Fire-flies hung in bright clusters on the dewy leaves, that waved in the cool night-wind; and the flowers stood gazing, in very wonder, at the little Elves, who lay among the fern-leaves, swung in the vine-boughs, sailed on the lake in lily cups, or danced on the
mossy ground, to the music of the hare-bells, who rung out their merriest peal in honor of the night.
On reaching the copse, Levin got out of the trap and led Oblonsky to a corner of a
mossy, swampy glade, already quite free from snow.
"There be three Badgers on a
mossy stone, Beside a dark and covered way: Each dreams himself a monarch on his throne, And so they stay and stay Though their old Father languishes alone, They stay, and stay, and stay.
The pearly lustre of the moon went out: The
mossy banks and the meandering paths, The happy flowers and the repining trees, Were seen no more: the very roses' odors Died in the arms of the adoring airs.
I thought my quest had brought me into a strange old haunted forest, and that I had thrown myself down to rest at the gnarled
mossy root of a great oak-tree, while all about me was nought but fantastic shapes and capricious groups of gold-green bole and bough, wondrous alleys ending in mysterious coverts, and green lanes of exquisite turf that seemed to have been laid down in expectation of some milk-white queen or goddess passing that way.
In the midst of the grove was a fine lawn, sloping down towards the house, near the summit of which rose a plentiful spring, gushing out of a rock covered with firs, and forming a constant cascade of about thirty feet, not carried down a regular flight of steps, but tumbling in a natural fall over the broken and
mossy stones till it came to the bottom of the rock, then running off in a pebly channel, that with many lesser falls winded along, till it fell into a lake at the foot of the hill, about a quarter of a mile below the house on the south side, and which was seen from every room in the front.
In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his black weedy bulk in the sea like some
mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian cliffs.
The mineral waters of Arva Wai* ooze forth from the crevices of a rock, and gliding down its
mossy side, fall at last, in many clustering drops, into a natural basin of stone fringed round with grass and dewy-looking little violet-coloured flowers, as fresh and beautiful as the perpetual moisture they enjoy can make them.
It sounded like the gurgling of a brook over
mossy stones in some quiet dell, and the crooning song of it lured me away and out of myself till I was no longer Hump the cabin-boy, nor Van Weyden, the man who had dreamed away thirty-five years among books.
This was a fountain, set round with a rim of old
mossy stones, and paved, in its bed, with what appeared to be a sort of mosaic-work of variously colored pebbles.
He entered a dense wood, picked his pathless way to the centre of it, and sat down on a
mossy spot under a spreading oak.
'Linton is just six months younger than I am,' she chattered, as we strolled leisurely over the swells and hollows of
mossy turf, under shadow of the trees.