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Burnish   Listen
verb
Burnish  v. i.  To shine forth; to brighten; to become smooth and glossy, as from swelling or filling out; hence, to grow large. "A slender poet must have time to grow, And spread and burnish as his brothers do." "My thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Burnish" Quotes from Famous Books



... Nature made for? is it for us The beautiful world is burnish'd and blent? If we had not eyes, would blossoms shine thus? If we had not nostrils, would they ...
— Harry • Fanny Wheeler Hart

... she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burn'd on the water—the poop was beaten gold, Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver, Which to the tunes of flutes kept stroke, and made The water, which they beat, to follow faster, As amorous of ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat

... spears, and bright with burnish'd shields, The embattled legions stretch their long array; Discord's red torch, as fierce she scours the fields, With bloody tincture stains the face ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... Scattering their balmy flowers, To summer airs th' o'ershadowing branches bow'd, The while, with humble state, In all the pomp of tribute sweets she sate, Wrapt in the roseate cloud! Now clustering blossoms deck her vesture's hem, Now her bright tresses gem,— (In that all-blissful day, Like burnish'd gold with orient pearls inwrought,) Some strew the turf—some on the waters float! Some, fluttering, seem to say In wanton circlets toss'd, "Here Love ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... word here, enbarnis, which has so long been lost to French that it is not even in Littre. But Dryden's "burnish into man" probably preserves it in English; for this is certainly not the other "burnish" from brunir. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... with the illuminating shaft from the door touching into high-lights the polish of his boots and the burnish of his accouterments. Finally he turned and in a voice now deadly ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck

... wine Of maidens-blush, commix'd with jessamine. Clean was the hearth, the mantle larded jet, Which, wanting Lar and smoke, hung weeping wet; At last i' th' noon of winter, did appear A ragg'd soused neats-foot, with sick vinegar; And in a burnish'd flagonet, stood by Beer small as comfort, dead as charity. At which amazed, and pond'ring on the food, How cold it was, and how it chill'd my blood, I curst the master, and I damn'd the souce, And swore I'd got the ague of the house. —Well, when ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick

... to all eyes unknown, Is borne away without a groan, On a chance plank, 'mid joyful cries Of birds that pierce the sunny skies With seaward dash, or in calm bands Parading o'er the silvery sands, Or mid the lovely flush of shells, Pausing to burnish crest or wing. No fading footmark see that tells Of that poor ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various

... the best English poets,—then Gower, Chaucer, Occleve, and Lydgate,—not the Catechism and Latin Grammar. It was very pleasant to come off the directions not to conveye spetell over the table, or burnish one's bones with one's teeth, to the burst of enthusiasm with which the writer speaks of our old poets. He evidently believed in them with all his heart; and it would have been a good thing for England if our educators since ...
— Caxton's Book of Curtesye • Frederick J. Furnivall

... for miles around. The whole arc of the sky, the whole circle of the world's rim, lay bare to the eye, infinitely varied by clouds and cloud-shadows, by pasture and arable, dark patches of woods and pallor of pools, by the lambent burnish of the west and the soft purpling of the east, even by differing weathers—here great shafts of sunlight, there the blurred column of a distant shower, or the faint smear, like a bruise upon the horizon, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... wattle gold trembles 'Twixt shadow and shine, When each dew-laden air draught resembles A long draught of wine; When the sky-line's blue burnish'd resistance Makes deeper the dreamiest distance, Some song in all hearts hath existence, — Such songs ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens



Words linked to "Burnish" :   glaze, smooth, smoothness, gloss, glossiness, furbish, effulgence, radiancy, radiance



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