Harebell quotes by topic: Women and harebells, Harebells features, Nature and harebells, Attitude to harebells, People and harebells, Roses and harebells, Wildflowers and harebells, Music and harebells, Walking and harebells, Flowers and harebells, Brook and harebells, Poetry and harebells, Children and harebells.
Women and harebells
A woman’s fair repute is like a blue harebell—a touch can wither it. (Ouida)
She wore a blue print gown which so deepened the blue of her eyes that Wordsworth’s line fairly sung itself:
The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze
On some gray rock. (Jane Addams)
A figure tremulous with a warm grace, a countenance perfect in its form, full of a natural gravity, yet quick to each emotion, turning from the pallor of sudden alarm to the flush of shyness or vexation. The mountains had stood around to shelter her, and she was like the harebell of the hills. (Neil Munro)
Anemones, harebells and spiderwort, foxgloves and dog-tooth violets, she knew them all, and the haunts where they came the earliest. She rarely gathered them, but went from one hiding-place to another for a glimpse of their shy faces, welcoming them as she would old friends. (Annie Fellows Johnston)
When the sun reached an angle of the wall where the “Venus-hair” of southern climes drooped its thick leaves, lit with the changing colors of a pigeon’s breast, celestial rays of hope illumined the future to her eyes, and thenceforth she loved to gaze upon that piece of wall, on its pale flowers, its blue harebells, its wilting herbage, with which she mingled memories as tender as those of childhood. The noise made by each leaf as it fell from its twig in the void of that echoing court gave answer to the secret questionings of the young girl. (Honoré de Balzac)
The harebells nod as she passes by,
The violet lifts its tender eye,
The ferns bend her steps to greet,
And the mosses creep to her dancing feet. (Julia C.R. Dorr)
Harebells features
The Harebell is very wide spread, being found in Scotland, Northern Europe and Asia as well as over much of North America. (Carl Elmer Jepson, Leland Francis Allen)
When he wrote down harebells, he told me that they looked delicate, but that they could grow between rocks. (Elizabeth Berg)
The fragile blossoms of the harebell lurk in the seclusion of our cool cañons or peer down at us from the banks of shaded mountain roads toward the end of July. We almost wonder that this ethereal flower dares delay its coming so long when outside its cool retreat all is parched and dry. It forms a delicate contrast to its more robust English sister, the harebell so often celebrated by the poets. (Mary Elizabeth Parsons)
It was a long stride forward in the evolutionary scale when the harebell welded its five once separate petals together; first at the base, then farther and farther up the sides, until a solid bell-shaped structure resulted. This arrangement which makes insect fertilization a more certain process because none of the pollen is lost through apertures, and because the visitor must enter the flower only at the vital point where the stigmas come in contact with his pollen-laden body, has given to all the flowers that have attained to it, marked ascendency. (Neltje Blanchan)
Did the harebell loose her girdle
To the lover bee,
Would the bee the harebell hallow
Much as formerly? (Emily Dickinson)
Nature and harebells
The smell of resin filled the air. A thrush was singing somewhere. Late harebells were thick among the grass, and small blue butterflies moved over the white flowers of the blackberry. (Mary Stewart)
I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. (Emily Brontë)
There were wild-flowers to pluck—the bright red poppy, the gentle harebell, the cowslip, and the rose. There were birds to watch; fish; ants; worms; hares or rabbits, as they darted across the distant pathway in the wood and so were gone… (Charles Dickens)
The distribution of plants in a given locality is not more marked and defined than that of the birds. Show a botanist a landscape, and he will tell you where to look for the lady’s-slipper, the columbine, or the harebell. On the same principles, the ornithologist will direct you where to look for the greenlets, the wood-sparrow, or the chewink. (John Burroughs)
Simplest of blossoms! To mine eye
Thou bring’st the summer’s painted sky;
The May-thorn greening in the nook;
The minnows sporting in the brook;
The bleat of flocks; the breath of flowers; (Moir)
Attitude to harebells
THIS English Thames is holier far than Rome,
Those harebells like a sudden flush of sea… (Oscar Wilde)
Not a harebell here; isn’t it provoking, when they grow in tufts up there, where one can’t reach them. (Louisa May Alcott)
A harebell, much as I have always loved harebells, never moved me that way! (George MacDonald)
I love the fair lilies and roses so gay,
They are rich in their pride and their splendor;
But still more do I love to wander away
To the meadow so sweet,
Where down at my feet,
The harebell blooms modest and tender. (Dora Read Goodale)
“Tell me, little harebell,
Are you lonely here.
Blooming in the shadow
On this rock so drear?” (William Holmes McGuffey)
People and harebells
An Alpine harebell is as different from an oleander as I am from a natural-born artist. (Dorothy Canfield Fisher)
Thou shalt not lack
The flower that’s like thy face, pale primrose, nor
The azur’d harebell, like thy veins. (William Shakespeare)
I seldom have met with a loss,
Such health do my fountains bestow;
My fountains all bordered with moss,
Where the harebells and violets grow. (William Shenstone)
“Use! Use! Use!”
I cried impatiently;—“nothing but use!
As if God never made a violet,
Or hung a harebell!” (J.G. Holland)
Roses and harebells
Hope is like a harebell, trembling from its birth,Love is like a rose, the joy of all the earth,Faith is like a lily, lifted high and white,Love is like a lovely rose, the world’s delight.Harebells and sweet lilies show a thornless growth,But the rose with all its thorns excels them both. (Christina Rossetti)
There slender harebells nod and dream,
And pale wild roses offer up
The fragrance of their golden hearts,
As from some incense-brimméd cup. (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
Run, little rivulet, run!
Sing of the flowers, every one,—
Of the delicate harebell and violet blue;
Of the red mountain rosebud, all dripping with dew. (Lucy Larcom)
Wildflowers and harebells
Wild flowers of downland, the rock-rose, the harebell, orchids, and meadow-sweet carpeted the short grass, and midsummer held festival. (Edward Frederic Benson)
One small house, the oldest in the village, was several hundred years old; and out of all the crevices between the stones hung harebells and other wild flowers; one side of it and much of the roof were covered with ivy. (Eliza Lee Follen)
The alpine blooms that live in dry or wind-swept places are dwarfed and flattened. They keep their beauty close to the earth. Many of these little flowering people are so greatly dwarfed that the plant with its leaf and blossom does not rise a quarter of an inch above the earth. Among these are the phlox, harebell, and the columbine. (Enos A. Mills, Laurence F. Schmeckebier)
Music and harebells
And the music I heard was the Little People singing, and ringing all the harebells and foxglove bells that grow along the banks of the brooks. (Flora Klickmann)
To shrieve his soul from the pangs of hell, The only requiem bells that rang Were the harebell and the heather bell. (John Masefield)
These harebells all
Seem bowing with the beautiful in song ;
And gaping cuckoo-flower, with spotted leaves,
Seems blushing of the singing it has heard. (John Clare)
Walking and harebells
This wandering by-path, too, among the fields, is pleasant. Fitches are flowering yet, purple and yellow, in the hedges, as well as the delicate harebell—bluebell of Scotland—on the bank below. (George Eyre-Todd)
And it is not for nothing that they spend long truant afternoons by ferny lanes and harebell copses in the seasons of bird-nesting and bramble-gathering. These make the fragrant memories of after years! (George Eyre-Todd)
I found some exquisite harebells by the roadside, and some very delicate little pink flowers. (Rose Hawthorne Lathrop)
Flowers and harebells
Too soon indeed! yet here the daffodil,
That love-child of the Spring, has lingered on
To vex the rose with jealousy, and still
The harebell spreads her azure pavilion,
And like a strayed and wandering reveller
Abandoned of its brothers, whom long since June’s messenger. (Oscar Wilde)
Sweet-brier, leaning on the crag
That the lady-fern hides under;
Harebells, violets white and blue:
Who has sweeter flowers, I wonder? (Lucy Larcom)
Brook and harebells
The brook babbled to her like an old friend; the blue harebells nodded their heads in the breeze, and silently seemed to say good-bye. (Susanna Moodie)
And to halt at the chattering brook, in a tall green fern at the brink
Where the harebell grows, and the gorse, and the foxgloves purple and white;
Where the shifty-eyed delicate deer troop down to the brook to drink
When the stars are mellow and large at the coming on of the night. (John Masefield)
Poetry and harebells
The Harebell has often formed the theme of our modern poets, as illustrative of grace and lightness. (Agnes FitzGibbon, Catharine Parr Traill)
Strange new wild flowers grew beside the rushing waters,—among them Sir Walter Scott’s own harebells, which I had never thought of except as blossoms of poetry; here they were, as real to me as to his Lady of the Lake! I loved the harebell, the first new flower the river gave me, as I had never loved a flower before. (Lucy Larcom)
Children and harebells
Then there were harebells, tiny lanterns, cream white and almost sinful looking, and these were so rare and magical that a child, finding one, felt singled out and special all day long. (John Steinbeck)
There, the little girl with flame-red hair picked daisies in the garden, threading them together to make a garland for her hair. She picked a posy of wildflowers- harebell, bindweed, campion, and bladderwort- and gave them to me. (Hazel Gaynor)
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