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Mignonette   Listen
noun
Mignonette  n.  (Bot.) A plant (Reseda odorata) having greenish flowers with orange-colored stamens, and exhaling a delicious fragrance. In Africa it is a low shrub, but further north it is usually an annual herb.
Mignonette pepper, coarse pepper.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mignonette" Quotes from Famous Books



... second of those eternal days he shut himself in the library. The unfilled lamp had gone out, leaving a trail of smoke in the air. The sprigs of mignonette and rosemary, with which the room was sprinkled every day, were unrenewed, and scented the gloom with close odours of decay. A costly manuscript of Theocritus was tumbled in disorder on the floor. Hermas sank into a chair like a man in whom the very spring of being is broken. Through the darkness ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke

... diamond cross from principle, he was the very poet of a passion flower, such holy mysteries as its opening petals disclosed to him! To Lucy Grey, who wore pensive curls, and had a sweet voice, he presented constantly fragrant little sprays of mignonette, cunning moss baskets with a suspicion of heliotrope peeping out, and crushed myrtle blossoms between the leaves of her most exquisitely bound books. To Katy Lessing, who rowed a small green boat somewhere up the Hudson in the summer, he confided ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... the strongest; that the living dead men had thrown behind them every canon of the world which had cast them out; and that I had to depend for my own life on my strength and vigilance alone. The crew of the ill-fated Mignonette are the only men who would understand my frame of mind. "At present," I argued to myself, "I am strong and a match for six of these wretches. It is imperatively necessary that I should, for my own sake, keep both health ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... familiar to us from the numerous representations and allusions of his friends. It is easy to fancy the recluse-poet sitting in his college-chambers in the old quadrangle of Pembroke Hall. His windows are ornamented with mignonette and choice flowers in China vases, but outside may be discerned some iron-work intended to be serviceable as a fire-escape, for he has a horror of fire. His furniture is neat and select; his books, rather for use than show, are disposed around him. He has a harpsichord in the room. In the ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray

... from the Bishop, who was an important person, and much looked up to. She did her best to stop crying, but it was hard work. When they reached home, the sight of the pansies perking their yellow and purple faces up to meet her, renewed her grief. There was her mignonette seed not yet sprouted. If she had known that they were going away, she would not have planted any. There, worst of all, was the corner where she had planned such a nice surprise for her mother,—"A. F." in green parsley ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge

... that part of Heaven wherein were his grandmother's illusions: and this was counted for righteousness in Jurgen. That part of Heaven smelt of mignonette, and a starling ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell

... answer at once. He was lying back again, staring out at the respectable imitation of a lawn, at rose beds, carpeted with over-blown mignonette, and a lone untidy tamarisk that flung a spiky shadow on the grass. And the eye of his mind was picturing the loveliest lawn of his acquaintance, with its noble twin beeches and a hammock slung between—an ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... dwelling itself, with its low ceilings and long oak beams and dim colouring and quaint furniture, had a certain austere charm, a quiet dignity of its own. The sunny air came softly in through wide-open latticed windows, bringing with it the scent of mignonette. There had never been a breath of air in the house in Pembridge Square. Ole Scorpio, that friend of my youth, looked peaceful and complacent in a little recess in which his soft colouring and perfect figure showed to great ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley

... is Thea," she answers and her voice is weary, gentle and a little hoarse. A caressing shimmer as of faintly blue velvet, an insinuating fragrance as of dying mignonette—both lie in this voice. The voice fills my heart. But I won't be taken in, least of all by some trite ghost which is in the end only a vision of one's ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann

... suffice it to say, it was France and June. An omnibus was waiting at the station where we dismounted: it carried us near, but not to, our destination. After leaving it we walked through the streets of a low-roofed village, then followed a path bordered with wild mignonette and apple trees that wound up the side of a hill covered with vineyards. A couple of chattering magpies ran before us, an invisible cuckoo was heard between snatches of Italian melody warbled by the tenor sotto voce and the little company ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... nest hid in it. Look at this mound of blooming pinks, This balm, these mountain daisies; And can you guess what grandma thinks The sweetest thing she raises? You're wrong, it's not the violet, Nor yet this pure white lily: It is this straggling mignonette,— I know you think it silly,— But hear my story; then, perhaps, You'll freely grant me pardon. (See how the spiders set their traps All over grandma's garden.) Long since I had a little friend, Dear as your darling sister, And she from over sea, did send This token, ere Death kissed her: 'Twas ...
— The Nursery, No. 107, November, 1875, Vol. XVIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various

... sensibility, the roses with wine-flushed cheeks laughed a welcome from afar, the night-stocks sighed—with myrtles and laurels I was not then acquainted, for they had no bright blossoms to attract me, but with mignonette (we have since quarreled) I was then on the most intimate terms. I am speaking of the palace gardens at Dusseldorf, where I used to lie on the grass reverently listening to Monsieur Le Grand as he told me of the great Emperor's heroism, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various

... strange sight, then, in America; a beautiful old sun-dial drowsed in a tangle of nasturtiums. A delicate, dreamy humming led my eyes to a group of beehives (always dear to me because of the Miel du Chamounix and our happy, sweet-toothed boyhood!) and near a border of poppies, marigold and hardy mignonette a great hound lay, vigilant beside a large, shallow basket, shaded by a gnarled wistaria clump. The basket was filled with something white, and as we stood in the door, a woman dressed in trailing white, with knots of rich blue here and there, came through a green gate in the side hedge ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell

... pitcher of mignonette, In a tenement's highest casement: Queer sort of a flower-pot—yet That pitcher of mignonette Is a garden in heaven set To the little sick child in the basement— The pitcher of mignonette, In the ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow

... the calm delights of sauntering and lying on the cliffs, watching "the wrinkled sea" that "beneath them crawls," breathing the air that has no suggestion of ocean in it save its freshness, so entirely is all odor of brine and sea-weed overborne by the fragrance of flowers, notably that of the mignonette, sweet-pea and nasturtium, making little excursions on foot or coach-top along the coast, or to the charming inland famous spots,—a thing very grievous to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various

... pleasantly accustomed to the frequent rustle of a silk dress, as its wearer sweeps across from room to room, now carrying flowers to the barbarous peach-bloom salon, now entering the dining-room to open its casements and let in the scent of mignonette and sweet-briar, anon bringing plants from the staircase window to place in the sun at the open ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... explained how—that she and Brian were alone together in this very room, the afternoon sunlight shining on them—for in spite of Lady Palliser's prophecy the day had been lovely—the scent of stocks and mignonette and sweet-peas blowing in upon them from the old-fashioned garden at the back of the Abbey. They had strayed to this spot with the others; and the others had strayed off and left them, Ida looking absently at the ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... tumbler. Sprinkle a very small quantity of fine salt on each layer of the flowers, cover the jar up tight, and place it in a south window, exposed to the heat of the sun. In the course of a fortnight a fragrant oil may be squeezed out of the cotton. Rose leaves, mignonette, and sweet-scented clover, make fine perfumes, ...
— The American Housewife • Anonymous

... true, And men believe thine lips they kiss.' I did not call you "Dear" or "Love," 'I think, till after Frank was born.' 'That fault I cannot well remove; The rhymes'—but Frank now blew his horn, And Walter bark'd, on hands and knees, At Baby in the mignonette, And all made, full-cry, for the trees Where Felix and his Wife were set. Again disturb'd, (crickets have cares!) True to their annual use they rose, To offer thanks at Evening Prayers In three ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore

... who are about commencing another day's pilgrimage of human life. A pleasant air is stirring at this time; and the freshness arising from the watering of the footpath—but more particularly the fragrance from innumerable bouquets, with mignonette, rose trees, and lilacs—extended in fair array—is altogether quite charming and singularly characteristic. But my present business is with prints. You see them, hanging in the open air—framed and not framed—for some quarter of a mile: with ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... o'clock in a general flight, when the sportsmen came home, and the guests went to their rooms. An hour afterward all these people met in the large drawing-room; the ladies in low-bodied evening dresses; the gentlemen in dress-coats and white satin waistcoats, with a sprig of mignonette and a white rose in their buttonholes. After dinner, they danced in the drawing-rooms, where a mad waltz would even restore energy to the gentlemen tired out by six ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... mignonette were raised from purchased seed, and several of them were placed under separate nets. Of these some became loaded with spontaneously self-fertilised capsules; others produced a few, and others not a single one. It must not be supposed that these latter plants produced ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin

... your hands with grains becoming gradually smaller, until they dwindle to the size of impalpable dust particles; assuming that you treat them all in the same way, and that from every one of them in a few days you obtain a definite crop—may be clover, it may be mustard, it may be mignonette, it may be a plant more minute than any of these, smallness of the particles, or of the plants that spring from them, does not affect the validity of the conclusion. Without a shadow of misgiving you would conclude that the powder must have ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... to forget The world and its disasters, And fill the mind with mignonette, Clove-pinks, ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore

... forgotten perfume and associations webby with age stir through the lethargy of years. Memories faded as flowers lift their heads. The frail scent of mignonette roused with the dust of letters half a century old, and eyes too dim and watery to show the glaze of tears turn backward fifty years upon the mignonette-bowered scene of love's young dream. A steel drawing-room car rolling through the clean and heavy stench of ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... anticipated the pleasure of meeting him, and the first news Dr. Watson gave me was that of his death. He was buried at Dowlish, a village where his family have a vault. Captain Grant, a fine fellow, put a wreath or immortelle upon the coffin as it passed us in church. It was composed of mignonette and wild violets." ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... baby by any means," and he looked with undisguised admiration upon the maiden, with all the mystic grace and perfect development of her young womanhood. "It is a woman, a perfect little woman, a fairer a sweeter, my own mignonette, than any girl ever seen in this part of the plains since ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins

... blue hare-bells hide, And myrtle plots with dew-fall ever wet, Gay tiger-lilies flammulate and pied, Sometime on pathway borders neatly set, Now blossom through the brake on either side, Where heliotrope and weedy mignonette, With vines in bloom and flower-bearing trees, Mingle their incense all to ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger

... in the garden picking a bouquet for the table, and Wally went to help her. She gave him a smile that made his heart do a trick, and when he bent over to help her break a piece of mignonette, ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston

... and his colleagues were to return from their mission to Elmstoke Rectory; but it was much pleasanter in Mrs. Linnet's parlour than in the bar of the Red Lion. Through the open window came the scent of mignonette and honeysuckle; the grass-plot in front of the house was shaded by a little plantation of Gueldres roses, syringas, and laburnums; the noise of looms and carts and unmelodious voices reached the ear simply as an agreeable murmur, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot

... first to disappear. In the days of great stretches of moist, deep woodland it may well have flourished. In my town it is rare and any year I may find it for the last time. On many counts I would not miss it, and yet that faint, refined odor which somehow always reminds me of ghosts of mignonette, of tender, almost forgotten memories once more stirred, gives a gentle melancholy to the woodland that all the glories of October will not be ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

... during courtship. I have elsewhere[44] pointed out that decorative colouring and sweet-scentedness may replace one another in Lepidoptera as well as in flowers, for just as some modestly coloured flowers (mignonette and violet) have often a strong perfume, while strikingly coloured ones are sometimes quite devoid of fragrance, so we find that the most beautiful and gaily-coloured of our native Lepidoptera, the species of Vanessa, ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel

... wind bowed them before it, and they were a shining, silken cloth. The poppies were a larger sort than those in the wheatfields, and of a very glorious crimson. In among the grasses was yellow coltsfoot; among the pebbles were sowthistle, mignonette, pink bindweed, and great patches of storksbill. Many noted the beauty of these flowers, a scene so un-Mesopotamian in its brightness. We were tasting of the joy and life of springtide in happier latitudes, a wine long praetermitted to our lips; and among us were those ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson

... think of putting mignonette-boxes outside the windows, for the younger children to sleep in by-and-by, I am afraid we should give your servant the cramp if we hardily undertook to lodge him. But in case you should decide to bring one, he ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens

... as the fact that bright colours in flowers do not attract insects in many cases, but much more inconspicuous flowers if they have a scent (mignonette, for example) do; passing over such a fact as that afforded by the violet, which (as some may not be aware) has two kinds of flower, one scented and of a beautiful colour, the other green and inconspicuous, and it is the ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell

... published in 1869, page 439.) yesterday in flower, and had to despatch it at once. I suppose some of your assistants will be able to make the genus out without great trouble. I have done little in experiment of late, but I find that mignonette is absolutely sterile with pollen from the same plant. Any one who saw stamen after stamen bending upwards and shedding pollen over the stigmas of the same flower would declare that the structure was an admirable contrivance for self-fertilisation. How utterly mysterious it is that there should ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... Avenue, as she was rested by the integrity of the Scottish Rite Temple, she loved the city as she loved no one save Hugh. She encountered negro shanties turned into studios, with orange curtains and pots of mignonette; marble houses on New Hampshire Avenue, with butlers and limousines; and men who looked like fictional explorers and aviators. Her days were swift, and she knew that in her folly of running away she had found the courage ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... chestnuts, and whelks, like great snails, sticking out their horns and crawling over each other in a lively way. A strange medley! The flowers are lovely; you can buy a big bunch of violets for a son, and sou is the peasant word for a halfpenny. Gladiolus, anemones, roses, and mignonette fill the air with fragrance. It is a beautiful ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton

... was a regular hothouse bouquet, of tea-rosebuds, scentless heath, and smilax; the second was just a handful of sweet-peas and mignonette, with a few cheerful pansies, and one fragrant little rose in the middle; the third, a small posy of scarlet verbenas, white feverfew, and ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott

... outside of the lawn at Mrs. Rose's many of the Umbellate tribe, that in case sun or rain should be too powerful their Umbels might be useful, and, indeed, many other plants were mixed among them. Mrs. Mignonette, the milliner, a sweet little creature, was there to learn fashions; she had brought with her one of her favourites, Venus's Looking-glass, whom she found of great service in her shop. The Nettles, Thistles, and Furze were very troublesome. The Thrifts were also on the outside, ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas

... and correct surroundings, and the Mr. Foxleys having finished their breakfast up-stairs in the public dining-room—a bare, almost ugly apartment, devoid of anything in furniture or appointments to make it homelike, except a box of mignonette set in the side-window, looked longingly out at the little paved court-yard beneath. They had had the most delicious rasher of ham, eggs sans peur et sans reproche, some new and mysterious kind of breakfast cake, ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison

... from the valley of the Almo, and passes over a kind of plateau. It is hemmed in on either side by high ugly walls, shaggy with a profusion of plants which affect such situations. The wild mignonette hangs out its pale yellow spikes of blossoms, but without the fragrance for which its garden sister is so remarkable; and the common pellitory, a near ally of the nettle, which haunts all old ruins, clings in great masses to the crevices, its leaves and ignoble blossoms white ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... creepers; but they scarcely glanced at the actual building, so strongly was their attention riveted on the one window before them. It was surrounded by an unusually broad framework, curiously and elaborately carved, and black as polished ebony. Flowers grew all about it,—sweet peas, mignonette, and large purple pansies—while red and white climbing roses rioted in untrained profusion over its wide sill. Above it was a quaintly built dovecote, where some of the strutting fan-tailed inhabitants were perched, swelling ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... it was that met their eyes—one that all the four appreciated to the full: a long, low room with a French window standing wide open to the garden just a step or two below. On the evening breeze wafted in the scent of mignonette and flowers, and the low sleepy clucking of the hens, about to go to roost. Near the window stood the table, with a silver kettle boiling merrily on its stand, and fruit and flowers and pretty china in abundance, all looking as dainty and tempting as heart could desire. There ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... fish, which will delight you; au reste, he is just where he was: he has heard something about a journey to Haughton, to the great Cu(314) of Hauculeo, but it don't seem fixed, unless he hears farther. Did he tell you the Prices and your aunt Cosby had dined here from Hampton Court? The mignonette beauty looks mighty well in his grandmother's jointure. The Memoires of last year are quite finished, but I shall add some pages of notes, that will not want anecdotes. Discontents, of the nature of those ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... of Sharon and stocky syringas, and other bushes and climbers, had entwined and confused their sprays and branches, till in places they formed an impenetrable mass. In other places, and even in the midst of this overgrown thicket, jessamine stars peeped out, lilies and violets grew half smothered, mignonette ran along where it could; even carnations and pinks were to be seen, in unhappy situations, and daisies and larkspur and scarlet geraniums, lupins and sweet peas, and I know not what more old-fashioned flowers, showed their fair ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner

... the window, and leaned out. What a lovely smell! There was a long bed of mignonette and heliotrope just below, but, besides the fragrance from this, the air was full of all the sweet scents which belong to an early summer morning in the country. What nice, curious noises, too, all mixed ...
— Thistle and Rose - A Story for Girls • Amy Walton

... Nearly all white flowers so affect me and many Indian flowers with heavy, almost pungent scents. (All the flower scents are quite unconnected with me with any individual.) Tuberose, lilies of the valley, and frangipani flowers have an almost intoxicating effect on me. Violets, roses, mignonette, and many others, though very delicious, give me no sexual feeling at all. For this reason the line, 'The lilies and languors of virtue for the roses and raptures of vice' seems all wrong to me. The lily seems to me a very sensual flower, while the rose and its scent ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... only for the Gloire de Dijons and the La Frances and the velvety Jacks, the rest over-ran the tables and the floor in anything that would hold them. The place rioted with the joy and the passion of roses, for buying and selling. There were other flowers, nasturtiums, cornbottles, mignonette, but they had a diminished insignificant look in their tied-up bunches beside the triumph of the roses. Farther on, beyond the cage of the money-changer, the country people were hoarse with crying their vegetables, in two green rows, and beyond that where the jostling ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... the latest out, which I find by the fashion books is Mignonette trimmed with Chinese Pheasant. Buttons up the back of the sleeves, with rubies and amethysts. Let the fichu be Eidelweiss; trim the fan and slippers with the same, and use dandelions and calla lilies for the bouquets. Not a button less than forty on the ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon

... and hear no clamour louder than the Church or Convent bells, or the dirge which the wind wails over them through the melancholy Cypress and the moaning Pine. The broad old belt of short flowery turf at the base, the Violet, the Gilliflower, and the vermilion spotted Mignonette, on their breast, and the chaplet of wilding shrubs upon their brows, give them a charm in the most common-place observation. With me, truant as I have been to the Classic page, it seemed a natural ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various

... declared that I was quite a poet, and the beehive was duly installed near the flower plots, that the delicate creatures might have the full benefit of the honeysuckle and mignonette. My spirits began to rise. I bought three different treatises on the rearing of bees, and also one or two new patterns of hives, and proposed to rear my bees on the most approved model. I charged all the establishment to let me know when there was ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... most enchanting spot. A red-tiled bungalow is built about a courtyard with cloisters and a fountain, while vines and flowers fill the air with the most delicious perfume of heliotrope, mignonette, and jasmine. Beyond the big living-room extends a terrace with boxes of deep and pale pink geraniums against a blue sea, that might be the Bay of Naples, except that Vesuvius is lacking. It is so ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane

... what is most ignorantly and malignantly denominated dirt—one week's earth—washed off the feet of a pretty young girl on a Saturday night, at a single sitting in the little rivulet that runs almost round about her father's hut, as would have served him to raise his mignonette in, or his crop of cresses. How beautifully glowed the crimson-snow of the singing creature's new-washed feet! First, as they shone almost motionless beneath the lucid waters—and then, fearless of the hard bent and rough roots of the heather, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... being indistinguishable, was somewhat soothing. Frank felt as the poet Lucretius did when from the security of a sheltered nook on the side of a cliff he watched boats tossing on the sea. The sense of neighbouring strain and struggle added to the completeness of his own repose. A bed of mignonette scented the air agreeably. Some white roses glimmered faintly in the twilight Far off, a grey still shadow, lay the bay. Frank's cigarette dropped, half smoked, from his fingers. ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham

... rested there, the room was filled with the strong, sweet odour of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost seemed a living visitant. And the man cried aloud: "What, dear?" as if he had been called, and sprang up and faced about. The rich odour clung to him and ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry

... softer skies were as blue over Dalton as in the wide fields without, and its footsteps as bloom-bringing in Miss Lucinda's garden as in mead or forest. Now Monsieur Leclerc came to her aid again at odd minutes, and set her flower-beds with mignonette borders, and her vegetable-garden with salad herbs of new and flourishing kinds. Yet not even the sweet season seemed to hurry the catastrophe that we hope, dearest reader, thy tender eyes have long seen impending. No, for this quaint alliance a quainter Cupid waited,—the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various

... honesty, Be there to welcome you and me! And what though the toil of the farm be stopped And the tireless plans of the place be dropped, While the prayerful master's knees are set In beds of pansy and mignonette And lily and aster and columbine, Offered in love, as ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley

... usual evening pilgrimage. I entered the flower garden by a little iron gate, and walked slowly amongst my roses. Here the air was full of delicate scents—lavender insistent; mignonette faint, but penetrating; homely wall-flowers, sweet even as the roses themselves. Night insects now were buzzing around me; the bushes took to themselves phantasmal shapes; even the path, very narrow and overgrown, was hard to find. I filled my hand with flowers and made my way slowly ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... put out the little sofas and jump over them, King Charles's beauties looking down on us from the wall so grand and gracious. And there was always mignonette and nemophila in window-boxes, so sweet in the evening air? And the honey? Oh, Harry, do you remember ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... this also Miss La Sarthe agreed. So Miss Roberta joyfully found Halcyone out upon the second terrace and imparted to her the good news. They would arrange flowers in the epergne, she suggested—a few sweet williams and mignonette and a foxglove or two. A pretty posy fixed in sand, such as she remembered there always was in their gala days. Halcyone was enchanted ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn

... was placed comfortably in it, when he seated himself at her feet. If they went through the garden, the carriage was stopped at Jack's favourite beds of flowers, for he had a remarkable fancy, like a cat, to enjoy their perfume; mignonette being always a source of delight. On one occasion, in Dublin, he was lost; sought for, and met in the arms of a policeman, who was carrying him home. The man said he had actually delivered himself up at the station, for he ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee

... dark foliage of perennial lupins, tossing up a white spray of flowers, and then it seemed as if every old-fashioned flower of white, or with a white variety, ran riot down to a border of sweet alyssum. Above all the fragrance came the unmistakable sweetness of mignonette. ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various

... had just finished watering her sweet-peas and mignonette; had inspected each of the four standard roses beside the front gate in search of green-fly; had caught a snail sallying forth to dine late upon her larkspurs, and called to Cai Tamblyn to destroy it; had, in short, performed all her ritual for the cool of ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... she said, "a little gentle breeze is coming in at the window, and the roses and pinks and mignonette will smell more sweetly still as the night advances. I will not light the lamp yet, for there is splendid moonlight, and it is such a witching hour. I can make the cocoa beautifully by moonlight. It will be ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade

... ornamental. Henna is prepared by reducing the leaves to powder, and when used is made into a pasty mass with water and spread on the part to be dyed, being allowed to remain for twelve hours. The plant is known in the West Indies as Jamaica Mignonette. ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders

... have the springs, the rills, The mignonette, the daffodils, The Eglantine, the harebell on the hills, The trembling poplar, sighing low And slow. . . . ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)

... mould sufficed to nourish a few stocks and carnations, a rose or two, and a mass of mignonette, which possibly, like the children of the poor, grew up sturdy and healthy from some of the adverse circumstances of their condition. It was a very favourite spot with her; and if she came hither in her happiest moments, it was here also her saddest ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... old fashioned flowers native to English and Scottish soil. Between the two gardens a thick row of tall, splendid sunflowers made a stately hedge. Then came larkspur, peonies, stocks, and sweet-williams, verbenas and mignonette, with borders of lobelia and heliotrope. Along the fence were sweet peas, for ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor

... Heliotrope Hollyhocks Honeysuckle Horse-radish Hyacinths Hydrangeas Hyssop Indian Cress Iris Kidney Beans Lavender Layering Leeks Leptosiphons Lettuce Lobelias London Pride Lychnis, Double Marigold Marjoram Manures Marvel of Peru Mesembryanthemums Mignonette Mint Mushroom Mustard Narcissus Nemophilas OEnothera bifrons Onions Paeonies Parsnip Parsley Peaches Pea-haulm Pears Peas Pelargoniums Perennials Persian Iris Petunias Phlox Pigs Pinks Planting Plums Polyanthus Potatoes Privet Pruning Propagate by cuttings Pyracantha Radishes Ranunculus Raspberries ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various

... banale maison bourgeoise. Gradually I became reconciled to it, on account of its greater convenience, and I even came to like it when the vines and wisteria and golden nasturtiums hid the ugly bare walls, and the fragrance of mignonette and roses and petunias was wafted into the rooms looking over the garden, and that of wild thyme and honeysuckle into those which looked over the fields; when the tall acacias began to shoot upwards straight and graceful from their velvety green ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... idealisation of that fine tree. Its leaves are a softer, brighter, deeper green, and in due season (August) it is covered— not ostentatiously like the real mango, with great spikes of bloom, looking each like a gigantic head of mignonette—but with small yellow-green flowers tucked away under the leaves, filling the air with a soft sweet perfume, and then falling on to the bare shaded ground beneath to make a deep-piled carpet. I do not know whether it is a mango ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... I danced till my legs ached with women old and girls young; but how could I remember how they were dressed and what their style of coiffure was? I know that silk rustled and there was a perfume of eau de Cologne and mignonette and my heart expanded and blazed while I whirled like a top with a sweet lady in ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson

... her house are two long, boarded beds of old-fashioned flowers, mignonette and petunias chiefly, and over the small, very white door with its shiny knob, creeps a white clematis vine. Just inside the hall-door you will discover a bright, clean, oval rag rug, which prepares ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson

... glad, so glad! For father and Lorez will never say so. I think I shall like you, Jarvis.' And, leaning on a box of mignonette, she considered him gravely with ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... it as it can be of anything in its rheumatic state, and in another minute we are all of us out of the church, and Whity-brown has locked it up. Another minute or little more, and, in the neighbouring churchyard- -not the yard of that church, but of another—a churchyard like a great shabby old mignonette box, with two trees in it and one tomb- -I meet Whity-brown, in his private capacity, fetching a pint of beer for his dinner from the public-house in the corner, where the keys of the rotting fire-ladders are kept and were never asked for, and where there is a ragged, white-seamed, out-at-elbowed ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... Huddled along the stone wall's shady side, The sheep show white, as if a snowdrift still Defied the dog-star. Through the open door A drowsy smell of flowers-gray heliotrope, And white sweet clover, and shy mignonette— Comes faintly in, and silent chorus lends To the pervading symphony of peace. No time is this for hands long over-worn To task their strength; and (unto Him be praise Who giveth quietness!) the stress and strain Of years that ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... is!" and David nodded, and smiled himself, as he handed her two or three of the finest, as if it was as natural a thing as to put a sprig of mignonette in ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott

... and through them one saw the rippling of the rich green foliage in the park; the large iron balconies were filled with flowers, fragrant mignonette, lemon-scented verbenas, purple heliotropes, all growing in rich profusion. The spray of the little scented fountain sparkled in the sun. Every one agreed that there was no other room in London like the grand ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)

... Beth was alone in a sunny sitting-room at the back of the house, looking out into grounds common to the whole square. It was about tea-time. The windows were wide open, the sunblinds were drawn down outside, and the warm air, fragrant with mignonette, streamed in over the window boxes. Angelica had given this room up to Beth, and here she worked or rested; read, wrote, or reflected, as she felt inclined; soothed rather than disturbed by the far-off sounds of the city, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... the accident, which fortunately did not occur. When I finally grew tired of waiting I stepped through a lattice gate, always hanging aslant and always creaky, into a garden plot running along close by the skittle-alley and parallel with it. It was a genuine peasant's garden, with touch-me-nots and mignonette in bloom, and in one place the mallows grew so tall that they formed a lane. Then when the sun went down behind the forest the Golm, which lay to the west, was bathed in red light, and the metal ball on its tall pillar looked down, like a sphere of gold, upon ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... posies, that were mother's pride and joy, In the sunny little garden where I wandered when a boy! Oh, the morning-glories twining 'mongst the shining sunflowers tall, And the clematis a-tangle in the angle of the wall! How the mignonette's sweet blooming was perfuming all the walks, Where the hollyhocks stood proudly with their blossom-dotted stalks; While the old-maids' pinks were nodding groups of gossips, here and there, And the bluebells swung so lightly ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln

... marbles, alone, shooting the taw with a cunnythumb. A wise tabby, a blinking sphinx, watched from her warm sill. Pity to disturb them. Mohammed cut a piece out of his mantle not to wake her. Open it. And once I played marbles when I went to that old dame's school. She liked mignonette. Mrs Ellis's. And Mr? He opened the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... ascending the broad steps she put her arm around her, but in the apartment, whence the noonday sun had been shut out and they were greeted with a cool atmosphere perfumed with the fragrance of the bouquets of roses and mignonette which Eva and the gardener had set in jars on the mantelpiece early in the morning, the abbess drew her darling closer to her side, saying, "The world is again showing you its most disagreeable face, my poor child, ere you bid ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... of mignonette In a tenement's highest casement: Queer sort of a flower-pot—yet That pitcher of mignonette Is a garden in heaven set, To the little sick child in the basement— The pitcher of mignonette, In the tenement's ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... room, jars of flowers everywhere, flowers that had caught most passion and delight from the sun,—scarlet and purple fuchsias, heavy-breathed heliotrope. Yet Grey bent longest over her own flower, that every childlike soul loves best,—mignonette. She chose some of its brown sprigs to fasten in her hair, the fragrance was so clean and caressing. Paul Blecker, even at the other end of the field, and in the gathering twilight, caught a glimpse of his wife's face pressed against the pane. It was altered: the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... Monsieur Benoit, and withered old Mere Michele, who did the weeding and helped Rose once a week in the laundry. There were such pretty trellises, covered with roses and clematis; such masses of bright flowers and sweet mignonette; such tidy gravel walks and clipped box edges; such floods of sunshine; so many butterflies and lizards basking in it; the birds singing with excess of joy. I used to fancy they sang in gratitude to the dear old Marquise, who never forgot ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... woman of over forty, short and extremely plump, and still attractive with her small features and pretty smile swamped in fat. She was a blonde, with green, limpid eyes; and, fairly well dressed in a sober, nicely fitting mignonette gown, she looked at once pleasant, modest, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... have several plants of Mignonette in it, grown for the especial purpose of cutting from. This is one of the most fragrant flowers ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford

... and neighbors. They mean to live nice,—he and Savira; and she has pretty, tasty ways; there'll be white curtains, and plants blooming in her windows, you may make sure; she's always had 'em in that little up-stairs dress-making room of hers; and boxes of mignonette and petunias on the ledges; and birds singing in a great summer cage swung out against the wall. She's one of the kind that reaches out, and can't be kept in; and she knows her gifts, and is willing ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... the jungle toward the foot of the hill were whole groves of the fragrant pandanus, ferns of infinite variety, and a species of wild mignonette with a perfume like that of commingled strawberries and lemon. Now and then we paused beneath the thick green foliage of the Magnolia grandiflora, as it towered in stately grandeur above its sister flowers, acknowledged queen of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various

... the silver sea! These are the gems of the universal gallery, the common heritage of man, the property of the humblest who has eyes to see, and as free as the air we breathe. We have our conservatories and spend our thousands upon orchids, but which of nature's smiles ranks with the rose and the mignonette, the daisy and the bluebell, and the sweet forget-me-not blooming for all earth's children, and which grow upon the window-sill of the artisan and which the laborer ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... decked with flowers in every available corner, and all these flowers were fresh and beautifully arranged. They were country flowers—and of course roses, roses everywhere. There were also great bowls of mignonette and large glass ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade

... the dance at the farm-house, which was at the other extremity of the garden, the monotonous murmur of the fountain below, and the fragrance of the jasmine and roses that curtained the window, mingled with that of the mignonette, sweet-basil, and other plants that ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera

... lying in her upper chamber in the old farmhouse, paper and pens at her side, on a little table, where Betty, her faithful sister, had placed a little jar of monthly roses and mignonette. Life was returning to her, and she rose from her couch, and throwing a shawl over her head, without telling Betty, she crept feebly downstairs and went out into the orchard, the boughs of the old apple trees, heavy with their rosy and russet load, touching her as she passed. Bryda went through the ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall

... was trim, like Ould Michael himself, set out in rectangular beds, by gravel-walks and low-cut hedges of "old man." It was filled with all the dear old-fashioned flowers—Sweet William and Sweet Mary, bachelor's buttons, pansies and mignonette, old country daisies and snapdragons and lilies of the valley and, in the centre of the beds, great masses of peonies, while all around, peeping from under the hedges of old man, were poppies of every hue. Beyond the garden there ...
— Michael McGrath, Postmaster • Ralph Connor

... shelves shut by doors into the wall, which the old usage of the household tradition called awmries (armoires). The furniture was reasonably modern, but not obtrusively so. There was a delicious recess in the deep window, with a seat and a table in it, and a box of mignonette along the sill. It looked out into the little high-walled entrance court, and beyond to the wall of the warehouse opposite; and the roar of the great city thoroughfare came like the distant surging of the ocean. Seldom had young maiden's bower given more satisfaction. ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... flushed with such color as never yet was woven on a Persian loom or blended in a wizard's diadem. The gold and silver of great daisies gleamed in the grass; pimpernel blue and red, mallow red and white, yellow spurge and green mignonette, blue borage and pink asphodel and parti-colored convolvulus, snap-dragon and marigold, violet and dandelion, and that crimson flower which shepherds call Pig's Face and poets call Beard of Jove for its golden change in autumn—all these and a thousand other children of the spring lay at the girl's ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... the loveliness of a bright day passes into her face; a soft sweet perfume is an inexhaustible pleasure to her; I have seen her take delight the whole day long in the scent breathed forth by some mignonette; and, after one of those rainy mornings that bring out all the soul of the flowers and give indescribable freshness and brightness to the day, she seems to overflow with gladness like the green world around her. If it is close and hot, and there is thunder in the air, La Fosseuse feels ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac

... eighty-four. The day was as sunny and warm as any of the days of its predecessor Augustus the Gorgeous, but yet there was an autumnal feeling in the air which made itself felt even in streets where there were no red and yellow Virginia creepers, no square gardens with long trails of mignonette and banks of flowering nasturtiums. In fact, you cannot anywhere escape the autumnal feeling, which begins about the middle of September. It makes old people think with sadness that the grasshopper is a burden in the land, and that the almond-tree is about to ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant

... had set, Upon the narrow casement-edge, A long green box of mignonette And you were leaning on ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... in answer to SISTER SNOUT, that a window-box may be very prettily arranged with nasturtiums (climbing ones) at each corner, and Lobelia speciosa. Mignonette would make a border, or violets and sweet alyssum placed alternately. Red geraniums should be placed behind the smaller plants, and thus a very pretty box may be made with good, hardy plants.—Answers also received from IOLANTHE, CHERUB, H. B. ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... out upon some stone court. Even as he watched, a bee came blundering up to his window, hesitated for a moment, and then went whirring off again, and through all the sun and glitter and the sparkle of the little river there was a scent of pinks, and mignonette, and even, although it could not really be so, of the gorse. The sky was a pale white blue, so pale that it was scarcely any colour at all and a few puffs of clouds, dead white like the purest smoke, hovered in dancing procession, above the purple wood. The sun ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole

... big enough for anybody to visit me in! You can go off to your fashionable resorts in the winter, if you want to—I can spare you better, then. But this summer! Jo, think of the moonlight nights, with the odour of mignonette coming up to the ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond

... thus clearly brought under our fundamental canon. It is the perception of this unity in diversity, of this similarity of plan, for instance, in all tree-like forms, however diverse,—the sprig of mignonette, the rose-bush, the fir, the cedar, the fan-shaped elm, the oval rock-maple, the columnar hickory, the dense and slender shaft of the poplar,—which charms the eye of those who have never heard in what algebraic or arithmetical terms this unity may be defined, in what geometrical or architectural ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... admiration and envy of the rest of "the Row." It certainly did look very gay and pretty. There were bright China-asters, sweet-scented stocks, French marigolds, rose bushes laden with blossoms, little clusters of candytuft, Virginia-stock, mignonette, and many other flowers, contrasting well in colour, and grouped in such ...
— Charlie Scott - or, There's Time Enough • Unknown

... white stars of the jasmine which clustered thickly round the house sent out a delicious fragrance, and there were a dozen other scents on the soft and balmy air, as though the sleeping stocks and carnations and mignonette breathed sweetly in ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes

... he showed her attention? And she let him caress her,' said sly Mignonette. 'And I used to see it and blush for her folly. The silly thing thinks he will come ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... The fairy-tale cottage was whitewashed and its broad eaved roof was thatched. Hollyhocks stood in haughty splendour against its walls and on either side its path. The latticed windows were diamond-paned and their inside ledges filled with flourishing fuchsias and trailing white campanula, and mignonette. The same flowers grew thick in the crowded blooming garden. And there were nests in the hawthorn hedge. And there was a ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... raptures. Young Henry Bright is a very enthusiastic young gentleman, full of life and emotion; and he very politely brought me from his gardens a radiant bouquet of flowers, among which the heliotrope and moss-roses and all other roses and mignonette make delicious fragrance. Yesterday Miss Lynch sent me a bunch of moss-rose buds—nine! Just think of seeing together nine moss-rose buds! Henry Bright brought the "Westminster Review" to Mr. Hawthorne, and said he should bring him all the new books. Mrs. Train called to ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... Whitelamb lay in his wet clothes with his face buried in a heap of mown grass. He had failed, and shamefully, after preparing himself for the interview by pacing (it seemed to him, for hours) the box-bordered walks which Molly had planted with lilies and hollyhocks, pinks and sweet-williams and mignonette. It was high June now, and the garden breaking into glory. He had tasted all its mingled odours this morning while he followed the paths in search of Hetty; and when at length he had found her under the great filbert-tree, they seemed to float about her and hedge ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... garden after six months of frost and snow. Imagine my feelings when Mrs. Medley found a bed of seedling bee larkspurs in her garden, and gave me at least two dozen!!! I have got a whole row of them along a border, next to which I think I shall have mignonette and scarlet geraniums alternately. It is rather odd after writing Reka Dom, that I should fall heir to a garden in which almost the only "fixture" is a south border of ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden



Words linked to "Mignonette" :   dyer's mignonette, mignonette family, genus Reseda, sweet reseda, reseda, Reseda odorata



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