|
|
|
More "Thrush" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... over her shoulder through the window to the dying day, and lightly sighed. The time was April's end, and had been squally, with violent storms; but the last onslaughts of the north-wester had routed the rain-clouds. The day was dying under a clear saffron sky, and a thrush piped its mellow elegy. Miss Percival heard him, and listened, smiling with her lips, and with her eyes also which the serene light soothed. Her lips barely moved, just relaxed their firm embrace, but no more. She held the light gratefully with her eyes, seemed unwilling to lose ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... nest. They were a little smaller than a robin's egg, and of a soft creamy white, blotched irregularly with dull purplish maroon of varying tone. So jealous of these mottled marvels were the king-birds that not even the most harmless of visitors were allowed to look upon them. If so much as a thrush, or a pewee, or a mild-mannered white throat, presumed to alight on the very remotest branch of that elm, ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... full song and plumage. And what is a bird without its song? Do we not wait for the stranger to speak? It seems to me that I do not know a bird till I have heard its voice; then I come nearer it at once, and it possesses a human interest to me. I have met the Gray-cheeked Thrush (Turdus aliciae) in the woods, and held him in my hand; still I do not know him. The silence of the Cedar-Bird throws a mystery about him which neither his good looks nor his petty larcenies in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... his ear at fault that brook and breeze Sang in their saddest of minor keys? What was it the mournful wood-thrush said? What whispered the pine-trees overhead? Did he hear the Voice on his lonely way That Adam heard in the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... greenery, flung shade across the road he paused in his tramp, squared his shoulders, and drank a deep breath of the cooler air; if the blazing sun sucked up a subtle, acrid smell from the hot dust stirred by his feet he snuffed it up greedily and found it good to live. A hawk in the air, a thrush whistling from a hazel bush as only a thrush can whistle, the glorious yellow of a break of ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... narrow, little hall smelling of new oilcloth into a fair-sized room which possessed one of the casements we had seen from outside and through which came the white glow and scent of the cherry bloom and the song of a thrush. ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... middle-window that opens on it, and now she stands in the blinding gleam, shading her eyes with her hand. It is late in July, and one may listen for a blackbird's note in vain. That song in the ash that drips a diamond-shower on the soaked lawn, whenever the wind breathes, may still be a thrush; his last song, perhaps, about his second family, before he retires for the season. The year we thought would last us out so well, for all we wished to do in it, will fail us at our need, and we shall find that the summer we thought was Spring's success will ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... croak of the raven, the scream of the jay, or the pert chattering of the daw. The nightingale, unwearied by the vocal exertions of the night, joins his inferiors in sound in the general harmony. The thrush is wisely placed on the summit of some lofty tree, that its loud and piercing notes may be softened by distance before they reach the ear; while the mellow blackbird seeks ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... chuckled hoarsely; "what do I care what you say about me? But don't you get saucy, my pretty thrush, or your friends will miss you some fine morning, and never see ...
— Twinkle and Chubbins - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland • L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
... and equally bored at the foot of the long slope of the Ettersberg, looking like any other little country town in the rain—comfortless and desolate'. In the midst of the loneliness and the spring rain, sounded now and then the note of a thrush, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... received an order which it was her bounden duty to obey. The sun shone brilliantly in upon the beautiful old room, and through the open window came a pleasant murmuring of bees among the mignonette, and the whistle of a thrush in an elm-tree sounded with clear and cheerful persistence. Hugo Jocelyn looked at the fair view of the flowering garden and drew his breath hard in ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... flame of the wild-fire abruptly ceased. The dawn arose red and broad in the east. The piles of dead beasts shone out black on the grey plain of the forest glade, and on the topmost bough of a pine tree a thrush began to sing. ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... sails a splendor of copper in the fading light. With the hush of night the breeze died into stillness until scarce a leaf of the weather-beaten poplars stirred. From the tangle of roses, sweet fern and bayberry that overgrew the fields the note of a thrush rose clear on the quiet air. A whirling bevy of gulls circled the bar, left naked and opalescent by the receding tide. Peace was everywhere, divine peace, save in the breasts of those who gazed only to find a mockery in ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... bursting into bud; roots of polyanthus flaunted mauve and orange blossoms; under a sheltered wall were even a few early violets, whose sweet fresh scent seemed as the first breath of spring. A missel-thrush on the bare pear tree sang triumphantly through the rain, and a song-thrush, with more melodious notes, trilled forth an occasional call; the robin, which had haunted the garden all the winter, was scraping energetically ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... child could ever gather. Only English larks and linnets, cowslips and hawthorn, were to be found in the toy-books and little histories read to him. "Everything was British: even the robin, a domestic bird," wrote the doctor, "instead of a great fidgety, jerky, whooping thrush." But when Peter Parley, Jacob Abbott, Lydia Maria Child, Mrs. Embury, and Eliza Leslie began to write short stories, the Annuals and periodicals abounded in American scenes and ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... a letter which must have come like the song of a wood-thrush to the author, its diction being as pure as his ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... too, are kaleidoscopic with scenes from the daily round of human life. We are given fleeting but vivid glimpses into the career of merchant and sailor. We see the sportsman in chase of the boar, the rustic setting snares for the greedy thrush, the serenader under the casement, the plowman at his ingleside, the anxious mother at the window on the cliff, never taking her eyes from the curved shore, the husbandman passing industrious days on his own hillside, tilling ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... can't be mentioned in the same breath as the Britisher; that our daffodils and primroses are sweeter far than the heavy-scented blossoms of the East; that the "brain-fever" bird of India is a wretched substitute for the lark and the thrush and others of "God's jocund little fowls"; that Abana and Pharpar and other rivers of Damascus are better than this Jordan—all this, I say, I know; but to-night ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... the beauty of it!" she answered. "Your song left your soul as the thrush's leaves his throat. Should we prize the thrush's more if we came upon ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... thoughtful friend, "is the nest that Niddie Thrush and Daisy Thrush built for themselves a year ago. They have now gone to live in a wood across the big river, so you are welcome to their old home. It is almost as good as new, and there is no ...
— Policeman Bluejay • L. Frank Baum
... do not address you; I am scolding my slave. Shall we wager and submit the matter to Lamachus, which of the two is the best to eat, a locust or a thrush? ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... the morning sun; the house and cow-house doors were closed, and no poultry wandered about the field in search of stray grains of corn, or early worms. It was a strange and unfamiliar silence, and struck solemnly on Sylvia's mind. Only a thrush in the old orchard down in the hollow, out of sight, whistled and gurgled with continual ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... snug abed, my boy, blankets to your chin, Nor dreamed of dancing birds without or sunbeams dancing in. Grey Thrush, he piped the tune for them. I peeped out through the glass Between the window curtains, and I saw them ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... A bee came buzzing in at the open window, made a tour of the flower-vases, and flew out again into the sunshine. From the lawn the cries of the tennis players, the calls of thrush and blackbird and dishwasher, were wafted in on waves of perfume from the roses. It was very pleasant and restful to Harry Luttrell after the sweat and labour of France. He sighed as he folded his letter and addressed it to a friend in the ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... decked with dazzling drops of dew; of the healthy happy heath creatures peeping out at her shyly, here a rabbit and there a hare; of a lark that sprang up singing and was lost to sight in a moment, of a thrush that paused to reflect as she passed. She thought of the little church on the high cliffs, the bourne of her morning walks, of the long stretch of sand; and of the sea; and she felt the fresh free ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... it fell. It was nearly three feet in height, with a long tuft of silken and silvery feathers down the back of its neck. Carlos knocked over a beautiful little bird with a chestnut-coloured head, a perfect heron in miniature, but only the size of a thrush. Lejoillie was delighted, and would have hugged us both as ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... proper thing for me now is to know nothing. I've forgotten everything. I know I'm a slave. I don't even know what I do know. (aside) Now our thrush here is after the worm in my trap; he'll soon be hung up handsomely, the way ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... the sweet, bewildered murmur of purple martins grew into sustained melody; thrush and mocking bird, thrasher and cardinal, sang from every leafy slope; and through the rushing music of bird and pouring waterfall the fairy drumming of the cock-o'-the-pines rang out ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... rough earthworks, fills the rifle-pits with delicate flowers, and wraps the splintered tree-trunks with her fluent drapery of tendrils. Soon the whole sharp outline of the spot is lost in unremembering grass. Where the deadly rifle-ball whistled through the foliage, the robin or the thrush pipes its tremulous note; and where the menacing shell described its curve through the air, a harmless crow flies in circles. Season after season the gentle work goes on, healing the wounds and rents made by the ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... growing bright, and a soft warm colouring flung through all the air from the coming rays of the coming sun. The cat-birds were wide awake and very busy; the song sparrows full of gladness; and now and then, further off, a wood-thrush, less worldly than the one and less unchastened than the other, told of hidden and higher sweets, in tones further removed from Earth than his companions knew. The wild, pure, ethereal notes thrilled like a voice from some clear region ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... like the scent of mignonette through the window. His lordship's mind stirs even under its counterpane of cards and dice and buttered claret and snuff and fripperies, and one might think he heard the echo of a thrush's song sung when he was a boy (Unbelievable ...
— The Harlequinade - An Excursion • Dion Clayton Calthrop and Granville Barker
... "Mrs. P. retired early, but Kay and I sat up chatting and enjoying the peaceful loveliness of this old garden. A sleepless mocking bird and a sleepy little thrush gave a concert in the sweet-lime tree; a couple of green frogs in the fountain rendered a bass duet; Kay thought that if we remained very quiet the spirits of some lovers of the 'splendid idle forties' might appear ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... them is to stuff them into a roll, scooped of it's crum; to baste them well with butter, and roast them, until they are brown and crisp. The ortolans are kept in cages, and crammed, until they die of fat, then eaten as dainties. The thrush is presented with the trail, because the bird feeds on olives. They may as well eat the trail of a sheep, because it feeds on the aromatic herbs of the mountain. In the summer, we have beef, veal, and mutton, chicken, and ducks; which last are very fat, and very flabby. All the meat ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... is on the bush, In the time before the thrush Has a thought about her nest, Thou wilt come with half a call, Spreading out thy glossy breast Like a careless prodigal; Telling tales about the sun, When ...
— Language of Flowers • Kate Greenaway
... sky. Turtle-doves and linnets, fly! Blackbird, thrush, and chaffinch gay, Hither, hither, haste away! One and all, come help me quick, Haste ye, haste ye—pick, ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... whose fragrant wreaths drooped till they touched the heads of all who entered. When Mrs. Murray and Edna ascended the steps and knocked at the open door, bearing the name "Allan Hammond," no living thing was visible, save a thrush that looked out shyly from the clematis vines; and after waiting a moment, Mrs. Murray entered unannounced. They looked into the parlor, with its cool matting and white curtains and polished old-fashioned mahogany furniture, but the room was unoccupied; ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... of the feathered tribe among the branches of the trees, some with pleasant trilling voices, and others uttering harsh, shrill, unfamiliar cries. The variety of birds was a very marked feature of this tropical region. The keen voice of the Ceylon thrush rang in our ears like the scream of a young child. Many other smaller birds were seen in rainbow feathers; and a sparrow, like his English brother, except that the Ceylon species wear a white ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... in the garden, advancing along one of the retired walks. The sun was shining with delicious warmth, making great masses of bright verdure, and deep blue shade. The cuckoo, that "harbinger of spring," was faintly heard from a distance; the thrush piped from the hawthorn; and the yellow butterflies sported, and toyed, and coquetted in ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... while Mrs. Laval changed her travelling dress, and Mrs. Bartholomew alternately assisted and talked to her. That elegant crimson satin robe swept round the room in a way that was very imposing to Matilda. She could not help feeling like a little brown thrush in the midst of a company of resplendent parrots and birds of paradise. But she did not much care. Only she thought it would be very pleasant to have the wardrobe upstairs furnished with a set of dresses to correspond somewhat with her new splendid surroundings. Mrs. Bartholomew had ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... natural state, the plant is believed to be propagated by the missel-thrush, which feeds upon its berries, but under favourable climatic conditions one may raise one's own mistletoe by bruising the berries on the bark of fruit trees, where they take root readily. It must be remembered, however, that the plant is ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... Cantonment, I discharged my unloaded barrel at a bird like a thrush in appearance, called a Wattle-bird, from having two little wattles which project from ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... said his companion, and picked up a fine woodpecker. A thrush and two other birds they could not place followed, and then they ran across a fallen tree under ...
— Four Boy Hunters • Captain Ralph Bonehill
... voice, for gray mist was descending, Slow rose the bard and retired from the hill, The blackbird's mild notes with the thrush's were blending, Oft scream'd the plover her wild notes and shrill, Yet still from the hoary bard, Methought the sweet song I heard, Mix'd with instruction and blended with woe; And oft as I pass along, Chimes in mine ear his song, "Life's like the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Our pet thrush 'Jack' also liked her better than any of us, though he was tame enough to eat out of my hand, giving me a friendly nip with his sharp beak occasionally, just to show what he could do if he had a mind to and was ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... said]: "He really has music in him. Read his poem "The Thrush" and you will see it. Tennyson said to me," [he added], "that Browning had plenty of music IN him, but he could ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... such events to occur, the young couple, true lovers of the simple life, took upon themselves the vows which united them until "death itself should part." The rustle of the leaves in the treetop murmured nature's sweet benediction, while the bluebird, the robin, and the thrush ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... birds many fine, rich meals. This comparatively feeble insect has been allowed by the throngs of birds to spread over the whole continent. A naturalist in one of the Western States had examined several species of the thrush, and found they had eaten mostly that class of insects known ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... hair Yellow like autumnal wheat When the sunshine falls on it. Blue-grey eyes she has, and brows Whiter than the winter snows; And her face is like a flower, As she gazes from the tower: As she gazes far below Where the garden roses blow, And the thrush and blackbird sing In the pleasant time of spring. "Woe is me!" she cries, "that I In a prison cell must lie; Parted by a cruel spite From my young and lovely knight. By the eyes of God, I swear Prisonment I will not bear! Here for ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... Thrush had quite a decent voice, I hear, Some years ago (A score or so), But now her voice is ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... things to happen exactly at their appointed times; we like everything to be usual, orderly, punctual, methodical, to a hair's breadth, to a minute. It distresses and upsets us if it is not so. For instance, to take a very trifling matter, a thrush has built its nest year after year in the catkin-tree on the lawn; this year, for no obvious reason, it is building in the ivy on the garden wall. We have said very little about it, but I think we both feel that the change is unnecessary, and just a ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... on which no Runic record has been graven; but at the last sound of the harp there soared over the hill, as though he had fluttered from the harp, a little bird, a charming singing-bird, with ringing voice of the thrush, with the moving voice pathos of the human heart, with a voice that told of home, like the voice that is heard by the bird of passage. The singing-bird soared away, over mountain and valley, over field and wood—he was the Bird of Popular Song, ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... And make happy the skies; The merry bells ring To welcome the Spring; The skylark and thrush, The birds of the bush, Sing louder around To the bells' cheerful sound; While our sports shall be seen On ...
— Poems of William Blake • William Blake
... the warm little roughness of a thrush's, which sings through a throat that is loosely strung with ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... With buttercups and daisies; Oh, how I long to quit the throng Of human forms and faces: The vain delights, the empty shows, The toil and care bewild'rin', To feel once more the sweet repose Calm Nature gives her children. At times the thrush shall sing, and hush The twitt'ring yellow-hammer; The blackbird fluster from the bush With panic-stricken clamour; The finch in thistles hide from sight, And snap the seeds and toss 'em; The blue-tit hop, with pert delight, About the crab-tree ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... digest all they eat?—To determine whether seeds would lose their vitality in passing through the digestive organs of birds, Kerner von Marilaun fed seeds of two hundred and fifty different species of plants to each of the following: blackbird, song thrush, robin, jackdaw, raven, nutcracker, goldfinch, titmouse, bullfinch, crossbill, pigeon, fowl, turkey, duck, and a few others; also to marmot, horse, ox, and pig, making five hundred and twenty separate experiments. As to the marmot, horse, ox, ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... proving amply wide when reached. Excited redbirds darted among the bushes, and the Harvester answered their cry. Blackbirds protested against the unusual intrusion of strange objects, and a brown thrush slipped from a late nest close the road ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... exchange birds' eggs with any correspondent of YOUNG PEOPLE. I have eggs of the following birds: hedge, song, house, and chipping sparrow, bluebird, swallow, brown and red thrush, peewit, woodpecker, meadow-lark, cat-bird, pigeon, turtle-dove, ...
— Harper's Young People, October 19, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... natural and rascally inclinations. I first came to this conclusion one early morning, several years ago, as I watched an old crow diligently exploring a fringe of bushes that grew along the wall of a deserted pasture. He had eaten a clutch of thrush's eggs, and carried off three young sparrows to feed his own young, before I found out what he was about. Since then I have surprised him often ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... blossom, fruit, or berries, and naturally their bills are slender and sharply pointed, rarely finch-like. The yellow-breasted chat has the greatest variety of vocal expressions. The ground warblers are compensated for their sober, thrush-like plumage by their exquisite voices, while the great majority of the family that are gaily dressed have notes that either resemble the trill of mid-summer insects or, by their limited range and feeble utterance, sadly belie the family name. Bay-breasted Warbler. Blackburnian ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... the bob-o'-link, the soft whistle of the thrush, the tender coo of the wood-dove, the deep, warbling bass of the grouse, the drumming of the partridge, the melodious trill of the lark, the gay carol of the robin, the friendly, familiar call of the duck and the teal, resound from tree and knoll ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... us dahn on top o' t'grass, Clois to a runnin' brook, An' harken'd t'watter wagtails sing Wi' t'sparrow, thrush, an' rook. ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... in ecstasy, picking great bunches of the flowers, and running from clump to clump with thrills of delight. Surely even Freckles's "Limberlost" could not be more beautiful than this. A persistent cuckoo was calling in the meadow close by; a thrush with his brown throat all a-ruffle trilled in a birch tree overhead, and a blackbird warbled his heart out among the hazel bushes by the fence. The girls went peeping here and there and everywhere in quest of birds' nests, and their ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... have a quarter crack, for that is the immediate effect of contraction caused by the absence of the expanding action of the frog and the consequent dead condition of the hoof from want of circulation and proper secretions. The horse would be equally free from "drop" and "pumiced" sole, seedy toe, thrush, and kindred complaints. ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... Rodogune) adorn and arrange it as you will, infallibly suggests an idea of solitude, that communicates sadness to the mind. Accordingly your path was here beguiled with the warbling of a thousand birds, the full-toned blackbird, the mellow thrush, and the pensive nightingale. The sorceress had invited them to her retreat, by innumerable assiduities and innumerable conveniences of food and residence, and had suffered no rude intrusion to disturb the sacredness of their haunts. Unused to molestation in all their ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... somewhere far afield A song of thrush unseen, And suddenly there stood revealed (Oh heart so merry, song so true!) A day when we shall walk, we two, Where other worlds ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 15, 1917 • Various
... exactly that you believed you heard the people themselves. All alone he simulated the murmur of a crowd, and this gave him a right to the title of Engastrimythos, which he took. He reproduced all sorts of cries of birds, as of the thrush, the wren, the pipit lark, otherwise called the gray cheeper, and the ring ousel, all travellers like himself: so that at times when the fancy struck him, he made you aware either of a public thoroughfare filled with the uproar of men, or of a meadow loud with the voices of beasts—at ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... now the youthful, gay, capricious Spring, Piercing her showery clouds with crystal light, And with their hues reflected streaking bright Her radiant bow, bids all her Warblers sing; The Lark, shrill caroling on soaring wing; The lonely Thrush, in brake, with blossoms white, That tunes his pipe so loud; while, from the sight Coy bending their dropt heads, young Cowslips fling Rich perfume o'er the fields.—It is the prime Of Hours that Beauty robes:—yet all they gild, Cheer, and delight in this their fragrant time, For thy dear ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... thrush was whistling with a sweet voice; the golden-crowned hammer plumed his feathers. In the thicket the pheasants clucked and the bright green humming birds flitted between the leaves; sometimes on the top of the pine tree a crow, hiding itself from the ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the White men, And Winona, the orphaned, was bought by the crafty, relentless Tamdoka. In the Spring-time of life, in the flush of the gladsome mid-May days of Summer, When the bobolink sang and the thrush, and the red robin chirped in the branches, To the tent of the brave must she go; she must kindle the fire in his teepee; She must sit in the lodge of her foe, as a slave at the feet of her master. Alas ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... the brown thrush, robin, turtle-dove, linnet, gold-finch, large and small blackbird, wren, and some others. As they came along, the whole party were of opinion that this river was the true Missouri; but Captain Lewis, being fully persuaded that it was neither the main stream, nor that which it would ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... Rhoda and Cartwell, followed by many injunctions from Katherine, started off toward the irrigating ditch. At a slow pace they drove through the peach orchard into the desert. As they reached the open trail, thrush and to-hee fluttered from the cholla. Chipmunk and cottontail scurried before them. Overhead a hawk dipped in its reeling flight. Cartwell watched the girl keenly. Her pale face was very lovely in the brilliant morning ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... after April, when May follows, And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! 10 Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray's edge— That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture 15 The first fine careless rapture! And though the fields look rough with hoary dew, All will be gay when noontide wakes anew The buttercups, the little children's dower —Far brighter than this ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... all trades, had been able to teach her,—a few simple chords to accompany her songs, picked up at hap-hazard. But her voice, like her face and form, irradiated witchery. It was sweet, firm, deep, with something haunting in it—the tone of a hermit thrush, marvelously pure and clear, carried through a gay strain like the mocking-bird's. Of course Beverley thought it divine; and when a message came from Colonel Clark bidding him report for duty at once, he felt an impulse toward mutiny of the rankest sort. He did not dream that a military ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... woodland road on summer nights. Laura walked there with me when she was engaged, and told me how it all happened, and the fishers rode past that time too, just as we came to an opening. We hid ourselves behind a great boulder; and the thrush began to sing, and many other birds, but the thing that affected me most ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... high road. It seemed as different from London as a fairy tale from a Latin grammar. There had been a slight shower of rain, which had brought out the scent of growing grass and budding leaves; the ground was white with the fallen blossom of blackthorn hedges; and a thrush, seated on the summit of an apple tree, was pouring forth a volume of song that sounded almost like a welcome to ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... straws and rubbish she carried to the top of a timber under my porch. But she did not seem to lose her temper. She did not spitefully reclaim the straws and strings that would persist in falling to the porch floors, but cheerfully went away in search of more. So I have seen a wood thrush time after time carrying the same piece of paper to a branch from which the breeze dislodged it, without any evidence of impatience. It is true that when a string or a horsehair which a bird is carrying to its nest gets caught in a branch, ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... last!' he said, regarding me with a jocular smile and a head cocked on one side, pretty much after the fashion of a thrush eyeing a worm. 'But, excuse me, after so much ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... For when by night I feel your tender side, Though for the narrow perch I cannot ride, Yet I have such a solace in my mind, That all my boding cares are cast behind; And even already I forget my dream. He said, and downward flew from off the beam; For daylight now began apace to spring, The thrush to whistle, and the lark to sing; Then, crowing, clapp'd his wings, the appointed call, To chuck his wives together ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... It was a delicious evening, and the birds were singing from every brake and hedgerow. Once or twice she heard the harsh call of the corncrake mingled with the flute-like notes of the thrush; a lark was carolling high up in the blue sky—by and by she heard him descend. Audrey walked swiftly down the long grass lanes, and, as she neared Rutherford she could see a dim man's figure in the distance. Of course it was Michael ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... correspondent tell me where I can get a catalogue of birds' eggs? I am starting a collection of eggs, and would like to exchange an egg of a brown thrush for one ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... tries with song of thrush Once more those hearts to move, I've seen her oft relentless crush,— My bud still blooms forever fresh— It is the ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... * lark, * yellowhammer, * robin, *wren, * golden-crested wren, * goldfinch, * chaffinch, * *greenfinch, pied wagtail, sparrow, * dunnock (hedge, accentor), missel thrush, starling, rook, jackdaw, *blackcap, * garden warbler, * willow warbler, * chiffchaff, * wood warbler, tree-creeper, * reed bunting, * sedge warbler, coot, water hen, little grebe (dabchick), tufted duck, wood pigeon, stock dove, * turtle dove, peewit, tit (? coal-tit), * cuckoo, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... first music she had ever heard, "except whistlin'," but there had been a great deal of "whistlin'" about the cabin up Lone River; whistling of robins in spring—nothing sweeter—the chordlike whistlings of thrush and vireo after sunset, that bubbling "mar-guer-ite" with which the blackbirds woo, and the light diminuendo with which the bluebird caressed the air after an April flight. Perhaps Joan's musical faculty was less untrained ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... blocks of sun-baked coral, lovely butterflies and other insects flitted amongst low growth, in company with tiny sun-birds which seemed clothed in brilliant burnished mail, and at every few steps larger birds, perfectly new to the visitors, took flight or hurried thrush-like to ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... a little bird's nest all broken with the wind and torn with the storm, and two or three little eggs, with a few wet leaves over them, addled and cold and forsaken, and my little gipsy heart cried over those poor little motherless things, for I was motherless too. And up in a tree I have heard a thrush singing the song of a seraph and I have said, as I looked at the eggs, "You would have been singers too, but ...
— Your Boys • Gipsy Smith
... and thrush Shall hail the rising day, Nor warble on their native bush, Nor charm me ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... day, just before luncheon, a mass of sparrow feathers was found on the hall-mat. The second day there were feathers of a blackbird. And the third day, when I came down to breakfast, I found a few thrush feathers carelessly left under the breakfast-room table. I began to search my mind, anxiously wondering whether any of my near ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... want for anything to eat or to wear, as we always had plenty of wild meat and plenty of fish, corn, vegetables, and wild fruits. I thought (and yet I may be mistaken) that my people were very happy in those days, at least I was as happy myself as a lark, or as the brown thrush that sat daily on the uppermost branches of the stubby growth of a basswood tree which stood near by upon the hill where we often played under its shade, lodging our little arrows among the thick branches of the tree and then shooting them down ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... between species of distinct genera. We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species. The recent increase of the missel-thrush in parts of Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush. How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates! In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it its great congener. One species of ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... a merry brown thrush sitting up in the tree, "He's singing to me! He's singing to me!" And what does he say, little girl, little boy? "Oh, the world's running over ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... not so full; when the next Almacks' ball takes place; whether you were at the last drawing-room, and which of the fair debutantes you most admire; whether Tamburini is to be denied us next year?" with many lamentations touching the possible defection, as if the migrations of an opera thrush were of the least consequence to any rational creature—of course you don't say so, but lament Tamburini as if he were your father; "whether it is true that we are to have the two Fannies, Taglioni and Cerito, this season; and what a heaven of delight we shall ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... faces sneer and snarl From doors of mudcracked houses If there were water And no rock If there were rock And also water And water 350 A spring A pool among the rock If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada And dry grass singing But sound of water over a rock Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But ...
— The Waste Land • T. S. Eliot
... ringing the church bell Mark had experienced the rapture of creative noise, the sense of individual triumph over time and space; and the sound of his ringing came back to him from the vaulted roof of the church with such exultation as the missal thrush may know when he sits high above the fretted boughs of an oak and his music plunges forth upon the January wind. Now when Mark was ringing the Sanctus-bell, it was with a sense of his place in the scheme of worship. If one listens to the twitter of a single ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... "Sing on, Blithe Bird" William Motherwell "I Like Little Pussy" Jane Taylor Little Things Julia Fletcher Carney The Little Gentleman Unknown The Crust of Bread Unknown "How Doth the Little Busy Bee" Isaac Watts The Brown Thrush Lucy Larcom The Sluggard Isaac Watts The Violet Jane Taylor Dirty Jim Jane Taylor The Pin Ann Taylor Jane and Eliza Ann Taylor Meddlesome Matty Ann Taylor Contented John Jane Taylor Friends Abbie Farwell ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... require the "gold cure." Mat had ridden over the mountains at all seasons until he loved them. His chief delights were the companionship of his stout horses and his even more intimate companionship with nature. To scare up a partridge, to scent the pines, to listen to the hermit thrush were meat and drink to him. That there was gold in these noble mountains moved him very little, though this fact provided him with a livelihood for which he was duly grateful. The school-teacher was fortunate to be brought up with a sharp turn so ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... the same morning, drawing the nails, and removed it to the pond-side by small cartloads, spreading the boards on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun. One early thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path. I was informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor Seeley, an Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the still tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... very lightly about it. But now that the marriage is a thing accomplished, it is all right. I had destined my niece for another sphere than a painter's world. However, when you can't get a thrush, eat a ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... smaller birds did not appear to be at all afraid of me, but would hop about within a yard's distance, looking for worms and other food, with as much indifference and security as if no creature at all were near them. I remember a thrush had the confidence to snatch out of my hand, with his bill, a piece of cake that Glumdalclitch had just given me for my breakfast. When I attempted to catch any of these birds, they would boldly turn against me, endeavoring to pick my fingers, ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... secret door we walk out on to the open rampart, where the sheep now graze; the cattle are driven into one of the ruined towers. We see the palace-yard, and look from it up to a window. Come, thou birch-wood's thrush, and warble thy lays; sing, whilst we recal the bitterness of love in the ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... hair arose, fell over in rich profusion, and added to its brightness; as did the glossy, well-defined eye-brow, boldly crossing the forehead, slightly waved at the outer extremities, but not arched. Her eyes were full, even for an orientalist, but neither sparkling nor prominent, soft as the thrush's. It was only when moved by joy, surprise, or sorrow, that the star-like iris dilated and glistened, and then its effect was most eloquent and magical. The distinct ebon-lashes which curtained them were singularly long and beautiful; and when she ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... far away, the tawny thrush is singing; New England woods, at close of day, with that clear chant are ringing: And when my light of life is low, and heart and flesh are weary, I fain would hear, before I go, the wood notes of ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... exclaimed triumphantly, "you've no call to mind about that. That's only thrush, that is. Three of ourn had it, and did beautiful. She's bound to be a bit fretful, but she won't come to no harm, so long ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... was with us in the thickest part of the wood a long way off. She heard a bird sing, a mavis I believe—was it not a mavis? Very well, then she heard a thrush, and she turned in the direction whence the sound came. She went some distance, but could not come across it. When she turned back, the bear came out of the bushes, it attacked her, pulled her to the ground, and without doing her any harm, we do ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... their sharp summits distinct against the sky. But the shadows coiled dull and heavy round the evergreens that skirted the churchyard, so that their outline was vague and confused; and there was a depth in that lonely stillness, broken only when the thrush flew out from the lower bushes, and the thick laurel-leaves stirred reluctantly, and again were rigid in repose. There is a certain melancholy in the evenings of early spring which is among those influences of Nature ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pre-arrangements of nerve-cells and muscle-cells which secure that a fit and proper answer is given to a frequently recurrent stimulus. An earthworm half out of its burrow becomes aware of the light tread of a thrush's foot, and jerks itself back into its hole before anyone can say "reflex action." What ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... these lived in the wonderful depths of Craythew Park, and of birds there was no end. There were game birds and song birds, from the handsome pheasants to the modest little partridges, the royalists and the puritans of the woods, from the love-lorn wood-pigeon, cooing in the tall firs, to the thrush and the blackbird, making long hops as they quartered the ground for grubs; and the robin, the linnet, and little Jenny Wren all lived there in riotous plenty of worms and snails; and nearer to the great house the starlings and jackdaws shot down in a great hurry ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... vigorous and gay as a young man. One day we found him lying like a dead man in a ditch, all distorted by his malady, just at nightfall. We carried him to our house in a wheelbarrow, and passed the night taking care of him. Three days later, he was at a wedding, singing like a thrush, leaping like a kid, and frisking about in the old-fashioned way. On leaving a marriage-feast, he would go and dig a grave and nail up a coffin. He performed those duties devoutly, and although they seemed ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... understand what they were about, the two "jontlemen" had taken up his Majesty's vessel under my command, had turned it bottom up with several shakes, to clear it of the water and sand, and with as little difficulty as a farmer's boy would have turned upside down a thrush's cage, in order to cleanse it. After this operation had been performed, they righted it, and one laying hold of the bow, and the other the stern, they swung it between them, as two washerwomen might a basket of ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... group seen so lately in sunlight assembled, 'Mid those walks over which the laburnum-bough trembled, And the deep-bosom'd lilac, emparadising The haunts where the blackbird and thrush flit and sing, The keenest eye could but have seen, and seen only, A circle of friends, minded not to leave lonely The bird on the bough, or the bee on the blossom; Conversing at ease in the garden's green bosom, Like those who, when Florence ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... have seen just round Hatton that the whole bird world is ruled by the signs that the trees hang out.' And she asked me what they were, and I told her to notice next spring that as soon as the birch-leaves opened, the pheasant began to crow and the thrush to sing and the blackbird to whistle; and when the oak-leaves looked their reddest, and not a day before, the whole tribe of ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... far elm-tree shadows flood Dark patches in the burning grass, The cows, each with her peaceful cud, Lie waiting for the heat to pass. From somewhere on the slope near by Into the pale depth of the noon A wandering thrush slides leisurely ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... her father left the city, to partake of the pleasures of the country.—Scarcely had the blackbird and the thrush begun their early whistle to welcome Louisa, than the weather changed all on a sudden; the north wind roared horribly in the grove, and the snow fell in such abundance, that every thing ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... apple-bloom behind them, and going down the gravel-path passed the plum trees—the daffodils there were over now—by the strawberry patch which Iden had planted under the parlour window; by the great box-hedge where a thrush sat on her nest undisturbed, though Amaryllis's dress brushed the branches; by the espalier apple, to the ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... a great many red kangaroos (foxy), some very young, others very large; and he chased a jerboa, which escaped him. He also saw a new bird with a black crest, about the size of a thrush. ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... he went onward home, and came to the front of his house. The blinds of Eustacia's bedroom were still closely drawn, for she was no early riser. All the life visible was in the shape of a solitary thrush cracking a small snail upon the door-stone for his breakfast, and his tapping seemed a loud noise in the general silence which prevailed; but on going to the door Clym found it unfastened, the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... with a low "Taise-toi." But gradually I saw her face change, and then, still holding herself proudly, and with the air of a queen graciously condescending to bestow a favor upon a suppliant, but also with a smile of radiant sweetness, she spoke, and her voice was like the song of the thrush beside ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... this particular instance, there is an undoubted connection. In Susan's case, as recorded by Wordsworth, what connection had the corner of Wood Street with a mountain ascending, a vision of trees, and a nest by the Dove? Why should the song of a thrush cause bright volumes of vapor to glide through Lothbury, and a river to flow on through the vale of Cheapside? As she stood at that corner of Wood Street, a mop and a pail in her hand most likely, she heard the bird singing, and straight-way began ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to note the pretty moss on the tree he climbs for safety. But the novel by comparison is like breakfasting in the open air on a summer morning; nothing is irrelevant if the waiter's mood is happy, and the tapping of the thrush upon the garden path, or the petal of apple-blossom that floats down into my coffee, is as relevant as the egg I open or the bread and butter I bite. And all sorts of things that inevitably mar the tense illusion which is the aim of the short ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... tomb. The central thought is of death, but around this he curiously twines, first, the early-blooming lilacs which the poet may have plucked the day the dark shadow came; next the song of the hermit thrush, the most sweet and solemn of all our songsters, heard at twilight in the dusky cedars; and with these the evening star, which, as many may remember, night after night in the early part of that eventful ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... pries among the thickets, following up the trail of warbler, sparrow, or thrush like a sleuth-hound. Yonder a tiny yellow-bird with a jet-black cheek flits hither with a wisp of dry grass in her beak, and disappears in the branches of a small tree close to my studio door. Like the shadow ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... there is Sabbath peace, the sound of far bells, the cry of the thrush, the holy pattering of leaves. The beeches, meeting aloft and entwining, fling the light and the spirit of the cathedral to the mossy floors. Here is purity and humanity. The air beats freshly on the face. Away in the soft blue distance is a shadowy suggestion of rolling country, the near ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... in 1832, it was in a most dilapidated condition: the slab on which the effigy of the knight once rested was broken in; within the head of the lady, which was separated from the body, a thrush had built its nest: notwithstanding, however, the neglect and damp to which the chapel was exposed, these chesnut effigies remained wonderfully sound ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... there are such diseases, it must be understood that diseases have been attributed to fungi as a primary cause, when the evidence does not warrant such a conclusion. Diphtheria and thrush have been referred to the devastations of fungi, whereas diphtheria certainly may and does occur without any trace of fungi. Fevers may sometimes be accompanied by fungoid bodies in the evacuations, but it is very difficult to determine them. The ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... that part. One is timid, another fastidious, another shy but ingenious. So, in the universal competition for a living, each has taken its own line according to the bent of its nature, and its one tool has been perfected for its trade until it can follow no other. The thrush catches such worms as rashly show themselves above-ground; but an ancient ancestor of the snipe found that, if it followed them into marshy lands, it could probe the soft ground and drag them out of their chambers. ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... sympathy we have in common,—the good Father knows every bird that flies over Fond du Lac. Who can tell what they whisper to him of the sweet Alsace so far away? We are treated to peeps into the nests of the orange-crowned warbler, the hermit thrush, and that shy wader, ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... frozen pond, And busy gold-crest, somewhere out of sight, Works at his saw with all his tiny might. I do not count the ring-doves or the rooks, We hear so much about them in the books They're hardly real; but from where I sit I see two chaffinches, a long-tailed tit, A missel-thrush, a yaffle—— ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... their united voices seemed still to be quivering in the air, then to be borne softly away by the echoes into the cool distance of the glaciers. A solitary thrush began to warble on a low branch of a stunted fir-tree, and a grasshopper raised its shrill voice in emulation. The sun was near its setting; the bluish evening shadows crept up the sides of ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the vesper sparrow. The young of birds always for a brief period repeat the markings of the birds of the parent stem from which they are an offshoot. Thus, the young of our robins have speckled breasts, betraying their thrush kinship. And the young junco shows, in its striped appearance of breast and back, and the lateral white quills in the tail, its kinship to the grass finch or vesper sparrow. The slate-color soon obliterates most of these signs, but the white quills remain. It has departed from the nesting-habits ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... evening gunshot set soft echoes tumbling from hill to hill, distant, more distant. Strains of the cavalry band rose in the evening silence, "The Star Spangled Banner" floating from the darkening valley. Then silence; and presently a low, sweet thrush note from ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... of every blossom coral-red. The living blue above throbs with the tremulous song of innumerable larks; the measured chant of cuckoos awakens the woods; and through the thickets a whole world's gladness sings itself forth from the throat of thrush and blackbird. Through the whole land between the four seas benediction is everywhere; blue-bells and the rosy fingers of heath deck the mountain-tops, where the grouse are crooning to each other among the ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... Where hardly shall a human footstep pass, Myriads of ferns and soft maianthemums, Or lily-breathing slender pyrolas Distil their hearts for you. Far in your pine-clad fastnesses ye keep Coverts the lonely thrush shall wander through, With echoes that seem ever to recede, Touching from pine to pine, from steep to ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... Shechoka (the robin) calling his mate. He says he has just found something good to eat." Or "Listen to Oopehanska (the thrush); he is singing for his little wife. He will sing his best." When in the evening the whippoorwill started his song with vim, no further than a stone's throw from our tent in the woods, ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... merry brown thrush sitting up in the tree. He's singing to me! He's singing to me! And what does he say, little girl, little boy? "Oh, the world's running over with joy! Don't you hear? Don't you see? Hush! Look! In my tree I'm as ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... season of the year. Continuing our walk, we pass under the rose-crowned aqueduct, and strike into the green avenue that darkens beyond; listening to the distant water bubbling up from the deepest recesses, and to the fitful whistle of blackbird and thrush, as they flit athwart the moss-grown gravel, and perch momentarily on the heads of mutilated termini and statues; whilst the clipt trees vibrate under the wings of others extricating themselves on a piratical cruise against ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... to many years' imprisonment, and being let loose to live as best she could, the girl became a servant, passed from hand to hand, inherited some property from an old farmer, whom she had caught, as if she had been a thrush on a twig covered with bird-lime, and with the money she had built this public-house on the new road which was being built across ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... of the average brown, had a rough effect of being quickly tossed into form, which pleased him; as she slipped down the room before him to place him at table he saw that she was, as it were, involuntarily, unwillingly graceful. She made him think of a wild sweetbrier, of a hermit-thrush; but, if there were this sort of poetic suggestion in Cynthia's looks, her acts were of plain and honest prose, such as giving Westover the pleasantest place and the most intelligent ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... half naturalist in his way of looking at Nature, and steers clear of the poetic vagueness in regard to species. A passing description of the brown thrush as "skulking" among the bushes hits that bird to the life. Some remarks on page 119 would seem to be applied by a slip of the pen to the crow blackbird, instead of the cowbird, which has always enjoyed the distinction of being the only American species that disposes of its offspring after the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... beef; He grapples with it squarely; but fluids, too, Have played their part in that cathedral choir He calls his throat. One godless virtue, sir, They seem to have given him. Never a nightingale Gurgles jug! jug! in mellower tones than he When jugs are flowing. Never a thrush can pipe Sweet, sweet, so rarely as, when a pipe of wine Summers his throttle, we'll make him sing to us One of his heathen ditties—The Malmsey Butt, Or ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... was brought to the author on the 20th December, 1843, with an oval substance, as large as a thrush's egg, occasionally protruding from the vagina. I advised that it should be removed by means of a ligature; but the owner was afraid, and a fortnight was suffered to pass before she was brought again. The tumour ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... sun does arise, And make happy the skies; The merry bells ring To welcome the Spring; The skylark and thrush, The birds of the bush, Sing louder around To the bells' cheerful sound; While our sports shall be ...
— Poems of William Blake • William Blake
... are in dread of poverty hear by what means you may grow wealthy. If a thrush, or any [nice] thing for your own private [eating], shall be given you; it must wing way to that place, where shines a great fortune, the possessor being an old man: delicious apples, and whatever dainties your well-cultivated ground brings forth for you, let ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... I began, haltingly, and could not collect my thoughts. Then we were in the cool woods. It was very still, there being only a faint rustling of leaves and the mellow note of a hermit-thrush. The deep shadows were lightened by shafts of sunshine which, here and there, managed to pierce the canopy of foliage. Somehow, the feeling roused by ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... with a brown and white wing perked on one side of it; no colour, except a soft pink that the cold air had laid on the cheeks with delicate skill. His quick eye noted too, the neat glove, the well-fitting little boot poised on the hearth of the stove. She looked like a little brown thrush about to spread its wings; but she did not fly, she walked over to the delivery and received a package of letters and papers, asking in low, clear tones, "Is the Eastern mail in?" The voice was in keeping with eyes, and ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... it a yet more extraordinary excitement. Her voice, as a mere sound, enchanted him. It rippled and flowed, deepened and tinkled. It cooed and sang to him at times like the soft ringdove calling to its mate, and, at times again, it gurgled and piped like a thrush happy in the sunlight. The infinite variation of her tone astonished and delighted him, and if it could have remained something as dexterous and impersonal as a wind he would have been content to listen to it for ever—but, could he give her ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... having abundance of large scarlet Ixoras in flower, which made it exceptionally gay. I got some very nice insects here, though, owing to illness most of the time, my collection was a small one, and my boy Ali shot me a pair of one of the most beautiful birds of the East, Pitta gigas, a lame ground-thrush, whose plumage of velvety black above is relieved by a breast of pure white, shoulders of azure blue, and belly of vivid crimson. It has very long and strong legs, and hops about with such activity in the dense tangled forest, ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... in the shape of a cloud, the pitch of a thrush's note, the nuance of a sea-shell you would find, had you only insight enough, inductive and deductive cunning enough, not only a meaning, but, I am convinced, a quite endless significance. Undoubtedly, ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... Raven listens in a dreamy stupor to the songs of the thrush and the nightingale and the canary—and shudders when the gaudy-plumaged birds of the distant South sweep by him to the orange groves of Carson. Tell him he wouldn't recognize the d—d country. He should bring his family ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... she was surrounded by great moving masses that must crush her. And there was no escape. Save in the old obliviousness, the cold darkness she strove to retain. But the vicar showed her eggs in the thrush's nest near the back door. She saw herself the mother-thrush upon the nest, and the way her wings were spread, so eager down upon her secret. The tense, eager, nesting wings moved her beyond endurance. She thought of them in the morning, when she heard the thrush whistling as he got up, and ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... London as a fairy tale from a Latin grammar. There had been a slight shower of rain, which had brought out the scent of growing grass and budding leaves; the ground was white with the fallen blossom of blackthorn hedges; and a thrush, seated on the summit of an apple tree, was pouring forth a volume of song that sounded almost like a ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... butterflies which have flown into Fairyland, and there the corn-crake built her nest in the grass. It was a famous corner for bird's-nesting, which with us took no crueller form than liking to part the thick leaves to peep at the pretty, perturbed mother-thrush on her clutch. Sometimes we peeped too often, and she flew away and left the eggs cold. We saw the world from that corner, for one could see through the hedge on to the road by lying low where the roots of the hedge-row made a thinness. ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... conceal her swift decrease. Weak subterfuge! Each mocking day doth fleece A blossom, and lay bare her poverty. Poor middle-agd summer! Vain this show! Whole fields of golden-rod cannot offset One meadow with a single violet; And well the singing thrush and lily know, Spite of all artifice which her regret Can deck in splendid guise, ...
— A Calendar of Sonnets • Helen Hunt Jackson
... mountains and peaks ... most beautiful, of a thousand varied forms, accessible, and full of trees of endless varieties, so tall that they seem to touch the sky; and I have been told that they never lose their foliage. The nightingale [i. e. some kind of thrush] and other small birds of a thousand kinds were singing in the month of November [December] when I was there."[522] Before he had done much toward exploring this paradise, a sudden and grave mishap quite altered his plans. On Christmas morning, between midnight ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... at fault that brook and breeze Sang in their saddest of minor keys? What was it the mournful wood-thrush said? What whispered the pine-trees overhead? Did he hear the Voice on his lonely way That Adam heard ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... are as mid-day to me, When the lily-bell bends with the weight of the bee, And the throat of the thrush is a-pulse in the heat, And the senses are drugged with the subtle and sweet And delirious breaths of the air's lullabies— So I swoon in the noon of her ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... the woods; but I acquired other means of procuring it. Encouraged by the success of my fishing, I made a sort of net from the filaments of the bark of a tree and a plant resembling hemp. With these I succeeded in catching some birds: one, resembling our thrush, was very fat, and of delicious flavour. I had the greatest difficulty in overcoming my repugnance to taking away their life; nothing but the obligation of preserving our own could have reconciled me to it. My children plucked ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... linger. She rode beneath a natural avenue of trees, whose branches met overhead like the arches of a cathedral, and was scarcely conscious of their pleasant shade. She heard neither the song of the wooing thrush, nor the cry of the startled blackbird, nor the evening hymn of the soaring lark. Alike to her was the gorse-covered common, along which they swiftly speeded, and the steep hill-side up which they more swiftly mounted. ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and I suggested that we had better be going back to the hotel. The talk seemed already to have taken us away from all pleasure in the prospect; I said, as we found our way through the rich, balsam-scented twilight of the woods, where one joy-haunted thrush was still singing: "You know that in America the law is careful not to meddle with a man's private affairs, and we don't attempt to ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... see that a horse is unsound, unless he works his flanks like the drone of a bagpipe, or blows and roars like a blacksmith's bellows; while some are so fastidious as to consider a horse as next to valueless because he may have a corn that he never feels, or a thrush for which he is not, nor likely to be, ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... feet in height, with a long tuft of silken and silvery feathers down the back of its neck. Carlos knocked over a beautiful little bird with a chestnut-coloured head, a perfect heron in miniature, but only the size of a thrush. Lejoillie was delighted, and would have hugged us both as ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... beautiful sentiment in human nature? It was, according to him, the sublimest manifestation of filial love—the instinct of affection for the great mother of us all. And then the flowers became our small sisters and brothers; and the dumb look of appeal in a horse's eye, and the singing of a thrush at the break of day—these were but portions of the inarticulate language now no longer known to us. What was any human being to make of this ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... continued to sing, and finally brought its concert to a close by giving a most marvelous imitation of the liquid, silvery chimes of the wood-thrush. ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... MacPhadraick," she said to herself. "It was his race of whom the Bard hath spoken, saying, Fear them not when their words are loud as the winter's wind, but fear them when they fall on you like the sound of the thrush's song. And yet this riddle can be read but one way: My son hath taken the sword to win that, with strength like a man, which churls would keep him from with the words that frighten children." This idea, when once it occurred to her, seemed the more reasonable, that MacPhadraick, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... very tree beneath which the man lay, Chrysostom, the thrush, took up his parable, and preached his morning sermon; and if it had been set to words, they might have ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... woman's face; Her dark eyes moistened with the mists that roll From the gulf-stream of passion in the soul; The other with her hood thrown back, her hair Making a golden glory in the air, Her cheeks suffused with an auroral blush, Her young heart singing louder than the thrush. So walked, that morn, through mingled light and shade, Each by the other's presence lovelier made, Monna Giovanna and her bosom friend, Intent upon ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... myself, while the heavens are watering our fields. Come, wife, cook three measures of beans, adding to them a little wheat, and give us some figs. Syra! call Manes off the fields, 'tis impossible to prune the vine or to align the ridges, for the ground is too wet to-day. Let someone bring me the thrush and those two chaffinches; there were also some curds and four pieces of hare, unless the cat stole them last evening, for I know not what the infernal noise was that I heard in the house. Serve up three of the pieces for me, slave, ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... and claims the eaves That last year were his home; The Robin follows where the plow Breaks up the crusted loam; And Red-wings spies the Thrush and pipes: ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... ye the pines, which rooted i' rocky ground,(17) Brave Euroclydon's onset at evening. Day dawns. The tree, which stood the tallest, Preeminent i' the leafy greenwood, Now lies the lowest. Safely the arbutus, Which bent before him, flourishes, and the sun Wakens the thrush, which slept securely Nestled in its emerald asylum. So, when the war-shout peals i' the noon o' night, Rousing the sleepers fearful, in ecstacy When slaves avenge their wrongs, arising Strong i' the name o' liberty new born, When fury spares not beauty nor innocence, First flame the grandest domes. ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... the mountain slopes were growing bright, and a soft warm colouring flung through all the air from the coming rays of the coming sun. The cat-birds were wide awake and very busy; the song sparrows full of gladness; and now and then, further off, a wood-thrush, less worldly than the one and less unchastened than the other, told of hidden and higher sweets, in tones further removed from Earth than his companions knew. The wild, pure, ethereal notes thrilled like a voice from some clear region where earthly defilement had been overcome, and earthly ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... The thrush was brought, and the two birds poured out their marvels of song together. The king wavered, then his inclination began to settle and strengthen—one could see it in his countenance. Hope budded in the hearts of the old ministers, their pulses began to beat quicker, the scepter began to rise slowly, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... I will fly From this magic, but could not, because that my eye Grew love-idle among the rich blooms; and the earth Held me down with its coolness of touch, and the mirth Of some bird was above me,—who, even in fear, Would startle the thrush? and methought there drew near A form as of AEgle,—but it was not the face Hope made, and I knew the witch-Queen of that place, Even Circe the Cruel, that came like a Death, Which I fear'd, and yet fled not, for want of my breath. There was thought in her ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... where the imperious roar of the forest king once startled the echoes. We have turned the oil and filth of our refineries into the streams that once crept purling and laughing through the wild-flowers and grasses, and the black smoke of our factories has silenced the plaintive note of the thrush and strangled the wondrous song of the nightingale. Our grandeur is ostentation and our dignity a dead-letter. The greatness that once longed for new worlds to conquer has degenerated into yellow-fingered grasping for ginger-bread display. The powerful figure of the pioneer ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... world is ruled by the signs that the trees hang out.' And she asked me what they were, and I told her to notice next spring that as soon as the birch-leaves opened, the pheasant began to crow and the thrush to sing and the blackbird to whistle; and when the oak-leaves looked their reddest, and not a day before, the whole tribe of ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... lawns, and innocent floods, 970 Ripe fruits, and lonely couch, contentment gave; But ever since I heedlessly did lave In thy deceitful stream, a panting glow Grew strong within me: wherefore serve me so, And call it love? Alas, 'twas cruelty. Not once more did I close my happy eyes Amid the thrush's song. Away! Avaunt! O 'twas a cruel thing."—"Now thou dost taunt So softly, Arethusa, that I think If thou wast playing on my shady brink, 980 Thou wouldst bathe once again. Innocent maid! Stifle thine heart no ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... disquietude. The country which we visit at week-ends was really a home to it, and the graver sides of life, the deaths, the partings, the yearnings for love, have their deepest expression in the heart of the fields. All was not sadness. The sun was shining without. The thrush sang his two syllables on the budding guelder-rose. Some children were playing uproariously in heaps of golden straw. It was the presence of sadness at all that surprised Margaret, and ended by giving her a feeling of completeness. ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... not the bird the original type and teacher of the poet, and do we not demand of the human lark or thrush that he "shake out his carols" in the same free and spontaneous manner as his winged prototype? Kingsley has shown how surely the old minnesingers and early ballad-writers have learned of the birds, taking their key- note from the blackbird, or the wood-lark, or the throstle, and giving utterance ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... days, for ever fled, When wand'ring wild, as fancy led, I ranged the bushy bosom'd glen, The scroggie shaw, the rugged linn, And mark'd each blooming hawthorn bush, Where nestling sat the speckled thrush; Or, careless roaming, wander'd on Among the braes ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... approached the Cantonment, I discharged my unloaded barrel at a bird like a thrush in appearance, called a Wattle-bird, from having two little wattles which project from either side ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... Blackbird, Cuckoo, Thrush, Or any bird in song; And common leaves that hum all day, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... suburban street is merely a disturber of the peace, and I know of nothing more forlorn than the singing of a caged bird in, let us say, Tottenham Court Road. Wordsworth's Poor Susan found a note of enchantment in the song of the thrush that sang at the corner of Wood Street, off Cheapside. But it was only an enchantment that passed into deeper sadness as the vision of the green pastures which it summoned up faded into ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... and puffy, not unlike a toad, moved about under the gorse of the garden hedge one morning, half hidden by the stalks of old grasses. By-and-by it hopped out—the last thrush, so distended with puffed feathers against the frost as to be almost shapeless. He searched about hopelessly round the stones and in the nooks, all hard and frostbound; there was the shell of a snail, dry and whitened and empty, as was ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... storm,—I hush my griefs to rest in tracing the picture of past delights. Yes, memory comes to my relief; I build again in the casket of the mind my sylvan hut, careless and full of youthful fancies. I am again seated in the depths of my native woods, speaking to the light-hearted thrush, and whistling to ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... not be made with too much sugar, else its medicinal-virtues will be impaired. A teaspoonful of this jelly may be given three or four times in the day to a child with thrush. In Russia the leaves of the black Currant are employed to fabricate brandy made with a coarse spirit. These leaves and the fruit are often combined by our herbalists with the seeds of the wild carrot for stimulating the kidneys in passive dropsy. A medicinal wine is also ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... Quantock did not answer, but cocked her head sideways in the direction of the pear-tree where a thrush was singing. It fluted a couple of repeated phrases and then was ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... in the heart of earth where the springs rise, Down with the sweet linnaea and the moss, In the brown thrush's throat, where the pines toss In Winter's harrying storms her secret lies. Ours the chill night-dews and the waiting pain Ere we her fairy wealth may ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... prairie, and they did not at once reveal themselves, but stood a little way back listening to her. She had ceased her song, and was gazing beyond intently. On the naked limb of a desolate, thunder-riven tree that stood apart from its lush, green-boughed neighbours, sat a thrush in a most melancholy attitude. Every few seconds he would utter a note of song, sometimes low and sorrowful, then in a louder key, and more plaintive, as if he were calling for some responsive voice from far ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... going off by himself in search of the "smiddy." Indeed he began to suspect that the worthy hermit was deceiving him, and was only fully convinced at last when he saw one of the birds. It was pure white, about the size of a thrush, and had a curious horn or fleshy ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... master or mistress at a single call from Melody. She could imitate every bird-call with her wonderful voice; and one day she had come home and told Miss Rejoice quietly that she had been making a concert with a wood-thrush, and that the red squirrels had sat on the branches to listen. Miss Vesta said, "Nonsense, child! you fell asleep, and had a pretty dream." But Miss Rejoice believed every word, and Melody knew she did by the touch of her ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards
... of Finland, and to provide himself with a good sword. So he set off in another direction, and lost himself in the woods, and had to pass the night on the wet grass under a fir-tree, which he did not at all relish. Next morning he started off again early, and a thrush sang to him, and directed him to turn to the west. He sprang forward with renewed energy and soon found himself in the open country, where he encountered an old woman,[45] who gave him minute instructions for finding his way to the smithy, which was three days' journey off. ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... from thy nest, Robin-redbreast! Sing, birds, in every furrow; And from each hill, let music shrill Give my fair Love good-morrow! Blackbird and thrush in every bush, Stare, linnet, and cock-sparrow! You pretty elves, amongst yourselves Sing my fair Love good-morrow; To give my Love good-morrow Sing birds, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... called upon a wealthy young lady by the name of Silsby, who had the eyes of a gazelle, but "when I mentioned subscription it seemed to fall on her ears, not as the cadence of the wood thrush, or of the mocking bird does on mine, but as a shower ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... somewhere out of sight, Works at his saw with all his tiny might. I do not count the ring-doves or the rooks, We hear so much about them in the books They're hardly real; but from where I sit I see two chaffinches, a long-tailed tit, A missel-thrush, a yaffle—— ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... morn; I felt the warmth through every fibre float; I thought I heard a thrush's piping note, Of hope ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... tender side, Though for the narrow perch I cannot ride, Yet I have such a solace in my mind, That all my boding cares are cast behind; And even already I forget my dream. He said, and downward flew from off the beam; For daylight now began apace to spring, The thrush to whistle, and the lark to sing; Then, crowing, clapp'd his wings, the appointed call, To chuck his wives together in ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... beauty of it!" she answered. "Your song left your soul as the thrush's leaves his throat. Should we prize the thrush's more if we came upon ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... when I repeat it. You lose the sweet shyness of her face, the appeal in her eyes not yet dry, and that soft minor chord in her voice that reminds me now of a wood-thrush. ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... rifle-pits with delicate flowers, and wraps the splintered tree-trunks with her fluent drapery of tendrils. Soon the whole sharp outline of the spot is lost in unremembering grass. Where the deadly rifle-ball whistled through the foliage, the robin or the thrush pipes its tremulous note; and where the menacing shell described its curve through the air, a harmless crow flies in circles. Season after season the gentle work goes on, healing the wounds and rents made by the merciless enginery ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... so mild here that the Thrush sings a little, and my Anemones seem preparing to put forth a blossom as well as a leaf. Yesterday I was sitting on a stile by our ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... room and chance in her for a brave man to earn his bread, if he will but go right on about his business, as the birds and the flowers do, instead of peaking and pining over what people think of him, like that miserable Briggs. Hark to that jolly old missel-thrush below! he's had his nest to build, and his supper to earn, and his young ones to feed, and all the crows and kites in the wood to drive away, the sturdy John Bull that he is; and yet he can find time to sing as merrily as an abbot, morning and evening, since he sang the new year in ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... the teepee were brought —the blankets, and beads of the White men, And Winona, the orphaned, was bought by the crafty relentless Tamdoka. In the Spring-time of life, in the flush of the gladsome mid-May days of Summer, When the bobolink sang and the thrush, and the red robin chirped in the branches, To the tent of the brave must she go; she must kindle the fire in his tepee; She must sit in the lodge of her foe, as a slave at the feet of her master. Alas ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... May follows, And the white-throat builds, and all the swallows! 10 Hark I where my blossomed pear tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray's edge— That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture! And though the fields look rough with hoary dew, All will be gay when noontide wakes anew The buttercups, ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... prevalent in all quarters. Both of us were suffering; also Mr. and Mrs. Petherick, and many of my men, one of whom died. My animals were all healthy, but the donkeys and camels were attacked by a bird, about the size of a thrush, which caused them great uneasiness. This bird is of a greenish-brown colour, with a powerful red beak, and excessively strong claws. It is a perfect pest to the animals, and positively eats them into holes. The original object of the bird in settling ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... over the porch. It had lattice windows, which opened like doors, and all round the sill, and up the sides, and over the top of the window, monthly roses and jasmine, wistaria and magnolia, climbed. A thrush had built its nest in the honeysuckle over the porch window, and there was a faint sweet twittering sound heard there now, mingled with the perfume of the roses and jasmine. The room inside was all white, but daintily relieved here and there with touches ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... catch a bird that I saw hovering over the water, and every now and then darting down into it! It was all over a mixture of the most beautiful green and blue, with some orange color. It was somewhat less than a thrush, and had a large head and bill, and ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... among the trees. The mountain villages were celebrating the Easter festival with candle-lit processions and with singing. The words of the Easter song floated across the blue spaces. "The Royal Banners forward go," came the faint chant, and, mingling with the vesper song of thrush and nightingale, lulled the tired travellers ...
— The Italian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... the opposite direction. I travelled more quickly than usual, the evening was calm and still, twilight fell over the wood. At a jutting point of the bank I seemed to hear an unusual sound, and held my breath to listen. But the wood was still sad and dreary. "Perhaps it was a warbler or a thrush," I thought, and walked on. A little later I pulled up again. This time I heard quite plainly a man's voice and the low of a cow. I quickly pulled on my wet boots and rushed into the wood. A flock of sheep watched by its shepherd was feeding on an open glade among the trees. The man seemed petrified ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... began to disclose to the fond deceiving breeze, with many a glimpse to attract a glance, all the cream of their summer intentions. And in full enjoyment of all these doings, the poet of the whole stood singing—the simple-minded thrush, proclaiming that the world was good and kind, but himself perhaps the kindest, and his nest, beyond doubt, the best ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... sun-light, the shadows of the birch-leaves were stirred on the ground; the ferns—Nest could have believed that they were the very same ferns which she had seen thirty years before, hung wet and dripping where the water overflowed—a thrush chanted matins from a holly bush near—and the running stream made a low, soft, sweet accompaniment. All was the same; Nature was as fresh and young as ever. It might have been yesterday that Edward Williams had overtaken her, and told her his love—the thought ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... of our British birds, the sole speaker occasionally drops into English, or I should never have understood what was going on. He may be a blackbird or thrush, but I doubt it, because I know all their remarks, while his are new to me. If A.A.M. heard them he would probably tell me they were those of a "Blackman's Warbler," and I should have believed him—once. Hardly now, after he has so airily exposed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... The male and female seemed to have very different plumage, especially about the head; that on the one having the varying tint of the Rifle bird, the head of the other more resembling in colour, that of the DACELO GIGANTEUS. They were about the size of a thrush, and seemed the sole residents of that particular spot, and I had not seen them elsewhere. The carts came slowly forward, the horses being much distressed. I continued to ride some miles ahead, and passed through a scrub in a clay hollow, to which ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... exactly at their appointed times; we like everything to be usual, orderly, punctual, methodical, to a hair's breadth, to a minute. It distresses and upsets us if it is not so. For instance, to take a very trifling matter, a thrush has built its nest year after year in the catkin-tree on the lawn; this year, for no obvious reason, it is building in the ivy on the garden wall. We have said very little about it, but I think we both feel that the change is unnecessary, and ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... am dead, I'd love to see An amber thrush hop over me And bend his ear, as he would know What I am whispering down below. May many a song-bird find his bread Upon my grave when ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... had fallen during the night, and each tiny grass-blade glistened in the sun, bending under the weight of its liquid diamond. The birds were improvising a miniature symphony in the birches at the end of the garden; the song-thrush warbled with a sweet melancholy his long-drawn contralto notes; the lark, like a prima donna, hovering conspicuously in mid air, poured forth her joyous soprano solo; and the robin, quite unmindful ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... day, an English May day; the grass, green beyond all ordinary greenness, the fragrant hawthorn hedges scenting the air, the thrush and the linnet singing in the trees, cowslips and daisies dotting the sward. A fresh, cool breeze swept over the uplands, and brought a faint trace of life and color ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... Every June morning when you go out to the field, Oriole and Blackbird and Bobolink will fly after you and make the day more delightful to you; and when you go home tired at sundown, Vesper Sparrow will tell you how grateful we are. When you sit on your porch after dark, Fife Bird and Hermit Thrush and Wood Thrush will sing to you; and even Whip-poor-will will cheer up a little. We know where we are safe. In a little while all the birds will come to live in Massachusetts again, and everybody who loves music will like to make ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... if some anxious housekeeper upon the hill above were afraid that things were not stirring fast enough,—and then again the waving and sinuous lines of water are quieted to a serener flow. The delicious red-thrush and the busy little yellow-throat are not yet come to this their summer haunt; but all day long the answering field-sparrows trill out their sweet, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... been watering and mowing and rolling it for over a century. In the turf were many flower-beds, and here and there were forest trees which had been there when the district was fields. Country birds came and built there year after year. You might hear the thrush begin about January. And in the spring it was a wilderness of sweet hyacinths and daffodils, lilac and may. The rooms were spacious and splendid within the big cream-coloured house; and the General used to say that in the early morning, ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... the soft voice, for gray mist was descending, Slow rose the bard and retired from the hill, The blackbird's mild notes with the thrush's were blending, Oft scream'd the plover her wild notes and shrill, Yet still from the hoary bard, Methought the sweet song I heard, Mix'd with instruction and blended with woe; And oft as I pass along, Chimes in mine ear his song, "Life's like the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... came, a calm evening of late July, the dusk upon the lawn, and most of the house-party already gone upstairs to dress for dinner. I had been standing beside the open window for some considerable time, motionless, and listening idly to the singing of a thrush or blackbird in the shrubberies—when I heard the faint twanging of the harp-strings in the room behind me, and turning, saw that Marion had entered and was there beside the instrument. At the same moment she saw me, rose from the harp and came ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... beautiful as spring— When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... criterions, we will notice another that seldom deceives us. The approach of a sleety snow-storm, following a deceitful gleam in spring, is always announced to us by the loud untuneful voice of the missel-thrush (turdus viscivorus) as it takes its stand on some tall tree, like an enchanter calling up the gale. It seems to have no song, no voice, but this harsh predictive note; and it in great measure ceases with the storms ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... to snuff That promised feast. They rode through golden furze So high the horsemen only were descried; And glades whose centuried oaks their branches laid O'er violet banks; and fruit trees, some snow-veiled Like bridesmaid, others like the bride herself Behind her white veil blushing. Glad, the thrush Carolled; more glad, the wood-dove moaned; close by A warbling runnel led them to the bay: Two chestnuts stood beside it snowy-coned: The banquet lay beneath them. Feasting o'er, The song succeeded. Boastful was the strain, Each ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... for me, to look up through the apple-blossoms and the fluttering leaves, and to see God's love there; to listen to the thrush that has built his nest among them, and to feel God's love, who cares for the birds, in every note that swells his little throat; to look beyond to the bright blue depths of the sky, and feel they are a ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... grouped themselves about him, delighted to listen. Many an hour of summer evening had they thus spent, none more peaceful than the present. The reader's cadenced voice blended with the song of a thrush. ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... were blooming as of old, the Avon wound its serpentine course to the sea, the song of the ploughman and shepherd swelled from the vale, the lowing of cattle, strolling homeward for the night echoed among the hills, the blackbird, thrush and vagrant crow sang and croaked as they hastened with their mates to their feathered families, and the daisies, wild roses, hedge rows, hawthorn bushes, and grand old elms and oaks bloomed in their everlasting ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... wonderful; for these old, seaside, eastern counties churches, relics of long past wealth and piety, are some of them among the most beautiful in the world. Then came the "Venite," of which here and there she sang a line or so, just one or two rich notes like those that a thrush utters before he bursts into full song. Rare as they might be, however, they caused those about her in the church to look at the strange ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... settled at last, and in another week I shall have left Thrush Hill. I am a little bit sorry and a great bit glad. I am going to Montreal to ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Timothy Turtle, who was not pleased when Bobby Bobolink moved to Cedar Swamp at haying time. But this was a very different sort of person. It was Jolly Robin's cousin, Mr. Hermit Thrush. Everybody called him "the Hermit" for short, because he was a quiet gentleman, who did not like to attract attention, but preferred to spend his time in a thicket on the edge of the swamp. He had a beautiful, sweet song, which he sang in a calm, ...
— The Tale of Bobby Bobolink - Tuck-me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... in veil on veil of evening The hills across from Cromwell grow dreamy and far; A wood-thrush is singing soft as a viol In the heart of the hollow where the dark pools are; The primrose has opened her pale yellow flowers And heaven is lighting ...
— Flame and Shadow • Sara Teasdale
... find out," said the judge, sipping his already cold tea from the cup, "how they manage to sing so well. I had a splendid thrush two years ago. Well, all of a sudden he was completely done for, and began to sing, God knows what! He got worse and worse and worse and worse as time went on; he began to rattle and get hoarse—just good for nothing! And this is how it happened: a little lump, not so big ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... finger All things near, Left a dewdrop on each blossom Like a tear Sing! merry thrush, on high To the breaking ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... about four or five feet, their branches mingling together and making a perfect shade. As the twilight began to fall, I sat down on the mossy instep of a spruce. Not a bush or tree was moving; every leaf seemed hushed in brooding repose. One bird, a thrush, embroidered the silence with cheery notes, making the solitude familiar and sweet, while the solemn monotone of the stream sifting through the woods seemed like the very voice of God, humanized, terrestrialized, and entering one's heart as to a home prepared for it. Go where ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... feed the critter some soothin' syrup?" jeers a villager. Emma reads the message of the hermit thrush. On the way to the "Big Woods." Trouble is threatened at Bisbee's Corners. The ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... the town is a charming scene, which I will attempt to describe. You have seen a rural hamlet, where each cottage is half concealed by its own garden. Now convert your linden into graceful palm, your apples into oranges, your gooseberry-bushes into bananas, your thrush which sings in its wicker cage into a gray parrot whistling on a rail; ... sprinkle this with strange and powerful perfumes; place in the west a sun flaming among golden clouds in a prussian-blue sea, dotted ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... doors of mudcracked houses If there were water And no rock If there were rock And also water And water 350 A spring A pool among the rock If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada And dry grass singing But sound of water over a rock Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But there is ...
— The Waste Land • T. S. Eliot
... down to us, for the reason that she was too great, too elusive in spirit, for any snapshot artist to attempt her. She never looked twice the same. In feature she was commonplace, her form lacked the classic touch, and her raiment was as plain as the plumage of a brown thrush in an autumn hedgerow. She was as homely as George Eliot, Mary Wollstonecraft, Rosa Bonheur, George Sand, or Madame De Stael. No two of the women named looked alike, but I once saw a composite photograph of their portraits and the picture sent ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... the sunlit orchard. In an apple tree a thrush was singing; the gooseberries were over-ripe; beetroots were ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... the voice with which they have been endowed, but they know that it is offensive, and are at pains to make it better; others (such as the peacock or the elephant) also know that their cry is unpleasant. They therefore use it sparingly. Others again, the dove, the nightingale, the thrush, know that their voices are very pleasant, and entertain us with them all day and all night long; but They know that Their voices are the most hideous of all the sounds in the world, and, knowing this, They perpetually insist upon thrusting those voices upon us, saying, as it were, ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... of very favourable repute in these regions met together one evening—a Thrush, a Lark, and a Nightingale. And all for what purpose, think you? It was a queer one—to hold a solemn conference about ...
— The Story of a Dewdrop • J. R. Macduff
... intellect in birds than people suppose. An instance of that occurred the other day, at a slate quarry belonging to a friend, from whom I have the narrative. A thrush, not aware of the expansive properties of gunpowder, thought proper to build her nest on a ridge of the quarry, in the very centre of which they were constantly blasting the rock. At first she was very much discomposed by the fragments flying in all directions, but still ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... A thrush hopped across the lawn, and paused to regard him with one bright eye. Apparently reassured, it deftly secured and ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... he is in constant attendance in the vicinity of the nest; he guards, feeds and sings to the female, and sometimes shares with her the duty of incubation. This is done by the male wood-pigeon, missel-thrush, blue martin, the buzzard, stone-curlew, curlew, dottrel, the sandpiper, common gull, black-coated gull, kittiwake, razorbill, puffin, storm-petrel, the great blue heron and the black vulture. Among these birds it is usual for the family duties to be performed quite irrespective of ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... he had chosen to rest under was a mighty elm, whose broad branches, thick with leaves, formed a deep green canopy through which the sunbeams filtered in flecks and darts of gold. A constant twittering of birds resounded within this dome of foliage, and a thrush whistled melodious phrases from one of the highest boughs. At his feet was spread a carpet of long soft moss, interspersed with wild thyme and groups of delicate harebells, and the rippling of a tiny ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... been invented and patented, all professing to be exactly what is wanted to relieve and cure diseased feet of all kinds. One man has a shoe he calls "concave," and says it will cure contraction, corns, thrush, quarter-crack, toe-crack, &c., &c. But when you come to examine it closely, you will find it nothing more than a nicely dressed piece of iron, made almost in the shape of a half moon. After a fair trial, however, it will be found of ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley
... thither, through the sky, turtle-doves and linnets, fly! Blackbird, thrush, and chaffinch gay, hither, thither, haste away! One and all, come, help me quick! haste ye, ...
— Grimm's Fairy Stories • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... a dozen yards, it gives vent to a louder call, so as to inform its companions that it is moving. This sound seems to induce others to follow its lead. This is especially noticeable in the case of the white-throated laughing-thrush. I have seen one of these birds fly to a branch in a tree, uttering its curious call, and then hop on to another branch in the same tree. Scarcely has it left the first branch when a second laughing-thrush flies to it; then a fourth, a fifth, ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... finer pleasure in a single day, and at a cheaper rate, than they in a month of days; but I never told them so, for they would not have understood me. The ear that hungers for the raucous strains of cockney Pierrots on a beach cannot attune itself to the notes of the morning thrush. ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... said that he knew two tunes, one was "God save the Queen," and the other was not. And yet to-day I have as good a heart for singing as ever had any of the most famous songsters. In tune, out of tune, I must lift up my voice. It is as urgent a need for me as for any mellow thrush. For my heart—oh, rare case!—is fuller of joy than it can hold. It brims over. Roger is coming back. It is February, and he has been away nearly seven months. All minor evils and anxieties—Bobby's departure for ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... offers, and upon which the eye of the traveller ordinarily delights to linger. She rode beneath a natural avenue of trees, whose branches met overhead like the arches of a cathedral, and was scarcely conscious of their pleasant shade. She heard neither the song of the wooing thrush, nor the cry of the startled blackbird, nor the evening hymn of the soaring lark. Alike to her was the gorse-covered common, along which they swiftly speeded, and the steep hill-side up which they more swiftly mounted. She breathed not the delicious fragrance of the new-mown hay, nor listened ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... ones being gutta-percha, rattans, and bilian wood. A curious article of export, which is found only in this river, is the Galega, or Bezoar stone. This is a perfectly hard light green substance, very much the size and shape of a thrush's egg, which is found in the interior of a peculiar species of monkey inhabiting Rejang. The Bezoar stone, which is supposed to be caused by disease in the animal, takes a beautiful polish, and is used as a charm by the Malays, but the majority are ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... all bedight With buttercups and daisies; Oh, how I long to quit the throng Of human forms and faces: The vain delights, the empty shows, The toil and care bewild'rin', To feel once more the sweet repose Calm Nature gives her children. At times the thrush shall sing, and hush The twitt'ring yellow-hammer; The blackbird fluster from the bush With panic-stricken clamour; The finch in thistles hide from sight, And snap the seeds and toss 'em; The blue-tit hop, with pert delight, About the crab-tree blossom; The homely robin shall draw near, ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... and inside the cheeks like little white threads or flakes. It is also called thrush. In bad cases it may cover the tongue and the whole of ...
— The Care and Feeding of Children - A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children's Nurses • L. Emmett Holt
... morning in the third week of Strand's stay at the Parsonage. A heavy dew had fallen during the night, and each tiny grass-blade glistened in the sun, bending under the weight of its liquid diamond. The birds were improvising a miniature symphony in the birches at the end of the garden; the song-thrush warbled with a sweet melancholy his long-drawn contralto notes; the lark, like a prima donna, hovering conspicuously in mid air, poured forth her joyous soprano solo; and the robin, quite unmindful of the tempo, filled out the pauses with ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of her motions, and the way the colour melted in her cheek, as I would dwell upon the fairest picture; and I listened to her voice because it was sweeter than my violin, or even the note of the hermit-thrush. But slowly I became aware of a change; and instead of merely the pleasure of eye and ear, and the warmth at the heart that comes from true kindliness and friendship, there would fall a trembling on me when she came or went, and a sense of the room being empty when she was not in it. When ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... the birds many fine, rich meals. This comparatively feeble insect has been allowed by the throngs of birds to spread over the whole continent. A naturalist in one of the Western States had examined several species of the thrush, and found they had eaten mostly that class of ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... heart was filled with an insatiable desire to know more and more of the beautiful world about her. She gathered knowledge from every country walk; she showed so much "uncommon sense," David Eby said, that it was a keen pleasure to show her the nests of the thrush or the rare nests of the humming-bird. David and his mother, enthusiastic seekers after nature knowledge, augmented the father's nature education of Phoebe by frequent walks to field and woods. And so, when Phoebe was twelve years old she knew the haunts of ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... range of tints, so varied, so subdued, and so beautiful,—whether of pure white, like the Martin's, or pure green, like the Robin's, or dotted and mottled into the loveliest of browns, like the Red Thrush's, or aqua-marine, with stains of moss-agate, like the Chipping-Sparrow's, or blotched with long weird ink-marks on a pale ground, like the Oriole's, as if it bore inscribed some magic clue to the bird's darting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... myself are charged with so many commissions, that they are crowding together like old women at the door of the mosque, who have lost their shoes. First, at your desire, I have been to Khounzakh. I crept along so softly, that I did not scare a single thrush by the road. Sultan Akhmet Khan is well, and at home. He asked about you with great anxiety, shook his head, and enquired if you did not want a spindle to dry the silk of Derbend. The khansha sends ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... The wild thrush lifts a note of mirth; The bronzewing pigeons call and coo Beside their nests the long day through; The magpie warbles clear and strong A joyous, glad, thanksgiving song, For all God's ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... she said; "and they really are inex-o- rable. They threw away my snail shell that a thrush had been eating, though I begged ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a hundred human significances? "The song of the bobolink," he says, "expresses hilarity; the sparrow sings faith, the bluebird love, the catbirds pride, the white-eyed fly-catchers self-consciousness, that of the hermit thrush spiritual serenity, while there is something military in the call of the robin." Mr. Burroughs has been compared with Thoreau, but he seems closer to White of Selborne, whom he has commemorated in one of his most charming essays. Like White, he ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... another, besides Timothy Turtle, who was not pleased when Bobby Bobolink moved to Cedar Swamp at haying time. But this was a very different sort of person. It was Jolly Robin's cousin, Mr. Hermit Thrush. Everybody called him "the Hermit" for short, because he was a quiet gentleman, who did not like to attract attention, but preferred to spend his time in a thicket on the edge of the swamp. He had a beautiful, sweet song, which he sang in a calm, ...
— The Tale of Bobby Bobolink - Tuck-me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... its own. The trees seem to whisper to each other in the rustling of their leaves. The birds, awakened by the wind or by the breaking of a twig, speak to their neighbors. The peevish catbird and the blue jay grumble, while the thrush, the dove, and the redbird peep caressingly to their mates, and again fall asleep with gurgles of ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... are the treasures Nature strews With lavish hand around; My precious gems are sparkling dews, My wealth the verdant ground. Mine are the songs that freely gush From hedge, and bush, and tree; The soaring lark and speckled thrush Discourse ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... exactly in its accustomed place; we like things to happen exactly at their appointed times; we like everything to be usual, orderly, punctual, methodical, to a hair's breadth, to a minute. It distresses and upsets us if it is not so. For instance, to take a very trifling matter, a thrush has built its nest year after year in the catkin-tree on the lawn; this year, for no obvious reason, it is building in the ivy on the garden wall. We have said very little about it, but I think we both feel that the change is unnecessary, and just a ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... hidden in mist and equally bored at the foot of the long slope of the Ettersberg, looking like any other little country town in the rain—comfortless and desolate'. In the midst of the loneliness and the spring rain, sounded now and then the note of a thrush, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... shapely head with its soft, but roughened hair, upon his breast. Sometimes he would row across the lake and they would walk side by side along the bank, and screened by the trees in which the linnet and the thrush sang the songs which make a lover's litany; at others—and these were the sweetest meeting of all, for they came in the soft and stilly night when all nature was hushed as if under the spell of the one great passion—he would ride or ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... call, and far off its mate sent back the echo. On sun-splashed mornings the thrush came, and in the moonlight the nightingale sang to ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... the window of the cottage. The sweet wild note of the mocking-bird was awakened in its turn; and from the depths of the tangled woods, where it might defy the human eye and hand, it sent forth its strain, shrill as the thrush, more various than the nightingale, and sweeter than the canary. But for the bird, the Spanish painter, Azua, would have supposed that all this music was the method of reception of the family by the peasantry; but, on expressing his surprise ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... hour, at a place called The Seven Springs, high up in a green valley of the Cotswold hills. Close beside the road, seven clear rills ripple out into a small pool, and the air is musical with the sound of running water. Above me, in a little thicket, a full-fed thrush sent out one long-drawn cadence after another, in the joy of his heart, while the lengthening shadows of bush and tree crept softly over the pale sward of the old pasture-lands, in the westering light ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... this subject. "Then birds' nests be it." A long and animated conversation ensued: the bird-nesting of his boyhood, the blackbird's nest which his father had held him up in his arms to look at when a child at Wylam, the hedges in which he had found the thrush's and the linnet's nests, the mossy bank where the robin built, the cleft in the branch of the young tree where the chaffinch had reared its dwelling—all rose up clear in his mind's eye, and led him back to the scenes of his ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... wavelets and ripples, rising and running and intersecting each other at all angles, forming an intricate pattern, as it were, a network of sweetest melody. Loud and close at hand were heard the lusty notes of thrush and blackbird, chaffinch and blackcap; and from these there was a gradation of sounds, down to the faint lispings of the more tender melodists singing at a distance, reaching the sense like voices mysterious and spiritualised from some ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... the cherry-tree, Where my marauder thrush was singing, Peered at the bee-hives curiously, And narrowly escaped a stinging; And then—you see, I watched—you passed Down the espalier walk that reaches Out to the western wall, and last, Dropped on ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... father's and sister's reception of her.... 'A stare or two at Fanny was all the voluntary notice that her brother bestowed, but he made no objection to her kissing him, though still entirely engaged in detailing further particulars of the "Thrush's" going out of harbour, in which he had a strong right of interest, being about to commence his career of seamanship in her at this very time. After the mother and daughter have received her, Fanny's seafaring father comes in, and does not notice her at first in his ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... come," said the other girl. "I was having a concert all by myself. I can imitate the thrush, the blackbird, and most of the birds round here. Shall I do the thrush ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... tribe among the branches of the trees, some with pleasant trilling voices, and others uttering harsh, shrill, unfamiliar cries. The variety of birds was a very marked feature of this tropical region. The keen voice of the Ceylon thrush rang in our ears like the scream of a young child. Many other smaller birds were seen in rainbow feathers; and a sparrow, like his English brother, except that the Ceylon species ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... well as any other. The world seemed full of young life. There were calves tethered in pleasant shady spots, and puppies and kittens adventuring from the doorways. The trees were full of birds: bobolinks, and cat-birds, and yellow-hammers, and golden robins, and sometimes a thrush, for the afternoon was wearing late. We passed the spring which once marked the boundary where three towns met,—Berwick, York, and Wells,—a famous spot in the early settlement of the country, but many of its old traditions ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... I write the air is balmy and the skies are blue, it is agonising to feel that our own spring rhubarb is growing crimson only to be toyed with by alien lips, and that the thrush on our pear-tree bough——But no, I am wrong; the pear-tree bough is in the garden of No. 9; it is only the trunk that stands in the garden of No. 10. That, by the way, is an accident that frequently occurs to estate-owners. Consider critically for a moment those well-known lines in which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... And as again the memory of her yesternight's kindness rose before him, his smile broadened; it became a laugh that went ringing down the glade, scaring a noisy thrush into silence and sending it flying in affright across the scintillant waters of the brook. Then that hearty laugh broke sharply off, as, behind him, the sweetest voice in all the world demanded the reason of ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... the shape of a cloud, the pitch of a thrush's note, the nuance of a sea-shell you would find, had you only insight enough, inductive and deductive cunning enough, not only a meaning, but, I am convinced, a quite endless significance. Undoubtedly, in a human ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... whispering voice of Spring, The thrush's trill, the cat-bird's cry, Like some poor bird with prisoned wing That sits and sings, but longs ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Saxe-Gotha as the Pictor foreshadows Lippi and Del Sarto. But if he did not as yet explore the ways of the musical soul, he shows already a peculiar instinct for the poetic uses and capabilities of music. He sings with peculiar entrain of the transforming magic of song. The thrush and cuckoo, among the throng of singing-birds, attract him by their musicianly qualities—the "careless rapture" repeated, the "minor third" which only the cuckoo knows. These Lyrics and Romances of 1842-45 are as full of tributes to the power of music as L'Allegro ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... class of poems it may be as well to observe, that among the Miscellaneous Sonnets are a few alluding to morning impressions, which might be read with mutual benefit in connection with these Evening Voluntaries. See for example that one on Westminster Bridge, that on May 2d, on the song of the Thrush, and the one beginning 'While ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... fragrant wreaths drooped till they touched the heads of all who entered. When Mrs. Murray and Edna ascended the steps and knocked at the open door, bearing the name "Allan Hammond," no living thing was visible, save a thrush that looked out shyly from the clematis vines; and after waiting a moment, Mrs. Murray entered unannounced. They looked into the parlor, with its cool matting and white curtains and polished old-fashioned mahogany furniture, but the room was unoccupied; then passing ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... same direction that Peggy had taken. Margaret had been in the oak woods several times with Peggy, and thought she might very likely find her there; but no one answered her call; only the trees rustled, and the hermit-thrush called in answer, deep in some thicket far away. Presently, as they walked, there shot through the dark oak branches a sunny gleam, a flash of green and gold. They pressed forward, and in another moment stood on the edge of the quaking bog. But ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... the theatre of nature," Arnold replied. "If you close your eyes and listen, you can hear the orchestra. There is a lark singing above my head, and a thrush somewhere ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in the garden, and one robin. I loved the robin best of all. His song was not so beautiful as the blackbird's or so mellow as the thrush's; but they hid and ran away from me, whilst the robin sought me out and stayed with me and sang me, all to myself, a little, tiny, gentle song of which I never grew tired. If I stayed quite still, he came so close he almost touched me; ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... dressing them is to stuff them into a roll, scooped of it's crum; to baste them well with butter, and roast them, until they are brown and crisp. The ortolans are kept in cages, and crammed, until they die of fat, then eaten as dainties. The thrush is presented with the trail, because the bird feeds on olives. They may as well eat the trail of a sheep, because it feeds on the aromatic herbs of the mountain. In the summer, we have beef, veal, and mutton, chicken, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... some cry—a workman's whistle perhaps—high in mid-air. Now, among the trees, it was the thrush trilling out into the warm air a flutter of jubilation, but fear seemed to spur him, Fanny thought; as if he too were anxious with such joy at his heart—as if he were watched as he sang, and pressed by tumult to sing. There! ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... so long, my sugar-morsel? How I laughed when Master Hansen, whom my old, silly, sour cousin of Wolgast sent with thee, came in lately into my workshop, and told me he had brought thee hither in a ducal coach! I ran directly to the courtyard; but when the knave opened the door, my little thrush had flown. Where hast thou ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... that should be taken on his message, or commented with pious exclamations on the mercy of the Lord in thus raising up for them protectors even in the wilderness. Meanwhile a chipmunk flitted along the bole of a fallen tree, a thrush chirped in the brake, a deer, passing airy-footed across an opening in the forest, looked an instant and then turned and plunged fleetly away amid the boughs, and a lean-bellied wolf, prospecting for himself and his friends, stuck his sinister snout ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... the Spring will no more linger, but come with joyous shout, With music in the city squares and laughter down the lane; The thrush will pipe at twilight to draw the blossoms out, And the vanguard of the summer host will ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts
... began, haltingly, and could not collect my thoughts. Then we were in the cool woods. It was very still, there being only a faint rustling of leaves and the mellow note of a hermit-thrush. The deep shadows were lightened by shafts of sunshine which, here and there, managed to pierce the canopy of foliage. Somehow, the feeling roused by these things loosened ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... 'Yesterday I went at twilight to the flowery meadows. There I heard a thrush singing, and I asked him, "Tell me, pretty song-bird, how shall I live most happily, as a maiden in my father's home or as a wife by my husband's side?" And the bird sang in reply, "The summer days are bright and warm, and so is a maiden's freedom; the winter is cold and ...
— Finnish Legends for English Children • R. Eivind
... and pleasant, to teach them to love and to treat tenderly all living things—to observe the little black-eyed squirrel without disturbing him while he cracked his nuts; to watch the mistle-thrush's nest till the timid bird had learned to sit there fearlessly, and not scurry away at their approach; and to visit the haunts of the moorhen without causing any consternation to her or her little black ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... train died away in the distance, and then, such was their utter stillness, from the thorn-bush close to them a thrush suddenly thrilled into song. The soft notes fell balmlike into that awful silence and turned it into ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... touched with fairy finger All things near, Left a dewdrop on each blossom Like a tear Sing! merry thrush, on high To ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... anthology, he will seem to himself to be walking among tombs. Upon each page might be suitably inscribed, "Sacred to the memory" of almost every one of the singers. But can we say with honest reproach, "forgotten poets"? The loiterer in the wood hears the song of the wood-thrush, but is the hermit-bird wronged, or is his song less sweet, because it is not echoed round the world? Is Fame to be held responsible for not retaining the name of every minstrel who loiters by and touches his harp lightly, and sings a sweet song as he passes on? Is it a hard fate to give ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... the woodland is a paradise for birds. Early in the spring the spotted thrush wings its way through leafy boughs. The cardinal in his bright red coat stays the year round. Neither snow nor winter wind dulls his plumage or stills his song. His mate, in somber green, sings too, ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... the rabbit run squeaking before the weasel; I watched the butcher crow working steadily down the hedge. If I turned seaward I looked beneath the blue and saw the dog-fish gnawing on the whiting. If I walked in the garden I surprised the thrush dragging worms from the turf, the cat slinking on the nest, the spider squatting in ambush. Behind the rosy face of every well-nourished child I saw a lamb gazing up at the butcher's knife. My dear Violet, that ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... few birds with part of their sustenance, and the principal of these are two well known songsters, the blackbird and the thrush. They, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 379, Saturday, July 4, 1829. • Various
... the truth? You think you sing for the Dawn, but you sing in reality to be admired, you—songster, you! [With contemptuous pity.] Is it possible you are not aware that your poor notes raise a smile right through the forest, accustomed to the fluting of the thrush? ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... of a casual song of the lark in a fresh morning, of the blackbird and thrush at sunset, or the monotonous wail of the yellow-hammer, the silence of birds is now complete; even the lesser reed-sparrow, which may very properly be called the English mock-bird, and which kept up a perpetual ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... come upon the scene of the summer's studies was the brown thrush family. For some time the head of the household had made the grove a regular resting place in his daily round. He always entered in silence, alighted on the lowest limb of a tree, and hopped lightly, step by step, to the top, where he sang softly a few delightful ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... and later (o'er the trifle), When Araminta with her tactful gush Asked if the garden seemed to help or stifle The Muses' output, I responded, "Tush; When you go out, my dear, please buy a rifle; I want to shoot that thrush." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... like stars in a network of closely wrought iron. On their hardy shrubs the pale pink clusters of mountain laurel were beaten into shapeless colour-masses by the wind-blown rains. Sometimes, up above, where the fiery points of redbud trees shot skyward, a thrush sang or a blue jay scolded—and the bird-notes were laden, like the air, with the ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... There's a merry brown thrush sitting up in the tree. He's singing to me! He's singing to me! And what does he say, little girl, little boy? "Oh, the world's running over with joy! Don't you hear? Don't you see? Hush! Look! In my tree I'm as happy ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... bush, and decked with dazzling drops of dew; of the healthy happy heath creatures peeping out at her shyly, here a rabbit and there a hare; of a lark that sprang up singing and was lost to sight in a moment, of a thrush that paused to reflect as she passed. She thought of the little church on the high cliffs, the bourne of her morning walks, of the long stretch of sand; and of the sea; and she felt the fresh free air of those open spaces ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... chambers, In the courts of Kalevala." Thus the Maid of Beauty answered From her throne amid the heavens: "Yesterday at hour of twilight, Went I to the flowery meadows, There to rock upon the common, Where the Sun retires to slumber; There I heard a song-bird singing, Heard the thrush simple measures, Singing sweetly thoughts of maidens, And the minds of anxious mothers. "Then I asked the pretty songster, Asked the thrush this simple question: 'Sing to me, thou pretty song-bird, Sing ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... the warblers, the black-throated blue-back, indicating as it did a world of bird life of which I had never dreamed, the bird life in the inner heart of the woods. My brothers and other boys were with me but they did not see the new bird. The first time I saw the veery, or Wilson's thrush, also stands out in my memory. It alighted in the road before us on the edge of the woods. "A brown thrasher," said Bill Chase. It was not the thrasher but it was a new bird to me and the picture of it is in my mind as if made only yesterday. Natural History was a subject ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... nodded eagerly. Guida handed him a mogue of cider. The little grey thrush of a man sipped it, and in a voice no bigger than a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the garden wakes to sound, for not a bird is mute: The robin pipes the piccolo; the blackbird plays the flute; While high upon a cedar-top a thrush with bubbling throat Lifts up to this accompaniment her ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... tunes his pipes When the half-grown moon shines dim; The sage thrush trills her evening song— But what are they to him? A rude-built cross beside the trail That follows to the west Casts its long-drawn, ghastly shadow Across the ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... general is scarce. We once saw a wild duck in the fields, but never any that were to be sold. We frequently saw snipes of two kinds, one of them exactly the same as that in Europe; and a kind of thrush was always to be had in great plenty of the Portuguese, who, for I know not what reason, seem to have monopolized the wild fowl and game. Of snipes, it is remarkable, that they are found in more parts of the world than any other bird, being common ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... cooing of doves, the soft tones of the golden oriole, and the lively chatter of the red cardinal; by night the booming note of the bull-bat, the sonorous call of the trumpeter swan, and that lay far excelling all—the clear song of the polyglot thrush, the famed ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... are its everlasting lamps: the grass, and the daisy, and the primrose, and the violet, are its many-coloured floor of green, white, yellow, and blue; the may-flower, and the woodbine, and the eglantine, and the ivy, are its decorations, its curtains, and its tapestry: the lark, and the thrush, and the linnet, and the nightingale, are its unhired minstrels and musicians. Robin Hood is king of the forest both by dignity of birth and by virtue of his standing army: to say nothing of the free choice of his people, which he has indeed, but I pass it by as an illegitimate basis ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... all this he went onward home, and came to the front of his house. The blinds of Eustacia's bedroom were still closely drawn, for she was no early riser. All the life visible was in the shape of a solitary thrush cracking a small snail upon the door-stone for his breakfast, and his tapping seemed a loud noise in the general silence which prevailed; but on going to the door Clym found it unfastened, the young girl who attended upon Eustacia being astir in the back part of ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... Whitefoot the Wood Mouse grew more and more unhappy, and when the dusk of early evening came creeping through the Green Forest, he sat about and moped instead of running about and playing as he had been in the habit of doing. The beautiful song of Melody the Wood Thrush somehow filled him with sadness instead of with the joy he had always felt before. The very happiness of those about him seemed to make ...
— Whitefoot the Wood Mouse • Thornton W. Burgess
... this volume has before him the book in which the boy set down his arithmetical and geometrical exercises while a pupil of Mr. Merrishaw, and in this book are scribbled in pencil a few undecipherable lines commencing, "Good morning to ye, ballad-singing thrush." He was thirteen years old when an incident occurred which gave a powerful impulse to his dawning genius. A companion had shown him Thomson's "Seasons," and he was seized with an irrepressible desire to possess a copy. He ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... that have especially beautiful songs are the Thrushes, which include the Robin and the Bluebird, the finest singer in this family probably being the Hermit Thrush. In the Southern States there is no more popular singer among the birds than the Mockingbird. But it should be remembered that a bird's song cannot be separated from the associations which it calls up in one's memory. So that the performance of an ordinary songster may be ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... past eleven. Up. Mrs Fleming is in to clean. Doing her hair, humming. voglio e non vorrei. No. vorrei e non. Looking at the tips of her hairs to see if they are split. Mi trema un poco il. Beautiful on that tre her voice is: weeping tone. A thrush. A throstle. There is a word ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... hooping-cough, and rolled upon and crushed by a whole field of small diseases, that came trooping on each other's heels to prevent his getting up again. Some bird of prey got into his throat instead of the thrush; and the very chickens turning ferocious—if they have anything to do with that infant malady to which they lend ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... distressed by it. Her critics were driven to wild things for comparisons. She was as quick as a swallow; and yet a conscientious ornithologist would have likened her in her moments of contemplation to the thrush for demureness. And a robin hopping across a meadow, alert in all his mysterious senses, was not more alive than Phil in action. Her middle-aged aunts said she was impudent, but this did not mean impudent speech; it was Phil's silences that annoyed her aunts and sometimes embarrassed or dismayed ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... came Paris from the house Into the sun, rosy and amorous, As when the sun himself from the sea-rim Lifteth, and gloweth on the earth grown dim With waiting; and he piped a low clear call As mellow as the thrush's at the fall Of day from some near thicket. At whose sound Rose up caught Helen and blushing turned her round To face him; but in going, ere she met The prince, her hand along the parapet She trailed, palm out, for sign to who below Rent ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... still keep ticking? Why does his round white face Stare at me over the books and ink, And mock at my disgrace? Why does that thrush call, 'Dunce, dunce, dunce!'? Why does that bluebottle buzz? Why does the sun so silent shine? — And what do I care ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... are glistening in the beam Of the low sun, and mountain-tops are bright, Oh, let me, by the crystal valley-stream, Wander amid the mild and mellow light; And while the wood-thrush pipes his evening lay, Give me one lonely hour to hymn the ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... lilies were pushing up green heads through the soil; the flowering currant was bursting into bud; roots of polyanthus flaunted mauve and orange blossoms; under a sheltered wall were even a few early violets, whose sweet fresh scent seemed as the first breath of spring. A missel-thrush on the bare pear tree sang triumphantly through the rain, and a song-thrush, with more melodious notes, trilled forth an occasional call; the robin, which had haunted the garden all the winter, was scraping energetically for grubs among the ivy on the wall, and scarcely troubled to fly away ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... smile, in which the agony of his mind was too truly imprinted; "but music displeased me." With this reply he disappeared. The excuse seemed strange but it was true; for she whose notes were to him sweeter than the thrush-whose angel strains used to greet his morning and evening hours-was silent in the grave! He should no more see her white hand upon the lute; he should no more behold that bosom, brighter than foam upon the wave, to him? A soulless sound, or a direful knell, to recall the remembrance ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... hardly to be found. But before some few daies are past, there's a great trial to be made of the Nurses experience and understanding; for, let them do what they will or can, the Child will not suck; yea, and what's worse, it hath gotten a lamentable Thrush. Alas a day what bad work is here again, the Nurse is so quamish stomackt that she cannot suck her Mistres, therefore care must be taken to find out some body or other that will come and suck the young womans breasts for twelve pence a time; or else her breasts will grow hard ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... observed some distance from the rock, over the cracked and dried-up plain: though it could not run very fast, it doubled quickly, and the rough cracked ground made odds in its favour; but it was ultimately secured. Pigeons, brown coloured, of various sizes, from that of a thrush to that of a common dove, were numerous and very tame. One of the smallest species alights and seeks about in the streets of small towns for seeds, like a sparrow, and more boldly than that bird, for it is not molested by the children—more perhaps ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... I felt the glow down every fibre float, And thought I heard a thrush's piping note ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... than a thrush in a vineyard,—began, so please you, his devout confession,—over which I pass, for the priest never revealed it, but you may guess it was both ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... thy nest, Robin-redbreast! Sing, birds, in every furrow; And from each hill, let music shrill Give my fair Love good-morrow! Blackbird and thrush in every bush, Stare, linnet, and cock-sparrow! You pretty elves, amongst yourselves Sing my fair Love good-morrow; To give my Love good-morrow Sing ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Earle Coates On a Noble Character marred by littleness, Charlotte Fiske Bates Probation, Florence Earle Coates Rose Romance, Ada Nichols Shadows All, Paul Hamilton Hayne Song, Robertson Trowbridge "What do I Wish for You?" ,Carlotta Perry Wood-Thrush at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... not a thrush, but one of the minor singers, lighting on a bough near us, trilled ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... eyes; her hair, of the average brown, had a rough effect of being quickly tossed into form, which pleased him; as she slipped down the room before him to place him at table he saw that she was, as it were, involuntarily, unwillingly graceful. She made him think of a wild sweetbrier, of a hermit-thrush; but, if there were this sort of poetic suggestion in Cynthia's looks, her acts were of plain and honest prose, such as giving Westover the pleasantest place and the most intelligent waitress in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... vibri, eksciti. Thrive prosperi. Throat gorgxo. Throb bati, palpiti. Throbbing bato—ado, ekbato. Throe agonio. Throne trono. Throng (crowd) amaso. Throttle sufoki. Through tra. Throw jxeti. Throw across transjxeti. Throw out eljxeti. Thrush turdo. Thrust pusxegi, enpusxi. Thumb dika fingro. Thump frapegi, bategi. Thunder tondri. Thunderstorm fulmotondro. Thunderstruck fulmofrapa. Thursday jxauxdo. [Error in book: jauxdo] Thus tiel, tiamaniere. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... the youthful, gay, capricious Spring, Piercing her showery clouds with crystal light, And with their hues reflected streaking bright Her radiant bow, bids all her Warblers sing; The Lark, shrill caroling on soaring wing; The lonely Thrush, in brake, with blossoms white, That tunes his pipe so loud; while, from the sight Coy bending their dropt heads, young Cowslips fling Rich perfume o'er the fields.—It is the prime Of Hours that Beauty robes:—yet all they gild, Cheer, and delight ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... kingfisher of considerable size, and splendid colouring, frequents the banks of the streams. A grey heron perches on the lower boughs of the trees, and fishes in the ponds. A small-winged woodpecker, and a large red-headed species, climb up and down the trees in sequestered places, and a thrush with a yellow beak and black head utters a sweet note among the bamboo groves and thickets; while owls, falcons, eagles and other ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... Champ-au-Haut the next afternoon. Here and there on the mountain side and along the highroad he noticed the massed pink and white clusters of the sheep laurel. Every singing bird was in full voice; thrush and vireo, robin, meadow lark, song-sparrow and catbird were singing as birds sing but once in the whole year; when the mating season is at its height and the long migratory flight northwards is forgotten in the supreme instinctive joy of the ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... flows, Every lark as it soars and sings that sweet spot knows; For the mate for whom it sings, Till the clear blue heaven rings, Is brooding on its nest mid the daisies in the grass; And that psalmist sweet, the thrush, And the linnet in the bush, Tell the children all their secrets in song as ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... carts amidst firewood; mutton and kangaroo strung on the branches of trees; idle and uncleanly men, of different civil condition but of one class; tribes of dogs and natives. No green hedges or flowery meadows, or notes of the thrush or nightingale; but yet there was the park-like lands, the brilliant skies, the pure river; and, above all, the untainted ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... most familiar and best known of all is the common robin, who may be seen every day, hopping about briskly on the meadows and uttering his cheery, enlivening call. The black-headed grosbeak, too, is here, with the Bullock oriole, and western tanager, brown song-sparrow, hermit thrush, the purple finch,—a fine singer, with head and throat of a rosy-red hue,—several species of warblers and ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... an exceedingly viscid and sticky pulp, surrounding the hard little nut-like seeds: and this pulp makes the seeds cling to the bills and feet of various birds which feed upon the fruit, but most particularly of the missel thrush, who derives his common English name from his devotion to the mistletoe. The birds then carry them away unwittingly to some neighbouring tree, and rub them off, when they get uncomfortable, against a forked ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... that there are such diseases, it must be understood that diseases have been attributed to fungi as a primary cause, when the evidence does not warrant such a conclusion. Diphtheria and thrush have been referred to the devastations of fungi, whereas diphtheria certainly may and does occur without any trace of fungi. Fevers may sometimes be accompanied by fungoid bodies in the evacuations, but it is very difficult to determine them. The whole question of epidemic diseases ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... festival with candle-lit processions and with singing. The words of the Easter song floated across the blue spaces. "The Royal Banners forward go," came the faint chant, and, mingling with the vesper song of thrush and nightingale, lulled the ...
— The Italian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... purse, of smiling, of greeting a friend, of addressing "inferiors in station." From her best beloved model, Mrs. Van Alstyne Fisher, she made requisition for that excellent thing, a soft, low voice as clear as silver and as perfect in articulation as the notes of a thrush. Suffused in the aura of this high social refinement and good breeding, it was impossible for her to escape a deeper effect of it. As good habits are said to be better than good principles, so, perhaps, good manners are better ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... recognize the source of the music. It might have been the song of a twilight bird, a thrush, a mocking-bird. He forgot for the moment that there are no song-birds ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... have seen a rural hamlet, where each cottage is half concealed by its own garden. Now convert your linden into graceful palm, your apples into oranges, your gooseberry-bushes into bananas, your thrush which sings in its wicker cage into a gray parrot whistling on a rail; ... sprinkle this with strange and powerful perfumes; place in the west a sun flaming among golden clouds in a prussian-blue sea, dotted with white sails; imagine those mysterious and unknown sounds, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... excited in these mountain-holes, without taking into account the wearisomeness of hotel-life. From the very day after our arrival you took a dislike to the paper in our little salon, and its squares, I confess, are very ugly. In every square, a thrush stretching out its neck to peck a currant. Two hundred thrushes and two hundred currants—it was enough to weary you to death. Suddenly there appears ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... white frost was on the grass, and there was a clear sky through which the sunrise was fast mounting. Along an eastern wood ran a fiery rose of dawn, the fine leaf-work of the beeches showing sharply upon it. There was a thrush singing, and a robin came close to the window, hopped on the ledge, ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that. I might by years of hard study get so far as to strike the correct notes, but the soul and expression would elude me, simply because I have not brain power sufficient to comprehend them. A thrush would be foolish to emulate ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... claims the eaves That last year were his home; The Robin follows where the plow Breaks up the crusted loam; And Red-wings spies the Thrush and pipes: 'Look! Speckle-breast ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... is one of the Flock," the curate said to himself. "And that mite of a boy is thirteen years old!" and he returned to London triumphant, bringing with him besides the information he went to seek, a root of primroses with yellow-tipped spikes ready to burst, and an early thrush's nest containing five delicate blue eggs. This last treasure Reginald displayed with ...
— Wikkey - A Scrap • YAM
... the original type and teacher of the poet, and do we not demand of the human lark or thrush that he "shake out his carols" in the same free and spontaneous manner as his winged prototype? Kingsley has shown how surely the old minnesingers and early ballad-writers have learned of the birds, taking their key- note from the blackbird, or the wood-lark, or the throstle, and giving utterance ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... a long letter, my dear Lenz, and as yet I am only at the preliminaries. Let us then pass on to the Deluge,—and come and see me at Weymar, where we can chat as long and fully as we like of these things in the shade of our fine park. If a thrush chances to come and sing I shall take advantage of the circumstance to make, en passant, some groundless quarrels with you on some inappropriate terms which one meets with here and there in your book,—as, ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... wives and children, The recollection of the gardens of little children, You are State Houses and Charters And the familiar treading of the foot to and fro on a road it knows. May is lilac here in New England, May is a thrush singing "Sun up!" on a tip-top ash-tree, May is white clouds behind pine-trees Puffed out and marching upon a blue sky. May is a green as no other, May is much sun through small leaves, May is soft earth, And apple-blossoms, And windows open to a South wind. May is a ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... and still, twilight fell over the wood. At a jutting point of the bank I seemed to hear an unusual sound, and held my breath to listen. But the wood was still sad and dreary. "Perhaps it was a warbler or a thrush," I thought, and walked on. A little later I pulled up again. This time I heard quite plainly a man's voice and the low of a cow. I quickly pulled on my wet boots and rushed into the wood. A flock of sheep watched ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... the road he paused in his tramp, squared his shoulders, and drank a deep breath of the cooler air; if the blazing sun sucked up a subtle, acrid smell from the hot dust stirred by his feet he snuffed it up greedily and found it good to live. A hawk in the air, a thrush whistling from a hazel bush as only a thrush can whistle, the glorious yellow of a break of whin, ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... 'if I have to come again into this world I'd be a blackbird or a thrush; I wouldn't be a pheasant or ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... in the Forest there is Sabbath peace, the sound of far bells, the cry of the thrush, the holy pattering of leaves. The beeches, meeting aloft and entwining, fling the light and the spirit of the cathedral to the mossy floors. Here is purity and humanity. The air beats freshly on the face. Away in the soft blue distance is a shadowy suggestion of rolling ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... over the narrow path, and a wild canary, singing in the sun, hopped from bough to bough. A robin's cheery chirp came from another tree, and the clear notes of a thrush, with a mottled breast, were answered by another in ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... none other in the quiet valley so happy as the rose-tree,—none other so happy unless perchance it was the thrush who made his home in the linden yonder. The thrush loved the rose-tree's daughter, and he was happy in thinking that some day she would be his bride. Now the rose-tree had many daughters, and each was beautiful; but the rose ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
