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Hemlock   Listen
noun
Hemlock  n.  
1.
(Bot.) The name of several poisonous umbelliferous herbs having finely cut leaves and small white flowers, as the Cicuta maculata, Cicuta bulbifera, and Cicuta virosa, and the Conium maculatum. See Conium. Note: The potion of hemlock administered to Socrates is by some thought to have been a decoction of Cicuta virosa, or water hemlock, by others, of Conium maculatum.
2.
(Bot.) An evergreen tree common in North America (Abies Canadensis or Tsuga Canadensis); hemlock spruce. "The murmuring pines and the hemlocks."
3.
The wood or timber of the hemlock tree.
Ground hemlock, or Dwarf hemlock. See under Ground.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hemlock" Quotes from Famous Books



... had never before been locked up in a lonely house at night without a human being within call. First, her feet grew strangely cold; then she felt a sort of creeping fear stealing up to her out of the floor, as if she had drunk hemlock and death were travelling slowly towards her heart, paralysing every limb and joint ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford

... beyond the pine-woods,' he answered, in a low dreamy voice, 'there is a little garden. There the grass grows long and deep, there are the great white stars of the hemlock flower, there the nightingale sings all night long. All night long he sings, and the cold, crystal moon looks down, and the yew-tree spreads out its ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde

... thou beheld, As careless thou hast journied on: The hemlock-bowl for Athen's pride; The gory field of Marathon; The monarch crowned, the warrior plumed, With power and with ambition burning; Yet they must all have seemed to thee Poor pigmies on a ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various

... the inmates of the hut were quiet. The huge outlaw bowed his shaggy head for a while, and then threw himself on a pile of hemlock boughs. Brandt was not long in seeking rest. Soon both were fast asleep. Two of the savages passed out with cat-like step, leaving the door open. The fire had burned low, leaving a bed of dead coals. Outside in the ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey

... hemlock, Annie Winnie; mony a cummer lang syne wad hae sought nae better horse to flee over hill and how, through mist and moonlight, and light down in the the ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... some of the articles in the subsequent catalogue do not induce intoxication, though they have been esteemed to do so; as tobacco, hemlock, nux vomica, stavisagria; and on this account should rather belong to other arrangements, as to the secernentia, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... sparks fly up the smoke-flue. From Kabibonokka's forehead, From his snow-besprinkled tresses, Drops of sweat fell fast and heavy, Making dints upon the ashes, 195 As along the eaves of lodges, As from drooping boughs of hemlock, Drips the melting snow in spring-time, Making hollows in the snow-drifts. Till at last he rose defeated, 200 Could not bear the heat and laughter, Could not bear the merry singing, But rushed headlong ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... long time, with the greatest heed and attention I could, and I am not easily carried away by preconceived opinion. In the end and in my conscience I should rather have appointed them hellebore than hemlock. It was rather a disease ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... harder than adamant; never to be broken, worn away, or blunted. Its only bad quality is, that it is sure to hurt those who touch it; and likely to draw blood, perhaps the life-blood, of those who press earnestly upon it. Let us away from this narrow lane skirted with hemlock, and pursue our road again through the wind and dust toward the great man and the powerful. Him I would call the powerful one who controls the storms of his mind, and turns to good account the worst accidents ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... this, because I know how to enjoy it. To the wise man, all is a pleasant hedonism." It struck, him at the time how terribly foolish and piteous great men were.... Jesus dead on a crucifix; Socrates and the hemlock bowl; the earnest Paul beheaded at Rome.... A little wisdom, a little callousness would have avoided all this.... How satisfied he was, how damned petty! His little bourgeois life, his harem of one pretty girl, his nice ship ... smug as a shop-keeper ... and then life, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

... the river, these woods, and overhung it—each bank a mute monotonous screen of foliage, unbroken by glade or clearing; pine and spruce and hemlock, maple and alder; piled plumes of green, motionless, brooding, through which no sunrays broke, though here and there a silver birch drew a shaft of light upon their sombre background. Here were no English woodlands, no stretches of pale green turf, no vistas opening beneath ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... doubts nor fears, Earth that knows of death, not tears, Earth that bore with joyful ease Hemlock for Socrates, Earth that blossomed and was glad 'Neath the cross that Christ had, Shall rejoice and blossom too When the bullet reaches you. Wherefore, men marching On the road to death, sing! Pour your gladness on earth's head, So be merry, so ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke

... clearings extending over several acres, while, again, a man might wander for hours without emerging from the timber, which included the common varieties found in the Middle States—oak, beech, maple, birch, hickory, hemlock, black walnut, American poplar or whitewood, gum, elm, persimmon, and ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis

... out of boughs covered with sheets of paper birch and elm. I had made a similar shelter for myself that I might not seem to discriminate too much in favor of the Englishman, and had told the men to do the same. But they were indolent, and stopped at chopping a few hemlock boughs, which they laid across crotched aspens. In truth, our shelters accomplished little against the cold and wet. Do what we could, we had great discomfort, and morning found the rain still dripping and the sky ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith

... his devoted partner, Judy, to clear a few acres of poor rocky land on the sloping margin of the level meadow, which he planted year after year with potatoes. Scattered over this small clearing, here and there might be seen the but-end of some half-burnt hemlock tree, which had escaped the general combustion of the log heaps, and now formed a striking contrast to the white limestone rocks which showed their rounded surfaces ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... Oil, two ozs. Oil Hemlock, two ozs. Oil Organum, two ozs. Chloroform, four ozs. Spirits Ammonia. Mix. Let it stand 24 hours and it is ready for use. Dose, internally, one teaspoonful for adults. Bathe the affected parts well. This is a great remedy ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus

... is true, very pleasant indeed to his parents at home, that night and the next morning; but then he went with Esther after cedar and hemlock branches. It may be asked, what opposition had he hitherto found to his intercourse with the colonel's daughter? And it must be answered, none. Nevertheless, Pitt felt it in the air, and it had the effect on him that the north wind and cold are ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner

... friction at first, then smoothly and swiftly as if they had never stopped. Summer reddened into autumn; autumn bronzed into fall. The maples and poplars were bare. The oaks alone kept their rusted crimson glory, and the cloaks of spruce and hemlock on the shoulders of the hills grew dark with wintry foliage. Keene's transitions of mood became more frequent and more extreme. The gulf of isolation that divided him from us when the black days came seemed wider and more unfathomable. Dorothy and John Graham were thrown ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke

... of wood for hives, pine is preferable, still other kinds will do; I have no faith in bees liking one kind better than another, and less likely to leave on that account. Hemlock is cheaper, and used to a great extent; when perfectly sound is as good as anything, but is very liable to split, even after the bees have been in them some time. It should be used only when better wood cannot be obtained. Bass wood when used ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby

... clear the land of its native trees and immediately replant saplings of certain introduced varieties about the farmyard or along the streets. In this way a forest growth of oak, elm, beech, butternut, hemlock, basswood, and birch is cleared off to give room for saplings of soft maple, cottonwood, and brittle willow. It is felt that the inexpensiveness of leaving the forest trees standing would derogate from the dignity that should invest an article ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... the young spruce by its side throws almost as distinct a shadow as its base, and the whole figure looks of a more solid texture, as if you could feel it with your hand. More beautiful than either is the fine image of this baby hemlock: each delicate leaf droops above as delicate a copy, and here and there the shadow and the substance kiss and frolic with each other in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... as some bits of bark and a small bough of hemlock fell at our feet. Then a shower of pine needles came slowly down, scattering over us and hitting the timber with a faint hiss. Before we could look up, a dry stick as long as a log fell ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller

... unexpected conclusion. No, she didn't really want to tell Cousin Ann all about it. Why was she doing it? Because she thought that was the thing to do. "Because if you don't really want to," went on Cousin Ann, "I don't see that it's doing anybody any good. I guess Hemlock Mountain will stand right there just the same even if you did forget to put a b in 'doubt.' And your syrup will be too cool to wax right if you don't take it out ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield

... graceful, fearless child. They had run races,—she was fleet as the wind and he could not always catch her. He had gathered the first ripe wild strawberries, not bigger than the end of her little finger, but, oh, how luscious! She had quarreled with him, too, she had struck him with a feathery hemlock branch, until he begged her pardon for some fancied fault, and nothing had suited him better than to loll under the great oak tree, listening to Pani's story and all the mysterious suppositions of her coming. Then he told wild legends of the various tribes, talked in ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... their flower of age Or gain and lose full vigour of their frame, And never burn with one same lust of love, And never in their habits they agree, Nor find the same foods equally delightsome— Sooth, as one oft may see the bearded goats Batten upon the hemlock which to man Is violent poison. Once again, since flame Is wont to scorch and burn the tawny bulks Of the great lions as much as other kinds Of flesh and blood existing in the lands, How could it be that she, Chimaera lone, With triple body—fore, a lion she; And ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... Boy Camper," of which, as I have remarked before, I already had a copy by me, there was a chapter describing how a balmy couch, far superior to any ordinary bed, might be constructed of the boughs of the spruce, the hemlock, the cedar, or other evergreen growths indigenous to our latitude; and also a chapter describing methods of cooking without pots or pans over a wood fire. The author went so far as to say that bacon was never so delicious as ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... of course, that I am talking in a cheap way;—perhaps we will have some philosophy by and by;—let me work out this thin mechanical vein.—I have something more to say about trees. I have brought down this slice of hemlock to show you. Tree blew down in my woods (that were) in 1852. Twelve feet and a half round, fair girth;—nine feet, where I got my section, higher up. This is a wedge, going to the centre, of the general ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... known by the Dutch settlers as the "Grote Binnewater," it cascades its way along the southern slope of the Shaupeneak Mountains to Esopus Village, a cross-road hamlet, and thence carries to the Hudson its waters dark-stained by companionship with trees of hemlock and cedar growth. The Pell property extends on the west bank to Pell's Dock, almost opposite the Staatsburgh ice houses. Mrs. Livingston's residence will now be seen on the east bank, and just above this the home of the late William B. Dinsmore on ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce

... departure had been made known, concluded to call upon him at his shack a few days later, and was considerably surprised to find the place roughly boarded up, while sounds of talking came from a shanty at the back. The latter was on the plumed edge of an odorous hemlock wood; squirrels and chipmunks ran, chattering, hither and thither in quest of food, and a muskrat, sitting on a log near the water, looked unconcernedly at Ringfield as he stood, hesitating, for a few seconds. While ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison

... Plenty of small hemlock boughs were heaped on the bottom of the tent to spread their blankets on; and Sid almost rebelled at the amount of dry wood Wade insisted on ...
— Harper's Young People, May 18, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... good to me I'd rather take a scolding than a chair, and drink hemlock instead of chocolate if you happen to have any ready," answered Mac with a pathetic puff as he subsided onto the sofa and meekly took the draft Phebe ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott

... said Kindly. "The girls will dance by nature, and the boys will fall in, rather more clumsily of course. But it will do well enough for us. Besides, they have all had more practice than you think for. You shall get the pine-tree, or hemlock, and buy the things,—I'll tell you what, to-morrow morning,—and I will ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker

... the house of one of the deacons. It was quite a sight the next morning to see the people coming in from the neighboring towns, and to note their odd dresses, which were indeed of all kinds, from silks and velvets to coarsest homespun woollens, dyed with hemlock, or oil-nut bark, and fitting so ill that, if they had all cast their clothes into a heap, and then each snatched up whatsoever coat or gown came to hand, they could not have suited worse. Yet they were all clean and tidy, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... may have been due to a desire to postpone his end until the proper time, as indicated by "Mine hour is not yet come", but when the time did come, Jesus did not bear his approaching death bravely, as Socrates did when about to drink the cup of hemlock. Jesus was much afraid, "and prayed, saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd

... sister. They know that an umbrella is not a gun, and they can count up to six, which is fair for young crows, though Silverspot can go up nearly to thirty. They know the smell of gunpowder and the south side of a hemlock-tree, and begin to plume themselves upon being crows of the world. They always fold their wings three times after alighting, to be sure that it is neatly done. They know how to worry a fox into giving up half his dinner, and also that when ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton

... an unprotected tree is impossible. The only plants that hold their own, in addition to the indestructible thistles, grasses, and clover, are a little herbaceous oxalis, producing viviparous buds of extraordinary vitality, a few poisonous species, such as the hemlock, and a few tough, thorny dwarf-acacias and wiry rushes, which even a ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... pink cheeks, and smooth lines of red hair over the temples, looked gayly and honestly out of the hood and nubia. Here and there along the road were sprigs of evergreen and ground-pine and hemlock. Lucretia glanced a trifle soberly at them. She was nearly in sight of the school-house when she reached Alma Ford's house, and Alma came out and joined her. Alma was trim and pretty in her fur-bordered winter ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins

... the cipher book at my usual hour for being called in the morning. When I had given this order, my mind dwelt awhile over my sins. Through my tired brain passed thought-pictures of philosophers waiting for cups of hemlock and various other strange and half-forgotten antique images. Then ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton

... admired Socrates," I remarked, "for his theatrical pretence of drinking the hemlock voluntarily. In future ages men will remember with greater admiration how I, with my own hand, prepared the instrument of my death. Do not forget to mention this circumstance in your notes, and add that my ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various

... enters in there, my dear Commodore," retorted Socrates. "For me, with Xanthippe abroad I do not need a club to go to; I can stay at home and take my hemlock in peace and straight. Xanthippe always compelled me to dilute it at the rate of one quart of ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs

... abolition is the abolition of life. Hence, people, who, failing to savour the struggle itself, anticipate the end of the struggle as the beginning of joy and happiness—these people are simply missing life; they are longing to exchange life for death. The hemlock would save them ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett

... understanding, and crime, and tears, and rage, and the love of murder. All these were blended together; and, mingled with fresh blood she had boiled them in a hollow vessel of brass, stirred about with {a stalk of} green hemlock. And while they are trembling, she throws the maddening poison into the breasts of them both, and moves their inmost vitals. Then repeatedly waving her torch in the same circle, she swiftly follows up the flames {thus} excited with {fresh} flames. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso

... through the open door and seen the blackened hearthstone, but I had never gone inside. The remains of a turf wall surrounded the cottage, but the low garden that this wall enclosed was overrun with ragwort and nettles and hemlock. My terrier was fond of investigating the garden, because among the thick undergrowth he invariably found either rabbits or water-rats, or a stoat. On this bright morning I was much surprised to find the whole of the enclosure cleared. Outside of the boundary was a great heap ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman

... watercourses, and search the dingle from one end to the other, hoping to find the little ones again and win their confidence. But they were not there; and I took to watching instead a family of mink that lived in a den under a root, and a big owl that always slept in the same hemlock. Then, one day when a flock of partridges led me out of the wild berry bushes into a cool green island of the burned lands, I ran plump upon the deer and her fawns lying all together under a fallen treetop, dozing away the heat of ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... bosom, a tumultuous world Of hopes and fears on his dear mem'ry spread; For fate had not the clouded roll unfurl'd, Nor yet with baleful hemlock crown'd ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent

... are derived. Oil of bitter almonds and cherry laurel water are poisonous in consequence of containing prussic acid. Opium owes its activity to the alkaloid morphia. The Upas-tiente derives its energetic powers from the alkaloid strychnia; conia is the active principle of hemlock; veratria of hellebore; aconita of monk's hood; and although there are several poisonous plants in which the active principle has not yet been detected, there can be little doubt that such a principle exists, although it has hitherto eluded ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... on the sharp-horned ledges Plunging in steep cascade, Tossing its white-maned waters Against the hemlock's shade." ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various

... Jesuitical rack, no cup of hemlock, no thumb-screw, no torture of any kind for David. Still, here was a duty to be done, an awful responsibility to be discharged in sorrow and with prayer; and grave good men they were. Blameless was ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen

... to the tree where the dead bear had lain, and examined the snow carefully. He soon found a well-defined trail that led farther back into the woods. This he followed easily, and it brought him to an old fallen hemlock, which was partly covered with snow. The tracks led into the deepest, thickest portion of the top and there ended at the mouth of a burrow that had been tunneled ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes

... river nearly two miles, when, coming to a little stream which flows into the larger, I turned into it to explore its course. Fir and hemlock of a century's growth met overhead, and formed an archway radiant with frost-work. All was dark within; but I was young and fearless, and I laughed and shouted ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey

... tremendous blast swept through the forest, blew open the door, and scattered the coals from the deep fire-place over the floor of the apartment. The moody man started from his reverie. Edgar secured the door, and, taking a broom composed of small sprigs of hemlock and cedar, brushed the ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton

... Islands and in New Zealand, great respect and consideration are shown the aged as embodying experience.[1020] The harsher custom recalls an ancient law of Aegean Ceos, which, ordained that all persons over sixty years of age should be compelled to drink hemlock, in order that there might be sufficient food ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... wanderings; here all the quaint chairs that Mr. Bill Harmon could pick up at a small price; here were two noble fireplaces, one with a crane and iron pot filled with flowers, the other filled sometimes with sprays of green asparagus and sometimes with fragrant hemlock boughs. The paper was one in which green rushes and cat-o'-nine-tails grew on a fawn-colored ground, and anything that the Careys did not possess for the family sitting room Ossian Popham went straight home and made ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... O sickle cutting hemlock the day long! That the husbandman across his shoulder hangs, And, going homeward about evensong, Dies the next morning, ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris

... escaping death; Pericles himself, after all his services to his country, and all the glory he had acquired, compelled to appear before the tribunals and make his defence; * * a priestess executed for having introduced strange gods; Socrates condemned and drinking the hemlock, because he was accused of not recognizing those of his country, &c.; these facts attest too loudly, to be called in question, the religious intolerance of the most humane and enlightened people ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... it capable of cultivation. This vast morass was about thirty miles long, and ten miles wide, and its interior but little known. With his usual zeal and hardihood he explored it on horseback and on foot. In many parts it was covered with dark and gloomy woods of cedar, cypress, and hemlock, or deciduous trees, the branches of which were hung with long drooping moss. Other parts were almost inaccessible, from the density of brakes and thickets, entangled with vines, briers, and creeping plants, and intersected by creeks and standing pools. Occasionally the soil, composed ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving

... the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arbor-vitae in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some of our Northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau

... precipices; no landing was possible there: the other two sides were thick wooded forests of pines and hemlocks. Nothing could exceed in loveliness the situation of this lake. Two roads led to it: one from the Springton, the other from the Welbury side; both running through the hemlock forests. In the winter these were used for carrying out ice, which was cut in great quantities on the lake. In the summer, no one crossed these roads, except parties of pleasure-seekers who went to sail or ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous

... stands at the foot of Lake Huron and commands the entrance to the upper lakes. Advancing along the western shore of this lake the voyager sees a long, alluvial bank covered with a forest of pine, poplar, beech, and hemlock. ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland

... brought home for him, he did not know that he was going to have an adventure. He nosed about among the bushes and the tall grasses and caught a few bugs and a frog or two. But he didn't think that THAT was much. He didn't seem to have much luck, down on the ground. So he climbed a tall hemlock, to see if he could find a squirrel's nest, or some ...
— Sleepy-Time Tales: The Tale of Fatty Coon • Arthur Scott Bailey

... from his lips and with good reason. The little shelter had stood close to a large hemlock tree. The lightning had struck the tree, causing it to topple ever. In falling, it had landed fairly and squarely upon the cabin, smashing it completely. One corner of the cabin was in ashes, but the heavy rain had probably ...
— Joe The Hotel Boy • Horatio Alger Jr.

... the lovely and the pure and the true come in instead. You have the cup in your hand, you can either press into it clusters of ripe grapes, and make mellow wine, or you can squeeze into it wormwood and gall and hemlock and poison-berries; and, as you brew, you have to drink. You have the canvas, and you are to cover it with the figures that you like best. You can either do as Fra Angelico did, who painted the white walls of every cell in his quiet convent with Madonnas and angels and risen Christs, or you ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... getting something done to the house, I had rather you did not come back this month, if you can possibly hold on at Brandon's. Remember me to him, and give our kind regards to his wife. I should be obliged if you would gather some hemlock leaves and send them to me. I want them for my ointment; the stuff the chemists sell is no good. Your mother's eyes are bad again; and your brother Berkeley has been gambling, and seems to think I ought ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw

... possible. To those young hearers, the words of Socrates may well have seemed to anticipate, not the visible world he had then delineated in glowing colour as if for the bodily eye, but only the chilling influence of the hemlock; and it was because Plato was only half convinced of the Manichean or Puritan element in his master's doctrine, or rather was in contact with it on one side only of his complex and genial nature, that Platonism became possible, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... made it necessary for them to seek a place of repose for the night. An overhanging rock surrounded by low bushes seemed an inviting spot, especially as the staff did not withhold them from it. Kathie, more learned in woodland ways than Laura, broke down branches of hemlock, and made a fragrant and spicy bed; and then, too tired to do more than say their prayers, they both were asleep ...
— The Princess Idleways - A Fairy Story • Mrs. W. J. Hays

... incessant rains, it is pervaded by a rich golden gloom, the result of the constant rotting of the brown and yellow bark, not only of the prostrate trees, but of the many killed by crowding and unable to seek the earth with the natural instinct of death. And above, the green of hemlock and spruce was perennially fresh and young, glistening and fragrant. Here and there was a small clearing where the clans had erected their ingenious and hideous totem poles, out of place in the ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton

... elegant woman, with her costly jewels, India shawls, and splendid equipage, have thought of this whilom rival, who issued every summer morning from the lane, in her hand a bunch of those simple flowers, occupying, as she did, the border-ground between the wild hemlock and honeysuckle of the wilderness and the exotic of the parterre, the bachelor's-button, mulberry-pink, southernwood, and bee-larkspur, destined to fill a tumbler on an end of the counter where she displayed her most ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... drifting down like white feathers from some giant flock of birds, falling softly among the spruce and hemlock and covering the wilderness with a carpet that left a tell-tale record of every foot which crossed its smooth expanse. And as the face of the wilderness changed, its inhabitants, also, changed. Some went into hiding for the cold months; others, fierce beasts such as the wolf and wildcat, simply ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer

... place. A sparkling spring, rising at the base of a giant hemlock at the head of a long deep gully, had in the course of ages filled in the hollow, till a broad level floor was made, surrounded by close-growing hemlocks, pines, and spruces, and carpeted with fine turf and pine needles. The water from the spring, flowing in a shallow ...
— Harper's Young People, July 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... leaves mostly," grunted Prickly Porky ungraciously. "I like hemlock best of all, but also eat poplar, pine and other trees for a change. Sometimes I stay in a tree for days until I have stripped it of all its bark and leaves. I don't see any sense in moving about any more ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess

... of Seneca lake we proceeded, without the occurrence of any thing of importance, by the outlets of the Canandaigua, Honeoye, and Hemlock lakes, to the head of Connissius lake, where the army encamped on the ground that is ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver

... Monophysitism in undermining belief in the reality of Christ's manhood is weakening sympathy with His sufferings. Calvary like Bethlehem has lost much of its appeal. A classical comparison will illustrate this fact. Plato's account of Socrates' last hour in the prison and of his drinking the hemlock is, I imagine, to many educated men far more moving than the story of the Passion and Death of Christ. There is a curious similarity in the two tragedies that invites attention and comparison. Both sufferers were heroes and moral reformers, ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce

... yule of the poor. Banished by police ordinance from the street, it reaped a scant harvest of pennies for Christmas cheer from the windows opening on the back yard. Against more than one pane showed the bald outline of a forlorn little Christmas tree, some stray branch of a hemlock picked up at the grocer's and set in a pail for "the childer" to dance around, a dime's worth of candy and tinsel on ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... arrangemunt begun to kick & squeal and rair up. Konsequents was I was kickt vilently in the stummuck & back, and presuntly I fownd myself in the Kanawl with the other hosses, kickin & yellin like a tribe of Cusscaroorus savvijis. I was rescood, & as I was bein carrid to the tavern on a hemlock Bored I sed in a feeble voise, "Boys, ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne

... larch and hemlock climbed the mountain at its side; Fairy-like a rill came leaping ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... following morning, just before dawn, he made what might be termed a flying call on Solomon Owl who lived in the hemlock woods beyond the swamp. ...
— The Tale of Betsy Butterfly - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey

... echoes were never stirred except by such words as they dared not repeat;[22] from which the rod of power, or the dagger of passion, came forth invisible; before whose stillness princes grew pale, as their fates were prophesied or fulfilled by the horoscope or the hemlock; and nations, as the whisper of anarchy or of heresy was avenged by the opening of the low doors, through which those ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin

... which Dr. Lamson removed his troublesome relatives. There is baneberry, whose very name sufficiently describes its dangerous nature. There are horse-radish, and stinging rocket, and biting wall-pepper, and still smarter water-pepper, and worm-wood, and nightshade, and spurge, and hemlock, and half a dozen other equally unpleasant weeds. All of these have acquired their pungent and poisonous properties, just as nettles have acquired their sting, and thistles their thorns, in order to prevent animals from browsing upon them and destroying them. And the animals ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... is easy to see why; beavers, otters, and the finest fish were abundant, and the hills and streams furnished constant variety. I should have made a good Indian, if I had been born in a wigwam. To talk like sailors, we made the old hemlock-stub at the mouth of the Dingley Mill Brook just before sunset, and sent a boy ashore with a hawser, and was soon safely moored to a bunch of alders. After we got ashore Mr. White allowed me to fire his long gun at a mark. I did not hit the mark, and am not ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... sparrows, which are so rapidly increasing among us, and which must add greatly to the food supply of the owls and other birds of prey, seek to baffle their enemies by roosting in the densest evergreens they can find, in the arbor-vitae, and in hemlock hedges. Soft-winged as the owl is, he cannot steal in upon such a retreat ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs

... in his riper years one of the best of counsellors among the North American tribes. He possessed a most vigorous mind, and was alike active, sagacious, and persevering. He will long be remembered for a saying of his to one who visited him toward the close of life; "I am," said he, "an aged hemlock, the winds of an hundred winters have whistled through my branches. I am dead at the top. The generation to which I belonged has run away and left me." He was a sincere believer in the Christian religion, and added to the above "why I live the Great ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard

... no wooden floor in the tent, strew small hemlock twigs. They make a fine carpet and the odor is both ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson

... the extreme. While having a deeper sense of the reality of life than others, he realized that he did not know much. He criticized freely the prevailing beliefs, customs, and religious practice. For this he was accused of impiety, and forced to drink the hemlock. With an irony in manner and thought, Socrates introduced the problem of self-knowledge; he hastened the study of man and reason; he instituted the doctrine of true manhood as an essential part in the philosophy of life. Conscience ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... this self-excusing sophistry he darted up the brook. The banks were steep and thickly meshed with rhododendron, from which hemlock shot like black arrows upward, but the boy threaded through them like a snake. His breast was hardly heaving when he reached a small plateau hundreds of feet above the road, where two branches of the stream met from narrower ravines right and left. To the right he climbed, not up the bed ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox

... use of reasonin' no further with him then; for when he said Samantha Allen in that axent, I knew he wus as sot as a hemlock post, and as hard to move as one. And so my common sense bein' so firm and solid, even in such a time as this, I reasoned it right out, he wouldn't stir till he had sunthin' to eat, and so the sooner ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... Edible.—The flat-cap mushroom, Agaricus placomyces Pk., occurs in borders of woods or under trees from June to September. According to Peck it occurs in borders of hemlock woods, or under hemlock trees. At Ithaca it is not always associated with hemlock trees. The largest specimens found here were in the border of mixed woods where hemlock was a constituent. It has been found near and under white pine trees in lawns, around the Norway spruce ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson

... known of the dreary solitudes beyond Lake Superior; enormous muddy ponds and marshes are succeeded by open, dry, sandy plains; then forests of hemlock and spruce arise, again swamp, bog, windfalls, and stagnant water succeed; in the course of many miles there may not be one dry spot found for a resting-place. The cold is intense in this desolate region; in winter spirits ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton

... which we ascended, are elevated and pretty uniform. From its mouth to the first fork, is a growth of cedar, on either bank, intermixed with hemlock, pine, birch, and a few scattered maples. Thence to the third fork, denoted on the map, the growth is exclusively pine and fir. This river is sluggish and deep, and is navigable for boats of ten to fifteen tons burden, without ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... reply; "not far from Hemlock Lodge there is one which we will look at when the leaves are all out. But you must not expect to find a perfect vase-shape, for it is only an approach to it. The dome-shaped elm has a broad, round head, which is formed by the shooting forth of branches of nearly equal length ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church

... crater of Vesuvius. At length they came to a small osteria on the mountain, where they proposed to enter and have a cup of wine together. The doctor consented; though he would as soon have been invited to drink hemlock. ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... each other in composition and in all of their properties. From the seed-vessels of one (the poppy) we collect a juice which dries up into our commercial opium; from the bark of another (cinchona) we extract the quinine with which we assuage the raging fever; from the leaves of others, like those of hemlock and tobacco, we distil deadly poisons, often of rare value for their medicinal uses. The flowers and leaves of some yield volatile oils, which we delight in for their odors and their aromatic qualities; the seeds of others ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne

... the howling wind. "I guess you'd better dry yourself in the kitchen. Hear her whizzin' through the trees? Gosh all hemlock! She's goin' to be ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon

... evil plants as well, but 'tisn't a many. There's hen bane which do kill the fowls and fishes if they eat the seed of it. And there's water hemlock ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin

... this tree to-day," said Ruth Giant. "It has stood here nearly a month. The hemlock is falling all ...
— The Graymouse Family • Nellie M. Leonard

... respectable tree ought to be thinking of dying, they only take another twist, and so live on another hundred years. I saw some in England seven hundred years old, and they had grown queerer every century. It is a species of evergreen, and its leaf resembles our hemlock, only it is longer. This sprig gives you some idea of its general form. It is always planted about churches and graveyards; a kind of dismal emblem of immortality. This sepulchral old tree and the bass and treble dogs ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... the licking jaws. Even Caesar himself had to fall at last, his strong soul perhaps not sorry to escape through his dagger-wounds from so pitiably small a world; and the poison in the death-cup of Socrates was not so much the juice of the hemlock as the venom of ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... spoke of the matter to Little Joe Otter, and Little Joe Otter spoke of the matter to Jerry Muskrat, and Jerry Muskrat spoke of the matter to Sammy Jay, and right while he was speaking there came a shrill scream of "Thief! thief! thief!" from a thick hemlock-tree near by, and the voice was just like the ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Mocker • Thornton W. Burgess

... alive; I think they'll make him mad. It is a frightful plight. Two angels buried him alive in Vallombrosa by night; I saw it, standing among the lotus and hemlock. A negro came to me, a black clergyman with white eyes, and remained beside me; and the angels imprisoned Mark; they put him on duty forty days and forty nights, with his ear to the river listening for voices; and when it was ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... which the wrens are noted, and besides these qualities, and what is rarely found conjoined with them, a wild, sweet, rhythmical cadence that holds you entranced. I shall not soon forget that perfect June day, when, loitering in a low, ancient hemlock wood, in whose cathedral aisles the coolness and freshness seems perennial, the silence was suddenly broken by a strain so rapid and gushing, and touched with such a wild, sylvan plaintiveness, that I listened in amazement. And so shy and coy was the little minstrel, that I came twice ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... world has piled its fagots round the great and good and brave; Thrust its Socrates the hemlock, scourged its Jesus to the grave; Though its sneer has chilled the tender, and its frown has cursed the good, While its Nero sways the sceptre and its Emmett ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... them build a fire of pine, and the tree which bears poisonous flowers[A], and the hemlock, and the grape-vine which bears no fruit. They did as he bade them, and made the fire flame high. Then Sketupah prepared the sacrifice. First he skinned the wolf, then he shelled the tortoise. He bound the wolf's ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... higher, the stream in the bottom constantly dwindled. Long before the crest was reached, the brook had become a very feeble stream, indeed. It had its source near the top of the pass, in a great spring that welled up under a large rock. A single hemlock had sprung up here in years past, and, watered by the spring, had grown to enormous size. For some reason the lumbermen had passed it by. Now it reared its giant bulk high above the younger growths around ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss

... threshold, started. Going out again, pass forth the door more wisely, And somewhat higher bear thy foot precisely. Hence luckless tables! funeral wood, be flying! And thou, the wax, stuffed full with notes denying! Which I think gathered from cold hemlock's flower, Wherein bad honey Corsic bees did pour: 10 Yet as if mixed with red lead thou wert ruddy, That colour rightly did appear so bloody. As evil wood, thrown in the highways, lie, Be broke with wheels ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... in all the rawness and ugliness of a backwoods hamlet. The rough fields, lately won from the virgin forest, showed here and there, among the stumps, a few log-cabins, roofed with slabs of pine, spruce, or hemlock. Near by was a wooden fort, made, no doubt, after the common frontier pattern, of a stockade fence ten or twelve feet high, enclosing cabins to shelter the settlers in case of alarm, and furnished ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman

... will, without any connexion between the evil of guilt and the evil of punishment. And it is not necessary to suppose that God in justifiable annoyance deliberately put a corruption in the soul and the body of man, by an extraordinary action, in order to punish him: much as the Athenians gave hemlock-juice to their criminals. M. Bayle takes the matter thus: he speaks as if the original corruption had been put in the soul of the first man by an order and operation of God. It is that which calls forth his objection (Reply to the Questions ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

... uninviting, and I thought its aspect more gloomy than that of Nova Scotia. Sometimes we traversed swamps swarming with bullfrogs, on corduroy roads which nearly jolted us out of the vehicle, then dreary levels abounding in spindly hacmetac, hemlock, and birch-trees; next we would go down into a cedar-swamp alive with mosquitoes. Dense forests, impassable morasses, and sedgy streams always bounded the immediate prospect, and the clearings were few and far between. Nor was the conversation of my companions calculated to beguile ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... pipes blew wondrous shrill, The hemlock small blew clear; And louder notes from hemlock large, And bog-reed struck the ear; But solemn sounds, or sober ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott

... eye of a newt, and the tongue of a dog, the leg of a lizard, and the wing of the night-owl, the scale of a dragon, the tooth of a wolf, the maw of the ravenous salt-sea shark, the mummy of a witch, the root of the poisonous hemlock (this to have effect must be digged in the dark), the gall of a goat, and the liver of a Jew, with slips of the yew tree that roots itself in graves, and the finger of a dead child: all these were set on to boil in a great kettle, or cauldron, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... unrolling of a magnificent panorama such as no man has yet painted. And what can I say? There was mountain, meadow, forest, island, field, cliff, and valley; there were the red leaves of the autumn maple, the yellow of the birch, the deep green of pine and hemlock, the verdure of the grass, the wide river winding to reach the sea, and we slowly stemming its current. How powerless are words to describe ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox

... are many others; the lightning strikes the oaks most of all, but it will strike the pine, the ash, the hemlock, the basswood, and many more. Only two trees have I never seen struck, the balsam ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton

... a mattress if you hadn't fitted me out with one. And when the other fellows saw how snug I was, they vowed they'd have a soft bed too; so what do you think they did? They gathered an immense quantity of hemlock branches—little soft ones, you know—and spread them thick over the boards, and then they laid blankets over that and made a really fine mattress for all. So that, you see, I quite set the fashion. The last thing to be made was the fireplace, which has the very queer name of 'caboose,' ...
— The Young Woodsman - Life in the Forests of Canada • J. McDonald Oxley

... of synthesis. In the light of the Bible genesis, science can account for the origin of the stalwart oak or the lordly pine, without going back to any mycological or cryptogamic forms, to follow down an ever-changing vital plexus that is as likely to land in a buttonwood tree as an oak, or in a hemlock as a pine,—in fact, quite as likely to land in a carnivorous animal as in an insectivorous plant. "Let the earth bring forth," is still the eternal fiat,—just as implicitly obeyed to-day as it was in the ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... despairs, from dying in spirit, which is far more terrible than any death in the body could possibly be. We have the ideal to give us the strength, if we are lovers of God, to go to the cross with Jesus; or, if we are lovers of Virtue, to drink the hemlock with Socrates. ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza

... and bloody, obscene and foul; tigers and bears; lustful and mischievous apes and monkeys? or such as are lovely and of good report,—doves and lambs, creatures pure and peaceable, patient to serve and gentle of spirit? Remember, remember, that what a man soweth—be it hemlock or be it wheat—that, and nothing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... time with an impious hand has broken his aged father's neck, let him eat garlic, more baneful than hemlock. Oh! the hardy bowels of the mowers! What poison is this that rages in my entrails? Has viper's blood, infused in these herbs, deceived me? Or has Canidia dressed this baleful food? When Medea, beyond all the [other] argonauts, admired their handsome leader, ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace

... study of Canadian evergreens, choosing spruce, balsam, and cedar, if available, or substitute hemlock ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education

... always been a plains' tribe. The rugged and white-capped heights interested Wonota because they were strange to her. Here, too, were primeval forests visible from the windows of the car. Hemlock and spruce in black masses clothed the mountainsides, while bare-limbed groves of other wood filled the valleys and the sweeps of ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson

... hemlock!" ejaculated the little man, "you are not lacking in impudence. Perhaps your Sauciness is not quite aware how things are distributed in this world?" saying which he lifted his pointed shoes and began ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... cannot be found; you must happen upon it! Hidden behind its rugged red rocks and hemlock-covered hills, it lies waiting for something to happen. It has its Trading Station, to and from which the Canadian Indians paddle their canoes—sometimes a dugout—bearing rare, luscious blue berries invitingly packed in small baskets with their own ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock

... like that Barney seemed to be hewing asunder not only the sturdy fibres of oak and hemlock, but the terrible sinews of frost and winter, and many a tree seemed to rear itself over him threatening stiffly like an old man of death. Only by fierce contest, as it were, could he keep himself alive, but he had a certain delight in working in the swamp during those awful arctic days. ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman



Words linked to "Hemlock" :   black hemlock, coniferous tree, Conium maculatum, spotted hemlock, hemlock water dropwort, Tsuga, Conium, Tsuga caroliniana, genus Conium, Tsuga heterophylla, west coast hemlock, wood, Tsuga mertensiana, mountain hemlock, Canadian hemlock, douglas hemlock, western hemlock, conifer



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