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More "Lilac" Quotes from Famous Books



... for a civilian with such an old hat as I generally wear. In the evening I was, of course, on the islands, on a lively dark-brown horse, and drank tea there with a nice, old, white-haired Countess Stroganoff. The lilac, I must tell you, has flowered here as beautifully as in Frankfort, and the laburnum, too; and the nightingales warble so happily that it is hard to find a spot on the islands where one does not hear them. In the city, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... amusement ruled the entire court; it was the period when ladies would seriously interrogate their ruder companions as to their opinions upon a foot more or less captivating, according to whether it wore a pink or lilac silk stocking—for it was the period when Charles II. had declared that there was no hope of safety for a woman who wore green silk stockings, because Miss Lucy Stewart wore them of that color. While ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... holding this vacant ground with a view to a rise in the price of lots, while all he wanted was to keep a feature of his beloved landscape unchanged. Lofty elms drooped at the corners of the house; on the lawn billowed clumps of the lilac, which formed a thick hedge along the fence. There was a terrace part way down this lawn, and when a white-painted balustrade was set some fifteen years ago upon its brink, it seemed always to have ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... of the hall, and facing the benches for visitors, the Shaker fraternity were ranged. The hats and straight straw bonnets hung decorously upon the wall over their heads: here and there a sky-blue shawl or one of faded lilac hung beneath the headgear. Across the wide apartment it was difficult to distinguish faces. I scanned closely the sisterhood—old, withered faces most of them, with here and there one young and blooming—but ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell

... sixteen and fourteen, in Highland costumes, were immediately before the Queen, who walked between Prince Arthur and Prince Leopold, children of eight and five years of age. Her Majesty's train was of lilac velvet, petticoat of lilac and silver moire—antique, with a flounce of Honiton lace; corsage ornamented with diamonds, the Koh-i- noor as a brooch; head-dress, a magnificent diadem of diamonds and pearls. The three younger princesses—Alice, Helena, and Louise, girls of fifteen, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler

... floor were polished to steel. Ellen sat a while listening to the soothing chirrup of the cricket and the pleasant crackling of the flames. It was a fine cold winter's day. The two little windows at the far end of the kitchen looked out upon an expanse of snow; and the large lilac bush that grew close by the wall, moved lightly by the wind, drew its icy fingers over the panes of glass. Wintry it was without; but that made the warmth and comfort within seem all the more. Ellen would have enjoyed ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner

... received him out of doors, on the shaded east side of the house, where the heat had driven her to await a cooling breeze from the river. One of the dingy rugs had been spread upon the grass close to the lilac clump, and by an unfashionable little table Miss Caroline sat, in a chair sadly out of date, reading of Childe Harold. It was understood that the minister had there sat in another antiquated chair of capacious arms and upholstered in faded green velvet, a chair brought by Clem; and ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... anxiously addressing her daughter, "I hope, Tabby, that Miss Nix will send home your lilac-colored ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren

... listening, while the evening unfolded over the lawns its soft waves of gold, which lit up with bluish rays the shade of the pines. There he could forget himself until he heard footsteps approaching in the street. The night scattered its scents over the garden: lilac in spring, acacia in summer, dead leaves in the autumn. When Jean-Christophe, was on his way home in the evening from the Palace, however weary he might be, he used to stand by the door to drink in the delicious scent, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland

... stopped in the act of putting on his lilac kid gloves. "What have I done? I may be a very bad fellow, but I'm not quite so bad as ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)

... things are to be seen, Such pleasant things to do, The April earth it is so green, The April sky so blue, The path from dawn to even-song So joyous is to-day, Up, little ones! and dance along The lilac-scented way! ...
— Child Songs of Cheer • Evaleen Stein

... early spring that flooded with waving purple the cool glens, and grassy knolls; yellow primroses that nestled in little clumps round the gnarled roots of the oak-trees; bright celandine, and blue speedwell, and irises lilac and gold. There were grey catkins on the hazels, and the foxgloves drooped with the weight of their dappled bee-haunted cells. The chestnut had its spires of white stars, and the hawthorn its pallid moons of beauty. Yes: surely she would come if he could only find her! She would come with him ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde

... Rhodopis was as full of sound, and scent and blossom as a night in fairy-land. It was one labyrinth of acanthus shrubs, yellow mimosa, the snowy gelder-rose, jasmine and lilac, red roses and laburnums, overshadowed by tall palm-trees, acacias and balsam trees. Large bats hovered softly on their delicate wings over the whole, and sounds of mirth and song echoed from ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... brash which steadily gave place to a heavier variety, composed of larger and more angular fragments. A swishing murmur like the wind in the tree-tops came from the great expanse. It was alabaster-white and through the small, separate chips was diffused a pale lilac coloration. The larger chunks, by their motion and exposure to wind and current, had a circle of clear water; the deep sea-blue hovering round their water-worn niches. Here and there appeared the ochreous-yellow colour ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... caused her a feeling of discomfort. Wounded in all her feelings, full of repugnance, she could not get used to it all. She had grown up full of affectionate admiration for a very different style of art—her mother's fine water-colours, those fans of dreamy delicacy, in which lilac-tinted couples floated about in bluish gardens—and she quite failed to understand Claude's work. Even now she often amused herself by painting tiny girlish landscapes, two or three subjects repeated over and over again—a lake with a ruin, a water-mill beating ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola

... warmly than usual on the lilac tufts the morning that Eppie was married, for her dress was a very light one. She had often thought, though with a feeling of renunciation, that the perfection of a wedding-dress would be a white cotton, with the tiniest pink sprig at wide intervals; so that when Mrs. Godfrey Cass ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot

... batteries which had thundered away since early morning. The result of this was that many of the enemy's shells dropped right in front of us. I remember noticing that while the smoke of our shells had a lilac color that of the enemy's ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various

... in the middle of the room was covered with a beautiful cloth with red stripes and six large silver covers upon it, the napkins folded like a boat in the shining plates, the salt-cellar and the sealed bottles, and the large cut glasses sparkling in the sun which came over the groups of lilac ranged along the windows. ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann

... enchanted place, walled around with starlit darkness, visited by wisps of breezes shaking down from their wings the breath of lilac and syringa, flowering wild grapes, and plowed fields. Down at the foot of our sloping lawn the little river, still swollen by the melted snow from the mountains, plunged between its stony banks and shouted its ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... that soap may change the color of an article, as, for instance, scarlet hosiery or lilac print, if the garment be not badly soiled, it may be cleansed by washing without soap in water in which pared potatoes have been boiled. This method will also prevent color from running in ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette

... but at the end where Eric stood there was a square, treeless place which had evidently once served as a homestead garden. Old paths were still visible, bordered by stones and large pebbles. There were two clumps of lilac trees; one blossoming in royal purple, the other in white. Between them was a bed ablow with the starry spikes of June lilies. Their penetrating, haunting fragrance distilled on the dewy air in every soft puff of wind. Along the fence rosebushes ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... for "scraps" of silk, muslin, and so-forth, to dress dolls for the fair. They were very sweet, for they knew they could make a fool of me. Father was not in, and I guess they timed their visit so that he wouldn't be. They got half a yard of pink silk, as much of blue, ditto of lilac and black, a yard of every kind of narrow ribbon in the store, a remnant of book-muslin, three yards—in all, about six dollars' worth of "scraps," and then asked me if I wasn't going to give a box of raisins and the coffee for the table. I said ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor

... his first audience she was dressed in black and received him in a room where yellow flowers were massed. On the second occasion she was in grey and the flowers were pink. At the third audience her dress was purple and the flowers were of lilac and white. ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard

... on her bed's edge, swathed in a lilac silk kimona — delicate relic of school days. Her bandaged feet, crossed, dangled above the rag-rug on the floor; her slim, tanned fingers were interlaced over the ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers

... sunset, far and low, On its westward windows dashes Primrose or pomegranate glow; And above, in glimmering splashes, Lilac stars ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein

... Kenmare, Sneem, Darrynane, to Cahirciveen, and thence towards Killorglin, is harrowing and startling. The whole potato crop is literally destroyed, while over a very wide surface the oat crop presents an unnatural lilac tinge to the eye; at the same time, in too many instances, the head is found flaccid to the touch, and possessing no substance. The barley crop, too, in many places, exhibits the effect of a powerful blight. In some places, also, where turnips have been grown, they present—as, indeed, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... from such lips: I felt rooted to the saddle—a sensation which, with me, was sufficiently rare. I looked round in helpless bewilderment, at the shimmering Serpentine, and the white houses in Park Lane gleaming out of a lilac haze, at the cocoa-coloured Row, and the flash of distant carriage-wheels in the sunlight: all looked as usual—and yet, there was I on the back of a horse which had just inquired 'whether I ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey

... Mocket's lay down a steep hillside, and along the river-bank, under a drift of coloured leaves, and by the sound of falling water. Mocket dwelt in a small house, in a small green yard with a broken gate. A red creeper mantled the tiny porch, and lilac bushes, clucked under by a dozen hens, hedged the grassy yard. As the hunter and Lewis Rand approached, a little girl, brown and freckled, barefoot and dressed in linsey, sprang up from the stone before the gate, and began to ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston

... doorstep he met little Susy, with her lilac pinafore in flames. She had been trying to reach something from the mantelpiece, and had climbed up on the unsteady old fender. There was no guard in front of the open fire, and the draught had drawn her pinafore towards the bars and set ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis

... blue now, with crests of foam; the island coast opposite was a shadowy streak stretched across the feet of the sun. Oh, it was beautiful to stand at that open window in the freshness, listening to the robin on the bare lilac bush a few yards away, to the quarrelling of the impudent sparrows on the path below, to the wind in the branches of the trees, to all the happy morning sounds of nature. A joyous feeling took possession of her heart, a sudden overpowering delight in what are called common things—mere earth, sky, ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp

... utter sighs, and even cries, moving convulsively their heads, arms, and legs. Then a man suddenly made his appearance; no one had seen him enter; you might have fancied he came out of the tank. He was dressed in a lilac robe, and held in his hand a long wand, which he several times dipped into the mysterious tank; then he made a sign, the doors opened, and twenty robust servants entered, and seizing such of the patients as began ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere

... of my voice the hounds leapt back; and, on a traveller's oath, I verily believe, once, and how swiftly, and how fearfully and brightly, those childish lids unsealed their light as of lilac that lay behind, glanced briefly, fleetingly, on one who had ventured so far, ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare

... come to Lloydsboro Valley earlier than usual. Red-bud trees glowed everywhere, and wild plum and dogwood and white lilac were all in bridal array. At The Locusts the giant trees which arched over the long avenue had not yet hung out their fragrant pennons of bloom, but old Colonel Lloyd, sauntering down towards the gate, was clad ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston

... Sir David Basset or Dame Deborah dream that the lame pedlar-woman, in the lilac print dress and white mob-cap, whom they passed in the park, and who curtsied so low as the great coach lumbered past, was the Royalist leader whom everyone was searching for; neither did they dream that Millicent, who was waiting so demurely on the steps to ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various

... the feverfew and stocks, The guelder-rose and hollyhocks; Outside my trellised porch a tree Of lilac frames a sky ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various

... garden is laid out in the modern landscape style. Fences carefully concealed, a deep fringe of hard wood trees on one side, a trim lilac hedge on the other, and a plantation of shrubs, roan, barbary, sumac, lilac and young maple. On the side west of the house was observable, next to a rustic seat, in the fork of a white birch, an archaeological monument made with the key-stone of Prescott ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... from Mr. Edwards's. This stood up gauntly white until near the orchard, where it was completely hidden by the high, feathery stalks of the asparagus-bed, by a row of great sunflowers, now heavy and bent with their disk-like seed-pods, and by a clump of lilac bushes. As his eye traveled along the white expanse, he gave a quick start, and his face ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson

... the world. Into which peaceful Eden stole at this point the serpent, and, as is usual, in the shape of woman. Little Eleanor, long-legged, slim, fresh as a flower in her crisp, faded pink dress, came around the corner. In one hot hand she carried, by their heads, a bunch of lilac and pink and white sweet peas. It cost her no trouble at all, and about half a minute of time, to charge the atmosphere, so full of sweet peace and rest, with a saturated solution of bitterness and disquiet. ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... said the lady, as she trilled out a little tune by whistling until it sounded like a bird in the lilac bush. "Have you any apples?" she asked, puckering ...
— Curly and Floppy Twistytail - The Funny Piggie Boys • Howard R. Garis

... vain efforts to lure down the elusive creature. The haze of very early morning pervades the garden which is the scene of their faint aspiration. One cannot see very clearly there. The ladies' furbelows are blurred against the foliage, and the lilac-bushes loom through the air as though they were white clouds full of rain. One cannot see the ladies' faces very clearly. One guesses them, though, to be supercilious and smiling, all with the curved lips and the raised eyebrows of Experience. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm

... edge, swathed in a lilac silk kimona—delicate relic of school days. Her bandaged feet, crossed, dangled above the rag-rug on the floor; her slim, tanned fingers were interlaced over the book on ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers

... us seemed changed, and assumed a gloomy aspect. A wood of aspen trees which we were passing seemed to be all in a tremble, with its leaves showing white against the dark lilac background of the clouds, murmuring together in an agitated manner. The tops of the larger trees began to bend to and fro, and dried leaves and grass to whirl about in eddies over the road. Swallows and white-breasted swifts came darting around the britchka and even ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy

... indeed; but still, after all, notwithstanding the expensiveness and beauty of the decorations which adorned it, I do not know that Jennie enjoyed it any more than she did a little seat that she had under some lilac bushes, near the brook at the bottom of her father's garden, ...
— Rollo in Paris • Jacob Abbott

... the lilac-scented air Descends the tranquil moon! Like thistle-down The vapory clouds float in the peaceful sky; And sweetly from yon hollow vaults of shade The nightingales breathe out their souls in song. And hark! what songs of love, what soul-like ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... pale gilded branches Stiff and high in the wind. On the lawns Patches of gray-lilac snow Melt in the hollows of the terraces. The park is an ocean of fawn-colored plush, Ridged and faded. Sharp and delicate, My shadow moves after me on the rumpled grass— Grass like a pillow worn by a ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott

... writes his name Franz Florimond. We always had so many flowery names mixed up with our olla-podrida talk. Your name is flowery too. I used to say Mamita would have called you Lady Viola; but violet colors and lilac colors are cousins, and they both suit your complexion and ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child

... than the charm, quieter and less analytic, of any sort of complete and out-of-the-common-run sort of house. To sit in a room like the one I was sitting in, with the figures of the tapestry glimmering grey and lilac and purple in the twilight, the great bed, columned and curtained, looming in the middle, and the embers reddening beneath the overhanging mantelpiece of inlaid Italian stonework, a vague scent of rose-leaves and spices, put into the china bowls by the hands of ladies ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... got the lilac bushes and cut off a part of the roots while the other men were digging the holes, and they planted the lilac bushes in the holes, but they didn't do it so carefully as they had with the other kinds ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins

... of wild plum, and settled herself on her boulder with a bound. Stretching forth one of her steel-tipped pads toward the south she seemed to draw the purple distance as one draws a lady by her scarf. The thin lilac-tinted haze parted on the gorge of the Rio Grande, between the white ranges. The walls of the canon were scored with deep perpendicular gashes as though the river had ripped its way through them with its claws. Yellow pines balanced on the edge ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al

... ivy is green again, the chestnut-tree is full of leaf, the Persian lilac beside the little fountain is flushed with red and just about to flower; through the wide openings to the right and left of the old College of Calvin I see the Saleve above the trees of St. Antoine, the Voirons above the hill of Cologny; while the three flights of steps ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... leaves become all green, while those that live on bark become brown? How have the desert animals become yellow and the Arctic animals white? Why were the necessary variations always present? How could the green locust lay brown eggs, or the privet caterpillar develop white and lilac-coloured lines on its ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... of the 10c the stamps of this issue provide but little variation in shade but the 10c more than makes up for this lack in the others for it exists in almost every conceivable tint from bright red-lilac through shades of violet and brown to a brown so intense as to be catalogued as a ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole

... express harmony and serenity,—have not yet, that I am aware, had reared to them their merited poetic monument, unless, indeed, Whitman has done this service for the hermit thrush in his "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn." Here the threnody is blent of three chords, the blossoming lilac, the evening star, and the hermit thrush, the latter playing the most prominent part throughout the composition. It is the exalting and spiritual utterance of the "solitary singer" that calms and consoles the poet when the powerful shock of the President's assassination ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... could get you some flowers," she said eagerly, "some out of our garden. Oh, we had such lots there, such lovely ones, roses, and violets, jessamine and lilac, and may—oh, all sorts. I had a garden of my own, too. Oh, I'd love to take you to granny's, and let you see ...
— The Story of Jessie • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... temple in a more tenantable state of repair, above a river crossed by a broken bridge, the ragged arches strongly reflected in the water; at the back, in the centre of the horizontal line (gracefully waved with lilac mountains), was the sun, rising or setting, it was never quite certain which; whilst little ill-drawn, inch-high figures straggled about in the foreground, and furnished a name to the picture: AEneas and Dido, Venus and Adonis, Cephalus and Aurora, Apollo ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook

... the ashes that were all that was left of the home. Men were playing a hose into it and every time they moved the stream, here or there, a great hiss and cloud of vapor came up. Some one had hung the Judge's straw hat on a lilac bush and there it advertised itself. But the Judge drew himself up and stiffened his body and set his teeth, as he looked at that scene, and I knew then he would not break down again, but would play the game he had begun to ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child

... sat down at her writing-table, and very hurriedly wrote something on some lilac-coloured letter paper on which the initials of her name had been stamped; this she folded up, sealed it and sent it by her butler to ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai

... and drew back in the shadow of a tall lilac bush. They were well across the campus and now, at the end of the path, near the gate and not far from Lenox Hall, something moved in and out of the moonlit way. It seemed to cross from the big stone wall and glide into ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft

... mansions, which still exhibited evidences of taste and culture, even in neglect and decay. Borders of box lined the graveled walks and encircled beautiful flower shrubs, or clusters of japonica, of manifold hues; the mock-orange, the lilac and magnolia tree were blooming luxuriantly, and grew to a remarkable height. What a contrast to the bare gardens we had left at home, amid a cold and cheerless storm. We were now in another zone, in the full bloom of summer. After helping ourselves to roses in ...
— The Flag Replaced on Sumter - A Personal Narrative • William A. Spicer

... later the east wind was still blowing, and the chilled sunshine still feebly shining down upon the nipped lilac and laburnum blossoms. The garden at Walpole Lodge was shorn of half its customary beauty, yet to Helen Romer, pacing slowly up and down its gravel walks, it had never possibly presented a fairer appearance. For Mrs. Romer had won her battle. All that she ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron

... all the country-side there was no garden so lovely as his. Sweet-william grew there, and Gilly-flowers, and Shepherds'-purses, and Fair-maids of France. There were damask Roses, and yellow Roses, lilac Crocuses and gold, purple Violets and white. Columbine and Ladysmock, Marjoram and Wild Basil, the Cowslip and the Flower-de-luce, the Daffodil and the Clove-Pink bloomed or blossomed in their proper order as the months ...
— The Happy Prince and Other Tales • Oscar Wilde

... progress of the baby. When little Evelyn was put into short frocks, and her little, dancing feet were shod with leather instead of wool, Maria felt a sort of delicious wonder, similar to that with which she watched a lilac-bush in the yard when its blossoms ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... he murmured to himself, a little wearily, for he knew where his weakness lay,—an invincible repugnance to the ugly things of life. As he passed on, however, his spirits rose again. He caught a breath of lilac scent from a closed florist's shop. He looked up to the skies, over the housetops, faintly blue, growing clearer every moment. Almost he fancied that he looked again into the eyes of this strange girl, recalled her ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... elsewhere—no other, in fact, than Dobble. He, too, was dressed en militaire, with a frogged coat and spurs; and was walking with a showy-looking, Jewish-faced, black-haired lady, glittering with chains and rings, with a green bonnet and a bird-of-Paradise—a lilac shawl, a yellow gown, pink silk stockings, and light-blue shoes. Three children, and a handsome footman, were walking behind her, and the party, not seeing me, entered the ...
— The Fatal Boots • William Makepeace Thackeray

... yellowish stalks and blades of bright-green grass were to be seen; the little rivulets glittering in the sunshine, and sweeping clods of earth and tiny chips of wood along with them; the reddish twigs of the lilac, with their swelling buds, which nodded just beneath the window; the fussy twitterings of birds as they fluttered in the bush below; the blackened fence shining wet from the snow which had lately melted off it; and, most of all, the raw, odorous ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy

... dressed. She had intended dropping in informally on Sibyl Forbes, still an outcast, in spite of her intercession, and wore a gown of dove-colored cashmere and a hat of the same shade with a long lilac feather. ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton

... quarters of a yard long, half a yard wide; a piece of crimson china ribbon; one piece of gold-colour, one of shaded lilac, and a rug-needle. ...
— The Lady's Album of Fancy Work for 1850 • Unknown

... magazine into the back yard where Freddie was playing with his wheelbarrow under the lilac-bushes. She sat down by the big pear-tree to read, though not forgetting to keep an eye on her little brother's proceedings. Missions seemed as interesting as ever as she read. Presently she saw Evaline coming out of ...
— A Missionary Twig • Emma L. Burnett

... all over again, finding, of course, many things which had escaped us the night before. We saw our first Melocactus, and our first night-blowing Cereus creeping over the rocks. We found our first tropic orchid, with white, lilac, and purple flowers on a stalk three feet high. We saw our first wild pines (Tillandsias, etc.) clinging parasitic on the boughs of strange trees, or nestling among the angular limb- like shoots of the columnar Cereus. We learnt to distinguish the poisonous Manchineel; ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... direct path over the moors. Leaving Princetown railway station upon his left hand he set his face west where the waste heaved out before him dark against a blaze of light from the sky. The sun was setting and a great glory of gold, fretted with lilac and crimson, burned over the distant earth, while here and there the light caught crystals of quartz in the granite boulders and flashed up from the evening ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts

... business, came in red-handed, and proved a botanist. It was a Woodsia hyperborea—that was the Latin name—and was rare in those parts, he said; but the Herrschaft should come earlier for flowers. July was the month. Then there was geum, and pale blue-fringed campanulas, and rich lilac asters, yellow violets, the white scented wax-flower, arnica and yellow aconite, both excellent medicines; there were thunder-flowers, and blood-drops, and grass of Parnassus, and hundreds more, all cut down by the scythes. There were ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various

... on the arm of our dear Prince?" asked a little fat man, girt in a white satin waistcoat, and a spray of white lilac in his buttonhole. ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... next enclosure did not a magnolia open its hard white flowers against the watery blue of April? And was there not, a little way down the line, a fence foamed over every May be lilac waves of wistaria? Farther still, a horse-chestnut lifted its candelabra of buff and pink blossoms above broad fans of foliage; while in the opposite yard June was sweet with the breath of a neglected syringa, which ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... eyes. At other times she was brooding in her room or sitting in her garden, where she was now, and where she found most comfort—the garden that Hale had planted for her-where purple asters leaned against lilac shrubs that would flower for the first time the coming spring; where a late rose bloomed, and marigolds drooped, and great sunflowers nodded and giant castor-plants stretched out their hands of Christ, And while June ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.

... was the kitchen yard, a gray and gritty expanse, with never a tree or bush to shade it except the lilac hedge bounding it on the garden side, and one sickly peach tree growing at the corner of "the house." Three hens and one rooster were scratching about the flat stone at ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland

... to thirty in the large ant-heaps which one constantly meets with in the bush, and which when rifled, in January or February, yield a rich harvest of these eggs. A shrub very much like dogwood, with a lilac flower rather like a large thistle, but with the leaves turned back, was plentiful, and is a valuable product, horses being able to live upon it for many weeks without water, though it does not look especially succulent. We saw beautiful parrots ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey

... schoolroom for nearly four years now, ever since her seventeenth birthday, and she knew every feature of the big bare room by heart, and every detail of the length of village street that the high, uncurtained windows commanded. She had stood at this window in all weathers: when locust and lilac made even ugly little Weston enchanting, and all the windows were open to floods of sweet spring air; when tie dry heat of autumn burned over the world; when the common little houses and barns, and the bare trees, ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris

... (At the end of the north aisle, in the chapel beside the choir.) Another picture painted chiefly for the sake of the included portraits, and remarkably cold in general conception; its color has, however, been gay and delicate, lilac, yellow, and blue being largely used in it. The flag which our Saviour bears in his hand, has been once as bright as the sail of a Venetian fishing-boat, but the colors are now all chilled, and the picture is rather crude than brilliant; a mere wreck of what it ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin

... startled by the appearance of the young lady. Laura had marked the outburst of warm weather by the donning of a white dress and her summer hat. In one hand she held a bunch of lilac that she had been gathering for her stepmother; in the other a volume of a French life of St. Theresa that she had taken an hour before from Augustina's table. In anticipation of the great favor promised ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... his hands out of his pockets, picked a leaf from a lilac bush beside the path, and put the stem of the leaf seriously into a corner of his mouth, before finding anything to say. "Well—well, all right," he finally responded. "I'll tell you—if ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington

... minute," Lavretsky cried after her unexpectedly. "I have a great favour to beg of your mother and you; to pay me a visit in my new abode. You know, I have had a piano sent over; Lemm is staying with me; the lilac is in flower now; you will get a breath of country air, and you can return the same day—will you consent?" Lisa looked towards her mother; Marya Dmitrievna was assuming an expression of suffering; ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev

... shouldn't swear at all, or, if they did, should break their oaths as gracefully as I did mine, when I whispered it was "so good of him, to be willing I should stay in the cottage where I had always lived, and where every rose-tree and lilac knew me!" And that was true, too. But not all the truth. What need to be telling truths all the time? And what had women tongues for, but to hold them sometimes? Perhaps "he," too, would have preferred a journey to Europe, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various

... glace silk, shaded in light green and lilac. The skirt trimmed with four rows of fringe of green and lilac silk intermingled. The corsage low and plain, with a pelerine which passes along the back and shoulders, and is brought down to the front of the waist in a point. This pelerine is edged with two rows ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... it out through a back window into a lilac bush, and we'll pick it up at our leisure. You may not have noticed that this old pile is built up against an abandoned mill. We shall loiter back to the inn carrying the loot quite boldly with us. You might lug it yourself as ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson

... attent, Waiting in vain for one blest sound— The little frock, with lilac scent, That used to whisper up the stair; Then in my arms with one wild bound— Your lips, your eyes, your hair. Never the south wind through the rose, Brushing its petals with soft hand, Made such sweet talking as your clothes, ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne

... Freddie went. He looked out, and as he did so, he saw something shaggy and black walk under the lilac bush in front of ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at Meadow Brook • Laura Lee Hope

... out of the window. Little windows, and the lilac and green of the garden were reflected ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... we have changed from what we were, we're not the carefree lot we were, Our hearts are filled with sorrow now and grave concern and pain, But it is good to see once more the budding lilac tree once more, And find the constant roses here to comfort ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest

... little time for enamel-work or leaf-embroidery. Her sisters bring the gifts—Spring, wind-flowers, Solomon's-Seal, Dutchman's-breeches, Quaker-ladies, and trailing arbutus, that smells as divinely as the true May. Autumn has golden-rod and all the tribe of asters, pink, lilac, and creamy white, by the double armful. When these go the curtain comes down, and whatever Powers shift the scenery behind, work without noise. In tropic lands you can hear the play of growth and decay at the ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... pink and white beauty, but with rose all deadened into white, like a sick pink pearl. Her pink and white character had also suffered the effacement of the years. She was as dainty and as negative as a piece of Dresden China. She loved to dress in lilac and old lace: and that is how I painted her, regarding her as a bit of exquisite decoration to be treated flat like a panel of ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... found this afternoon upon the Rocky river, in full flower: it was a tall slender stalked bush, about six or eight feet high, growing almost in the bed of the river, with leaves like a geranium, and fine delicate lilac flowers about an inch and a half in diameter; here, too, we found the first gum-trees seen upon any of the watercourses for many miles, as all those we had recently crossed, traversed open plains which were quite without either trees or shrubs of ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... pace, he looked up, eagerly, into the dumfounded man's face, tail waving, dark eyes aglint with expectation. It had been hard to locate the weapon, in all that tangle of lilac-stems. It had been harder to carry the awkwardly heavy thing all the way back, in his mouth, without dropping it. But, if this was the plaything the Master had chosen, Lad was only too willing ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune

... a snake to be poisonous which was not so. However, we had the mata hari, sun-snake, black and coral colour, and a metallic green flat-headed creature, Fortrex trigonocephalus, which were venomous enough. I once had a little flower-snake for a pet. It was beautifully marked with green and lilac, and used to catch flies climbing about the room; but one day it mounted to the top of a high door, the wind blew the door to, and my pretty snake was thrown to the ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall

... shrill vociferation of his name came from the gooseberry garden without. She had grown suspicious at his long disappearance, and had leapt to the conclusion that he had climbed over the wall behind the sheltering screen of the lilac bushes; she was now engaged in energetic and rather hopeless search for him among the artichokes and ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki

... It appeared that he was getting up. Horribly depressed and sorry for him, Kenny went to sleep again. When he awoke the sun was laughing iridescently from meadow trails of rain. The fragrance of wet pine came in through the barn window. The lilac in the garden was ready to flower. Kenny longed to be off. Nevertheless he breakfasted at some length in the farm kitchen and paid so handsomely in coin and grace that there was ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... restful mysteriousness of a forest glade, suggested by the stems and the leaves of the plants ranged along the balustrade of the open side. In the streaks of light falling through the open doors of the reception-rooms, the blossoms, white and red and pale lilac, came out vivid with the brilliance of flowers in a stream of sunshine; and Mrs. Gould, passing on, had the vividness of a figure seen in the clear patches of sun that chequer the gloom of open glades ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... certain birthday of father's, when mother had determined to be gay. It was just before supper. Cyril, clad in his first brief trousers, was to knock at the study door with a little purple nosegay in his hand, to show his father that the lilac had bloomed. Olive, in crimson cashmere, was to stand near, and when the door opened, present him with her own picture of the cat and her new kittens; while mother, looking so pretty, with her own gift all ready ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... years, Lydia did not reply, but went to the window and gazed absently at the tiny patch of flowers beyond the door—the two lilac trees in full blossom, the thread of glistening river, and behind it all, the northern wilderness. Just below the window stood the missionary and the ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson

... herself in her dressing-room, which was filled with baskets of orchids, bouquets of roses, and bunches of lilac, when a telegram was brought to her. She tore it open. It was a message from The Hague containing ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France

... think, more than a fortnight of severe weather, and in March the sun was positively summer hot. I am out of doors almost all day. Our spring, however, has made up for the lenient winter, by being as cold and capricious as possible, and at this moment hardly a fruit-tree is in blossom or a lilac-tree in bud; and looking abroad over the landscape, 'tis only here and there that I can detect faint symptoms of that exquisite green haze which generally seems to hang like a halo over the distant woods at this season. I do not remember so backward a spring since I have been in this country. I ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... swelled across the blossoms of the spring, which were lighting up every shabby corner and hillside garden. Through this pleasant confusion of past and present, of spring-time scattering blossoms upon the graves, of old ivy walks and iron bars imprisoning past memories, with fragrant fumes of lilac and of elder, one could picture to oneself, as in a waking dream, two figures advancing from the corner house with the ivy walls—distinct, sedate—passing under the old doorway. I could almost see the lady, carefully dressed in many fine muslin ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)

... lands which you have enjoyed in your much-travelled experience. The Antipodes, Canada, the United States, Norway, Belgium before the tragedy—you make it all just as vivid to us as those cold spring days on the rolling Tay, the glowing time of lilac and Mayfly, or the serene evenings when the roach float dips sweetly at every swim. Whatever one's mood, salmon or gudgeon, spinning bait or black gnat, Middlesex or Mississippi, your pages have something ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... The lilac bloom faded from mountain and woodland; already meadow and pasture lay veiled under the thickening dusk. The last day-bird had piped its sleepy "lights out"; bats were flying high. When the moon rose the first ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers

... the country, some robins built a nest in a lilac-bush in the garden. One day I looked in the nest, and saw one little green egg. Two or three days after, I saw three more little green eggs, and pretty soon what did I see there but four ...
— The Nursery, June 1877, Vol. XXI. No. 6 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various

... and following her eyes I saw behind the high, green hedge bordering the road on which we were walking some red roofs rising, half hidden by the masses of white cherry blossom which hung over them. A cottage was there boasting a garden in front, a garden that was filled with lilac and laburnum not yet in bloom; filled to overflowing, for the lilac bulged all over the hedge in purple bunches and the laburnum poured its young leaves down on it. A tiny lawn, rather long-grassed and not innocent of daisies, took up the centre of the ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross

... stranger was, and wherever he was, he knew how to tease Miss Kitty Cat. Now he howled at her from the thicket of lilac bushes on the edge of the flower garden. Now he mewed at her from the hedge in front of the farmhouse. And though Miss Kitty Cat tried to get a glimpse of him, she couldn't see anything that even faintly resembled ...
— The Tale of Miss Kitty Cat - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey

... apple trees there was a platform built around it with a flight of steps leading up to it. It was what the children called the apple tree house. Here Clara and Alice were playing dolls. Peggy could seldom be induced to play dolls. She ran up the steps and made a dash for Clara. Clara, in a lilac frock, was sitting primly on one of the wooden chairs with which the platform was furnished. Her hair was a darker brown than Alice's, and her face had the pallor of the city child who has lived indoors all winter. She was rather a stiff little girl in ...
— Peggy in Her Blue Frock • Eliza Orne White

... shuts out the sea and hides from the Hermit the glory of the sundown. But we can behold its effects on Mt. Sanneen, on the clouds above us, on the glass casements in the villages far away. The mountains in the east are mantled with etherial lilac alternating with mauve; the clouds are touched with purple and gold; the casements in the distance are scintillating with mystical carbuncles: the sun is setting in the Mediterranean,—he is waving his farewell to ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... Jean manifested undisguised satisfaction when the dim still-room precincts were fairly left behind, and they got into the pleasant old walled-in garden, where the yellow afternoon's sun was lying on the opening fruit-blossom, and bringing delicious scents out of the newly-blown lilac and hawthorn. She kept pulling Geordie's corduroys, to draw his attention to all that captivated her as they walked along the broad gravel walk. This was certainly a much pleasanter way home than along ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae

... books, volumes sewn in familiar covers, were taken out and put back hopeless: they had no charm; they could not comfort. Is this something new, this pamphlet in lilac? I had not seen it before, and I re-arranged my desk this very day—this very afternoon; the tract must have been introduced within the last hour, while we ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... responsibility for his poetic images and his moral reflections, blossoms unknown to my naturalist's garden; but I can swear to the truth of all he says, for it corresponds with what I see each summer on the lilac-trees of ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre

... the smell of clover came with the springtime breezes from the meadow yonder! The red-headed woodpecker heard them at play, and she clambered out of the hollow maple and dodged hither and thither as if she, too, shared their merriment. Yes, and the yellow thistle-bird, whose nest was in the blooming lilac-bush, came and perched in the pear-tree and sang a little song about the dear little eggs in her cunning home. And there was a flower in the fence-corner,—a sweet, modest flower that no human eyes but the little boy's had ever seen,—and she sang ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field

... and swing me in! Trees are bare, but birds begin Twittering to the peeping leaves, On the bough beneath the eaves. Wait,—one lilac bud I saw. Icy hillsides feel the thaw. April chased off March to-day; Now I catch ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... weather, as hot as the Italian climate I had lately left. I have never seen so many birds and flowers in my garden. Liszt was playing the piano on the ground floor, and the nightingales, intoxicated with music and sunshine, were singing madly in the lilac-trees around." ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... under a great lilac tree in full purple bloom. She moved to it and sat down, but Nap remained upon his feet, watching ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell

... the water from the old wheel fell with silvery echo and ran rippling over the stones into the river. Somewhere above the cliff a negro was playing a banjo and far down the river, beside a little cottage torn with shot and shell, but still standing, a mocking-bird was singing in the lilac bushes. ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon

... The flowering lilac bends its fresh, fragrant clusters over the dead man's head; the swallow again flies past; "quivit! quivit!" Now the men come with nails and hammer; the lid is placed over the corpse, whose head rests on ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen

... when quite unexpectedly something happened, something utterly amazing and out of the common, and which was to be fraught with entirely unlooked-for consequences. As she put her foot on the first of the steps that led to the side door a figure moved silently from under the shade of a lilac bush close by, and, tapping her upon the arm, drew her aside ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil

... the twilight Here in the abbey close, Pouring from your lilac-bough Note on pebbled note, Why do you sing so, Making your song so bright. Swelling to a throbbing curve That ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various

... and sent a glorious day for the May Day Festival. It was an early spring and everything that could do honor to the day had burst into blossom: daffodils that bordered the lawns of the campus houses nodded their delicate yellow heads in the morning sunlight; clumps of lilac bushes formed bouquets of purple and white and from an occasional old apple tree showers of pink petals ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed

... asked Phillis, trying to peep between the lilac-bushes, but failing to discover more than the white glimmer ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey

... Prince was young and had lately come to live in the doctor's square house, with the three peaked windows in the roof, and the tall box borders and lilac bushes in its neat front yard, Oldfields was just beginning to wake from a fifty years' architectural sleep, and rub its eyes, and see what was thought about a smart little house with a sharp gabled roof, and much scalloping of its edges, which a new store-keeper had seen fit to build. ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... and awfully well, too, to his own singing. Mamma, who was attired in a flowing pink dressing-gown and a black hat trimmed with lilac, became suddenly emulous, and with her spade under her arm joined in the jig. This lasted for about a minute, and was a never-to-be-forgotten sight. They skipped round the hall, they changed sides, they swept ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn

... far back, then?" said Rebecca, wishing to appear interested, but really intent upon a new sprout at the foot of the lilac-bush. ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye

... much mischief during the remainder of the day, except chewing up the dish-rags which were hung on the lilac bush to dry, and all the ...
— Billy Whiskers - The Autobiography of a Goat • Frances Trego Montgomery

... like an Italian one, and for the last few days—at least the last four—without the slightest particle of cloud, and the sun blazing. With this, not a breath of air. The mountains look quite crimson and lilac, and everything glows with the setting sun. The evenings are quite a relief. Really one cannot undertake expeditions, the heat is so great. We thought of you, and wished you could be here; you would ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria

... with negro servants at their bridles, bare-legged water-carriers with hairy goat-skins slung over their shoulders, and Arab women in a heap of veils, cloaks, mufflings, all of the same ashy white, the caftans of clutched children peeping through in patches of old rose and lilac and pale green. ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... rocks lay upon the yellow sands and darkened, near the shore, the translucent sea. At the entrance of the black caverns the spray leaped up on the advance of every wave,—not in threatening but as if at play. Far away over the lilac and green waters arose the craggy peaks of Skye, their projections and hollows in the softest light and shadow. As the sea-birds rose from their rest upon the billows, opposite the sun, diamond drops fell from their ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau

... panel with the pale, proud face of old General Fotherington's dead wife painted on it, which every midnight he was once believed to return and visit. But when other parts of the house had fallen into hopeless disrepair, Helen had taken Tommy's little hatchet, and had felled the lofty lilac-hedge that obscured all the southern windows of the room, had cleaned the old paint, made good use of a bucket of white-wash, reset the broken glass herself, and then moved chattels and personals into the vacancy, and given it a more homelike appearance than it had worn ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... up, as I feared we should be," Mrs. Peterkin at length ventured to say, finding herself in a lilac-bush by the side of the piazza. She scarcely dared to open her eyes to see ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale

... take careful note of the locality; blows are exchanged and the rival swains indulge in mild skirmishing on the floor, then shake the dust off their wings and fly away. I find them, opposite my window, in the refreshment-bar of the lilac-bush, whose branches bend with the weight of their scented panicles. Here the Bees get drunk with sunshine and draughts of honey. Those who have had their fill come home and fly assiduously from tube to tube, placing their heads in the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... fair promise of ripening fruits. The high sloping hills surrounding the fertile vale of Cold Springs were clothed with the blossoms of the gorgeous scarlet enchroma, or painted-cup; the large pure white blossoms of the lily-like trillium; the delicate and fragile lilac geranium, whose graceful flowers woo the hand of the flower-gatherer only to fade almost within his grasp; the golden cyprepedium, or mocassin flower, so singular, so lovely in its colour and formation, waved ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill

... Wallencamp, when no fresh winds were borne to us from the ocean. The sun shone hot on the stunted cedars. The tides crept in lazily. All one weary afternoon, in the hum and stir of the dusty school-room, little Bessie Sartell—Captain Sartell's youngest, and his darling—sat stringing lilac blossoms together in a chain. She was such a cunning edition of the big Captain. She had the same strong Saxon physique in miniature, the same clear pink and white complexion, eyes hardly more limpidly blue than his, and hair that was sunniest flax, like ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... [lilac] or pipe-tree, so easily propagated by suckers or layers; the flower of the white (emulating both colour and flavor of the orange) I am told is made use of by the perfumers; I should not else have named it among ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn

... train to Brackenhurst. All the world knows Brackenhurst, of course, the greenest and leafiest of our southern suburbs. It looked even prettier than its wont just then, that town of villas, in the first fresh tenderness of its wan spring foliage, the first full flush of lilac, laburnum, horse-chestnut, and guelder-rose. The air was heavy with the odour of May and the hum of bees. Philip paused a while at the corner, by the ivied cottage, admiring it silently. He was glad he lived there—so very aristocratic! What joy to glide direct, on ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen

... day he met her on the stairs going to her room. She carried a lilac gown over her arm and a large hat in her hand. She was smiling at the hat. He smiled ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair

... comfortably back of his head and looked at her. She was gazing out over the Bad Lands to the East. "In the very centre, as a sort of protecting nurse to all the littler flowers," he went on, "is a big lilac bush, and there the bees and humming birds are thick on a warm spring day. There are plenty of birds too, but I didn't know so many of them. They nested everywhere—in the 'big tree,' the orchard, the evergreens, the hedges, and in the long row of maple trees with trunks as big as a barrel and limbs ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White

... inner door, and Mrs. Petullo, flushed a little to her great becoming in spite of a curl-paper or two, and clad in a lilac-coloured negligee of the charmingest, came into the office with a well-acted start of surprise to find ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... down there among the lilac-bushes, as if somebody were listening to all that was said by the growing crowd on the front-door step, and another whisper went across the walk: "Clint, give him his right ear. The left sticks. I'm afraid I'll pull him off ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... musicians were giving the afternoon concert. Between its two stationary divisions moved a current of promenaders, with some such effect as if the colors of a lovely garden should have liquefied and flowed in mingled rose and lilac, pink and yellow, and white and orange, and all the middle tints of modern millinery. Above on one side were the agreeable bulks of architecture, in the buff and gray of Carlsbad; and far beyond on the other were the upland slopes, with villas ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... old red house was the talisman that brought back to her mind the familiar picture. She wondered if it lay over the hill beyond that rugged road. She closed her eyes and saw the green fields, the mighty balm-of-gilead tree, the lilac bushes, and the dull red walls of the house standing back from the village street, not far from the white-steepled church. She could see it all, plainly. The thought came to her suddenly that it was home. It was the first realization she had of old Hercules Thayer's kindness. ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger

... a start at the favoured hour of ten. Under the lee of the Quinconces, past the Hotel Richelieu, Villa Richelieu, and the elevated Villa Marguerite, and we were fairly on our way, the air sweetly laden with the scent from the flower-decked fields and the lilac-trees ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough

... and there was the pure water running by, where she could fill her watering pot, morning, noon and night, and saturate the fibres exposed to the sun's bleaching rays. And there was a thick row of blossoming lilac bushes shading the lower windows the whole breadth of the building, in which innumerable golden and azure-colored birds made their nests, and beguiled the spinster's labors ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz

... mute depositories of frightfully tragic secrets. One bright spring morning in the very olden time, says the tradition, a Lord of this domain left his castle. It was when the sweet violet first cast its odours on the breeze, when the bright and abundant bloom of the lilac and laburnum gracefully decorated the gardens, and the country was reclad in all the charming freshness of the season. After a short absence, he returned, accompanied by a lovely bride;—but ere long she died. He went again, returning ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle

... some lilac bushes, she enjoyed the great decorum of the arrest, and heard the dialogue of the two men die away along the path. Soon after, the rolling of a carriage and the beat of hoofs arose in the still air of the night, and passed speedily ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a mile from the Craigie House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the road leading to the old town of Watertown, is Elmwood, a spacious square house set amongst lilac and syringa bushes, and overtopped by elms. Pleasant fields are on either side, and from the windows one may look out on the Charles River winding its way among the marshes. The house itself is one of a group which before the war for independence belonged to ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... land is a mistake, for, not only is there much rock projecting wherever mountains or rocky capes and islands rise, but the snow seldom looks white, and if carefully looked at will be found to be shaded with many colours, but chiefly with cobalt blue or rose-madder, and all the gradations of lilac and mauve which the mixture of these colours will produce. A White Day is so rare that I have recollections of going out from the hut or the tent and being impressed by the fact that the snow really looked white. When to the ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... Just now the lilac is in bloom, All before my little room; And in my flower-beds, I think, Smile the carnation and the pink; And down the borders, well I know, The poppy and the pansy blow ... Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through, Beside the river make for you A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep Deeply ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various

... "Bill Summers," "I was up to your folkeses house jist two or three days ago. No, there ain't many changes to speak of. The lilac bush by the kitchen window is over a foot higher, and the elm in the front yard died and had to be cut down. And yet it don't seem the same place that ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... to be paid to his father. The empress was very kind to the Mozarts, and sent them costly dresses. 'Would you like to know,' writes Leopold to Hagenauer, his host at Salzburg, 'what Wolferl's (a pet name for Wolfgang) dress is like? It is of the finest cloth, lilac-coloured, the vest of moire of the same colour. Coat and top-coat with a double broad border of gold. It was made for the Hereditary Duke Maximilian Franz.' In the picture which is preserved in the Mozart collection at Salzburg, Mozart is painted in this dress. Wolfgang never showed the least embarrassment ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands

... paused and were talking together. Mary's high, sweet laugh floated over the flowers, then her voice, a mere murmur. His voice, lower still. Then silence. They had turned back, together, down the lilac walk. ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... know it is very different from Sindbad's. In his valley, there was only a diamond lying here and there; but, in the real valley, there are diamonds covering the grass in showers every morning, instead of dew: and there are clusters of trees, which look like lilac trees; but, in spring, all their blossoms are ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... married folks. Bill, the handsome West Indian black, married my pretty washerwoman Rosalind, and was thought rather assuming because he was asked in church and lawfully married; and she wore a handsome lilac silk gown and a white wreath and veil, and very well she looked in them. She had a child of two years old, which did not at all disconcert Bill; but he continues to be dignified, and won't let her go and wash clothes in the river, because the hot sun makes her ill, and ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon

... touches coaxing, delicate, And arts that never tire, They tie the rose-trees each to each, The lilac to the brier, Making for graceless things a grace, With steady, ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge

... the sky, the grass and flowers, and one could see the joy of life sparkling in her eyes. Sometimes she would dart forward to catch some flying creature, crying out as she brought it back: "Look, uncle, how pretty it is! I want to hug it!" And this desire to "hug" flies or lilac blossoms disquieted, angered, and roused the priest, who saw, even in this, the ineradicable tenderness that is always budding in ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... death in life, the ultima linea rerum. It was the last decree, the irrevocable sentence, the absolute end: and I had not yet reached half the Psalmist's span; I had not yet forgotten the lost summer mornings when the breeze scented with lilac came blowing through the casement, bearing with it the sound of ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith

... to all the things and people in it she had known and lived with, and turn her face to meet new things and new people. Nothing would be familiar to her in that strange world, not even tea-cups with blue rims like these she was washing up for the last time. Everything new, down to the two lilac prints, made longer than ever before, lying at the bottom of the new black box. It was wonderful to think of, and very confusing to the mind. There would even be a new baby to look after. But when Biddy reached this point she smiled securely, for she had no fears about the baby, though ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton

... termed it, backwards and forwards along the little path under the old elm-tree in front of the summer-house, with its bare branches stretched out like a giant's fingers clutching at the sky, always turning when he got up to the lilac bush and retracing his steps slowly and deliberately, as if anxious to tread in his former footprints in the very centre of the box- ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... However, we had the mata hari, sun-snake, black and coral colour, and a metallic green flat-headed creature, Fortrex trigonocephalus, which were venomous enough. I once had a little flower-snake for a pet. It was beautifully marked with green and lilac, and used to catch flies climbing about the room; but one day it mounted to the top of a high door, the wind blew the door to, and my pretty snake was thrown to the ground and broke ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall

... afternoon, when both the old ones slept, he abstracted a pipe, stuffed it with the rich black flakes and fled with matches to a nook of charming secrecy in the midst of the lilac clump. Thence arose presently clouds of smoke from the ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson

... the worst by a long way—not but what your good lady made noise enough when she thought you'd been made away with: and afterwards, when she went upstairs and, taking a glance out of window, spied a long black coffin laid out under the lilac bushes, I'm told you could hear her a mile away. But she've been weakening this half-hour: her nature couldn't keep it up: whereas the longer we keep that Frenchman, the louder he ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Devonshire-terrace I have seen a better sky? I dare say it is; but like a great many other heresies, it is true. . . . But such green, green, green, as flutters in the vineyard down below the windows, that I never saw; nor yet such lilac and such purple as float between me and the distant hills; nor yet in anything, picture, book, or vestal boredom, such awful, solemn, impenetrable blue, as in that same sea. It has such an absorbing, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... lilac print. Her sleeves were turned up to the elbows, and she wore a big apron with a bib. He noticed that her ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell

... biblioteko. lichen : likeno. lick : leki. lie : kusxi, ("tell a"—) mensogi. life : vivo, vigleco. lift : levi, levilo, lifto, elevatoro. light : lum'i, -o; (ek)lumigi, malpeza. like : simila; kiel; sxati. likely : versxajne, kredeble. lilac : siringo. lily : lilio; (of the valley) konvalo. lime : kalko; (tree) tilio. limit : lim'o, -igi. limp : lami, lameti. line : linio; subsxtofi. linen : tolo, linajxo, (washing) tolajxo. linnet : kanabeno. lint : cxarpio. lip : lipo. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer

... the same time. Those intended for the princely table numbered two hundred,—two for each guest. They were the handsomest young men among the ten thousand serfs, clothed in loose white trousers and shirts of pink or lilac silk; their soft golden hair, parted in the middle, fell upon their shoulders, and a band of gold-thread about the brow prevented it from sweeping the dishes they carried. They entered the reception-room, bearing huge trays of sculptured silver, upon which were anchovies, the finest Finnish ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor

... and tongues conspire In the unfolding of the tale That Adam and Eve beneath the blossoming rose-tree Told each other in the Garden of Eden. Once more the wind blows from the walls, And I behold a fair young mother; She stands at the lilac-shaded door With her baby at her breast; She looks across the twilit fields and smiles And whispers to her child: "Thy ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller

... And the Autumn's pride. She must weave the loveliest carpets, Chequered sun and shade, Every wood must have such pathways Laid in every glade; She must hang laburnum branches On each arched bough;— And the white and purple lilac Should be waving now; She must breathe, and cold winds vanish At her breath away; And then load the air around her With the scent of May! Listen then, Oh Spring! nor linger On thy charmed way; Have pity on thy prisoned flowers Wearying for the day. Listen to the raindrops falling ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter

... elegant society ladies of the pork-packing metropolis. The Sun God, worshipped for two score centuries in India, Egypt, Greece and Rome, has a new shrine on Lake Park Avenue, and the prophet gives tea-parties at which his disciples are fed on lilac-blossoms—"the white and pinkish for males, the blue-tinted for females". He wears a long flowing robe of pale grey cashmere, faced with white, and flexible white kid shoes, and he sells his lady adorers a book called "Inner Studies", price five dollars per volume, ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... little hands he had held in his the previous day. Charles must go for Jerry—go at once, for he wanted her, and as when Arthur wanted a thing he wanted it immediately, Charles was soon on his way to the cottage in the lane, where he found the little girl under a tall lilac bush, busy with the mud pies she was making, and talking to herself, partly in English and partly in broken German, which she had resumed ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes

... a lilac dove This Corsair desperate and daft? Behold the conning tower above The big stern chasers pointing aft! This is not he that saved mankind With pards and pigs from tempests blind, But rather he that forged ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 16, 1914 • Various

... the bill!" She declaimed it to a lilac-bush, standing with her hands behind her, and face uplifted. "I have no money, and no position—therefore the vast majority of men won't want to marry me. And as to scheming to make them want it—why!—good ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... easel, stood a nearly finished painting,—a sunny corner of the old manor kitchen, with Betsy Todd in lilac print gown, peeling apples by the open window, through which one caught a glimpse of the tall hollyhocks in ...
— The S. W. F. Club • Caroline E. Jacobs

... yellowish and white hue of the grasses in it only recently under water, contrasting with the brilliant green of the sweet turf around. There was a marsh marigold in it, with stems a quarter of an inch thick; and in the grass on the verge, but just beyond where the flood reached, grew the lilac-tinted cuckoo ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies

... out the sea and hides from the Hermit the glory of the sundown. But we can behold its effects on Mt. Sanneen, on the clouds above us, on the glass casements in the villages far away. The mountains in the east are mantled with etherial lilac alternating with mauve; the clouds are touched with purple and gold; the casements in the distance are scintillating with mystical carbuncles: the sun is setting in the Mediterranean,—he is waving his farewell ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... sweet-smelling; everything in perfect order. On the great bed with its lilac silk quilt, was the bag she had made and embroidered with her own hands to hold her sleeping things; her slippers ready at the foot; the sheets even turned over at the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... groped his way in the dark to the end of the room, where Wildney, shoving aside a green baize curtain, noiselessly opened a door, which at once led them into a little garden. There they both crouched down under a lilac tree beside ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar

... soothing chirrup of the cricket and the pleasant crackling of the flames. It was a fine cold winter's day. The two little windows at the far end of the kitchen looked out upon an expanse of snow; and the large lilac bush that grew close by the wall, moved lightly by the wind, drew its icy fingers over the panes of glass. Wintry it was without; but that made the warmth and comfort within seem all the more. Ellen would have ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner

... colony of hens. I learned all the flowers that summer." He clasped his hands comfortably back of his head and looked at her. She was gazing out over the Bad Lands to the East. "In the very centre, as a sort of protecting nurse to all the littler flowers," he went on, "is a big lilac bush, and there the bees and humming birds are thick on a warm spring day. There are plenty of birds too, but I didn't know so many of them. They nested everywhere—in the 'big tree,' the orchard, the evergreens, the hedges, and in the long row of maple trees with trunks as big as a ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White

... think of this," said Charles, "scents are complete in themselves, yet do not consist of parts. Think how very distinct the smell of a rose is from a pink, a pink from a sweet-pea, a sweet-pea from a stock, a stock from lilac, lilac from lavender, lavender from jasmine, jasmine from honeysuckle, honeysuckle from hawthorn, hawthorn ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman

... step. There was a long piercing wail of the whistle that was smothered as the engine entered the snow-shed. The girl on the platform stood motionless a moment. Then one of her hands dropped from her breast, and with it came a faded spray of purple lilac. She stepped quickly to the rail and tossed it back into the twilight. Wade sprang forward, snatched it from the track and pressed it to his lips. When the last car dipped into the mouth of the snow-shed he was still standing there, gazing after, his hat in hand, a straight, lithe ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour

... carelessly on the long, flat stones that so thickly covered the ground, waiting for the opening services, while the parish bell kept up a merry peal. Everything seemed simple and happy, and I do not wonder that the Brontes loved their home, with its little garden of lilac bushes, the old church in front, and the sweeping moors stretching far behind. On many a Sunday morning like this they had trodden the very path I then was treading, and had entered the church-door; but how few of these simple villagers knew the treasures of genius showered ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various

... hammer into the form of a pointed mushroom. Zidore was again blowing the charcoal in the chafing-dish. The sun was setting behind the house in a brilliant rosy light, which was gradually becoming paler, and turning to a delicate lilac. And, at this quiet hour of the day, right up against the sky, the silhouettes of the two workmen, looking inordinately large, with the dark line of the bench, and the strange profile of the bellows, stood out from the limpid back-ground of ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... are the marble gravestone in Trull Churchyard, and Tablet in Ecclesfield Church, both carved by Harry Hems, of Exeter, and similarly decorated with the double lilac primrose,—St. ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden

... in fact return very soon. Her evening dress she had exchanged for a full lilac silk tea-gown, with open hanging sleeves; a thick twisted cord was fastened round her waist. She sat down by her husband, and, waiting till he was left 'fool,' said to him, 'Come, dumpling, that's enough!' (At the word 'dumpling' Sanin glanced at ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev

... sometimes. I had so much in me to give to some one and the years were all slipping by and it became, every day, more difficult. There was a girl ... something seemed to begin between us. She was the daughter of one of the canons, dark-haired, and she used to wear a lilac-coloured dress. She was very kind; once when we were walking through the town I began to talk to her. I believe she understood, because she was very, very young—only about eighteen—and hadn't begun to laugh at me yet. She had a dimple in one cheek, ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole

... of old Mosey's cabin was a mass of purple lupine. Behind the house the wild oats were dotted with brodiaea, waving on long, glistening stems. The California lilac was in bloom on the trail, and its clumps of pale blossoms were like breaks in the chaparral, showing ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham

... the big summer hats, with stones on them to keep them from blowing away, looked like immense shells. It was strange that even the sea seemed to sound differently when all those leaping, laughing figures ran into the waves. Old Mrs. Fairfield, in a lilac cotton dress and a black hat tied under the chin, gathered her little brood and got them ready. The little Trout boys whipped their shirts over their heads, and away the five sped, while their grandma sat with one ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield

... I was asked to buy were of a much paler purple than the others, and I was at no loss to explain this peculiarity. The plants with the deep violet petals and dark crimson eye had single blossoms, whereas those whose petals were lilac, and whose eye was of a paler red colour, were double. Cultivation had increased the number of petals, but it had diminished the richness of the colouring. This is an interesting example of the impartial balancing of nature. No object possesses every endowment. Defect ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... echoed Miss Celia, heartily. "Ten years ago I came here a little girl, and made lilac chains under these very bushes, and picked chick-weed over there for my bird, and rode Thorny in his baby-wagon up and down these paths. Grandpa lived here then and we had fine times; but now they are all gone ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various

... and I were wedded: I wore a lilac gown; And the ringers rang with a will, and he gave the ringers a crown. But the first that ever I bare was dead before he was born, Shadow and shine is life, ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson

... walnuts a little belated, unfurling their rusty-red fronds. A waft of rich scent comes from a hawthorn hedge where a hidden cuckoo flutes, or just where the lane turns by the old water-mill, which throbs and grumbles with the moving gear, a great lilac-bush leans out of a garden and fills the air with perfume. Yet, as I go, I am filled with a heavy anxiety, which plays with my sick heart as a cat plays with a mouse, letting it run a little in the sun, and then pouncing upon it in terror and dismay. The beautiful ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson

... amazing and out of the common, and which was to be fraught with entirely unlooked-for consequences. As she put her foot on the first of the steps that led to the side door a figure moved silently from under the shade of a lilac bush close by, and, tapping her upon the arm, drew her aside ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil

... peaceful Eden stole at this point the serpent, and, as is usual, in the shape of woman. Little Eleanor, long-legged, slim, fresh as a flower in her crisp, faded pink dress, came around the corner. In one hot hand she carried, by their heads, a bunch of lilac and pink and white sweet peas. It cost her no trouble at all, and about half a minute of time, to charge the atmosphere, so full of sweet peace and rest, with a saturated solution of bitterness and disquiet. Her presence ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... have been collected at great expense, owing to the severity of the winter. The halls of Lucrece and of La Reunion, in which the dancing quadrilles were formed, resembled an immense parterre of roses, laurel, lilac, ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant

... to be the perfection of taste. The obvious reflection, that one color of the rainbow is quite as much of God as another, has led the children of gentle dove-colored mothers to appear in shades of rose-color, blue, and lilac; and wise elders have said, it is not so much the color or the shape that we object to, as giving too much time and too much money,—if the heart be right with God and man, the bonnet ribbon may be of ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... of the long drawing-room windows of the house in the rue de l'Universite, and looked out between the curtains upon the rather grimy little garden, where a few not very prosperous cypresses and chestnuts stood guard over the rows of lilac shrubs and the box-bordered flower-beds and the usual moss-stained fountain. She was thinking of the events of the past month, the month which had elapsed since the evening of the De Saulnes' dinner-party. They were not at all startling events; in a practical ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman

... hearts and aching joints had advanced ten days and ten degrees. The season's first straw replacement of derby had been noted by press. The city itched in its last days of woolens and drank sassafras tea for nine successive mornings. A commuter wore the first sweet sprig of lilac. The slightly East Sixties took to boarding up house-fronts into bland, eyeless masks. The very East Sixties began ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst

... wet season had drawn near its close. Signs of spring were visible in the swelling buds and rushing torrents. The pine forests exhaled a fresher spicery. The azaleas were already budding; the ceanothus getting ready its lilac livery for spring. On the green upland which climbed the Red Mountain at its southern aspect, the long spike of the monk's-hood shot up from its broad-leaved stool and once more shook its dark blue bells. Again the billow above Smith's grave was soft ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... swiftly up the flag-bordered path between the lilac bushes. "It's a beautiful day, ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney

... past the "Bell," the "Boar's Head," and the "Queen's Arms"—taverns that have borne the same names since the days when Westminster was Sanctuary. People home from the races were going into them with their red ties awry, with sprigs of lilac in their buttonholes; and oak leaves in their hats. The air was full of drunken singing, sounds of quarrelling, shameful words and curses. There were some mutterings of thunder and occasional flashes of lightning, ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine

... Whose shadows fall before Thy lowly cottage door— Under the lilac's tremulous leaves— Within thy snowy clasped hand The purple flowers it bore. Last eve in dreams, I saw thee stand, Like queenly nymph from Fairy-land— Enchantress of the flowery ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... the gardens with lilac and laburnum bushes, with gooseberries and currants. There were no flowers there that did not sow themselves year after year. They were damp, grubby places, but even there an imaginative child like Mary Gray could find ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan

... was a bed of myrtle, and another one of verbenas, over which the butterflies hovered on hot summer days, and another of pansies, and along the wall great clumps of valley lilies. And at the end of the path was a lilac bush that the Judge's wife had planted in the first days ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey

... struggling with the long, flowered skirt of a lilac silk reception dress of Mrs. Lincoln's, and Budd was getting into one of her ruffled morning wrappers, while Tad began to sing at the top ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... me quite a sinking of the heart. I tried not to show that I was sad, but I'm afraid Mr. Starr guessed, for in the afternoon he gave me a water-color sketch he had made in the morning, on deck. He called it a "rough, impressionist thing," but it is really exquisite; the water pale lilac, with silver frills of foam, just as it looked in the light when he sat painting; fields of cloth-of-gold, starred with wild flowers in the foreground; far-off trees in soft gray and violet, with a gleam of rose here and there, which means ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... apartments were piled one above the other until the historic cylinder of stone opened to the sky. In contrast to the barrenness of the gray inclosures, through the squares of the windows throbbed the blue and gold, green and lilac, of Italian heavens ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... was the brook itself that was my chief and dearest companion. It chattered and sang to me, and told me of the goblins who lived under the hill, of fairies dancing on the grass on moonlight nights, and scolding the pale lilac milk-maids on the banks; and of a sad little old man dressed in brown, always sad because his dear water-children ran away from him when they heard the voice of the great river telling them of the calling of ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless

... was grown over lushly with grass; but at the end where Eric stood there was a square, treeless place which had evidently once served as a homestead garden. Old paths were still visible, bordered by stones and large pebbles. There were two clumps of lilac trees; one blossoming in royal purple, the other in white. Between them was a bed ablow with the starry spikes of June lilies. Their penetrating, haunting fragrance distilled on the dewy air in every soft puff of wind. Along the fence rosebushes grew, ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... with creepers, and with terraced lawns stretching down to the sunny corner to which the girl had been carried earlier in the day. There were flowers everywhere—beds of hyacinths, and borders of purple and yellow crocuses. A lilac tree was bursting into blossom, the breeze was soft and full of life. Below, beyond the yellow-starred field of which the woman had spoken, flowed the Seine, and in the distance one could see the outskirts ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... as most were willing to admit after they had read, for instance, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, a poem that Swinburne called "the most sonorous nocturn yet chanted in the church of the world." The three motifs of this song are the lilac, the evening star, and ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... on the terrace step, close to the marble vases where heliotropes swung their dainty lilac chalices against her shoulder, and the scarlet geraniums stared unabashed, Beryl's gaze wandered from the lovely park and ancient trees, to the unbroken facade of the gray old house; and as, in painful contrast she recalled the bare bleak garret room, where a beloved invalid held want ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... prodigality had outdone herself here. Pale white the aspen-trees shone, and above was the fluttering, quivering canopy of gold tinged with green, and below clustered the asters, thick as stars in the sky, waving, nodding, swaying gracefully to each little autumn breeze, lilac-hued and lavender and pale violet, and all the ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey

... gleam On whitewashed wall and sagging beam, Until the old, rude-furnished room Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom; While radiant with a mimic flame Outside the sparkling drift became And through the bare-boughed lilac-tree Our own warm hearth seemed blazing free. The crane and pendent trammels showed, The Turk's heads on the andirons glowed; While childish fancy, prompt to tell The meaning of the miracle, Whispered the old rhyme: "Under ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck

... moment, gone to pick some of the biggest leaves from the lilac bush of which the Gardens contained numerous sooty specimens. The leaves Robin was playing with were some he had plucked first to show her a wonderful thing. If you laid a leaf flat on the seat of the bench and were fortunate enough to possess ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... finest. It throws out one or two trunks clean and smooth, 30 feet or so high, the branches terminated by immense leaves, deep green above edged with yellow and ruby red-brown below. The creamy white flowers are shaded with lilac and are slightly scented. They are produced in tightly-packed clusters 9 to 15 inches across and twenty or ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband

... pine woods had perished to make room for the Camp. The car stopped presently on the edge of the town. To the left spread a river estuary, with a spit of land beyond, and lighthouses upon it, sharp against a pale blue sky. Every shade of pale yellow, of lilac and pearl, sparkled in the distance, in the scudding water, the fast flying westerly clouds, and the sandy inlets among the still ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... The day one of the softest and brightest in autumn; the lights various; the mountains in the richest colouring, fern covering them with reddish gold in great part; here and there, trees in every variety of autumn foliage; and the rock itself of a kind of lilac tint; the outlines of the mountains very fine; the Tarn, which might almost be called a lake for size and abundance of water, with no culture, or trees, or habitation around it, here and there a great rock stretching into it like a promontory, and high mountains surrounding it on three ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... found shelter, and were silent; only rarely the mocking voice of the bluebird sang out like a little steel bell. Before stopping in this birch forest I passed with my dog through a poplar grove. I confess I am not very fond of the poplar tree with its pale lilac-colored trunk and its grayish-green, metallic leaves, which it lifts high and spreads in the air like a trembling fan—I do not like the constant shaking of its round, untidy leaves, which are so awkwardly attached to long stems. The poplar is pretty only on certain summer evenings when, rising ...
— The Rendezvous - 1907 • Ivan Turgenev

... eyes I saw behind the high, green hedge bordering the road on which we were walking some red roofs rising, half hidden by the masses of white cherry blossom which hung over them. A cottage was there boasting a garden in front, a garden that was filled with lilac and laburnum not yet in bloom; filled to overflowing, for the lilac bulged all over the hedge in purple bunches and the laburnum poured its young leaves down on it. A tiny lawn, rather long-grassed and not innocent of daisies, took up the centre of the garden, and on to this ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross

... sweetly scented for all that; hyacinths in early spring that flooded with waving purple the cool glens, and grassy knolls; yellow primroses that nestled in little clumps round the gnarled roots of the oak-trees; bright celandine, and blue speedwell, and irises lilac and gold. There were grey catkins on the hazels, and the foxgloves drooped with the weight of their dappled bee-haunted cells. The chestnut had its spires of white stars, and the hawthorn its pallid moons of beauty. Yes: surely she would come ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde

... legs, and Mrs Blimber in a lilac bonnet, and Mr Feeder, B.A., with his long knuckles and his bristly head of hair, and Mr Feeder's brother, the Reverend Alfred Feeder, M.A., who was to perform the ceremony, were all assembled in the drawing-room, and Cornelia with her orange-flowers and bridesmaids had just come down, and ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... exchange in very recent times. Busbequius, Austrian ambassador at Constantinople about the middle of the sixteenth century—whose letters contain one of the best accounts of Turkish life which have appeared down to the present day—brought home from the Ottoman capital the lilac and the tulip. The Belgian Clusius about the same time introduced from the East the horse chestnut, which has since wandered to America. The weeping willows of Europe and the United States are said to have sprung from a slip received from Smyrna by the poet Pope; and ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... They are botanical collections in the heart of the city, the money coming from the city; the taxpayers pay the bill. We have a tremendous botanical collection here, and are known the country over for our lilac and other collections. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various

... occasioned delay. The morning was cloudy and promised rain; but a N.W. wind broke through the clouds, which resolved themselves into cirrostratus, and we had heat again. Besides the SALSOLA AUSTRALIS, we found a HALGANIA with lilac flowers, probably distinct from the species hitherto described, which are natives of the ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell

... bibulous paper, and the residue perfectly dried for use. The principal colors used are Carmine, Chrome Yellow, Burnt Sienna, Ultramarine and White; boxes fitted with sets of colors properly prepared, may be obtained of the dealers, and include Carmine, White, Lilac, Sky Blue, Pink, Yellow, Flesh color, Orange, Brown, Purple, Light Green, Dark Green and Blue. With a few colors, however, all the rest may be made thus: Orange, by Yellow and Red; Purple, with Blue ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey

... obtain a better view of the undulating coast, embraced in one grand mountain form, all its parts uniting like the members of one body. Ischia and the naked promontories on the extreme end repose in their lilac envelop, like a slumbering Pompeiian nymph under her veil. Veritably, to paint such nature as this, this violet continent extending around this broad luminous water, one must employ the terms of the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various

... the charm, quieter and less analytic, of any sort of complete and out-of-the-common-run sort of house. To sit in a room like the one I was sitting in, with the figures of the tapestry glimmering grey and lilac and purple in the twilight, the great bed, columned and curtained, looming in the middle, and the embers reddening beneath the overhanging mantelpiece of inlaid Italian stonework, a vague scent of rose-leaves and spices, put into the china bowls by the hands of ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... looking at Ray Ingraham, in her striped lilac and white calico, with its plaited waist and cross-banded, machine-stitched double skirt, sitting by her shady window, beyond which, behind the garden angle, rose up the red brick wall of the bakehouse, whence came a warm, sweet smell of many new-drawn loaves,—looking around within, at ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... robed the hills in sombre green, begins to brighten with new life; new leaves adorn the ragged red arms of the manzanita, and among them blow thousands of little urn-shaped flowers of rose-color and white. The bright green of one lilac is almost lost in a luxuriance of sky-blue blossoms, and the white lilac looks at a distance as if drifted over with snow. The cercocarpus almost rivals the lilac in its display of white and blue, and the dark, forbidding adenostoma now showers forth dense panicles of little ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... changes that had taken place since the days when she sought this favorite greenhouse to study her text-books. Near her stood an antique China vase containing a rare creeper, now full of beautiful, star-shaped lilac flowers. Many months before, her guardian had given her this root, and she had planted it in this same vase; now the long, graceful wreaths were looped carefully back, and tied to a slender stake. She bent over the fragrant blossoms, with ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... I could get you some flowers," she said eagerly, "some out of our garden. Oh, we had such lots there, such lovely ones, roses, and violets, jessamine and lilac, and may—oh, all sorts. I had a garden of my own, too. Oh, I'd love to take you to granny's, and let you ...
— The Story of Jessie • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... these kodak pictures of the farm and its house," the young man said, producing an envelope from a pocket. "Take a chair here by the window, Mrs. Stevenson, where you'll have the light. See, this one shows the house, with the trees and lilac bushes in front, and gives you a glimpse of the flower garden. ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd

... of my knowledge has held it necessary, for its proper conduct, to have in order certain floral drives. First the apple blossom drive introduces the spring, and the lilac drive confirms the impression that really the season is advancing; but the locust drive is the sweetest of all, taking these nature lovers along some shady lanes, beside the east bank of a great river, and in places where, the trees planted ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland

... Boughs of lilac whereon to rest April spreads when you build your nest, Autumn feeds you with golden corn And berries ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy

... been decreed the close of the minister's activity, at least in Glaston. It was a lovely June twilight; the bats were flitting about like the children of the gloamin', and the lamps of the laburnum and lilac hung dusky among the trees ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... voice hath not a trace of sweetness It thrills one through and through, With promises of Joy in all completeness What time the skies are blue. When robins from the apple-trees are flinging Out on the air their silver shower of song,— In lilac days, when children run a-singing, No single thought shall do thy ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard

... pigeon appearing at lunch to save me, as the old lady thought, from starvation. Who but a woman could have stood salad for six weeks, even salad sanctified by the presence and scent of the most gorgeous lilac masses? I did, and grew in grace every day, though I have never liked it since. How often now, oppressed by the necessity of assisting at three dining-room meals daily, two of which are conducted by the functionaries ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp

... the celestial bodies, more especially the sun, which now appeared as a globe of lilac fire in the centre of a silvery lustre, but I will leave him to publish his results in his own fashion. We may claim to have seen the South Pole, but, of course, at a distance too great for scientific purposes. Judging by its appearance, I should say it was surrounded by a frozen land. ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro

... the different species to each other is that of armed neutrality. They are very jealous of neighbors. A few years ago I was much interested in the housebuilding of a pair of summer yellow-birds. They had chosen a very pretty site near the top of a tall white lilac, within easy eye-shot of a chamber window. A very pleasant thing it was to see their little home growing with mutual help, to watch their industrious skill interrupted only by little flirts and snatches of endearment, frugally cut ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell

... met little Susy, with her lilac pinafore in flames. She had been trying to reach something from the mantelpiece, and had climbed up on the unsteady old fender. There was no guard in front of the open fire, and the draught had drawn her pinafore towards the bars and set it on ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis

... had passed out of sight, Cynthia came from the kitchen with an armful of wet linen and began spreading it upon some scrubby lilac bushes in a corner of the yard. After fifteen years it still made her uncomfortable to have Christopher around when she did the family washing, and when it was possible she waited to dry the clothes until he had gone back to the field. In her scant calico dress, with the furrows of age already ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... of frogs seemed part of the silence in which she waited for his answer. The warm air was heavy with the scents of lilac, honeysuckle, and syringa. As they stood by the railing of the balcony that connected the exterior of their two rooms, she erect, he leaning outward with an arm stretched toward the sky, a great white lilac, whose roots were in the early days of the ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King

... petticoats are still rather short, but it would be hard to hide such small feet, and such still smaller shoes. "Il faut souffrir pour tre belle," but quoi bon tre belle? if no one sees it. As for me, I ventured upon a lilac silk of Palmyre's, and a ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... thanking you for D'Alembert's book,(824) I say not a word of any thing but politics. I have not had a single other thought these three weeks. Though in all the bloom of my passion, lilac-tide, I have not been at Strawberry this fortnight. I saw things arrive at the point(825) I wished, and to which I had singularly contributed to bring them, as you shall know hereafter, and then I saw all my Work kicked down ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... have seen many of our shrubs or tall bush-plants in your vacations. Do you remember the sweet creamy white azaleas and the buckeyes that grow along the creeks in the redwoods? And the feathery blue blossoms of the wild lilac crowding in close thickets up the hillsides? One of our shrubs is a holiday visitor, the Christmas-berry, whose bright-red clusters trim your house at that gay, happy season. The manzanita is another pretty bush, with pink ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton

... stand frost at, or shortly after, full bloom, and they will set a bumper crop of peaches. We have had two years of late spring frosts at the time nut trees were in bloom, and we have had bumper crops of peaches each year. Apples were badly hit, so many have failed to bear. Lilac blossoms failed to come out and be showy because of these severe frosts. However, I know of a peach tree heavily loaded right now growing between two Persian walnuts that haven't had a single nut either year, though they have borne ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various

... shadows of the lilac fall upon my page, checkered with the slant rays of the morning light; there is a slope of green grass under the window; here is quiet all around; I wish ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey

... they sailed. The next morning, after they had lost sight of the rock, when they went on deck, who should they see walking up and down, with an air of no little consequence, and having a pair of lilac kid gloves on his hands, but Bully Pigeon. Jack and Murray forgot all his bad qualities, and only thought of him as an old schoolfellow. So they went up to him, and cordially put ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston

... when flesh went forth to coquet with flesh while hypocritically affecting business with spiritual things; on this occasion for wearing their white stockings and thin shoes, and their pink, white, and lilac gowns, on which every mud spot would be visible, the pool was an awkward impediment. They could hear the church-bell calling—as yet nearly a ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... of all things in the world! You never could stand that shade at the best of times. Lilac! Why, I ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair

... by the darker mantles when on the nest and the red legs when flying. Grass, moss and mud are used in the nest. The ground color of the eggs is buffy or brownish, and the spots are dark brown and lilac. ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed

... items of the program, Linda had fixed upon a French Pastoral Play, which was to be acted in the garden among the trees and lilac bushes. The girls were really supposed to get up the whole of the little entertainment by themselves, but Mademoiselle was kind in this instance, and helped to coach them. The scene was to be a Fete Champetre, and the costumes were to be copied from some of Watteau's ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil

... took a handful of BUDDING LILAC-LEAVES, and crushing them slightly between his hoofs, so as to bring out their peculiar fragrance, fastened them to the end of a long pole and held them towards the creature. Its expression changed in an instant,—it drew in their fragrance eagerly, and attempted to seize them with its ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... A widow should wear crape with a bonnet having a small border of white. The veil should be long, and worn over the face for three months, after which a shorter veil may be worn for a year, and then the face may be exposed. After six months white and lilac may be used, and colors resumed after ...
— The Book of Good Manners • W. C. Green

... have it," said the lady, as she trilled out a little tune by whistling until it sounded like a bird in the lilac bush. "Have you any apples?" she asked, ...
— Curly and Floppy Twistytail - The Funny Piggie Boys • Howard R. Garis

... little proud of the implied compliment. Mr. Alford left them, to attend to his affairs, and they went on with their romp,—running on the top of the smooth wall beside the meadow, gathering clusters of lilac blossoms from the fatherly great posy that grew on the sunny side of the house, and admiring the solitary state of the peacock, as, with dainty step, he trailed his royal robe over the sward. Soon they heard voices ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various

... to care very little who watched them at their work, I sat down on an upturned flower-pot in the shade of a friendly lilac, determined to ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... could see it in mine, that I could hide it. And I have one vivid recollection of a quiet room with flowers in it, and latticed windows, but I don't know where it was or how I came there, or who were the people in it who spoke to me. There was a tall woman with grey parted hair in a lilac gown. I can see her now. And I swore before God that I had left off the drug. And some one standing behind me took the little infernal machine out of my pocket, and I was confronted with it. And the tall woman ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley

... festooning the bushes, recalled the flowery fields and lanes of England, and yet told us that we were not there. The meadows had also their moist emerald sward scattered with the grass of Parnassus, and an autumnal crocus of a particularly delicate lilac. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... trusses of lavender hue, growing on a shrub in spring, will mean lilac. I'm getting quite proud ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil

... red-handed, and proved a botanist. It was a Woodsia hyperborea—that was the Latin name—and was rare in those parts, he said; but the Herrschaft should come earlier for flowers. July was the month. Then there was geum, and pale blue-fringed campanulas, and rich lilac asters, yellow violets, the white scented wax-flower, arnica and yellow aconite, both excellent medicines; there were thunder-flowers, and blood-drops, and grass of Parnassus, and hundreds more, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various

... never had before or after. I think now that those must have been moments when you too were in like contact with earth,—had your feet in grass which felt a faint ripple of wind, or stood under a lilac in a drench of fragrance that ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous

... country, fresh and verdant Gruyere Did thy children imagine how happy they were? Did thy shepherds know they lived an idyll? Had they read Theocrite, had they heard of Virgil? No, no! as in gardens the lilac and rose Grow in innocent beauty, their days ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven

... the pink and white beauty, but with rose all deadened into white, like a sick pink pearl. Her pink and white character had also suffered the effacement of the years. She was as dainty and as negative as a piece of Dresden China. She loved to dress in lilac and old lace: and that is how I painted her, regarding her as a bit of exquisite decoration to be treated flat like a ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... be seen with wings well held out from his panting sides. The beautiful green beetle, here called the "June-bug," hovered about the beds of thyme, its jeweled, enameled green body and its silver gauze wings flashing in the sun, although June was far down the revolving year. Blue and lilac lizards basked in the garden walks, which were cracked by the heat. Little stir was in the streets; the languid business of a small town was transacted if absolute need required, and postponed if ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... majestic circular clumps, disposed at equal distances with wonderful symmetry: there are some single shrubs scattered in elegant profusion: here a Portugal laurel, there a juniper; here a laurustinus, there a spruce fir; here a larch, there a lilac; here a rhododendron, there an arbutus. The stream, you see, is become a canal: the banks are perfectly smooth and green, sloping to the water's edge: and there is Lord Littlebrain, rowing in an ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock

... be to the meeting place of the Three Rivers. Why might not fortune lead us to have a summer in Connecticut and a winter in California? "I know a place where the wild thyme grows," many such places indeed, and high hillsides of wild lilac and a wee mountain crowned with the flowering manzanita. Oh, this world is a place to make souls grow if one can get an apple tree, a pine and an oak, a few lilies, a circle of crimson phlox, a stretch of moving water and a sweep of sky, that can ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... life," she thought, and the regret was still in her mind when one of those miracles which in our ignorance we call accidents occurred. Out of the lilac-scented twilight, out of the wild, sweet spirit of spring, a voice said in her ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... a red gleam of fire athwart the moonlight and the old house of Luella Miller was burned to the ground. Nothing is now left of it except a few old cellar stones and a lilac bush, and in summer a helpless trail of morning glories among the weeds, which might be considered emblematic ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

... shine with pale and tender glory, In the lilac-scented stillness, let us listen to Earth's story. All the flow'rs like moths a-flutter glimmer rich with dusky hues, Everywhere around us seem to fall from nowhere the sweet dews. Through the drowsy lull, ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell

... excellent shelter from the sun. It has the advantage also of not engendering insects; for, in consequence of its poisonous qualities, no insect can live upon it. When in blossom, the large clusters of its flowers resemble those of the lilac; these are succeeded by bunches of yellow berries, each about the size of a small cherry. It is a deciduous tree; but the berries remain during the winter, and drop off ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley

... suddenly turned up. She looked at the sea again. The rift in the leaden sky had lengthened and widened, and the first pale primrose of the dawn showed beyond. A faint flush followed, and then it seemed as if the night sky slowly rolled itself up and was put away, leaving a floor of silver, deepening to lilac, for the first bright beam to disport itself upon. Then the sea smiled, and the weariness of it, back and forth, back and forth, passed into animation. Its smooth surface became diapered with light airs, and moved with a gentle roll. The sullen murmur rose to a morning ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... to have. Jennie enjoyed this room very much indeed; but still, after all, notwithstanding the expensiveness and beauty of the decorations which adorned it, I do not know that Jennie enjoyed it any more than she did a little seat that she had under some lilac bushes, near the brook at the bottom of her father's garden, ...
— Rollo in Paris • Jacob Abbott

... their fine fresh faces, and their many petticoats - striped petticoats, red petticoats, blue petticoats, always clean and smart, and never too long - and their home-made stockings, mulberry-coloured, blue, brown, purple, lilac - which the older women, taking care of the Dutch-looking children, sit in all sorts of places knitting, knitting, knitting from morning to night - and what with their little saucy bright blue jackets, knitted too, and fitting close to their handsome figures; ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens

... face. He lived in a tiny cottage all by himself, and every day he worked in his garden. In all the country-side there was no garden so lovely as his. Sweet-william grew there, and Gilly-flowers, and Shepherds'-purses, and Fair-maids of France. There were damask Roses, and yellow Roses, lilac Crocuses and gold, purple Violets and white. Columbine and Ladysmock, Marjoram and Wild Basil, the Cowslip and the Flower-de-luce, the Daffodil and the Clove-Pink bloomed or blossomed in their proper order as the months ...
— The Happy Prince and Other Tales • Oscar Wilde

... dusk. She did not ask herself why it was there was a new note in nature that year, nor did she trouble herself about time or eternity. Her eternity was the exquisite monotony of tranquil days, her time-keepers the spring flowers, the apple-blossom and quince, daffodil, wallflower, lilac and laburnum, the perfumed calycanthus, forget-me-nots, pansies, hyacinths, lilies-of-the-valley in the woods, and early roses on a warm south wall; and over all the lark by day, and again at night the nightingale. In a life like hers, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... on the left, where are seen the well and lilac bushes by the wall, in the now open field, lived Nutting and Le Grosse. But ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... right side of Perseus. Lilac in color and approaching the earth at the rate of six miles per second. It culminates Jan. 1st. This star is ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott

... up heights of marvelous beauty, along the edges of deep defiles that opened below our feet like valleys of Paradise. The candlenut, the ama, with its lilac bloom, the hibiscus and pandanus, green and glossy, the petavii, a kind of banana the curving fronds of which spread high in air, the snake-plant, makomako, a yellow-flowered shrub, and many others none of us could name, carpeted the farther ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... and the whole exterior is a beautiful "mosaic" of green, gray, and glaucous lichen. The eggs are a rich delicate cream color, ornamented by a "wreath" round the larger end of madder-brown, purple, and lilac spots. ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various

... girls had just time to take one more deep breath, full of the fragrance from the lilac blossoms, before ...
— Clematis • Bertha B. Cobb

... snake to be poisonous which was not so. However, we had the mata hari, sun-snake, black and coral colour, and a metallic green flat-headed creature, Fortrex trigonocephalus, which were venomous enough. I once had a little flower-snake for a pet. It was beautifully marked with green and lilac, and used to catch flies climbing about the room; but one day it mounted to the top of a high door, the wind blew the door to, and my pretty snake was thrown to the ground and ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall

... opposite direction to the house, into what was called the Ash Copse. The dark green of our winter shrub, the spotted laurustinus, was relieved by the golden tassels of the laburnum, just opening into bloom; the hawthorn contended for beauty and perfume with the delicate blossoms of the purple lilac; while its modest sister, the white, sent forth her pale green leaves, and delicate buds, over a bed ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall

... great Tower of Talbot (who alas! never was in Falaise in his life) stood out against a faintly moonlit sky. And glancing over his right shoulder at the mantling west, Theo hurried Brigit past the Breach of Henri IV., with its crown of lilac trees, up the steep causeway to the Tower itself. "We must climb to see the sun, dearest," he said, "let us make haste. I am glad to be with you while you for the first time see it come up over the edge." He was very happy and looked rather splendid in his triumphant ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten

... purity of a white Aster. It has those spotless flowers that bring thoughts of heaven. Asters have many blue and lavender tints. None of them are muddy, or metallic, or dingy, as are too many blues and lavenders. They show the blue of a June sky, or the blue of the amethyst, or the color of the lilac of spring, together with soft lavenders, pale blues and deep indigo. Sulphur and primrose tints are the nearest yellow, but in reds they run the gamut from rosy flesh and palest apple-blossom through ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various

... hands with the lady on the car platform, and then looked past her in confused surprise. A girl stood in the vestibule, clad in garments of pale lilac tint which fell about her figure in long sweeping lines, emphasizing its fine contour against the dark brown paneling. She had a large hat of the same color, and it enhanced the attractiveness ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss

... genus is South Africa, centering in Cape Colony and Natal, though there have been recent finds of value on the mountains of tropical Africa and in Madagascar. The European and Asiatic species run to purple and lilac in coloring, though white varieties occur in cultivation. Flowers and plants are rather small, rendering them most useful for pot or frame culture and for naturalizing in protected borders where the deeply planted corns can ...
— The Gladiolus - A Practical Treatise on the Culture of the Gladiolus (2nd Edition) • Matthew Crawford

... warming-pan; by pond after pond, where not only men and boys, but scores after scores of women and girls, were sliding, and roaring, and clapping their lean old sides with laughter, as they tumbled down, and their hobnailed shoes flew up in the air; the air frosty with a lilac haze, through which villas, and commons, and churches, and plantations glimmered. We drive up the hill, Bob and I; we make the last two miles in eleven minutes; we pass that poor, armless man who sits there in the cold, following you with his eyes. I don't give anything, and Bob looks ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... the doll that was choicest we offered a prize: There were wee mites of dollies, and some of great size. Some came in rich purple, some lilac, some white, With ...
— The Nursery, Volume 17, No. 101, May, 1875 • Various

... that she was well and becomingly dressed. She had intended dropping in informally on Sibyl Forbes, still an outcast, in spite of her intercession, and wore a gown of dove-colored cashmere and a hat of the same shade with a long lilac feather. ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton

... was very bright and clear, and the sun shone through soft lilac leaves on more important folios, while Mr. Jellicorse, with happy sniffs—for his dinner was roasting in the distance—drew a single line here, or a double line there, or a gable on the margin of the paper, to show his head clerk what to cite, and ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... I have discovered one thing about Belgium. Everything smells exactly alike. To-day there have been presented to my nose four different things purporting to have different odours, drains, some cheese, tobacco, and a bunch of lilac. There was no difference at all in ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan

... washed clothes in a large wooden tub set on a bench nailed between the two china-berry trees in the yard. Peter loved those china-berry trees, covered with masses of sweet-smelling lilac-colored blossoms in the spring, and with clusters of hard green berries in the summer. The beautiful feathery foliage made a pleasant shade for Emma Campbell's wash-tubs. Peter loved to watch her, she looked so important and so cheerful. While she worked she sang endless ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler

... towers and a balcony, rise before him. Vines and climbing roses ran up the towers, and beneath the balcony was a vestibule well filled with flowers. In short, to our Anton, brought up as he had been in a small town, it all appeared beauteous and stately in the extreme. He sat down behind a bushy lilac, and gave himself up to the contemplation of the scene. How happy the inhabitants must be! how noble! how refined! A certain respect for every thing of acknowledged distinction and importance was innate in the son of the accountant; and when, in the midst of the beauty around him, his thoughts ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... no fresh winds were borne to us from the ocean. The sun shone hot on the stunted cedars. The tides crept in lazily. All one weary afternoon, in the hum and stir of the dusty school-room, little Bessie Sartell—Captain Sartell's youngest, and his darling—sat stringing lilac blossoms together in a chain. She was such a cunning edition of the big Captain. She had the same strong Saxon physique in miniature, the same clear pink and white complexion, eyes hardly more limpidly blue than his, and hair that was sunniest flax, like the ends of the Captain's ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... enter the dining-room, a cheerful apartment looking on to the beautiful lawn at the back, which has at the end the arched conservatory of lilac-tinted glass at top, in which the novelist took so much interest, and where he hung some Chinese lanterns, sent down from London the day before his death. We are informed that in this building he signed the last cheque which he drew, ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes

... that hanging on the arm of our dear Prince?" asked a little fat man, girt in a white satin waistcoat, and a spray of white lilac in ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... scarcely any markings elsewhere. As a rule the markings are of an olive-brown of one shade or another; but when the ground is at all pinkish then the markings are more or less of a reddish brown. Besides these primary markings, all the eggs exhibit a greater or smaller number of faint lilac or purple spots or blotches, which chiefly occur where the other markings are most dense. In length they vary from 1.06 to 1.22, and in breadth from 0.8 to 1.0, but the average of 34 eggs is ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume

... found it necessary to have some place he could get through in a hurry to go after the school children who delighted in teasing him. So now quick as a flash he ran for this hole, which was well hidden by a big lilac bush, and before the tramp even knew he was coming, Zip was through the hole and had his little, sharp teeth buried in his shin. With a cry of surprise and pain, the tramp turned to see what had hurt him. When he saw the little dog, he raised his cane to strike ...
— Zip, the Adventures of a Frisky Fox Terrier • Frances Trego Montgomery

... Wish I had a daughter just like her," he said, and took himself off to make up for a broken night's rest. But Dr. Lavendar and Danny still sat in front of the lilac-filled fireplace, and thought of old Henry Roberts listening for the Voice of God, and of his Philippa. The father and daughter had lately taken a house on a road that wandered over the hills between ...
— The Voice • Margaret Deland

... him as his own name; he reconstructed in his thought all the old well-known furniture, and replaced it precisely as it had stood long ago. He passed again a childish finger over the rough surface of the faded Utrecht velvet chairs, and smelled again the strong fragrance of the white lilac tree, blowing in through the open parlour-window. He savoured anew the pleasant mental atmosphere produced by the dainty neatness of cultured women, the companionship of a few good pictures, of a few good books. Yet this home had been broken up years ago, the dear familiar things had been scattered ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,

... known and lived with, and turn her face to meet new things and new people. Nothing would be familiar to her in that strange world, not even tea-cups with blue rims like these she was washing up for the last time. Everything new, down to the two lilac prints, made longer than ever before, lying at the bottom of the new black box. It was wonderful to think of, and very confusing to the mind. There would even be a new baby to look after. But when Biddy ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton

... muftis, bright green tents for the viziers, scarlet tents for the kiayaks, dark blue tents for the great officers of state, the Emirs, the Mecca, Medina, and Stambul justiciaries, the Defterdars, and the Nishandji; lilac-coloured tents for the Ulemas, bright blue tents for the Muederesseks, azure-blue tents for the Ciaus-Agas, and dark green designates the tent of the Emir Alem, the bearer of the sacred standard. And high above them all on a hillock towers the orange-coloured pavilion of ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai

... the stale cake and muddy coffee that the slatternly landlady produced, and afterwards, as she was being helped to get back into her riding dress, bestowed upon her a little lilac wool frock from her trunk that the woman admired greatly. From that moment the landlady of the stopping place was a new creature. Missions and missionaries had been nothing to her through the years, but ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill

... little summer-house in the garden, which the speculator's trowel had spared by some fancy of the builder's, who believed that he was preserving these hundred feet square of earth for his own pleasure, they were admiring the first green shoots of the lilac-trees, a spring festival which can only be fully appreciated in Paris when the inhabitants have lived for six months oblivious of what vegetation means, among the cliffs of stone where the ocean of humanity tosses to ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... Then he put on his hat, came down off the platform, and shuffled out of the open door, his violin in one hand, its box in the other. There were not more than a dozen of us who followed him into the little churchyard. The moon was rising, and the shadows of lilac and rose bush, of slab and monument lay long across the green mounds. Standing there between the graves of the dead he began to play. I shall never forget that solemn calling of ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller

... get you some flowers," she said eagerly, "some out of our garden. Oh, we had such lots there, such lovely ones, roses, and violets, jessamine and lilac, and may—oh, all sorts. I had a garden of my own, too. Oh, I'd love to take you to granny's, and let ...
— The Story of Jessie • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... remember, Laura,' Dick goes on, 'I kissed you once. It was under a lilac in the Loudon Woods. I knew at the time that you were angry, and I should have apologised. ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie

... together, through a windy night which was bringing out April scents even from the London grass and lilac-bushes. ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... somewhat musty odour of old country houses, ascended from the tiled and ruddled floor that glistened like a mirror. On the chest of drawers a tall statuette of the Immaculate Conception rose greyly between some porcelain vases which La Teuse had filled with white lilac. ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola

... were my love yon lilac fair, Wi' purple blossoms to the spring; And I, a bird to shelter there, When wearied on my little wing! How I wad mourn, when it was torn By autumn wild, and winter rude! But I wad sing on wanton wing, When youthfu' May its ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... to the lady and to her father, and had gone out of the room and down the lilac-bordered path and through the gate, and when the three at the window had watched him turn into Duke of Gloucester Street, the master of Westover looked at the master of Fair View and burst out laughing. "Ludwell ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... Blanchard! I scolded her all the time she was assisting me to put it on! Oh! since then how sincerely have I forgiven her! She had brought me a fashionable sash to wear with the dress, but I resisted the temptation, and casting aside the elegant ribbon, I put on an old lilac belt and descended to the parlor where the company ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin

... after, full bloom, and they will set a bumper crop of peaches. We have had two years of late spring frosts at the time nut trees were in bloom, and we have had bumper crops of peaches each year. Apples were badly hit, so many have failed to bear. Lilac blossoms failed to come out and be showy because of these severe frosts. However, I know of a peach tree heavily loaded right now growing between two Persian walnuts that haven't had a single nut either year, though they have borne nuts previously. Thus, peaches will ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various

... feathered tribes are discovered in great numbers. Penguins are very plenty, and of these there are four different kinds. The royal penguin, so called from its size and beautiful plumage, is the largest. The upper part of the body is usually gray, sometimes of a lilac tint; the under portion of the purest white imaginable. The head is of a glossy and most brilliant black, the feet also. The chief beauty of plumage, however, consists in two broad stripes of a gold color, which pass along from the head to the breast. The bill is long, and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... endure white." "Your rose-colored, then, the best of the batch"— "I haven't a thread of point-lace to match." "Your brown moire antique"—"Yes, and look like a Quaker." "The pearl-colored"—"I would, but that plaguy dressmaker Has had it a week." "Then that exquisite lilac, In which you would melt the heart of a Shylock;" (Here the nose took again the same elevation)— "I wouldn't wear that for the whole of creation." "Why not? It's my fancy, there's nothing could strike it As more comme it faut"—"Yes, but, dear me, that lean Sophronia ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various

... her coming departure. Noons were hot, and nights were chill; bird carols were infrequent; chrysanthemums were unfurling their buds. The vines that festooned the windows of the children's convalescent ward sent an occasional yellow-coated messenger to the lilac bushes below—a ...
— Polly of the Hospital Staff • Emma C. Dowd

... in autumn; the lights various; the mountains in the richest colouring, fern covering them with reddish gold in great part; here and there, trees in every variety of autumn foliage; and the rock itself of a kind of lilac tint; the outlines of the mountains very fine; the Tarn, which might almost be called a lake for size and abundance of water, with no culture, or trees, or habitation around it, here and there a great rock stretching into it like a promontory, and high mountains surrounding it on three sides, on ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... of chatter rose and swelled and ebbed and suddenly sank away. At six o'clock, the minister and two maiden ladies in black silk with lilac ribbons, laid down their last plates of ice-cream and said they thought they must be going. Amanda and her mother preened their dresses and patted their hair. "Come into the study," said Mr. Wilson to Luke. "I want to ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke

... to rise, and at the same time the full moon, impelled softly upward by force as unseen as thought. Charlotte's fair head gleamed out abruptly in the moonlight like a pale flower, but the folds of her mottled purple skirt were as vaguely dark as the foliage on the lilac-bush beside her. All at once the flowering branches on a wide-spreading apple-tree cut the gloom like great silvery wings of a brooding bird. The grass in the yard was like a shaggy silver fleece. Charlotte paid ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... had gone by seemed floating before my eyes. I saw myself in the convent garden, with all my little world enclosed in those four walls, and I heard the shrill laughter of the girls with whom I was walking, and I even fancied that I could catch the perfume of the lilac trees which drooped over the smoothly kept lawn. And then the picture faded away, and from the vessel's side I saw Cruta, a purple-topped island rising like some precious jewel from the sea! I shuddered at the memory ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Mademoiselle ran around ringing her hands and talking about it. Then I went up to Mrs. Bolling's room, and we talked. I told her how to make mustard pickles, and how my mother's grandpa's relation came over in the Mayflower, and about our single white lilac bush, and she's going to get one and make the pickles. Then I played double Canfield with her for a while. I'm glad I didn't go home before I knew her better. When she acts like Mrs. O'Farrel's aunt I pretend she is her, and we don't quarrel. ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley

... anona, the water-loving tupelo, the catalpa with its large trumpet flowers, the melting liquidambar, and the wax-leaved mangolia. Blending their foliage with these fair indigenes are an hundred lovely exotics—the orange, lemon, and fig; the Indian-lilac and tamarind; olives, myrtles, and bromelias; while the Babylonian willow contrasts its drooping fronds with the erect reeds of the giant cane, or the lance-like blades ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... paradise after our starved lives in the smoky city. My apple tree still grew at the east end of the house. There was a willow tree mother had planted, which now swept the ground with its long, graceful branches. There were quantities of rose and lilac bushes, a walled spring of delicious water in the cellar, and a whole world of wealth; but the potato lot looked up in despair—a patch of yellow clay. Mother put a twelve years' accumulation of coal ashes on it, and thus proved them ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm

... and a young lady—like a butterfly awakened by the brightness of the day—fluttered forward from the porch of Surbridge Hall, dressed in all the hues of the rainbow. A green bonnet, a pink pelisse, a red shawl, and lilac parasol, were scarcely in keeping with the sylvan scene on which she hurriedly entered. She was very tall and very thin, and had been taught to walk by a Parisian promeneuse at a guinea a lesson; so that the tail of her gown described a half circle every time she stept, and her ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... have hung festoons from laburnum trees, And clothed the lilac, the birch and broom; I've wakened the sound of humming-bees, And decked all nature ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various

... stream, O diamond day, O charm of lilac-time and May. O whispering meadows green and gay, O fair things past believing! Could but the world stand still, stand still When over wood and stream and hill This morn's eternal miracle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various

... rather later than usual, and as Lawrence looked out on the bright morning, with the mists just disengaging themselves from the many-hued foliage which crowned the tops of the surrounding hills; and on the recently risen sun, hanging in an atmosphere of grey and lilac, with the smile of Indian summer on its face; he thought he would like to take a stroll, before that meal; but either the length of his walk on the previous day, or the rapidity of the latter portion of it, had ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton

... overalls and went out in his shirt sleeves a hoeing in the front garden. And I and my chum helped Ma carry water to wash. She said it seemed like the longest week she ever saw, but when we brought the water, and took a plate of pickles to the hired girl that was down with the mumps, we got in the lilac bushes and waited for the curtain to rise. It wasn't long before folks began going to church and you'd a dide laughing to see them all stop in front of where Ma was washing and look at her, and then go on to where Pa was hoeing weeds ...
— The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy - Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, No. 2 - 1883 • George W. Peck

... lawn was hedged with a fringe of lilac and syringa bushes, with one great, spreading horse-chestnut tree at the corner. The house did not stand far back from the street. The little girl could see a generous section of Main Street sloping past, dark already under ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton

... hand on his shoulder, a hand protruding from a well tailored gray sleeve and lilac striped cuff, that caught Hamdi Bey by the epauleted shoulder ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley

... bushes, recalled the flowery fields and lanes of England, and yet told us that we were not there. The meadows had also their moist emerald sward scattered with the grass of Parnassus, and an autumnal crocus of a particularly delicate lilac. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... The rising sun made a golden path across the tranquil bay and lighted up the three forts and the starry battlecross softly stirring over each. Dauphin Island and Mobile Point were moss-green and pearly white. The long, low, velvety pulsations of the bay were blue, lilac, pink, green, bronze. But angry smoke poured from the funnels of the Tennessee and her three dwarf consorts, they four also showing the battle-flag, and some seven miles away, out in the Gulf, ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... feeling of discomfort. Wounded in all her feelings, full of repugnance, she could not get used to it all. She had grown up full of affectionate admiration for a very different style of art—her mother's fine water-colours, those fans of dreamy delicacy, in which lilac-tinted couples floated about in bluish gardens—and she quite failed to understand Claude's work. Even now she often amused herself by painting tiny girlish landscapes, two or three subjects repeated over and over again—a lake with a ruin, a water-mill beating a stream, a chalet ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola

... eaten by buffaloes. A tree commonly planted near wells and villages in the submontane tract is the dhrek (Melia azedarach, N.O. Meliaceae), which is found as far west as Persia and is often called by English people the Persian lilac. The bahera (Terminalia belerica, N.O. Combretaceae), a much larger tree, is Indo-Malayan. Common shrubs are the marwan (Vitex negundo, N.O. Verbenaceae), Plumbago Zeylanica (Plumbaginaceae), the bansa or bhekar (Adhatoda ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie

... going this evening to eat toasted cheese with that celebrated poet Bernard Barton. And I must soon stir, and look about for my great coat, brush myself, etc. It blows a harrico, as Theodore Hook used to say, and will rain before I get to Woodbridge. Those poor mistaken lilac buds there out of the window! and an old Robin, ruffled up to his thickest, sitting mournfully under them, quite disheartened. For you must know the mild winter is just giving way to a remarkably severe spring. . . . I wish you were here to smoke a pipe with me. I play of evenings some ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald

... the Saturday previous to her mistress. She was dressed in lilac damask, trimmed with swansdown, and her hair, for the last time in her life, streamed over her shoulders and fell at its own sweet will. Matrons always tucked away their hair in the dove-cote, while widows were careful not to show a single ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt

... Jack. 'Now, don't get excited; your bird is all right, though I'm sorry to say he's in rather low company,' And he led her to the dining-room window that looked into the garden, and there, sure enough, was Tufty on a lilac-bush. Brownie was there too. She was hopping about and talking in a most earnest and excited manner. It was easy to see that she was using all her powers of persuasion to coax Tufty not to go back to his old home, but to help her ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning

... dimly lit corredor had a restful mysteriousness of a forest glade, suggested by the stems and the leaves of the plants ranged along the balustrade of the open side. In the streaks of light falling through the open doors of the reception-rooms, the blossoms, white and red and pale lilac, came out vivid with the brilliance of flowers in a stream of sunshine; and Mrs. Gould, passing on, had the vividness of a figure seen in the clear patches of sun that chequer the gloom of open glades in the woods. The stones in the rings upon ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... marvellous sight in his rapid motion through the air. The kingbird is preeminently a bird of the garden and orchard. The nest is open, though deep, and not carefully concealed. Eggs are nearly round, bluish white spotted with brown and lilac. With truly royal exclusiveness, the tyrant favors no community of interest, but sits in regal state on a conspicuous throne, and takes his grand flights alone or with his queen, but never with a ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan

... not get up, he sat on as though he were waiting for something. He was an old man of sixty-five, prematurely aged, with a bent and bony figure, with a sunken face and the dark skin of old age, with red eyelids and a long narrow back like a fish's; he was dressed in a smart cassock of a light lilac colour, but too big for him (presented to him by the widow of a young priest lately deceased), a full cloth coat with a broad leather belt, and clumsy high boots the size and hue of which showed clearly that Father ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... ambassador at Constantinople about the middle of the sixteenth century—whose letters contain one of the best accounts of Turkish life which have appeared down to the present day—brought home from the Ottoman capital the lilac and the tulip. The Belgian Clusius about the same time introduced from the East the horse chestnut, which has since wandered to America. The weeping willows of Europe and the United States are said to have sprung from a slip received ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... chaise longue. His white lilac and fuchsia—those were her favourite flowers he had discovered—were on a small table by her side, scenting the room faintly but definitely. She had a letter in her hands, which she asked him to ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg

... morning-glories, and lilacs grew in the yard. They company had planted those lilacs to nourish the souls of the worker's children. They gave me joy, and that is why the Mooseheart grounds are filled with lilac bushes. ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis

... Lilacs," which Arthur Hughes had painted for him, and how he dwelt with intense pleasure on the exquisite contrasts of colour which it contained—the gold hair of a girl standing out against the purple of lilac-blossom. But with those who find in such things as these a complete satisfaction of their desire for the beautiful he had no sympathy; for no imperfect representations of life could, for him, take the place of life itself, life as God has made it—the babbling of the brook, the singing of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood

... on steadily for days. Frogs flop round and round your room, and you can almost hear the trees growing. In the rains the forests are a wonderful sight, such dense masses of foliage and flowers. Can you imagine great trees entirely covered with exquisite blooms, and garlands of pink and lilac creepers interlacing ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker

... seemed to hear the fine East-Anglian accent of the well-remembered voice—I seemed to see the mighty figure, strengthened by the years rather than stricken by them, striding along between the whin bushes or through the quags, now stooping over the water to pluck the wild mint he loved, whose lilac-coloured blossoms perfumed the air as he crushed them, now stopping to watch the water-wagtail by the ponds as he descanted upon the powers of that enchanted bird—powers, like many human endowments, more glorious than pleasant, ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... a family of my knowledge has held it necessary, for its proper conduct, to have in order certain floral drives. First the apple blossom drive introduces the spring, and the lilac drive confirms the impression that really the season is advancing; but the locust drive is the sweetest of all, taking these nature lovers along some shady lanes, beside the east bank of a great river, and in places where, the trees planted only for the fence utility of the hard yellow wood, ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland

... there, and so they do here. Everybody has it. My prettiest one is much like yours, only it's poppy-coloured. Katherine's is cornflower blue this year, and she's got a black one and a lilac one. When you see all the others prancing about in the same sort of things, you won't feel ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... but I'm afraid Mr. Starr guessed, for in the afternoon he gave me a water-color sketch he had made in the morning, on deck. He called it a "rough, impressionist thing," but it is really exquisite; the water pale lilac, with silver frills of foam, just as it looked in the light when he sat painting; fields of cloth-of-gold, starred with wild flowers in the foreground; far-off trees in soft gray and violet, with a gleam of rose ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... into his coupe—very conspicuous here for a civilian with such an old hat as I generally wear. In the evening I was, of course, on the islands, on a lively dark-brown horse, and drank tea there with a nice, old, white-haired Countess Stroganoff. The lilac, I must tell you, has flowered here as beautifully as in Frankfort, and the laburnum, too; and the nightingales warble so happily that it is hard to find a spot on the islands where one does not hear them. In the city, during these days, we had such unremitting heat as we almost never ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... hands he had held in his the previous day. Charles must go for Jerry—go at once, for he wanted her, and as when Arthur wanted a thing he wanted it immediately, Charles was soon on his way to the cottage in the lane, where he found the little girl under a tall lilac bush, busy with the mud pies she was making, and talking to herself, partly in English and partly in broken German, which she had ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes

... green here and there, and into a birch forest growing on both sides of the road. In the forest it was almost hot, no wind could be felt. The birches with their sticky green leaves were motionless, and lilac-colored flowers and the first blades of green grass were pushing up and lifting last year's leaves. The coarse evergreen color of the small fir trees scattered here and there among the birches was an unpleasant reminder of winter. On entering the forest the horses began ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... (Melia Azadirachta) is the "Persian lilac" whose leaves, intensely bitter, are used as a preventive to poison: Gur is the Anglo-Indian Jaggeriraw sugar and Ghi clarified butter. Roebuck gives the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... the wild comfrey grow in bunches here and there; the leaves are attached to the stem for part of their length, and the stem is curiously flanged. The bells are often greenish, sometimes white, occasionally faintly lilac; they are partly hidden under the dark-green leaves. Where undisturbed the comfrey grows to a great size, the stems becoming very thick. Green flags hide and almost choke the shallow mouth of a streamlet that joins the brook coming from the ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies

... of the Arctic regions is quite different. There is much more land, and no such enormous solid cap of ice. Spitzbergen, the land of "pointed mountains," is said to be very beautiful. Lord Dufferin describes his first view of it as "a forest of thin lilac peaks, so faint, so pale, that had it not been for the gem-like distinctness of their outline one could have deemed them as unsubstantial as the ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock

... grown over lushly with grass; but at the end where Eric stood there was a square, treeless place which had evidently once served as a homestead garden. Old paths were still visible, bordered by stones and large pebbles. There were two clumps of lilac trees; one blossoming in royal purple, the other in white. Between them was a bed ablow with the starry spikes of June lilies. Their penetrating, haunting fragrance distilled on the dewy air in every soft puff of wind. Along the fence rosebushes grew, ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... and round the garden among the rose-bushes that hadn't any roses yet, only buds, and the lilac bushes and syringas and American currants, and the more she thought of the doctor's bill, the less she liked the thought ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit

... savage. I did as you told me, dear aunty. Not one tiny little frog even have I carried in my pockets, not even a beetle; and this is the result. I will not tell you all the things I had found; I couldn't bear to describe them. Two such beauties of beetles—bright red wings, the body lilac blue, and glittering as any precious stone! Such a rare species! And an oleander-sphinx! And my magnificent caterpillar of the humming-bird moth!—you know, aunty, that one with yellow stripes and blue eye-spots. All trodden to ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri

... ran to the left. Nekhludoff ran fast to the right, trying to escape from the artist, but when he looked round he saw the artist running after Katusha, who kept well ahead, her firm young legs moving rapidly. There was a lilac bush in front of them, and Katusha made a sign with her head to Nekhludoff to join her behind it, for if they once clasped hands again they were safe from their pursuer, that being a rule of the game. He understood the sign, and ran behind the bush, ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... * * Forgive the past! Henceforth flowers shall bloom upon the surface Of your dwellings. The lilac in the spring Shall blossom, and the sweet briar shall exhale Its fragrant smell. E'en the drooping fuchsia Shall not be wanting to adorn your tombs; While the weeping willow, pointing downwards, Speaks significantly to the living, That ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent

... Mrs. Hurd's kitchen Marcella found the air of the February evening tonic and delightful. Unconsciously impressions stole upon her—the lengthening day, the celandines in the hedges, the swelling lilac buds in the cottage gardens. They spoke to her youth, and out of mere physical congruity it could not but respond. Still, her face kept the angered look with which she had parted from Mrs. Jellison. More than that—the last few weeks ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... forms of pumpkins, millet, sorghum, kidney-bean, dolichos, capsicum, and indigo. Nor does he include flowers; and several of the more anciently cultivated flowers, such as certain roses, the common Imperial lily, the tuberose, and even the lilac, are said (9/3. 'Hist. Notes' as above by Targioni-Tozzetti.) not to be known in the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin

... which surrounded the hill, while the feet pressed at every step upon the soft green elastic turf, that here grew of the finest texture, and in the shortest strands. Nowhere else could be found such large heaths, with their beautiful pinky lilac bells looking as though moulded in wax; while harebells, orchids, anemones, arums, formed only a tithe of the rich banquet of flowers which awaited the collector—and a most staunch collector was Mr Inglis. He used to say that he was one of the most ignorant of men, and the more he collected ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn

... platform built around it with a flight of steps leading up to it. It was what the children called the apple tree house. Here Clara and Alice were playing dolls. Peggy could seldom be induced to play dolls. She ran up the steps and made a dash for Clara. Clara, in a lilac frock, was sitting primly on one of the wooden chairs with which the platform was furnished. Her hair was a darker brown than Alice's, and her face had the pallor of the city child who has lived indoors all winter. She was rather a stiff little girl in her manners, ...
— Peggy in Her Blue Frock • Eliza Orne White

... the package that had made them so much trouble was hastily thrust far under a broad-spreading lilac bush, and with a gasp, Helen started on a mad run down the street followed closely by Bessie. Not until they had turned a corner and passed into another street, did the two culprits dare to take a long breath ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller

... mountains or rocky capes and islands rise, but the snow seldom looks white, and if carefully looked at will be found to be shaded with many colours, but chiefly with cobalt blue or rose-madder, and all the gradations of lilac and mauve which the mixture of these colours will produce. A White Day is so rare that I have recollections of going out from the hut or the tent and being impressed by the fact that the snow really looked white. When to the beautiful tints ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... very distance it put between them and her. Diana was different from them, and growing more different; yet it was hard to find fault. She was so handsome, too; that helped the effect of superiority. And her dress; what was there about her dress? It was a pale lilac muslin, no way remarkable in itself; but it fell around lines so soft and noble, and about so queenly a carriage, it waved with so quiet and graceful motions, there was a temptation to think Diana must have called in dressmaking aid that was not lawful—for the minister's wife. ...
— Diana • Susan Warner

... the pork-packing metropolis. The Sun God, worshipped for two score centuries in India, Egypt, Greece and Rome, has a new shrine on Lake Park Avenue, and the prophet gives tea-parties at which his disciples are fed on lilac-blossoms—"the white and pinkish for males, the blue-tinted for females". He wears a long flowing robe of pale grey cashmere, faced with white, and flexible white kid shoes, and he sells his lady adorers a book called "Inner Studies", price five dollars ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... a few minutes later into the street. A threatening shower had passed away. The sky overhead was wonderfully soft and blue; the air was filled with sunlight, fragrant with the perfume of barrows of lilac drawn up in the gutter. Eve walked by my side, her head a little thrown back, her eyes ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... world. Into which peaceful Eden stole at this point the serpent, and, as is usual, in the shape of woman. Little Eleanor, long-legged, slim, fresh as a flower in her crisp, faded pink dress, came around the corner. In one hot hand she carried, by their heads, a bunch of lilac and pink and white sweet peas. It cost her no trouble at all, and about half a minute of time, to charge the atmosphere, so full of sweet peace and rest, with a saturated solution of bitterness and disquiet. Her presence alone was a bombshell, and with a sentence ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... doing?" asked Phillis, trying to peep between the lilac-bushes, but failing to discover more than the white glimmer ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey

... kind to the Mozarts, and sent them costly dresses. 'Would you like to know,' writes Leopold to Hagenauer, his host at Salzburg, 'what Wolferl's (a pet name for Wolfgang) dress is like? It is of the finest cloth, lilac-coloured, the vest of moire of the same colour. Coat and top-coat with a double broad border of gold. It was made for the Hereditary Duke Maximilian Franz.' In the picture which is preserved in the Mozart collection at Salzburg, Mozart is painted in this dress. ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands

... moment, plucked a small sprig from a lilac-bush, smelled it and threw it away. "I am not very sure of anything!" ...
— The Europeans • Henry James

... seemed to have forgotten the incident at the foot of the stair. A softer light was in her eyes when they came to the bow of the ship, and Alan fancied he heard a strange little cry on her lips as she looked about her upon the paradise of Taiya Inlet. Straight ahead, like a lilac ribbon, ran the narrow waterway to Skagway's door, while on both sides rose high mountains, covered with green forests to the snowy crests that gleamed like white blankets near the clouds. In this melting ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood

... trim, white-painted, "genteel" houses, which, being more gossipy and less nicely bred, crowded close up to the street, instead of standing back from it with arms akimbo, like the mansion-houses. Their little front-yards were very commonly full of lilac and syringa and other bushes, which were allowed to smother the lower story almost to the exclusion of light and air, so that, what with small windows and small windowpanes, and the darkness made by these choking growths of shrubbery, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... ride?' You can judge for yourself how disconcerting the inquiry must have been from such lips: I felt rooted to the saddle—a sensation which, with me, was sufficiently rare. I looked round in helpless bewilderment, at the shimmering Serpentine, and the white houses in Park Lane gleaming out of a lilac haze, at the cocoa-coloured Row, and the flash of distant carriage-wheels in the sunlight: all looked as usual—and yet, there was I on the back of a horse which had just inquired 'whether I thought ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey

... and the bushes nearest to the window yielded a series of useful clews. For example, Dukovski succeeded in discovering a long, dark streak, made up of spots, on the grass, which led some distance into the center of the garden. The streak ended under one of the lilac bushes in a dark brown stain. Under this same lilac bush was found a top boot, which turned out to be the fellow of the boot already found in ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne

... the Pine Street house he had trusted it to no hands but his own, and finding it hard to hold had carried it on his head. He had also elected to wait on the table—the reunion had a character of intimacy upon which no second boy should intrude—and to do the occasion honor had put on his lilac crepe jacket and green silk trousers. From behind the chairs he looked approvingly at the glistening spread of silver and glass, the flowered mound of the Silver Queen bowl, the ring of faces, and "Miss Lolly" and "Miss Clist" in the dresses he ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... wander, Thro' the groves of verdant green; Toying with the lilac yonder— Here, with the rose of ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis

... berth in the gun-room. Neither Jack nor Murray had seen him, nor had they heard his name before they sailed. The next morning, after they had lost sight of the rock, when they went on deck, who should they see walking up and down, with an air of no little consequence, and having a pair of lilac kid gloves on his hands, but Bully Pigeon. Jack and Murray forgot all his bad qualities, and only thought of him as an old schoolfellow. So they went up to him, and cordially put ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston

... then stay to hear any further. But since that we have talked a great deal about love and forgiveness; and I find I must love Ben Hunt, even though I now see poor Hector's tomb in the garden. For John went to fetch him, and we buried him under the lilac-tree, on the right hand side, just by the large sun-flower. And we cried a great deal, and made a card tomb-stone over his grave; and father gave us an old hatband and we cut it into pieces and we went as mourners. His coffin was carried by Tom Wood, ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas

... except return these salutations, as she could not yell an aside to Mrs Quantock, screaming out "Who is that Indian"? for if Mrs Quantock heard the Indian would hear too, but as soon as she could, she turned back towards the house again, and when once the lilac bushes were between her and the road she walked with more than her usual speed, in order to learn with the shortest possible delay from Peppino who this fresh subject of hers could be. She knew there were some Indian ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... trees. On one side a magnificent cedar; on the other a great copper beech. Here and there among the tombs and headstones many beautiful blossoming trees rose from the long green grass. The laburnum glowed in the June afternoon sunlight; the lilac, the hawthorn and the clustering meadowsweet which fringed the edge of the lazy stream mingled their heavy sweetness in sleepy fragrance. The yellow-grey crumbling walls were green in places with wrinkled harts-tongues, and were topped with sweet-williams and spreading ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker

... come from Vienna, where they had been fitted with completely new uniforms, Their outfit, although a little theatrical, looked very handsome: the pelisse and dolman in white and the trousers and the shako in lilac; all clean bright and shining. One might have thought they were going to a ball, or to play in a musical comedy. This brilliant appearance contrasted somewhat with the more modest toilette of our Chasseurs, many of whom were still dressed in the worn clothing in which ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot

... I love best is the walk to Saint-Jean, for there, about a hundred yards from the town is a little wood, or rather a little half-wild cluster of hornbeams, maples, limes and lilac bushes, a bouquet that murmurs in the breeze. The very first day I discovered it, I felt its charm. I determined to make love to it; I made up my mind to know it tree by tree, to search out its humblest plants, its vetches, its saxifrages, and to see whether there was no Solomon's seal to be found ...
— Marguerite - 1921 • Anatole France

... beach we went, and walked it all over again, finding, of course, many things which had escaped us the night before. We saw our first Melocactus, and our first night-blowing Cereus creeping over the rocks. We found our first tropic orchid, with white, lilac, and purple flowers on a stalk three feet high. We saw our first wild pines (Tillandsias, etc.) clinging parasitic on the boughs of strange trees, or nestling among the angular limb- like shoots of the columnar ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... eighteen inches or so high and broad, covered with loose clusters of pansies in the most brilliant and harmonious contrasts of color, and the most delicate blendings of rare shades, such as snow white and lilac. Unfortunately, these marvelous blossoms remain but a few weeks at most, and then there is a year's care and waiting. As with the fantastic cacti, all their blossoming energy and beauty seems to be concentrated ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell

... of the lilac screen and found a little summer-house occupied by Sammy and Winnie, and the low mellow voice of Winnie was flowing on and ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester

... Lahens got up from the piano. She was tall and well-made; perhaps too full in the bosom, perhaps too wide in the hips, and perhaps the smallness of the waist was owing to her stays. Her figure suggested these questions. She wore a fashionable lilac blue silk, pleated over the bosom; and round her waist a chatelaine to which was attached a number of trinkets, a purse of gold net, a pencil case, some rings, a looking-glass, and small gold boxes jewelled— probably containing powder. Her hair was elaborately arranged, ...
— Celibates • George Moore

... played at shinty, with loud shouts and violent rushes after a little wooden ball. The town's cows were wandering in for the night from the common muir, with their milkmaids behind them in vast wide petticoats of two breadths, and their blue or lilac short-gowns tucked well up at their arms. Behind, the windows revealed the avenue, the road overhung with the fresh leaves of the beeches, the sunlight filtering through in lighter splashes on the shade. Within, the drink was running to its dregs, and piles of oatcake ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro

... rounded the point and turned into Avalon Bay. Almost a perfect semicircle, the beach of glistening white sand enclosed a basin of turquoise sea in which were reflected the dark, rich tones of the cliffs, all glowing like an opal beneath the sun, while above rose the hills covered with the wild lilac and greasewood of California. Even the tame sea-lions which frequent the harbor and follow incoming boats, and which frequently are to be seen hauled up on small fishing-craft, seemed to fit wonderfully into the scene. A passenger who heard the boy's exclamation of delight, ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... Representative of the Old Family would take a Garden Rake and pattern all this hateful Currency into a neat Mound, after which a milk-fed Secretary would iron it out and disinfect it and sprinkle it with Lilac Water and tie it into artistic Packets ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade

... came along the path leading from the barn, he stood near a lilac bush for a few moments watching the pretty group under the trees. But he couldn't understand having breakfast outside ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... pierces snow, though I have seen gentians filling thawed hoof-prints. Crocuses are languid till they have had sun for a day or two. But the soldanella enjoys its snow, at first, and afterwards its fields. I have seen it make a pasture look like a large lilac silk gown. ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin

... satin piece hangs over the front parlor mantel. It is much prettier and better done than the one Miss Longstitch worked of Charlotte at the tomb of Werter, though she did sew silver spangles all over Charlotte's lilac gown, and used chenille, at a fi'-penny-bit a needleful, for all the banks and the large tree. Now, as the mantel-piece is provided for, I wish a landscape for each of the recesses, and a figure-piece to hang on each side of the large looking-glass, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various

... thrill came to me when I saw the house and the popple tree and the lilac bushes—they looked so friendly! Old Shep came barking up the road to meet us and ran by the buggy side with joyful leaps and cries. With what affection he crowded upon me and licked my face and hands when my feet were on ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller

... least suggest, to the unbitten or unblighted human intellect, the notion of development into anything other than their like: one does not expect a mushroom to translate itself into a pineapple, nor a betony to moralize itself into a lily, nor a snapdragon to soften himself into a lilac. ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... earnest. By 4.15 A.M. they had most of it littered over the drive, but had struck some granite boulders which defied even the crowbars. A further conference was then held, but at this point Edward made a dramatic appearance, clad in lilac pyjamas, odd boots and a kimono of the Aunt's, which he had worn as King Alfred in some charades the night before, and in the darkness had donned in mistake for his dressing-gown. His address was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various

... flowers in the garden, but more sweetly scented for all that; hyacinths in early spring that flooded with waving purple the cool glens, and grassy knolls; yellow primroses that nestled in little clumps round the gnarled roots of the oak-trees; bright celandine, and blue speedwell, and irises lilac and gold. There were grey catkins on the hazels, and the foxgloves drooped with the weight of their dappled bee-haunted cells. The chestnut had its spires of white stars, and the hawthorn its pallid moons of beauty. Yes: surely she would come if ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde

... the things we meet in sleep was still upon him. He got up and flung open his lattice window. From the garden beneath rose the sweet scent of May flowers, very different from that of his dream which yet lingered in his nostrils, whilst from a neighbouring lilac- bush streamed the rich melody of the nightingale. Presently it ceased before the broadening daylight, but in its stead, pure and clear and cold, arose the notes of the mavis, giving tuneful thanks ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... night's sleep was as a moment. He opened his eyes to see the crags and towers and peaks and domes, and the lofty walls of that vast, broken chaos of canyons across the river. They were now emerging from the misty gray of dawn, growing pink and lilac and ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various

... sweet to him, all manifestations of femininity in a woman very dear. There were four long windows in the dining-room, but the roof of the verandah, the thick vines springing from pillar to pillar, the lilac-trees and willows just beyond, chastened the light in the room. Magdalena looked almost pretty, with her air of proud reserve, the roses nestling in her dark hair. Ten years ago he might have loved her, perhaps, in spite ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... eyes toward the crests we stood dazzled and stupefied by what we saw. They looked red and notched like festoons of coral, for all the summits are made of porphyry; and the sky overhead seemed violet, lilac, discolored by the vicinity of these strange mountains. Lower down the granite was of scintillating gray, and under our feet it seemed rasped, pounded; we were walking over shining powder. At our right, along a long and irregular course, a tumultuous torrent ran ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant

... moment. "Going to play garden around the house. This is a—a lilac tree!" And he set the flower-pot down close to Bert's elbow. Bert was now busy trying to put a pasteboard chimney on his house, and did not notice. A moment later Bert's elbow hit the flower-pot and down ...
— The Bobbsey Twins - Or, Merry Days Indoors and Out • Laura Lee Hope

... matters. Bobby trotted quietly about, sniffing at everything with the liveliest interest, head on this side or that, alertly. His business, learned in his first summer in Greyfriars, was to guard the nests of foolish skylarks, song-thrushes, redbreasts and wrens, that built low in lilac, laburnum, and flowering currant bushes, in crannies of wall and vault, and on the ground. It cannot but be a pleasant thing to be a wee young dog, full of life and good intentions, and to play one's dramatic part in making an old garden of souls tuneful with bird song. A cry of alarm from parent ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson

... porch and porch, Thou and thy fellow—when the pale stars fade At dawn, and when the glowworm lights her torch, O Beadle of the Burlington Arcade? —Who asketh why the Beautiful was made? A wan cloud drifting o'er the waste of blue, The thistledown that floats above the glade, The lilac-blooms of April—fair to view, And naught but fair are these; and such, I ween, ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley

... These streamers, or "merry dancers," as they are sometimes termed, were at times peculiarly bright. Their colour was most frequently yellowish white, sometimes greenish, and once or twice of a lilac tinge. The strength of the light was something greater than that of the moon in her quarter, and the stars were dimmed when the aurora passed over them as if they had been covered ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... polished, a blaze of the most exquisite and unrivalled tint. It is, however, more or less pale, and mixed with blue in various proportions; hence it occurs rose-red and reddish white, crimson, peach-blossom red, and lilac blue—the latter variety being named oriental amethyst. A ruby perfect both in colour and transparency, is much less common than a good diamond, and when of the weight of three or four carats, is even more valuable than ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 560, August 4, 1832 • Various

... upturned, making vain efforts to lure down the elusive creature. The haze of very early morning pervades the garden which is the scene of their faint aspiration. One cannot see very clearly there. The ladies' furbelows are blurred against the foliage, and the lilac-bushes loom through the air as though they were white clouds full of rain. One cannot see the ladies' faces very clearly. One guesses them, though, to be supercilious and smiling, all with the curved lips and the raised eyebrows of Experience. For, in their time, all these ladies, and all their ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm

... the terrace step, close to the marble vases where heliotropes swung their dainty lilac chalices against her shoulder, and the scarlet geraniums stared unabashed, Beryl's gaze wandered from the lovely park and ancient trees, to the unbroken facade of the gray old house; and as, in painful contrast she recalled ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... of alighting forms of both sexes which followed the entry of the huge concatenation into the station, Ned Hipcroft soon discerned the slim little figure his eye was in search of, in the sprigged lilac, as described. She came up to him with a frightened smile—still pretty, though so damp, weather-beaten, and shivering from long exposure to ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy

... college in an automobile, stopping at Mrs. Eichelberger's only long enough to get my suitcase. As I drove on past the next corner I chanced to look up the intersecting street. There, by a lilac bush, stood my companion. He was not alone. With him was a very pretty girl wearing a soft black dress and a corsage of narcissus. But the corsage was now smaller, by one flower, than it had been before, for, as I sighted them, she was in the act of placing one ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street

... shifted. Cassy was in a room floored with thick rugs, hung with heavy draperies, and in that room the catamount had hired her to sing! But the disgust of it passed. The curtain fell. Cassy turned to the window, through which a breath of lilac blew. ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... began to feel very strange. Everything about her seemed to grow larger and larger, except Andy. The entrance to the basement seemed as wide as the barn door; the lilac bush over her head looked as big as an oak tree, and the piece of cooky in her hand as big ...
— The Cat in Grandfather's House • Carl Henry Grabo

... silvery echo and ran rippling over the stones into the river. Somewhere above the cliff a negro was playing a banjo and far down the river, beside a little cottage torn with shot and shell, but still standing, a mocking-bird was singing in the lilac bushes. ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon

... tone, Ascott stopped in the act of putting on his lilac kid gloves. "What have I done? I may be a very bad fellow, but I'm not quite so bad ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)

... not readily yield an essential oil, so in such oases we have to rely altogether upon more or less successful substitutes. For instance, the perfumes sold under the names of "heliotrope," "lily of the valley," "lilac," "cyclamen," "honeysuckle," "sweet pea," "arbutus," "mayflower" and "magnolia" are not produced from these flowers but are simply imitations made from other essences, synthetic or natural. Among the "thousand flowers" that contribute to the "Eau de Mille Fleurs" ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson

... turn inebriated with the hard glare and deep shadows of abundant light, with the infinite contrasts of the streets, with the far-ranged dignity of domes and towers swimming in the golden haze of midday, or melting in the lilac mists of evening. I felt also, in this vast congregation of my fellow-creatures, the exhilarating sense of my own insignificance. Of what value were my own opinions, hopes, or programmes in this huge concourse and confusion ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson

... understood and with a quick exclamation he stopped the car. And there, behind a great clump of tall lilac bushes, he put his arms around them both. He kissed them both, too, Mary Rose first and hurriedly and then Miss Thorley, ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett

... savage landscape, over which a brilliant sky, of luminous indigo and lilac, was bending to the vague edge of the world. Serious though the situation was, the Frenchman could not repress a thought of the untamed beauty of that scene—a land long familiar to him, in the days when he had flown down these ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... the long brown legumes hanging from their branches, told they were the famous "mezquite" trees—the American acacia. The red mulberry could be seen in the creek bottoms, and here and there the beautiful wild-china-tree with its pretty lilac flowers. The whole surface both of hill and valley was clad in a rich mantle of short buffalo grass, which gave it the aspect of a meadow lately mown, and springing into fresh verdure. It was a lovely landscape, and ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid

... Basset or Dame Deborah dream that the lame pedlar-woman, in the lilac print dress and white mob-cap, whom they passed in the park, and who curtsied so low as the great coach lumbered past, was the Royalist leader whom everyone was searching for; neither did they dream ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various

... for he has said all things and made the advent of another painter impossible, inconceivable. He who could never do a right thing can now do no wrong one. Canvases beside which the vaguest of Mr. Whistler's nocturnes are clear statements of plain fact, lilac-coloured canvases void of design or tone, or quality of paint, are accepted by a complacent public, and bought by American millionaires for vast sums; and the early canvases about which Paris would not once tolerate ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore

... of delicious death, a swooning ecstasy, an absorption of her individuality in his. Just as the spring gradually displaced the winter by a new branch of blossom, and in that corner of the garden by the winsome mauve of a lilac bush, without her knowing it his ideas caught root in her. New thoughts and perceptions were in growth within her, and every day she discovered the new where she had been accustomed to meet the familiar idea. She ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... another, whose greens are softened and shaded, and seem to be seen through a purplish veil; behind that rises another, of a decided cloud-like purple; and in the next still the purple tint changes to rosy lilac; while above all, like another world up in the sky, mingling its tints with the passing clouds, sometimes obscured by them, and then breaking out between them, lie the glacier regions. These glaciers, in the setting sun, look like rivers ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... ensure her poorliness being over. I had not left her Fanny Hill, but why I cannot tell, for I knew how baudy books excited a woman. The night before my next attack, I wrapped up the book, directed it to her, gave a boy sixpence to deliver it, hid myself by a lilac which was in the front-garden close to the road, and saw the boy give it to her, and go off quickly as I had told him. It was just dark, and too dark inside the passage of the house to see; for Jenny ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous

... "why, because they look just like her. If I were to see that lilac muslin in China, I should say it was meant for Rose. Now this is mine, I know,—this bright pink; isn't it, mamma? No half shades ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... it in some form for my children.—It seems an injustice that they should miss it, and yet it is probable that they are getting an equal joy of life, an equal exaltation from the opening flowers of the single lilac bush in our city back-yard or from an occasional visit to the ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland









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