Bog

“ The autumn wind stirred the dead sedges at its brim, and though the dying twilight was still gleaming in the sky, the great bog had caught little of its glow, and lay full of coiling blue mists, pale quagmires, and islands of mysterious darkness. ”

“ The glassy water reflected every form, color, motion of these untroubled ducks as in a glass, doubling the graceful effect. Around them stretched the gloriously colored bog; and beyond the bog were the nebulous-green larches, the somber black growth and the lifting hills, on which autumn had laid its golden touch. Truly a beautiful sight, a sight to make the heart of hunter or naturalist tremble with expectancy as he fingered his gun. I have known that trembling, that expectancy; but there was greater pleasure, perhaps greater freedom also, in leaving the happy comedy undisturbed. ”

“ On the morning after the death of the hound the fog had lifted and we were guided by Mrs. Stapleton to the point where they had found a pathway through the bog. It helped us to realize the horror of this woman's life when we saw the eagerness and joy with which she laid us on her husband's track. We left her standing upon the thin peninsula of firm, peaty soil which tapered out into the widespread bog. ”

“ The bog world, like the pasture world and the deep wood, at this time of year is full of blissful love making, but it is also full of heartrending jealousies and fights to a finish. No wonder the pukwudgies and bog bogles are full of talk and excitement back there; there is enough food for gossip. ”

“ Now, I've heard my Granny say that a long time before her day the Moon got trapped and buried in the bog. I'll tell you the tale as she used to tell it to me.
On some nights the beautiful Moon rose up in the sky and shone brighter and brighter, and the people blessed her because by her wonderful light they could find their way home at night through the treacherous bogs. ”

“ A wide, black bog, level as a lake, skirted with copse, spreads at the left, as you journey northward, and the long and irregular line of mountain rises at the right, clothed in heath, broken with lines of grey rock that resemble the bold and irregular outlines of fortifications, and riven with many a gully, expanding here and there into rocky and wooded glens, which open as they approach the road. ”

“ Doubtless, the Eternal Shade that broods over this mighty Bog, and hinders the sun-beams from blessing the Ground, makes it an uncomfortable Habitation for any thing that has life. Not so much as a Zealand Frog cou’d endure so Aguish a Situation. ”

“ Tempest on sea and earthquake are dreadful enough, but there is no phenomenon more portentous than that of the moving bog, when the very earth seems to become liquid lava, shifting and changing, obliterating landmarks, and swallowing up whatever stands in the way of its fatal course. ”

“ Bog, bog, n. soft ground: a marsh or quagmire.—v.t. to sink or to entangle.—n. Bog′-butt′er, a mineral substance, resembling butter, found in Irish bogs.—adj. Bogg′y.—ns. Bog′let, Bog′land; Bog′-moss, a genus of moss plants; Bog′-oak, trunks of oak embedded in bogs and preserved from decay—of a deep black colour, often used for making ornaments; Bog′-ore, a kind of iron ore found in boggy land; Bog′-spav′in, a lesion of the hock-joint of the horse, consisting in distension of the capsule enclosing the joint, usually arising suddenly from a sprain in action ”

“ I was making the best of my way, keeping as nearly as I could in the middle of the road, lest, blinded by the snow which was frequently borne into my eyes by the wind, I might fall into the dyke, when all at once I heard a shout to windward, and turning my eyes I saw the figure of a man, and what appeared to be an animal of some kind, coming across the bog with great speed, in the direction of myself ”

“ This celebrated bog is situated in a nearly level plain, bounded by gentle slopes, which lead up to wide-extended table-lands. In the spots where the salt springs rise, the bog is so soft that a man may force a pile into it many yards perpendicularly. Some of these quaking bogs are even now more than fifteen acres in extent, but were formerly much larger, before the surrounding forest was partially cleared away. Even at the present day cows, horses, and other quadrupeds are occasionally lost here, as they venture on to the treacherous ground. ”

“ Sound trees are found in both sorts of bogs, particularly in those of Ireland, which differ from the English, as the former sometimes present a perfect scenery of hill and dale, while the latter are mostly of a level surface. Of the most common spontaneous growth are, heath, bog-myrtle, rushes, and sedgy grass. Bogs are of various depths, some being found to be fifty feet deep, and others still deeper. ”

“ The thing to be done by anyone who gets into such a bog is to spread his arms out—this will prevent his sinking—and if he cannot struggle out, to wait, cooling his toes in bog water, till assistance comes. ”

“ Very dreary-looking places were these bogs, as they lay brown and gloomy under the shadow of the forest, their treacherous surface only broken here and there by bushes of stunted birch-trees. We could well understand how goblin-like must [231] seem the myriad lights of the will-o’-the-wisps, as they dance in unearthly fashion over such dark and dangerous morasses.
Again we plunged into the thick forest, and another hour’s riding brought us to the entrance of a narrow defile, the gateway, as it were, to the mountain regions. ”

“ On the tops of the barest hills and buried in the deepest bogs are to be found the roots, stems and other remains of these ancient woods, mostly of oak and pine, some of the bogs being literally full of stems, the splinters of which burn like matches. ”

“ They circle swiftly and invisibly in the deep shadows—their silhouettes dart across the sky openings, and, with a loud swish, they strike the 69 water and settle comfortably for the night behind some weedy bogs close to the opposite shore. ”

“ In our own country, we have been so long encroaching upon the bogs and wastes that some of us come to regard them as exceptional tracts all over the world. But when one travels in new countries in northern climes, one soon learns what a vast extent of the world’s surface was at one time covered with bogs. In North America day after day, even by the margins of the railroads, one sees the vivid blooms of the Cardinal–flower springing erect from the wet peaty hollows. ”

“ In this pious design the bogle was happily frustrated by the intervention of some trees which grew on the precipice, and to which my unhappy grand-uncle clung with the zeal of a drowning man. The enraged ghost, finding it impossible to extricate him from those friendly trees, and resolving, at all events, to be revenged upon him, fell upon maltreating the fiddler with his hands and feet in the most inhuman manner. ”

“ The top itself is a wild moor, full of bogs. In hard rains a cataract tumbles from the top to the bottom of this mass of rock, which, at all times, is in a drizzling state: small shrubs hang about the projections of the rocks in every direction ”

“ Then I've seen the moors all covered with fog, so thick that you couldn't see your hand if you held it close to your eyes!"
"Father says people often get lost in those fogs," Theodore remarked, "and sometimes they get into bogs, don't they?" ”

“ Her vast bogs act as sponges, absorbing the winter rains, and only leisurely and prudently does she administer the hoarded supply, so that the rivers never run dry in the hottest and most rainless summers. ”

“ They stand irregularly one to two feet asunder, so as to afford convenient room for a passage between them, in every direction, over a foundation of much the same substance as the bogs themselves, which is usually quite dry. ”

“ There is a dense wood where every thorn on every tree is sharp as a spear-point and is curved and clutching. There is a deep gulf to be gone through," she said, "a place of silence and terror, full of dumb, venomous monsters. There is an immense oak forest—dark, dense, thorny, a place to be strayed in, a place to be utterly bewildered and lost in. ”

“ How great the number is of the hells I have been permitted to realize from knowing that there are hells under every mountain, hill, and rock, and likewise under every plain and valley, and that they stretch out beneath these in length and in breadth and in depth. In a word, the entire heaven and the entire world of spirits are, as it were, excavated beneath, and under them is a continuous hell. ”

“ By all these signs I knew that we were crossing that fearful lake which is haunted by ghosts and demons, and I therefore commended my soul to God. The power of the Lord overcomes all evil. Scarcely had I said my prayer against the spirits of darkness, when suddenly the veil of fog was rent asunder, and like a great rose of fire the sun shone out, clothing the world in garments of colour and gold!
Before this glorious eye of God the darkness fled and was no more. The dense fog, which had changed to a thin, transparent mist, lingered a little on the mountain-sides, then vanished quite away. ”

“ So long as the mistletoe, in which the flame of the lightning smouldered, was suffered to remain among the boughs, so long no harm could befall the good and kindly god of the oak, who kept his life stowed away for safety between earth and heaven in the mysterious parasite; but when once that seat of his life, or of his death, was torn from the branch and hurled at the trunk, the tree fell—the god died—smitten by a thunderbolt.760
The King of the Wood and the Golden Bough. ”

“ The flight of a gull on unstirring wings when the wind buoys it, the glide of water over the descent of smooth rock, with never a ripple, like all things effortless, swift, and free, such was the gait of Satan as he fled. ”

“ All of the cluster of piny hills which surrounds Diablo like brilliants around a stone of the first water are still in darkness, and the two large valleys at either side seem an indistinct blur, when the heavy, phantom-like shadow is thrown on the scene, slantingly, clear, and sudden. ”

“ Like a flash of lightning came a jagged line of fire down the blank wall opposite him, a line that remained, that grew wider, that let a pale cold light into the room, showing him now all its details,—the empty fireplace, where a thin smoke rose in a spiral from a bit of charred wood, the mass of the great bed, and, in the very middle, black against the curious brightness, the armored man, or ghost, or devil, standing, not suspended, beneath the rusty hook. ”

“ The angels, confused with the storm clouds of which they are the spirit, lash the damned down to the Hell stream, band upon band, even from the far distance. And in the foreground the rocks are splitting, the soil is upheaving with the dead beneath; here protrudes a huge arm, there a skull; in one place the clay, rising, has assumed the vague outline of the face below. ”

“ How strange the resonance that certain syllables have for us! He might have designated by its name the mountain where his flocks were to pasture, and I should not have noticed it, but the unexpected lack of precision communicated to me by some sorcery a longing for the heights. It attacked me as suddenly and unexpectedly as a lightning shock. I had not felt the charm of the wild, bare place from which I was returning with grandfather; but now I was not only instantaneously initiated into it,—I augmented its wildness and isolation. ”

“ As a suggestive introduction to a series of illustrations of this subject, he has attempted symbolically to vindicate the high antiquity of the world. Mountains overgrown with noble forests,—ravines worn out by watercourses,—burnt out volcanoes still faintly smoking. In the foreground the mighty stock of a patriarchal oak still remains in the ground, on whose half-bared roots a deer is trying the strength of his horns,—a conception as fine as it is beautifully executed. ”

“ He was the god of the insatiable appetite, the continual eater of trees, whose path through forests was covered with black smoke fragrant with burning wood, and sometimes burdened with the smell of human flesh charred into cinders in the lava flow. ”

“ The hells are everywhere, both under the mountains, hills, and rocks, and under the plains and valleys. The openings or gates to the hells that are under the mountains, hills, and rocks, appear to the sight like holes and clefts in the rocks, some extended and wide, and some straitened and narrow, and many of them rugged. They all, when looked into, appear dark and dusky; but the infernal spirits that are in them are in such a luminosity as arises from burning coals. ”

“ Any mysterious sound emanating from a forest, a rock, a mountain pass, or gloomy gorge, was accepted as a manifestation of some divine presence; a shrine was raised to the embodied spirit, and so the whole land became literally crowded with local deities. ”

“ Fog-youths are coming, right in front of the fog they are coming.
“Where the water stands straight up, next to him, the water people are coming to us. With water-downy-feathers as their feathers they are coming to us; holding the lightning in their hands they are coming to us. ”

“ Beneath us was nothing now to be seen but a black tempest, till looking East between the clouds and the waves, we saw a cataract of blood mixed with fire, and not many stones’ throw from us appeared and sunk again the scaly fold of a monstrous serpent. ”

“ The Gods of the Mountains, where seven beggars masquerade as the mountain gods come to life, and some of the people believe but some doubt. But at last the seven gods from the mountain come down, terrible figures of green stone, and with sinister menace point terrible fingers at the beggars, [245] who stiffen as on pedestals, draw their feet under them like the cross-legged posture of the images, and turn to stone, so that the people coming say: “They were the true gods. They have turned to stone because we doubted them.” ”