"Sylvan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never remember to have met so much even as a peasant returning from his daily labor, or a country maiden tripping to the neighboring town—that gave its character, and I will add, its charm to this half pastoral, half sylvan lane. For nearly three miles it ran in one direction, although, as I have said, with many devious turns, and seemingly unnecessary angles, and through that length it did not pass within the sound of one farm-yard, or the sight of one cottage chimney. But to make ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... beautiful squaws named Do-humme died in the Museum. She had been a great favorite with many ladies. Do-humme was buried on the border of Sylvan Water, at Greenwood Cemetery, where a small monument erected by her friends, designates her last resting-place. The poor Indians were very sorrowful for many days, and desired to get back again to their Western wilds. The father and the betrothed of Do-humme cooked ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... sparkles of the brook In its deep thickets, whose refreshing green Soothes my strained eyesight. The cool shadows fall Like balm upon me from the boughs o'erhead. My coming strikes a terror on the scene. All the sweet sylvan sounds are hushed; I catch Glimpses of vanishing wings. An azure shape Quick darting down the vista of the brook, Proclaims the scared kingfisher, and a plash And turbid streak upon the streamlet's face, Betray the water-rat's swift dive ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... the Phoenix Park approaches the little river Tolka, which winds through a succession of delightful bits of sylvan scenery, such as may be found in the wide demesne of Abbotstown and the classic shades of Glasnevin. From the banks of the Tolka, on the opposite side of the park, the pastures ascend in a gentle slope to culminate at Dunsink, where at a distance of ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... led Dickens so often in his walks from Gadshill Place to Chatham. But the neighbourhood which gave him most pleasure, combining as it did with similar associations an exquisite beauty, was, Forster tells us, the sylvan scenery of Cobham Park. The green woods and green shades of Cobham would recur to his memory even in far-off Lausanne, and the last walk that he ever enjoyed—on the day before his fatal seizure—was through these woods, ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... sing, is quite remarkable. And it is impossible to visit the forest or the sequestered dell, where the notes of the feathered tribes are heard to the greatest advantage, without being impressed with the conviction that there is design in the arrangement of this sylvan minstrelsy.— ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... thus reply. He is the dog of one dead far remote. But had he now such feat-performing strength As when Ulysses left him, going hence To Ilium, in one moment thou shouldst mark, Astonish'd, his agility and force. He never in the sylvan deep recess 380 The wild beast saw that 'scaped him, and he track'd Their steps infallible; but he hath now No comfort, for (the master dead afar) The heedless servants care not for his dog. Domestics, missing once their Lord's controul, Grow wilful, and refuse their proper ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... dreams and wilder words take wing, Deep in the woods I hear a shepherd sing A simple ballad to a sylvan air, Of love that ever finds your face more fair. I could not give you any godlier thing ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... how slightly her New England birth and breeding covered her ancestral traits, and bridged the gulf of a thousand years of civilization that lay between her race and ours. But in fact, she was doubly estranged by descent; for, as we learned later, a sylvan wilderness mixed with that of the desert in her veins; her grandfather was an Indian, and her ancestors on this side had probably sold their lands for the same value in trinkets that bought the original African pair on the ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... not sure, but I think the prince did afterward visit the island, and was much impressed by its quiet, sylvan life and the incomparable beauty of the princess; and ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... my verse! to greet Adorning nature in his sylvan seat! His southern hermit, his unchanging friend, Sends him such tribute, as the heart may send, Love, that, in honouring a peaceful sage, Invokes all blessings on his hallowed age. Though many a mountain rears its head between His wood-crown'd mansion, and my cell marine, In mental ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley
... difference between these two stages of culture. But let us look for other terms of comparison. The scalping scene is no more the true picture of savagery than the bayonet charge of civilization. Savagery is sylvan life. Contrast Ka-ni-ga with New York. Ka-ni-ga is an Indian village in the Rocky Mountains. New York is, well—New York. The home in the forest is a shelter of boughs; the home in New York is a palace of granite. The dwellers in Ka-ni-ga ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... Gravelled walks led through rich shrubbery, darkened by overhanging foliage. Mossy paths, of charming intricacy, invited the wanderer to explore their mysterious windings. At every turn a marble statue, life-sized, met the eye: here the sylvan god Pan, with rustic pipes in hand—here the huntress Diana, with drawn bow—here the amorous god Cupid, upon a beautiful pedestal on which was sculptured these lines, said to have been once written by Voltaire under a statue of ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... spring visitor to the woods of England,—the cuckoo,—is undoubtedly destitute of family affection, as are others of its relatives; but this is not the case with the whole tribe. As the spring advances, from the sylvan glades of Pennsylvania a curious note, constantly repeated, is heard, resembling the word "cow-cow." It is the note of a bird, and from the sound it resembles it is generally known as the "cow-bird." It is also ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... at the boy's face, clear and untarnished in the moonlight. He was looking dreamily away at the lawn, dappled with the shadow of the slender young trees. They seemed creatures scarcely more sylvan than he, sprawled, like a loitering faun with his hands clasped behind his head. His mouth had the pure, ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... to persuade himself to discover a counsellor or a friend. In this connection, we do well to follow the poet's train of thought in the lyric called "In a Wood," where he enters a copse dreaming that, in that realm of "sylvan peace," Nature would offer "a soft release from man's unrest." He immediately observes that the pine and the beech are struggling for existence, and trying to blight each other with dripping poison. He sees ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... the dark-brown moors, The dusky mountain's shade, Down which the wasting torrent pours, Conceal'd so sweet a maid; When sudden started from the plain A sylvan scene and gay, Where, pride of all the virgin train, I ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... his hat toward prospects of exceptional account and casting his frank blue eyes into her face between-times. Charmingly perfect teeth and a wonderful sweep of yellow hair. A highly civilized faun for her highly sylvan setting. Indifferent, perhaps, to her precious Trio; but there were other young fellows to ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... hearts. But, curiously enough, though they were in Arcady, they were also in the Park. Hayden looked up the little lane; north and south marched an unending line of people. They were in Arcady, but deprived of its ancient privilege of sylvan and umbrageous solitude. ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... might escape the normal lot of being twisted round the fingers of every rogue they meet from Dragoman to Rajah. And a quotation from them tells at once: it shows the quoter to be man of education, not a "Jangali," a sylvan or savage, as the Anglo-Indian official is habitually termed by ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Hawthorne presently arriving, and seeing a bevy of admirers where he had expected but three or four, fell into a state of agitation, which is vividly described by his biographer. He "stood perfectly motionless, but with the look of a sylvan creature on the point of fleeing away.... He was stricken with dismay; his face lost colour and took on a warm paleness ... his agitation was-very great; he stood by a table and, taking up some small object that lay upon it, he ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... birds and the brilliant colors of their plumage? What of their variety, their sweet songs, and their beauty? I dare not enlarge upon this theme, for I fear I should not be believed. How shall I enumerate the infinite variety of sylvan animals: lions, catamounts, panthers—though not like those of our regions—wolves, stags, and baboons of all kinds? We saw more wild animals—such as wild hogs, kids, deer, hares, and rabbits—than could ever have entered the ark of Noah; but ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... where he can hear and feel the throbbing heart of man? I will make answer for him, and say, in the dark, gray city. Oh, they do greatly err, who think, that the stars are all the poetry which cities have; and therefore that the poet's only dwelling should be in sylvan solitudes, under the green roof of trees. Beautiful, no doubt, are all the forms of Nature, when transfigured by the miraculous power of poetry; hamlets and harvest-fields, and nut-brown waters, flowing ever under the forest, vast and shadowy, with all the sights and sounds of rural life. ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... where Marshal Neipperg is encamped. "Not a bit of it, your Excellency! Neipperg is safe at Neisse; amid inaccessible embankments and artificial mud: and these are mere Hussar-Pandour rabble out here; whom a push or two sends home again,—would it could keep them there! But they are of sylvan (or SALVAGE) nature, affecting the shade; and burst out, for theft and arson, sometimes at great distances, no calculating where. The King's Army lay all that night upon their arms, and encamped next morning, the 10th. I believe nothing happened that day, for we were obliged ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... mansion of modern appearance; a plantation of trees on each side shapes the space into a rude semicircle. This mansion is the manor house, and in front, in the midst of a confused crowd, some dozen young men in gay sylvan costumes are standing in a circle, armed with flails, and vigorously threshing the ground. Jolly, hearty young fellows they are, and a merry chant they raise. One eager thresher in his zeal breaks his flail at the bend, and a shout from the ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... increased in volume and in sound, but it was soon far beneath us, pursuing its headlong course till it reached level ground, where it flowed in the midst of a beautiful but confined prairie. There was something sylvan and savage in the mountains on the farther side, clad from foot to pinnacle with trees, so closely growing that the eye was unable to obtain a glimpse of the hill sides, which were uneven with ravines and gulleys, the haunts of the wolf, the wild boar, and the corso, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... and his dark hair and mustache, and smiling, handsome face, and his popularity among the class that he was pleased to denominate "gal critters." He piqued himself upon his several endowments as a hardy woodsman, his endurance, his sylvan craft, his pluck, and his luck and his accurate aim. The buck—all gray and antlered, for it was August—that hung across the horse, behind the saddle, gave token of this keen exactitude in the tiny wound at the base ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... fair field flowers, but thought only of the victor's wreath; he heard no melody but fame's shrill trumpet rising ever louder on the blast, and saw no beauty but in Minerva's laureled brow; the cool sylvan path became a blinding mountain trail, his hours of dalliance days of toil and nights of agony. The hidden son had become master of the sire, and all the host of Heaven melted into a single star which poured its baleful fire into his face the treacherous star of Hope. And ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... arrow-heads and bones— Their places nameless and unmarked by stones. Now freighted vessels toil along the view, Where once was seen the Indian's bark canoe; And to the woods the shrill escaping steam Proclaims our triumph in discordant scream. Where rose the wigwam in its sylvan shade, Where the bold hunter in his freedom strayed, And met his foe or chased the bounding stag, The lazy horses at the harrow lag. Where the rude dance was held or war-song rose, The scene is one of plenty and repose. The quiver of her race is empty now, Its bow lies broken underneath ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... herself exchanged elaborate curtseys, and Miss Lavinia sailed into the pleasant sylvan parlor and took ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... a while, when we'd spun past the charming villas and attractive shops of Cannes (which looks so deceitfully sylvan, and is one of the gayest watering-places in the world) silence began ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... the eagles flit,—what a glorious promontory! What a contrast at this height, in this immensity, between the arid rocky haunts of the mountain bear and eagle and the spreading, vivifying verdure surrounding the haunts of man. On one side are the sylvan valleys, the thick grown ravines, the meandering rivulets, the fertile plains, the silent villages, and on the distant horizon, the sea, rising like a blue wall, standing like a stage scene; on the other, a howling immensity of boulders and prickly shrubs and plants, an arid wilderness—the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Like the last, this tribe worship the sun, but with the moon as his wife, and the stars as their children. Besides these they revere Manes, and countless local and sylvan deities. Like Druids, they sacrifice only in a ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... Of life, even in blameless Arcady. Bay, laurel, myrtle, ivy never sere, And fields flower-decorated all the year, And streams that carry secrets to the sea, And hills that hold back something evermore Though wild their speech with clouds in thunder-roar,— Yea, every sylvan sight and peaceful tone Are thine to give thy days their purer zest. Let not the legend grieve thee on this stone. I Death am here. What then? My ...
— Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems • Thomas Runciman
... other hand, which came to us as the Old French sauvage or salvage (Ital. selvaggio, salvatico), is the Latin silvaticus, sylvaticus, salvaticus, that which pertains to a forest and is sylvan or wild. In its earliest usage it had reference to plants and beasts rather than to men. Wild apples, pears, or laurels are characterized by the epithet sylvaticus in Varro, De re rustica, i. 40; ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... boast, for the usual cloud of smoke and flame that hung night and day above the blast furnaces was replaced by a brilliant, hard blue sky. The works were shut down. They had reached the end of Blue Grass Avenue at the south line of the park. It was a spot of semi-sylvan wildness that they were fond of. The carefully platted avenues and streets were mere lines in the rough turf. A little runnel of water, half ditch, half sewer, flowed beside the old ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... encampment upon the edge of a thick and venerable wood, beech and oak, walnut and hickory. Regimental headquarters was indeed within the forest, half a dozen tents pitched in a glade sylvan enough for Robin Hood. Here Cleave found Stafford sitting, writing, before the adjutant's tent. He looked up, laid down his pen and rose. "Ah! Where did you come from? I thought you in the Valley, in training for a brigadier!" He came forward, holding out his hand. "I am glad to see ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... bay, on the shore of which was a large village, while close to us, under the shade of the lofty palm-trees which overhung the water, numerous groups of women and children were disporting in the refreshing stream. When we first intruded into this sylvan retreat, their consternation was so great that they scarcely knew where to run to screen themselves from our view; then setting up a loud and simultaneous shriek, they fled, dragging the young ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... haunted Spring and Dale, as ne'er smote human Ears before nor since: Nymphs and Wood-Gods, or they that had passed for such, breaking up House and retreating to their own Place. I warrant you, there was Trouble among the Sylvan People that Day—Satyrs hirsute and ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... Evander the Arcadian, in a dark recess in the side of the Palantine hill, watered by a perpetual fountain, and shaded by a hanging grove. A tradition, that, in the same place, Romulus and Remus were suckled by the wolf, rendered it still more sacred and venerable in the eyes of the Romans; and this sylvan spot was gradually surrounded by the stately edifices of the Forum. [81] After the conversion of the Imperial city, the Christians still continued, in the month of February, the annual celebration of the Lupercalia; to which they ascribed a secret and mysterious influence on the genial ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... noble grove, overflowing the bijou canon. Through this a small bright stream meandered. Park-like it was, with a kind of cockney ruralness further endorsed by the waste papers and rifled tins of picnickers. Up this stream, and down it, among its pseudo-sylvan glades and depressions, wandered the bright and unruffled Alvarita. Once she saw evidence of the recreant reptile's progress in his distinctive trail across a spread of fine sand in the arroyo. The living water was bound to lure him; he could not ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... the hay-harvest, and silent but for a few clucking fowls and a murmur of voices within the infants' school; thence across a bridge, and up and along a winding valley to the park gates at Damelioc. Beyond these the valley narrowed to a sylvan gorge, and the speckless carriage-road mounted under forest trees alongside a river tumbling in miniature cascades, swirling under mossy footbridges, here and there artfully delayed to form a trout-pool, or as artfully veiled by thickets of trailing wild roses and Traveller's Joy. For a mile ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Sylvan poets glean, Who picture life without a flaw; Nature may form a perfect scene, But ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... the hut, together with the botanical studies and the formation of the herbarium, suggested the plan of the "Sylvan Year," and thereby lent additional interest to these pursuits, though at that time his main work was the prosecution of "The Intellectual Life," now that he had finished the correction of the handbook on etching. [Footnote: ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... simple mind will not know these enemies. It is quite another thing that he should be able to give account of his faith and expound to another the theory of his self-union and freedom. This requires rare gifts. Yet without this self-knowledge there may be a sylvan strength and integrity in that which he is. "A few strong instincts and a few ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... numerous, with branching antlers, curiously mossed, as though they had acquired that vegetation by rubbing, as they often did, against the high wooden pale—itself made picturesque by age—which hedged them in their sylvan prison for miles. Moreover, there were wild-cattle, as at Chartley (though not of the same breed), the repute of whose fierceness kept the few public paths that intersected this wild domain very unfrequented. These animals, imported half ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... came to see you, in the first place, and to remind you of those habits of our earlier days, so delightful to remember, when we used to wander about together at Vincennes, and, sitting beneath an oak, or in some sylvan shade, used to talk of those we ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... father. "If there's anything that spoils the sylvan shades for me, it is to learn that they were once the scene of battle axes and blood spilling, and such ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... years ago, a gap betwixt the trees—a gate's width—but now none could enter unless the branches were lopped, and Eben Merritt would not allow that. His respect for that silent file of sylvan giants, keeping guard before his house against winds and rains and fierce snows, was greater than his hospitality and concern for the ease of guests. "Let 'em go round—it won't hurt 'em," he would say, with his great merry laugh, when his wife sometimes suggested ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... feast is prepared, each guest provides himself with a few broad leaves from the nearest sal tree, and forming these into a cup, he pins them together with thorns from the acacia. Squatting down in a circle, with half-a-dozen of these sylvan cups around, the attendant fills one with rice, another with dhall, a third with goat's-flesh, a fourth with turkaree or vegetables, a fifth with chutnee, pickle, or some kind of preserve. Curds, ghee, a little oil perhaps, sugar, plantains, and other fruit are ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... leaves in the noon-day quiver; The vines on the mountains wave; And Tiber rolls his river As fresh by the Sylvan's cave. But my brothers are dead and gone; And far away From their graves I stray, And dream ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... few yards, and passing under the bridge which he had viewed with so much terror, the path ascended rapidly from the edge of the brook, and the glen widened into a sylvan amphitheatre, waving with birch, young oaks, and hazels, with here and there a scattered yew-tree. The rocks now receded, but still showed their grey and shaggy crests rising among the copse-wood. Still higher, rose eminences and peaks, some bare, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... uninterrupted scene of sylvan pleasures, I spent the time until the 27th day of July following, when my brother, to my great felicity, met me according to appointment, at our old camp. Shortly after we left this place, not thinking it ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... Majendie hung back to look at her. She turned and stood before him, superb and still, shrined in a crescent of tall beech stems, column by column, with the light descending on the fine gold of her hair. Nothing in Anne even remotely suggested a sylvan and primeval creature; but, as she stood there in her temperate and alien beauty, she seemed to him to have yielded to a brief enchantment. She threw back her head, as if her white throat drank the sweet air like wine. She held out her white hands, and let the warmth play ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... the departure of the two hunters, continued her preparations for their evening repast. Her sylvan table was the moss-covered trunk of a large fallen tree, on the broadest part of which she had spread a snow-white cloth and arranged what were left of the bright pewter vessels that had been her pride in the settlements. It had a strange aspect ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... whether Mr. Chesnutt invented their motives, or found them, as he feigns, among his distant cousins of the Southern cabins. In either case, the wonder of their beauty is the same; and whatever is primitive and sylvan or campestral in the reader's heart is touched by the spells thrown on the simple black lives in these enchanting tales. Character, the most precious thing in fiction, is as faithfully portrayed against ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... assail me from various quarters at once. I have often observed that this corner is a haunt and loitering-place for those winds which have no work to do upon the deep dashing ships against our iron-bound shores, nor in the forest tearing up the sylvan giants with half a rood of soil at their vast roots. Here they amuse themselves with lesser freaks of mischief. See, at this moment, how they assail yonder poor woman who is passing just within the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that she was entirely contented sitting here by the side of this smiling giant eating delicious fruit in a sylvan paradise far within the remote depths of an African jungle—that she was ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... these things made a deep impression, and there as she sat in the green shade, soothed by the lulling sound of the flowing waters, and the soft murmuring of the many-coloured insects that hovered among the fragrant leaves which thatched her sylvan bower, her young heart was raised in humble and holy aspirations to the great Creator of all things living. A peaceful calm diffused itself over her mind, as with hands meekly folded across her breast, the young girl prayed with the guileless fervour ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... of a hundred years ago was Sylvan Harmer, chiefly a stone cutter (he cut the stone for the tower), but also the modeller in clay of some very ingenious and pretty bas-relief designs for funeral urns, notably a group known ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... look at things, as on the satyr who swears by his horns and mates not with his kind afterwards, 'While, holding beards, they dance in pairs—and that is all excellent and reminds one of those fine sylvan festivals, 'in Orion.' But now tell me if you like altogether 'Ben Capstan' and if you consider the sailor-idiom to be lawful in poetry, because I do not indeed. On the same principle we may have ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... The sylvan ball room, is an oblong square, lined with beautiful treillages, surmounted with vases of flowers. The top is open. When the queen gave her balls here, the ground was covered by a temporary flooring, and the whole was brilliantly lighted. As we passed by the palace, we saw, ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... and then I thought I would not care to wander here quite alone, and that a whisper might steal on my ear, sweeter than the note of the thrush and the nightingale; and that there might be a somebody without whom all that sylvan beauty would be a blank, but with whom any place would become a fairyland. And then I fell to wondering who that somebody would be; and I looked at Cousin John, and felt a little cross—which was very ungrateful; and a little ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... age. The principal one is the Arcadia. The name, which was adopted from Sannazzaro, would indicate a pastoral—and this was eminently the age of English pastoral—but it is in reality not such. It presents indeed sylvan scenes, but they are in the life of a knight. It is written in prose, interspersed with short poems, and was inspired by and dedicated to his literary sister Mary, the Countess of Pembroke. It was called indeed the Countess ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... to overtake her, but she danced away like a fairy in the moonlight, throwing a glance of mischief over her shoulder at me, with her finger on her lips. It seemed to me a pity that so sylvan a dell should merely be used for the purposes of speed, but in a jiffy Mary was at the little door in the wall and had the bolts drawn back, and I was outside before I understood what had happened, listening to bolts being thrust ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... the outside of the house as of the inside. A pleasant and beautiful exterior usually signifies pleasantness and peace within. While well-fenced and well-tilled farms are always pleasing to the eyesight, and neatly dressed roadsides are generally desirable, it does not follow that no shrubbery or sylvan tangles of trees should be allowed to grow on farms or by the wayside. A bare and rocky hill or knoll suggests images of bleak and barren desolation, cold blasts, and parching sun; while a hill clothed ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... leading over the mountains, which is impassable for carriages, I passed through vast tracks of forest, where the lofty trees were covered with stout vines reaching to the tree tops, rendering it difficult for man to penetrate those sylvan recesses. Near the highest part of this mountain road, at a height of several thousand feet above the sea, is situated a romantic lake, called by the French the Grand Etang, or Great Lake, which fills the crater of an extinct volcano. Near this spot, where the atmosphere is always ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... are pleased to be severe. Know that you are forgiven. This delicious sylvan retreat does not lend itself to acrimonious dispute, or, in plain English, quarreling. Let dogs delight, if they want to; I refuse to be goaded by your querulous nature into giving anything but the soft answer. Now to business. Nothing is so conducive to friendship, when ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... highly sylvan surroundings of the Trinidad "Sentinel" office—a little clearing in a pine forest—and its attendant fauna, made these signals confusing. An accurate imitation of a woodpecker was also one ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... was the chaplain of the sixth Massachusetts regiment, that which was fired upon in Baltimore. The first artillery company from Massachusetts had as its chaplain Stephen Barker. Others who served as army chaplains were John Pierpont, Edmund B. Willson, Francis C. Williams, Arthur B. Fuller, Sylvan S. Hunting, Charles T. Canfield, Edward H. Hall, George H. Hepworth, Joseph F. Lovering, Edwin M. Wheelock, George W. Bartlett, John C. Kimball, Augustus M. Haskell, Charles A. Humphreys, Milton J. Miller, George A. Ball, William G. Scandlin, E.B. Fairchild, Samuel W. McDaniel, Frederick R. Newell, ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... sequestered spot of sylvan shade whence rises a Spring which tradition designates Queen Anne's. Here the limpid crystal flows in gentle, yet ceaseless streams, conveying "Health to the sick and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various
... falling on the ear with the true sylvan cadence, is that of the Black-throated Green-backed Warbler, whom I meet at various points. He has no superiors among the true Sylvia. His song is very plain and simple, but remarkably pure and tender, and might be indicated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... Latin; but he has left the school, without being succeeded by another instructor of the same learning.' 'At seven years of age,' writes the son of a Loyalist family, 'I was one of those who patronized Mrs Cranahan, who opened a Sylvan Seminary for the young idea in Adolphustown; from thence, I went to Jonathan Clark's, and then tried Thomas Morden, lastly William Faulkiner, a relative of the Hagermans. You may suppose that these graduations to Parnassus was [sic] carried into ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... them. Forthwith Despair— More keen that one of these was rotten— Moved me to seek some forest lair Where I might hide and dwell forgotten, Attired in skins, by berries stained, Absolved from brushes and ablution;— But, ere my sylvan haunt was gained, Fate ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... reached is Marysville, whence the highway skirts the Tulalip Indian reservation, crosses the Stillaguamish river in the Sylvan Flats and enters Stanwood where a scenic road branches off to Camano Island. At Mount Vernon and Burlington, where it intersects the Skagit county road leading from Anacortes eastward to the mountains, one may appreciate ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles
... Sylvan monsters not alone appear, But sea-cows struggle with the shaggy bear, And horses of the deep, a ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... yet never upon them. These bushes, blended with a variety of other acacias and crowned here and there with casuarinae, form very picturesque groups, especially when relieved with much open ground. Indeed the beauty of the sylvan scenery on the lower Bogan may be cited as an exception to the general want of pictorial effect in the woods of New South Wales. The poverty of the foliage of the eucalyptus, the prevailing tree, affords little of mass or shadow; and indeed seldom has that tree, either ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... pretty sister mine, There's plenty and to spare Of milk and eke of good red wine Within my castle fair. Ah, feast with me, or pluck a rose Within my pleasant garth, Or stroll beside yon brook which flows In brawling, sylvan mirth." ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... distinguished amateur of the fine arts, taking a leading part in originating local exhibitions and the like, are attached to his private residence, a handsome mansion flanked by a large and charming garden in the Boulevard du Temple. The laying out of this sylvan oasis is due to M. Vadr, the head gardener of the city of Paris, who contributed so largely to the picturesque embellishment of the Bois de Boulogne. M. Irroy's establishment, which comprises a considerable range ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... sylvan trophies; down the wold She hears the sobbing of the stags that flee, Mixed with the music of the hunting rolled, But her delight is all in archery, And nought of ruth and pity wotteth she More than the hounds that follow on the flight; The tall nymph draws a golden bow of ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... all the gravity of countenance he was master of—"Madam," says he, "are we to consider you as one of the Sylvan Deities who preside over these scenes, or connected in any way with the vehicle?"—"Wehicle, indeed, you hunhuman-brutes, instead of assisting a poor distressed female who has been chuck'd from top of that there safety-thing, as they calls it, into ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... men were called in, for the man of the jungle must naturally know more about snakes than other men. These were probably Katkurrees, an aboriginal race, who live by woodcutting, hunting and other sylvan occupations. They proved to be practical men and at once sucked the wound. An intelligent Havildar of the Customs Department, who chanced to be present, then lanced the wound slightly to let the blood flow, and tied the ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... sidereal spaces, or among the Lethean mansions of souls unborn, or pacing the unexplored confines of the habitable globe. There stood the majestic image, veiled in a dead language, yet still visible; and it was as if one of the poet's own sylvan groves had been suddenly cut down, and opened a view of Olympus. Then all these present fascinating trivialities of war and diplomacy ebbed away, like Greece and Rome before them, and there seemed nothing real in the universe but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... laughter and her lawless eye that betrayed how slightly her New England birth and breeding covered her ancestral traits, and bridged the gulf of a thousand years of civilization that lay between her race and ours. But in fact, she was doubly estranged by descent; for, as we learned later, a sylvan wildness mixed with that of the desert in her veins: her grandfather was an Indian, and her ancestors on this side had probably sold their lands for the same value in trinkets that bought the original African pair ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... banished from your native glades, Where tyrant frost with famine leag'd proclaims "Who lingers dies"; with many a risk ye win The privilege to breathe our softer air And glean our sylvan berries. GISBORNE'S ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... for a moment at the old hound that was sniffing and whimpering in his master's ears, as if he could answer him. Poor Jonquil! he has shared his master's fortune fairly—the better and the worse; for years his humble comrade in the sylvan solitudes of Charrebourg, and here the solitary witness of his parting moment. Who can say with what more than human grief that dumb heart is swelling! He will not outlive his old friend many days—Jonquil is past the age for ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... on and the whipping mental urge of grape juice meddled with by Uncle Henry wears off. And so, before it all ends, what about Herman Wagner, Sole Prop. of Wagner's Sylvan Glen? ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... bosom Nature's student treads The sylvan haunts, exultingly leaps forth To hail the coming of the genial spring, Shedding around from her green lap the buds, In winter's rugged casket long enshrined, To form the chaplet of the infant year.— Young pensive moralist!—'tis sweet to muse On beauties which escape the vulgar ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... still, the sun shining in the light blue sky, and the wind altogether hushed. On each side of the winding road spread the bright green turf, occasionally shaded by picturesque groups of doddered oaks. The calm beauty of the sylvan scene wonderfully touched the fancy of the youthful fugitive; it soothed and gratified him. He pulled up his pony; patted its lively neck, as if in gratitude for its good service, and, confident that he could not be ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... displeased with me. I ought to have remembered that this was too rough for her and taken the other path." Indeed, she had felt rather guilty as Mrs. Potts's back, the ridge of its high stays strongly marked by the slanting sunlight, descended among the sylvan scenery. ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... and sweet-scented fragrance! Why, an asphalt street has a sylvan dell skinned to death, and a twelve-percent soap factory ...
— Billy Baxter's Letters • William J. Kountz, Jr.
... homely cut, and requiring some persuasion to renew them. He detested every thing that came in the way of his convenience, whether long skirts, hanging sleeves, royal mantles, or boots with folding tops. He was (for his time) a great reader, a "huge lover of the woods" and of all sylvan sports, fond of travelling, a very small eater, a generous almsgiver, a faithful friend—and a good hater. The model example which he set before him as a statesman was that of his grandfather, Henry First. The Empress Maud, his mother, was above all things Norman, and was now living ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... of that old Adamic cry: "The woman whom thou gavest," but the disfranchisement of man, who is the only polygamist, and the stepping down and out of the sex as a legislator under whose fostering care this evil has grown. Retire to your sylvan groves and academic shades, gentlemen, as Mrs. Stanton suggests, and let the Deborahs, the Huldahs, and the Vashtis come to the front, and let us see what we can do toward the remedy of your wretched legislation. But suffrage for women in Utah has accomplished great good. I spent ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... the appointed place, he found an entrance to the greenery near by. Within were people on every bench in sight—New York's unhoused lovers, whose wooing is accomplished in the all but sylvan glades which the ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... and played with it continually. She kept it always in trim by washing it in a fountain, and combing and smoothing its hair, and she amused herself by adorning it with wreaths, and garlands, and such other decorations as her sylvan ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... however, understand that here people go to the country for precisely opposite reasons to those which influence Eastern tourists to leave the city and betake themselves to rural districts. In the East, one leaves the crowded streets and heated atmosphere of the great city to seek coolness in some sylvan retreat. Here, we leave the chilling winds and fogs of the city to try to get warm where they cannot penetrate. Warm it may be; but the country at this season is not at its best as to looks. The flowers and the grass have disappeared with the rains, the latter, ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... to that suit," chuckled Lance. "He told me so. As he expects to live in the sylvan forest, as did the 'merrie, merrie men' of Robin Hood, Purt ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... blessing. The people over whom he ruled were as free in their opinions and actions as the air they breathed. Legal or moral restraints were few; yet the gentle-minded people were enemies to violence or crime. They were widely scattered, with not a city or town and scarce a hamlet within their sylvan domain. The only roads were bridle paths from house to house, and these were indicated by notches cut in trees—"blazed roads." There was not a settled minister in the ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... covered with a mat of grassy vegetation, and possess more the character of bogs than of fountains. They slowly discharge into the stream below, and are so numerous along both banks as to give a peculiar character to the landscape. These groups of sylvan vegetation are generally of a rounded form, and the trunks of the trees are tall and straight, while those on the level plains above are low and scraggy in their growth. There can be little doubt but that the water, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... went into the sculpture-gallery, where I looked at the Faun of Praxiteles, and was sensible of a peculiar charm in it; a sylvan beauty and homeliness, friendly and wild at once. The lengthened, but not preposterous ears, and the little tail, which we infer, have an exquisite effect, and make the spectator smile in his very heart. This race of fauns was the most delightful of all ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... seize tin basins, soap, and towels, and invade a lovely oak-grove at the rear and left of our camp. Here is a delicious spring into which we have fitted a pump. The sylvan scene becomes peopled with "National Guards Washing,"—a scene meriting the notice of Art as much as any "Diana and her Nymphs." But we have no Poussin to paint us in the dewy sunlit grove. Few of us, indeed, know how picturesque we are at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... abounds in these qualities; so does Wordsworth's. There is less of them in Browning, and more of them in the younger poets. That communing with nature, those dear friendships with birds and flowers, that gentle wooing of the wild and sylvan, that flavor of the rural, the bucolic,—all these are important features in the current popular poetry, but they are not to any marked extent characteristic of Whitman. The sentiment of domesticity, love as a sentiment; the attraction of children, home and fireside; the attraction ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... leaving the ground, presently to execute the competition of archery intended for the morrow. To the best archer a prize was to be awarded, being a bugle-horn, mounted with silver, and a silken baldric richly ornamented with a medallion of St. Hubert, the patron of sylvan sport. ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... and justice. Bainton was his particular enemy for one, and Bainton's master, John Walden, for another. His long-practised 'knavish tricks' and the malicious delight he took in trying to destroy or disfigure the sylvan beauty of the landscape by his brutish ignorance of the art of forestry, combined with his own personal greed, were beginning to be well- known in St. Rest, and it is very certain that on May-morning when the youngsters ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... sacrificed, and often, alas, human victims also. The mistletoe thus gathered was divided into small portions and distributed among the people. The tiny sprays were fastened above the doors of the houses, as propitiation to the sylvan ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... refuge. But they knew of a harbor of refuge to which no royal governors had come, over which the flag of England had never waved, and where no lawyer or tax-collector had yet set foot, in that sylvan land west of the Alleghenies on which few besides Daniel Boone, the famous hunter, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... of sylvan handicraft having been explained to me, in detail, Theodora announced that it was time to return to the house. "Gram does not approve of our taking too long strolls on Sunday," said she. "But so long as we do right, I ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... fix'd her love On the cool fountain, or the shady grove; 40 Still, with the shepherd's innocence, her mind To the sweet vale, and flowery mead, inclined; And oft as spring renew'd the plains with flowers, Breathed his soft gales, and led the fragrant hours, With sure return she sought the sylvan scene, 45 The breezy mountains, and the forests green. Her maids around her moved, a duteous band! Each bore a crook, all rural, in her hand: Some simple lay, of flocks and herds, they sung; With ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... asleep in the grass on the other bank. Colville and Effie gathered wild-flowers, and piled them in her mother's lap when she remounted to the carriage and drove along while they made excursions into the little dingles beside the road. Some people who overtook them in these sylvan pleasures reported the fact at a reception to which they were going, and Mrs. Amsden, whose mind had been gradually clearing under the simultaneous withdrawal of Imogene and Colville from society, professed herself again as thickly clouded as a weather-glass before a storm. She appealed ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... dwell a hermit In some silent peaceful wood, Where no voice of human being Ever breaks the solitude; Where babbling brook, and minstrelsy Of winged friends are heard To join the sylvan choruses Of leaves when gently stirred, Than live in costly splendor With a heartless, greedy throng, Whose only thought is sordid pelf Obtained ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... isolated earthwork bearing the plantation and tower, which together rose like a flattened dome and lantern from the lighter-hued plain of stubble. It was far too dark to distinguish firs from other trees by the eye alone, but the peculiar dialect of sylvan language which the piny multitude used would have been enough to proclaim their class at any time. In the lovers' stealthy progress up the slopes a dry stick here and there snapped beneath their feet, seeming like ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... O my beloved!" Then he beheld, in a dream, once more the home of his childhood; Green Acadian meadows, with sylvan rivers among them, Village, and mountain, and woodlands; and, walking under their shadow, As in the days of her youth, Evangeline rose in his vision. Tears came into his eyes; and as slowly he ...
— Greetings from Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... alarm, nothing in her appearance to forbid. The motive and the movement were equally quaint; incomprehensible to him; for after putting himself out of sight, he understood the absurdity of the supposition that she would seek the secluded sylvan bath for the same purpose as he. Yet now he was, debarred from going to meet her. She might have an impulse to bathe her feet. Her name was Diana . . ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... As with the blushes of an evening sky? Or wilt thou rather stoop thy vagrant plume, Where gliding through his daughters honour'd shades, The smooth Peneus from his glassy flood Reflects purpureal Tempo's pleasant scene? Fair Tempe! haunt beloved of sylvan Powers, Of Nymphs and Fauns; where in the golden age 300 They play'd in secret on the shady brink With ancient Pan: while round their choral steps Young Hours and genial Gales with constant hand Shower'd blossoms, odours, shower'd ambrosial ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... was so small: Yet great in virtue, for his beams enclos'd His virtues in her; never was propos'd Riddle to her, or augury, strange or new, But she resolv'd it; never slight tale flew From her charm'd lips without important sense, Shown in some grave succeeding consequence. This little sylvan, with her songs and tales, Gave such estate to feasts and nuptials, That though ofttimes she forewent tragedies, Yet for her strangeness still she pleas'd their eyes; And for her smallness they admir'd her so, They thought her perfect ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... essentially Giorgionesque in their fanciful presentation, the young Apollo, a lovely, fair-haired boy, pursuing a maiden with flowing tresses, whose identity with Daphne is only to be recognised by the laurel springing from her fingers. The story is but an episode in a sylvan scene, where other figures, in quaint costumes, seem to be leading an idyllic existence, untroubled by the cares of life, and utterly unconcerned at the strange event passing before ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook |
