"Swan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... SWAN Randy Paine comes back from France to the monotony of every-day affairs. But the girl he loves shows him the beauty in ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... to wee Shane, there was so much of it that it flicked through his head like a dream: the hazy September afternoon; the long, lean vessel like a greyhound; the sails white as a swan's wing; the cordage that rattled like wood; the bare-footed, bearded sailors; the town of Carrickfergus in the offing; the lap-lap-lap of water; the silent man at the wheel; the sudden transition of the friendly Raghery man into a firm, authoritative figure, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... millimeters, and whose weight was from 5 to 6 kilogrammes. The results were: intensity, 1 ampere; electro-motive power, 25 volts, corresponding to an energy of 25 volt-amperes, or about 2.5 kilogrammeters per second. The pile was covered with a copper jacket whose upper parts supported two Swan lamps. Upon putting on the cover a contact was formed with the electrodes, and it was possible by means of a commutator key with three eccentrics to light or extinguish one of the lamps or both at once. A single element would have sufficed to keep one Swan lamp of feeble ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... to those already referred to, there were brigades from Lac- la-Puie, the Lake of the Woods, Cumberland House, Athabasca, and Swan River, and other places many ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... I know. Late last night a masked man woke up Jim Snell. You know, he sleeps in a room at the back of the printing office. Well, this fellow made him dress, set up this bill, and run off five hundred copies while he stood over him. I'll swan I never heard of ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... chamber, then, with swan and dove Ranged thickly, and engrailed with rare device Of reds and purples, for a Paradise Wherein my Love may greet me, I my Love, ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... anoint. He was a lord full fat and in good point His eye stepe, and rolling in his bed, That stemed as a forneis of led. His botes souple, his hors in gret estat, Now certainly he was a fayre prelat. He was not pale as a forpined gost. A fat swan loved he best of any rost. His palfrey was as broune as is ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... Avenue! It was four o'clock on a fine day early in April, and was Fanny the one to spend four o'clock on a fine day indoors? Other girls in that very street sat over ledgers, or drew long threads wearily between silk and gauze; or, festooned with ribbons in Swan and Edgars, rapidly added up pence and farthings on the back of the bill and twisted the yard and three-quarters in tissue paper and asked "Your pleasure?" of ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... and desired to secure for himself the same beautiful plumage. Supposing that the Swan's splendid white color arose from his washing in the water in which he swam, the Raven left the altars in the neighborhood where he picked up his living, and took up residence in the lakes and pools. But cleansing his feathers as often as he would, ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... that were necessary for subsistence and comfort. While these preparations were going on a large squad from Le Sueur, ten miles further down the river, under the command of Captain Tousley, sheriff of Le Sueur county, joined us. Early in the day a squad from Swan lake, under an old settler named Samuel Coffin, had gone to New Ulm to see ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... had ever before entertained. It was, indeed, then that Shelley sketched out, and chiefly wrote, his poem of "Julian and Maddalo," in the latter of which personages he has so picturesquely shadowed forth his noble friend[24]; and the allusions to "the Swan of Albion," in his "Lines written among the Euganean Hills," were also, I understand, the result of the same access of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... at once to the wharf or station of our sky-sailer. Ah, how shall I describe my sensations on first beholding this most wonderful achievement of the age, and thus satisfying myself that it was an actual existence, and not the mere chimera of a diseased brain? There she sat like a majestic swan, floating, as it were, in the pure empyrean, and crowned with a diadem of stars. The Moon, Arcturus, and the Pleiades might well all make obeisance to her, and the Milky Way invite her to extend her flight and plough its snowy fields. I was astonished at her size, the symmetry of her parts, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... found in his extant writings. Horace had many lyrical effusions of the Theban bard which we have not. How graceful is Horace's modesty in his 'Ego apis Matinae More modoque,' as contrasted with the Dircaean Swan! Horace is my great favourite: I love ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... he was about, he let his trembling fingers stray over the fiddle, and began playing the famous air of "Yankee Doodle." It was the chant of the swan singing its requiem in ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... journey. Terror of Phaeton, and his inability to rule the horses. Conflagration of the world. Petition of Earth to Jupiter, and death of Phaeton by thunder. Grief of Clymene, and of his sisters. Change of the latter to poplars, and their tears to amber. Transformation of Cycnus to a swan. Mourning of Phoebus. Jupiter's descent to earth; and amour with Calistho. Birth of Arcas, and transformation of Calistho to a bear; and afterwards with Arcas to a constellation. Story of Coronis. Tale of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... of the harbour, where there are large flats of sand and mud, there is great plenty of water-fowl, most of which were altogether unknown to us: One of the most remarkable was black and white, much larger than a swan, and in shape somewhat resembling a pelican. On these banks of sand and mud there are great quantities of oysters, mussels, cockles, and other shell-fish, which seem to be the principal subsistence of the inhabitants, who go into shoal water with their little canoes, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... poet, and you make good verses, it is likely enough that some queen will stuff your mouth with balass rubies. How poorly our modern means of locomotion compare with those of the Nights. If you take a jinni or a swan-maiden you can go from Cairo to Bokhara in less time than our best expresses could cover a mile. The recent battles between the Russians and the Japanese are mere skirmishes compared with the fight described in "The City of Brass"—where 700 million are engaged. ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... Fortitude, and Justice. In the lower tier on the canopy are six figures: Saxulf, first Abbot; Cuthwin, first Bishop of Leicester; John de Sais; Benedict; S. Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, his hand resting on the head of his tame swan; and John Chambers, last Abbot and first Bishop of Peterborough. In the upper tier are four Bishops: Bishop Dove, the theologian; Bishop Cumberland, the philosopher; Bishop Kennett, the antiquary; and Archbishop ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... see but again for an hour what the wind and the sun have dispelled and consumed, Those full deep swan-soft feathers of snow with whose luminous burden the branches implumed Hung heavily, curved as a half-bent bow, and fledged not as birds are, but petalled as flowers, Each tree-top and branchlet a pinnacle jewelled and carved, ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... not like mere teasing, either. She was evidently in earnest when she repeated that she did not like him. He knew her face when she was chaffing, and her tone, and the little bending of the delicate, swan-like throat, too long for perfect beauty, but not for perfect grace. When she was in earnest, her head rose, her eyes looked straight before her, and her voice sank to a graver note. He knew all the signs of truth, for ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... very bliss. My highest ecstacies could not bear down and silence the weight of my ridicule, which, in its turn, was powerless to prevent me from running into other and more gorgeous absurdities. I was double, not "swan and shadow," but rather, Sphinx-like, human and beast. A true Sphinx, I was a riddle and ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... are shining, quiet and silvery. All without is soft and beautiful, and no doubt the Norma herself looks all in unison with the scene, balancing herself like a lazy swan, white and graciously. So it is without, and within, there is miserable sea-sickness, bilge-water, and all the unavoidable disagreeables of a ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... temple. But without paying the least homage to the image of the 'Lo' spirit, he simply kept his eyes fixed intently on it; for albeit made of clay, it actually seemed, nevertheless, to flutter as does a terror-stricken swan, and to wriggle as a dragon in motion. It looked like a lotus, peeping its head out of the green stream, or like the sun, pouring its rays upon the russet clouds in the early morn. Pao-y's tears unwittingly ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... Holland, he found his way to the house where she was employed, learnt that she had been arrested (you see, the red stitches on her handkerchief, which everyone had supposed were laundry marks, turned out to be plans of Hampton Court Maze and the most direct route to Swan and Selfinsons), and, seizing the rifle, he rushed from the house (it was the night the Russians passed through Aberdeen and ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 9, 1914 • Various
... steadily approaching the revolting thing. He was scarcely a yard distant when the neck of the snake arched like a swan's, and the head was drawn far back to strike. In an instant the stock of his rifle swept over the top of the log with the quickness of lightning. There followed a sharp, cracking noise, like the explosion of a percussion-cap, ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis
... struggle was long; it was cruel. Often, when the hour came for the glass that was denied him by economy, when thirst seized him by the throat, the Captain was forced to make an heroic effort to withdraw his hand already reaching out towards the swan's beak of the cafe; many times he wandered about, dreaming of the king turned up and of quint and quatorze. But he almost always courageously returned home; and as he loved Pierette more through every sacrifice that he ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... exception of Caleb Williams. Political Justice should be read in the second edition (1796), which is maturer than the first and more lively than the third. A modern summary of it by Mr. Salt, with the full text of the last section "On Property," was published by Swan, Sonnenschein & Co. This selection emphasises his communism, but hardly does full justice to the novelty of his anarchist opinions. Full biographical data are to be found in William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, by Mr. Kegan ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... laughed and said, "Well, I'll be gol darned if you didn't get me. You must have right smart eyes, for I swan I didn't know which one ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... the 'Swan,' reports that the tow-boat, 'Daniel Webster,' burst her larboard boiler on the 6th instant, while towing in a vessel over the South-west Bar. Mr. William Taylor, one of the Balize pilots, and one of the firemen were instantly killed. The rest of the crew ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... from the effects of a possible shell. The two young men now mounted the stone bench by the door, which allowed them to look over the ledge at the eastern sea. Presently the craft appeared round the end of the island, pure white, floating like a swan on the water, and ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... the most stupid one he ever sat through, when just as the soprano was in the midst of that touching ballad, "Comin' thro' the Rye" (the soprano always sings "Comin' thro' the Rye" on an encore)—the Black Swan used to make it irresistible, Philip remembered, with her arch, "If a body kiss a body" there was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of speech, are necessarily and irrevocably Germanic. "Les Maitres Chanteurs," "The Dwarfs of Niebelheim," "Elizabeta," are impossibilities, whereas, for instance, Beethoven's "Eroica" labours under no such disadvantage. "Goodbye, My Dearest Swan," invests part of "Lohengrin" with a certain grotesque colour that no one would ever dream of if there were no necessity for the singer to be tied down to the exigencies of palpable and certainly most materialistic language. The thought ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... a free man, at Swan River, indicated the danger of undefined powers, and the boundless arrogance of office. He was seized by the commander of a vessel and delivered to the Phoenix hulk, New South Wales, where, loaded with irons of unusual weight, his clothing branded, he was confined with prisoners destined for ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... as it does to the strongest of human instincts, is the theme of many popular fictions from India to Iceland. With a malignant mother-in-law in place of the two sisters, it is the basis of a mediaeval European romance entitled "The Knight of the Swan," and of a similar tale which occurs in "Dolopathus," the oldest version of the "Seven Wise Masters," written in Latin prose about the year 1180: A king while hunting loses his way in a forest and coming ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Imagination was the ruling power of his mind. His thoughts were twin-born; the thought itself, and its figurative semblance in the outer world. Thus, through the quiet, still waters of his soul each image floated double, "swan and shadow." ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... &c. Sweet, think not I am at ease, For because my chief part singeth; This song from death's sorrow springeth, As to Swan in last disease; For no dumbness nor death bringeth Stay to true love's melody: Heart and soul ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... I could see signs of life, sometimes mere rings and ripples in the water, sometimes the gleam of a great silver-sided fish in the air, sometimes the arched, slate-colored back of some passing monster. Once upon a yellow sandbank I saw a creature like a huge swan, with a clumsy body and a high, flexible neck, shuffling about upon the margin. Presently it plunged in, and for some time I could see the arched neck and darting head undulating over the water. Then it dived, and I ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... goose question of the Reformation was the burning of one Huss, whose name in English signifyeth Goose, for which reason he is said to have exclaimed to his tormentors 'Now ye indeed roast a goose, but, lo! after me there will come a swan whom ye can not roast;' which was strangely fulfilled in LUTHER, whose name—slightly varied—signifies in Bohemian a swan. But, reader, 'an it please you,' here is the original and 'Simon Pure' explanation, as furnished ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... license,' 'and sang her own songs as a means of subsistence'; by Mrs. Thrale, Dr. Johnson's friend; by Mrs. Hunter, the wife of the great anatomist; by the worthy Mrs. Barbauld; and by the excellent Mrs. Hannah More. Here is Miss Anna Seward, 'called by her admirers "the Swan of Lichfield,"' who was so angry with Dr. Darwin for plagiarising some of her verses; Lady Anne Barnard, whose Auld Robin Gray was described by Sir Walter Scott as 'worth all the dialogues Corydon and Phyllis have together spoken from the days of Theocritus downwards'; ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... already, though still early by the clock, and the mercury in the thermometers had gone out of sight and stayed there. Katrine came tripping along a side street on her way back to the row, warm in her skin coat, and her face all aglow and abloom under her fur cap. She had turned into the "Swan and Goose" saloon on her way up, had put in half-an-hour over a game, and won a fat little canvas bag stuffed with gold dust; had thinned it out somewhat in hot drinks across the bar, and now, warmed through with rum, and light-hearted, she was returning with the bag still ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... all their parts, were handed from the gentlemen to the ladies, and from the ladies to each other, and as freely examined and criticised, as if they had been paintings of birds. The gentlemen, upon their parts, were equally as facetious upon the naked Venuses; and a Swan affixed to a Leda, was the lucky source of innumerable pleasant questions and answers. Every thing, in a word, is tolerated which can in any way be passed into an equivoque. Their conversation in this respect resembles their dress—no matter how thin that covering may ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... may answer the first before sunrise, unless I am badly mistaken. I have heard an old adage which declares that if you give a man long enough rope he will hang himself. My new application is that you let him talk enough he is apt to sing his own swan song, for a farewell perch on the electric ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... exception of three kinds of rabbits, no quadruped is found in these islands. There are serpents, but they are not dangerous. Wild geese, turtle-doves, ducks of a larger size than ours, with plumage as white as that of a swan, and red heads, exist. The Spaniards brought back with them some forty parrots, some green, others yellow, and some having vermilion collars like the parrakeets of India, as described by Pliny; and all of them have the most brilliant plumage. Their wings are ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... will go forewood; for things are come to a creesus; and I have seen with my own bays, such smuggling — But I scorn for to exclose the secrets of the family; and if it wance comes to marrying, who nose but the frolick may go round — I believes as how, Miss Liddy would have no reversion if her swan would appear; and you would be surprised, Molly, to receive a bride's fever from your humble sarvant — but this is all suppository, dear girl; and I have sullenly promised to Mr Clinker, that neither man, woman, nor child shall no that arrow said a civil thing to me in the way of infection. ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... the country to which they devote their talents and energies depends less upon their pecuniary means than upon the fancy of the emigrant or the popularity of a name. From the year 1826 to 1829, Australia and the Swan River were all the rage. No other portions of the habitable globe were deemed worthy of notice. These were the El Dorados and lands of Goshen to which all respectable emigrants eagerly flocked. Disappointment, as a matter of course, followed their high-raised expectations. ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... that the swan was not then a mere ornamental bird, either alive or dead, but an ordinary article of citizen-dinners, it being classed with "gies and dowks" in the business of the poulterer. At the same time, no mention being made of swine in any of these ordonnances or petitions, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 37. Saturday, July 13, 1850 • Various
... espressione. It is a wonderful elegy, a yearning without hope, a swan-song of desire, sadder almost than the frank despair of the Finale of the Pathetique symphony,—pulsing with passion, gorgeous with a hectic glow of expressive beauty, moving too with a noble grace. Though there is a foil ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... addressed to Maecenas, of the Second Book, the poet gives way to a burst of joyous anticipation of future fame, figuring himself as a swan soaring majestically across all the then known regions of the world. When he puts forth the Third Book several years afterwards, he closes it with a similar paean of triumph, which, unlike most prophecies of the kind, has been completely fulfilled. In both he alludes ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... took the lid entirely off. They all peered into the box. There lay an old clay pipe and a roll of faded calico. Mr. Fairbanks took up the roll and shook it out. "It's an apron," said he. "It's his father's pipe, and his mother's apron—I—swan!" ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... bosom's heaving whiteness With beauty overbrims, Like swan upon the waters When gentliest it swims; Like cotton on the moorland Thy skin is soft and fine, Thy neck is like the sea-gul When dipping in ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... the ancient mansion of Grizlehurst. Surrounded on every side by dark and almost trackless woods, sprung through a long line of ancestry from primeval forests, it reposed in undisturbed seclusion, still and majestic as the proud swan that basked upon the dark lake before it, secure from intrusion and alarm. Gable-ends and long casements broke the low piebald front into a variety of detail—a-combination of effect throwing an air of picturesque beauty on the whole, which not all the flimsy and frittered "Gothic" ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... of miles on its tub-like proportions, or its gay flag of motley. And yet we question whether even Mr. Wakley himself, with all his advantages, would venture to do more than assert his equality with the Swan of Avon. Homer, too, wrote in a very remote period,—so very remote and so very uncertain, that the critics have begun seriously to doubt whether the huge figure of the blind old man, as it looms through the grey obscure of ages, be in reality the figure of one poet, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... flowers. After them the Vintners' Company, with the band of the Royal Artillery; ten Commissioners, each bearing a shield; eight master porters in vintner's dress; the Bargemaster in full uniform, and the Swan Uppers. These are men who look after the swans belonging to the corporation of London, which build their nests along the banks of the Thames, and they mark the young swans ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... Sunium's marbled steep,[202] Where nothing, save the waves and I, May hear our mutual murmurs sweep; There, swan-like, let me sing and die: A land of slaves shall ne'er be mine— Dash down yon cup ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Pagasai. And first came Heracles the mighty, with his lion's skin and club, and behind him Hylas his young squire, who bore his arrows and his bow; and Tiphys, the skilful steersman; and Butes, the fairest of all men; and Castor and Polydeuces the twins, the sons of the magic swan; and Caineus, the strongest of mortals, whom the Centaurs tried in vain to kill, and overwhelmed him with trunks of pine trees, but even so he would not die; and thither came Zetes and Calais, the winged sons of the north wind; and Peleus, the father of Achilles, whose ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... midst of his combats and his necessities like a flower making its way from between rough stones, or a moonbeam gleaming amid dark clouds. Luther loved music; indeed, he wrote treatises on the art. Accordingly his versification is highly harmonious, so that he may be called the Swan of Eisleben. Not that he is by any means gentle or swan-like in the songs which he composed for the purpose of exciting the courage of the people. In these he is fervent, fierce. The hymn which he composed on his way to Worms, and which he and his companion chanted as they entered that city, 2 ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... depart; I charge you, stay! And were my voice a trumpet loud as fame, To reach the round of heaven, and earth, and sea, All nations should be summoned to this place, So little do I fear that fellow's charge: So should my honour, like a rising swan, Brush with her wings the falling drops away, And proudly plough ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... eyes like stars, lips like cherries, neck like a swan, and a laugh like a ripple of music?" Pearl ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... one, and lay down on the hard ground, intending to pass the night there. Just before sunset, however, she heard a rustling, and saw six swans come flying in at the window. They alighted on the ground and blew at each other, and blew all the feathers off, and their swan's skins stripped off like a shirt. Then the maiden looked at them and recognized her brothers, was glad and crept forth from beneath the bed. The brothers were not less delighted to see their little sister, but their joy was of short duration. "Here ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... her daughter-in-law, and to make her son's wife her friend and confidante. But such a relationship was impossible; for, when she tried to share with her daughter the emotions which crowded upon her, they rolled off the queen like water off the breast of a swan. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... with considerable accuracy; but almost the entire west coast, so far as the number, extent and character of its numerous indentations are concerned, has hitherto remained a terra incognita. Judge James G. Swan, who, under the direction of the U. S. Government, visited the islands in 1883, and voyaged in a canoe from Massett to Skidegate, gave in a lecture before the Provincial Legislature of British Columbia, the first public confirmation of the entrances to the inlets ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... to "death and derision," of her being in a royal rage with her poet. At last he cries out for Pity to become incarnate and vest his lady in her own robe. It may be that he loved his misery; he is always on the point of dying, but, like the swan, he was careful to set it to music first. Selvaggia, in fact, laughed at him (he turned once to call her a Jew for that) egged on as she was by her brother and her own vivacious habit. She had no Nicoletta at Pitecchio, no mother anywhere, and a scheming father ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... "I swan!" he mused, "I don't know when I've looked at that afore. I remember when I bought that hat, jest as well. Took care of it and brushed it—my! my! I don't know but it's somewheres around now. I thought I was jest about the ticket ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... "I swan to goodness, little fellow, if I wasn't an angel I couldn't live with you at all, at all, you're that peevish since I've stopped smoking." Then with his most wistful Irish look he would add, "Be patient with me El. I'm having a hell ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... waters calm, the sands bare and glistening in the early sunbeams; no vestige of the storm or of the bloody outrage of the night remained—all was peace and beauty. In the distance was a single snow-white sail, floating swan-like on the bosom of the blue waters. All around was beauty and peace, yet from the young man's tortured bosom peace had fled, and remorse, vulture-like, had struck its talons deep into his heart. He called himself a murderer, the destroyer ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... walks as I have seen a swan Swim thro' the water just where the sun shone. There ends of willow branches ride, Quivering with the current's glide, By ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... of great industry, and great genius; and he has had compliments enough on it to turn his head, if to those qualities he does not add great good sense; a quality which, the longer I live, the more I am persuaded is the true rara avis, and not much oftener met with than a black swan:—the white swan of Pindar cannot vie in rarity at ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... fat woman at one of the little green tables at the back of the Potwell Inn, and struggled with the mystery of life. It was one of those evenings, serenely luminous, amply and atmospherically still, when the river bend was at its best. A swan floated against the dark green masses of the further bank, the stream flowed broad and shining to its destiny, with scarce a ripple—except where the reeds came out from the headland—the three poplars rose clear and harmonious against a sky of green and yellow. And ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... subjects designedly chosen to exhibit the failings and errors of the gods. One scene represented Leda caressing the swan, under which form Jupiter had disguised himself; and another, Danae, in the brazen tower in which her father had imprisoned her, but where the god effected his entrance in the form of a shower of gold. Still ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... a roe about them in the middle, it was as white as snow; black-grey eyes in their centre. Cloaks of linen as white as the tunic of a swan around these ties.[FN4] Harps of gold and silver and bronze, with figures of serpents and birds, and hounds of gold and silver: as they moved those strings those figures used to run about ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... place in the 'bei-wagon'; but the diligence did not start till eleven o'clock in the evening. There was a great deal of time to be got through before then. Fortunately it was lovely weather, and Sanin after dining at a hotel, famous in those days, the White Swan, set off to stroll about the town. He went in to look at Danneker's Ariadne, which he did not much care for, visited the house of Goethe, of whose works he had, however, only read Werter, and that in the French translation. He walked along ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... dogs: those we named Margaulx. And albeit the sayd island be 14 leagues from the maine land, notwithstanding beares come swimming thither to eat of the sayd (M92) birds: and our men found one there as great as any cow, and as white as any swan, who in their presence leapt into the sea: and vpon Whitsunmunday (following our voyage toward the land) we met her by the way, swimming toward land as swiftly as we could saile. So soone as we saw her, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... bright star of maidens, A beam without haze, No murkiness saddens, No disk-spot bewrays. The swan-down to feeling, The snow of the gaillin,[134] Thy limbs all excelling, Unite to amaze. The queen, I would name thee, Of maidenly muster; Thy stem is so seemly, So rich is its cluster Of members complete, Adroit at each feat, And thy temper so sweet, Without banning or bluster. My grief ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... they got upon sticks, and went said journey, and, being there, did see Mr. Burroughs, the minister, who spake to them all; that there were then twenty-five persons met together; that she tied a knot in a rag, and threw it into the fire to hurt Timothy Swan, and that she did hurt the rest that complained of her by squeezing puppets like them, and so almost choked them; that she and Martha Carrier did both ride on a stick or pole when they went to the witch-meeting at Salem Village, and that the stick broke as they ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... all-night coffee-stalls was white with egg-shells! What I needed then was an operation for cataract. I also remember taking a man to the opera who had never seen an opera. The work was Lohengrin. When we came out he said: "That swan's neck was rather stiff." And it was all he did say. We went and had a drink. He was not mistaken. His observation was most just; but his perspective was that of those literary critics who give ten lines to pointing out three slips of syntax, and three lines to ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... Esperanza's boat near Otley ferry, to walk along the beach to Bevisham, and he kept eye on the elegant vessel as she glided swan-like to her moorings off Mount Laurels park through dusky merchant craft, colliers, and trawlers, loosely shaking her towering snow-white sails, unchallenged in her scornful supremacy; an image of a refinement of beauty, and of a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in the middle of summer. Whilst the elevation of the principal peaks, Mount Exmouth, Mount Cunningham, and others was being taken, it was discovered that so far from Australia possessing only one large watercourse, the Swan River, it had several, the chief being Hawkesbury River, formed by the confluence of the Nepean, the Grose, and the Brisbane; the river Murray not being yet known. At the period under notice a commencement had been ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... under the command of Lieutenants Clerke and Edgcumbe. When they came on board to dinner, they informed me that the people continued to behave in the same inconsistent manner as in the morning; but more especially one man, whom Mr Edgcumbe was obliged to fire at, and believed he had struck with a swan shot. After that the others behaved with more discretion; and as soon as our people embarked they all retired. While we were sitting at dinner an old man came on board, looked into many parts of the ship, and then went ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... woman visits a lady of the family of G. of R., at the time of her confinement, when the nurse is absent, and strokes down the clothes, the patient (says Mrs. Crowe), "never does any good, and dies." Another legend is, that a single swan is always seen on a particular lake close to the mansion of another family before a death. Then, Lord Littleton's dove is a well-known incident. And the lady above quoted speaks of many curious warnings of death by the appearance of birds, as well as of a spectral ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... the swan that swims in Tuoni, the black death-river. One shot only canst thou have. If thou succeed, then mayst ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... innocent—than in conducting a hitherto uninitiated visitor over his grounds, and making him in some degree aware of the incomparable advantages possessed by the inhabitants of the White House in the matter of red-streaked apples, russets, northern greens (excellent for baking), swan-egg pears, and early vegetables, to say nothing of flowering 'srubs,' pink hawthorns, lavender bushes more than ever Mrs. Jerome could use, and, in short, a superabundance of everything that a person retired from business could desire to possess ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... the note of the swan singing its own funeral hymn!' said the patrician Placidus, looking in maudlin pity from the corpse of the boy to the face of Vetranio, which presented for the moment an involuntary expression ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... to ask if he would buy the Russian China papers. I told him at the same time that a Russian ship was going at the charge of the Russian Government to India, Swan River, and China as a ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... with extraordinary enthusiasm—the enthusiasm of a fanatic or a lover. The great ship reflected the sun's glow from her many bright parts, and was indeed a beauteous object, yet swan-like, the guns uncovered as the men worked at them, and a newer lustre ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... in aria." A lady in Court dress holds a rose to shield herself from Cupid, a dear little fellow with wings, who is shooting his dart at her heart. Perhaps poor Elizabeth Hinde died of it and this is her "swan song." ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... white swan or goose feathers; have them plucked off the fowl with care not to break the web; free them from down, except a small quantity on the shaft of the feather. Get also a little fine wire, different sizes; ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... and singular ornament of nature!" exclaimed the Knight, bowing low before her, as did his Squire; "fairer than the feathers of the graceful swan, and far more beautiful than Aurora's morning countenance, to thee, the fairest of all fair ones, most humbly and only to thy beauty do I here submit my affections. Tell me, therefore, to whom my heart must pay its true devotions, thy birth, ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... portion of the design being inverted. In the 1869 issue of the stamps of the United States no less than three of the values had the central portions of their designs printed upside down. The 4d., blue, of the first issue of Western Australia is known with the Swan on its head. Even the recently issued Pan-American stamps, printed in the most watchful manner by the United States official Bureau of Engraving and Printing, are known with the central portions of the design inverted, and these errors, despite the most ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... articles of less importance, and in smaller quantities, were coarse linen, feathers for beds, tar, linen yarn, beet, rhubarb, Persian silk, cork, bacon, cordage, skins of squirrels, and cats; bees' wax, hogs' birstles, mice and goats' skins, swan and geese down, ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... lampoon against Dryden, entitled "The Laureat," inscribes his collection of poems, printed 1688-9, to the Earl of Abingdon; and it contains some pieces addressed to him and to his lady. He survived also to compose, on the Earl's death, in 1700, "The Mourning Swan," an eclogue to his memory, in which a shepherd gives the following account of the proximate cause of ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... child-lover! What an eager, delightful audience are these little ones, grieving at the sorrows of the heroes, laughing at their happy successes, breathless with anxiety lest the cat catch the disobedient mouse, clapping hands when the Ugly Duckling is changed into the Swan,—all appreciation, all interest, all joy! We might count the rest of the world well lost, could we ever be surrounded by such blooming faces, such loving hearts, and ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... costly embroidered; her hair hanging down loose, as fair as the beaten gold, and of such length that it reached down to her hams; having most amorous coal-black eyes; a sweet and pleasant round face, with lips as red as any cherry; her cheeks of a rose colour, her mouth small; her neck white like a swan, tall and slender of personage; in sum, there was no imperfect place in her. She looked round about her with a rolling hawk's eye, a smiling and wanton countenance, which near hand inflamed the hearts of all the students, but that they persuaded themselves she was a spirit, which made ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... for [c]Buckingham, are gone Vnder the Swan, the Armes of that olde Towne, The Londoners, and Middlesex as one, Are by the Red Crosse, and the Dagger knowne; The Men of [d]Essex ouermatch'd by none, Vnder Queene Hellens Image Martching downe; [e]Suffolke a Sunne halfe risen from the brack, ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... whether by the same collection of a more dense body then the other, or at least, of the denser part of the other, there might not be imagin'd a reason of the apparition of some new fix'd Stars, as those in the Swan, Cassiope's Charr, ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... that genius has yet idealized; that where Hawthorne's "David Swan" slept, or that which Thoreau found upon the banks of Walden Pond, or where Whittier parted with his childhood's playmate on Ramoth Hill. It is not heights, or depths, or spaces that make the world worth living in; for the fairest landscape needs still to be garlanded ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... "the Pompadour and the Parabere," can still enchant us from the page of history and chronicle. "Zeus gave them beauty, which naturally rules even strength itself," to quote the Greek orator on the mistress of them all, on her who, having never lived, can never die, the Daughter of the Swan. ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... is like the snaw drift; Her throat is like the swan; Her face it is the fairest That e'er the sun shone on,— That e'er the sun shone on; And dark blue is her ee; And for bonnie Annie Laurie I'd lay me doune ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... day I hear that G[od] has shot an arrow into the midst of this Town. The small pox is in an ordinary ye sign of the Swan, the ordinary Keepers name is Windsor. His daughter is sick of the disease. It is observable that this disease begins at an alehouse, to testify God's displeasure agt the sin of drunkenness & yt of multiplying alehouses!" ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... displayed a Saracen's head upon his signboard; then came in regular order Julian Walton, the mercer, with a wheelbarrow; Stephen Fronsard, the girdler, with a cardinal's hat; John Silverton, the pelter or furrier, with a star; Peter Swan, the Court broiderer, with cross-keys; John Morstowe, the luminer, or illuminator of books, with a rose; Lionel de Ferre, the French baker, with a vine; Herman Goldsmith, the Court goldsmith, who bore a dolphin; William Alberton, ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... the struggles and hardships that made him so. It reminds me of the fabled song of the swan, brother. He told his beautiful tale, and died. Ah! Poor Wilson, he was a ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... Kingdom; nevertheless, it was a noble craft—one of the good, stable, insubmergible and self-emptying kind which were known as the Greathead lifeboats, and which for many years did good service on our coasts. It sat on the raging waters like a swan, and although the seas broke over it again and again, it rose out of the water buoyantly, and, with the brine pouring from its sides, kept end-on to the seas, surmounting them or dashing right through them, while her gallant ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... him were the wolf, from his acuteness of sight, and because he spared his flocks when the god was a shepherd; the crow and the raven, because these birds were supposed to have, by instinct, the faculty of prediction; the swan, from its divining its own death; the hawk, from its boldness in flight; and the cock, because he announces the rising of ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... that work-day earth wherein you nevertheless acquit yourself so well? There—I must stop describing you, or I shall catch the infection of your own euphuism, and talk of you as you would have talked of Sidney or of Spenser, or of that Swan of Avon, whose song had just begun when yours—but I will not anticipate; my Lady Bath is waiting to give you ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... those parties who miscall themselves critics, and I don't care to have them paw the book at all. It's my swan song, my retirement from literature permanently, and I wish to pass to the cemetery unclodded.... Well, my book is written—let it go, but if it were only to write over again there wouldn't be so many things left out. They burn in me; they keep multiplying and multiplying, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... have a something of soft and flowing in your verses; them I understand altogether. But there was Gottsched, one day, reading me his Translation of IPHIGENIE; I had the French Copy in my hand, and could not understand a word of him [a Swan of Saxony, laboring in vain that day]! They recommended me another Poet, one Peitsch [Herr Peitsch of Konigsberg, Hofrath, Doctor and Professor there, Gottsched's Master in Art; edited by Gottsched thirty years ago; now become a dumb idol, though at ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... uttered fell, 395 The echoes could not catch the swell. "A stranger I," the Huntsman said, Advancing from the hazel shade. The maid, alarmed, with hasty oar, Pushed her light shallop from the shore, 400 And when a space was gained between, Closer she drew her bosom's screen— So forth the startled swan would swing, So turn to prune his ruffled wing. Then safe, though fluttered and amazed, 405 She paused, and on the stranger gazed. Not his the form, nor his the eye, That youthful ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... bridal visit must have charmed you, and I am glad you had the gladness of witnessing some of the happiness of your friend, Mrs. Acton Tyndal, you who have such quick sympathies, and to whom the happiness of a friend is a gain counted in your own. The swan's shadow is something in a clear water. For poor Mrs.——, if she is really, as you say Mrs. Tyndal thinks, pining in an access of literary despondency, why that only proves to me that she is not happy otherwise, that her life and soul are not sufficiently filled for her woman's ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... denied By moderate purse, the low by decent pride; Come and determine,—will you take your place At the full Orb, or half the lunar Face? With the Black-Boy or Angel will ye dine? Will ye approve the Fountain or the Vine? Horses the white or black will ye prefer? The Silver-Swan or Swan opposed to her - Rare bird! whose form the raven-plumage decks, And graceful curve her three alluring necks? All these a decent entertainment give, And by their comforts comfortably live. Shall I pass by the Boar?—there are who cry, "Beware the Boar," and pass determined by: Those dreadful ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... Capel Lofft and the poet Southey, he was enabled to leave the trade to which he had been apprenticed and go to Cambridge. His poems have most of them a strongly devotional cast. Among them are Gondoline, Clifton Grove, and the Christiad, in the last of which, like the swan, he chants his own death-song. His memory has been kept green by Southey's edition of his Remains, and by the beautiful allusion of Byron to his genius and his fate in The English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... have been recorded, as in the often-quoted instance of the Dahlia.[626] After several years' culture the Zinnia has only lately (1860) begun to vary in any great degree. "In the first seven or eight years of high cultivation the Swan River daisy (Brachycome iberidifolia) kept to its original colour; it then varied into lilac and purple and other minor shades."[627] Analogous facts have been recorded with the Scotch rose. In discussing the variability of plants several experienced horticulturists have ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... the Public in the words of Mr. SWAN: who in a Letter address'd to me in The Ladies Museum of this Month, after congratulating me on my "successful efforts," (and with such a Production to propose to public Attention how could they ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... how, seven days after they left Cape Raz, their largest ship, the Delight, after she had "most part of the night" (I quote Hayes), "like the swan that singeth before her death, continued in sounding of trumpets, drums, and fifes, also winding of the comets and hautboys, and, in the end of their jollity, left off with the battle and doleful knells," struck the next day (the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Barrett, Henry Taylor, William Barnes, and others were by this date of mature age. It is difficult to remind ourselves, who have lived in the radiance of that august figure, that some of the most beautiful of Tennyson's lyrics, such as "Mariana" and "The Dying Swan" are now separated from us by as long a period of years as divided them from Dr. Johnson and the author of "Night Thoughts." The reflection is of value only as warning us of the extraordinary length of the epoch we still call "Victorian." It covers, not a mere generation, but much ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... own kind. So they refused to have old King Bear as their king and went to Old Mother Nature to ask her to appoint a king of the air. Now Mr. Eagle was one of the biggest and strongest and most respected of all the birds of the air. There were some, like Mr. Goose and Mr. Swan, who were bigger, but they spent most of their time on the water or the earth, and they had no great claws or hooked beak to command respect as did Mr. Eagle. So Old Mother Nature made Mr. Eagle king of the air, and as was ...
— Mother West Wind "How" Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... the entrance of the bore may be, this egg is always at the bottom of the acorn, within the cup, at the base of the cotyledonary matter. The cup furnishes a thin film like swan-skin which imbibes the sapid exudations from the stem, the source of nourishment. I have seen a young grub, hatched under my eyes, eat as his first mouthfuls this tender cottony layer, which is moist and flavoured ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... the Angel Gabriel, with enormous real swan's wings suspended from her shoulders, looked the part to perfection, and most angelic with her lovely smile, blond hair, ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... recast his own views accordingly. A serious ethnological error had crept into his great work, "Capital," two editions of which had been previously published in German between 1863-1873. A footnote by Frederick Engels (p. 344, Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., English edition, 1886) testifies to the revolution Morgan's works had wrought on the ethnological conceptions of the founder ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel |
