He lost his life, we are informed, by trying to rend with his hands an old oak, which wedged him in, and pressed him to death; the poet says "he met his end, Wedged in that timber which he strove to rend.

The man who abandons some good enterprise for a worthless, or insignificant, undertaking is said to "cut down an oak and plant a thistle," of which there is a further version, "to cut down an oak and set up a strawberry."

Upon this piece of lent land stood our favorite oak.

On one side of this inlet is a beautiful dark grove; on the opposite side the land rises abruptly from the water's edge into a high ridge, on which grow a few scattered oaks of great age and immense size.

When Nature plants an oak in the forest, she does not say, Be a lichen, an Eozoön canadense, a small ground-creeping thing!

That old familiar tree, Whose glory and renown Are spread o'er land and sea And wouldst thou hew it down? Woodman, forbear thy stroke! Cut not its earth-bound ties; Oh! spare that aged oak, Now towering to the skies.

It was worth nobody's while to pull down and remove the ponderous and clumsy oak, much less the masonry or flagged roofing of the pile.

" A further variation of the same idea tells us how: "Little strokes fell great oaks," In connection with which may be quoted the words of Ovid to the same effect: "Quid magis est durum saxo?

The sun shone, and lit up the oaks, whose every leaf was brown or buff; the gnats played in thousands in the mild air under the branches.

Then in contrast she painted life as it must be for the sisters now that the thirty tender vines had found a stanch old oak for their clinging.

An oak, a man; means any oak, Or any man of all mankind; A dog, a bone, means any dog, Or any bone a dog may find.

It is even possible that the veneration in which they held the oak had no other origin.

When she reached the great oak, she turned the key and opened the door.

Jack climbed a tall oak to reconnoitre the ground for McDowell, but, as his glass revealed the battling lines, he shouted to Barney to climb for a moment, to impress the frightful yet grandiose spectacle upon his mind.

Rule, Britannia, etc. Still more majestic shalt thou rise, More dreadful from each foreign stroke; As the loud blast that tears the skies, Serves but to root thy native oak.

But I could not but notice, as significant of the tendency to which I have referred, that, on passing a large, outbranching oak standing in the boundary of two fields, he remarked that the detriment of its shadow could not have been less than ten shillings a year for half a century.

From Felon Gamesters, the raw squire is free, And Briton owes her rescued oaks to thee.

I never understood how possible, how common they must have been in medieval Europe, till I saw in the forest of Fontainebleau a few oaks, like the oak of Charlemagne and the Bouquet du Roi, at whose age I dare not guess, but whose size and shape showed them to have once formed part of a continuous wood, the like whereof remains not in these islesperhaps not east of the Carpathian mountains.

If Carmen had committed the crime of sending the poison-oak, it must have been in a fit of madness, after hearing thingsstupid thingsfrom Miss Dene.

The face of the country is exceedingly beautiful, the soil fertile, and bearing oaks and shagbark hickory.

Time, that devours every thing, has here made great havoc among them, and also destroyed some oaks of large dimensions.

[The hill, where ne'er rang woodman's stroke, Was clothed with elm and spreading oak, Through whose black boughs the moon's mild ray As hardly strove to win a way, As pity to a miser's heart.]

" I caught up my hat, and we went forth, closing the oak behind us, and took our way up King's Bench Walk in silence, but with a new and delightful sense of intimate comradeship.

On this account, Grecian woodcutters avoid the oak, regarding it as an accursed tree.

There are likewise thriving plantations, containing some remarkably fine young oaks.