "Even this ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... life—and his, the young, the stalwart, rather than mine, the mouldering, the sere. I love life. Not yet am I ready to weigh anchor, and reeve halliard, and turn my prow over the watery paths of the wine-brown Deeps. Oh no. Not yet. Let him die. Many and many are the days in which I shall yet see the light, ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... frost-winds sere The heavy herbage of the ground, Gathers his annual harvest here, With roaring like the battle's sound, And hurrying flames that sweep the plain, And smoke-streams gushing up the sky: I meet the flames with flames again, And at my ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... beginning of spring, in this part of Africa it was already pushing. Even if it were not, the beasts could live upon what herbage remained over from last summer and on the leaves of trees, neither of which in this winter veld ever become quite lifeless, whereas on the sere and fire-swept plains beyond the mountains they might find nothing at all. So we determined to risk the savages and the lions which followed the game into these hot districts, especially as it was not yet the fever season or that of the ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... so many here Of the yellow leaf and sere, Who are anxious, aye, and ready To respond unto Your call; Yet You pass them by unheeding, And You set our hearts to bleeding! "O," you mutter, "God, how cruel ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... summer floweret charms, The leaves will soon be sere, And Autumn folds his jewelled arms Around the dying year; So, ere the waning seasons claim Our leafless groves awhile, With golden wine and glowing flame We 'll crown ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... see into their nests. Leaning over the battlements and looking far down, I surveyed the grounds laid out like a map: the bright and velvet lawn closely girdling the grey base of the mansion; the field, wide as a park, dotted with its ancient timber; the wood, dun and sere, divided by a path visibly overgrown, greener with moss than the trees were with foliage; the church at the gates, the road, the tranquil hills, all reposing in the autumn day's sun; the horizon bounded by a propitious sky, azure, marbled with pearly white. ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... a steep highway that leads Somewhere, cold, austere; And I follow a shadow that heeds My coming, and points, not in wrath, Out over: we tread the sere path Up to the summit; recedes All gloom; and at last The beauty a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... self-surrender as did those spiritual communions made by him sometimes at the close of some visit to the Blessed Sacrament. The book which he used for these visits was an old neglected book written by saint Alphonsus Liguori, with fading characters and sere foxpapered leaves. A faded world of fervent love and virginal responses seemed to be evoked for his soul by the reading of its pages in which the imagery of the canticles was interwoven with the communicant's prayers. An inaudible ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... pagan picture, we behold a tall and erect cross. The upper fields harmonise with the lower. The Christian painting displays a vigorous and stately tree between two younger palm-trees; the pagan picture has the same symbols; but the middle tree is in the sere and yellow leaf, whilst a Dryad issuing from the roots flourishes an axe to cut it down. The allusion is not to be mistaken. The sun of paganism has set: the axe ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... shadows to-day, except such as the trees cast upon the green moss beds and the black rocks. The tops of the tall elms were sere and rusty, but the leaves of the rugged oaks that fringed the canyon's lips shone a rich and glossy brown. All down the sides the poplars and delicate birches, pale yellow, but sometimes flushing into orange and red, stood shimmering in the golden light, while here and there ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... exceedingly shrewd man of business, and—some said—a miser. He was turned sixty years of age, and of course had seen many and great changes in Plymouth during his time, yet, although well advanced in the "sere and yellow," was still a hale and hearty man, able to do a hard day's work against the best individual in his yard; and although he had the reputation of being wealthy he lived alone in a little four-roomed cottage occupying one corner of his yard, and did ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... like a tree In bulk, doth make man better be; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere: A lily of a day Is fairer far in May, Although it fall and die that night— It was the plant and flower of Light. In small proportions we just beauties see; And in short ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... ask," returned the boy; and hastily preceding Rogers, he put his head in at Lapham's door, and then withdrew it. "Please to sit down," he said; "he'll see you pretty soon;" and, with an air of some surprise, Rogers obeyed. His sere, dull-brown whiskers and the moustache closing over both lips were incongruously and illogically clerical in effect, and the effect was heightened for no reason by the parchment texture of his skin; the baldness extending to the crown of his head was like a baldness made ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to redeem his forlorn failure. Mitchel, who shared his Australian imprisonment, left a fine picture of "this noblest of Irishmen, thrust in among the off-scourings of England's gaols, with his home desolated and his hopes ruined, and defeated life falling into the sere and yellow leaf. A man, who cannot be crushed, or bowed, or broken; anchored immovably upon his own brave heart within; his clear eye and soul open as ever to all the melodies and splendors of heaven and earth, and calmly waiting for ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... more, O ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forced fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear Compels me to disturb your season due: For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... in front of a great, rambling, old house, set in the midst of a wide lawn, brown and sere now with approaching winter, and surrounded by huge, knotted, gnarled, old oaks, whose dry leaves still clung to the twisted branches and rustled in the crisp air. A fat, sleek, black Tabby lay asleep on the warm porch-rail; a gaunt, ungainly greyhound lay sunning ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... fragrance, and the ruby fire Of maple-buds along the misty hills, And that immortal call which fills The waiting wood with songs? The snow-drops came so long ago, It seemed that Spring was near! But then returned the snow With biting winds, and earth grew sere, And sullen clouds drooped low To veil the sadness of a hope deferred: Then rain, rain, rain, incessant rain Beat on the window-pane, Through which I watched the solitary bird That braved the tempest, ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... to the American Embassy other than by amazing deposits at the best banks. But she did have, in addition to this, a pungent charm and undeniable force and good taste. It was said that the moment she had seen Mantegazza's villa she had decided to possess it, even at the price of its sere ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... understanding of mutual love only the night before, and Will was power-fully moved to glance often toward the house, but feared somehow the jokes of his companions. He worked on, therefore, methodically, eagerly; but his thoughts were on the future-the rustle of the oak tree nearby, the noise of whose sere leaves he could distinguish beneath the booming snarl of the machine; on the sky, where great fleets of clouds were sailing on the rising wind, like merchantmen bound to some land ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... clothe them in youth, much as the winter frost and wind strip the delicate foliage from the trees. And to such the music of the world is dead. Love has vanished with the summer dews, and in its place are cutting blasts and snows and sere memories rustling like fallen leaves about the feet. As we grow old we are too apt to grow away from beauty and what is high and pure, our hearts harden by contact with the hard world. We examine love and find, or believe we find, that it is nought but a variety ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... they sprouted again from the roots, a new enemy made its appearance—an insect of the coccus family, with a kind of shell on its back, which enables it to withstand all the common applications for destroying insects, and the ravages of which are shown by the leaves becoming black and sere, and the twigs perishing. In October last, a gale drove in the spray from the ocean, stripping the trees, except in sheltered situations, of their leaves, and destroying the upper branches. The trunks are now putting out new sprouts and new ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... me for a sonnet. Ah, my Dear, Can clocks tick back to yesterday at noon? Can cracked and fallen leaves recall last June And leap up on the boughs, now stiff and sere? For your sake, I would go and seek the year, Faded beyond the purple ranks of dune, Blown sands of drifted hours, which the moon Streaks with a ghostly finger, and her sneer Pulls at my lengthening shadow. Yes, 'tis ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... truly that we are a good deal hampered with 'old blood.' Sir Allan {44} will not be in our way, however. He is very reasonable, and requires only that we should not in his 'sere and yellow leaf' offer him the indignity of casting him aside. This I would never assent to, for I cannot forget his ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... glorious crimson to the scene; this was given by shrubs, not by trees. The tints were certainly, in the larger growths, less delicate here than there; the poplar's chrome was darker, the willow's mottled chrome more sere. But there was the exquisite pale canary of the birch, the blood-red and yellow of the wild rose, which glows in both hues, the rich crimson of the red willow, with its foil of ivory berries, and the ruddy copper of the high-bush cranberry. These, ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... I have here? ye lese my lyff: Alas! dere God, xuld I now rave? An old man may nevyr thryff With a yonge wyff, so God me save! Nay, nay, sere, lett bene, Xuld I now in age begynne to dote, If I here chyde she wolde clowte my cote, Blere myn ey, and pyke out a mote, And thus ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... in Sloane Square is really a Home for Superannuated Horses. It is a sort of equine Athenaeum. No horse is ever seen there till it has passed well into the sere and yellow. A Sloane Square cab-horse may be distinguished by the dignity of its movements. It ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... lady almost screamed. "Do I then look so old? Am I in the sere and yellow? Why do you ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... Deep in the victim's neck reversed, then stripp'd 510 The carcase, and divided at their joint The thighs, which in the double caul involved They spread with slices crude, and burn'd with fire Ascending fierce from billets sere and dry. The spitted entrails next they o'er the coals 515 Suspended held. The thighs with fire consumed, They gave to each his portion of the maw, Then slash'd the remnant, pierced it with the spits, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... sombre hemlocks, or through the fairyland the gay woods made on either side. Two large boats and two small ones held them all, and away they went, first up through the three bridges and round the bend, then, turning, they floated down to the green island, where a grove of oaks rustled their sere leaves and the squirrels were still gathering acorns. Here they often met to keep their summer revels, and here they now spread their feast on the flat rock which needed no cloth beside its own gray lichens. The girls trimmed each dish with ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... Cemetery, on Wednesday, the 22nd February. During the day large numbers visited the sorrowing house, and gazed for the last time on the features of the revered dead. As was to be expected, the larger number were, like the venerable deceased, far into "the sere and yellow leaf," and many who had known him for a long time could scarce restrain the unbidden tear as a flood of recollections surged up at the sight of the still form ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... ere its brilliant leaves were sere, Or scattered by the Autumn wind, Fierce lightnings struck its glories down, And left a blasted ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... wetted with glycerine or spread with spermaceti ointment, the part being at the same time carefully preserved from dirt, cold, and wind. It is said that a once favorite actress, celebrated for the beauty of her hands, even when in the "sere and yellow leaf," covered them nightly with the flare of a calf or lamb, with the fat attached, over which was drawn a glove or mitten of soft leather. The application of a little glycerine or fatty matter, in the way just indicated, ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... to posterity their wreaths will look unseemly. Here, perhaps, an everlasting Amaranth, and, close by its side, some weed of an hour, sere, yellow, and shapeless. Their very beauties will lose half their effect, from the bad company they keep. They rely too much on story and event, to the neglect of those lofty imaginings that are peculiar to, and definite ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... no marvel for his soul was filled With true poetic fire; and oft sweet song Of purest praise spontaneously has welled From his enraptured heart. Then he would long To leave a world where misery and wrong So much prevail, but yet content to stay And sere his master, his poor saints among; Would try to save those led from God astray, That he might aid Christ's cause while it ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... companies of negroes sat over dishes of mucous consistency and drank, with thick lips, liquors of vicious dyes. The prodigious women, often paler than the men, drinking with them, gabbled in a loud and corrupt Spanish and, without hats on their sere crinkled masses of hair, were unrestrained in displays of calculated or ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... heat 'mong the fern-stalks green,— Or dreameth of elves 'neath the forest treen: He wrappeth him up when the oak leaves sere And the ripe acorns fall, at the wane o' the year; And he tippleth at Yule, by the log's cheery glow.— Come, jollily trowl The brown round bowl, And pledge ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... wurchepful sere, and good day! A ceteceyn of this cyte ye seme to be; Of herborwe[43] ffor spowse and me I yow pray, ffor trewly this woman is fful were, And fayn at ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... is like a fairy dwelling, a gnomic palace built of the aether of dreams. It is tiny and delicate and lovely, and replete with memories of sere leaves in November and of lilies in April. It is a castle of vanished hopes, of dimly-remembered dreams, of sad memories older than the deluge. The dead years circle slowly and solemnly around its low white ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... not love her as formerly! The great man denies, ready to deny on the Gospels, to her and to himself; and yet, at bottom, if we read with the microscope, there are symptoms, and it is not deniable. How should it? Leafy May, hot June, by degrees comes October, sere, yellow; and at last, a quite leafless condition,—not Favonius, but gray Northeast, with its hail-storms (jealousies, barren cankered gusts), your main wind blowing. "EMILIE FAIT DE L'ALGEBRE," sneers he once, in an inadvertent moment, to some Lady-friend: "Emilie doing? Emilie ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... is where the sword of Rome lay open my face, yea, wide open as the lips of a crying child. And on my back, most noble mistress, thou mightest hide thy white fingers in the welts cut by the stinging thong. And seest thou my arm? Here is flesh cooked sere as the shell of a tortoise. Thus have blade and thong and branding iron of Rome marked me with wounds and commanded my lips to silence. Yet have these scars each one a thousand silent tongues crying ever 'Hate! Hate! Hate!' But here," and he threw back his tunic and placed three fingers ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... a roaring wind: It did not come anear; But with its sound it shook the sails, That were so thin and sere. ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... of rest, and I sit here Among the trees, green mounds, and leaves as sere As my own blasted hopes. There was a time When Love and perfect Happiness did chime Like two sweet sounds upon this blessed day; But one has flown forever, far away From this poor Earth's unsatisfied desires To love eternal, and the sacred fires With which the other lighted up my mind Have ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... Of these fair spreading trees; which bids us seek Some better shroud, some better warmth to cherish Our limbs benummed, ere this diurnal star Leave cold the night, how we his gathered beams Reflected may with matter sere foment; Or, by collision of two bodies, grind The air attrite to fire; as late the clouds Justling, or pushed with winds, rude in their shock, Tine the slant lightning; whose thwart flame, driven down Kindles the gummy bark of fir or pine; And sends a comfortable heat from far, Which might ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... blazing sun wades through the blue ether, and space seems redolent of purity and beauty. The breeze is as bland as the breath of a babe, coming through my casement with the light, and bathing my parched cheek; and the sere summer is warming away the gentle, genial spring. This is her last day; and to how many countless thousands is it the last day of life? Oh! could I die as gently, as beautifully as dies this budding season of the year, and could ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... each hour more firm, from time to time Following where I heard my call from heaven, And guided ever by a soft clear light, I turn'd, devoted still, to those first boughs, Or when on earth are scatter'd the sere leaves, Or when the sun restored makes green ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... one province of verse, if not exactly of poetry, in which Byron reigns undisputedly, though it is far distant from the land of lyrics. In his latest and longest production, Don Juan, he tells us that his 'sere fancy has fallen into the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... sudden changes of season here. Spring comes gradually day by day, a perceptible hourly waking to life and color; and this glides into a summer which never ceases, but only becomes tired and fades into the repose of a short autumn, when the sere and brown and red and yellow hills and the purple mountains are waiting for the rain clouds. This is according to the process of nature; but wherever irrigation brings moisture to the fertile soil, the green ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... amid the sere, yellow skeletons of last summer's ferns, if haply winter have forgotten one green leaf for our home vase—in vain we rake, freezing our fingers through our fur gloves—there is not one. An icicle has pierced every heart; and there are no fern leaves except those miniature ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Lord Jasper continued, coming over to Henry and taking hold of his arm. "Thirty-one. I'm getting on in years, ole f'la, that's what I'm doing ... sere and yellow, so to speak ... and a chap my age doesn't want to be bothered with a damn play. He wants something ... something substansl!..." He fumbled over the word "substantial" and then fell on it. "Something substansl," he repeated. "Now, ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... nomenclature of New York a "hall bedroom." The sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and they both commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than Ransom's own habitation—houses built forty years before, and already sere and superannuated. These were also painted red, and the bricks were accentuated by a white line; they were garnished, on the first floor, with balconies covered with small tin roofs, striped in different colours, and with an elaborate iron lattice-work, which gave them a repressive, cage-like appearance, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... its minor cadences. A gray, clammy day, tinged with the chill breath of coming snow. Thompson missed the sun that had cheered and warmed those hushed solitudes. Just to look at that dull sky and to hear the wind that was fast stripping the last sere leaves from willow and maple and birch, and to feel that indefinable touch of harshness, the first frigid fingerings of the frost-gods in the air, gave him a swift touch of depression. He shivered a little. Turning to his wood box he hastened ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... been, were it not for the example of Plutina's grandfather, who, somewhat beyond four-score, was still scandalously lively, to the delectation of local gossip. But, though after the departure of Jones at a junction, Zeke reflected half-amusedly on the rather sere romances of these two ancient Romeos, he was far from surmising that, at the last, ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... shoulder of Yellow Old Bald up came the sun, bannered and glorious; the distant ranges glowed in his splendours; the sere fields about the place were all gilded. The small-paned eastern window of the sick-room let in a flood of morning light. Gone was the bird choir that used to welcome his earliest rays, swept south by the great tide of migration. ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... Yes, at times it is, To clink happy rhymes, and fling On the canvas scenes of bliss, When we are half famishing!— When your "jersey" rips in spots, And your hat's "forget-me-nots" Have grown tousled, old and sere— It ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... fields were bare, the frosts began to pinch, and the young ones longed to see the world; so they must go. The day they started, the whole flock flew to the great house, to say good-by. Some dived and darted round and round it, some hopped to and fro on the sere lawn, some perched on the chimney-tops, and some clung to the window ledges; all twittering a ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... yonder by the way-side, beneath their weight of snow. Wherever the eye can pierce their white vesture, all is still deep spring-green beneath; unchanged at heart—strong and true. So I like to look on you, Sere Leaf.' ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... and horn, huntsman and horn, Shall scare your heaths and coverts lorn, Braying 'em shrill and clear, O; But lone and still Shall lift each hill, Each valley wan and sere, O. ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... been green on the graves of Shepherd Fennel and his frugal wife; the guests who made up the christening party have mainly followed their entertainers to the tomb; the baby in whose honour they all had met is a matron in the sere and yellow leaf. But the arrival of the three strangers at the shepherd's that night, and the details connected therewith, is a story as well known as ever in ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... jetted steam, dead clouds awoke And quivered on the Western rim. Then the singing started: dim And sibilant as rime-stiff reeds That whistle as the wind leads. The South whispered hard and sere, The North answered, low and clear; And thunder muffled up like drums Beat, whence the East wind comes. The heavy sky that could not weep Is loosened: rain falls steep: And thirty singing furies ride To split the sky ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... still the memory, never sere, But fresh as after fallen rain, Of those who learned their lesson here And may not ever come again, Gives to this garden, bruised and browned, A greenness ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... with its long looks sere On the breast of the open plain; She loosened the matted hair of the slain, And cried, as she filled each juicy vein: "Awaken! for ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... and took the street leading to the nearest park. A steel-grey sky, with slowly-trailing clouds, looked down on her, and the keen, chilly wind wafted a fine snow-powder in her face as she pressed against it. The trees were bare, and the sere grass grew hoary as the first snow-flakes of the season came down softly and shroud-like. The walks were deserted, save where a hurrying form crossed from street to street, homeward bound; and Electra passed slowly along, absorbed in thoughts colder than the frosting that gathered on shawl ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... art far away, And I'm disconsolate to-day, In sorrow sighing; My pleasant thoughts lie like the leaves, O'er whose cold heads AEolus grieves, Complaining, dying. 'Tis weary, dreary, dreary here, The yellow leaves are falling sere, With mournful rustling, The little bird has hush'd his song, And close the greener boughs among He's coldly nestling. How sad the high wind's sounding dirge, As 'twere old ocean's moaning surge, Around our dwelling; I well may tell the reason why, ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... justice in the world. When Time has worked his inexorable will, and powder, paint, and crafty clothing can no longer hide his ravages, then the virtuous woman triumphs, probably for the first time in her life. They are both old, she and the courtesan, but she is sometimes beautiful—old, grey, and sere, but venerable, charming—and little children love her, and younger women bring their troubles—ay, and their joys, reverently to her, feeling a benediction in the touch of the pure, withered hand. While the courtesan—alas! a ridiculous garish ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... my three weeks' hard work have got to go into the ignominious pigeon-hole. Confound it, I could have earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble. However, I shouldn't have done it, for I am too lazy, now, in my sere and yellow leaf, to be willing to work for anything but love..... I kind of envy you people who are permitted for your righteousness' sake to dwell in a boarding house; not that I should always want to live in one, but I should ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... smoldred and burned to death within, or else at their comming forth most cruellie received upon the points of speares, billes, and swords of their adversaries that watched for them verie diligentlie. This great riot well deserved sere and grievous punishment, but yet it passed over without correction, because of the hatred generallie conceived against the obstinate frowardnesse of the Jewes. Finallie, after the tumult was ceased, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... still the same—where'er we tread, The wrecks of human power we see, The marvel of all ages fled, Left to decay and thee. And still let man his fabrics rear, August in beauty, grace, and strength,— Days pass, thou 'Ivy never sere,'[6] And ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... oak, the grotesque but graceful branches which never shed their honours under the tyrant pruning-hook; the soft green sward; the chequered light and shade; the wild luxuriant weeds; the lichen and the moss—all, all are beautiful alike in the green freshness of spring, or in the sadness and sere of autumn. Their beauty is of that kind which makes the heart full with joy—appealing to the affections with a power which belongs to nature only. This wood runs up, from below the base, to the ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... road ill-formed, leading for the most part across a sere and desolate country, with nothing to relieve its barrenness except long stretches of the great spear-headed reeds. At noon the heat was intense; the little cavalcade halted for half an hour under the shade of some black towering rocks which broke the monotony of the district, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... to a sere, bare hillside on which neither trees nor brushwood grew. It amounted to a natural clearing, acres in extent. Lockley swept his eyes around. There were many thick-foliaged small trees attempting to advance into the clear space. He grunted ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... was sere; The day was dark and drear. Wild war was loosed in rage o'er our quiet country then; When at Moravian town, Where the little Thames flows down, In the net of battle caught ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... and greens" was unknown to us until the discoverer of that ethnological fact. Dr. George William Bagby, read us his lecture on these cheerful comestibles. We were the first to see the frost that "lies heavy on the palings and tips with silver the tops of the butter-bean poles, where the sere and yellow pods are chattering ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... Sleep Sister Snow The Contrast A Mystery Triumph In Winter, with the Book we had in Spring Sere Wisdom Isolation The Lost Dryad The Gifts of the Oak The ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... his, the young, the stalwart, rather than mine, the mouldering, the sere. I love life. Not yet am I ready to weigh anchor, and reeve halliard, and turn my prow over the watery paths of the wine-brown Deeps. Oh no. Not yet. Let him die. Many and many are the days in which I shall yet see the light, walk, think. I am averse ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... perfect days for the girl-wife. Under these genial suns, with such companionship, such daily food, she rushed towards maturity like some half-wild colt brought suddenly from the sere range into abundant and peaceful pasture, the physical side of her being rounded out, glowing with the fires of youth, at the same time that the poor old Captain sank slowly but surely into inactivity and feebleness. She did not perceive his decline, for he talked bravely of his future, and ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... over the parapet, finding rest in a mild melancholy, his thoughts chiefly occupied with the decay of Prepimpin who sat by his heels gazing at the roadway, occupied possibly by the same sere reflections. Presently the flea-catching antics of a ragged mongrel in the middle of the roadway disturbed Prepimpin's sense of the afternoon's decorum. He rose and with stiff dignity stalked towards him. He stood nose to nose with the ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... from the boulder leaps: The sere and leafless oak-bough weeps A strange rich attar: tamarisks too Of balsam pure distil ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... not running from anything the charcoal burner might say, do, but from a terrifying spectacle of himself; from the vision of a body shot through the breast, huddled in the sere underbrush. He was aghast at the unsuspected possibility revealed, as it were, out of a profound dark by the searing flash of his anger, cold at the thought of such absolute self-betrayal. Howat saw in fancy the ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... arrived all right, and much obliged. I do not think I shall take any arsenic; shall send partridges to Mr. Yarrell; much obliged. Ask Edward to BARGAIN WITH Clemson to make for my gun—TWO SPARE hammers or cocks, two main-springs, two sere-springs, four nipples or plugs—I mean one for each barrel, except nipples, of which there must be two for each, all of excellent quality, and set about them immediately; tell Edward to make inquiries about prices. I go on Sunday per packet to Plymouth, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... whine no more. Nor seek again an eastern shore; The world befits a busy brain,— I'll hie me to its haunts again. But if, in some succeeding year, When Britain's 'May is in the sere,' Thou hear'st of one, whose deepening crimes Suit with the sablest of the times, Of one, whom Love nor Pity sways, Nor hope of fame, nor good men's praise, One, who in stern Ambition's pride, Perchance not Blood shall turn aside, One rank'd in some recording ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... "Nah![37] I breathe upon the forests, And the leaves fall sere and yellow; Then I shake my locks and snow falls, Covering all the ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... uphold me, lingering and languishing here, A pale late plant of your once strong stock?" I say to them; "A thinker of crooked thoughts upon Life in the sere, And on That which consigns men to night after showing ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... memory of grayling fishing up to my colonial interlude is of a wet, muggy November day in Herefordshire. It was late in the month, and as the previous week had been marked by early frost, the sere leaves, having lost their grip, were rattling down on the water with every gust, and, indeed, from the mere weight of the rain. It was pretty practice, dropping the flies so as to avoid these little impediments; but it wasted time ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... and the old man halted in his tracks, his gaze riveted upon the wood. For several minutes he saw no sign of what was transpiring behind that screen of sere and yellow autumn leaves, and then a man came running out, and after ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... moon of the sere, falling leaves. From the heads of the maples the west-wind Plucks the red-and-gold plumage and grieves on the meads for the rose and the lily; Their brown leaves the moaning oaks strew, and the breezes that roam on the prairies, Low-whistling ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... the world of the Coulee.—The grasses and many of the flowers were also new to us. On the uplands the herbage was short and dry and the plants stiff and woody, but in the swales the wild oat shook its quivers of barbed and twisted arrows, and the crow's foot, tall and sere, bowed softly under the feet of the wind, while everywhere, in the lowlands as well as on the ridges, the bleaching white antlers of by-gone herbivora lay scattered, testifying to "the herds of deer and buffalo" ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... barren poll one hoary lock Over his wrinkled front fell far adown, Well nigh to where his frosty brows did frown Like jagged icicles at cottage eaves; And for his coronal he wore some brown And bristled ears gather'd from Ceres' sheaves, Entwined with certain sere and ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... sunny morning, he rose from his rug, went into the conservatory (he was very thin then), walked around it deliberately, looking at all the plants he knew, and then went to the bay-window in the dining-room, and stood a long time looking out upon the little field, now brown and sere, and toward the garden, where perhaps the happiest hours of his life had been spent. It was a last look. He turned and walked away, laid himself down upon the bright spot in the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... age, of stately, unbending form and face radiant and genial with the florid flush of that Indian Summer which so many Englishmen wear late in those autumnal years that bend and pale American forms and faces to "the sere and yellow leaf" of life. But the sequel proved that he did not abdicate his position too early. In a little more than a year from this event, his spirit was raised to higher fellowships and folded with those of the ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... the yellow leaf, That rustling strews The wintry path, where grief Delights to muse, Spring's early violet, that sweetly opes Its fragrant leaves to the young morning's kiss, Type of our youth's fond dreams, and cherished hopes, Will soon be this: A sere and yellow leaf, That rustling strews The wintry path, where grief Delights to muse. The summer's rose, in whose rich hues we read Pleasure's gay bloom, and love's enchanting bliss, And glory's laurel, waving ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread. The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs, the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... the flag, which shows additional bulbs from year to year; (2) the joints in the flower stalks, of which some half-dozen may be found on each stalk; (3) the large seed-pods that terminate in stalks, a very noticeable feature when the plant is sere; (4) the various bunches or knots of iris in a bed of the plants, so that the whole phrase suggests a thickly matted bed of flags. I favour the last interpretation, though Tennyson's fondness of technical accuracy in his references makes ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... was upon her imagination; the sluggish, lurid tarn of Usher; the pale, gigantic water lilies, nodding their ghastly, everlasting heads over the dreary Zaire; the shrouding shadow of Helusion; the ashen skies, and sere, crisped leaves in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir, hard by the dim lake of Auber—all lay with grim distinctness before her; and from the red bars of the grate the wild, lustrous, appalling eyes of Ligeia ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... the grassy mounds Its graceful growth had veiled!— How sere and faded was their life, ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... the winter! When the snow is all about; It may seem a time of trouble for the blossoms peeping out, And the sere leases of the forest and the dead grass of the hills Bring a set-back to the roses and the lilies have the chills; But the world is rolling onward! and the spring is drawing nigh, When the birds will spill their music through the ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... deglat palms which grow here in great abundance—the finest in the world—with their lower leaves pendent, sere and yellow; the figs, lemons, apricots and pomegranates clustering in savage meshes of unpruned boughs among which the vine, likewise unkempt, writhes and clambers liana-fashion, in crazy convolutions—all these things conspire to give to certain ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... sowing to the flesh, O youth? Have you turned your back upon the truth? Are you scattering seeds of evil From the garner of the devil? Are you thinking of the harvest By and by? Soon will spring and summer pass, Brown and sere will grow the grass; No time then for good seed-sowing: You and I Must gather what we've sown, forsooth. Are you sowing to the flesh, ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... that laugh Prothero dropped out of Benham's world for a space of years. There may have been other letters, but if so they were lost in the heaving troubles of a revolution-strained post-office. Perhaps to this day they linger sere and yellow in some forgotten pigeon-hole in ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... about at the unwinding view up Winterbottom Road—so familiar to Ken, who was trying to see it all with fresh eyes. They climbed out at the gate of the farm, and Hop turned his beast and departed. Half-way up the sere dooryard, Ken touched his wondering mother's arm and drew her to a standstill. There lay Applegate Farm, tucked like a big gray boulder between its two orchards. Asters, blue and white, clustered thick to its threshold, honeysuckle ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... brotherhood! If our great Mother has imbued my soul With aught of natural piety to feel Your love, and recompense the boon with mine; If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even, 5 With sunset and its gorgeous ministers, And solemn midnight's tingling silentness; If autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood, And winter robing with pure snow and crowns Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs; 10 If spring's voluptuous pantings when she breathes Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me; If no bright bird, insect, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... is chill and drear, December's leaf is dun and sere; No longer Autumn's glowing red Upon our forest hills is shed; No more beneath the evening beam The wave reflects their crimson gleam; The shepherd shifts his mantle's fold And wraps him closely from the cold: His dogs no merry circles wheel, ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... alway, night and morn, Woods upon woods, with fields of corn Lying between them, not quite sere, And not in the full, thick, leafy bloom, When the wind can hardly find breathing room Under their tassels,—cattle near, Biting shorter the short green grass, And a hedge of sumach and sassafras, With bluebirds twittering all around,— ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... wedding vesture, that has lain Yet all unvisited, the silken gown: Bring out the bracelets, and the golden chain Her dearer friends provided: sere and brown Bring out the festal crown, And set it on her forehead lightly: Though it be withered, twine no wreath again; This only is the crown she can ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... secondly, his pride: "Exegi monumentum sere perennius." He is not the least afraid to say that. He did it; knew he had done it; said he had done it; and ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... the horizon are great masses of rain clouds, ragged and angry-looking, and the whole firmament seems to weigh down on the still earth, where everything is burnt and parched, the foliage of the trees hanging limp and heavily, and the grass, yellow and sere, mingling with the hot, white dust of the roads. Absolute stillness everywhere down here by the Yarra Yarra, not even the river making a noise as it sweeps swiftly down on its winding course between its low mud banks. No bark of a dog ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... disappointed that you could not come on the day I mentioned. I have grudged this splendid weather very much. The moors are in glory, I never saw them fuller of purple bloom. I wanted you to see them at their best; they are just turning now, and in another week, I fear, will be faded and sere. As soon as ever you can leave home, be sure to ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... tenuous threads to weave her nest, She seeks and gathers there or here; But spins it from her faithful breast, Renewing still, till leaves are sere. ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... company pleasant. Dark clumps of forest-trees on one hand grew near together, and the spaces between, though cleared, looked hardly less wild; for vines and sumach and ferns had taken possession. The sun's rays yet lay warm on the rolling downs, the sere grass and the purplish blackberry vines, and sparkled on the waves beyond; but when Mr. Simlins and Faith struck into the woods for a 'short cut,' the shadowy solitude closed them in on all sides. Softly their steps moved over the fallen pine leaves, or rustled through the shreds of autumn ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... Paris green was an effective antidote against these destructive worms, and I have ordered a barrel of it from the city. I intend to spread a layer of this Paris green over all our flower and vegetable beds; the contrast thus presented to the dull, sere brown of our lawn will be very pleasing to the eye. In fact, I am not sure that it would not be cheaper to color our whole lawn with Paris green than to attempt to revise it with water, which can be used with legal liberality only ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... that sang when ye were here, Are singing in another clime; Have left the hedge and forest sere, And gone where all is summer-time. The frail bright flowers that bloom'd around, When ye were blooming bright as they, Lie crushed and withered on the ground, Their fragrance ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... door: a frosty rime Is branching over it, and drifts are deep Against the wall. He knocks, and there is time,— (For none doth open),—time to list the sweep And whistle of the wind along the mere Through beds of stiffened reeds and rushes sere. ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... be confessed, had not had very good luck holding on to the few eligible young bachelors who had seemed, for a brief period, to regard them with serious intent. The poor soul was worried about the girls, as well she might be, since the strides of time were rapidly bearing both into the sere-and-yellow-leaf period of life. For her son, she had earnest, passionate mother love, but since, like all mothers, she was obsessed with the delusion that every girl in the world, eligible and ineligible, was busy angling for her darling, she had left his matrimonial ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... the naked trees, Where wild streams shiver as they pass, Yet in the sere and sighing grass I hear a murmur ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... rain swept down from the mountains. The path followed a brook, descending in long, steep steps from the hillside; water perfectly clear, bubbling along the yellow stones between the grassy banks and making now and then a little leap into a lower basin; along the stream great screens of reeds, sere, pale, with barely a pennon of leaves, rustling ready for the sickle; and behind, beneath the watery sky, rainy but somehow peaceful, the russet oak-scrub of the hill. Of spring there was indeed visible only the green of the young wheat beneath the olives; not a bud ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... that either our distinguished friend here has reached that condition described by Shakespeare as 'the sere and yellow leaf,' or has suffered some premature abatement of his mental and physical faculties. Whether ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... the little pine table close to the heap of failing embers, and aided by what light the sulky candle gave, was bending over and trying to arrange a patch on my old hunting-coat. It was an old, old hunting-coat, far gone in the sere and yellow leaf. It was old-fashioned now, though once of proper cut and comeliness. It was disfigured, stained and worn. The pockets were torn down. The bindings were worn out. It was quite willing to be left alone now, hung by upon a forgotten ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... was worse, the fodder in store was, in prospect of a long siege, scanty. But the worst of all, indeed the only weak and therefore miserable fact, was, that the spirit, I do not mean the courage, of the castle was gone; its enthusiasm had grown sere; its inhabitants no longer loved the king as they had loved him, and even stern-faced general Duty cannot bring up his men to a hand-to-hand conflict with the same elans ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... purple-blue distance —with a warm haze floating above them, which, though clear enough in our neighbourhood, became impenetrably blue in the far distance. Woods, woods, woods, leafy branches, foliage globes, or parachutes, green, brown, or sere in colour, forests one above another, rising, falling, and receding—a very leafy ocean. The horizon, at all points, presents the same view, there may be an indistinct outline of a hill far away, or here and there a tall tree higher than the rest conspicuous in its outlines ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... over the glassy surface of the river; men lounge about in the house-boats and barges, or gather together at King's, or Hall's, and industriously promulgate small talk and tobacco-smoke. All is gay and bustling. Although the feet of the strollers in the Christ Church meadows rustle through the sere and yellow leaf, yet rich masses of brown and russet ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... food, hungry for change, hungry for the words of men. His long gray mustache hung far below his stubble-covered chin; there was a pallor of a lingering sickness in his skin, which the hot sun could not sere out of it. He sat dispiritedly on his broken seat, sagging forward ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... the morning mist. And with the evening cloud, Showering thy gleaned wealth into my open breast, (Those peerless flowers which in the rudest wind Never grow sere, When rooted in the garden of the mind, Because they are the earliest of the year). Nor was the night thy shroud. In sweet dreams softer than unbroken rest Thou leddest by the hand thine infant Hope. The eddying of her garments ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... a potters vessel shiver'd so. And now be wise at length ye Kings averse Be taught ye Judges of the earth; with fear Jehovah serve and let your joy converse With trembling; Kiss the Son least he appear In anger and ye perish in the way If once his wrath take fire like fuel sere. Happy all those who have in ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... a tree In bulk, doth make men better be, Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere: A lily of a day, Is fairer far, in May, Although it fall and die that night; It was the plant and flower of light. In small proportions we just beauty see; And in short ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
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