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Gorse

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



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"Gorse" Quotes from Famous Books



... irresistible force. We had been close prisoners to the house all those days, dreading to open a door to go out for wood or water, lest a terrific blast should rush in and whip the light shingle roof off. Not an animal could be seen out of doors; they had all taken shelter on the lee-side of the gorse hedges, which are always planted round a garden to give the vegetables a chance of coming up. On the sky-line of the hills could be perceived towards evening, mobs of sheep feeding with their heads up-wind, and travelling to the high camping-grounds which they always select in preference ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker

... the story of the ancient Way, or the Pilgrims' Road that follows it; only on foot can you climb the hills as you please, or follow the path where it chooses to take you. It is only by walking that you will get to the best of the Thursley heather, or the Bagshot pines and gorse, or the whortleberries in the wind on Leith Hill, or the primroses of the Fold country, or the birds that call through the quiet of the Wey Canal—though there, too, you may take a boat; it is one of the prettiest of the byways. The walker through Surrey sees the best; the others ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... epitome of the results of this awakening. Anything more desolate than its aspect when it was first established it would be impossible to imagine. Long 'lines' of huts, planted in a wilderness of gorse, heather, and sand, dimly lit, and miserably appointed; 'women that were sinners' prowling about the outskirts, and gradually taking possession of much of the hastily-constructed town, with the usual accompaniment of low public-houses and music-halls—such, ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers

... Scotland, that it seems vain and presumptuous to meddle with them; and yet we must ask our readers to figure to themselves a sharp cleft sloping downwards to a brawling mountain stream, the sides scattered with gray rocks of every imaginable size, interspersed here and there with heather, gorse, or furze. Just in the widest part of the valley, a sort of platform of rock jutted out from the hill-side, and afforded a station for one of those tall, narrow, grim-looking fastnesses that were the strength of Scotland, as well as ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge

... that the envelope was addressed, "Lady Linnet, Gorse Bush, Somersetshire;" and that in the left-hand corner there was written, "For ...
— Comical People • Unknown

... influence on the general aspect of nature in temperate than in tropical climates. During twelve years spent amid the grandest tropical vegetation, I have seen nothing comparable to the effect produced on our landscapes by gorse, broom, heather, wild hyacinths, hawthorn, purple ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... down upon the earth, there was a vividness of flamy vegetation, of fierce seclusion amid the savage peace of the commons. Strange how the savage England lingers in patches: as here, amid these shaggy gorse commons, and marshy, snake infested places near the foot of the south downs. The spirit of place lingering on primeval, as when the Saxons ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence

... of vegetables cooking led us eventually to the little mound amidst the gorse where our aristocratic visitors were temporarily residing. There was some difficulty at first in attracting their attention, but this I overcame by tying our visiting-cards to a piece of string and dangling it down the tunnel that served as an entrance. After coughing several times I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various

... rude than many of the fishermen's cottages along the coast—there lived, a few years since, three persons: old Aimee Kaudren, aged seventy, who with her snow-white cap and sabots, and her keen clear-cut face, might have been seen any day in or near the cottage, cutting the gorse-bushes that grew about the rocks for firing, leading the cow home from her scanty bit of grazing, kneeling on the stone edge of the pond by the well, to wash the clothes, or within doors cooking the soup in the huge cauldron that stood on the granite hearth. A sight indeed it was to see ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall

... proved asylum of the spineless. Nature has flung them broadcast. She starts low down among the plants, thorn and thistle, gorse and cactus. Then she turns to the sea-urchins and caterpillars and beetles, then she fashions the globe-fish and thorny devil-lizard, then she comes to the birds—spikes are their only weapons—lastly, in me and mine, she reaches the fulness ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English

... later Newbury set out to walk to Coryston. The day was sultry, and June in all its power ruled the countryside. The hawthorns were fading; the gorse was over; but the grass and the young wheat were rushing up, the wild roses threw their garlands on every hedge, and the Coryston trout-stream, beside which Newbury walked, brimming as it was, on its chalk bed, ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... thought. After his day the "back-to-nature" idea became more popular and perhaps more picturesque. Our literature becomes more and more aware of an American background. Bobolinks and thrushes take the place of skylarks; sumach and cedar begin to be as familiar as heather and gorse; forests, prairies, a clear, high sky, a snowy winter, a summer of thunderstorms, drive out the misty England which, since the days of Cynewulf, our ancestors had seen in the mind's eye while they were writing. Nature literature becomes a category. ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... the tales, or new or old, In idle moments idly told; Flowers of the field with petals thin, Lilies that neither toil nor spin, And tufts of wayside weeds and gorse Hung in the parlor of the inn Beneath the sign of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... were occasional visitors of irreproachable antecedents from Tunbridge Wells. Respectability is a plant which in that fashionable watering-place has been so assiduously cultivated that it flourishes now in the open air; like the yellow gorse, it is found in every corner, thriving hardily under the most unfavourable conditions; and the keener the wind, the harder the frost, the more proudly does it hold its head. But on this particular day the gathering was confined ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham

... heightened my old hatred of his dingy old antiquarian fussiness and my longing for the youth and liberty that called to me from the sea. Outside was strong sunlight with a wind; and a yellow head of some broom or gorse in the garden rapped against the glass of the window. I thought of that living and growing gold calling to me from all the heaths of the world—and then of that dead, dull gold and bronze and brass of my brother's growing dustier and dustier as life ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... of the village soon turned off into the heart of the moorlands that lay, rising and falling in irregular undulations, between the sea and the hills. He was quickly out of sight of Scarhaven, and in the midst of a solitude. All round him stretched wide expanses of heather and gorse, broken up by great masses of rock: from a rise in the road he looked about him and saw no sign of a human habitation and heard nothing but the rush of the wind across the moors and the plaintive cry of the sea-birds ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher

... shining water well I found a very little dell, No higher than my head. The heather and the gorse about In summer bloom were coming out, Some ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg

... among sand-dunes, flourishing spears we knew we were on the Moors' coast, and stood over north to Spain; and a strong south-west wind bore us in ten days to a coast of high red rocks, where we heard a hunting-horn blow among the yellow gorse and knew it ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling

... how merry a start we got, When the red fox broke from the gorse, In a country so deep, with a scent so hot, That the hound could outpace the horse; I remember how few in the front rank shew'd, How endless appeared the tail, On the brown hill-side, where we cross'd the road, And headed towards ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon

... before the horses, and which were merely the beams that the two lanterns projected on the never-ending hedges of the roadway. But how was it that trees were so green in the month of December? Astonished at first, she bent to look out, and then she remembered how the gorse, the evergreen gorse of the paths and the cliffs, never fades in the country of Paimpol. At the same time a warmer breeze began to blow, which she knew again and which smelt ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... Andrew's love for her, were revealed to me one day when, with Deborah's master, his lumbering sons and comely daughters, and my chum Fred Harcourt, an artist from "across the water," we were cutting some early grass in May, just before the full bloom of the gorse had begun to fade from the hillsides and from the tops of the hedges where it had made borders of gold for the green of the ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various

... uncultivated, and yet it cannot be said to have been unproductive; for, probably, there never was a space of ground of equal size, unless it were Maidenhead Thicket, which could show so rich and luxuriant a crop of gorse, heath, and fern. For a shelter to the latter, appeared scattered at unequal distances over the ground a few stunted trees—hawthorns, beeches, and oaks. The beech, however, predominated, in honour of the county in which the common was situated; for though, probably, if we knew the origin of the ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James

... Dane! The heathen Dane Is wasting Hampshire's coast again— From ravaged church and plundered farm Flash the dread beacons of alarm— Fly, helpless peasants, fly! Ytene's green banks and forest shades, Her heathery slopes and gorse-clad glades Re-echo to the cry— Where is the King, whose strong right hand Hath oft from danger freed the land? Nor fleet nor covenant avails To drive aloof those pirate sails, In vain is Alfred's sword; Vain seems in every sacred fane The chant—'From fury of the Dane, ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge

... of some serene and peaceful quality in your poems. Here, then, there are sixty-four little pages of restfulness for those whose minds are troubled. You don't plunge into the deep of metaphysics and churn it into a foam, but you perch on your little bough and pipe sweetly of gorse and heather and wide meadows and brightly-flashing insects; you sing softly as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 26, 1891 • Various

... Wells are numerous. The common, with its mixture of springy turf, golden gorse, with here and there a bold group of rocks, is one of the most beautiful in the home counties, and in whatever direction one wanders there are long views over far-stretching wooded ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home

... down, when Grace Carrington first talked with me of the Canadian Dominion on the bleak slopes of Starcross Moor. There was a hollow in the hillside where a few pale-stemmed birches and somber firs formed, as it were, a rampart between the poor, climbing meadows and the waste of gorse and fern, and we two beneath them seemed utterly ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... its seductive opulence of harmony. Exquisite melodies, limpid and unstrained as the carol of a bird in Spring-time, and as plaintive as the cooing of a turtle-dove seems as natural products of the Scottish Highlands as the gorse which blazons on their hillsides in August. Debarred from expressing their aspirations as people of broader culture do—in painting, in sculpture, in poetry and prose, these mountaineers make song the flexible and ready instrument ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... Purple heath, golden gorse, and tufts of broom. Tall pines with branches like steps to tempt you to climb. Regular precipices after climbing above the sand-pit, from which you could jump into the soft sand, and then slide and roll down to the bottom. Once I jumped upon a little promontory high above the slope, ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn

... Westmoreland dales, the month was rainier than elsewhere, but if possible, milder. Yellow buds were already foolishly breaking on the gorse, and weak primroses, as though afraid to venture, and yet venturing, were to be found in the depths of ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... the hill, Ventnor presents from the sea a remarkable and magnificent picture. Each house being at a different elevation, commands sunshine all the day. Sheltered from the cold wind, trees and flowers flourish and retain their beauty during the winter. When the golden gorse and purple heather are in bloom upon the downs it forms a most attractive scene. Steamboat trips daily during the summer furnish the visitors with abundant opportunities of enjoying this vision of beauty. The Railway ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various

... season, and in the gardens of the little gray houses, with their red-tiled roofs, and by the roadside were gorgeous asters of all shades of purple. In the less cultivated places, heather blooms luxuriantly and yellow gorse which attracted Miss Cassandra's trained botanist's eye, and she suddenly quoted the old Scotch saw, with about the same appropriateness as some of the remarks of "Mr. F's Aunt" in Bleak House: "'When gorse is out of season, kissing is out of ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton

... woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... expected. On Midsummer Eve people in the Isle of Man were wont to light fires to the windward of every field, so that the smoke might pass over the corn; and they folded their cattle and carried blazing furze or gorse round them several times. In Ireland cattle, especially barren cattle, were driven through the midsummer fires, and the ashes were thrown on the fields to fertilise them, or live coals were carried into them to prevent blight. In Scotland ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... beneath a ruin, he had found the commas. He had seen a white admiral circling higher and higher round an oak tree, but he had never caught it. An old cottage woman living alone, high up, had told him of a purple butterfly which came every summer to her garden. The fox cubs played in the gorse in the early morning, she told him. And if you looked out at dawn you could always see two badgers. Sometimes they knocked each other over like ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... a heavenly ramble this morning, and found blue periwinkles and anemones in the woods, but no primroses. Lots of palm and gorse. Robins, willow-wrens, and yellow-hammers were singing, the darlings, much prettier music than guns, and it is good to get away from the sound of motors and ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous

... have said, was impenetrable above; but it was burrowed at its base by over-ground runs of some wild animal—not, I think, a very large one; they were just like the runs which rabbits make among gorse and heather, only on a bigger scale—bigger, even, than a fox's or badger's. By crouching and bending our backs, we could crawl through them with difficulty into the scrubby tangle. It was hard work creeping. The runs divided soon. Colebrook ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... give the alarm without being sure. The monk had declared the force to be the enemy, but the boy wished to see for himself, and, darting sidewise, he ran down the hill, bearing to his right, till by stooping he could keep under cover of the gorse-bushes and approach quite ...
— The King's Sons • George Manville Fenn

... lane were the cottage of Tabby's sister, the school the Brontes daily visited, and the sexton's dwelling where the curates lodged. Behind the vicarage a savage expanse of gorse and heather rises to the horizon and stretches many miles away; a path oft-trodden by the Brontes leads between low walls from their home to this open moor, their habitual resort in childhood and womanhood. The higher plateaus afford a wide prospect, but, despite the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey

... wildness and quiet became increasingly grateful. The silence of nature was broken only by bird sounds, and the most frequent sound was that of the yellow bunting, as, perched motionless on the summit of a gorse bush, his yellow head conspicuous at a considerable distance, he emitted his thin monotonous chant at regular intervals, like a painted toy-bird that sings by machinery. There, too, sedentary as an owl in the daytime, the corn bunting was common, discharging his brief song at intervals—a ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson

... out into the world to try their luck, and each took his own way; but when the youngest had gorse ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent

... lake for nearly its whole length. Loch Vennachar lies between hills of comparatively gentle declivity, pastured by flocks, and tufted with patches of the prickly gorse and coarse ferns. On its north bank lies Lanrick Mead, a little grassy level where Scott makes the tribe of Clan Alpine assemble at the command of Roderick Dhu. At a little distance from Vennachar lies Loch Achray, which we reached by a road winding among shrubs and low trees, birches, and ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant

... a giant's grave in this antique land, Ethelberta lifted her eyes to behold two sorts of weather pervading Nature at the same time. Far below on the right hand it was a fine day, and the silver sunbeams lighted up a many-armed inland sea which stretched round an island with fir-trees and gorse, and amid brilliant crimson heaths wherein white paths and roads occasionally met the eye in dashes and zigzags like flashes of lightning. Outside, where the broad Channel appeared, a berylline and opalized variegation of ripples, currents, ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... Playford. The churches, both of Little and of Great Bealings, are very ancient, and well deserve a visit; but the Woodbridge Road itself passes through some very pretty scenery. Rushmere Heath, in the early summer time, when the gorse is in bloom, is one mass of yellow, in the cleared spaces of which may usually be seen a gipsy encampment. The gibbet once stood on this heath, and in former times it seems to have been the place where executions usually ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie

... Gorse, or Whin. This pretty native shrub needs no description, suffice it to say that it is one of the handsomest-flowering shrubs in cultivation. U. europaeus flore-pleno (Double-flowered Gorse) is even more beautiful than the species, ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster

... a low waste of unenclosed land, with sedge and gorse pricking up everywhere through the snow, and with long lines of pollards marking the bed of a frozen stream. Near the line was a deserted brick-kiln, surrounded by long uneven mounds and ridges of ice, with three poplars mounting guard over it. Flights of rooks ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley

... occurrence in my own travels gives some faint idea of the sentiment which dictated this remark. At St. Helena the flora of the North and South singularly meet. Patches of gorse (Ulex Europæa)—that idol of Linnæus and ornament of our English and Cambrian wastes—grow freely on the higher grounds, rivalling the purple heath in their golden bloom, and shrubs of warmer climates in their sweet perfume. Returning to ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... the sun flashed on the carriages and on the quivering leaves in the park. It was a joyous morning, and men and women looked at the sky and smiled as they went about their work or their pleasure, and the wind blew as blithely as upon the meadows and the scented gorse. But somehow or other I got out of the bustle and the gaiety, and found myself walking slowly along a quiet, dull street, where there seemed to be no sunshine and no air, and where the few foot-passengers loitered ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen

... smaller divisions of the crowd. The greatest attraction apparently lay in the direction of Dog Lane, the outlet towards Paddiford Common, whither the caricatures were moving; and you foresee, of course, that those works of symbolical art were consumed with a liberal expenditure of dry gorse-bushes and ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot

... from Willey Water along the course of the bright little stream. The afternoon was full of larks' singing. On the bright hill-sides was a subdued smoulder of gorse. A few forget-me-nots flowered by the water. There was a rousedness and a ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... something else. It was like a thing alive—a huge giant lying spread out in the sun warming itself, or covering itself with thick, white mist which sometimes writhed and twisted itself into wraiths. First I noticed and liked it some day, perhaps, when it was purple and yellow with gorse and heather and broom, and the honey scents drew bees and butterflies and birds. But soon I saw and was ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... had materially changed since their descent of the hill. In place of the richly-cultivated district which lay on the other side, a broad brown tract of waste land spread out before them, covered with scattered patches of gorse, stunted fern, and low brushwood, presenting an unvaried surface of unbaked turf. The shallow coat of sod was manifested by the stones that clattered under the horse's hoofs as he rapidly traversed the arid soil, clearing with ease to himself, though not without discomfort ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... which would otherwise afford an agreeable food to horses, are armed with thorns or prickles, which secure them from those animals; as the holly, hawthorn, gooseberry, gorse. In the extensive moorlands of Staffordshire, the horses have learnt to stamp upon a gorse-bush with one of their fore-feet for a minute together, and when the points are broken, they eat it without injury. The horses in the new forest in Hampshire are affirmed to do the ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... these Pasture or Meadow Grounds being supposed to be, either Weeds, Moss, Sour-grass, Heath, Fern, Bushes, Bryars, Brambles, Broom, Rushes, Sedges, Gorse or Furzes: what are ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various

... outrageous in his sports. Previous to the great downfall of politics in his county, he had supported the hunt by every means in his power. He had preserved game till no goose or turkey could show a tail in the parish of St. Ewold's. He had planted gorse covers with more care than oaks and larches. He had been more anxious for the comfort of his foxes than of his ewes and lambs. No meet had been more popular than Ullathorne; no man's stables had been more liberally open to ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... barometer spinning upwards; they feel ready for any fun that comes in their way. And, alas! did not this same buoyancy of spirit not many years ago involve certain respectable oarsmen in a difference with the executive? Tacenda, indeed! Yet if a rabbit springs up out of the gorse, and the dogs are off in full cry, can nature in such a ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... covered with barrows, each holding the mouldering bones of some forgotten chieftain, laid to rest, how many centuries ago, with the rude mourning of a savage clan. I stood on one of the highest of these the other day, on a great gorse-clad headland, and sent my spirit out in quest of the old warrior that lay below—"Audisne haec, Amphiaraee, sub terram condite?" But there was no answer from the air; though in my sleep one night I saw a wild, red-bearded man, in a coat of skins, ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... earth couldn't you stay on deck?" demanded the mother angrily, as she lifted the transformation from her brow and heaved it on to the upper berth, thereby unashamedly exposing a head not unlike a gorse ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest

... servants said his lordship wasn't in. As I came away, I saw him, as I thought, pass the lodge and go up the road, and I cut after him, but couldn't overtake him, and at last lost sight of him. I struck into a tangled sort of pathway through the gorse, or whatever it's called down here, and it brought me out near the river. His lordship was just sculling down, and then I knew it was some one else had gone by the lodge, and not him. Perhaps ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood

... all cry, "Oh, Sir TENNIS, our own, Drive him back whence he came to his bunkers and gorse." And the men shake their heads, for Sir TENNIS seems blown, There are cracks in his armour, and wounds on his horse. But the Umpire, Sir PUNCH, as he watches says, "Pooh! Let them fight and be friends; there is ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 11, 1890 • Various

... as in the gorse, when grown in dry, gravelly situations, we see many leaves and twigs modified into thorns to diminish the loss of water through evaporation by exposing too much leaf surface to the sun and air. That such spines protect the plants which bear them from the ravages of grazing cattle ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... so sure," I answered. "Barely a mile away there is a pretty piece of gorse land that appears to be no good to anyone. I daresay for ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome

... the gorse bushes in their second blossoming, and the moor, stretched before her, was as her life promised to be: it was monotonous in its bright colouring, quiet and serene, broad-bosomed for its children. Old sheep looked up at her as she went by, and she saw herself in some relationship to ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young

... [Sidenote: Wild worms wriggle to their abodes in the earth.] Wylde worme[gh] to her won wrye[gh] i{n} e ere, [Sidenote: The fox goes to the woods.] e fox & e folmarde to e fryth wynde[gh], [Sidenote: Harts to the heath, and hares to the gorse.] Hertt{es} to hy[gh]e hee, hare[gh] to gorste[gh], [Sidenote: Lions and leopards go to the lakes.] & lyou{n}e[gh] & lebarde[gh] to e lake ryft{es}, 536 [Sidenote: Eagles and hawks to the high rocks.] Herne[gh] & haueke[gh] to e hy[gh]e roche[gh]; e hole-foted fowle to ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various

... gorse would be out, fringing the pastures, and on the roadside would be heartsease and faery thimbles, and perhaps a few late primroses; and the meadow would be green with corn." A faint wisp of a sigh escaped her at the thought, and the tinker looked across at her questioningly. ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer

... right hand of the enclosure would fall and rot among the grass, if it were not that we heard the booming bark of dogs echoing from great buildings at the back. And now the half-weaned calves that have been sheltering themselves in a gorse-built hovel against the left-hand wall come out and set up a silly answer to that terrible bark, doubtless supposing that it has ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... however, knew intimately every detail of that wilderness of trees within. He knew all the purple coombs splashed with yellow waves of gorse; sweet with juniper and myrtle, and gleaming with clear and dark-eyed pools that watched the sky. There hawks hovered, circling hour by hour, and the flicker of the peewit's flight with its melancholy, petulant cry, deepened the sense of stillness. He knew the solitary pines, dwarfed, ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood

... it be heavenly to run away from it all, and have a week- end in the country! The gorse will be out, and the hawthorn still in blossom. What's the very cheapest one could do it on for ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... have a tonic and exhilarating effect on this Patchinar pony. Before we could reach him (a work of considerable difficulty and some risk) he had risen to his feet, given himself a good shake, and was nibbling away at a bit of gorse that peeped through the snow on which he had fallen. A deep cut on the shoulder was his only injury, and, curiously enough, our portmanteaus, with the exception of a broken strap, were unharmed. There was, luckily, ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt

... menthe coloured panthers were covered up by a hunting frieze. It was a priceless show, one of the field appearing in a chic pair of red gloves! I suppose they had some extra paint over from the pink coats. Scene I. was the meet, with the fox lurking well within sight behind a small gorse bush, but funnily enough not a hound got wind of him. Scene III. was a good water-jump where one of the field had taken a toss right into the middle of a stream. Considering the sandy spot he had chosen as a take-off, he had no one to thank but himself. A lady further ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp

... still clinging to the friendly goat, came near the edge of the field, which here sloped more steeply to the mountain top. Great boulders, slightly covered with lichen and moss, were strewn about, and around them the bracken and gorse were growing, and in every crevice of these rocks there were plants whose little, tight-fisted roots gripped a desperate, adventurous habitation in a soil scarcely more than half an inch deep. At some time these rocks had been smitten so ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens

... delicious morning; the feeling of the coming summer was in the air, the larks were singing joyously above the moorland, as if they, too, were revelling in the bright sunlight, the clean, keen air, the scent of the gorse with which it was perfumed. Celia could scarcely refrain from singing; she walked quickly, and sometimes, to Roddy's delight, she ran races with him. She came to the end of the moor at last, and swung down to the high road, followed it for some time and presently came ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice

... by the time they reached the farm had formed quite a different estimation of the head girl. The walk in itself was delightful. Their way lay along a road that led over the moors. On either side stretched an expanse of gorse and whinberry bushes, interspersed with patches of grass, where sheep were feeding. Dykes filled with water edged the road, and in these were growing rushes, and sedges, and crowfoot, and a few forget-me-nots and other water-loving flowers. Larks were ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... carefully one on the top of the other in Tom's arms, then sat down on the mossy root of a tree, and watched him as he crossed the common towards the little brown hut among the gorse bushes. ...
— The Gap in the Fence • Frederica J. Turle

... was passed at tretat, his beautiful childhood; it was there that his instincts were awakened in the unfoldment of his prehistoric soul. Years went by in an ecstasy of physical happiness. The delight of running at full speed through fields of gorse, the charm of voyages of discovery in hollows and ravines, games beneath the dark hedges, a passion for going to sea with the fishermen and, on nights when there was no moon, for dreaming on their boats of ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... letter I am primitive man, and he abhors the brown and the waving field, and 'the spirit in his feet' leads him to some grassy glen where he follows his flocks, listening to the song of the wilding bee that sings as it labours amid the gorse. What a soulless race that plain must breed," I thought; "what soulless days are lived there; peasants going forth at dusk to plough, and turning home at dusk to eat, procreate and sleep." At last a ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... took him by an unfrequented way, and in the course of an hour's devious ramble he found himself on the canal spoil-bank. The cutting was perhaps a hundred feet deep, and the artificial mounds were old enough to be covered by turf and gorse. They bore here and there a tree, and in any hollow of the hills, where the chimneys and furnace-fires were hidden, it needed no special gift of the imagination to make a rolling prairie of the scene, or at ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... let himself out. Then he turned with an almost hysterical delight and ran—ran like the wind, without pausing, without thinking, straight on, up one turning, down another, until he reached a broad open common, thickly wooded, sprinkled with gorse and hazel and may, and faintly purple with fading heather. There he flung himself down in the beautiful sunlight, among the yellowing bracken, to ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare

... me, of course, to rob me.' To rob her, and of what?... of her watch; where was it? It was gone. The watch was gone.... But, had she lost it? Should she go back and see if she could find it? Oh! impossible! see the place again—impossible! search among the gorse—impossible! ...
— Celibates • George Moore

... a sky of plain dark blue, making a path of swaying gold toward the beach, where we could see the water curl upon the sands like suds. A little back was a steep rise of granite rocks, with gorse and heather growing on the sides, at the bottom of which some gipsies, or free-traders, had built a great fire, and we heard them singing a drunken catch in chorus, and saw them whirling round and round the fire in a circle, as we ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane

... little common, very wild and tangled with gorse, and in summer very picturesque. Some elms bordered the road, and there was a large clear-looking pond, and flocks of geese would waddle over the common, hissing and thrusting out their yellow bills ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... the graceful charm of the Thames above the locks nor the romance of the crowded stream below London Bridge. In the afternoon he walked about the common; and that is gray and dingy too; it is neither country nor town; the gorse is stunted; and all about is the litter of civilisation. He went to a play every Saturday night and stood cheerfully for an hour or more at the gallery-door. It was not worth while to go back to Barnes for the interval between the closing of the Museum and his meal in an A. B. C. shop, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... to McClure the alternative of following Jean on his own responsibility, but the Stonykirker had far too great a respect for his skin to search a valley bristling like a thousand hedgehogs with all manner of thorn and gorse bushes, waved over with broom and darkened with undergrowth, any single clump of which might conceal half-a-dozen rifles, each with the eye of a sharpshooter behind it—a mere spark in the sheltering dusk, but quite enough to frighten most ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett

... offer. I warned him of his one peculiarity. The morning of the hunt we rode out together. It was in the direction of Ballynegarde. There was often a trap to be met in the way of a sunken ditch over-grown with gorse, and unless one knew the lay of it a horse was apt to rush through instead of jumping and find himself and the rider at the bottom of the sunken ditch. I had forgotten to warn the rider of Mick Molloy of this fact. We had a fine seven-mile run in ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon

... as a ballroom floor," said he. It was a clear, still day and we were sitting among the gorse on the top of the garrison, looking down the sea towards the west. Five miles from the Scillies, the thin column of the Bishop showed like a cord strung tight in the sky. "But out there all round the lighthouse there are eddies ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason

... heard, and at a little distance he saw the beautiful Yolande de Foix, radiant and charming as ever, riding slowly by—apparently returning from the chase. He followed her with his eyes admiringly, but felt no regret as her figure was lost to view amid the thick gorse bushes bordering the road down which she was going, and turned with ever increasing love and adoration to the sweet being at his side. The memory of the fair Yolande, whom he had once worshipped in a vague, boyish way, faded before the delicious reality of his passionate love for ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier

... but swelling uplands covered with massy foliage sloped down to its wild, irregular turf soil,—soil poor for pasturage, but pleasant to the eye; with dell and dingle, bosks of fantastic pollards; dotted oaks of vast growth; here and there a weird hollow thorn-tree; patches of fern and gorse. Hoarse and loud cawed the rooks; and deep, deep as from the innermost core of the lovely woodlands came the mellow note of the cuckoo. A few moments more a wind of the road brought the house in sight. At ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... us old England all silver and gold, With the flame o' the gorse and the flower o' the thorn; We long for lush meadow-lands where we were foaled And boast of great runs with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various

... aware," he continued, "that there's a deal of gorse and bramble growing right down to the very edge of the coast thereabouts, Middlebrook. Scrub—that sort o' thing. The stuff that if it catches anything loose, anything protruding from say, the pocket of a garment, 'll lay hold and stick ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher

... its beds of lettuce and potatoe, its neat patches of parsley and thyme; then a field beyond. I note the double meandering hedge-line that indicates the high road, and beyond again the ground rises in sun-bathed pastures and ploughed land to the gorse-covered cliff edge with its background of pure sky; a little to the right, yet still in full view from my window, is an abrupt dip in the cliff, which shows a great wedge of glittering sea. It is here that my eyes always ultimately rest, until they ache with ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various

... gave me an even better idea of the woman my aunt had been than even the panic of her solicitor. The thing went as smoothly as the disappearance of a caravan of gypsies, camped for the night on a heath beside gorse bushes. We went to the ball that night as if from a household that had its roots deep in the solid rock, and in the morning we ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad

... The bees are turning homeward for th' last time, and we've a terrible long bit to go yet. See! here's a linnet's nest in this gorse-bush. Th' hen bird is on it. Look at her bright eyes, she won't stir. Ay! we mun hurry home. Won't mother be pleased with the bonny lot of heather we've got! Make haste, Sally, maybe we shall have cockles for supper. ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

... hast fire at hand, beneath the embers, and let make ready dry fuel of gorse, or thorn, or bramble, or pear boughs dried with the wind's buffeting, and on the wild fire burn these serpents twain, at midnight, even at the hour when they would have slain thy child. But at dawn let one of thy maidens gather the dust of the fire, ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang

... stopped; but there was no one on the bank, and though the towers of S. Philip and S. James appeared again and again in lessening size as we looked back, there came at last a bend in the canal, when a high bank of gorse shut out the distance, and ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing

... travelled was at first varied with trees and bushes clothed in rich foliage; but soon its aspect changed, and ere long he pursued a path which led over a wide extent of wild moorland covered with purple heath and gorse in golden-yellow bloom. The ground, too, became so rough that the youth was fain to confine himself to the highroad; but being of an explorative disposition, he quickly diverged into the lanes, which in that part of Cornwall were, and still ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne

... narcissus grows wild in the lower fields; a lovely creamy stream of flowers flows along the lanes, and lies hidden in the levels; hyacinth-pools of blue shine in the woods; and then with a later burst of glory comes the gorse, lighting up the country round about, and blazing round about the beacon hill. The beacon hill stands behind Farringford. If you follow the little wood of nightingales and thrushes, and follow the lane where the blackthorn hedges shine in spring-time (lovely ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... report that the dead body of John Slater, driver of the special train, has just been found among the gorse bushes at a point two and a quarter miles from the Junction. Had fallen from his engine, pitched down the embankment, and rolled among the bushes. Injuries to his head, from the fall, appear to be cause of death. Ground has now been carefully examined, ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... sprinkled here and there with white-fleeced sheep stretching away on one side, and on the other a valley, down which flowed, with ceaseless murmurings, a rapid stream, a steep hill covered with gorse and heather, the summit crowned with a wood of dark pines rising beyond it. Just above the manse could be seen the kirk, which, with a few cottages, composed the village; while scattered far around were the huts in which the larger part of the pastor's flock abode. As he gazed ...
— Janet McLaren - The Faithful Nurse • W.H.G. Kingston

... he heard the bracken stirring and something scraping the gorse below. They were coming; they were among the rocks! He straightened up and hurled a great slab of rock down through darkness; heard them scrambling upward still; seized slab after slab and smashed them downward at the flashes as the red flare of their ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers

... "lady-smocks, all silver white," with the course of the little stream through the midst indicated by a perfect golden river of shining kingcups interspersed with ferns. Beyond lay tracts of brown heath and brilliant gorse and broom, which stretched for miles and miles along the flats, while the dry ground was covered with holly brake, and here and there woods of oak and beech made a sea of verdure, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... and the wide blue hill views and pleasant valleys one saw on either hand from the sandscarred roadway, even the sides of the road itself set about with grey heather scrub and prickly masses of gorse, and pine trees with their year's growth still bright green, against the darkened needles of the previous years, were fresh and delightful to Mr. Hoopdriver's eyes But the brightness of the day and the day-old sense of freedom fought an uphill ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells

... between their spreading branches; at most they lose their way in the intricacies of some seaside pineta, where the feet slip on the fallen needles, and the sun slants along the vistas of serried, red, scaly trunks, among the juniper and gorse and dry grass and flowers growing in the sea sand. Into the vast mediaeval forests of Germany and France, Boiardo and Ariosto's fancy ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee

... clutched by the two hind legs. Poor Tony Tuppett almost shed tears as he looked at the dead animal, and thought what might have been the fate of the pack. "It's him, my lord," he said, "as we run through Littleton gorse Monday after Christmas last, and up to Impington Park where he got away from us in a hollow tree. He's four year old," added Tony, looking at the animal's mouth, "and there warn't a finer dog ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope

... to the church, An ornament unto the town; On one side an old coal pit, The other well gorsed around. Peter Hadley peeped through the gorse, In order to see them fight; Spittle jobbed out his eye with a fork, And said, — ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler

... some wanderer from the herd tinkled drowsily, arousing him from his reverie. The horses were ascending; the road emerged into a plain, set with bracken and gorse, with here and there a single tree, whose inclining trunk told of storms braved for many seasons. Near the highway, in the shadow of a poplar, stood a shepherd's hut, apparently deserted and isolated from human kind. The fool reined the ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham

... a black cassock, looped up for convenience in walking by a shabby cincture, was wandering among the brambles and gorse bushes, peering short-sightedly here and there, and as Ishmael appeared the man's hand closed suddenly over some object on a leaf. Ishmael had hardly recognised the Parson before ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... window, through the quiet green fields—like a great, swift, gleaming whisper of London. And now, all in six seconds, this great quiet air about me is waked to vast vibrations of the mighty city. Out over the red pines, the lonely gorse fields, I have seen passing the spirit of the Strand. I have seen the great flocking bridges and the roar about St. Paul's in communion with the treetops and with the hedgerows and with the little brooks, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... up the hill out of Lyme was a long exhibition of vanity, the women waving their handkerchiefs, the men putting on all sorts of airs, jetting like gamecocks. When we got up to the top of the hill, I saw the old lame puppet-man, sitting on the edge of the wild, unenclosed, gorse-covered common-land which stretches away towards the town of Axminster. He was watching us with deep interest. Our men were spreading out into line upon this common. The horse was ranging on, bobbing about, far ahead. The foot were looking about eagerly as they got out ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield

... was of distinctly composite structure. Tradition said that it had been a royal hunting lodge in the days when Barnes and Putney and Wimbledon were tiny hamlets and the Thames flowed silver-clear through a vast, wild region of forest and gorse and heather, and the ancestors of the deer in Richmond Park browsed in the shade of ancient oaks and elms and beeches, and antler-crowned monarchs sent their hoarse challenges bellowing across the open spaces which separated their ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith

... a bough by my window, and in his call I heard the sweet-briar wind rushing over the young grass. Refulgent fall the golden rays of the sun; a minute only, the clouds cover him and the hedge is dark. The bloom of the gorse is shut like a book; but it is there—a few hours of warmth and the covers will fall open. The meadow is bare, but in a little while the heart-shaped celandine leaves will come in their accustomed place. On the pollard willows the long wands are yellow-ruddy in the passing gleam of sunshine, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... the birds are mostly in sole possession and are almost the only living moving things on the hills. The fox, though at one time common, is now very rarely seen, for game, with the disappearance of gorse and bramble, has almost vanished, and other beasts of prey, weasel and stoat, shun the open uplands where the only enemy of field mouse and vole is the eagle of the south country, the ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes

... see how long they'll be before they find. It's very pretty work in a small gorse, but in a great wood like this I don't care much for being so accurate. But for heaven's sake don't tell Julia Tristram; I should not have a chance if she thought ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope

... lanes innumerable, deep between banks of fern and flower; by paths along the bramble-edge of scented meadows; by the secret windings of copse and brake and stream-worn valley—a way lies upward to the long ridge of Haldon, where breezes sing among the pines, or sweep rustling through gorse and bracken. Mile after mile of rustic loveliness, ever and anon the sea-limits blue beyond grassy slopes. White farms dozing beneath their thatch in harvest sunshine; hamlets forsaken save by women and ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... beyond my comprehension. I had walked out on the moor in the forenoon, and on my return, as I topped the brow that overlooks the little town, I saw my fellow-lodger some little distance off among the gorse. She had raised a light easel in front of her, and with papered board laid across it, was preparing to paint the magnificent landscape of rock and moor which stretched away in front of her. As I watched ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle

... an awkward impression. For the great writer to tell us about his first kiss seemed to my mind a little incongruous with his short and fat-little figure... Another thing that was offensive; these kisses did not occur as they do with the rest of mankind. There had to be a framework of gorse (it had to be gorse or some such plant that one must look up in a flora) and there had to be a tint of purple in the sky, such as no mortal had ever observed before, or if some people had seen it, they had never ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... say, in the most literal sense, for in picking his way from the links to the shingle beach his foot caught, partly in a gorse-root and partly in a biggish stone, and over he went. When he got up and surveyed his surroundings, he found himself in a patch of somewhat broken ground covered with small depressions and mounds. These latter, when he came ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James

... beauty of open spaces which rest and relieve the mind; and of immensity in the shining sea-line beyond the cliffs, and the arching vault of the sky overhead dipping down to encircle the earth; and of colour for all moods, from the vividest green of grass and yellow of gorse to the amethyst ling, and the browns with which the waning year tipped every bush and bramble—things which, when properly appreciated, make life worth living. It was in this direction that Evadne walked, taking it without design, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... preserved for foxes, and the hounds were carefully run through the belt of woods. But half an hour did that, and then they went away to Price's Little Holt. On that side there were no more gentlemen's places; there was a gorse cover or two and sundry little spinnies; but the county was a country for foxes to run and men to ride; and with this before them, the members of the Brotherton Hunt were pleased to be summoned to Cross ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope

... she looked as if she belonged to God. Her Master claimed her early. Dear, your yellow hair will shine no more in the sun that you loved; you have long given over your day-dreams—and you are now dreamless. Or perhaps you dwell amid the silent glory of one last long dream of those you loved. The gorse on the moor moans by your grave, the brackens grow green and tall and wither into dead gold year by year, the lake gleams gloomily in fitful flashes amid its borders of splendour; and you rest softly while ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... each crevice in the rock. She walked up the dry bed of a tributary brook, and searched among the gnarled roots and the dry, brown grass fringing the gravelly watercourse. She skirted the meadows and the rocks where the hunters had beaten down the gorse and the brambles near her home; thence she returned to the pool. Hitherto she had loved the placid night; to her the stillness was significant of peace. But now that stillness was full of sadness, and weariness, and monotony. The shadows ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees

... is an extension of the New Forest land, almost all heather and bog, undulating and, in the drier spots, growing bushes of the glistening holly. It is forest scenery without the trees, excepting the plantations of fir made by a former generation, but presenting grand golden fields of gorse in the spring, and of red and purple heather in early autumn; and whereas the northern side of Hursley gives the distinctive flora of dry chalk, here we have the growth of the black peaty bog, the great broom-rape, brown and leafless, growing on the roots of the gorse; the curious dodder spreading ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge

... most charming self. The American whispered to her that a picnic without her would be a desolation and he had half a mind to stop another week at his aunt's—but Gertrude was not enjoying herself. From behind the gorse bushes, from between the moss-grown boulders, from beneath the dark foliage of the Scotch firs, there peeped ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh

... before them sloped up to meet the blue sky, the golden gorse spread its splendid tapestry against the green pasture. There was the tiny house, the one house in Ireland for Nora; its very windows watched her coming. A whiff of turf-smoke flickered above the chimney, the white walls were as white as the clouds above; there was a figure moving about ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett

... latter have a large burrow, and until the grass is too tall, or after it is cut or grazed, can be watched from the highway. In this hedge the first nightingale of the year sings, beginning some two or three days before the bird which comes to the bushes in the gorse, which will presently ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies

... well that I go back to Flanders," he said again, somewhat gloomily; and as he spoke he heard voices on the fall of the hill below him, and glancing down through the gorse bushes, saw approaching his resting-place four sportsmen who looked as ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... shaken off the torpor of winter. The queen started laying again in the very first days of February, and the workers have flocked to the willows and nut-trees, gorse and violets, anemones and lungworts. Then spring invades the earth, and cellar and stream with honey and pollen, while each day beholds the birth of thousands of bees. The overgrown males now all sally forth from their cells, and disport themselves ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck

... Hewish was an Englishman, his great-great-grandson was Irish, and the only thing that was left to remind him of his ancestry was the house of Roscarna, the sullen Connaught stone fixed in an alien design, and the huge belt of timber through which the gorse and heather were slowly creeping down from the mountain and settling in the valley bottom that they had once inhabited. But the foreign woods that trailed along the shore of the ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young

... and it at once set vigorously to work, recommending prizes for essays on twenty-four subjects, some of which are in the first volume of the Society's Journal. Prizes were also offered for the best draining-plough, the best implement for crushing gorse, for a ploughing match to be held at the first country meeting of the Society fixed at Oxford in 1839, for the best cultivated farm in Oxfordshire and the adjacent counties, and for the invention of any new ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler

... moor, where the heather and gorse bloomed so bravely, so lonely that even along the road which skirted it the number of those who passed by in a day could be counted on the fingers of your hand; and as for the moor itself, it seldom had any visitors but the cows from the little farm ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... cut from Sunnyside to the hospital lay through Crabtree Moor, and as Sara took her way across the rough strip of moorland, dotted with clumps of gorse and heather, her thoughts flew back to that day when she and Garth had encountered Black Brady there, and to the ridiculous quarrel which had ensued in consequence of Garth's refusal to condone the man's offence. For days they had not spoken ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler

... syrup—'twas a kindly deed To help a fellow-townsman in his need, Though harsh the price, and I was feign to crawl About his feet ere I might buy at all. But thou—although a myriad flocks may crop By Sussex gorse or Cheviot's grassy top, A myriad herds tumultuously snort From Palos Verdes eastward to Del Norte, Or where the fierce vaquero's bold bravado Resounds about the Llano Estacado; Though every abattoir works ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various

... and decidedly dark. Every now and then Bennett, to call the stranger by what was almost confessedly a nom-de-guerre, flashed a powerful electric torch on the roadway. "Don't want to walk into a gorse-bush," he explained ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony

... horse and he, and he was feeling drowsy in the hot sunshine, when the horse stopped, lowered his head, and began to nibble the grass; and Toad, waking up, just saved himself from falling off by an effort. He looked about him and found he was on a wide common, dotted with patches of gorse and bramble as far as he could see. Near him stood a dingy gipsy caravan, and beside it a man was sitting on a bucket turned upside down, very busy smoking and staring into the wide world. A fire of sticks was burning near by, and over the ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame

... though the works were very interesting and I enjoyed seeing the work go oil, I was ready enough to get away, and so sure as the sun shone brightly I felt a great longing to be off from the soot and noise to where the great hills were a-bloom with heather and gorse, and tramp ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn

... face from the smiling sea; the south wind dancing over the yellow gorse caught up the words uttered in that clear, musical voice and carried them over the cliff to one who was lying with half-closed eyes under the shade of a large tree—a young man with a dark, half-Spanish face handsome with a coarse kind of beauty. He was lying there, resting ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme

... "they live on the fat of the land. Scraps of all kinds, apples, and a dish of bread and milk under their very noses. I sat inside a gorse bush on the bank, and watched them till my ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing

... thing I want you to arrange is the purchase of those twenty acres of rough pasture and gorse, right in the centre of the property," said John, "rented by the man who lives outside Youlestone, at what they call Pott's farm, for his wretched, half-starved beasts to graze upon. He's saved us the trouble of exterminating the rabbits ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture

... red with the coming light they were traversing an immense tract of wild forest land, bright with the gorse, then in flower, and tenanted only by myriads of rabbits; here they came upon a grassy dell, with plenty of good grazing for their horses, and a clear stream running through ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake

... the flowers of the Chase we see at once. In whatever direction we look across the common there is a perfect blaze of gold—the blossoms of the prickly Gorse or Furze. Spring is the time to see its mass of golden yellow blossoms best; but I do not think there is a week, or even a day, in the whole year when some of the flowers are not out. Did you ever hear the saying, "Kissing is out of season when the ...
— Wildflowers of the Farm • Arthur Owens Cooke

... bit of gorse-bush. The whole year round the thorn has been hardening and sharpening. Spring comes: the thorn does not drop off, and it does not soften; there it is, as uncompromising as ever; but half-way up appear two brown furry balls, ...
— Parables of the Cross • I. Lilias Trotter

... vaulted it gracefully; the Terror, hampered by the bag of booty, climbed over it (for the Twins it was always simpler to vault or climb over a gate than to unlatch it and walk through) and took their way along a narrow path through the gorse and bracken. They had gone some fifty yards, when from among the bracken on their right ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson

... to-day to any man or to any woman," said Violet. What was to be said to a young lady who spoke in this way, and who had become of age only a fortnight since? She rode that day the famous run from Bagnall's Gorse to Foulsham Common, and was in at ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope

... there was no fertility. Deep down in the hollow a stream, which runs dry every summer, had prepared a strip of soil just worth reclaiming as coarse meadow or tillage; but the strip was narrow—a man might throw a stone across it at some points—and on either side the heath and gorse and fern held their own on the dry sand. Such a place afforded no room for an English village of the true manorial kind; and I surmise that it lay all but uninhabited until perhaps the middle of the eighteenth century, by which time a few "squatters" ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt

... widened into a broad tidal estuary as it neared the sea. The mountains, which rose tier after tier from the level green meadows, had their lower slopes thickly clothed with pines and larches; but where they towered above the level of a thousand feet the forest growth gave way to gorse and bracken, and their jagged summits, bare of all vegetation save a few clumps of coarse grass, showed a splintered, weather-worn outline against the sky. Penllwyd, Penglaslyn, and Glyder Garmon, those lofty peaks like three strong Welsh giants, seemed to guard the entrance to the enchanted ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil

... tread, An English cowslip lifts its head; And, as to do her grace, rise up The primrose and the buttercup! I roam with her through fields of cane, And seem to stroll an English lane, Which, white with blossoms of the May, Spreads its green carpet in her way! As fancy wills, the path beneath Is golden gorse, or purple heath: And now we hear in woodlands dim Their unarticulated hymn, Now walk through rippling waves of wheat, Now sink in mats of clover sweet, Or see before us from the lawn The lark go up to greet the dawn! All birds that love the English sky Throng round ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly

... the wool of sheep, the coat of cattle, or the nether integuments of wayfaring humanity, and can't be got rid of without some little difficulty. Most of them, you will find on examination, belonged to confirmed hedgerow or woodside plants: they grow among bushes or low scrub, and thickets of gorse or bramble. Now, to such plants as these, it is obviously useful to have adhesive fruits and seeds: for when sheep or other animals get them caught in their coats, they carry them away to other bushy spots, and ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... have built to-day, a proud and perfect day, And I have built the towers of cliffs upon the sands. The foxgloves and the gorse I planted on my way. The thyme, the velvet thyme, grew up beneath my hands, ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson



Words linked to "Gorse" :   furze, Ulex, whin, Ulex europaeus, bush, shrub, genus Ulex



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