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Sylvan   /sˈɪlvən/   Listen
Sylvan

noun
1.
A spirit that lives in or frequents the woods.  Synonym: silvan.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Sylvan" Quotes from Famous Books



... he heard The sylvan merriment: he saw The pranks of butterfly and bird, The humours of ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang

... conquer everything and springs up, piling itself into heaps, climbing the trees, creeping across the paths, extending over the water, restraining one's steps and hiding the view on every side, as if it wished to conceal the shrine of some forgotten sylvan divinity,—at this spot is hidden a small royal palace, called the House-in-the-Wood, a sort of Casa del Labrador of the Villa Aranjuez. It was erected in 1647 by Princess Amalia of Solms, in honor of her husband, Frederick ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis

... intervals, be heard the wild scream of the couguar, or the distant howling of wolves, these scarcely interrupt the music falling endlessly upon the ear—the red cardinals, the orioles, the warbling fringillidae, and the polyglot thrushes—who meet here, as if by agreement, to make this lovely sylvan spot the scene ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... up in many a park and little warded holt about the Moorfoot braes, that William Douglas and Sybilla de Thouars stood together upon a crest of hill, crowned with dwarf birch and thick foliaged alder—a place in the retirement of whose sylvan bower they had already spent ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett

... fire, Laid The'be waste, and slew my warlike sire! By the same arm my seven brave brothers fell; In one sad day beheld the gates of hell. My mother lived to bear the victor's bands, The queen of Hippopla'cia's sylvan lands. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... Nature wore a wrinkled face, That not a leaf e'er shed its sylvan grace, But, harden'd by their northern wind, Rude, deceitful, and unkind, Thy half-cloth'd sons their oaten cake denied, Victims at once of penury ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr

... the influence of this sylvan solitude, nobly declared that she could and would do without a set bath-tub, and proposed building a cabin and living near to ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... Baragwaneth bent slowly down, holding the Neck towards the ground, and all the labourers bowed low over their billhooks. Still more slowly the old man straightened himself, raising his arms till he held the bunch of corn high above his head, like some sylvan priest elevating the Host. The billhooks, which a moment before had lain like shining crescents on the grass, went flashing up into blackness against the glow of the sky, and from each ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... time. He saw again that her thick hair was, vulgarly speaking, brown, but that there was a shade of tawny autumn leaf in it, for "appreciation"—a colour indescribable and of which he had known no other case, something that gave her at moments the sylvan head of a huntress. He saw the sleeves of her jacket drawn to her wrists, but he again made out the free arms within them to be of the completely rounded, the polished slimness that Florentine sculptors, in the great time, had loved, and of which the apparent firmness is expressed in ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James

... every one. Hans loved its quiet and sylvan beauty. It was just such a place as he would choose to ramble in, book in hand, and dream away many a pleasant hour. Hendrik liked it much, because he had already observed what he termed "extensive spoor" about the spot: in other words, he had noticed the tracks of many ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... otherwise spoiling the stems is of no moment. I could never behold this devastation without a strong sentiment of regret. Perhaps the prejudices of a classical education taught me to respect those aged trees as the habitation or material frame of an order of sylvan deities, who were now deprived of existence by the sacrilegious hand of a rude, undistinguishing savage. But without having recourse to superstition it is not difficult to account for such feelings ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... sylvan; in its rough-hewn frames Of oak and pine the dryads held their claims, And lent its ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... town and lived in the woods if his mother had let him; and in every vague plan of running off the forest had its place as a city of refuge from pursuit and recapture. The pioneer days were still so close to those times that the love of solitary adventure which took the boys' fathers into the sylvan wastes of the great West might well have burned in the boys' hearts; and if their ideal of life was the free life of the woods, no doubt it was because their near ancestors had lived it. At any rate, that was their ideal, ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells

... sentiment that I could neither overcome nor escape. The garden of the Luxembourg made my heart leap and banished every other thought. How many times had I stretched out on one of those little mounds, a sort sylvan school, while I read in the cool shade some book filled with foolish poetry! For such, alas! were the debauches of my childhood. I saw many souvenirs of the past among those leafless trees and faded lawns. There, when ten years of age, I had walked with ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset

... are interrupted by the mention of Phoebus, the Dryads, old Sylvan, and Pan. The Ode to Content is in the same metre as his school-fellow's Ode to Evening; but in the numbers, it is very inferior both to that and to Mrs. ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... piping loud, Or ushered with a shower still, When the gust hath blown his fill, Ending on the rustling leaves, With minute-drops from off the eaves. And, when the sun begins to fling His flaring beams, me, Goddess, bring To arched walks of twilight groves, And shadows brown, that Sylvan loves, Of pine, or monumental oak, Where the rude axe with heaved stroke Was never heard the nymphs to daunt, Or fright them from their hallowed haunt. There, in close covert, by some brook, Where no profaner eye may look, Hide me from day's garish eye, While the bee with honeyed ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton

... which had lately formed one of the stately pillars in the sylvan temple of Nature, was of too large dimensions to chop in two with axes; and after about half an hour's labour, which to me, poor, cold, weary wight! seemed an age, the males of the party abandoned the task in despair. To go round it ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... just as suited the purpose of the writer. Whether we consider it as contemporary with, or preceding the productions of the same class by Shakespeare, it is a relic of high interest, and nearly all the sylvan portions of the play, in which Robin Hood and his "merry men" are engaged, are of no ordinary beauty. Some of the serious scenes are also extremely well written, and the blank-verse, interpersed with rhymes, as was usual in our earlier dramas, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... copse; and then I thought I would not care to wander here quite alone, and that a whisper might steal on my ear, sweeter than the note of the thrush and the nightingale; and that there might be a somebody without whom all that sylvan beauty would be a blank, but with whom any place would become a fairyland. And then I fell to wondering who that somebody would be; and I looked at Cousin John, and felt a little cross—which was very ungrateful; and a little ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville

... (W. H.) 'Amid the Corn', a charming account of the denizens of the corn-fields, in his 'Sylvan Lyrics' (New ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... drawn from woods To share her home caresses, And looked up to her human eyes With sylvan tendernesses. ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang

... of any thing the surrounding woods afforded. Scarce two months had passed since their arrival and they were familiar with all the cosy retreats, nooks and pretty spots to be found. Surrounded by her followers, Lady Rosamond appeared as a naiad holding revel with her sylvan subjects. ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour

... curiosity. There was the pathos of the youth and sex of the victim, murdered in a peaceful country home. The terrible primality of murder accords more easily with the elemental gregariousness of slum existence; its horror is accentuated, by force of contrast, in the tender simplicity of an English sylvan setting. Colwyn's chief interest lay in the fact that, although the case against Hazel Rath was as strong as circumstantial evidence could make it, the supposed motive for the crime was weak. But he reflected that there did not exist in human life ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees

... been half destroyed by the English, were now overgrown with vines and half hidden by fallen trees, showed the combined ravages of war and nature. A few yards in advance of them the glen widened into a sylvan amphitheater, waving with firs and pines, and rendered almost impassable by underbrush. A short turning in the road suddenly brought them in front of a romantic waterfall. The cousins drew rein, watching the fall of the water ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison

... the dark-brown moors, The dusky mountain's shade, Down which the wasting torrent pours, Conceal'd so sweet a maid; When sudden started from the plain A sylvan scene and gay, Where, pride of all the virgin train, I first ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... of Le Frain was distinguished like her sister, by a sylvan appellation; her name was Le Codre (Corylus, the Hazel), and the knight's tenants had sagaciously drawn a most favourable prognostic of his future happiness, from the superiority of nuts to vile ash-keys; ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham

... virtues in her; never was proposed Riddle to her, or augury, strange or new, But she resolv'd it; never slight tale flew From her charm'd lips without important sense, Shown in some grave succeeding consequence. This little sylvan, with her songs and tales, Gave such estate to feasts and nuptials, That though ofttimes she forewent tragedies, Yet for her strangeness still she pleas'd their eyes; 80 And for her smallness they admir'd ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... in the hut, together with the botanical studies and the formation of the herbarium, suggested the plan of the "Sylvan Year," and thereby lent additional interest to these pursuits, though at that time his main work was the prosecution of "The Intellectual Life," now that he had finished the correction of the handbook on etching. ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... rural pleasures, seemed to us, upon reflection, to be the desirable one. Fortunately, Buffalo afforded the happy mean. Our extensive parks, our unsurpassed facilities for yachting, fishing, and all aquatic sports, our many sylvan lake and river retreats, our world-famed Niagara,—certainly a more desirable selection of rural scenes and pleasures cannot be found ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... of modern appearance; a plantation of trees on each side shapes the space into a rude semicircle. This mansion is the manor house, and in front, in the midst of a confused crowd, some dozen young men in gay sylvan costumes are standing in a circle, armed with flails, and vigorously threshing the ground. Jolly, hearty young fellows they are, and a merry chant they raise. One eager thresher in his zeal breaks his flail at the bend, and a shout from the ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie

... forced by adverse circumstances to remain apart. One of the poems, for instance, says that Tristan's love messages were written on chips of wood, which he floated down the little stream which flowed past his sylvan lodge and crossed the ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber

... the name of Robin Hood, particularly charming to most bosoms, coming as they do to us fraught with all delicious associations; the wild, free forest life, the sweet pastime, the adventures of bold outlaws amid the heaven of sylvan scenery, and the national renown of British bowmen which mingles with the records of our chivalry in history and romance; while the revival of archery in England of late years, as an elegant amusement, sufficiently ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various

... Saint Helena, now so quiet and sylvan, was once alive with mining camps and villages. Here there would be two thousand souls under canvas; there one thousand or fifteen hundred ensconced, as if for ever, in a town of comfortable houses. But the luck had failed, the mines petered out; and the ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... hemlocks and other trees undesirable in kind or in some way defective, so that the neighboring trees appear to have closed over the gaps make by the removal of the larger and better ones, maintaining the general continuity of the forest and leaving no sign on the sylvan sea, at least as seen from ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir

... nearer, crowns with her enclosure green, As with a rural mound, the champaign head Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, Access denied; and overhead upgrew Insuperable height of loftiest shade, Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm, A sylvan scene, and, as the ranks ascend, Shade above shade, a woody theatre Of stateliest view. Yet higher than their tops The verdurous wall of Paradise upsprung; Which to our general sire gave prospect large Into his nether empire neighbouring round. And higher than that wall a circling row ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... short clothes of a homely cut, and requiring some persuasion to renew them. He detested every thing that came in the way of his convenience, whether long skirts, hanging sleeves, royal mantles, or boots with folding tops. He was (for his time) a great reader, a "huge lover of the woods" and of all sylvan sports, fond of travelling, a very small eater, a generous almsgiver, a faithful friend—and a good hater. The model example which he set before him as a statesman was that of his grandfather, Henry First. The Empress Maud, ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt

... softly the name ripples on the ear!—we were entertained magnificently. Above us was the azure canopy; around us a dense forest of cedars, and in a shady nook, a sylvan retreat as it were, a barrel of choice beer. The mocking-birds caroled from the evergreen boughs. The plaintive melody of the dove came to us from over the hills, and pies at a quarter each poured in upon us ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty

... seen the green trees, by the spring. The engineer's orders included the building of a flume, carrying the water down from the Chilano's plantation into a tank, built on the ruins of the rock which had guarded the sylvan spring. The discordant voices of a gang of Chinamen profaned the stillness which had framed Miss Frances' girlish laughter; the blasting of the rock had loosened, to their fall, the clustering trees above, and the brook below was a ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... to the sky— is a maxim in these pine regions of literal importance. There is something besides utility also to be mentioned in this connection. With the exception of swamps, which are few and far between, the timber land has all the beauty of a sylvan grove. The entire absence of underbrush and decayed logs lends ornament and attraction to the woods. They are more like the groves around a mansion in their neat and cheerful appearance; and awaken reflection on the Muses and the dialogues ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews

... morning. Nobody, however, for months could give information about his rider; and it seemed probable that he would not be discovered until the autumn and the winter should again carry the sportsman into every thicket and dingle of this sylvan tract. One person only seemed to have more knowledge on this subject than others, and that was poor Ferdinand von Harrelstein. He was now a mere ruin of what he had once been, both as to intellect and moral feeling; and I observed him frequently smile when the jailer was mentioned. "Wait," ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... many a dream Of sylvan sounds that woo the ear in vain, While still thy numbers seem To voice the pain of bliss, the bliss ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various

... "Deprived of kingdom, and taking up our abode in the woods, we are engaged in the practice of virtue as ascetics with regulated lives. Unworthy of a forest life, how will thy daughter, living in the sylvan asylum, bear this hardship?" Aswapati said, "When my daughter knoweth, as well as myself, that happiness and misery come and go (without either being stationary), such words as these are not fit to be used towards one like me! O king, I have come ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... glad that you have come, Arthur, from the dusty town; You must throw aside your cares, And relax your legal frown. Coke and Littleton, avaunt! You have ruled him through the day; In this quiet, sylvan haunt, Be ...
— Ballads • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... consulting and the gods apart, and the Torquati were most conservative among all the great houses. From childhood up—and in years she was scarcely more than a child—all these had been very real to her. Pomona wandered through every orchard beside her beloved Vertumnus; Pan and his sylvan brood sported behind the foliage of every copse. She would as soon have thought of questioning their presence as of doubting her own being. Marcia believed; the average Roman patrician affected to believe and indulged in his polite, Hellenic doubts; the ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne

... fatally on nearly half their numbers on the way. But those pursuers, as wary as they were brave and untiring, with the double object of concealing the inequality of their numbers, which were but four, and securing the advantages that a choice of positions in all sylvan contests especially affords, had instantly fallen back to a line of hastily-selected coverts, stretching across the gorge, and had now become wholly invisible to their advancing foes, who soon paused in turn, and, shielding themselves behind the bodies of trees ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson

... the woods of England,—the cuckoo,—is undoubtedly destitute of family affection, as are others of its relatives; but this is not the case with the whole tribe. As the spring advances, from the sylvan glades of Pennsylvania a curious note, constantly repeated, is heard, resembling the word "cow-cow." It is the note of a bird, and from the sound it resembles it is generally known as the "cow-bird." It ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... comfortable and happy home of the Montgomerys, was indeed no misnomer; for in this beautiful and sylvan retreat every heart was truly made glad and every guest only felt sad when the ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... control. They had done, briefly, what they were. There was no individual blame to attach, no applause; spare moralizing to append. He returned to the pages before him, to the memories of the radiant Ambre and Marimon, the sylvan echoes ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... passing under the bridge which he had viewed with so much terror, the path ascended rapidly from the edge of the brook, and the glen widened into a sylvan amphitheatre, waving with birch, young oaks, and hazels, with here and there a scattered yew-tree. The rocks now receded, but still showed their grey and shaggy crests rising among the copse-wood. Still higher, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... What a contrast at this height, in this immensity, between the arid rocky haunts of the mountain bear and eagle and the spreading, vivifying verdure surrounding the haunts of man. On one side are the sylvan valleys, the thick grown ravines, the meandering rivulets, the fertile plains, the silent villages, and on the distant horizon, the sea, rising like a blue wall, standing like a stage scene; on the other, a howling immensity of boulders and prickly shrubs and plants, an arid wilderness—the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... departments in which fancy most readily indulges herself. The Irish, the Welsh, the Gael, or Scottish Highlander, all tribes of Celtic descent, assigned to the Men of Peace, Good Neighbours, or by whatever other names they called these sylvan pigmies, more social habits, and a course of existence far more gay, than the sullen and heavy toils of the more saturnine Duergar. Their elves did not avoid the society of men, though they behaved to those who associated with them with caprice, which ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... trysted there considerably; Jerry and Nan went there to pursue uninterruptedly the ceaseless wrangles and arguments on profound subjects that seemed to be their preferred method of sweethearting. And Rilla had a beloved little sylvan dell of her own there where she liked to ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... Sire addressed They all obeyed his high behest, And thus begot in countless swarms Brave sons disguised in sylvan forms. Each God, each sage became a sire, Each minstrel of the heavenly quire,(112) Each faun,(113) of children strong and good Whose feet should roam the hill and wood. Snakes, bards,(114) and spirits,(115) serpents bold Had sons too numerous ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... safe in my sylvan home, I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome; And when I am stretched beneath the pines, Where the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and pride of man, At the Sophist schools and the learned clan; For what are they all in their high conceit, When man ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine

... short league to Sillery when they left the St. Louis Road, and the driver turned his horses' heads towards the river, down the winding sylvan way that descended to the shore; and they had not so much desire, after all, to explore the site of the old mission. Nevertheless, they got out and visited the little space once occupied by the Jesuit chapel, where its foundations may yet be traced in the grass, and they read the inscription on ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells

... spirit of song,—midst the zephyrs at play In bowers of beauty,—I bend to thy lay, And woo, while I worship in deep sylvan spot, The Muses' soft echoes to kindle the grot. Wake chords of my lyre, with musical kiss, To vibrate and tremble with ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy

... lived in a large, comfortable house, with fine old trees around it, and Mary began to hope, when she saw the wealth of sylvan beauty, that her visit might not be so unbearable as ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins

... perhaps, have written with their "eyes upon the object." Blushing Flora paints the enameled ground; cheerful murmurs fluctuate on the gale; Eridanus through flowery meadows strays; gay gilded[32] scenes and shining prospects rise; while everywhere are balmy zephyrs, sylvan shades, winding vales, vocal shores, silver floods, crystal springs, feathered quires, and Phoebus and Philomel and Ceres' gifts assist the purple year. It was after this fashion that Pope rendered the famous moonlight passage in his translation of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... exception is of those who pursue Truth as by a divine compulsion, and who can be likened only to the nympholepts of old; those unfortunates who, whilst carelessly strolling amidst sylvan shades, caught a hasty glimpse of the flowing robes or even of the gracious countenance of some spiritual inmate of the woods, in whose pursuit their whole lives were ever afterwards ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell

... forget—the world is wide—the abode Of peace may still be found, nor hard the road. 20 It boots not, so, to every chance resigned, Where'er the spot, we bear the unaltered mind. Yet, oh! poor cottage, and thou sylvan shade, Remember, ere I left your coverts green, Where in my youth I mused, in childhood played, I gazed, I paused, I dropped a tear unseen, That bitter from the font of memory fell, Thinking on him ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles

... or the shady grove; 40 Still, with the shepherd's innocence, her mind To the sweet vale, and flowery mead, inclined; And oft as spring renew'd the plains with flowers, Breathed his soft gales, and led the fragrant hours, With sure return she sought the sylvan scene, 45 The breezy mountains, and the forests green. Her maids around her moved, a duteous band! Each bore a crook, all rural, in her hand: Some simple lay, of flocks and herds, they sung; With joy the mountain and the forest rung. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins

... compare the close, sculptural modelling in the figure of Antiope with the broader, looser handling in the figure of Europa; compare the two landscapes, which are even more divergent in style. The glorious sylvan prospect, which adds so much freshness and beauty to the Venere del Pardo, is conspicuously earlier in manner than, for instance, the backgrounds to the Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Calisto of Bridgewater House. The captivating work is not without its faults, chief among which is the ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips

... of Christian sanctity over what else might have seemed a heathen wilderness. This sort of religious talisman being secured, a man the most afraid of ghosts (like myself, suppose, or the reader) becomes armed into courage to wander for days in their sylvan recesses. The mountains of the Vosges, on the eastern frontier of France, have never attracted much notice from Europe, except in 1813-14 for a few brief months, when they fell within Napoleon's line of defence against the Allies. But they are interesting for this among ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... lady enamored, she, at the ending of her words, continued: "Beati, quorum tecta sunt peccata;"[1] and, like nymphs who were wont to go solitary through the sylvan shades, this one desiring to see and that to avoid the sun, she moved on then counter to the stream, going up along the bank, and I at even pace with her, following her little step with little. Of her steps and mine were not a hundred, when the banks both like gave a turn, in such wise ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri

... her sylvan trophies; down the wold She hears the sobbing of the stags that flee, Mixed with the music of the hunting rolled, But her delight is all in archery, And nought of ruth and pity wotteth she More than the hounds that follow on the flight; ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... Wrandall, grey and gaunt and somewhat wistful, rode slowly through the leafy lane, attended some little distance behind by Griggs the groom, who slumped in the saddle and thought only of the sylvan dell to curse it with poetic license. (Ever since Mr. Wrandall had been thrown by his horse in the Park a few years before his wife had insisted on having a groom handy in case he lost his seat again: hence Griggs.) It sometimes got on Mr. Wrandall's nerves, ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon

... negotiation he consented to take me to Los Pasages. Thanks to Republican vigilance, but principally it may have been to the nature of the ground, the road thither was clear. We started at six o'clock in the evening, and after a lively spin through sylvan scenery drew up in less than an hour at the outskirts of a village on the edge of a quiet pool, which we had bordered for nigh a mile. No papers had been asked for, on leaving, at the bridge over the Urumea, where a post of volunteers kept guard by an antique and stumpy bronze howitzer, mounted ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for some land of sylvan spectacle. I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... Rico may be divided into agricultural, pastoral, and sylvan. According to the Spanish Government measurements the island's area is 2,584,000 English ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk

... the Forest Shades! Lend thy pow'r, and lend thine ear! A Stranger trod thy lonely glades, Amidst thy dark and bounding Deer; Inquiring Childhood claims the verse, O let them not inquire in vain; Be with me while I thus rehearse The glories of thy Sylvan Reign. ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield

... beneficent rule of Solomon. As the serpent prince of the outer darkness, he retains the old characteristics of Vritra, Ahi, Typhon, and Echidna. As the black dog which appears behind the stove in Dr. Faust's study, he is the classic hell-hound Kerberos, the Vedic Carvara. From the sylvan deity Pan he gets his goat-like body, his horns and cloven hoofs. Like the wind-god Orpheus, to whose music the trees bent their heads to listen, he is an unrivalled player on the bagpipes. Like those other wind-gods the psychopomp Hermes and the wild huntsman Odin, he is the prince of the powers ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske

... rich shrubbery, darkened by overhanging foliage. Mossy paths, of charming intricacy, invited the wanderer to explore their mysterious windings. At every turn a marble statue, life-sized, met the eye: here the sylvan god Pan, with rustic pipes in hand—here the huntress Diana, with drawn bow—here the amorous god Cupid, upon a beautiful pedestal on which was sculptured these lines, said to have been once written by Voltaire under a statue of ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn

... O sylvan prophet! whose eternal fame Echoes from Judah's hills and Jordan's stream; The music of our numbers raise, And tune ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott

... you saw Oberon in sylvan dress moving lightly through a wood that looked like a wood (and so left your mind free to listen to him), you could believe in all the lovely things he had to say; but when you saw Mr. BARKER'S Oberon standing stark, like a painted graven image, with yellow cheeks and red eyebrows, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various

... say, have all: not so! This have they—flocks on every hill, the blue Spirals of incense and the amber drip Of lucid honey-comb on sylvan shrines, First-chosen weanlings, doves immaculate, Twin-cooing in the osier-plaited cage, And ivy-garlands glaucous with the dew: Man's wealth, man's servitude, but not himself! And so they pale, ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton

... as from a trap-door opening in the roof, and a voice was heard to utter these words in Anglo-Saxon, "Leap, sirrah; come, no delay; leap, my good Sylvan, show your honour's activity." A strange chuckling hoarse voice, in a language totally unintelligible to Count Robert, was heard to respond, as if disputing the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... trained over them. There it was a pretty prattling brook, the channel of which had been turned so as to make it come foaming down over a steep ledge of rocks. Or perhaps it was some statue of nymph or sylvan god, or some artfully built arbour overgrown with roses or honeysuckle. I have never seen grounds so tastefully laid out, and it was done, as all good work in art must be done, by following Nature so closely that it only differed from her handiwork in its profusion in ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... 1835, and saw it covered with mills and factories, begrimed with the smoke and soot of steam-engines; its romantic beauty deformed, its sylvan solitudes disturbed and desecrated by the sounds of active industry, and the busy hum of men. I asked what had brought about so great a change, and found that the author of it,—a man having a more numerous band of retainers and dependents than any baron bold of ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly

... his absorbed, bestial, and yet godlike crouching before the plant, as if he were the god of lower life, I somehow understood his isolation, why he did not marry. Pan and the ministers of Pan do not marry, the sylvan gods. They are single and isolated ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence

... Adirondacks, on the north, and founded there, at the foot of Hurricane Mountain, his place "Glenmore" and its "Summer School of the Culture Sciences." Although the primeval forest has departed from its immediate vicinity, the region is still sylvan, the air is sweet and strong and almost alpine in quality, and the mountain panorama spread before one is superlative. Davidson showed a business faculty which I should hardly have expected from him, ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... cot back'd by a wood-fring'd height, Where sylvan Usk runs swiftly babbling by: Here thy young eyes first look'd on earth and sky, And all the wonders of the day and night; O born interpreter of Nature's might, Lord of the quiet heart and seeing eye, Vast is our debt to thee we'll ne'er deny, Though ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... a magic seat) lay an offering of green cocoa-nuts; and when you looked up you found the boughs of the tree to be laden with strange fruit: palm-branches elaborately plaited, and beautiful models of canoes, finished and rigged to the least detail. The whole had the appearance of a midsummer and sylvan Christmas-tree al fresco. Yet we were already well enough acquainted in the Gilberts to recognise it, at the first sight, for a piece of wizardry, or, as they say in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... ensconced behind their sylvan ramparts, watched each other in silence. In the morning, an Indian deserter told the English commander that the French were packing their baggage. Schuyler sent to reconnoitre, and found them gone. They had retreated unseen through the snow-storm. ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman

... voice, easy graceful bearing, commanding figure, and handsome face, still pale and wan from his recent sufferings, evidently proving immensely attractive to Dona Antonia, much to my secret disgust. As for me, I am afraid I did little more than sit a silent worshipper at the shrine of this sylvan beauty upon whom we had ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood

... in the noon-day quiver; The vines on the mountains wave; And Tiber rolls his river As fresh by the Sylvan's cave. But my brothers are dead and gone; And far away From their graves I stray, And dream of ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... ye shades! all hail, ye vernal blooms Ye bow'ry thickets, and prophetic glooms! Ye forests hail! ye solitary woods! Love-whispering groves and silver-streaming floods! Ye meads, that aromatic sweets exhale! Ye birds, and all ye sylvan beauties hail! Oh how I long with you to spend my days, Invoke the muse, and try the ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore

... not enterprise or impudence enough to venture from my concealment; indeed, I felt like an arrant poacher, until I read one or two of Ovid's Metamorphoses, when I pictured myself as some sylvan deity, and she a coy wood nymph of whom I was in pursuit. There is something extremely delicious in these early awakenings of the tender passion. I can feel, even at this moment, the thrilling of my boyish bosom, whenever by chance I caught a glimpse of her white frock fluttering ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... make answer for him, and say, in the dark, gray city. Oh, they do greatly err, who think, that the stars are all the poetry which cities have; and therefore that the poet's only dwelling should be in sylvan solitudes, under the green roof of trees. Beautiful, no doubt, are all the forms of Nature, when transfigured by the miraculous power of poetry; hamlets and harvest-fields, and nut-brown waters, flowing ever under the forest, vast and shadowy, with all the sights and ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... adjoining Windsor Great Park. The rest of the land formerly composing it has been sold or leased. Enough of the forest remains, in conjunction with the park, to enable the visitor to make many delightful excursions. The most agreeable way of seeing this sylvan country is on horseback. Perhaps nowhere in the world can one get a more delicious canter. By a little management it is easy to take a ride of twenty-five miles without more than a couple of miles off the turf. In 1607 the Great Park was stated at 3650 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various

... or abjure? But thou art placed above me; thou art Lord; From thee I can, and must, submiss, endure Cheek or reproof, and glad to scape so quit. Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk, Smooth on the tongue discoursed, pleasing to the ear, And tunable as sylvan pipe or song; 480 What wonder, then, if I delight to hear Her dictates from thy mouth? most men admire Virtue who follow not her lore. Permit me To hear thee when I come (since no man comes), And talk ...
— Paradise Regained • John Milton

... grower and shipper, but also as a distinguished amateur of the fine arts, taking a leading part in originating local exhibitions and the like, are attached to his private residence, a handsome mansion flanked by a large and charming garden in the Boulevard du Temple. The laying out of this sylvan oasis is due to M. Vadr, the head gardener of the city of Paris, who contributed so largely to the picturesque embellishment of the Bois de Boulogne. M. Irroy's establishment, which comprises a considerable range of buildings grouped around two courtyards, ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly

... covered with downy fur. A tail is probably hidden under the garment. Only a sculptor of the finest imagination, most delicate taste, and sweetest feeling would have dreamed of representing a faun under this guise; and, if you brood over it long enough, all the pleasantness of sylvan life, and all the genial and happy characteristics of the brute creation, seem to be mixed in him with humanity—trees, grass, flowers, cattle, deer, and unsophisticated man." This passage shows how much my father was wont to trust to first impressions, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... graceful outlines to the blue sky, across a vast canopy of treetops; beneath whose shade the wolf and the wildcat, the badger and the fox, yet roamed at large, and preyed upon the wild deer and the lesser game. It bore the name of Walderne, which signifies a sylvan spot frequented by the wild beasts; the castle lay beneath; the parish church rose on the summit of the ridge above—a simple Norman structure, imposing in its ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake

... easily as in the Rue de Rivoli at Paris." His patience was again a little tried when he found baggage-wagons ploughing up his favourite walks, and trumpeters in twos and threes teaching newly-recruited trumpeters in all the sylvan places, and making the echoes hideous. But this had its amusement too. "I met to-day a weazen sun-burnt youth from the south with such an immense regimental shako on, that he looked like a sort of lucifer match-box, evidently blowing his life rapidly out, under the auspices of two ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... behold, in the tower Of the heaven, the thunder! on stairways of cloudy commotion, Colossal of tread, like a giant, from echoing hour to hour Goes striding in rattling armor ... The Nymph, at her billow-roofed dormer Of foam; and the Sylvan—green-housed—at her window of leaves appears; —As a listening woman, who hears The approach of her lover, who comes to her arms in the night; And, loosening the loops of her locks, With eyes full of love and delight, From the couch of her rest in ardor and haste arises.— ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein

... to Mr. Bowles's own judgment a passage from another poem of Cowper's, to be compared with the same writer's Sylvan Sampler. In the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... his solemn crest, And open flung his sylvan doors; Meek Rivers led the appointed Guest To ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... towards Black Nest, reached in a short time the borders of a wide swamp lying between the great lake and another pool of water of less extent situated in the heart of the forest. This wild and dreary marsh, the haunt of the bittern and the plover, contrasted forcibly and disagreeably with the rich sylvan ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth

... its human jailer it is still a prisoner confined in a space so small that it never has an opportunity to stretch its wings in flight, nor can it ever bathe in the bright sunshine or view the blue skies above it. The whispering of the winds through the sylvan shades is lost to the captive forever. Is it strange that the nature of this ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various

... his eye upon the two figures as they threaded their way through these sylvan phenomena. Mr. Melbury's long legs, and gaiters drawn in to the bone at the ankles, his slight stoop, his habit of getting lost in thought and arousing himself with an exclamation of "Hah!" accompanied with an upward jerk of the head, composed a personage recognizable by his ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... table as stationary and steady as any in any hotel in Glasgow. Next day the weather was clear. We rounded the terrible headland, and were floating at ease that evening on the glassy surface of Loch Erribol. In this half-sylvan seclusion we rested for several days. Thence some eight hours of steaming brought us to the roadstead of Thurso. For several days we lay there while the yacht rocked uneasily, and most of our time was spent in expeditions on dry land. In some ways Thurso was curious. ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... it, I suppose, from end to end at least a hundred times, and I never remember to have met so much even as a peasant returning from his daily labor, or a country maiden tripping to the neighboring town—that gave its character, and I will add, its charm to this half pastoral, half sylvan lane. For nearly three miles it ran in one direction, although, as I have said, with many devious turns, and seemingly unnecessary angles, and through that length it did not pass within the sound of one farm-yard, or the sight of one cottage chimney. But to make ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various

... moment at the old hound that was sniffing and whimpering in his master's ears, as if he could answer him. Poor Jonquil! he has shared his master's fortune fairly—the better and the worse; for years his humble comrade in the sylvan solitudes of Charrebourg, and here the solitary witness of his parting moment. Who can say with what more than human grief that dumb heart is swelling! He will not outlive his old friend many days—Jonquil is past the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... aisles, and the sylvan dancing floor, bounded by garlanded and beribboned pillars, swarmed with a gay company. Torchlight painted strange high lights on silken masks, touching with subdued sparkles the eyes behind the slanting eye-slits; half a thousand lanterns threw ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers

... of the enthusiast, it would here seem that, with an extended policy, she had planted treasures, for another and a greatly larger class, far more precious to the eyes of hope and admiration than all the glories and beauties in her sylvan and picturesque abodes. Her very sterility and solitude, when thus found to indicate her mineral treasures, rise themselves into attractions; and the perverted heart, striving with diseased hopes, and unnatural passions, gladly welcomes the wilderness, without ever once thinking how to ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... lightnings. Then fell, not the slender needles of water we call rain, but veritable floods, that were to our heaviest European showers what the cataracts of the Rhine, at Staubach, or the falls of Niagara, are to the gushings of a sylvan rivulet. In a few minutes the Jackal river had converted the valley into a lake, in which the plantations and buildings appeared to be afloat, and rendering egress from ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien

... and odor, and was shut in by high walls of ripe old brick. Here and there were large-sized plaster casts—Venus, Minerva, Mercury, a goat-hoofed Pan with his pipes, a Silence with a finger at her lips. They were all sylvan green and crumbled with exposure to the weather, so that, in spite of cheapness, they gave the place a certain Old-world and stately aspect to an observer who was disposed to think so and did not care to look at them too curiously. A square deal table with ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray

... land which is washed by the Delaware's waters, Guarding in sylvan shades the name of Penn the apostle, Stands on the banks of its beautiful stream the city he founded. There all the air is balm, and the peach is the emblem of beauty, And the streets still re-echo the names of the trees of the forest, ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase

... however, understand that here people go to the country for precisely opposite reasons to those which influence Eastern tourists to leave the city and betake themselves to rural districts. In the East, one leaves the crowded streets and heated atmosphere of the great city to seek coolness in some sylvan retreat. Here, we leave the chilling winds and fogs of the city to try to get warm where they cannot penetrate. Warm it may be; but the country at this season is not at its best as to looks. The flowers and the grass have disappeared ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald

... having failed, he found himself stranded. His father was a prosperous farmer; but a stepmother ruled the household. So young Palmer hired out to a Michigan farmer, for he was one of those hardy New Englanders who ask no favors of fortune. Imagining a pretty frontier girl to be a sylvan goddess, with a Puritan's devotion he made love to her, only to be scorned for his modesty. But failure and disappointment served but to strengthen him, and he struck ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall

... that led Dickens so often in his walks from Gadshill Place to Chatham. But the neighbourhood which gave him most pleasure, combining as it did with similar associations an exquisite beauty, was, Forster tells us, the sylvan scenery of Cobham Park. The green woods and green shades of Cobham would recur to his memory even in far-off Lausanne, and the last walk that he ever enjoyed—on the day before his fatal seizure—was through these woods, the charm of which cannot be better defined ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin

... through a rock, whitened, smoothed, and almost polished by its fretting, which overhangs the deep, circular bowl like a canopy, or rather, like a half-uplifted lid, its inner side being mottled and colored like a beautiful shell. The stream glides over the brim of its sylvan bowl and goes on its way rejoicing. We loitered here for a half-hour watching the golden and crimson leaves that had dropped in, and that lay in rich mosaics in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... bright brown eyes, and his dark hair and mustache, and smiling, handsome face, and his popularity among the class that he was pleased to denominate "gal critters." He piqued himself upon his several endowments as a hardy woodsman, his endurance, his sylvan craft, his pluck, and his luck and his accurate aim. The buck—all gray and antlered, for it was August—that hung across the horse, behind the saddle, gave token of this keen exactitude in the tiny wound at the base of the ear, where ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... days, without the loss of a single life at the hands of the savages, and with all his men in excellent health. Each day of his march he had pitched his camp among scenes of sylvan loveliness, on the banks of the pleasant streams that watered the fertile levels and the wild meadows, or wound through the rich valleys between the low hills. It would have been wonderful if his Pennsylvanian and Virginian recruits had not looked upon the land ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells

... Mystic's banks I held my dream. (I held my fishing rod as well,) The vision was of dace and bream, A fruitless vision, sooth to tell. But round about the sylvan dell Were other sweet Arcadian shrines, Gone now, is all the rural ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... of fairy bread, that dwarfed and changed them in a moment. Barring their kidnapping practices the elves were an innocent and joyous people, and they sought more distant hiding-places in the wilderness when the stern churchmen and cruel rangers penetrated their sylvan precincts. ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner

... eminence from which we saw what dispelled at once the illusion of sylvan solitude. The sun had been shining an hour or two, and the bridge before us and the road beyond were defended by abatis and other obstructions. On the further bank a line of infantry was in full view with batteries in position prepared to receive us. I confess ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe

... as Nymphs, that wandered all alone Among the sylvan shadows, sedulous One to avoid and one ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante

... clothes. Towards evening Bishop Grouard and Father Lacombe held a well-attended service, which in this profound wilderness was peculiarly impressive. Listening, one thought how often the same service, these same chants and canticles, had awakened the sylvan echoes in like solitudes on the St. Lawrence and Mississippi in the old days of exploration and trade, and of missionary zeal and suffering. It recalled, too, the thought of man's evanescence and the apparent ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... the appointed place, he found an entrance to the greenery near by. Within were people on every bench in sight—New York's unhoused lovers, whose wooing is accomplished in the all but sylvan glades ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele

... the brigade was halted. About midway of the arc of water, the stream is spanned by a bridge. As the darkness crept on, the picture presented from our bivouac was in the highest degree charming, and might be supposed to realize some sylvan poet's dream. ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood

... And that morning the sylvan wilds were kept resounding with the heart-easing, blithesome music which bespoke the thankfulness and the gladness of the singer's heart. It was the happiest morning he had ever known in all his life, and yet, despite an unaccountable ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady

... admiration; and to those who knew and loved Mendelssohn (alas! the expressions are synonymous), the glorious wood itself, where he walked and mused and held converse with the spirit of Shakespeare, forms a solemn sylvan temple, forever consecrated to tender memories of his ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... have ever congregated the talent and beauty of every clime. With the painter, the poet, the sculptor, here sleep, in the city of the silent, Michael Angelo, Alfieri, and like spirits, rendering it hallowed ground to the lovers of art. Proud and lovely city, with thy sylvan Casino spreading its riches of green sward and noble trees along the banks of the silvery Arno, well may a Florentine be proud of ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray

... that and the Sunday following. And then, "on Monday, at six in the morning," both the Majesties left Prag, for a place called Chlumetz, southwestward thirty miles off, in the Elbe region, where they have a pretty Hunting Castle; Kaiser intending "sylvan sport for a few days," says the old rag of a Newspaper, "and then to return to Prag." It is here that Grumkow, after a pleasant morning's drive of thirty miles with the sun on his back, finds Kaiser Karl VI.; and makes his announcements, and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... the departure of the two hunters, continued her preparations for their evening repast. Her sylvan table was the moss-covered trunk of a large fallen tree, on the broadest part of which she had spread a snow-white cloth and arranged what were left of the bright pewter vessels that had been her pride in the settlements. ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... compound of perverted inclinations, that he is altogether at the mercy of external circumstances, loses all independence and singleness of character, and degenerates so rapidly from the primitive dignity of his sylvan origin, that it is scarcely possible to indulge in any other expectation, than that the whole species must at length be exterminated by its ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock

... had been a queer, fanciful youngster too, Doctor Ralph remembered, always passionately aquiver with a wild sylvan poetry and over-fond of book-lore like her father. Mischievously glancing at a spray of mistletoe above the girl's dark head, he stepped forward with the careless gallantry that had won him many a kindly glance ...
— When the Yule Log Burns - A Christmas Story • Leona Dalrymple

... encountered us, and his face beamed with cheerfulness and good humor. The song of the black softened the toils of labor, in the unfinished clearings; and even the wild red man, shooting suddenly from out the sylvan covert, wore in his visage of habitual gravity, an air of resignation which took all ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms

... a warm, fair Saturday afternoon that he undertook his land-voyage of discovery. He had more curiosity, it may be, than he would have owned; for he had heard of the girl's wandering habits, and the guesses about her sylvan haunts, and was thinking what the chances were that he should meet her in some strange place, or come upon traces of her which would tell secrets she would not ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... and slew my warlike sire! His fate compassion in the victor bred; Stern as he was, he yet revered the dead, His radiant arms preserved from hostile spoil, And laid him decent on the funeral pile; Then raised a mountain where his bones were burned; The mountain nymphs the rural tomb adorned; Jove's sylvan daughters bade their elms bestow A barren shade, and in his ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... cares Absolv'd, and sacred from the selfish crowd. Happiest of men I if the same soil invites A chosen few, companions of his youth, Once fellow-rakes perhaps now rural friends; With whom in easy commerce to pursue Nature's free charms, and vie for Sylvan fame A fair ambition; void of strife, or guile, Or jealousy, or pain to be outdone. Who plans th'enchanted garden, who directs The visto best, and best conducts the stream; Whose groves the fastest thicken, ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 6 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis

... were hearde such piteous Shrieks and Cries of invisible Beings, echoing from haunted Spring and Dale, as ne'er smote human Ears before nor since: Nymphs and Wood-Gods, or they that had passed for such, breaking up House and retreating to their own Place. I warrant you, there was Trouble among the Sylvan People that Day—Satyrs hirsute and ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning

... venerable tract of forest land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primaeval date, wherein Druidical mistletoe was still found on aged oaks, and where enormous yew-trees, not planted by the hand of man grew as they had grown when they were pollarded for bows. All this sylvan antiquity, however, though visible from The Slopes, was outside the immediate ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... entreated their father. "If there's anything that spoils the sylvan shades for me, it is to learn that they were once the scene of battle axes and blood spilling, ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam

... smoke into the laquearia, Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling. Huge sea-wood fed with copper Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, In which sad light a carved dolphin swam. Above the antique mantel was displayed As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale 100 Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, "Jug Jug" to dirty ears. And other withered stumps of time ...
— The Waste Land • T. S. Eliot

... bloomed, birds sang, and the soul of the spring was in their hearts. But, curiously enough, though they were in Arcady, they were also in the Park. Hayden looked up the little lane; north and south marched an unending line of people. They were in Arcady, but deprived of its ancient privilege of sylvan and umbrageous solitude. ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... Presently the birds appeared,—a pair of the solitary vireo. They came flitting from point to point, alighting only for a moment at a time, the male silent, but the female uttering this strange, tender note. It was a rendering into some new sylvan dialect of the human sentiment of maidenly love. It was really pathetic in its sweetness and childlike confidence and joy. I soon discovered that the pair were building a nest upon a low branch a few yards from me. The male flew cautiously to the ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various

... terrible sound echoed through the woods. The savages threw down their bows and arrows and made signs of friendliness. The English went ashore, hostages were exchanged, and a kind of amicableness ensued. After such sylvan entertainment Smith and his men returned to the boat. The oars dipped and rose, the bright water broke from them; and these Englishmen in Old Virginia proceeded up the Potomac. Could they have seen—could they but have seen before them, on the north bank, rising, like the unsubstantial ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston

... usher'd with a shower still, When the gust hath blown his fill, Ending on the russling Leaves, With minute drops from off the Eaves. 130 And when the Sun begins to fling His flaring beams, me Goddes bring To arched walks of twilight groves, And shadows brown that Sylvan loves Of Pine, or monumental Oake, Where the rude Ax with heaved stroke, Was never heard the Nymphs to daunt, Or fright them from their hallow'd haunt. There in close covert by som Brook, Where no profaner eye may look, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... inner side, the Ridge dropped to an Alpine meadow that billowed up another slope through mossed forests to the snow line of the Holy Cross Mountains. What the girl saw was a sylvan world of spruce, then the dark green pointed larches where the jubilant rivers rioted down from the snow. What the man saw ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... re-dawned upon the tribes; their household lares, after so harsh a translation to distant climates, found again a happy reinstatement in what had in fact been their primitive abodes; they found themselves settled in quiet sylvan scenes, rich in all the luxuries of life, and endowed with the perfect loveliness of Arcadian beauty. But from the hills of this favored land and even from the level grounds as they approach its western border, they still look out upon ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... turned his back on her? There was nothing in his presence to alarm, nothing in her appearance to forbid. The motive and the movement were equally quaint; incomprehensible to him; for after putting himself out of sight, he understood the absurdity of the supposition that she would seek the secluded sylvan bath for the same purpose as he. Yet now he was, debarred from going to meet her. She might have an impulse to bathe her feet. Her name was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... pursuit, and active in the fight. Him, as their chief, the chosen troops attend, Which Bessa, Thronus, and rich Cynos send; Opus, Calliarus, and Scarphe's bands; And those who dwell where pleasing Augia stands, And where Boagrius floats the lowly lands, Or in fair Tarphe's sylvan seats reside: In forty vessels cut the ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... stillness; the quietly rippling stream winding downward from the higher ground in the north, and now and then, in the spring of the year, overflowing its bed in a wilderness of brambles and rushes;—do these things make you realise more plainly the sylvan remoteness of that part of New York which we now ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin

... and transferred to our Christian festivals. Cutting the mistletoe was distinctly a rite practised by the Druids, who cut the sacred plant with a golden knife, and sacrificed two white bulls to the sylvan deities whom they thus sought to propitiate. We hang up our bunches of mistletoe now, but we do not attach any superstitious importance to it, nor imagine that any gods of the woods will be influenced by our procedure. ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... loves all alike, And to the meanest as the greatest yields Her sunny splendors and her fruitful rains. Love all flowers, then. Be sure that wisdom lies In every leaf and bloom; o'er hills and dales; And thymy mountains; sylvan solitudes Where sweet-voiced waters sing the long year through; In every haunt beneath the Eternal Sun, Where Youth or Age sends forth its grateful prayer, Or thoughtful ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various

... learned to employ his swains on topics of controversy. The Italians soon transferred pastoral poetry into their own language. Sannazaro wrote "Arcadia" in prose and verse; Tasso and Guarini wrote "Favole Boschareccie," or Sylvan Dramas; and all nations of Europe filled volumes with Thyrsis and Damon, and Thestylis ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson

... into line, and he was mounting his horse to be ready for orders, he remembered Gildersleeve's drunken tale concerning the commandant, and laughed aloud. But turning his face toward brigade headquarters (a sylvan region marked out by the branches of a great oak), he was surprised to see a strange officer, a fair young man in captain's uniform, ...
— The Brigade Commander • J. W. Deforest

... last of these sylvan occasions I awoke, not with a graceful start, like the story-book ladies, but with a grunt. Sis was digging me in the ribs with her toe. I looked up to see her standing over me, a foaming tumbler of something in her hand. I felt that it was eggy ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber

... blushes of an evening sky? Or wilt thou rather stoop thy vagrant plume, Where gliding through his daughters honour'd shades, The smooth Peneus from his glassy flood Reflects purpureal Tempo's pleasant scene? Fair Tempe! haunt beloved of sylvan Powers, Of Nymphs and Fauns; where in the golden age 300 They play'd in secret on the shady brink With ancient Pan: while round their choral steps Young Hours and genial Gales with constant hand Shower'd blossoms, odours, shower'd ambrosial dews, And spring's Elysian ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside

... wood-spirit, that he is part human." The characteristics that had made Steering stand too determinedly to suit Crittenton Madeira made him forge ahead determinedly now. "Piney would be apt to suffer less if he were wholly the sylvan, irresponsible creature, the faun, he sometimes seems to be. But, alas, Piney has a man's heart, Miss Madeira. He will have to suffer for that, for he will have to love. That's why 'poor' Piney; because he will have ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young

... elevation: there is not a rock, nor a birch, nor a cytisus, nor an arbutus upon them great enough to shelter a new-dropped lamb. Level the Alps one with another, and where is their sublimity? Raise up the vale of Tempe to the downs above, and where are those sylvan creeks and harbours in which the imagination watches while the soul reposes; those recesses in which the gods partook the weaknesses of mortals, and mortals the enjoyments ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... Rusticity, nature, sylvan solitudes, and all that, were exquisite bound in Russia, with gold lettering and tinted leaves; wonderfully alluring viewed at leisure with the gallery to one's self, and the light at the proper angle, charmingly ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland

... to overtake her, but she danced away like a fairy in the moonlight, throwing a glance of mischief over her shoulder at me, with her finger on her lips. It seemed to me a pity that so sylvan a dell should merely be used for the purposes of speed, but in a jiffy Mary was at the little door in the wall and had the bolts drawn back, and I was outside before I understood what had happened, listening to bolts being thrust back again, ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane

... There were avenues of trees then as now. Instead of the ornamental water ran a long canal, populous with ducks, which joined a pond called—no one knows why—Rosamund's Pond. This pond was a favorite trysting-place for happy lovers—"the sylvan deities and rural {66} powers of the place, sacred and inviolable to love, often heard lovers' vows repeated by its streams and echoes"—and a convenient water for unhappy lovers to drown themselves in, if we may credit the ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... was not all alone: around him grew A sylvan tribe of children of the chase; Whose young, unwakened world was ever new, Nor sin, nor sorrow, yet had left a trace On her unwrinkled brow; nor could you view A frown on Nature's or on human face: The free-born ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... reached is Marysville, whence the highway skirts the Tulalip Indian reservation, crosses the Stillaguamish river in the Sylvan Flats and enters Stanwood where a scenic road branches off to Camano Island. At Mount Vernon and Burlington, where it intersects the Skagit county road leading from Anacortes eastward to the mountains, one may appreciate the famous Skagit Valley, the "Holland of the Northwest," where ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles



Words linked to "Sylvan" :   silvan, spirit, disembodied spirit, wooded



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