"Sere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vale is yellow and sere, The ancient elms seem withered and bare, The river asleep in its rushy bed, The waters are green, and the grass is red, The roses are dead in the sylvan bowers, Where oft in the dewy evening hours, Ere yet the fairies had sought the dell, And the merle was ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... ask me for a sonnet. Ah, my Dear, Can clocks tick back to yesterday at noon? Can cracked and fallen leaves recall last June And leap up on the boughs, now stiff and sere? For your sake, I would go and seek the year, Faded beyond the purple ranks of dune, Blown sands of drifted hours, which the moon Streaks with a ghostly finger, and her sneer Pulls at my lengthening shadow. Yes, 'tis that! My shadow stretches ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... called upon us, the courtesy of our rulers, the marked attentions paid us in society, and the many enthusiastic letters we daily receive, we are led to believe that woman's suffrage is becoming very popular. As both the editor and proprietor of The Revolution are in the sere and yellow leaf, the many attentions and compliments showered upon us are of course from no personal considerations, but so many tributes of respect to the ideas we represent; as such we gratefully accept all that come to us, and thank our ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... and the elk and the deer, And eagles gigantic, aged and sere, They rode long-horn cattle, they cried "A-la-la." They lifted the knife, the bow, and the spear, They lifted ghost-torches from dead fires below, The midnight made grand with the cry "A-la-la." The midnight made grand with a red-god charge, A red-god show, A red-god ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... lay sere and brown like a piece of faded tapestry beneath the November sun that, peering through the dust-laden air, seemed old and worn with his efforts to warm the poor ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... voiceless hangs the world beside his bier, Our words are sobs, our cry of praise a tear: We are the smitten mortal, we the weak. We see a spirit on Earth's loftiest peak Shine, and wing hence the way he makes more clear: See a great Tree of Life that never sere Dropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak: Such ending is not Death: such living shows What wide illumination brightness sheds From one big heart—to conquer man's old foes: The coward, and the tyrant, and the force Of all those weedy ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... never sere, But fresh as after fallen rain, Of those who learned their lesson here And may not ever come again, Gives to this garden, bruised and browned, A ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... —with a warm haze floating above them, which, though clear enough in our neighbourhood, became impenetrably blue in the far distance. Woods, woods, woods, leafy branches, foliage globes, or parachutes, green, brown, or sere in colour, forests one above another, rising, falling, and receding—a very leafy ocean. The horizon, at all points, presents the same view, there may be an indistinct outline of a hill far away, or here and there a tall tree ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... van, has all the boon it asks, Shall win man's praise and woman's love; Shall be a wisdom that we set above All other skills and gifts to culture dear, 215 A virtue round whose forehead we enwreathe Laurels that with a living passion breathe When other crowns are cold and soon grow sere. What brings us thronging these high rites to pay, And seal these hours the noblest of our year, 220 Save that our ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... seated next each other, both young and handsome; but one, owing to the freshness of her robe, which was of simple organdie, looked infinitely better than the other, who was quite as pretty, but who, wearing a robe of expensive lace, whose whiteness had fallen into "the sere and yellow leaf," appeared ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... the male plant. A well-known case is that of the hemp-plant, where the sexes are indistinguishable up to the period of fertility, but when the male plants have shed their pollen, and thus fulfilled their duty of fertilising the female plants, they cease to grow, turn yellow and sere, and if at all crowded wither and die. Many other examples might be cited, but the question is too wide to enter on here. See Lester Ward, op. cit., ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... "The sere wounded one, O sweetest Dulcinea of Toboso, sends thee the health which he wants himself. If thy beauty disdain me, I cannot live. My good Squire Sancho will give thee ample account, O ungrateful fair one, of the penance I do for love of thee. Should it be thy pleasure ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... the Countess de Saldar, the behaviour of this well-born English maid was anything but well-bred. She absolutely shrugged her shoulders and marched a-head of him into the conservatory, where she began smelling at flowers and plucking off sere leaves. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... l'estela del dia ven daus Jerusalem que' m'ensenha qu'ien dia: estatz sus e levatz, senhor, que Dieu amatz! que.l jorns es aprosmatz e la nuech ten sa via; e sia.n Dieus lauzatz per nos e adoratz, e.l preguem que.ens don patz a tota nostra via. La nuech vai e.l jorns ve ab elar eel e sere, e l'alba no's rete ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... hard work have got to go into the ignominious pigeon-hole. Confound it, I could have earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble. However, I shouldn't have done it, for I am too lazy, now, in my sere and yellow leaf, to be willing to work for anything but love..... I kind of envy you people who are permitted for your righteousness' sake to dwell in a boarding house; not that I should always want to live in one, but I should like the change occasionally from this housekeeping ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... toward many a wearier night His soul sustained his sorrows in her sight. And earth was bitter, and heaven, and even the sea Sorrowful even as he. And the wind helped not, and the sun was dumb; And with too long strong stress of grief to be His heart grew sere ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the blow, the unwept scar; Mine too the flames that sere; And on my breast not one proud star That leaves a brother's heaven bare. Life is the search of God For His own unity; I walk stone-bare till all are shod, ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... feathery seaweed growing out of a frozen ocean than like trees upon a plain. He was nearing a grove of elm and birch which he had not seen the evening before; by the almost hidden rails of the fence there were half-buried shrubs. So dry, so hard, so absolutely without bud or sere leaf was the interlacing outline of the trees and shrubs, that they too seemed to be some strange product of this new sort of ocean; they did not remind him of verdant glades. Not that beauty was absent, nor charm, but the scene was strange, ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... inheritance ... that fadeth not away." It shall not be as the garlands offered by men—green to-day and to-morrow sere and yellow. "Its leaf also shall not wither." It shall always retain its freshness, and shall offer me a continually fresh delight. And these are all ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... as they are not conspicuous. In a majority of cases, however, the colour is undoubtedly protective, the brown hue being of a shade that assimilates very closely to the surroundings. There are pale yellowish browns, lined and mottled, in species living amidst a sere, scanty vegetation; earthy browns, in those frequenting open sterile or stony places; while the species that creep on trees in forests are dark brown in colour, and in many cases the feathers are mottled in such a manner as to make them curiously resemble the bark ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... Shann got a better idea of the land about the river. It was sere, the vegetation dwindling except for some rough spikes of things pushing through the parched ground like flayed fingers, their puffed redness in contrast to the usual amethystine coloring of Warlock's ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... is the one great light place in my life; and to me, to-day, sere as I am, the sweet—the sweetest sound—on God's green earth"—the corners of his mouth quivered—"is the name of Alice. Take care of Mary, Richling; she's a priceless treasure. Don't leave the making and sustaining of the home sunshine ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... Fire, when frost-winds sere The heavy herbage of the ground, Gathers his annual harvest here, With roaring like the battle's sound, And hurrying flames that sweep the plain, And smoke-streams gushing up the sky: I meet the flames with flames again, And at my door they ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... no shadows to-day, except such as the trees cast upon the green moss beds and the black rocks. The tops of the tall elms were sere and rusty, but the leaves of the rugged oaks that fringed the canyon's lips shone a rich and glossy brown. All down the sides the poplars and delicate birches, pale yellow, but sometimes flushing into orange and red, stood ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... once more, O ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forced fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear Compels me to disturb your season due: For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer: Who would ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... The leaves are sere, The woods are drear, The breeze that erst so merrily did play, Naught giveth save a melancholy lay; Yet life's great lessons do not fail E'en in ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... is not ripe for larger knowledge. Nature and the Divinity that guides her must protect their new evolving creatures. A too sudden revelation and they might perish from sheer wonder.... Yes, truth must come softened, as a dream, to the man child's brain. Its naked light would sere and blind him forever.... But to me it has been given to see—to hear—and keep sane in the light. Oh, from what planet is the call? From what one of the hundred million spheres? How many centuries has it been sent outward to the deaf, the dumb, and the blind? ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... Lord Jasper continued, coming over to Henry and taking hold of his arm. "Thirty-one. I'm getting on in years, ole f'la, that's what I'm doing ... sere and yellow, so to speak ... and a chap my age doesn't want to be bothered with a damn play. He wants something ... something substansl!..." He fumbled over the word "substantial" and then fell on it. "Something substansl," he repeated. "Now, ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... leave their friend. But the fields were bare, the frosts began to pinch, and the young ones longed to see the world; so they must go. The day they started, the whole flock flew to the great house, to say good-by. Some dived and darted round and round it, some hopped to and fro on the sere lawn, some perched on the chimney-tops, and some clung to the window ledges; all twittering a ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... remembrances of summer, and the earth was golden and red; and the sky was folded in lawny clouds, which the breeze was lifting, revealing beautiful spaces of blue. All the abundant hedgerows were red with the leaf of the wild cherry, and the oak woods wore masses of sere and russet leafage. Spreading beeches swept right down to the road, shining in beautiful death; once a pheasant rose and flew through the polished trunks towards the yellow underwood. Sprays trembled on naked rods, ferns and grasses fell about the gurgling watercourses, a motley undergrowth; and ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... camest with the morning mist. And with the evening cloud, Showering thy gleaned wealth into my open breast, (Those peerless flowers which in the rudest wind Never grow sere, When rooted in the garden of the mind, Because they are the earliest of the year). Nor was the night thy shroud. In sweet dreams softer than unbroken rest Thou leddest by the hand thine infant Hope. The eddying of her garments ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... was getting sere, there was new-fallen snow on Lizard Head, and winter was coming. He had the animal's instinct to den up, to seek winter quarters. Certain ties other than those of Mary's love combined to draw him back to Marmion for the winter. If he could only shake off his burdening notoriety and ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... lately appeared with the taking title of the Hundred and One. Its origin, as well as its subject, is interesting. It is a voluntary association of almost all the literary talent of France, for the benefit of an enterprising bookseller, whose affairs have, it seems, fallen into the sere, since the commercial embarrassments following on the Revolution. A hundred and one authors of all ranks and political opinions, philosophers, academicians, journalists, deputies, poets, artists, have combined ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... some famous, some obscure, are plunged more or less deeply in proportion to the heinousness of their crimes; for, like earthly streams, this has its deep and shallow. At the latter point they cross, on the back of Nessus the Centaur, and at once enter (Canto xiii.) a wood of gnarled and sere trees, in which the Harpies have their dwelling. These trees have sprung from the souls of suicides, and retain the power of speech and sensation. From one of these, who in life had been the famous statesman Peter de Vineis, Dante learns that at the judgement they will ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... thing you are about to discuss to-day, if it be the same you told us in our last walk—Education: if you are only going to give us some institution for it, I daresay it may be very good for to-day, or for this generation, but it will have its sere and yellow leaf, and there will be a time when future Milvertons, in sentimental mood, will moan over it, and wish they had it and all that has grown up to take its place at the same time. But all this is what I have often heard you say yourself in ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... February. During the day large numbers visited the sorrowing house, and gazed for the last time on the features of the revered dead. As was to be expected, the larger number were, like the venerable deceased, far into "the sere and yellow leaf," and many who had known him for a long time could scarce restrain the unbidden tear as a flood of recollections surged up at the sight of the still form ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... night and morn, Woods upon woods, with fields of corn Lying between them, not quite sere, And not in the full, thick, leafy bloom, When the wind can hardly find breathing-room Under their tassels,—cattle near, Biting shorter the short green grass, And a hedge of sumach and sassafras, With bluebirds twittering all around,— (Ah, good painter, you can't ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... parched, long lifting to the blue Of summer's brilliant sky but russet hue Of sere grass shivering in the trade-wind's sweep. Soon, with light footfalls, from their tranced sleep The first rains bid the poppies rise anew, And trills the lark exultant summons, too. How swift at Fancy's beck those gay crowds leap To glowing life! The eager green ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... sudden changes of season here. Spring comes gradually day by day, a perceptible hourly waking to life and color; and this glides into a summer which never ceases, but only becomes tired and fades into the repose of a short autumn, when the sere and brown and red and yellow hills and the purple mountains are waiting for the rain clouds. This is according to the process of nature; but wherever irrigation brings moisture to the fertile soil, the green and bloom are perpetual the ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... the glory from the trees, whose few brown and sere leaves hung disconsolately on the branches. High above them was an occasional skirmishing line of wild ducks. The deep stillness was broken only by the scattering of nuts the scurrying squirrels were harvesting, by the cry of startled wood ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... metrical effusions, with the exception of the fifth and sixth, the clouds of obscurity have long since cast a darkening hue. Even the "Elegaic Sonnets" of Charlotte Smith, which first appeared in 1784, and formed a sort of poetical era in point of popularity, have long since "fallen into the sere and yellow leaf," as it was discriminately hinted by Burns would be the case with his soul-breathing Letters; the Sonnets by the Rev. W.L. Bowles, although emanating from a beautiful fountain-spring of thought and feeling, which should have screened their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... finding rest in a mild melancholy, his thoughts chiefly occupied with the decay of Prepimpin who sat by his heels gazing at the roadway, occupied possibly by the same sere reflections. Presently the flea-catching antics of a ragged mongrel in the middle of the roadway disturbed Prepimpin's sense of the afternoon's decorum. He rose and with stiff dignity stalked towards him. He stood nose to nose with the mongrel, his tufted tail in straight defiance ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... bed of withered and sere leaves and as one distraught, wandered through the shadows of the misty, weird night. In the wood and by the waters he wandered, while the night wore on and the moon held its way—still a lustrous blur ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... 's small pity in 't: Like mistletoe on sere elms spent by weather, Let him cleave to her, and both rot ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... as ever, in spite of the flowers scattered round it having been withered black! Of all the things in the room their greeting strikes me as sincere. They are still here simply because it was not felt worth while even to remove them. Never mind; let me welcome truth, albeit in such sere and sorry garb, and look forward to the time when I shall be able to do so unmoved, ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... which grow here in great abundance—the finest in the world—with their lower leaves pendent, sere and yellow; the figs, lemons, apricots and pomegranates clustering in savage meshes of unpruned boughs among which the vine, likewise unkempt, writhes and clambers liana-fashion, in crazy convolutions—all these things conspire to give to certain parts of the oasis, notwithstanding ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... maple-buds along the misty hills, And that immortal call which fills The waiting wood with songs? The snow-drops came so long ago, It seemed that Spring was near! But then returned the snow With biting winds, and all the earth grew sere, And sullen clouds drooped low To veil the sadness of a hope deferred: Then rain, rain, rain, incessant rain Beat on the window-pane, Through which I watched the solitary bird That braved the tempest, buffeted and ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... to a sere, bare hillside on which neither trees nor brushwood grew. It amounted to a natural clearing, acres in extent. Lockley swept his eyes around. There were many thick-foliaged small trees attempting to advance into the clear space. ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... door: a frosty rime Is branching over it, and drifts are deep Against the wall. He knocks, and there is time,— (For none doth open),—time to list the sweep And whistle of the wind along the mere Through beds of stiffened reeds and rushes sere. ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... and in direct opposition to the Isis on the pagan picture, we behold a tall and erect cross. The upper fields harmonise with the lower. The Christian painting displays a vigorous and stately tree between two younger palm-trees; the pagan picture has the same symbols; but the middle tree is in the sere and yellow leaf, whilst a Dryad issuing from the roots flourishes an axe to cut it down. The allusion is not to be mistaken. The sun of paganism has set: the axe is already ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... of real labor was sure to put a finish to these poor habiliments. So we gradually flung them all aside, and took to honest homespun and linsey-woolsey, as preferable, on the whole, to the plan recommended, I think, by Virgil—"Ara nudus; sere nudus,"—which, as Silas Foster remarked, when I translated the maxim, would be apt to ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... love what children fair were born To rapture! ere thy last wild song was sung. I deem thy day is Night and thou the Moon— So feeble is thy kiss, so cold thy light,— Lamp of my life, alas!—how soon, how soon— O speak! comes thy last greeting and good-night? My breasts are sere as sand, no flowers bloom, No grass, no forests hide my misery bare; The reaches of the tyrannous poles consume Those gardens of delight we made so fair, And men lie dark in caves, a sullen race, Framed of ray daughter's flesh but now my bane, ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... then about sixty-five years of age, of stately, unbending form and face radiant and genial with the florid flush of that Indian Summer which so many Englishmen wear late in those autumnal years that bend and pale American forms and faces to "the sere and yellow leaf" of life. But the sequel proved that he did not abdicate his position too early. In a little more than a year from this event, his spirit was raised to higher fellowships and folded with those of the pure and blest of bygone ages. The incidents ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... in this part of Africa it was already pushing. Even if it were not, the beasts could live upon what herbage remained over from last summer and on the leaves of trees, neither of which in this winter veld ever become quite lifeless, whereas on the sere and fire-swept plains beyond the mountains they might find nothing at all. So we determined to risk the savages and the lions which followed the game into these hot districts, especially as it was not yet the ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... they scanned the great expanse below them with eager eyes. It spread remoter and remoter, with only a few clusters of sere thorn bushes here and there, and the dim suggestions of some now waterless ravine to break its desolation of yellow grass. Its purple distances melted at last into the bluish slopes of the further hills—hills it might be of a greener kind—and ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... haue Tribute of mee: [Sidenote: on me,] the aduenturous Knight shal vse his Foyle and Target: the Louer shall not sigh gratis, the humorous man[6] shall end his part in peace: [7] the Clowne shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickled a'th' sere:[8] and the Lady shall say her minde freely; or the blanke Verse shall halt for't[9]: [Sidenote: black ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... Pertwood and about Lidyard as good butter is made as any in England, but the cheese is not so good. About Lidyard, in those fatt grounds, in hott weather, the best huswives cannot keep their cheese from heaving. The art to keep it from heaving is to putt in cold water. Sowre wood-sere grounds doe yield the best cheese, and such are Cheshire. Bromefield, in the parish of Yatton, is so - sower and wett - and where I had better cheese made than anywhere in all ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... a poet's page The blest reverse he proved: How sweet to pass life's pilgrimage, From purple youth to sere old age, Aye loving ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... sat silent for some time, too lazy to speak, almost to think. The beautiful flower-garden which lay before us, sloping towards the river, looked rather brown and sere, after the hot winds, although the orange-trees were still green enough, and vast clusters of purple grapes were ripening rapidly among the yellowing vine-leaves. On the whole, however, the garden was but a poor subject of contemplation for one who remembered it in all its full November beauty, ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... the long stretches of pasturage and meadow land outside the walls were blasted and sere when the old mute, whom I had seen twice before, let me out of the big gate. When I returned he was there to open the gate for me and help ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... ant works up his mound In the mouldered piny soil, And above the busy ground Takes the joy of earnest toil: Dropping pine-cones, dry and sere, Warn him 'tis the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... aught of natural piety to feel Your love, and recompense the boon with mine; If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even, 5 With sunset and its gorgeous ministers, And solemn midnight's tingling silentness; If autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood, And winter robing with pure snow and crowns Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs; 10 If spring's voluptuous pantings when she breathes Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me; If no bright ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... grain were waving on the hill-side, and sere corn-blades rustled in the wind, from the orchard came the scent of ripening fruit, and all the garden-plots lay ready to yield up their humble offerings to their master's hand. But in the silence of the night a greater Reaper had passed by, gathering in the harvest of a righteous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... for best effect, neither too many nor too few. The treatment had to be mainly provocative—an appeal in some cases by very coarse means indeed to very coarse nerves, in others by finer devices addressed to senses more tickle o' the sere. And so grew up that unsurpassed and hardly matched product the French short story, where, if it is in perfection, hardly a word is thrown away, and not a word ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... vol. X, pp. 321-322: 'Ultimamente veanse mis leturas: y si en ellas se hallare rastro de novedades, sino antes inclinacion a todo lo antiguo y lo sancto, yo sere mentiroso, si no es que este testigo llama novedad todo lo que no ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... Saynt Andrew, and the Abbot of Scone, The Bisshop of Glascow, thise were taken sone; Fettred on hackneis, to Inlond ere thei sent, On sere stedis it ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various
... spoiled in spring, And over-long was green, and early sere, And never gathered gold in the late year From autumn suns, and moons of harvesting, But failed in frosts ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... of bronze double-edged, and with a goodly handle of olive wood fastened well. Next she gave him a polished adze, and she led the way to the border of the isle where tall trees grew, alder and poplar, and pine that reacheth unto heaven, seasoned long since and sere, that might lightly float for him. Now after she had shown him where the tall trees grew, Calypso, the fair goddess, departed homeward. And he set to cutting timber, and his work went busily. Twenty trees in all he felled, and then trimmed them with the axe of bronze, and deftly smoothed them, ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... round at this bit of country for two months"—with a shrug of the shoulders. "I should have sought your bright eyes could see all what sere is to see in ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... descending in long, steep steps from the hillside; water perfectly clear, bubbling along the yellow stones between the grassy banks and making now and then a little leap into a lower basin; along the stream great screens of reeds, sere, pale, with barely a pennon of leaves, rustling ready for the sickle; and behind, beneath the watery sky, rainy but somehow peaceful, the russet oak-scrub of the hill. Of spring there was indeed visible only the green of the young wheat ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... flown, bright dreams? Has that rude hand Sufficed to dash to naught your frail creations? Sad thoughts and humors black now fill my soul. So his rough foot hath bruised the dewy grass, And left it sere. Why should his harsh words touch me? The truth of yesterday is false to-day. How could I know, dear God! How might I guess The bitter sweetness, the delicious pain! A new heart fills my breast, as soft and weak And melting as a tear, unto its lord; ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... was mild, yet somewhat overcast by tho mists which announce coming winter in London, and Helen walked musingly beneath the trees that surrounded the garden of Lord Lansmere's house. Many leaves were yet left on the boughs; but they were sere and withered. And the birds chirped at times; but their note was mournful and complaining. All within this house, until Harley's arrival, had been strange and saddening to Helen's timid and subdued ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... host am I of lovers sad and sere For waiting long drawn out and expectation drear. My patience underneath the loss of friends and folk With pallor's sorry garb hath clad me, comrades dear. Abasement, misery and heart-break after those I suffer who endured before me many a year. ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... cattle in several grassy openings, and here and there a vaquero's hut of branches; for it is a general practice of the hacienderos to drive down their herds to the low grounds of the coasts and rivers, during the dry season, and as soon as the grass on the hills or highlands begins to grow sere and yellow. We observed also occasional heaps of oyster-shells on the banks, or half washed away by the river; and on the sand-spits at the bends of the stream, and in all the little shady nooks of the shore, we saw thousands of water-fowl, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... our distinguished friend here has reached that condition described by Shakespeare as 'the sere and yellow leaf,' or has suffered some premature abatement of his mental and physical faculties. Whether he is ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... already deepened into night. Along the sere and melancholy wood, the autumnal winds crept, with a lowly, but gathering moan. Where the water held its course, a damp and ghostly mist clogged the air, but the skies were calm, and chequered only by a few clouds, that swept in long, white, spectral streaks, over the solemn ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lands of the outer world were born of the sea, before even the Land of the Sun (Mu) and the Land of the Sea (Atlantis) arose from molten rock and sand, there was land here in the far south. A sere land of rock plains, and swamps where slimy life mated, ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... and the windy sycamore and hastened across the sere grass. "Father, father!" he cried. "Do you know who that is?" In his young voice there was both warning and appeal. Adam Gaudylock, he knew, had spoken to his father, but Gideon had given no sign. ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... thee betide When thou hast handled been awhile, With sere flowers to be thrown aside; And I shall sigh, while some will smile, To see thy love to every one Hath brought thee to be loved ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... ascent up the picturesque glen where the Arno runs deep, to the white towers of Arezzo; then Cortona throned in state on its lonely hill-top, and girt by its gigantic Etruscan walls; next the low bank, the lucid green water, the olive-clad slopes of reedy Thrasymene; last of all, the sere hills and city-capped heights of their ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... short, no words can convey an adequate impression of the gorgeousness of the forest tints in North America during the autumn. The foliage is inconceivably beautiful and varied, from the broad and brightly dark purple leaf of the maple, to the delicate and pale sere leaf of the poplar, all blending harmoniously with the deep green of their brethren in whom the vital sap still flows in full vigour. I have heard people compare the Hudson and the Rhine. I cannot conceive two streams more totally dissimilar—the distinctive features of one ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... had seated myself during his narrative), my heart was stirred with pity; I took down the Cicero, and lit on a sheet of yellow paper covered with faded manuscript, which, of course, I did not read. I turned to the hearth, tossed on the fire the sere old paper, which blazed at once, and then, hearing the words pax vobiscum, I looked round. But I was alone. After a few minutes, devoted to private ejaculations, I returned to the dining-room; and that is all my story. Your maids need ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... sowing to the flesh, O youth? Have you turned your back upon the truth? Are you scattering seeds of evil From the garner of the devil? Are you thinking of the harvest By and by? Soon will spring and summer pass, Brown and sere will grow the grass; No time then for good seed-sowing: You and I Must gather what we've sown, forsooth. Are you sowing to ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make man better be; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere: A lily of a day Is fairer far in May, Although it fall and die that night— It was the plant and flower of Light. In small proportions we just beauties see; And in short measure life may ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... black imp, and suddenly The black one bit himself into my heart; And lo, at once the earth lay void and barren, And sun and stars were straightway drenched in gloom. The landscape, glad erewhile, lay dark, autumnal; Each grove was sere, each flower stem was broken; Within the frozen sense my strength lay dead, All joy, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Speke neu{er} vnhonestly of woma{n} kynde, Ne let hit neu{er} renne in y mynde; 260 e boke hym call{es} a chorle of chere, That vylany spekes be weme{n} sere: For all{e} we ben of wymme{n} bor, And oure fadurs vs be-forne; 264 {er}for{e} hit is a vnhonest thyng To speke of hem ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... weight, like those old cedars yonder by the way-side, beneath their weight of snow. Wherever the eye can pierce their white vesture, all is still deep spring-green beneath; unchanged at heart—strong and true. So I like to look on you, Sere Leaf.' ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... head was right before him. But seen thus closely, the terror of it was lessened. Fleshless indeed it was. But a parchment skin was tightly drawn over the bones, and Allan could see that its true shade was a sere yellow. It was the bluish light that had given it the green of decay. The deep-sunk eyes were kindly; they gleamed with pleasure as Allan's opened; ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... little valley of the Lairet, which wound and rippled over its glossy brown pebbles, murmuring a quiet song down in its hollow bed. Tufts of spiry grass clung to its steep banks, and a few wild flowers peeped out of nooks among the sere fallen leaves that lay upon the still greensward on each shore of the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... stretched out in limitless rolling swells of prairie until they met the blue sky that on every hand bent down to touch them. In spring brightly green, and spangled with wild flowers, by midsummer this prairie had grown sere and yellow. Clumps of dark green cottonwoods marked the courses of the infrequent streams—for most of the year the only note of color in the landscape, except the brilliant sky. On the wide, level river bottoms, sheltered by the enclosing hills, the ...
— When Buffalo Ran • George Bird Grinnell
... head sat a raven, On a sere bough, a grown great bird, and hoarse! Who, all the while the deer was breaking up So croaked and cried for it, as all the huntsmen, Especially old Scathlock, thought it ominous; Swore it was Mother Maudlin, whom he met At the day-dawn, just as he roused ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... ask," returned the boy; and hastily preceding Rogers, he put his head in at Lapham's door, and then withdrew it. "Please to sit down," he said; "he'll see you pretty soon;" and, with an air of some surprise, Rogers obeyed. His sere, dull-brown whiskers and the moustache closing over both lips were incongruously and illogically clerical in effect, and the effect was heightened for no reason by the parchment texture of his skin; the baldness extending ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... unforgotten day at Rye They sang a love-song in July; In August, hard by Lewes town, They sang of joy 'twixt sky and down; And in September's golden spell We heard them singing on Scaw Fell. October's leaves were brown and sere, But skylarks sang by Teston Weir; And in November, at Mount's Bay, They ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... for sporting, the lusty Tarascon race cherishes one love: ballad-singing. There's no believing what a quantity of ballads is used up in that little region. All the sentimental stuff turning into sere and yellow leaves in the oldest portfolios, are to be found in full pristine lustre in Tarascon. Ay, the entire collection. Every family has its own pet, as is known to ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... verdure that borders it, strewed with the pale yellow leaves of the elm, just beginning to fall; hedgerows glowing with long wreaths of the bramble in every variety of purplish red; and overhead the unchanged green of the fir, contrasting with the spotted sycamore, the tawny beech, and the dry sere leaves of the oak, which rustle as the light wind passes through them; a few common hardy yellow flowers (for yellow is the common colour of flowers, whether wild or cultivated, as blue is the rare one), flowers of many sorts, but almost of one tint, still blowing in spite of the season, ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... When, in the sere And autumn leaves decayed, The mournful forest tells how quickly fade The glories of the year! When in the silent tomb oppressed, Frail man, with weight of days, Sinks to his tranquil rest; Contented nature but obeys Her everlasting law,— The general doom awakes ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the bearers bore him across the sere plateau towards a stone that lay almost in its centre. Presently they halted, and, pointing to ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... men can love a flower Unto Lanciotto was Francesca dear, 'Tis not on such Love wields his jealous power; And therefore Paolo moved him not to fear, Though he so green with youth and he so sere. Nor yet indeed was wrong, the hidden thing Grew at each heart, unknown of each, a year,— Two eggs still silent in the nest through spring, May draws so near to June, and not yet ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... opera it was so exciting and so wonderful that everything else was wiped out of her mind. In the front of the box she sat—its sole ornament—against a background of Mrs. Kirkham's contemporaries, withered and sere in contrast with her lily-pure freshness. In the entr'actes the hostess recalled the opera house in its heyday when the Bonanza Kings occupied their boxes with the Bonanza Queens beside them, when everyone ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... contemptuous reply; "you are already in the sere and yellow leaf; while I seem to have a ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... of this life is gone,— Even the hope, lingering now, Like the last of the leaves left on Autumn's sere and faded bough,— 'Twill seem as still those friends were near, Who loved me in youth's early day, If in that parting hour I hear The same sweet notes and die away,— To that song of the olden time, Breathed, like Hope's farewell strain, To say, in some brighter clime, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... every-day business, as much so as in former times "reduced gentlemen" took to keeping school or posting books. In former times, men took to politics to give zest to a life already replete with pecuniary indulgences, as those in the "sere and yellow leaf" are wont to take to religion as a solacing comfort against things that are past, and pave the way to a very desirable futurity. But now, politicians are of no peculiar class or condition ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... was her's,' said I, decoring with a band Of mildest pearls Amelia's milder hand. 'Nay, I will wear it for her sake,' she said: For dear to maidens are their rivals dead. And so, She seated on the black yew's tortured root, I on the carpet of sere shreds below, And nigh the little mound where lay that other, I kiss'd her lips three times without dispute, And, with bold worship suddenly aglow, I lifted to my lips a sandall'd foot, And kiss'd it three times thrice without dispute. Upon ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... stranger magic than this in my Spanish estates. The lawny slopes on which, when a child, I played, in my father's old country place, which was sold when he failed, are all there, and not a flower faded, nor a blade of grass sere. The green leaves have not fallen from the spring woods of half a century ago, and a gorgeous autumn has blazed undimmed for fifty years, among the trees ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... fountains of their grief, and often did she find them weeping so bitterly that she could not comfort them. She would draw them to her bosom, and tenderly caress them; but it all availed not, and when the month of October came, with its sere foliage and fading flowers, Emma and Anna had grown so thin, and pale, and feeble, from their wearing home-sickness, that they stayed all day in the wigwam, going out only to visit Winona's grave. They drooped and drooped, and those who saw them said, "The white children will die, and lie ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams
... hunter has gone with a sneer at fate, (Spring and the sea and the sun) Let the bird fly free to find her mate, Ere the year of love grow sere and late. Sweet ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the turf awakens all about as if in the spirit of friendliness. See the old barn on the meadow slope; the green seems to have oozed out from it, and to have flowed slowly down the hill; at a little distance it is lost in the sere stubble. One can see where every spring lies buried about the fields; its influence is felt at the surface, and the turf is early quickened there. Where the cattle have loved to lie and ruminate in the warm summer twilight, there the April sunshine loves to ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... soon I heard a roaring wind: It did not come anear; But with its sound it shook the sails, That were so thin and sere. ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... As jetted steam, dead clouds awoke And quivered on the Western rim. Then the singing started: dim And sibilant as rime-stiff reeds That whistle as the wind leads. The South whispered hard and sere, The North answered, low and clear; And thunder muffled up like drums Beat, whence the East wind comes. The heavy sky that could not weep Is loosened: rain falls steep: And thirty singing furies ride To split the sky from ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... entering the vestibule, he saw something that he had never seen before. At the end of the passage, below the dark staircase, was a door opening into the Paradou, and he could see the vast garden spreading there beneath the pale sunlight, with all its autumn melancholy, its sere and yellow foliage. The doctor hurried through the doorway and took a few steps over ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... and the forest put on the sere and sombre robes of autumn, and yet no visible change—none at least more favorable to the wishes of William Hinkley—took place in the character and conduct of the maiden. Her mind, on the contrary, seemed to take something of its hue from the cold sad tones of the forest. ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... chill and drear, December's leaf is dun and sere; No longer Autumn's glowing red Upon our forest hills is shed; No more beneath the evening beam The wave reflects their crimson gleam; The shepherd shifts his mantle's fold And wraps him closely from ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... and horn, huntsman and horn, Shall scare your heaths and coverts lorn, Braying 'em shrill and clear, O; But lone and still Shall lift each hill, Each valley wan and sere, O. ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... the drear month of October, The leaves were all crisped and sere, Adown by the Tarn of Auber, In the misty mid ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... and sere the slim sycamore sighs; Lushly the lithe leaves lie low o'er the land; Whistles the wind with its whisperings wise, Grewsomely gloomy and garishly grand. So doth the sycamore solemnly stand, Wearily watching in wondering ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... additional use of sitting-room and study, made the lack of space particularly noticeable. The window afforded a prospect pleasant enough to eyes such as theirs. Above the lower houses on the opposite side of the way appeared tall trees, in the sere garb of later autumn, growing by old Westminster School; and beyond them, grey in twilight, rose the towers of the Abbey. From this point of view no vicinage of modern brickwork spoilt their charm; the time-worn monitors stood alone against a sky of ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... sounds That greet thine ear. Slow cycles will pass on And in the time-to-be-bright years, grow wan; Old planets fade, new stars shall dimly burn, But not to Eden's peace shalt thou return. Oft from thy yearning heart glad hope shall fail. Thy fruit of life lift bloom all sere and pale. Certain, small comfort bides, when joy is gone, In Great or Less. Grim Sorrow waits to lead thee on. Sorrow! Thou hast not seen her pallid face. In thy most troubled dream she had no place"— "Nay, I depart," she said, with lips grown chill. "Fearless and ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... highway that leads Somewhere, cold, austere; And I follow a shadow that heeds My coming, and points, not in wrath, Out over: we tread the sere path Up to the summit; recedes All gloom; and at last The ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... cold, to the one pair of human eyes that were destined to see you! The little birds that come and go and return to us over such vast distances, they perish like this in myriads annually; flying to and from us they are blown away by death like sere autumn leaves, "the pestilence-stricken multitudes" whirled away by the wind! They die in myriads: that is not strange; the strange, the astonishing thing is the fact of death; what can they tell us of it—the wise men who live or have ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread. The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs, the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through all ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... that we are a good deal hampered with 'old blood.' Sir Allan {44} will not be in our way, however. He is very reasonable, and requires only that we should not in his 'sere and yellow leaf' offer him the indignity of casting him aside. This I would never assent to, for I cannot forget his services ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... you young beast—I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that forty's just the right age for me. You're reminding me that I'm a trifle passe myself and ought to marry something sere and yellow. But I tell you I don't feel any older than twenty-five—never have, it's my affliction—while you've never been younger than forty in all your life. It's you who ought to marry middle-age"—and he ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... but there seemed nothing to distinguish it from the thousands of other piratical craft which pillage the public with the aid of the taximeter clock on the port beam! Soon they were at the big Broadway playhouse, where Shirley floundered out first, after the ungallant manner of many sere-and-yellow beaux. He swayed unsteadily, teetering on his cane, as Helene leaped lightly to the sidewalk beside him. The driver stood by the door of the car, leering ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... the herd shall find thee out In coming time, and many a nobler crown To one they love to honour gladly throw; Wilt thou not turn thee from their eager shout, And whisper o'er these leaves, then sere and brown: 'Thou'rt late, O world! love knew it ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... dirge-like music, low, Sounds forth again the solemn harp of Time; Mass for the buried hours, a funeral chime O'er human joy and woe. The sere leaves wail around thy passing bier, Speed to ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... Valley, he stopped the carriage at a picturesque wooded knoll between the road and the river, and said that here he used to come with his sister to gather harebells. It was so late in the season that every other flower by the roadside had been killed by frost; even the goldenrod was more sere than yellow. But the harebells were fresh in their delicate beauty, and he gathered a handful of them which lighted up his "garden room" for several days. I remember that on this occasion an effect referred to in "The River Path" was reproduced most ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... evening was very beautiful. The cold November day was dying into night. Clear, clear was the sky save for some black and heavy snow clouds that floated on it driven before the easterly wind that piped through the sere grasses and blew the plovers over him as though they were dead leaves. Where the sun had vanished long bars of purple lay above the horizon; to his excited fancy they looked like the gateway of another ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... defeated husband drove home along the leafy borders of the beautiful Central Park—the one lovely oasis in New York's scattered maze of brick and iron monstrosity—he saw his life lying sere and yellow around him, his bare uplands scorched ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... choked highway curved and they were suddenly fronted by a desert of sere desolation, a desert floored by glassy slag which sent back the sun beams in a furnace glare. Varta shaded her eyes and tried to see the end of this, but, if there was a distant rim of green beyond, the heat distortions in ...
— The Gifts of Asti • Andre Alice Norton
... in accordance with "classical" custom, permitted this concise and concentrated theme, a contrast of power and gentle self-content, to be swept away by the rush of the Allegro, like a sere and withered leaf; so that, whenever it caught the ear at all, a sort of dance pace was heard, in which, during the two opening bars the dancers stepped forward, and in the two following bars twirled about in "Laendler" [Footnote: Laendler—an Austrian ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... green on the graves of Shepherd Fennel and his frugal wife; the guests who made up the christening party have mainly followed their entertainers to the tomb; the baby in whose honour they all had met is a matron in the sere and yellow leaf. But the arrival of the three strangers at the shepherd's that night, and the details connected therewith, is a story as well known as ever in the country about ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... trees turned into naked black ghosts; or, rather, into many-stringed harps whereon the northwest gales alternately shrieked and roared. The fire-blue lake was a sheet of leaden ice, twenty inches thick. The fields showed sere and grayly lifeless in the patches between sodden snow-swathes. Nature had flown south, with the birds; leaving the northern world a lifeless and empty husk, as deserted as ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... are wede away;" Her forest trees are sere; Her Royal Oak is gane for aye, The young Chevalier! O Charlie is my darling, My darling, my darling; O Charlie is my ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various |
