Well-seasoned meerschaum
This is part of a description of the village schoolroom where the sometimes compassionate, sometimes ascerbic schoolmaster Bartle Massey tries...
Red-tinged snow
No, not blood-stained, but a kind of lichen bringing the red of Snow White’s ruby mouth to the snow.
Source:...
Well-lubricated gods
Wise, merry Folly laughs off the boozy behaviour of tanked-up gods, treating them like so many party-animal adolescents.
From Erasmus'...
Deep-keeled ice
An arresting image of ice grounding like a boat’s hull scraping a shallow sea-floor.
‘… the sound of deep-keeled ice...
New-grown green
At the precocious signal of spring, I see new-grown green peeping all about. And isn't that a sweet scene, sitting...
Foes and friends
Here, the Trojan hero Hector addresses the Greek Ajax in friendship. There is a number of heart- prefixed triologisms in...
Spring-time clothes
A thrilling image of glittering northern waters in a moment of calm and gentleness.
'Crossing from Scalpay in...
Plaid-like juxtapositions
Orlando, born in the 16th century and at home in the 17th and 18th, seems to suffer aesthetic culture shock...
Flat-footed view
Nicolson's writing helped cure me of any 'flat-footed view' I may have had of the Bronze Age, spinning its warriors...
String-thin paths
A knife-edge precarity in this phrase. May your paths be broad and sure!
Source: Beowulf, Kevin Crossley-Holland, illus. by Charles Keeping (Oxford...
Broad-leaved sycamores and weary-hearted women
George Eliot writes sensitively and movingly of the early manifestation of Methodism. She wrote Adam Bede around 1850 but set...
Hate-honed swords and other battle gear
Everything a battle-scarred Swede could need: fine-forged mesh to protect him from other people's hate-honed swords, and a great-shafted spear...
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