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Furze

noun
1.
Very spiny and dense evergreen shrub with fragrant golden-yellow flowers; common throughout western Europe.  Synonyms: gorse, Irish gorse, Ulex europaeus, whin.



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"Furze" Quotes from Famous Books



... irradiated by the dawn of a great amazement. "Where are yer?" said Mr. Thomas Marvel over his shoulder and coming on all fours. He saw a stretch of empty downs with the wind swaying the remote green-pointed furze bushes. ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells

... They are so fine and fair, You'd think a box of essences Was broken in the air: But Phyllida, my Phyllida! The breath of heath and furze When breezes blow at morning, Is ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... ethical or political or economic principles. Take, for instance, the account of the miracle of Moses and the Burning Bush. The preacher will point out that Moses saw a bush that burned and burned and that, unlike most furze bushes of those upland pastures which were ignited by the hot Syrian sun, was not consumed. It was this enduring quality of the bush that interested him. Thus Moses showed the first characteristic of genius, namely, capacity for ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... before breakfast on the following day and examined the cliff. It fell in broad scales of limestone, whereon grew thistles and the white rock-rose, sea pinks and furze. Rabbits dwelt here and the bloodstained sack had been discovered by a dog. It was thrust into a hole, but the terrier had easily reached it and dragged it ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts

... on very thoughtful and dreamy over the purple heather and amongst the golden furze till they reached the edge of the scrub oak wood, where they stopped short and looked in ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn

... the sound of oars plain above the wash of waves on the beach. I look'd about me. On either side the road was now bank'd by tall hills, with clusters of bracken and furze bushes lying darkly on their slopes. Behind one of these clusters I station'd Billy with the Captain's long sword, and a pistol that I by signs forbade him to fire unless in extremity. Then, retiring some forty paces up the road, I hid the Captain and ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch

... your honor, he'll eat chopped furze with you better than he'll eat oats and hay along of a new master," retorted Rake rapidly, tightening the girths. "I don't know nothing, sir, save that I heard you was in a strait; I don't want to know nothing; but I sees them cursed cads a-runnin' ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... it to be wondered at, that men with imagination, men like Furze, the Bishop of Pretoria, saw in a vision clear that the padre's job lay with the living and not with the dying, that he could point the way by the example of a splendid life with the soldier, far better than ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey

... mountain, the roots of which derive a precarious subsistence from the uncertain soil, are liable to be blown down, and are made pollards of at an early age to prevent this mishap; also, they are frequently burned down by bonfires kindled under them to destroy the furze. The chestnut shoot is only four years old before it begins to bear. Three pounds of fresh chestnuts fetch about one penny—dried, or in flour, about double that price. The peasants bake a little ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... tumult of the canon lifted, The gray hawk breathless hung; Or on the hill a winged shadow drifted Where furze and thorn-bush clung; ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte

... hairy; hands that once had clasped the sword never, like Joan of Arc, to relinquish it until the royal standard floated in the cathedral of Rheims; hands that were often bloody from the thorns and furze of the Bocage; hands which had pulled an oar in the Marais to surprise the Blues, or in the offing to signal Georges; the hands of a guerilla, a cannoneer, a common solder, a leader; hands still white though the Bourbons of the Elder branch were again in exile. Looking at those ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... quarter of a mile from the stables John Straker's overcoat was flapping from a furze-bush. Immediately beyond there was a bowl-shaped depression in the moor, and at the bottom of this was found the dead body of the unfortunate trainer. His head had been shattered by a savage blow from some heavy weapon, and he was wounded on the thigh, where there was a long, ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... expedition. The Surrey country was in its full glory: the first purple heather was fully out, and the distant hills rose blue and vaporous across stretches of vivid crimson, broken here and there by the dim gray greens of the furze or the sharper colour of the bracken. The chorus of birds had died away, but the nests were not yet tenantless. The great sand-pit near the farmhouse was still vocal with innumerable broods of sand-martins, ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... the gloomy and ruinous hut were enlightened partly by some furze which blazed on the hearth, the smoke whereof, having no legal vent, eddied around, and formed over the heads of the assembled council a clouded canopy, as opake as their metaphysical theology, through which, like stars through mist, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... in the parish of Spreyton in the county of Devon, there appeared in a field near the dwelling house of Philip Furze, to his servant Francis Pry, being of the age of twenty-one, next August, an aged gentleman with a pole in his hand, and like that he was wont to carry about with him when living, to kill moles withal, who told the young man he should not be afraid of him; but should tell ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey

... despicable practical gardener, took care to keep her beaupots constantly supplied from the first snowdrop to the last china rose. Nothing was too large for Cicely's good-will, nothing too small. Huge chimney jars of lilacs, laburnums, horse-chestnuts, peonies, and the golden and gorgeous double furze; china jugs filled with magnificent double stocks, and rich wallflowers,* with their bitter-sweet odour, like the taste of orange marmalade, pinks, sweet-peas, and mignonette, from her own little garden, or woodland posies that might beseem the hand of the faerie queen, composed of those ...
— Aunt Deborah • Mary Russell Mitford

... suddenly showed, drawing it from within his jacket, a yellow flower, very common in Brittany, and sometimes to be found in La Brie (where, however, it is rare),—the furze, or broom. ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... toward so near a relative, especially as he had seen very little of his cousin Herbert till he had found him thus. Moreover, my grandfather and the Dean had spent little brotherly love on each other, having had a life-long feud about a copy-hold furze brake of nearly three-quarters of an acre, as Betsy remembered to have heard her ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... Laura spoke in haste: "Good folk, I have no coin; To take were to purloin: I have no copper in my purse, I have no silver either, And all my gold is on the furze That shakes in windy weather Above the rusty heather." "You have much gold upon your head," They answered altogether: "Buy from us with a golden curl." She clipped a precious golden lock, She dropped a tear more rare than pearl, Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red: Sweeter than ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti

... handsomest-flowering shrubs in cultivation. U. europaeus flore-pleno (Double-flowered Gorse) is even more beautiful than the species, the wealth of golden flowers almost hiding the plant from view. U. europaeus strictus (Irish Furze) is of more erect and slender growth, and less rigid than the ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster

... scooped in the sand, measuring about seven feet across and three feet deep in the centre. While the men finished lining the sides of the kiln with stones, the women and girls would leap into it with armfuls of furze; which they lighted and so, strewing the dried ore-weed upon it, built little by little into a blazing pile. The great sea-lights which ring the Islands now make a brave show; but (say the older inhabitants) it will not compare with the ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... I left them, and turned to climb the hill which rose sharply on our right, its side dotted with furze-bushes, and its crest hidden by a clump ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates

... and furze were pretty soon left behind; we were again in the wooded scenery that I enjoyed so much, so entirely natural and pretty, and so little disturbed by traffic of any kind. I was looking from the chaise-window, and soon detected the object of which, for some time, ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... emperor, and saluted him. Perhaps it was with some purpose of applying a remedy to this unfortunate rencontre, that the party dismounted at a point where several roads met, and turned their horses adrift to graze at will amongst the furze and brambles. Their own purpose was, to make their way to the back of the villa; but, to accomplish that, it was necessary that they should first cross a plantation of reeds, from the peculiar state of which they ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... "Ever eat furze flowers?" asked Cass, offering Mark some that he had pulled off in passing. "Kind of nutty taste they've got, I reckon. I belong to ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie

... excitement! this Katterfelto of wonders! exceeded expectation, went beyond belief and soared above all the natural powers of description! She was nature itself! She was the most exquisite work of art! She was the very daisy, primrose, tuberose, sweet brier, furze blossom, gilliflower, wall flower, cauliflower, auricula, and rosemary! In short, she was the bouquet of Parnassus! When expectations were so high, it was thought she would be injured by her appearance, but it was the audience who were injured: several ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous

... factions in the rear of the room were waging war with paper darts; while a small, sandy-haired boy, whose tangled hair and disordered attire gave him the appearance, as the saying goes, of having been dragged through a furze-bush backwards, rapped vigorously with his knuckles upon the master's table, and inquired loudly how many more times he was to ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery

... by the side of the beacon. The stones were still standing as they had been reared by Paslew, and on looking at them he was astonished to find the hollow within them filled with dry furze, brushwood, and fagots, as if in readiness for another signal. In passing round the circle, his surprise was still further increased by discovering a torch, and not far from it, in one of the interstices ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... as to be almost touching. Standing among the thistles in the growing season one could in a sense hear them growing, as the huge leaves freed themselves with a jerk from a cramped position, producing a crackling sound. It was like the crackling sound of the furze seed-vessels which one hears in June in ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson

... he came back round the hill, where he was hidden by the furze growing along a ditch. And when he came in sight of his cabin he saw that all the old men had gathered around it, and one of them was just at that time thrusting a rake with a wisp of lighted straw on it into ...
— Stories of Red Hanrahan • W. B. Yeats

... of cultivation, except about the foot of that hill, where there is said to be a village, but it is invisible. Round the Salt Lake a good many trees are dotted about, likely olives and figs, and a good deal of bright green scrub exists on the lower hill slopes. This scrub Ashmead-Bartlett calls furze in his articles, but I have never seen furze in Gallipoli. This plant is generally 2 to 3 feet high, is in very solid bushes of a stiff, fibrey nature, with an ovate, dark green glaucous leaf. Thyme and numerous other plants abound. I have been interested ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson

... was out of his body, it would become the property of a young man whom he hated! He might not cut down the pine woods, nor disturb those venerable single trees which were the glory of his park;—but there were moments in which he thought that he could take a delight in ploughing up the furze, and in stripping the hill-sides of the heather. Why should his estate be so beautiful for one who was nothing to him? Would it not be well that he should sell everything that was saleable in order that his own ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope

... night had fallen something like 150 marauders had met, all armed, of course; and of still more ominous import than their weapons were the firebrands they carried—shredded cedar bark loosely bound in rolls, resinous splinters of pinon, dry greasewood (a furze very easily ignited), and pouches full of ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various

... the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me. Linnaeus fell on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the first time the long heath of some English upland made yellow with the tawny aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of some rose. It has always been so with me from my boyhood. There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde

... return she would no longer delay, but tell him the day on which he might claim her for his wife. A minute more, and with all speed he was making a straight cut across the *cliff-side. Disregarding the path, he scrambled over the projections of rock and trampled down the furze, with only one thought in his mind—how soon he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... Huers, as the men are called who watch for the fish, had taken their stations on every height on the look-out for their approach. Each huer kept near him the "white bush," which is the name given to a mass of furze covered with tow or white ribbons. This being raised aloft is the sign that a school is in sight. The boats employed were of two descriptions, the largest of from twenty to thirty tons, carrying seven or eight men; and the smaller somewhat ...
— Michael Penguyne - Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast • William H. G. Kingston

... Oh! how glorious 'tis To right the oppressed, and bring the felon vile To just disgrace! Ere yet the morning peep, Or stars retire from the first blush of day, With thy far-echoing voice alarm thy pack, 40 And rouse thy bold compeers. Then to the copse, Thick with entangling grass, or prickly furze, With silence lead thy many-coloured hounds, In all their beauty's pride. See! how they range Dispersed, how busily this way and that, They cross, examining with curious nose Each likely haunt. Hark! on the drag I hear Their doubtful notes, preluding to a cry More nobly full, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville

... is easy To beget great deeds; but in the rearing of them— The threading in cold blood each mean detail, And furze brake of half-pertinent circumstance— There lies the self-denial. 516 CHARLES KINGSLEY: Saint's ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various

... endure the purgatorial tortures of this infernal confine for the space of ninety-nine years, eleven months, and twenty-nine days, and all on account of the impropriety of my conduct yesternight under your roof. Here am I, laid on a bed of pitiless furze, with my aching head reclined on a pillow of ever-piercing thorn, while an infernal tormentor, wrinkled, and old, and cruel, his name I think is Recollection, with a whip of scorpions, forbids peace or rest to approach me, and keeps anguish eternally awake. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... the owl and the boom, boom of the frog, deep silence reigned. The crescent moon stole silently above the horizon. Wonderful, significant is that silent, stealthy approach of the moon. Red Head lumbered from his lair and crouched beside the shimmering fire of the furze. A startled grass-snake strove to leap out of the way of the monarch of the woods—- a hurried crunch and a string of thirty white ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various

... visit this mysterious place; and so it happened one day, when she had her dog with her, and the sun was shining, and all about her bright and gay, that she climbed up the little green knoll, and pushing her way through many brambles, furze bushes, and dwarf shrubs, she found herself in the centre of the huge heaps of stones and rubbish, of which she had hitherto seen only the summits, from the windows ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]

... among Biblical commentators whether the Rhinoceros or the Hippopotamus is the Behemoth of Scripture, but as the Rhinoceros feeds on furze and the Hippopotamus does not, it would seem that the terminal syllable "moth" more properly applies to the latter. As numerous fossil remains of the animal have been found from time to time in the Rhenish provinces ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various

... golden blossoming furze, with purple foxglove, or curious orchis hiding in stray corners; wild moor-like lands, beautiful with heaths and honey-bottle; grand stretches of sloping downs where the hares hid in the grass, and where all the horses in the kingdom might gallop at their will; these ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies

... village lies on the side of a steep, long hill or chine, looking over the Berkshire woods, and commanding a view of the many-turreted city itself. Over its broad summit once stretched a chestnut forest; and now it is covered with the roots of trees, or furze, or soft turf. The red sand which lies underneath contrasts with the green, and adds to its brilliancy; it drinks in, too, the rain greedily, so that the wide common is nearly always fit for walking; and the air, unlike ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman

... had come through the gardens into the pine-wood, and I had jumped the rusty banked stream that runs down the Bearshill valley, and clambered the barbed wire fence. I came up the steep bank and through a fringe of furze to where she stood in the shade; I kissed her hand, and discovered mine had been torn open by one of the thorns of the wire and was dripping blood. "Mind my dress," she said, and we laughed as we kissed with ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells

... Jigatzi, and again turns south, flowing to the west of Lhassa, and at some distance from that capital. Lhassa, as all agree, is at a much lower elevation than Jigatzi; and apricots (whose ripe stones Dr. Campbell procured for me) and walnuts are said to ripen there, and the Dama or Himalayan furze (Caragana), is said to grow there. The Bactrian camel also thrives and breeds at Lhassa, together with a small variety of cow (not the yak), both signs of a much more temperate climate than Jigatzi enjoys. It is, however, a remarkable fact that there are two tame elephants near the latter city, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... of their former town. Except in the houses of the better sort, they have no chimnies, so that we were very much incommoded by the smoke during our stay at that place. Their fuel is turf, which they have very good, together with whins or furze. As there grows little wood hereabout, building is very expensive; as also they are in want of lime, which they have to bring from a far distance. But they have abundance of stone, the whole country appearing entirely composed of rocks and stones, so that ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr

... "But I like the furze bushes and the nightingale," she said regretfully, "and the exquisite wildness of it. It is not nearly so ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell

... give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground; long heath, brown furze, any thing. The wills above be done! but I would fain die ...
— The Tempest • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]

... not begin to fish directly, but stood gazing round at the glorious prospect of hill and dale and miniature mountain, here grey and sparkling, there flushed as if with the golden sheen of blossoming furze, while the lower slopes were of the magnificent ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn

... fair one listen'd not,— And feign'd she had not seen; But sought a distant spot, The furze and heath between, But, as she proudly went, Thorns, in her path that lay, Her little feet have rent, And stopp'd her on ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello

... vinegar and pepper and salt being rubbed into it. But my old mother used to say that it was a good sign when a cut smarted a lot. So I s'pose my wound's first rate, for it smarts like a furze bush in ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn

... dusty men, its quivering mirage of hot air, its strings of patient hay-nibbling donkeys, which look as if they had just awakened out of a flour bin. Above, a green down stretches up to bright yellow furze-crofts far aloft. Behind a reedy marsh, covered with red cattle, paves the valley till it closes in; the steep sides of the hills are clothed in oak and ash covert, in which, three months ago, you could have shot more cocks in one day than you would in Berkshire in a year. Pleasant little ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... a mile from home, we came upon a large heath, and the sportsmen began to beat. They had done so for some time, when as I was at a little distance from the rest of the company, I saw a hare pop out from a small furze-brake almost under my horse's feet. I marked the way she took, which I endeavoured to make the company sensible of by extending my arm; but to no purpose, until Sir Roger, who knows that none of my extraordinary motions are insignificant, rode up to ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others

... road, and plunged through the heath, the furze, the rank glistening pools, straight towards the light-as the swimmer ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... is chirping the brooklet near, In the water a something stirs, And the wanderer can in the stillness hear A plash and a sigh through the furze. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... Wendover always walked, and both made a sharp impression on the rector's nerves. In the heart of one of the loneliest commons of the parish Robert, swinging along one November evening through the scattered furze bushes, growing ghostly in the darkness, was suddenly conscious of a cloaked figure with slouching shoulders and head bent forward coming towards him. It passed without recognition of any kind, and for an instant Robert caught the long sharpened features and haughty ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... rifts between the trees nipa houses were tucked away, adding to the charm of the landscape, and the multifarious shades of green to be found on these hillsides were further diversified by shrub-like trees with a faint red tinge like furze, and by still others with a silvery ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel

... hungry, damp, and very cold; and the last time Edward had tripped and tumbled headlong into a furze bush—they had each had so many stumbles and falls that they had lost count of the number they had had—he dropped his new bicycle lamp, and had been unable to find it again. Their expedition could not ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler

... pond, sad flowers, pond weed, the marsh clover, the sand plantain; in a corner, a willow with roots laid bare, which hung over the exhausted pool as if looking for its lost reflection; around about, nettles, briars, dry heather, furze, stripped of its blossoms; that damp and heavy atmosphere which is natural to humid places; the light of day thinly veiled by the exhalations from the earth; an odor of decaying plants, long silence interrupted by dull sounds; an air of abandonment, of idleness, of lassitude, ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne

... instantly so infuriated, that rushing in, the travellers were immediately driven out, and were glad to save themselves from the lighted fire-wood on the hearth, which was hurled at them. On this they went to seek a spot to bivouac for the night. Coleridge lay under the shelter of a furze-bush, annoyed by the thorns, which, if they did not disturb his rest, must have rendered it comfortless. Youth and fatigue, inducing sleep, soon rose above these difficulties. In the ascent of the Brocken, they despaired of seeing the famous spectre, in ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman

... And in the furze did lie; The words we heard that Parson say Made all the horses shy! The Sailor he was seen no more Upon that stormy bay; But still we chased the old gray fox, The same old fox, The game old fox; Still we chased the old gray fox Through ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle

... was no sound! Then skirting the furze bushes of the headland, the three assassins dragged their stiffened limbs along in the darkness, hastening to where the stout Hirondelle rocked easily in the dead water of the one protected cove to ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... hands and knees, I received a blow on the head from one of the frightened horse's feet, and lay for a little while quite sick and stunned. How long this sensation lasted I have no means of knowing, but when I recovered my senses I was wet through, and found myself lying among furze-bushes in a damp hollow. The horse had apparently resigned himself to the position, and lay quiet. As I struggled to my feet, with a thousand colored lights flashing before ray eyes, the darkness and silence of the night seemed filled with booming noises like those which ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray

... perils should be escaped, there would be starvation. The real number lost is fourteen, besides Lord St. Erme. It was a strange scene when I arrived at about seven o'clock yesterday evening. The moor looking so quiet, and like itself, with the heath and furze glowing in the setting sun, as if they had no sympathy for us, till, when we came near the black heaps of coal, we saw the crowd standing round,—then getting into the midst, there was the great broken ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... thoroughly swept, there was evidently too much risk about the performance to admit of its being repeated, so about a year afterwards I asked an "old chum" what I was to do with my chimney. "Sweep it with a furze-bush, to be sure," she replied. I mentioned this primitive receipt at home, and the idea was carried out a day or two later by one man mounting on the roof of the house whilst another remained in the kitchen; the individual on the roof threw down a rope to the one below, who fastened ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker

... it open. He entered, and quietly closed it behind him. Then he went down the step past the bar-counter, and through to the lighted doorway of the kitchen. There sat his wife, planted in front of the range, where a furze fire was burning. She sat in a chair full in front of the range, her knees wide apart on the fender. She looked over her shoulder at him as he entered, but she did not speak. Then she ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence

... of the lad had not changed in expression to any extent since Nick Ribsam drove him into the earth, but there was some downy furze on his upper lip and chin, while his voice was of that squeaky and uncertain tone heard ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis

... the hour and the mist, it was still fairly light, the zigzagging sandy path plainly visible between the heath, furze brakes, stunted firs and thorn bushes. The young clergyman, although more familiar with crowded pavements and flare of gas-lamps than open moorland in the deepening dusk, pursued his way without difficulty. What ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... migrations and conflicts upon a large scale; one discovers the process developing into a phase of social fragmentation and destruction and then, unless the whole country has been wasted down to its very soil, the Normal Social Life returns as the heath and furze and grass return after the burning of a common. But it never returns in precisely its old form. The surplus forces have always produced some traceable change; the rhythm is a little altered. As between the Gallic peasant before ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... me in the most obliging manner, and gave me a variety of information uncommonly valuable. He has made the greatest improvements I have anywhere met with. The whole country twenty-two years ago was a waste sheep-walk, covered chiefly with heath, with some dwarf furze and fern. The cabins and people as miserable as can be conceived; not a Protestant in the country, nor a road passable for a carriage. In a word, perfectly resembling other mountainous tracts, and the whole yielding ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young

... collected the beetles). Even on the second day its legs were supple. But the butterflies were dead. A whiff of rotten eggs had vanquished the pale clouded yellows which came pelting across the orchard and up Dods Hill and away on to the moor, now lost behind a furze bush, then off again helter-skelter in a broiling sun. A fritillary basked on a white stone in the Roman camp. From the valley came the sound of church bells. They were all eating roast beef in Scarborough; for it was Sunday when Jacob caught the pale ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... pig met a man with a bundle of furze, and said, "Please man give me that furze to build a house;" which the man did, and the pig built his house. Then along came the wolf, ...
— Aunt Friendly's Picture Book. - Containing Thirty-six Pages in Colour by Kronheim • Anonymous

... striding up the gentle slope of the glen, with many a rock peeping through its sward, and tufted ferns and furze, giving a wild and neglected character to the scene; the background of which, where the glen loses itself in a distant turn, is formed by its craggy and ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... lathered from a dish or tub, Hodge now began with grinning pain to grub, Just like a hedger cutting furze: 'Twas a vile razor!—then the rest he tried— All were imposters—"Ah," Hodge sighed! "I wish my ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... following thereon, kept Richard silent till Sandyfield rectory, the squat-towered, Georgian church and the black-headed, yew trees in the close-packed churchyard adjoining, the neighbouring farm and its goodly show of golden-gray wheat-ricks were left behind, and the carriage entered on the flat, furze-dotted expanse of Sandyfield common. Flocks of geese, arising from damp repose upon the ragged autumn turf, hissed forth futile declarations of war. A gipsy caravan painted in staring colours, and hung all ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... of wool. But every man, however Whiggish in his inclinations, entertains a secret respect for the powerful; and though I passed within a few feet of a large wasps' nest, suspended to a jutting bough of furze, the wasps I took especial care not to disturb. I pressed on, first through a broad belt of the forest, occupied mainly by melancholy Scotch firs; next through an opening, in which I found an American-looking village of mingled cottages, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... fertility, and that scarce any advantages of ornament or situation will be able to equal this beauty. It is the same case with particular trees and plants, as with the field on which they grow. I know not but a plain, overgrown with furze and broom, may be, in itself, as beautiful as a hill covered with vines or olive-trees; though it will never appear so to one, who is acquainted with the value of each. But this is a beauty merely of ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume

... Bagpipes, and an ancient Viol, and a Book of Strathspeys and Madrigals; and our Archdeacon will come to meet him, and to talk over ancient Music and Books: and we shall all three drive out past the green hedges, and heaths with their furze in blossom—and I wish—yes, I do—that ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald

... where her footsteps were no longer checked by a hedgerow, and she had wandered vaguely, unable to distinguish any objects, notwithstanding the wide whiteness around her, and the growing starlight. She sank down against a straggling furze bush, an easy pillow enough; and the bed of snow, too, was soft. She did not feel that the bed was cold, and did not heed whether the child would wake and cry for her. But her arms had not yet relaxed their instinctive clutch; and the ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot

... done up, and how could I refuse? So we went off through the heather and furze; I walking slowly because I was so tired, and he went tripping along merrily with his legs like a ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... of mutual observation fell from them as the city dropped behind; they were once more creatures for whom the external world alone had reality. There was a glorious June sky; there were country roads scented with flower and tree; the wide-gleaming common with its furze and bramble; then the great park, with felled trunks to rest upon, and prospects of endlessly-varied green to soothe the eye. The girls exhibited their pleasure each in her own way. Sally threw off restraint, and sprang ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing

... could find a hiding-place for his unfortunate boots, and could tell Muggridge where to look for them. It was a splendid idea, he thought; there could not be a better hiding-place, and running as fast as his feet could carry him to a clump of furze, he pushed his boots far in under the bush, took one glance to see that all was safe, and fled back again to ...
— Paul the Courageous • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... as though bewildered by the space, the sunshine, and the breeze, the great rabbit sat and stared about him; then suddenly old instincts came crowding back upon his rabbit brain, He saw furze and bracken, and rabbits' burrows all about him, he felt the turf under his feet, and life calling to him—and ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... answered Nicky-Nan. "I glimpsed him followin' me, back along the path; an' when I turned about for a chat, he dodged behind a furze-bush like as if he was pouncin' on some valuable butterfly. 'That's odd,' I thought: for I'd never heard of his collectin' such things. But he's often told me how lonely a constable feels, an' I thought he might have picked up wi' the habit to amuse himself. So on I walked, ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)

... spoke in haste: 'Good folk, I have no coin; To take were to purloin: I have no copper in my purse, I have no silver either, And all my gold is on the furze 120 That shakes in windy weather Above the rusty heather.' 'You have much gold upon your head,' They answered all together: 'Buy from us with a golden curl.' She clipped a precious golden lock, She dropped a tear more rare than pearl, Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red: ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti

... as became the work of a master who loved the open, and the music flowed with them like the ripple of a glancing water; so a deeper silence settled upon all, and I was back in England where a sparkling beck leaped out from the furze of Lingdale and sped in flashing shallows under the yellow fern, while somewhere beyond the singer's voice I could almost hear the alders talking to the breeze. When it ceased the sound grew louder, but it was only a bitter blast that came from the icy Pole moaning ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... was climbing over the ditch, "Look round, Pat," says he. And when Pat looked round, there were jewels and pearls lying at the roots of the furze-bushes on the ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing

... wooded thicket marks, on this point of the peninsula, the last effort of the vigorous vegetation of Normandy. As soon as its edge has been crossed, the view extends suddenly and without obstacle over the vast moors which form the triangular plateau of the Cape La Hague; fields of furze and heather, stone fences without cement, here and there a cross of granite, on the right and on the left the distant undulations of the ocean—such is the severe but grand landscape that is suddenly unfolded to the ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet

... James's! They are so fine and fair, You'd think a box of essences Was broken in the air: But Phyllida, my Phyllida! The breath of heath and furze, When breezes blow at morning, Is ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson

... strolled off to the right, and, when hidden, took to his heels for a hundred yards sprint. Turning into a winding bridle-path tucked between hedges of thorn and hazels, he walked to a point where it crossed a patch of furze. At a little distance a hand-bridge spanned the river, and gave access to the eastern end of the village by a steep climb of the wooded cliff. The path, in fact, was a short cut ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy

... hot July afternoon, or the sense of drugging—which followed Aunt Thirza's Sunday lunch. Some slept, some thought they were awake; but Noel and young Morland walked upward through the woods towards a high common of heath and furze, crowned by what was known as Kestrel rocks. Between these two young people no actual word of love had yet been spoken. Their lovering had advanced by glance ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... harbour; it entered the mouth of the romantic river, on the one side of which was the fort, still bearing the name of Cromwell, and on the other Kingsbridge, which Peter Pindar hath celebrated; while on both sides, as precipitous banks, rose towering hills, their summits covered by a stunted furze, and the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various

... narrow strip of larch and beech, with here and there a pine, stretched out towards the valley between the road and the first long high hill of the full moor. She was looking for a place where they might lunch, for Ashurst never looked for anything; and this, between the golden furze and the feathery green larches smelling of lemons in the last sun of April—this, with a view into the deep valley and up to the long moor heights, seemed fitting to the decisive nature of one who sketched ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... building which seemed to be a wayside inn, but was triumphantly lettered "hotel" along the top of its gable end, we at length debouched on to a solitary-looking semi-deserted row of red-brick houses that occupied one side of a wild-looking, furze- grown common, which I could perceive faced the sea; the sound of the low murmurs of the waves on the beach alone breaking the ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson

... in the wood, shut in by a few trees and great patches of golden-blossomed furze. The sun came down warmly, birds twittered in the boughs, and a couple of rabbits showed their white cottony tails for a moment or two as they plunged down into their burrows, while above all, in a low, deep, roaring bass, there was the heavy ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn

... caused the gate at the head of his avenue, which formerly, having only one hinge remained at all times hospitably open—he had caused this gate, I say, to be newly hung and handsomely painted. He had also shut up with paling, curiously twisted with furze, certain holes in tie fences adjoining, through which the gipsy boys used to scramble into the plantations to gather birds' nests, the seniors of the village to make a short cut from one point to another, and the lads and lasses for evening rendezvous—all without offence taken, or leave asked. ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... and on, until he came to a bridle-path, and following this, it led him up through winding lanes, bordered with golden furze that filled the air with fragrance, and brought him to the summit of the green hills that girdled and looked down on the Mystic Lake. Here the horse stopped of his own accord, and the dwarf's heart beat quickly as his eye rested ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy

... the water. Around and above him the frosty sky flashed with innumerable stars, and over the barque's masts, behind the long chine of the eastern hill, a soft radiance heralded the rising moon. It was a young moon, and, while he waited, her thin horn pushed up through the furze brake on the hill's summit and she mounted into the free heaven. With upturned eye the young minister followed her course for twenty minutes, not consciously observant; for he was thinking over his ambitions, and at his time of life these are apt to soar with the moon. Though possessed with zeal ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... little town of Kirkby-Malhouse, harsh and forbidding are the fells upon which it stands. It stretches in a single line of grey-stone, slate-roofed houses, dotted down the furze-clad ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle

... included the fibrous substances that can be spun into threads, and woven or felted into cloth. Some of these, like the covering of the sheep, goat, and llama, or the cocoon of the silk-worm, are of animal origin; others, like cotton furze, the husk of the cocoanut, and the bast of the flax-plant are vegetable products. Their use in the manufacture of cloth antedates the period at which written history begins; it probably begins with the time when primitive man gradually ceased ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway

... groan, a deep sigh. furze, a prickly shrub. grown, increased. gage, to pledge. gall, bile. gauge, to measure. Gaul, old name of France. gate, door; entrance. gild, to overlay with gold. gait, manner of walking. guild, a corporation. gilt, adorned with gold. gloze, to smooth over. guilt, crime. ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey

... and twice over, as the boy softly passed out of the shade into some sunny opening, he came upon little groups of deer—beautiful large-eyed thin-legged does, with their fawns—grazing peacefully on the soft grass which grew in patches between the tufts of golden prickly furze, for they were safe enough, the huntsmen being gone in search of the lordly bucks, with their tall flattened horns if they were fallow deer, small, round, and sharply pointed ...
— Young Robin Hood • G. Manville Fenn

... Dartmoor the burning of the furze up the hillsides to let new grass grow, is called zwayling."—E. ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.

... her own kinship and communion with them. She remembered these hillsides grey as time, where the grass was a perishing bloom on the face of the immemorial granite. A million memories and instincts met in these smells of furze and heather and moss, of green rushes and the sweet earth of ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair

... laments (and rightly) the absence in the tropic forests of such grand masses of colour as are supplied by a heather moor, a furze or broom-croft, a field of yellow charlock, blue bugloss, or scarlet poppy. Tropic landscape gardening will supply that defect; and a hundred plants of yellow Allamanda, or purple Dolichos, or blue Clitoria, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... to retain them." This brings out the leading idea as to the man's memory in a very forceful manner. Contrast it with the simple statement—"His memory is good." Sometimes Simile is prostituted to a low and degrading use; as "His face was like a danger signal in a fog storm." "Her hair was like a furze-bush in bloom." "He was to his lady love as a poodle to its mistress." Such burlesque is never permissible. Mere likeness, it should be remembered, does not constitute a simile. For instance there is no simile when one city is compared to another. ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin

... Second Pig's venture with a man with a load of furze. Builds a furze house. Wolf ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready

... cliff, as if seeking its protection, lay the little fishing fleet, with its brown sails giving warmth and colour to as bonny an English landscape as could well be seen. There up aloft, where the hill cliff was purple and gold and grey with heath and furze and crag, was the man with the bushes, signalling to his comrades in the boat, which seemed to be crawling slowly along, the piled-up filmy brown net, lying in a clumsy heap, so it seemed, but really in carefully laid-out folds, with every rope in place ready for the ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn

... adventurers, bravely ride the billowy furze, Golden foil and dewy pearls are swaying to a tune: Quaff the brew of red raspberry through the vine veils gossamery. Till we turn when night comes ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls

... Katterfelto of wonders! exceeded expectation, went beyond belief, and soared above all the natural powers of description! she was nature itself! she was the most exquisite work of art! she was the very daisy, primrose, tube rose, sweet-briar, furze blossom, gilliflower, wall-flower, cauliflower and rosemary! in short she was a bouquet of Parnassus. Where expectation was raised so high, it was thought she would be injured by her appearance; but it was the audience who were injured—several ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... until evening, when, having killed as many hares as they could readily carry, they took a short cut home through the lower fields. By this way they came upon a long, green hill, covered in some places with short furze, and commanding a full view of the haunted house, which lay some four or five hundred yards below them, with its back door lying, ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... roads were everywhere enclosed between high hedges, on which were planted rows of elms; and the same kind of hedge divided the fields and tenements. Every house, too, in those days had its orchard, cider being then universally drunk; and the hill-sides and cliffs were covered with furze brakes, as in all country houses they baked their own bread and required the furze for fuel. Now all that is changed. The meadows are drained and planted with brocoli for the early London market, to be replaced by a crop of potatoes at the end ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith

... through some rough, hilly, open ground, which on the right side towards the ocean has never been cultivated. The distance from the ocean here may, perhaps, be a quarter of a mile, and the ground is for the most part covered with low furze. On the left of the road the land is cultivated in patches, and here, some half mile or more from the ferry, a path turns away to Crump Island. The house cannot be seen from the road, and, indeed, can hardly be seen at all, except from the sea. It lies, perhaps, three furlongs from the high ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope

... And as seafaring men, who long have wrought In the great deep for gain, at last come home, And towards evening see the headlands rise Of their dear country, and can plain descry A fire of wither'd furze which boys have lit Upon the cliffs, or smoke of burning weeds Out of a till'd field inland;—then the wind Catches them, and drives out again to sea; And they go long days tossing up and down Over the grey sea-ridges, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... heathland reveals itself dimly, terminating in an abrupt slope, at the summit of which are three tumuli. On the sheltered side of the most prominent of these stands a hut of turves with a brick chimney. In front are two ricks of fuel, one of heather and furze for quick ignition, the other of wood, for slow burning. Something in the feel of the darkness and in the personality of the spot imparts a sense of uninterrupted space around, the view by day extending from the cliffs of the Isle of Wight eastward to Blackdon Hill by Deadman's Bay westward, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... across the grass. She no longer felt as if the darkness hedged her in. She thought she could walk back across the field, and get over the stile; and then, in the very next field, she thought she remembered there was a hovel of furze near a sheepfold. If she could get into that hovel, she would be warmer. She could pass the night there, for that was what Alick did at Hayslope in lambing-time. The thought of this hovel brought the energy of a new ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... You know we were warned to watch Keyhaven marshes—and a dreary spot it is. Worse than the most dismal flats on the Essex coast, which is saying a lot. Well, before I tell you what happened, I ought to describe the place. It's a marsh, with patches of dry ground thickly covered with furze, that extends from Keyhaven to Lymington River—about four miles. It is separated from the sea—or rather mud-flats, covered at high tide—by a low bank on which is an apology for ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman

... no appreciation of the country about him; no love of Nature for its own sake. In winter he becomes an inmate of the workhouse, where he almost always proves himself turbulent and disorderly. As soon as it becomes warm enough to sleep in a haystack, or under a hedge, or in a thick clump of furze and bracken, he discharges himself from 'the Union' and takes to 'the roads.' From town to town he begs or steals his way, safe in the assurance that should things go amiss the nearest workhouse must always ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... little tea-party in Maggot's cottage broke up the whole were scattered abroad, and men and mules and horses sped with their ill-gotten gains across the furze-clad moors. ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne

... had pitched head first into a furze bush which broke the fall, otherwise I must have met with serious injury. As it was, when I recovered my momentary loss of consciousness, I found that I had sustained no worse harm than a severe shaking, scratches galore, and the utter demolition of my clothes! I picked myself up with difficulty, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell

... in advance of her. She hastened forwards, and found him and all the others just emerged from the wood, and standing on an open bare common where neither castle nor cottage was to be seen, nothing but a carpet of purple heath, dwarf furze, and short soft grass upon which a few cows, a colt, and a donkey, were browsing. The party were standing together, ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge



Words linked to "Furze" :   bush, genus Ulex, Ulex, Ulex europaeus, shrub, Irish gorse, whin, needle furze



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