meadows quotes

  • Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.Fogonthe Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships† And hard byTemple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, atthevery heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
    ^3  Bleak House, ch.1.

  • From the lone shieling of the misty island Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland, And we in dreams behold the Hebrides! Fair these broad meads, these hoary woods are grand; But we are exiles from our fathers' land.

    -John Galt
      'Canadian Boat Song', a translation from the Gaelic attributed to Galt, published in Blackwood's Magazine, Sep. It has also been attributed to Walter Scott.

  • The real pitch lake is simply about two hundred asphalt tennis courts, in very bad condition, set in the midst of somegently undulating greenmeadows.Iam inclined to ask for my money back.

    - Aldous Leonard Huxley
      On the Trinidad Pitch Lake. Beyond the Mexique Bay.

  •    Who, of men, can tell That flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would swell To melting pulp, that fish would have bright mail, The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale, The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones, The seed its harvest, or the lute its tones, Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet, If human souls did never kiss and greet?

    -John Keats
      Endymion, bk.1, l.835^42.

  • Wildness and silence disappeared fromthe countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fall but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced.

    - Archibald MacLeish
      'The Great  American Frustration', in the Saturday Review, 9  Jul.

  • My mind was once the true survey Of all these meadows fresh and gay; And in the greenness of the grass Did see its hopes as in a glass.

    - Andrew Marvell
    c.1650^1652  'The Mower's Song' (published1681).

  • Away with systems! Away with a corrupt world! Let us breathe the air of the Enchanted island.Golden lie the meadows; golden run the streams; red gold is on the pine-stems. The sun's coming down to earth, and walks the fields and the waters. The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts.

    - George Meredith
      The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, ch.19.

  •    Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures Whilst the landscape round it measures, Russet lawns and fallows grey, Where the nibbling flocks do stray, Mountains on whose barren breast The labouring clouds do often rest; Meadows trim with daisies pied, Shallow brooks, and rivers wide.

    -John Milton
    c.1631 L'Allegro, l.69^76.

  • There is no manner of doubt that a town surrounded by water is a very fine sight; but a town surrounded by land is much finer.Can there be any comparison in point of beauty, between the dull monotony of a watery surface, and the delightful variety of gardens, meadows, hills and woods ?

    -John Moore
    c.1780  A View of Society and Manners in Italy.

  • Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.

    - Robert Louis Stevenson
    Virginibus Puerisque,'Virginibus Puerisque', pt.2.

  • It is a little plaything-house that I got out of Mrs Chevenix's shop, and it is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled meadows with filigree hedges†barges as solemn as Barons of the Exchequer move under my window† Thank God! theThames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry.

    - Horace, 4th Earl of Orford Walpole
      Of Strawberry Hill, the first'Gothic'cottage, a showplace in its day. Letter to Henry Seymour Conway, 8 Jun. InW S Lewis (ed) Selected Letters of HoraceWalpole (1973). Mrs Chevenix kept a well-known toy-shop.

  • Up from the meadows rich with corn, Clear in the cool September morn.

    -John Greenleaf Whittier
      'Barbara Frietchie', opening lines.

  • Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,both what they half create And what perceive.

    -William Wordsworth
      'Lines composed a few miles aboveTintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of theWye', l.102^6.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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