"Fen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Benacus then no more They call the name, but Mincius, till at last Reaching Governo into Po he falls. Not far his course hath run, when a wide flat It finds, which overstretchmg as a marsh It covers, pestilent in summer oft. Hence journeying, the savage maiden saw 'Midst of the fen a territory waste And naked of inhabitants. To shun All human converse, here she with her slaves Plying her arts remain'd, and liv'd, and left Her body tenantless. Thenceforth the tribes, Who round were scatter'd, gath'ring to that ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... Master Pearson? Do you think you could arouse the people in the fen-country? You might raise and drill an army in those wilds without the Government knowing any thing ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... constitutes the City of London. The London of the Britons before the Romans landed, is supposed to have been little other than 'a collection of huts set down on a dry spot in the midst of the marshes;' a forest nearly bounded this spot, at no great distance from the Thames; and a lake or fen existed, outside London, at or near the site now occupied by Finsbury Square. The area of London, at this early period, is supposed to have been bounded by—to use their modern designation—Tower Hill on the east, Dowgate Hill on the west, Lombard and Fenchurch ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... journey, I find that my choice lies between well-printed books which I have no wish to read, and well-written books which I could not read without permanent injury to my eyesight. The keeper of the bookstall, seeing me gaze vaguely along his shelves, suggests that I should take 'Fen Country Fanny' or else 'The Track of Blood' and have done with it. Not wishing to hurt his feelings, I refuse these works on the plea that I have read them. Whereon he, divining despite me that I am a superior ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... years found it practicable to make the geese travel on foot too, as well as the turkeys, and a prodigious number are brought up to London in droves from the farthest parts of Norfolk; even from the fen country about Lynn, Downham, Wisbech, and the Washes; as also from all the east side of Norfolk and Suffolk, of whom it is very frequent now to meet droves with a thousand, sometimes two thousand in a drove. They begin to drive them generally in August, by which time the ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... board of a privateer which was employed by the Jacobites as a regular packet boat between France and England. This vessel conveyed him to a desolate spot in Romney Marsh. About half a mile from the landing place a smuggler named Hunt lived on a dreary and unwholesome fen where he had no neighbours but a few rude shepherds. His dwelling was singularly well situated for a contraband traffic in French wares. Cargoes of Lyons silk and Valenciennes lace sufficient to load thirty packhorses ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be living at this hour And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby; England has need of thee, and so have I— She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour, League after grassy league from Lincoln tower To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen. Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men, Like a tall ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... be, 'twas borne on me that land had lived of old, And men had crept and slain and slept where now they toiled for gold; Through jungles dim the mammoth grim had sought the oozy fen, And on his track, all bent of back, ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... "Moor and fen." While these words seem new and unusual to us, we must remember that in England they are as common as the terms marsh ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... work were in many respects a remarkable class. The "railway navvies," as they are called, were men drawn by the attraction of good wages from all parts of the kingdom; and they were ready for any sort of hard work. Some of the best came from the fen districts of Lincoln and Cambridge, where they had been trained to execute works of excavation and embankment. These old practitioners formed a nucleus of skilled manipulation and aptitude, which rendered them of indispensable utility in the immense undertakings of the period. Their expertness ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... with Bensersiel too, or the country between? I searched the ordnance map again, standing up to get a better light and less jolting. There was the road northwards from Esens to Bensersiel, passing through dots and chess-board squares, the former meaning fen, the latter fields, so the reference said. Something else, too, immediately caught my eye, and that was a stream running to Bensersiel. I knew it at once for the muddy stream or drain we had seen at the harbour, ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... in the glare Of the moon's dying light. As a fen-fire's beam On a sluggish stream Gleams dimly, so the moon shone there; And it yellowed the strings of thy tangled hair, That shook in the wind ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... seen Caernarvon's towers, And well he knew the spire of Sarum; And he had been where Lincoln bell Flings o'er the fen that ponderous knell— A ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... the people, belonging to the said parish, being no less than six or seven miles distant from their own kirk; for which and other reasons the heritors and others procured a disjunction, and called the new parish Fen ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... the fate of the elves is nearly the same As the terrible fate of men; To love, to rue, to be, and pursue A flickering wisp of the fen. We must play the game with a careless smile, Though there's nothing in the hand; We must toil as if it were worth our while Spinning our ropes of sand; And laugh, and cry, and live, and die At the waft ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... unknown name. A Winkelried it was, Who slew the dragon in the fen at Weiler, And lost his life in the ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... when a deeper calm Descends upon thee, quiet Mere, and then There is a sound of bells, a far off psalm From gray church towers, that swims across the fen; And the light sigh where grass and waters meet, Is thy meek welcome to the ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... the direction of Fairy Glen, that I fully realised how romantic the moonlight was. Every wooded hill and every precipice, whether craggy and bald or feathered with pines, was bathed in light that would have made an Irish bog, or an Essex marsh, or an Isle of Ely fen, a land of poetry. ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... From time to time appears a patch of barren moorland, which has been planted with forest-trees, in accordance with the suggestions of Mr. Evelyn, and under the wet sky the trees are thriving. Wide reaches of fen, measured by hundreds of miles, (which now bear great crops of barley,) are saturated with moisture, and tenanted only by ghost-like companies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... thee joy, or bid thee blind Thine eyes with tears,—that thou hast not resign'd The passionate fire and freshness of thy youth: For as the current of thy life shall flow, Gilded by shine of sun or shadow-stain'd, Through flow'ry valley or unwholesome fen, Thrice blessed in thy joy, or in thy woe Thrice cursed of thy race,—thou art ordain'd To share beyond the lot ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the interior, too, how many hundreds of miles of roads now intersect regions not long ago deemed impracticable!—firm on the fen, in safety flung across the chasm—and winding smoothly amidst shatterings of rocks, round the huge mountain bases, and down the glens once felt as if interminable, now travelled almost with the speed of the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... horse was loose he 'gan to race Unto the wild mares wandering in the fen, With WEHEE! WHINNY! right through thick and thin! This Miller then returned; no word he said, But doth his work, and with these clerks he played, Till that their corn was well and fairly ground. And when the meal is sacked and safely bound John goeth out, and found ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... to the Dismal Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore; Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen where the serpent feeds, And ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... education there, or devoting their lives to piety within its walls. It was here that Guthlac, a Saxon warrior, disgusted with the world, sought solitude and repose; and for ten long years he led a hermit's life in that damp and marshy fen; in prayer and fasting, working miracles, and leading hearts to God, he spent his lonely days, all which was rewarded by a happy and peaceful death, and a sanctifying of his corporeal remains—for many wondrous miracles were wrought by ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... moon's wan crescent scarcely gleams, Ghost-like she fades in morning beams; Hie hence each peevish imp and fay, That scare the pilgrim on his way:— Quench, kelpy! quench, in bog and fen, Thy torch that cheats benighted men; Thy dance is o'er, thy reign is done, For Benyieglo ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... hearths of their cabins, The fields of their corn, Unwarned and unweaponed, The victims were torn,— By the whirlwind of murder Swooped up and swept on To the low, reedy fen-lands, The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... emptying the cup to the dregs. The lost magnificence always in view—for, you must know, the manor-house of Helenenthal exactly overlooks it. It is surrounded by moor and fen—wellnigh two hundred acres. Perhaps one could cultivate some of it—one might be the pioneer of progress. What could ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... Mahkahdaeneneh, n. a black man Mahkahdaequa, n. a black woman Mawezhah, adv. anciently, long ago Metegwob, n. a bow Moskin, n. full Mahdwawa, n. a sound Menoodahchin, adv. enough Menekaun, n. seed Menequang, v. to drink Mahskoosen, n. a marsh, a bog, a fen Mamangwah, n. a butterfly Mahskeeg, n. a swamp Mahmahjenoowin, n. miracle Mahnahtaneseweneneh, n. a shepherd Mahskahwezewin, strength Mahjetong, v. to begin Mahkuk, n. a pail, or box Mahkahkoosug, n. a barrel Megahzooweneneh, n. a soldier, a man of war, or a fighting man Mahmahkahdezing, ...
— Sketch of Grammar of the Chippeway Languages - To Which is Added a Vocabulary of some of the Most Common Words • John Summerfield
... Fen District in 1815, which the 'Westminster Gazette' calls 'a powerful drama of human passion'; and the 'National Observer' ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... two ago I found myself beside the lower waters of the Cam, in flat pastures, full of ancient thorn-trees just bursting into bloom. I gained the towing-path, which led me out gradually into the heart of the fen; the river ran, or rather moved, a sapphire streak, between its high green flood-banks; the wide spaces between the embanked path and the stream were full of juicy herbage, great tracts of white cow-parsley, ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... English riddles borrow themes from native folk-songs and saga; in their hands inanimate objects become endowed with life and personality; the powers of nature become objects of worship such as they were in olden times; they describe the scenery of their own country, the fen, the river, and the sea, the horror of the untrodden forest, sun and moon engaged in perpetual pursuit of each other, the nightingale and the swan, the plow guided by the 'gray-haired enemy of the wood,' the bull breaking up clods left unturned by the plow, the falcon, the arm-companion of ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... 1. Today Inspector General Chang Hsun entered the city with his troops and actually restored the monarchy. He stopped traffic and sent Liang Ting-fen and others to my place to persuade me. Yuan-hung refused in firm language and swore that he would not recognize such a step. It is his hope that the Vice- President and others will take effective means to protect the Republic. ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... proceeding Macbeth, more suo, continued to mutter like a man in a troubled dream, now humming a bar of the tune, now drawling out a phrase from the words, "O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till the night is gone"—this, I believe, he repeated several times, lighting his pipe in the intervals and spitting out of the door. Then he went on more articulately: "Rum ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... and virtuous," spake Peter in the drone of an ancient fortune-teller, "one keeps her eyes pinned on the front. One hears nothing; and one becomes as discreet of tongue as the little blue sphinx at Chow-Fen-Chu." ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... what an ugly place Plaistow is. The land isn't actual fen now, but it was once. And it's quite flat. And there is a great dike, twenty feet wide, oozing through it just oozing, you know; and lots of little dikes, at right angles with the big one. And the fields are all square. And there ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... of the swain drowned in a fen, and the grief of his widow, possessing every charm which simplicity and tenderness can bestow, and give to that Ode claims to admiration which, if admitted, have been hitherto ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and that prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady. We have the malady, whatever may be the cure or the cause. We drove in a body to Science the other day for an antidote; which was as if tired pedestrians should mount the engine-box of headlong trains; and Science introduced ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that wast prophetess and bride, When truth and thou trod under time and chance? What latter light of what new hope shall guide Out of the snares of hell thy feet, O France? What heel shall bruise these heads that hiss and glide, What wind blow out these fen-born fires that dance Before thee to thy death? No light, no life, no breath, From thy dead eyes and lips shall take the trance, Till on that deadliest crime Reddening the feet of time Who treads through blood and passes, time shall glance Pardon, and Italy ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... where the fen-lights flit! Ignoble sediment of loftier lands, Thy humour clings about our hearts and hands And solves us to its softness, till we sit As ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... who through a fen Of filthy darkness grope: We did not dare to breathe a prayer, Or to give our anguish scope: Something was dead in each of us, And ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... my mind such thoughts awake, By lone Saint Mary's silent lake; Thou know'st it well,—nor fen, nor sedge, Pollute the pure lake's crystal edge; Abrupt and sheer, the mountains sink At once upon the level brink; And just a trace of silver sand Marks where the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the porter, and there had been no response. If they did not stop at Effry there would be no halt for forty minutes. Now was his time. He waited a little till they had got up the speed. The line here ran through miles and miles of fen country, more or less drained by dykes and rivers, but still wild and desolate enough. Over this great flat the storm was sweeping furiously—even drowning in its turmoil the noise of ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... with the fen behind and the fog before, When the rain-rot spreads and a tame sea mumbles the shore, Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no wrong, Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your sire's old song— O you envy the blessed dead that can ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... service for homely characters. The dialect these people talk, without editorial comment, delights and amuses from its strangeness, and also from the conviction that it is as real as the landscape. They tell wonderful tales of moor and fen as they tramp the woods or sail on moonlit waters, and sitting by a peat fire of a stormy night, discuss, between deep pulls of Scotch whisky, the Erastianism that vitiates modern theology. We must look in the pages of Scott for a more charming ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... as beauteous, Nature, is thy face,' Exclaim'd Orlando: 'all that grows has grace: All are appropriate—bog, and marsh, and fen, Are only poor to undiscerning men; Here may the nice and curious eye explore How Nature's hand adorns the rushy moor, Here the rare moss in secret shade is found, Here the sweet myrtle of the shaking ground; Beauties are these that from the view retire, But well ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... above the Romans left a yet nobler memento of their sojourn in the shape of good roads. Except the modern iron highways, these old Roman roads form still the chief means of intercommunication at this border of the fen regions. For many generations after Durobrivae had been deserted by the imperial legions, the country went downward in the scale of civilization. Stipendiary and other unhappy knights came in shoals; monks and nuns settled in swarms, like crows, upon the fertile ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... marshes show, with Stebonhithe Church and a few other signs to mark recognizable country. On the south side the marshes were very extensive, stretching from the River inland for a considerable distance. The north shore was fen also, but a little above the tides was a low eminence, a clay and gravel cliff, that sea-wall which now begins below the Albert Dock and continues round the East Anglian seaboard. Once it serpentined as far ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... rose afar the city spires, and thence Came the deep murmur of its throng of men, And as its grateful odors met thy sense, They seemed the perfumes of thy native fen. Fair lay its crowded streets, and at the sight Thy tiny song grew ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... small subsidiary tells round about it, the sites of small isolated buildings or villages connected with the central settlement. Originally the settlements were built upon natural rises of the ground which stood up as islands in the fen-country. ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... the Tanais, which has its source in the northern parts of the Riphean mountains[5], which are near the Sarmatic[6] ocean; and this river then runs directly south, on the west side of Alexander's temples, to the nation of the Russians[7], where it runs into the fen called Maeotis, and thence it issues eastwards with a great stream, near the town called Theodosia, into the Euxine. Then becoming narrow for a considerable track, it passes by Constantinople, and thence into the Wendel sea, or Mediterranean. The south-west end of Europe is in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... Winchester, Harold's uncle, not only brought the tenants of the church lands, but he himself with twelve of his monks had put on armour under their monkish robes. The Abbot of Peterborough headed a contingent from the Fen Country; the men of London under the sheriff of the Mid Saxons were there, and prepared to die in defence of the royal standard, which it was the special privilege of London to guard. In the Abbey of Westminster, where ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... in hidden glens From the secret heart of the mountains, Where the red fox hath its dens And the gods their crystal fountains; Up runnel and leaping cataract, Boulder and ledge, I climbed and tracked, Till I came to the top of the world and the fen That drinks up the clouds and cisterns the rain, And down through the floors of the deep morass The procreant woodland essences drain— The thunder's home, where the eagles scream And the centaurs pass; But, where it was born, I lost ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... I dipp'd in the romantic, A hundred thousand have run frantic— There's not a hideous highland spot, (Long fallowed to the core by Scott)— No rill, through rack and thistle dribbling, But has its deadlier crop of scribbling. Each fen, and flat, and flood, and fell, Gives birth to verses by the ell— There Wordsworth, for his muse's sallies, Claims all the ponds, the lanes, and alleys— There Coleridge swears none else shall tune ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... for the FBI—the Fantasy Bureau of Investigation! Learning of a monster meeting of science fiction "fen" in New York, I teleported myself 3,000 miles from the Pacificoast to check the facts on the monsters. And it was true—the 14th World SciFi ...
— Out of This World Convention • Forrest James Ackerman
... over the stile I passed round the village churchyard, where the moss-grown gravestones stood grim and ghostly in the white light, and out across the meadows down to where the waters of the Nene, rippling on, were touched with silver. The river-path was wide, running by the winding bank away to the fen-lands and beyond. As I gained the river's edge and walked beneath the willows I heard now and then a sharp, swift rustling in the sedges as some water-rat or otter, disturbed by my presence, slipped away into hiding. ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... starfish lying on a flat shore at low tide. Southward, westward, and northward from the head or centre of the clump (which is where the Cathedral stands) it throws out arms every way, and these arms have each short tentacles of their own. In between the spurs runs the even fen like a calm sea, and on the crest of the spurs, radiating also from Ely, run the roads. Long ago there was but one road of these that linked up the Isle with the rest of England. It was the road from the south, and there the Romans had ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... which is low down in the fen country, he found a sullen girl. She met him at the bridge of the Galland fen and her grey eyes flashed fire. She was a tall maid, very fair to look upon, and the blue tunic which she wore over her russet gown was cunningly embroidered. Embroidered too with ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... the relationship of Sussex to this great event. All the chapters in Mr. Freeman's great history do not impress the imagination so strongly as this one fact, that William the Conqueror has always been Duke William to the Sussex folk. He was Duke William to the fen folk, too. They fought for their belief and were compelled to accept his kingship. The Sussex folk fought, too, and they handed down their conception of the great fight ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... on this earth we live And weigh the various Qualities of men, Seeing how most are fugitive, Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then, Wind-wavered corpse-lights, daughters of the fen, The more we feel the high stern-featured beauty Of plain devotedness to duty, 290 Steadfast and still, nor paid with mortal praise, But finding amplest recompense For life's ungarlanded expense In work done squarely and unwasted days. For this we honor him, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... protruded, his forehead receded obliquely; his ears formed one solid piece with head and neck—a horrible man. The other, Manteca, was so much human refuse; his eyes were almost hidden, his look sullen; his wiry straight hair fen over his ears, forehead and neck; his scrofulous lips hung eternally agape. Once more, Luis ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... otherwise have ascribed to the influence of mountain scenery. Such causes, however, affect the lowland as much as the highland religious character in all districts far from cities; but they do not produce the same effects. The curate or hermit of the field and fen, however simple his life, or painful his lodging, does not often attain the spirit of the hill pastor or recluse: we may find in him a decent virtue or a contented ignorance, rarely the prophetic vision or the martyr's passion. Among the fair ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... coarse-cut Boer tobacco, "I'll tell it to you if you like: you are going to live in the house, and you may as well know it. I am sure, Captain Niel, that it will go no further. You see I was born in England, yes, and well-born too. I come from Cambridgeshire—from the fat fen-land down round Ely. My father was a clergyman. Well, he wasn't rich, and when I was twenty he gave me his blessing, thirty sovereigns in my pocket, and my passage to the Cape; and I shook his hand, God bless him, and off I came, and here in ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... his cloak Delphis lost; that now I shred and cast into the cruel flame. Ah, ah, thou torturing Love, why clingest thou to me like a leech of the fen, and drainest all the black ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... mountains? I should answer, I should tell you, 10 "From the forests and the prairies, From the great lakes of the Northland, From the land of the Ojibways, From the land of the Dacotahs, From the mountains, moors, and fen-lands, 15 Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah, Feeds among the reeds and rushes. I repeat them as I heard them From the lips of Nawadaha, The musician, the sweet singer." 20 Should you ask where Nawadaha Found these songs so wild and wayward, Found these legends ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... mess!" said Osbert. "There's Orme of the Fen run off, because I gave him a scolding for his impudence: and it is his turn to watch to-night. I have not a minute to go after him; I don't ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... west wind off the prairie; Ho, north wind off the pine; Ho, myriad azure lakes, hill-clasped, Like cups of living wine; Ho, mighty river rolling; Ho, fallow, field and fen; By a thousand voices nature calls, To fire the hearts ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... in each blade of grass, Each towering peak and mountain pass; Each forest, river, lake and fen Reveals the God of worlds and men; His works of wisdom prove to me, A wise, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... with a jurisdiction partially separate; within its bounds there are, besides the city of Ely, several towns and villages, as Wisbech, March, Chatteris, &c. and the former great waste of marsh and fen has become, by means of drainage, a fertile corn-growing district of great importance. Ely is believed to have taken its name from Elig in the Saxon tongue, signifying a willow; or from Elge in the Latin of Bede the historian, from ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... fancied she waved her hand to him; but being in no humour to join the cavalcade, he remained seated, and the riders soon passed out of sight. As he sat there sombre thoughts came to him, stealing up like exhalations from the fen. He saw his life stretched out before him, full of broken purposes and ineffectual effort. Public affairs were in so perplexed a case that consistent action seemed impossible to either party, and their chief efforts were bent toward directing the choice of a regent. It was this, rather than ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore, Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen, where the serpent feeds, And man never ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the Finns that they began earlier than any other European nation to collect and preserve their ancient folklore. In the seventeenth century we meet men of literary tastes like Palmskold who tried to collect and interpret the various national songs of the fen-dwellers of the North. But the Kalevala proper was collected by two great Finnish scholars of our own century, Zacharias Topelius and Elias Lonnrot. Both were practising physicians, and in this capacity ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... and full of memories, what can be said of this vast ruined forest of stone pines with its mystery of mere and fen, its coolness and shadow, its astonishing silence? Only this I think, that if once you find it, nothing else in Ravenna will seem half so precious as this green wood. You will love it always and for its own sake more than anything else ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... sons. Keen sportsmen these, who dearly love to walk for hours in pursuit of game in the autumn, on the chance of bagging an occasional brace of partridges or a wild pheasant (for everything here is wild), or, in winter, when lake and fen are frostbound, by the river and its withybeds after snipe and wildfowl—for the Cotswold stream has ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... themselves, had been kept at the monasteries in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere. The yearly entries were mostly brief, dry records of passing events, though occasionally they become full and animated. The fen country of Cambridge and Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries. Here were the great abbeys of Peterborough and Croyland and Ely minster. One of the earliest English songs tells how the savage heart of the Danish {16} king Cnut was softened by ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of the breeze sweeps over the trees, and the mists lie low on the fen, From grey tombstones are gathered the bones that once were women and men, And away they go, with a mop and a mow, to the revel that ends too soon, For cockcrow limits our holiday - the dead ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... farther conversation I got up, and thanking the kind woman departed. I soon left the moors behind me and continued walking till I came to a few houses on the margin of a meadow or fen in a valley through which the way trended to the east. They were almost overshadowed by an enormous mountain which rose beyond the fen on the south. Seeing a house which bore a sign, and at the door of which a horse ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... and snakes. You may see these serpents basking on the surface among thickets of the flowering rush, or coiled about the lily leaves and flowers—lithe monsters, slippery and speckled, the tyrants of the fen. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... blood as theirs for the shedding, In the veins of Cavaliers was its heading. You have no such stately men In your abolition den, To march through foe and fen, ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... see the good woman's eyes fill with tears: but she wiped them away, and took advantage of the additional persuasion they gave to her natural whine to say, "If, Sir, you know of any young gentleman who likes fen-shooting, and wants a nice, pretty, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... went Panther and the Raven, Searched the forest and the marshes, Searched for leagues along the lake-shore, But they found no trace or tidings, Found no track in marsh or meadow, Found no trail in fen or forest, On the shore-sand found no footprints. Many days they sought and found not. Then to Panther spoke the Raven: "She is in the Land of Spirits— Surely in the Land of Spirits. High at midnight ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... the price of laud, Why should we seek, since Byfield is at hand; For works on draining either bog or fen, In Marsh and Moore we ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... roots, and instead of drinking with eager delight the beauties of Virgil have been culling and drying his phrases for future use."—"I fear my good genius, who was wont to visit me with nightly visions in woods and brakes and by the river's marge, is now dying of a fen ague, and I shall thus probably emerge from my retreat not a hair-brained son of imagination, but a sedate black-lettered book worm, with a head like ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... and on till she came to a fen, and there she gathered a lot of rushes and made them into a kind of a sort of a cloak with a hood, to cover her from head to foot, and to hide her fine clothes. And then she went on and on till she came ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... to run, Thus Nature disciplines her son: Meeter, she says, for me to stray, And waste the solitary day, In plucking from yon fen the reed, And watch it floating down the Tweed; Or idly list the shrilling lay With which the milkmaid cheers her way, Marking its cadence rise and fail, As from the field, beneath her pail, She trips it down the uneven dale: Meeter for me, by yonder cairn, ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... argument of 'Beowulf' is as follows:—Hrothgar, King of the Gar-Danes, has built a splendid hall, called Heorot. This is the scene of royal festivity until a monster from the fen, Grendel, breaks into it by night and devours thirty of the king's thanes. From that time the hall is desolate, for no one can cope with Grendel, and Hrothgar is in despair. Beowulf, the noble hero of the Geats, in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... happiness; a safe dwelling, convenient clothing, abundant and wholesome nourishment, smiling fields, fertile hills, populous empires, all is my work; without me this earth, given up to disorder, would have been but a filthy fen, a wild wood, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... called "civilisation" than some of the secluded valleys lying between the Radnorshire hills. Here Nature still holds her own, and spreads her pure and simple charms before us. Large tracts of moor and rushy fen are interspersed with craggy hills, rising one behind another in lovely shades of purple and blue; and far from the haunts of men, or at all events of town men, many acres of uncultivated land are still tenanted by the wild mountain pony and the picturesque gipsy. On the ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... being accidentally included with the sawdust in which Wenham Lake ice is packed for transport. The Canadian river-weed is known first to have escaped from the botanical gardens at Cambridge, whence it spread rapidly through the congenial dykes and sluices of the fen country, and so into the entire navigable network of the Midland counties. But there are other aliens of older settlement amongst us, aliens of American origin which nevertheless arrived in Britain, in all probability, long before Columbus ever set foot ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... at their backs The ancient Danish battle-axe. They raised a wild and wondering cry As with his guide rode Marmion by. Loud were their clamouring tongues, as when The clanging sea-fowl leave the fen, And, with their cries discordant mix'd, Grumbled and yell'd the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... (105) Brought thee a loss as life precious, as heavenly breath. Loss of a bridegroom dear; such whirling passion in eddies Suck'd thee adown, so drew sheer to a sudden abyss, 110 Deep as Graian abyss near Pheneos o'er Cyllene, Strainer of ooze impure milk'd from a watery fen; (110) Hewn, so stories avouch, in a mountain's kernel; an hero Hew'd it, falsely declar'd Amphytrionian, he, When those monster birds near grim Stymphalus his arrow 115 Smote to the death; such task bade him a dastardly lord. So that another God might ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... The villages of Spain that Borrow visited could even at that time compare favourably morally and educationally, with the villages of his own county of Norfolk at the same period. The morals of the agricultural labourers of the English fen country eighty years ago were a scandal, and the peasantry read nothing; more than half of them could not read. They had not, moreover, the humanising passion for song and dance that Andalusia knew. ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... both in these islands and elsewhere, have been told in verse and prose, and not more often, nor more loudly, than they deserve. But we must remember, now and then, that there have been heroes likewise in the lowland and in the fen. Why, however, poets have so seldom sung of them; why no historian, save Mr. Motley in his "Rise of the Dutch Republic," has condescended to tell the tale of their doughty deeds, is a question not ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... I went, when the ice passed out of the fjord, in Jarl Agard's ships. I was made drink-boy and sword-bearer to him, and in lieu of other name was called Ragnar Lodbrog. Agard's country was neighbour to the Frisians, and a sad, flat country of fog and fen it was. I was with him for three years, to his death, always at his back, whether hunting swamp wolves or drinking in the great hall where Elgiva, his young wife, often sat among her women. I was with Agard in south foray with his ships ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... is presumed, knows where Shelford Fen is, and that it is famous for rearing geese. A luckless wight, who had the misfortune to be plucked at his examination for the degree of B.A., when the Rev. T. Shelford was his examiner, made the following ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... characteristics have been evolved through long ages by birds that have had to get their food in swamps and shallow lakes, and were thus gradually equipped for food-getting through long ages of practice. But of course no particular bird is thus modified by circumstances. A pigeon transferred to a fen would not develop the characteristics of the heron; it would simply die for lack of food. It is rather that certain minute variations take place, for unknown reasons, in every species; and the bird which happened to be hatched out in a fenland with a rather sharper ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... I found by thee unawed, On that thrice hallow'd eve abroad. When goblins haunt from flood and fen, The steps of ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... wades through the fen when it goes in search of prey, and why shouldst thou not stoop to pick up gold out of the dust? I know how thou couldst speak with the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... star Coils and shatters at her heels; Peals the horn exulting, peals Plaintive, is it near or far. Huntress, arrowy to pursue, In and out of woody glen, Under cliffs that tear the blue, Over torrent, over fen, She and forest, where she skims Feathery, darken and relume: Those are her white-lightning limbs Cleaving loads of leafy gloom. Mountains hear her and call back, Shrewd with night: a frosty wail Distant: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... by pining Fancy view'd, Dissolve. Above the sparkling flood When Phoebus rears his awful brow, From lengthening lawn and valley low The troops of fen-born mists retire. Along the plain The joyous swain Eyes the gay villages again, And gold-illumined spire; While, on the billowy ether borne, Floats the loose lay's jovial measure; And light along the fairy Pleasure, Her green robes glittering ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... a considerable amount of ground, but the work was not heavy. The church was one of the fine edifices for which the fen country is so famous, and the vicarage was a comfortable house, with large and very beautiful gardens and paddock, and with outlying fields. The people were farmers and laborers, with a sprinkling of shopkeepers; the only "society" was that ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... Alfred, the king had the remains of Harold exhumed and thrown into a fen. This a-fensive act showed what a great big broad nature Hardicanute had,—also the kind of timber used in making ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye |
