"Yew" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the two, boy and adventurer, passed into a hall where the latter's spur rang upon the stone flooring, and thence into a long room, cold and shadowy, with the light stealing in through deep windows past screens of fir and yew. Touched by this wan effulgence, beside an oaken table on which was not wine nor dice nor books, a man sat and looked with strained eyes at ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... for Christmas, and Gwen stood rather forlornly in the church porch, her hands in her pockets, watching a few snowflakes that were beginning to fall silently from the heavy grey sky and to whiten the tops of the gravestones and the outlines of the crooked yew trees near the gate. The peace and goodwill that ought to have been present everywhere to-day seemed to ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... cloisters there grows a great yew tree, spreading its many branches and shade over them, and above the side walls, forming a dark cowl, which overshadows the old house of the monks. In ancient Erin the yew tree was regarded as sacred, and in its shade the Druids performed their mystic rites. With the early ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... they had reached the corner of a thick screen of yew-trees, "all is safe. There they stand, and father between them speaking to them. No, we will not go nearer, since we know that it is well with them. Men deal with each other better out of women's earshot. Ah, see, there they are giving one another their ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dome of looking-glass reflects the tesselated floor. Strangely enough, this garish mixture of colour does not offend the eye, toned down as it is by the everlasting twilight shed over the mimic palace and garden by overhanging branches of cypress and yew. An expanse of smooth-shaven lawn, white beds of lily and narcissus, marble tanks bubbling over with clear, cold water, and gravelled paths winding in and out of the trees to where, a hundred yards or so distant, a sunk fence divides the garden from a piece of ground ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... looking up into Mr. St. John's face without the least apparent fear. Boys sometimes call the little blue-tit Billy Biter, no doubt from personal experience of the sharpness of Mr. Tit's beak. The great tit which we can see under the yew tree in our garden, almost any hour of the day, is very common in the neighbourhood, and I dare say if we look well about us during our walk ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... made no reply, but reflected that, no matter how cruel the Witch might be, she had only one life to lose, and in her present plight what terror could death hold for her? She did not attempt to look for flies, therefore, but sat down beneath a yew tree, and gave way to tears and lamentations. 'Alas, dear husband,' she cried, 'how grieved you will be when you go to fetch me from the castle, and find me gone! You will suppose me to be dead or faithless; how I hope that you will mourn the loss of my life, not the ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... house of Sir James Colquhoun, who is owner of almost all the thirty islands of the Loch, which we went in a boat next morning to survey. The heaviness of the rain shortened our voyage, but we landed on one island planted with yew, and stocked with deer, and on another containing perhaps not more than half an acre, remarkable for the ruins of an old castle, on which the osprey builds her annual nest. Had Loch Lomond been in a happier climate, it would have been the boast of wealth and ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... resolve of braving his way, habit and consideration induced him to prefer the track least frequented or attended with risk. At the extremity of the wall, where it turned at a right angle to afford an opening for a gateway, grew an immense yew-tree, solitary and alone, like some dark and malignant giant, stretching out its arms to battle with centuries and storms; softened by no shadow, cheered by no sunbeam, enlivened by no shower, no herb or flower flourished beneath its ban, but there it towered, like the ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... the Manor. Upon that point the whole school perfectly agreed. The garden was as fascinating as the house, and proved an absolute dream of delight, with its smooth bowling-green, its winding paths, its charming little arbours overgrown with creepers, its clipped yew hedges, and its unexpected flights of steps. It might have been designed as a kind of terrestrial paradise for girls. The big lawns afforded space for so many tennis courts that there was no need for the younger ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... sixty, guiltless of curls, with a huge structure of bonnet cocked straight at the top of her head, like the roof of a market-house, and her broad, square skirts of faded green, deformed by formal knots of yew and holly. Look with what a blushless face of triumph she eyes her poor tottering neighbour opposite, who never appears destined "to suffer a recovery." Oh, 'tis remorseless! But look down that vista of charity children in slate coloured ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... exclaims. "I thought yew were in Pa-ar—is! Ma, would yew have concluded to find Lord Algy here? This is too lovely! If I'd known yew were coming I'd have stopped at home—yes, I ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... He published twenty proclamations in one day, in one of which he advised the people, "Since the vintage was very plentiful, to have their casks well secured at the bung with pitch:" and in another, he told them, "that nothing would sooner cure the bite of a viper, than the sap of the yew-tree." ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... china breathes of days, not hours, Of patches, powder, belle and beau, Of sun-dials, secrets, yew-tree bowers, And the romance ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... one of our most ornamental deciduous trees, but one of the most interesting. Few persons would at first sight take it to be a Conifer, more especially as it is destitute of resin; nevertheless, to that group it belongs, being closely allied to the Yew, but distinguishable by its long-stalked, fan-shaped leaves, with numerous radiating veins, as in an Adiantum. These leaves, like those of the larch but unlike most Conifers, are deciduous, turning of a pale ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... fine old yew-trees, now long since decayed and gone, but then spreading their dark-green arms over the little turf-covered graves. Reared against the buttresses of the church was an old stone coffin, together with a fragment of a curious monumental ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Margaret's home. He could not look enough at the quaint old garden with its formal flower-beds and primly cut yew-trees, or the wonderful old house, the front of which had not been changed since Henry and Elizabeth. As they went through the hall, he gazed in an awe-stricken way at the great carved staircase and the walls where armor was hanging and strangely fashioned weapons. He felt as ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... John then cried, stepping into the middle of the row, "take thou this good stout bow of yew. You are going to join us and make one of Sherwood's merry men till his Majesty returns and reinstates you as the rightful Earl of Huntingdon. Come! Say you will be one of us." All the outlaws crowded affectionately about Robert and ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... one still afternoon he found himself hidden under the dense greenish-black umbrella of a yew tree, lying prone on the ivied wall of the orchard of Ladykirk and listening to the talk of Patsy and Miss Aline, who were sitting beneath in a creeper-covered "tonelle," work-baskets by their sides, and as peaceful as if Ladykirk had been ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... reminded of the old farmer in Cranford revelling in the new knowledge which he has gained of the colour of ash-buds in March. So too we are taught to look afresh at larch woods in spring and beech woods in autumn, at the cedar in the garden and the yew tree in the churchyard. We are vividly conscious of the summer's breeze which tumbles the pears in the orchard, and the winter's storm when the leafless ribs of the wood clang and gride. As the perfect stanza lingers in our memory, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... people made a smoke as if in defiance; but on sending a boat on shore to see what they wanted, they could not be brought to venture near our people, and the boat returned. Their bows were of a wood resembling yew, and almost as large and strong as those of France and England; the arrows of small twigs which grow from the ends of the canes, massive and very solid, about the length of a mans arm and a half; the head is made of a small stick hardened in the fire, about three-eighths of a yard long, tipped ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... very beautiful home which he was leaving. Before him stretched the gardens—Italian in design, brilliant with flowers, with here and there a dark cedar-tree drooping low upon the lawn. A yew hedge bordered the rose-garden, a fountain was playing in the middle of a lake. A wooden fence encircled the grounds, and beyond was a smooth rolling park, with little belts of pine plantations and a few larger trees here and ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of good size, but wore a gloomy aspect. A great yew hedge, which seemed to enclose a walk or bowling-green, hid the ground floor of the east wing from view, while a formal rose garden, stiff even in neglect, lay in front of the main building. The west wing, of which ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... peaches hung upon the walls,[338-9] without my ever offering to pluck them, because they were forbidden fruit, unless now and then,—and because I had more pleasure in strolling about among the old melancholy-looking yew-trees,[338-10] or the firs, and picking up the red berries, and the fir apples, which were good for nothing but to look at,—or in lying about upon the fresh grass with all the fine garden smells around me,—or basking in the orangery,[338-11] till ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... but I shall never make a proper bowman of you! Were ever such shafts fashioned to fit across cord and yew!" ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... gone off to the bottom of the garden among the laurels, looked everywhere except above the wall to be sure that he was alone, and at last lit up, only as he raised his eyes in gratitude for the first blissful inhalation to discover that dreadful little boy peeping at him from the crotch in the yew-tree in the next garden. As though God had sent him to be ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... a' wide scatter'd now, Some to the Indies gane, And ane, alas! to her lang hame; Not here we 'll meet again. The kirkyaird, the kirkyaird, Wi' flowers o' every hue, Shelter'd by the holly's shade, An' the dark sombre yew. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... chemical knowledge to the aid of good husbandry; Abercrombie and Speechly and Marshall had written treatises on all that regarded good gardening. The nurseries of Tottenham Court Road, the parterres of Chelsea, and the stoves of the Yew Gardens were luxuriant witnesses of what ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... Gold to lay down All wrongs to atone for, And Hogni in likewise; Then she asked who was fain Of faring straightly, The steed to saddle To set forth the wain, The horse to back, And the hawk to fly, To shoot forth the arrow From out the yew-bow. ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... death, And in sad cypress let me be laid; Fly away, fly away, breath; I am slain by a fair cruel maid. My shroud of white, stuck all with yew, O prepare it; My part of death no one so true Did ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... indulgent to the strong And natural dread of man's last home, the grave, Its frost and silence—they disposed around, To soothe the melancholy spirit that dwelt Too sadly on life's close, the forms and hues Of vegetable beauty. There the yew, Green ever amid the snows of winter, told Of immortality, and gracefully The willow, a perpetual mourner, drooped; And there the gadding woodbine crept about, And there the ancient ivy. From the spot Where ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... they debarked on that southwestern coast they found a land warm and winning as the south they had left behind—a land of ever-green woods, yew and arbutus mingling with beech and oak and fir; rich southern heaths carpeting the hillsides, and a soft drapery of ferns upon the rocks. There were red masses of overhanging mountain, but in the valleys, sheltered and sun-warmed, they found a refuge like the Isles of the Blest. The Atlantic, ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... boy," cried Phronsie, running eagerly along with a particularly ugly looking specimen of a cake figure in her hand, "is the be-yew-tifullest, ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney
... whole weeks I'd think things not lawful to be uttered about the climate too. So, little cousin, I forgive you. Remember that 'into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and dreary.' Oh, if you'd only come to visit me last fall. We had such a bee-yew-tiful September last year. We were drowned in sunshine. This fall we're drowned in water. Old settlers tell of a similar visitation in '72, though they claim even that wasn't ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... lack of decision and reality, there is on the other hand no lack of talent; and there are many designs of Hablot Knight Browne which place him in the very first rank of English book illustrators. His etching of The Goblin and the Sexton (the eccentric yew-tree notwithstanding), Mr. Pickwick in the Pound, and the very admirable little etchings which we find in that rare Paper of Tobacco by "Joseph Fume," may be favourably compared with some of the best comic ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... two yew trees breaking the glare of its white walls" (these yews still stand on the eastern side of the cottage). "A little semi-vestibule between two doors prefaced the entrance into what might be considered the principal ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... open fields and commons, heaths and unfrequented places, feeding upon worms and insects. In severe weather it approaches our plantations and shrubberies, to feed on the berry of the mistletoe, the ivy, or the scarlet fruit of the holly or the yew; and, should the redwing or the fieldfare presume to partake of these with it, we are sure to hear its voice in clattering and contention with the intruders, until it drives them from the place, though it watches and attends, notwithstanding, to its ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... as a residence, but to give as perfect an idea as possible of a baronial hall of the Middle Ages. To get to the entrance the visitor toils up a rather steep hill, and on the way passes two remarkable yew trees, cut to represent the crests of the two families whose union by a romantic marriage is one of the traditions of this famous place. One yew represents the peacock of Manners, the present ducal house of Rutland, and the other the boar's head of Vernon. Parts of this house, ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... lowly little abode, hidden in a mane of green-barked yew-tree. Near is an apple-tree, Big like a hostel; A pretty bush thick as a fist of hazel-nuts, a choice spring and water fit for a Prince to drink. Round it tame swine lie down, Wild swine, grazing deer, A badger's brood, A peaceful troop, a heavy ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... With Spanish yew so strong, Arrows a cloth-yard long, That like to serpents stung, Piercing the weather; None from his fellow starts, But playing manly parts, And like true ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... romp, And to whisper in the sleeper's ear Of wo and danger near; And mist will hide the pale, cold moon, And the stars will seem like the sparkling flies That twinkle in the prairie glades, In my brother's month of June— Murky shades, dim, dark shades, Shades of the cypress, pine, and yew, In the swamp of the ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... he cannot eat. At last a friend, to physic bred, Perceived his case, and thus he said: "Be ruled by me, you soon shall eat, With hearty gust, the plainest meat; A pint of milk each rising morn, Procure from cow of sable horn; Shake in three drops of morning dew From twig of ever-verdant yew; It must by your own hand be done, Your face turn'd westward from the sun. With this, ere half an hour is past, Well crumb'd with biscuit, break your fast; Which done, from food (or all is vain) For twice three hours and one abstain— Then dine on one substantial ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... trust to his pilotage; but wiser men have been led by fools. By this time he reached the bottom of the alley, where, turning short on a little parterre of flowers, shrouded from the east and north by a close yew hedge, he found an old man at work without his coat, whose appearance hovered between that of an upper servant and gardener; his red nose and ruffled shirt belonging to the former profession; his hale and sunburnt visage, with his green ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... how rare, it is to meet with any one who thinks in unison with yourself! Do you ever walk in the Necropolis, Mr. Dunshunner? It is my favourite haunt of a morning. There we can wean ourselves, as it were, from life, and beneath the melancholy yew and cypress, anticipate the setting star. How often there have I seen the procession—the funeral of some very, very ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... in the night and told her husband, who knew her ways and loved her tenfold for them, that she had dreamed herself in the old churchyard, and that as the moon rose behind the tower the three old men who live in the three yew-trees had come out and played cards upon a tomb in the moonlight, and one of them had beckoned to her and offered to tell her fortune. It fell out that she was to die in the spring, and as he held up the fatal card, the old ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... away—David and Canon Aylwin strolling off together—and soon Lucy found herself alone. She sat down in a seat round which curved a yew hedge, and whence there was a somewhat wide view over a bare, hilly country, with suggestions everywhere of factory life in the hollows, till on the southwest it rose and melted into the Derbyshire ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... costumes, their reverences, and all the substance of their address. The influx of strangers and Parisians to Versailles, to be witnesses of such a spectacle, was so extraordinary and prodigious that the hostels and other public inns were insufficient, and they were obliged to light fires of yew ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... That, while their sleet the climbing Sailor blinds, Lash the white surges to the sounding shore. So com'st thou, WINTER, finally to doom The sinking year; and with thy ice-dropt sprays, Cypress and yew, engarland her pale tomb, Her vanish'd hopes, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... was a triangular slope of turf, which the indulgent might call a lawn, and beyond its low hedge of neglected fuchsia bushes a steeper slope of heather and bracken dropped down into cavernous combes overgrown with oak and yew. In its wild open savagery there seemed a stealthy linking of the joy of life with the terror of unseen things. Sylvia smiled complacently as she gazed with a School-of-Art appreciation at the landscape, and then of a sudden she ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... hidden beneath the careless calm of her ordinary moods—violent spring flashing white on almond-blossom through the purple clouds; a snowy, moonlit peak, with its single star, soaring up to the passionate blue; or against the flames of sunset, an old yew-tree standing dark guardian of some ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... sable stole, Graceful in years, pant eager for the goal. Old Norbury starts, and, with the seventh-form boys, In weeds of Greek the church-yard's peace annoys, With classic Weston, Charley Coote and Tew, In dismal dance about the mournful yew. But first in notes Sicilian placed on high, Bates sounds the soft precluding symphony; And in sad cadence, as the bands condense, The curfew tolls ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 9, Saturday, December 29, 1849 • Various
... (minus the telegraph) will give some idea of what these Gates looked like in their earliest days; only, instead of seeing the cultivated down, we must imagine it wildly clad with primaeval undergrowth of yew and juniper, like the beautiful tangled district near Guildford, still known as Fairyland. Thanet is now all sea-front—it turns its face, freckled with summer resorts, towards the open German Ocean. Ruim had then no sea-front at all, save the bare and inaccessible white cliffs; it turned, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... was an enchanted island in the middle of the sea. It was called the Isle of Yew. And in it were five important kingdoms ruled by men, and many woodland dells and forest glades and pleasant meadows and grim ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... sexton, and he seemed to be perpetually at work digging graves in the churchyard. Then, too, there was no shop, and they had no friends in the village, and after the long walk from home all that could be hoped for was a turnip out of the fields. The church, surrounded by yew-trees, stood in the middle of the village. The whitewashed walls of the Parsonage blinked through an avenue of the same trees. Lull said the church was a Presbyterian meeting-house, and on Sundays people came from miles ...
— The Weans at Rowallan • Kathleen Fitzpatrick
... With Spanish yew so strong, (p. 420) Arrows a cloth-yard long, That like to serpent stung, Piercing the weather. None from his fellow starts, But playing manly parts, And, like true English hearts, Stuck ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... him it must have been that land his father meant and he writing his poem of the Green Graveyard of Creggan. While he was sleeping under the weeping yew-trees the young queen had touched the sleeping poet ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... little gravelled circus opposite the Rectory porch. Beyond the gate is seen the dusty high road, parallel with the wall, bounded on the farther side by a strip of turf and an unfenced pine wood. On the lawn, between the house and the drive, is a clipped yew tree, with a garden bench in its shade. On the opposite side the garden is shut in by a box hedge; and there is a little sundial on the turf, with an iron chair near it. A little path leads through the ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... of the famished eagle and the gloomy desolation of the yew trees covered with snow saddened him much longer and more keenly than the perfume of the orange trees, the gracefulness of the vines, and the Moorish song ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... one grave in Willesden churchyard. There is a small yew-tree west of the church. Beneath that tree let us lie. In one grave, mind. Do ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... young gods easily In the days when you are young; But I go smelling yew and sods, And I know there are gods behind the gods, Gods that are ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... solitude in which this way is usually traversed. Some miles on this side of Coniston there is a farmstead—a gray stone house, and a square of farm-buildings surrounding a green space of rough turf, in the midst of which stands a mighty, funereal umbrageous yew, making a solemn shadow, as of death, in the very heart and centre of the light and heat of the brightest summer day. On the side away from the house, this yard slopes down to a dark-brown pool, which is supplied with fresh water from the overflowings of a stone cistern, ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... smoothly up, so high, that in the winter the sun only peeped above the ridge for an hour or two; beyond the house, the valley wound away into the heart of the hills, and at the end a black peak looked over. The place was very sparsely inhabited; within a close of ancient yew trees stood a little stone church, and a small parsonage smothered in ivy, where an old priest, a cousin of the knight, lived. There were but three farms in the valley, and a rough track led over the hills, little used, except by ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... keenly about me for a sapling or small tree that might serve as a ladder, and before long I came upon exactly the kind of thing I wanted. It was a young tree, somewhat resembling a yew, about twenty feet high, with a number of branches springing from its trunk close together and radiating in all directions, the lowest branch being about seven feet from the ground. This tree I at once attacked, and, the wood being soft, while the axe was keen, it fell some ten minutes later. Lopping ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... and the shade from the yew-trees lies so still on the sward. When the brows of Roland are gloomiest, and the compression of his lips makes sorrow look sternest, be sure that Blanche is couched at his feet, waiting the moment when, with some heavy ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... table in the centre is covered with copies of scarce and valuable alchymical tracts, in company with the caput mortum and the hour-glass. A few antiques, consisting of half-a-dozen cloth-yard arrows, the stout yew bow of the green clad yeoman, the ponderous mace and helmet of the valiant knight, and other relics of the days of chivalry, complete the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... himself with thoughts of another world that should reunite him to her and be the dawn of new happiness; like a man who should illusorily confound the last glistening of a wintry sunset seen through dark yew-branches, with the broad-beaming strength of the summer morning. "If I thought," he said, "that I should not see her in the other life, my poor imagination would shrink from the idea of perfect bliss, which I would ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... clouds and the necks move over them together; where the waves break it into cliffs, they are characteristic of our shores, and through its thin coat of whitish mould go the thirsty roots of our three trees—the beech, the holly, and the yew. For the clay and the sand might be deserted or flooded and the South Country would still remain, but if the Chalk Hills were taken away we might as well be in the Midlands." (Hilaire Belloc: The ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... neat, pretty cottage it was, with clipped yew hedges all round the garden, and yews inside, too, cut into peacocks and trumpets and teapots and all kinds of queer shapes, And out of the open door came a noise like that of the frogs, when they know ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... she had given me against her father, and why was she so frankly anxious to know about my love affairs? These were the two questions which pressed for an answer. So out we went together into the sweet coast-land air, the sweeter for the gale of the night before, and we walked through the old yew-lined paths, and out into the park, and so round the castle, looking up at the gables, the grey pinnacles, the oak-mullioned windows, the ancient wing with its crenulated walls and its meurtriere windows, the modern with its pleasant verandah and veil of honeysuckle. And as she showed me ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... yet some facts could be given leading to an opposite conclusion. (9. I am indebted to Prof. Newton for the following passage from Mr. Adam's 'Travels of a Naturalist,' 1870, p. 278. Speaking of Japanese nut-hatches in confinement, he says: "Instead of the more yielding fruit of the yew, which is the usual food of the nut- hatch of Japan, at one time I substituted hard hazel-nuts. As the bird was unable to crack them, he placed them one by one in his water-glass, evidently with the notion that they would in time become softer—an interesting proof of intelligence ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... grave. 'And this was her's,' said I, decoring with a band Of mildest pearls Amelia's milder hand. 'Nay, I will wear it for her sake,' she said: For dear to maidens are their rivals dead. And so, She seated on the black yew's tortured root, I on the carpet of sere shreds below, And nigh the little mound where lay that other, I kiss'd her lips three times without dispute, And, with bold worship suddenly aglow, I lifted to my lips a sandall'd foot, And kiss'd it three times thrice without dispute. ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... not forget these words. They coloured his farewell to Beckley: the dear old downs, the hopgardens, the long grey farms walled with clipped yew, the home of his lost love! He thought of them through weary nights when the ghostly image with the hard shut eyelids and the quivering lips would rise and sway irresolutely in air till a shape out of the darkness extinguished it. Pride is the God of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Station (G.N.R.). Richard Baxter lived here for a short time. The neighbourhood is well wooded and very pleasing to the eye. The church, on the hill-top, dates only from 1790; but the site was occupied by an earlier structure. The memorials are of no historic interest; but near the enormous yew tree in the churchyard stands the tomb of the first Lord Cottenham (d. 1851). Near by, too, lies Sir Lucas Pepys, physician to George III. (d. 1830). Totteridge Park, W. from the village, was the residence of Baron ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... sight by an intervening yew tree, she watched him coming down the church path, conscious of a somewhat pleasurable sense of anticipation, and when he had passed under the lichgate and, turning to the left, came face to face with her, she bowed and smiled, ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... of the last importance to the community of which he is a member," answered the clergyman, gravely. "On the termination of this anti-rent question hangs, in my judgment, a vast amount of the future character, and much of the future destiny, of Yew York." ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... arterwards as the letters was sold by auction for thutty pound. I see it in the paper. If he'd ha' sent me five pound I'd ha' been content. But he niver give me nothin' but that one drink. And ye see, master, I didn't know as yew worn't one ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... dread of man's last home, the grave, Its frost and silence—they disposed around, To soothe the melancholy spirit that dwelt Too sadly on life's close, the forms and hues Of vegetable beauty.—There the yew, Green even amid the snows of winter, told Of immortality, and gracefully The willow, a perpetual mourner, drooped; And there the gadding woodbine crept about, And there the ancient ivy. From the spot Where the sweet maiden, in her ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... stone stile, he crossed it by the help of the man, and proceeded alone to the tomb of his old master's grave, surrounded by a rail, with a yew growing inside, marking the site of the ancient family vault. The moon now shining clearly, the bailiff saw him kneel and uncover his head, which shone in its light, in the distance resembling a scull bleached ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... take their seats. Nothing that was done there seemed to be any trouble or burdensome. But at the first course there came a surprise in the form of a knight outside the door. As he sat on his charger, all armed from head to feet, he looked prouder than a bull, and a bull is a yew proud beast. One leg was fixed in the stirrup, but the other he had thrown over the mane of his horse's neck, to give himself a careless and jaunty air. Behold him advancing thus, though no one noticed him until he came forward with the words: "I wish to know which is ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... stood at the end of the village that was nearest the station, and thus, when the panorama of her kingdom opened before her, she had but a few steps further to go. A yew-hedge, bought entire from a neighboring farm, and transplanted with solid lumps of earth and indignant snails around its roots, separated the small oblong of garden from the road, and cast monstrous shadows ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... a fish's tooth, but most of them anoint it with an herb.[227-1] They do not shoot as in other parts, but in a certain way which cannot do much harm. Here they have a great deal of fine and long cotton, and plenty of mastic. The bows appeared to be of yew, and there is gold and copper. There is also plenty of aji,[227-2] which is their pepper, which is more valuable than pepper, and all the people eat nothing else, it being very wholesome. Fifty caravels might be annually loaded with it from Espanola. The Admiral says that he found ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... means, signor," replied the Corsican. "Though yew would never believe it, to look at her, she carries her canvas better and longer than any boat belonging to Ajaccio, and as for working to ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... commemorates the entry of our Lord into Jerusalem when the people strewed {205} the way with palm branches and cried, "Hosanna to the Son of David." It was formerly customary for worshippers to appear on this day in procession carrying in their hands palms, or yew or willow branches, which were blessed before the beginning of the Communion Service. On Palm Sunday the Church has always begun to set before God and man the Gospel account of the Passion of our Lord, that by St. Matthew being read ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller
... house, perhaps six hundred yards, it stood, ghostly, with a face like that of a dark-eyed white owl, made by the crossing of its narrow sails. With a black companion—a yew-tree cut to pyramid form, on the central point of Sussex—it was watching us, for though one must presume it built of old time by man, it looked up there against the sky, with its owl's face and its cross, like a ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... of juice and gloss, Sir or Madam, Am clean forgotten as Thomas Voss; Thin-urned, I have burrowed away from the moss That covers my sod, and have entered this yew, And turned to clusters ruddy of view, All day cheerily, ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... much as her little graves. There the tiny bodies, like unexhausted censers, pour out all the stored sweetness they had no time to use above the ground, turning the earth they lie in to precious spices. There the roots of the old yew trees feel about tenderly for the little unguided hands, and sometimes at nightfall the rain bends over them weeping ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... the garden-bed, Mid box and thyme and yew, And spikes of purple lavender, And spikes of larkspur blue, The bind-weed tendrils win their way, ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... on your list,' you say; 'in fact, it was occupied. It is the house on the left, in its own grounds, just as you enter the village. There is a good lawn, and a wonderful clipped yew hedge.' ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... silks and fine array, My smiles and languished air, By Love are driven away; And mournful, lean Despair Brings me yew to deck my grave: ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... Spearhead fences, yew-tree hedges, Coats of arms no more regilded, Sphinxes gleaming through the thickets.... Creakingly ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... juice of rue, That groweth underneath the yew; With nine drops of the midnight dew, From lunary[11] distilling: The molewarp's brain mixed therewithal; And with the same the pismire's gall: For she in nothing short would fall, The Fairy was ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... under the dizzy dormers and gables, to flush the flies on his muzzle, and whole flocks of little blue titmice fluttered just overhead, in their rovings from holly and laurel to newly tasseled firs and yew trees. ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... despair and suicide. The elder-tree is more auspicious to the sleeper; while the fir-tree, better still, betokens all manner of comfort and prosperity. The lime-tree predicts a voyage across the ocean; while the yew and the alder are ominous of sickness to the young and of death to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Penelope in the yew-walk, leaning against the statue of a satyr. And looking from the grotesque features above to the lovely face below, I suddenly found my old heart a-thumping strangely—for beside this very statue, in almost the same attitude, ...
— The Honourable Mr. Tawnish • Jeffery Farnol
... "A yew, the most beautiful of the wood, it is called a king, it is not bulky. May the spear drive on the whole crowd to their ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... deeply shaded and occupies a small hill with the Loddon flowing partly round it, then taking its swift way through the village. Miss Mitford's monument is a plain, almost an ugly, granite cross, standing close to the wall, shaded by yew, elm, and beech trees, and one is grateful to think that if she never had her reward when living she has found at any rate ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... brick, and back premises of tile, oak, and modern rough-cast, with old brew-houses that almost enclosed a graveled court behind. Behind this again lay a great kitchen garden with box-lined paths dividing it all into a dozen rectangles, separated from the orchard and yew walk by a broad double hedge down the center of which ran a sheltered path. Round the south of the house and in the narrow strip westwards lay broad lawns surrounded by high trees completely shading ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... Miss Hasluck was in the garden. I told the supercilious footman not to trouble, I would seek her there myself. I guessed where she would be; her favourite spot had always been a sunny corner, bright with flowers, surrounded by a thick yew hedge, cut, after the Dutch fashion, into quaint shapes of animals and birds. She was walking there, as I had expected, reading a book. And again, as I saw her, came back to me the feeling that had swept across me as a boy, when first outlined against the dusty books and papers of my father's ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... came upon a terrace bordered by a thick yew hedge, and descending by steps to a lower terrace, he became aware of voices in a strange tone and key—not loud, but, as it were, intensified far beyond the note of ordinary talk. Ashe stood still; for he had recognized the voice of Lady Kitty. But before he had made ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the infection of his melancholy has made us all grave; but she often, weeps. Then she is so absent, that she cut out the frieze gowns for the alms-women too short, and spoiled Mrs. Mellicent's eye-water. The tapestry chairs are thrown aside, and she steals from us to the bower in the yew-tree that overlooks the green, where she devotes her mornings to reading Sydney's Arcadia. My dear Eusebius, I see her disease, for I recollect my own behaviour when I was doubtful whether you preferred me; but surely, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... or ever has had. There were wide, wide lawns with carved stone seats, green with moss. Over the lawns hung weeping-willows, and their feathery bough-tips brushed the velvet grass when they swung with the wind. The old flagged paths had high, clipped, yew hedges either side of them, so that they looked like the narrow streets of some old town; and through the hedges, doorways had been made; and over the doorways were shapes like vases and peacocks and half-moons all trimmed ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... ungainly, fantastic forms, but with the advent of Le Notre the good taste which he propagated so widely promptly rejected these grotesques, which, for a fact, were an importation from Flanders, like the gloriettes. Not by the remotest suggestion could a clipped yew in the form of a peacock or a giraffe be called French. Le Notre eliminated the menagerie and the aviary, but kept certain geometrical forms, particularly with respect to hedges, where niches were ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... sir, don't!' he faltered, and shut his eyes, expecting the Indian to bound upon him. But when he opened his eyes again, the savage was gone! He must have slipped behind a ragged old yew which had once been clipped and trimmed ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... oaks there present a forlorn appearance after rain with funereal mosses dripping with moisture hanging from their trunks. The firs, Picea morinda, with its grey tassels, and Abies Pindrow with its dark green yew-like foliage, succeed the blue pine. Picea may be said to range from 8000 to 10,000 feet, and the upper limit of Abies is from 1000 to 2000 feet higher. These splendid trees are unfortunately of small ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... oft reverted eye I climb the Coomb's ascent: sweet songsters near Warble in shade their wild-wood melody: Far off the unvarying Cuckoo soothes my ear. Up scour the startling stragglers of the flock 5 That on green plots o'er precipices browze: From the deep fissures of the naked rock The Yew-tree bursts! Beneath its dark green boughs (Mid which the May-thorn blends its blossoms white) Where broad smooth stones jut out in mossy seats, 10 I rest:—and now have gain'd the topmost site. Ah! what a luxury of landscape meets My gaze! Proud towers, and Cots more dear to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the sunny English garden that next I visited. It, too, was terraced and had fountains, but the water in these fountains sparkled in the sun, and the cool dampness of the Italian garden was lacking. On the terrace were occasional closely-trimmed yew trees, or box trees clipped in odd shapes. A curving walk, edged with laurel, led to the ivy-walled inner garden. Here, in the full sun and warmth, grew, not the delicate rose bush of my Italian garden, but sturdy, bold rose trees, and apple trees, ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various
... and Christopher Wren. Grounds were laid out in rectangular plots, bordered by straight alleys, sometimes paved with vari-colored sand, and edged with formal hedges of box and holly. The turf was inlaid with parterres cut in geometric shapes and set, at even distances, with yew trees clipped into cubes, cones, pyramids, spheres, sometimes into figures of giants, birds, animals, and ships—called "topiary work" (opus topiarium). Terraces, fountains, bowling-greens (Fr. boulingrin) statues, arcades, quincunxes, espallers, and artificial ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... it. And just then he looked up and saw a great spotted eagle sailing slowly towards Ballygawley, and he cried out: 'You, too, eagle of Ballygawley, are old, and your wings are full of gaps, and I will put you and your ancient comrades, the Pike of Dargan Lake and the Yew of the Steep Place of the Strangers into my rhyme, that there may be a curse ...
— Stories of Red Hanrahan • W. B. Yeats
... where Rab's two predecessors have been laid, and where Rab will lie when Mrs. Phin has 'boxed' him, is a sleepy little place set on a gentle slope of ground, softly shaded by willow and yew trees. It is enclosed by a stone wall, into which an occasional ancient tombstone is built, its name and date almost obliterated by ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... "Yew aw the enny, ennyseckle, Oi em ther bee, Oi'd like ter sip ther enny from those red lips, ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... and Blackheath, stood in the midst of well-kept grounds a goodly mansion, which held this pleasant room. It was always light and cheerful and warm, for the three windows down to the broad gravel-walk before it faced south; and though the lawn was darkened just in front of them by two magnificent yew-trees, the atmosphere of the room itself, in its silent, sunny loftiness, was at once gay and solemn to my small imagination and senses,—much as the interior of Saint Peter's of Rome has been since to them. Wonderful, large, tall jars of precious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... like a branch of yew, for if it is bent it soon straightens. By the third day I was on my feet again, with only the stiffness of healing wounds to remind me of those desperate passages. When I could look about me I found that men had arrived from the Rappahannock, and among ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... "Well, beneath that yew-tree, then," said George, pointing to another slight rise near the first; "but it is important for us to lose no detail of this engagement. Everything depends perhaps for your Majesty on an ill-judged manoeuvre or a ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... are contained in a wooden box; the wood is, I believe, yew. It cannot be pronounced, I think, with any certainty, whether the wooden box was originally part of the shrine of the precious MSS. It is very rude in its construction, and has not a top or lid. Indeed it appears to me to have been a coarse botched-up thing to receive the ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... Bay-Berries yield a Wax, which besides its Use in Chirurgery, makes Candles that, in burning, give a fragrant Smell. The Cedar-Berries are infused, and made Beer of, by the Bermudians, they are Carminative, and much of the Quality of Juniper-Berries; Yew and Box I never saw or heard of in this Country: There are two sorts of Myrtles, different in Leaf and Berry; the Berry yields Wax that makes Candles, the most lasting, and of the sweetest Smell imaginable. Some mix half Tallow with this Wax, others use it without Mixture; and these are ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... the high unbroken terrace wall, built like the house itself of brick, had the almost menacing aspect of a fortification—a castle bastion, from whose parapet one looked out across airy depths to distances level with the eye. Below, in the foreground, hedged in by solid masses of sculptured yew trees, lay the stone-brimmed swimming-pool. Beyond it stretched the park, with its massive elms, its green expanses of grass, and, at the bottom of the valley, the gleam of the narrow river. On the farther side of the stream the land rose again in ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... the pangs of grief or unrequited love—pent up in its own solitude, unpitied and uncared for—and filled with dark thoughts, and sad sounds, and tones of plaintive winds, sighing through the cypress and doleful yew with mournful melody around the resting-place of the loved and lost, to submissive lamentings, and slow stealing tears that assuage its aching anguish and tranquillize the spirit, leading it to the hope of a brighter future, in whose dawning beams it will, ere-long, show like "the tender grass, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... Farnham Station I had no difficulty in being directed to Charlington Heath. It was impossible to mistake the scene of the young lady's adventure, for the road runs between the open heath on one side and an old yew hedge upon the other, surrounding a park which is studded with magnificent trees. There was a main gateway of lichen-studded stone, each side pillar surmounted by mouldering heraldic emblems; but besides this central carriage drive I observed several points where ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... perch, and to stretch my cramped legs by running about in the charming garden behind that celebrated inn. Dim bright memories are with me still of the long-windowed parlour opening into a garden verdant with grass, and stately yew hedges, and formal clipped trees; gay, too, with bright flowers, and mysterious with a walk winding under an arch of the yew hedge to the more distant bowling-green. On one side of this arch an admirably-carved stone figure in broadcoat ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... town-house has other and peculiar advantages. Besides being an exceedingly spacious and dismal brick building, with a dismal iron railing in front, and long, dismal, thin windows, with little panes of glass, it looked out into the churchyard, where, time out of mind, between two yew-trees, one of which is cut into the form of a peacock, while the other represents a dumb-waiter, it looked into the churchyard where the monument of the late Bluebeard was placed over the family vault. It was the first thing the widow saw ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... she entered the grass-grown courtyard, where stood the ancient spreading yew, the "dule-tree," under which the Glencardine charters had been signed and justice administered. Other big trees had sprung from seedlings since the place had fallen into ruin; and, having entered, she paused amidst its ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... less after John was installed, one soft grey day in March, this patient couple walked slowly arm-in-arm up the hill, under the lychgate, past the dark yew that shadowed the peaceful graves, and so through the damp church porch, up to the old stone altar, and there were quietly married, and then walked home again. No feasting or rejoicing was there at that wedding; the ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... gold chain with an object attached to it. He glanced at the object and then took off his spectacles to examine it more narrowly. 'What's the history of this?' he asked. 'Odd enough,' was the answer. 'You know the yew thicket in the shrubbery: well, a year or two back we were cleaning out the old well that used to be in the clearing here, and what ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... if this charming old-world plesaunce were quite familiar to him, Gerald goes straight on, down a grass path ending in what appears to be a high impenetrable wall of yew, and Nancy, surprised, then sees that a narrow, shaft-like way leads straight through the green ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... the circling waves, a fruitful soil! And ninety cities crown the sea-born isle: Mix'd with her genuine sons, adopted names In various tongues avow their various claims: Cydonians, dreadful with the bended yew, And bold Pelasgi boast a native's due: The Dorians, plumed amid the files of war, Her foodful glebe with fierce Achaians share; Cnossus, her capital of high command; Where sceptred Minos with impartial hand Divided right: ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... more about it, and she glanced round to see if Mr Roy noticed where she was standing. No. His earnest face and pursed-up mouth looked more engrossed than ever. Neither of the speakers could see her, for between her and them there was a small piece of thick yew hedge. So, secure in her wrong-doing, Biddy lent an attentive ear and forgot her duty, the baby, and everything else. She ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton |
