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More "Thrush" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gave me in my birth and habit, in the delight and study of my eyes, and not of another man's. Of all absurdities, this of some foreigner, purposing to take away my rhetoric, and substitute his own, and amuse me with pelican and stork, instead of thrush and robin; palm-trees and shittim-wood, instead of sassafras and hickory,—seems the most needless." Locke said, "God, when he makes the prophet, does not unmake the man." Swedenborg's history points the remark. The parish disputes, in the Swedish church, between the friends and foes ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that 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 was ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... in the air and everywhere The throb of a life new-born, In mating thrush and blossoming brush, In the hush ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... impossible for the first child endowed with this faculty not to speak in the presence of a companion similarly endowed, as it would be for a nightingale or a thrush not to carol to its mate. The same faculty creates the same necessity in our days, and its exercise by young children, when accidentally isolated from the teachings and influence of grown companions, will readily account for the existence ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... whispering to me of the country green and cool— Of redwing blackbirds chattering beside a reedy pool; It brings me soothing fancies of the homestead on the hill, And I hear the thrush's evening song and the robin's morning trill; So I fall to thinking tenderly of those I used to know Where the sassafras ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... stood freshly clad for church; A Thrush, white-breasted, o'er them sat singing on his perch. "Happy be! for fair are ye!" the gentle singer told them, But presently a buff-coat Bee came booming up to scold them. "Vanity, oh, vanity! Young maids, beware of vanity!" Grumbled out the ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... hither, through the 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
... 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
... I mind the olden time, The sweet, sweet olden time; How all the night I long'd for morn, And bless'd the thrush whose early note The silver chords of silence smote With greetings to the day new-born; For then again, with heart elate, I hoped to meet her at the gate, In the ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... bower, And in the morning twilight wandered forth Beside the osiers of a rivulet, Full ankle-deep in lilies of the vale. The nightingale had ceas'd, and a few stars Were lingering in the heavens, while the thrush Began calm-throated. Throughout all the isle There was no covert, no retired cave Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves, 40 Though scarcely heard in many a green recess. He listen'd, and he wept, and his ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... Blackbird and the Thrush, And charming Nightingale, Whose sweet songs sweetly echo Through every ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... worshiped, like the Egyptians, animals and birds; and, like the Assyrians, the sun and moon; they attributed moreover, a sort of divinity to the rainbow. The Tagalos adored a blue bird, as large as a thrush, and called it Bathala, which was among them a term of divinity. [79] They also worshiped the crow (as the ancients worshiped the god Pan and the goddess Ceres). It bore the name Mei lupa, which signifies "master of the soil." ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... 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 ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... all its splendours; she remarked not the twinkling of the bright stars, not how they mirrored themselves in the ladies-mantle, which stood full of pure crystal water; she heard not the rushing of the river, nor the song of the pine-thrush; for never before, in her breast, had Barbra ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... His sense of melody was painfully dull, and some of his lighter effusions, as he would have called them, are almost ludicrously wanting in grace of movement. We cannot expect in a modern poet the thrush-like improvisation, the impulsively bewitching cadences, that charm us in our Elizabethan drama and whose last warble died with Herrick; but Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning have shown that the simple pathos of their music was not irrecoverable, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... Winter undismayed, To see the dainty snow-flakes fall. These kindly greeted, with small head Held on one side, a sparrow said, "To choose a gift for Cecily We've met to-night. What shall it be?" A flute-like trill, in graceful pride, A thrush sang sweetly, then replied, "What better than the gift of song?" "None better," answered all ...
— Harper's Young People, December 23, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... 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 ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... northern sea, where 'the white horses fume and fret' under a cold, gray, northern sky. The oaks in the park are just thickening with yellow-green buds. And there, close to my window, perched on a topmost twig, a missel-thrush is singing, facing the wind like a gentleman. You look out upon a purple sea, I suppose, beneath clear skies and over orange trees and palms. I wonder if any brave bird pipes to you as my storm-cock to me? It brings up one's courage to hear his song, so strong and wild and sweet, in the very ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... birds see him first, jay and blackbird and thrush; They shriek at his coming and curse him, each one; With the clay of the vale on his pads and his brush, It's the Fallowfield fox and he's pretty near done; It's a couple of hours since a whip tally-ho'd him; Now the rookery's stooping to mob and to goad him; There's an earth on the hill, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... beat down upon the mountains and valleys. The thrush and the mocking-bird had been driven to cool places, and their songs were not heard in the trees. The hotel was crowded with refugees from Memphis. A terrible scourge was sweeping through Tennessee, and its black shadow was creeping down to the Gulf of Mexico; and as it crept it mowed ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... What a time they are having—thrush, bobolinks, blackbirds, nightingales, woodpeckers, little pee-wees, all fluttering, skimming, chirping; bursting their tiny throats for the very joy of living. And they are all welcome—and it wouldn't make any difference to them if they hadn't been; they ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... listened as she had never listened before. Why had it become so strangely sweet to listen to the simple sounds? Why did the rich Tyrian dye of the dawn touch her cheek and flush the flowering floss of her silken hair? A thrush from the single laurel at the ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... sweet spring Returning here once more,— The memory of the love that holds In my fond heart such power,— The thrush again his song assaying,— The little rills o'er pebbles playing, And sparkling as they fall,— The memory recall Of her on whom my heart's desire Is, shall be, fixed till ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... I 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 you tchokh selammoum, (many ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... who lived in an orchard once became acquainted with a Swallow. A friendship sprang up between them; and the Swallow, after skimming the orchard and the neighboring meadow, would every now and then come and visit the Thrush. The Thrush, hopping from branch to branch, would welcome him with his most cheerful note. "O mother!" said he to his parent one day, "never had creature such a friend as I have in this same Swallow."—"Nor ever any mother," replied the parent-bird, "such ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... not hurry himself, for there was plenty of time before five o'clock, and he stopped every few moments to examine some wayside plant, and to listen with the ardor of a true lover of nature to the merry voices of the thrush and blackbird singing ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... 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 throstle that ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... 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 ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... a wood thrush in the dusk Twirl three notes and make a star— My heart that walked with bitterness ...
— Love Songs • Sara Teasdale
... whose wings had been broken by a bird of prey; and as it could not fly to the bottom of its cage for water, or food, she made a little ladder for it, so it could jump up and down when it pleased. She had besides a thrush, which had been almost frozen to death, and never recovered the use of its feet: but it did not sing the less ...
— Paulina and her Pets • Anonymous
... peopled the scene. Gulls, in strong fierce flight, laughed overhead. Swallows darted back and forth, ceaselessly twittering, as they built their cup-shaped mud nests beneath the eaves. Upon the lawn companies of starlings ran, flapping glossy wings, squealing, whistling; to the annoyance of a song thrush, in spotted waistcoat and neatly fitting brown surtout, who, now tall, now flattened to the level of the turf, its head turned sideways, peered and listened, locating the presence of the victim worm.—Three or four vigorous pecks—the starlings running elsewhere—to ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... A wood thrush's nest that I found contained two young thrushes and two buntings. All of them were about half fledged. Being of nearly the same size, the queerly assorted bantlings lived in apparent peace in their narrow quarters. I watched them at frequent intervals, but saw no attempts on the part of ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... spring by-and-by when we find a brilliant cardinal flower, or a showy lady's slipper, just as we forget the timid, tender tones of the bluebird when the grand song of the grosbeak floods the evening air, or the exquisite melody of the hermit thrush spiritualizes the leafy woods; just as many a man forgets the ministrations of his humbler friends in early life when he has climbed into the society of those whom earth calls great. But the aspens will neither grieve nor murmur. They will continue to make ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... And the singing of the thrush; And we saw the squirrel's brush In the hedges, As along his back 't was thrown, Like a glory of his own. While the sun behind it, ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... The thrush soars up, over green clad hills, (The day is long, so long;) Like liquid silver his music spills, And ever it quivers, and runs, and trills In a ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... they distinguished 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, ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... went with her to the King's palace, and she now had no difficulty. She knew the language of those who lived in the forest, and she was no longer poor and lonely. So in the pages of this book you will learn of the lives of faithful dogs and huge buffaloes, and the brown thrush will sing for you a song full of meaning. The modest violet, the jack-in-the-pulpit, even the four-leaf clovers will tell you stories about the forest and the field, so that wherever you walk you will be surrounded by your friends. The magic glass of Merlin will unseal ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... a stone wall to him. He was down in every fit of the 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 their name—worried him ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... Thrush, Lark, Blackbird, and Nightingale, and one or two choristers more. These are connected with the pheasants in their speckledness, and with the pies in pecking; while the nightingale leads down to the smaller groups of ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... 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
... at Hurst Walwyn, though large, wainscoted, and well furnished, bore as pertinaciously the air of a cell as the appearance of Sister Cecily St. John continued like that of a nun. There was a large sunny oriel, in which a thrush sang merrily in a wicker cage; and yet the very central point and leading feature of the room was the altar-like table, covered with rich needlework, with a carved ebony crucifix placed on it, and on the ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cricket 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 ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... 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
... stripped and bathed him in the brook, they presently sat down, all four together, and ate and talked and laughed right merrily, the while lark and thrush and blackbird carolled lustily ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... 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 ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... The 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 I've ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... Roussillon, a jack of 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
... abound with beauties: in the bee that lit upon the nettle and sucked the honey out of its blossom; in the nettle that nodded under the weight of the bee; in the dew that dropped like a diamond from the alder-bough when the thrush alighted on its stem; in the thrush that warbled till the speckled feathers on its throat throbbed as if its heart were in its song; in the slug that trailed a silver track upon the dust; in the very dust itself that twirled in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... canals there comes a sudden rush and hurry, as 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
... men waking. The yellow was out on the gorse, with a heady scent like a pineapple's, and between the bushes spread the grey film of coming blue-bells. High up, the pines sighed along the ridge, turning paler; and far down, where the brook ran, a mad duet was going on between thrush and chaffinch—"Cheer up, cheer up, Queen!" "Clip clip, clip, and kiss me—Sweet!"—one against ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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 ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... 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 ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... was 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 linnet in open country or ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... English cousin famed in poetry, and the sharp crescendo of the coach-whip bird would scarcely be classed as "sweet." "The tinkle of the bell-bird in the ranges may have gratified his ear; but the likelihood is that the birds which pleased him were the harmonious thrush and the mellow songster so opprobiously named the thickhead, for no better reason than that collectors experience a difficulty in skinning it.* (* Mr. Chas. L. Barrett, a well known Australian ornithologist, and one of the editors ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... 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 ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... and the brother's and 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 excitement. "Captain ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... 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 take refuge ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... Latterly number of shoes have 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 no more virtue in curing diseases or relieving ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley
... blooms in the falling dark, That flower of mystical yearning song: Sad as a hermit thrush, as a lark Uplifted, glad, and strong. Heart, we have chosen the better part! Save sacred love and sacred art Nothing is ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... out into the sunlit orchard. In an apple-tree a thrush was singing; the gooseberries were ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... gift (or more properly an issue of several gifts), not an acquisition; it cannot be taught. As to teaching style to one with inharmonious or defective natural powers, you might as well attempt to teach a thrush to sing the songs of the nightingale. To be sure, like the poetical, or the scientific, or any mental gift, it requires culture. But style is little helped from without. The most, as to the form of his utterance, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... The nightingale to sing so fresh and clear? The thrush or lark that, mounting high above, Chants her shrill notes to heedless ears of corn Heavily ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... The teacher took the palpitating little figure in her arms and kissed the wet face. She had learned something of this sweet wood-thrush girl, and had seen both sides of life's coin enough to be able to close her eyes and ears, and visualize the woman ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... * blackbird, * 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, * ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... willow- sprays of them shinin' bars a layin' down on the gray twilight field. And fur away over the green hills and woods of the east, the moon was a risin', big and calm and silvery. And we could hear the plaintive evenin' song of the thrush, and the crickets' happy chirp, till we got nearer the schoolhouse, when they sort o' blended in with 'There is a fountain filled with ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... 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 ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... were a bird When winter comes I'd trust you, mother dear, For a few crumbs, Whether I sang or not, Were lark, thrush, or starling.— ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... newspapers, like that of eminent or notorious people to a watering-place, as the first authentic notification of spring. And such his appearance in the orchard and garden undoubtedly is. But, in spite of his name of migratory thrush, he stays with us all winter, and I have seen him when the thermometer marked 15 degrees below zero of Fahrenheit, armed impregnably within,(1) like Emerson's Titmouse, and as cheerful as he. The robin has a bad reputation among people who do not ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... dumb trouble, for her blind eyes were still wet with tears. The river was murmuring at her feet; an old olive-tree over her head was pattering with its multitudinous tongues; the little family of a squirrel was chirping by her side, and one tiny creature of the brood was squirling up her dress; a thrush was swinging itself on the low bough of the olive and singing as it swung, and a sheep of solemn face—gaunt and grim and ancient—was standing and palpitating before her. Bees were humming, grasshoppers were ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... elevated," he says, "with many 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 ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... and sauntered down the walk together. Two green-and-white butterflies fluttered past them, and in the pear-tree at the corner of the garden a thrush ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... secure. Then wake again, and yield God ever praise, Content with hips and haws and brambleberry; In contemplation passing out his days, And change of holy thoughts to make him merry. Who when he dies, his tomb may be a bush, Where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush." ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... still. 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 ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... whiff chub strap smith twist when shun prick string track whist trash brick smack crash whim chest crust stump stock which script scrub splash scrap whisk spend shred struck block ship cramp grunt scamp frank chill smash print shrink throb chat twitch stack thump pluck sprang spring drink thrush shrub sham switch check stretch brush chess snatch ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... with us. The little striped hornet heats his nose with a spirit lamp and goes forth searching for the man with the linen pantaloons. All nature is full of life and activity. So is the man with the linen pantaloons. Anon, the thrush will sing in the underbrush, and the prima donna will do up her voice in a red-flannel rag ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... the blue haze beneath the incense of the morning mass. Black-capped precentor of the avian choir, the chickadee sounds two sweet tones, clear and musical, like keynotes blown from a silver pipe. The wood thrush sounds a few organ tones, resonant and thrilling. It is almost his last summer service; soon, like the thrashers, he will be drooping and silent. The chewink, the indigo bird, the glad goldfinches, the plaintive pewees are the sopranos; the blue-bird, the quail, with her long, sweet call, ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... and then on and on they went downward through the bushes, which ever and again brushed against their sleeves, and twice over startled and arrested by a sudden dash as of an enemy; but it was nothing worse than a startled bird, blackbird or thrush, roused from its roosting sleep by the disturbers ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... granary, and a nice warm fire on the hearth in winter. But what have I to do with all these things? Wasn't I born a heathen, quite a heathen? I was born in the woods, just as the squirrel was born in an oak, just as a hawk was hatched on the crag and the thrush in the fir-tree!" ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... bends into billows, grey, silvery, and green, when a breeze of sufficient strength sweeps across it. The larks are so multitudinous that no distinct song can be caught, and amidst the confused melody comes the note of the thrush and the blackbird. A constant under-running accompaniment is just audible in the hum of innumerable insects and the sharp buzz of flies darting past the ear. Only those who live in the open air and watch the fields and sea from hour to hour and day to day know ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... to continue without end, along the forest level; farther, the wild mint and the centaurea perfume the shady nooks, the oaks and lime-trees arch their spreading branches, and the honeysuckle twines itself round the knotty shoots of the hornbeam, whence the thrush gives forth ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... the space of a minute, I have heard it imitate the woodlark, chaffinch, blackbird, thrush, and sparrow.... Their few natural notes resemble those of the nightingale, but their song is of greater compass and more varied."—Ashe, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... in his garden he sowed cotton seeds. By-and-by the cotton seeds grew up into a cotton bush, with big brown pods upon it. These pods burst open when they are ripe; and you can see the fluffy white cotton bulging all white out of the pods. There was a Thrush in this garden, and the Thrush thought within herself how nice and soft the cotton looked. She plucked out some of it to line her nest with; and never before was her sleep so soft as it was on ...
— The Talking Thrush - and Other Tales from India • William Crooke
... Midland counties in 1895, and since that they have been seen in smaller numbers. The late Mr. J. Cordeaux, F.R.G.S., M.B.O.U., one of our greatest authorities, says that its note is lower and more of a querulous murmur than that of the ringdove. In size it is not much larger than a missel thrush. ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... scarcely finding rest; I have fled vehemently, I have fled as a chain, I have fled as a roe into an entangled thicket; I have fled as a wolf cub, I have fled as a wolf in a wilderness, I have fled as a thrush of portending language; I have fled as a fox, used to concurrent bounds of quirks; I have fled as a martin, which did not avail; I have fled as a squirrel, that vainly hides, I have fled as a stag's antler, ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... 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
... it is dusky, And the hermit thrush and the black and white warbler Are singing and answering together. There is sweetness in the tree, And fireflies are counting the leaves. I like this country, I like the way it has, But I cannot forget my dream I had of the sea, The gulls swinging and calling, And ...
— Poems By a Little Girl • Hilda Conkling
... with wings new dressed float on the summer tide? Hast thou heard the thrush, full-throated, call his mate across the lea? Hast thou watched the moon soar up the heavens, sweeping aside the clouds, and defying the mists of earth? Hast thou marked, my Dutchman, the summer laughter on a field of golden corn? Hast thou tracked ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... development of the frog. With a frog of good size, low down, and taking part in the pressure of the foot on the ground, contraction will be prevented. On the other hand, an ill-developed frog, one wasted by long-continued and spreading thrush, or one robbed of its normal function by excessive paring in the forge, is a common starting-point of the condition we are considering. We have already referred to this in Chapter III., when considering the experiments of Lungwitz in this connection. ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... mortified to observe, in those solitary walks, that the 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 peck my fingers, which I ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... Betty read or knitted and inveigled her stout, kindly landlady into gossip on the threshold while she cleared away the evening meal, and so the morning of the ninth day found Betty staring out of her window, listening for the thrush to begin ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... as I planted: I did not count them. I made a rapid estimate of the cost of the seed, the interest of the ground, the price of labor, the value of the bushes, the anxiety of weeks of watchfulness. I looked about me on the face of Nature. The wind blew from the south so soft and treacherous! A thrush sang in the woods so deceitfully! All Nature seemed fair. But who was to give me back my peas? The fowls of the air have ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... blind that does not believe in them. I 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 ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... 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 ...
— Flame and Shadow • Sara Teasdale
... 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 document of this kind, there ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... 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 with white sails; imagine those mysterious and unknown sounds, those breathings of the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... stream, and they hung like a palpable sort of clouds in the gathering mists. The mists, in fact, seemed of much the same density as the trees, and I should be bolder than I like if I declared which the birds were singing their vespers in. There was one thrush imitating a nightingale, which I think must have been singing in the heart of the mist, and which probably mistook it for a tree of like substance. It was having, apparently, the time of its life; and really the place was enchanting, with its close-cropped, daisy-starred lawns, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... INFLAMED.—The external parts, and the passage to the womb (vagina), in these cases, are not only irritable and itching, but are sometimes hot and inflamed, and are covered either with small pimples, or with a whitish exudation of the nature of aphtha (thrush), somewhat similar to the thrush on the mouth of an infant; then, the addition of glycerine to the lotion is a great improvement and ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... the salmon in the flood, That over golden sands doth run; And fair the thrush in his abode, That spreads his wings in gladsome fun; More beauteous look, if truth be spoke, The ...
— Ermeline - a ballad - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... 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 cool ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... hour. All the birds have been stricken dumb or have been banished, yet as an echo to any violation of the silence comes the sweet, mellow, inquisitive note of the "moor-goody" (to use the black's name, for the shrike thrush). The bird seems fond of sound and will answer in trills and chuckles attempts to ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... commerce with married women and of betraying many of the public interests to gratify them. Of his temperance and simplicity in his way of living the following anecdote is told. On one occasion when he was ill and indisposed to his ordinary food, the physician prescribed a thrush for him. After search had been made and none found, for the season was past, some one observed that one might be found at the house of Lucullus, for he kept them all the year round: "Well then," said Pompeius, "I suppose if Lucullus were not luxurious, ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... and bluebird, meadow-lark and song-sparrow were singing in the mornings at home; the maple buds were red; windflowers and bloodroot were blooming while the last patches of snow still lingered; the rapture of the hermit thrush in Vermont, the serene golden melody of the wood thrush on Long Island, would be heard before we were there to listen. Each was longing for the homely things that were so dear to him, for the home people who were ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... mossy brink, Where the cattle came to drink, They trilled and piped and whistled With the thrush and bobolink, Till the kine, in listless pause, Switched their tails in mute applause, With lifted heads, and dreamy eyes, And ...
— Riley Child-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... Tiberius appears as a patron of literature fill us with great respect for his taste. He is said to have given one Asellius Sabinus 100,000 sesterces for a dialogue between a mushroom, a finch, an oyster, and a thrush,[9] and to have rewarded a worthless writer,[10] Clutorius Priscus, for a poem composed on the death of Germanicus. On the other hand, he seems to have had a sincere love of literature,[11] though he wrote in a crabbed and affected style. ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... and seventy warblers are described by Davie in his "Nests and Eggs of North American Birds," and the Kentucky Warbler is recognized as one of the most beautiful of the number, in its manners almost the counterpart of the Golden Crowned Thrush (soon to delight the eyes of the readers of BIRDS), though it is altogether a more conspicuous bird, both on account of its brilliant plumage and greater activity, the males being, during the season of nesting, very pugnacious, continually chasing one another about ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... body seemed as full of the spirit of the waltz as a thrush's body is of song. Peter Roeder moved along with her in a maze, only half-answering her questions, his gray eyes full ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... Far off a grey-brown thrush warbling in hedge or in marsh; Down there in the blossoming bushes, my brother, what is that you ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... unlumbered forest. The tree lies where it falls; the undergrowth chokes the trails; and on the hottest day it is cool in the green, sun-chequered wilderness. Deer start in the thickets or steal down to drink in the lake. The only sounds are the wood-pecker's scream, the song of the hermit-thrush, the thrumming and drumming of bull-frogs in the water. My friend is a sportsman; I am not; and while he catches trout I have been reading Homer and Shelley. Shelley I have always understood; but now, for the first time, I seem to understand Homer. Our guide here, I feel, might have ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Walwyn, though large, wainscoted, and well furnished, bore as pertinaciously the air of a cell as the appearance of Sister Cecily St. John continued like that of a nun. There was a large sunny oriel, in which a thrush sang merrily in a wicker cage; and yet the very central point and leading feature of the room was the altar-like table, covered with rich needlework, with a carved ebony crucifix placed on it, and on the wall above, quaint and stiff, but lovely-featured, delicately ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Brown-thrush singing all day long In the leaves above me, Take my love this little song, "Love me, love me, ...
— Helen of Troy and Other Poems • Sara Teasdale
... the lightning zigzags down through the hemlocks, and the arrowhead guards its waxen blossom in the streams; so long as the earth shakes with the thunder of hoofs, or pours out its heart in the song of the veery-thrush, or bares its bosom in the wild rose, so long will there be little chapels to Pan in the woodland—chapels on the lintels of which you shall read, as Virgil wrote: Happy is he who knows the rural gods, Pan, and old Sylvanus, and the ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... besides its melodious quality, is full of expression. In this respect it excels the liquid chansons of the mountain hermit thrush, which is justly celebrated as a minstrel, but which does not rehearse a well-defined theme. The towhee's song is sprightly and cheerful, wild and free, has the swing of all outdoors, and is not pitched to a minor ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... not like you as well in stone-coloured merino as in blue. Should a bird of paradise wear the plumage of a thrush or a quail?' ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... to dream of her as he had seen her in the locket. They were both back in the old homeland. He was talking with her in an English garden and a thrush was singing overhead. How long it was since he had listened to the song of any bird! Why, he had almost forgotten that there was such an ecstasy in the world. So exalted was he, that he paid more attention to the thrush's song than to the words which Mordaunt ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... 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 ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... walking on through the forest, when one of our hunters made a sign to us to stop, and he advanced cautiously. We saw him raise his bow and let fly an arrow. Down fell a small bird rather larger than a thrush, the plumage as we saw it falling being of the most intense cinnabar red with the softest and most lovely gloss. Mr Hooker ran forward in the greatest state of agitation I had ever seen him exhibit, and kneeling down, gradually lifted up the bird. Had ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 spend the ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... men-folk sleep, Unseen spreads on the light, Till the thrush sings to the coloured things, And earth forgets ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... friends of a neighbour. She had cried off on the score of "seeing something of Father," at which Lancelot had winked. But James was not in to tea, and at six—and no sign of him—she yielded to the liquid calling of a thrush in the thickening lilacs, and had gone out. There she stayed till it was dark, in a favourite place—a circular garden of her contriving, with a pond, and a golden privet hedge, so arranged as to throw yellow reflections in the water. ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... lightly in With odoriferous woods of COMORIN, Each brilliant bird that wings the air is seen;— Gay, sparkling loories such as gleam between The crimson blossoms of the coral-tree[62] In the warm isles of India's sunny sea: Mecca's blue sacred pigeon,[63] and the thrush Of Hindostan[64] whose holy warblings gush At evening from the tall pagoda's top;— Those golden birds that in the spice time drop About the gardens, drunk with that sweet food[65] Whose scent hath lured them o'er ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... propagate by rubbing the glutinous berries and their seeds on the under side of a small branch at the angle where it joins a limb. There it will often flourish unless snapped up by a wandering missel-thrush. It is very slow in growth, but, when it attains a fair size, is strikingly pretty in winter when the tree is otherwise bare, for its peculiar shade of faded green, with its white and glistening berries, makes an unusual effect—quite different from that of any other ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... A thrush began to sing somewhere in the trees. Here and there a rose scattered its petals on the breeze. Some low-lying fleecy clouds rose to meet the sun, broke up into airy ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... "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, in ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... along the terrace behind them like a running thrush. When she sees how they are employed, she rises angrily to her full height, and ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... the blackbird for excellence because of its "spiritual quality." Colonel Roosevelt liked the song of the blackbird so much that he was almost indignant that he had not heard more of its reputation before. He said everybody talked about the song of the thrush; it had a great reputation, but the song of the blackbird, though less often mentioned, was much better than that of the thrush. He wanted to know the reason of this injustice and kept asking the question of himself and me. ...
— Recreation • Edward Grey
... surface of the earth, inhabiting different continents and even different hemispheres, speak with one voice, must we not believe that they have originated in the places where they now occur with all their distinctive peculiarities? Who taught the American Thrush to sing like his European relative? He surely did not learn it from his cousin over the waters. Those who would have us believe that all animals have originated from common centres and single pairs, and have been distributed from such ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... in the grove, The blackbird and linnet and thrush, And goldfinch and sweet cooing dove, Sat pensively mute in the bush: The leaves that once wove a green shade Lay withered in heaps on the ground: Chill Winter through grove, wood, and glade Spread sad ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... shoot them, for reasons which one must be a huntsman to understand. My companion shot one, and, if I had been well, I might have shot two; I was too exhausted. After three it cleared and became wonderfully fine, the horn-owl gave place to the thrush, and at sunrise the bird-chorus became deafening; the wood-pigeons singing bass, withal. At five I was down again, and, as it began to pour once more, I abandoned further attempts, returned hither, ate very heartily, after a twenty-four hours' fast, and drank two glasses ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... 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 than any other. ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... must be made between the "yeast plants," one of which produces thrush, and the "mould plants," the existence of which, as parasites in the skin, gives rise to certain cutaneous diseases. These two classes of germs are foreign to the present topic, which is surgery; and I shall, therefore, confine my remarks to that group of vegetable parasites to which the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... for man's own boasted powers. Set the man who has been accustomed to make engines of one type, to make engines of another type without any intermediate course of training or instruction, and he will make no better figure with his engines than a thrush would do if commanded by her mate to make a nest like a blackbird. It is vain then to contend that the ease and certainty with which an action is performed, even though it may have now become matter of such fixed habit that it cannot be suddenly and seriously modified without rendering the ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... there for years and had grown quite hopeless about seeing his kind again. When there was a gap in the mountains, he could hear the querulous, senseless love-quarrel of flickers going on below him; passing a deep ravine, the note of the wood-thrush—that shy lyrist of the hills—might rise to him from a dense covert of maple and beech: or, with a startling call, a red-crested cock of the woods would beat his white-striped wings from spur to spur, as though he were keeping close to the long swells of an unseen sea. Several times, a pert ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... 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 ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... one can help noticing its performances. A record has been kept of the variety entertainments provided by the bird. Besides its own calls, whistles, and song, it reproduces the song of the blackbird and thrush absolutely correctly, and mimics with equal nicety the calls of the curlew, the corncrake, ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... tree—from 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; ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... 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 beams ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... 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
... pheasant. Mr. Jenner Weir, also, finds that all male birds with rich or strongly-characterised plumage are more quarrelsome than the dull- coloured species belonging to the same groups. The goldfinch, for instance, is far more pugnacious than the linnet, and the blackbird than the thrush. Those birds which undergo a seasonal change of plumage likewise become much more pugnacious at the period when they are most gaily ornamented. No doubt the males of some obscurely-coloured birds fight desperately together, but it appears that when sexual selection ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... when as 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... plant we in the apple-tree? Buds, which the breath of summer days Shall lengthen into leafy sprays; Boughs, where the thrush with crimson breast Shall haunt and sing and hide her nest. We plant upon the sunny lea A shadow for the noontide hour, A shelter from the summer shower, When ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... with the plague, being at the end of the towne that I took him up; but God have mercy upon us all! Sir John Lawson, I hear, is worse than yesterday: the King went to see him to-day most kindly. It seems his wound is not very bad; but he hath a fever, a thrush, and a hickup, all three together, which are, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... thrush's call— That liquid note that all night long was stilled— The living chalice, brown and bright and small, Seems with the joy of living overfilled— Then suddenly, unfinished, clear and sweet The song is drowned in noises ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... bush, and flower grow and blossom upon either side; and a little bird, with a throat like a thrush, warbles a canticle of exquisite musical modulations, so to speak. But the most stirring sight of all is the system of logging carried on by the mill companies. "Look! Quick!" ejaculates the driver; and your gaze is directed to a monster log that comes furiously dashing from the summit ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... were walking slowly back to the Gap, after seeing Bob Chowne part of the way home to Ripplemouth. The feeling of coming summer was in the air, the birds were singing in the oak woods their last farewell to the day, and from time to time we startled some thrush and spoiled his song. ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... hush fell around the circle, and every listener was still, even as the rustling leaves hang motionless when the light breeze falls away in the hour of sunset. Then through the silence, like the song of a far-away thrush from its hermitage in the forest, a voice came ringing: "I know it, I know ...
— The Spirit of Christmas • Henry Van Dyke
... 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 ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... I care about my own folks?" asked Jim, with a laugh that made the little thrush shudder. "I prefer ...
— Twinkle and Chubbins - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland • L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
... and his wife sat smoking beside their fire; and when the hermit thrush was singing, the whippoorwill whippoorwilling, the owl oo-koo-hooing, the fox barking, the bull frog whoo-wonking, the gander honking, the otter whistling, the drake quacking, the squirrel chattering, the cock grouse drumming, and the wolf howling—each ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... of men, and even without a friend with thee, thou wouldst not find it solitary. The crowing of the hannaquoi will sound in thine ears like the daybreak town-clock; and the wren and the thrush will join with thee in thy matin hymn to thy Creator, to thank Him for ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... bowling-green at their feet; or, rather, I kneeled there before them. Do not think that we were left without a proper guard, for we could be seen from the balcony of the house, and on the mountain-ash tree was an old missel-thrush that kept on chirruping and twittering, "Take care, you boy! ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... study it, to my husband's chapter on it, in his new edition of Veterinary Notes for Horse Owners. The feet of horses should not be washed, because this practice renders horses liable to cracked heels and thrush, both of which ailments diminish the sure-footedness of an affected animal. If the feet are carefully picked out and brushed they can be kept in a hard, healthy condition, such as we find in the feet of young and unbroken horses which have never been shod. The stable should be kept clean ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... its scarlet tinge. It was very still, yet all alive with woodsy sounds. Now a belated cicada swung his rattle as if in a fright, next a bull-frog, with hoarse kerchug! took a header for his evening bath. Once, later on, when the shadows were falling, a sleepy thrush settled upon a twig near by, and sang his good-night in sweetest tones. About this time he heard a farm-boy calling anxiously through the neighboring wood for the lost Sukey of the herd, and at times a dusty rumble announced a wagon jolting ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... leaving a volley of nods, winks and exclamations behind him. The windows stood open, the hour, the season invited. I saw the long, velvety vista of the cypress avenue, the slender feathers of trees in young leaf, the pleasantness of the grass, heard the invitation of a calling thrush, thought poignantly of Virginia, and went out, hoping ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... Barney was restrained from 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 tubercle ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... proportions. A 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 ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... Keppoch's bard, and I've no doubt you have heard many of my songs. I'm namely in the world for the best songs wit ever strung together. Are you for war? I can stir you with a stave to set your sinews straining. Are you for the music of the wood? The thrush itself would be jealous of my note. Are you for the ditty of the lover? Here's the songster to break hearts. Since the start of time there have been 'prentices at my trade: I have challenged ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... femuro. thing : afero, ajxo, objekto. think : pensi, opinii. thirst : soif'i, -o. thistle : kardo. thorn : dorno. thrash : drasxi; skurgxi, bategi. threaten : minaci. threshold : sojlo. thrill : eksciti. throat : gorgxo, fauxko. throne : trono. throw : jxeti. thrush : turdo. thunder : tondr'i, -o. thus : tiel, tiamaniere; jene thyme : timiano. ticket : bileto. tickle : tikli, amuzi. tide : tajdo, marfluo. tidy : bonorda. tie : ligi; kravato. tiger : tigro. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... from its former use as a magic charm and as a therapeutic agent) is in civilization now confined to sexual perverts and the insane, among some animals it is normal as a measure of hygiene in relation to their young. Thus, as, e.g., the Rev. Arthur East writes, the mistle thrush swallows the droppings of its young. (Knowledge, June 1, 1899, p. 133.) In the dog I have observed that the bitch licks her puppies shortly after birth as ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... is found by the alpine lakes and brooks on the mountains of the West. It is a modest-appearing bird, about the size of a thrush, and wears a plain dress of slaty blue. This dress is finished with a tail-piece somewhat like that of the wren, though it is not upturned so much. The bird seems to love cascades, and often nests by ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... on the branch of yon blossoming tree, This mad-cap cousin of Robin and Thrush, And sings without ceasing the whole morning long; Now wild, now tender, the wayward song That flows from his soft gray, fluttering throat; But oft he stops in his sweetest note, And shaking a flower from the blossoming bough, ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... 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 ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... questions, and I 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 you tchokh selammoum, (many ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... The wood thrush, on the contrary, is patience itself. A youngster of this lovely family sits a half hour at a time motionless and silent on a branch, head drawn down upon his shoulders, apparently in the deepest meditation. When he sees food coming he is gently agitated, ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... 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 ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... 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
... 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
... Parker remarked. "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 ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... dropped into a reclining posture. The tree 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 stream into a hollow cavity of stones made pleasant and soothing music. Charmed ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... eastern United States, 6 per cent breed in the eastern rather than the western United States, 30 per cent breed in both the eastern and western United States, 20 per cent are restricted to the Republic of Mexico, and the southern parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, and 1 per cent (Aztec Thrush and Rufous-capped Atlapetes) is endemic to the Republic ...
— Birds from Coahuila, Mexico • Emil K. Urban
... 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 ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... were sentenced 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 ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... there. The clear water sparkled and quivered in the early 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 of his words—his ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... birds 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 ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... 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 ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... marched 35 miles or more, and encamped at nightfall on the banks of Rio Biobio. The country still presented the same fertile aspect, and abounded in flowers, but animals of any sort only came in sight occasionally, and there were no birds visible, except a solitary heron or owl, and a thrush or grebe, flying from the falcon. Human beings there were none, not a native appeared; not even one of the GUASSOS, the degenerate offspring of Indians and Spaniards, dashed across the plain like a shadow, his flying steed ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... Every where she appeared to abound with beauties: in the bee that lit upon the nettle and sucked the honey out of its blossom; in the nettle that nodded under the weight of the bee; in the dew that dropped like a diamond from the alder-bough when the thrush alighted on its stem; in the thrush that warbled till the speckled feathers on its throat throbbed as if its heart were in its song; in the slug that trailed a silver track upon the dust; in the very dust itself that twirled in threads and circles on the ground ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... human news. Still summer-eventide everywhere! The great Sun hangs flaming on the utmost North-West; for it is his longest day this year. The hill-tops rejoicing will ere long be at their ruddiest, and blush Good-night. The thrush, in green dells, on long-shadowed leafy spray, pours gushing his glad serenade, to the babble of brooks grown audibler; silence is stealing over the Earth. Your dusty Mill of Valmy, as all other mills and drudgeries, may furl its canvass, and cease swashing and circling. The swenkt ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... sometimes lends a 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 their errand ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... the Egyptians, animals and birds; and, like the Assyrians, the sun and moon; they attributed moreover, a sort of divinity to the rainbow. The Tagalos adored a blue bird, as large as a thrush, and called it Bathala, which was among them a term of divinity. [79] They also worshiped the crow (as the ancients worshiped the god Pan and the goddess Ceres). It bore the name Mei lupa, which ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... litle birds that resort thither either for shelter or to build their nests. when sun began to shine today these birds appeared to be very gay and sung most inchantingly; I observed among them the brown thrush, Robbin, turtle dove, linnit goaldfinch, the large and small blackbird, wren and several other birds of less note. some of the inhabitants of the praries also take reffuge in these woods at night or from ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... 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. ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... shafts,—I pay thee homage. Thou art my king. I give honor due to the vulture, the falcon, and all thy noble baronage; and no less to the lowly bird, the sky-lark, whom thou permittest to visit thy court, and chant her matin song within its cloudy curtains; yea the linnet, the thrush, the swallow, are my brethren:—but still I am a bird, though but a bird ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... The gifts to 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 for her waiting! the wings of the East-wind have brought her no tidings; On the meadow the meadow-lark ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... 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 ...
— The Italian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... this dwelling 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 ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... into the rickyard, so that the birds which came searching along among the grasses and pieces of wood thrown carelessly aside against the wall could see into the room. Robins, of course, came every morning, perching on the sill and peering in with the head held on one side. Blackbird and thrush came, but always passed the window itself quickly, though they stayed without fear within a few inches of ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... Turner Kindness to Animals Unknown A Rule for Birds' Nesters Unknown "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 Brown Anger Charles and Mary ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... my ears that made me feel that I was not quite alone in this desolate swamp. The gray squirrels scolded among the tree-tops; robins, the brown thrush, and a large black woodpecker with his bright red head, each reminded me of Him without whose notice not a sparrow falleth to ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... as the notes of a thrush, exquisitely delicate, with the high ecstasy that only music can express. It swelled into a positive paen of rejoicing, eager, wonderful, almost unearthly in its purity. It ended in a confused jumble like the glittering fragments of a beautiful thing shattered to atoms at a blow. And ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... separated the wood from the orchards and plantations of fruit trees, and pausing for a minute to look down on the more than half-hidden village, invariably the first loud sounds that reached my ear were those of the cuckoo, thrush, and blackbird. At all hours in the village, from early morning to evening twilight, these three voices sounded far and near above the others. I considered myself fortunate that no large tree near the cottage had ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... primroses, and cowslips; all the trees bursting into leaves, and the hedges already clothed with their vernal livery; the mountains covered with flocks of sheep and tender bleating wanton lambkins playing, frisking, and skipping from side to side; the groves resound with the notes of blackbird, thrush, and linnet; and all night long sweet Philomel pours forth her ravishingly delightful song. Then, for variety, we go down to the nymph of Bristol spring, where the company is assembled before dinner; so good natured, so free, so easy; ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... friend spoke thus I smiled, but answered nothing. His arguments failed to convince me. Yet I loved to hear him talk—his voice was mellow as the note of a thrush, and his eyes had an eloquence greater than all speech. I loved him—God knows! unselfishly, sincerely—with that rare tenderness sometimes felt by schoolboys for one another, but seldom experienced by grown men. I was happy ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... when the thrush flies out o' the frost With a nid, [etc.] 'Tis time for loons to count the cost, ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... Content with hips and haws and brambleberry; In contemplation passing out his days, And change of holy thoughts to make him merry. Who when he dies, his tomb may be a bush, Where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush." ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... right fairly Are singing ever early; The lark, the thrush, the nightingale, The make-sport cuckoo and the quail. These sing of Love! then why sleep ye? To love your sleep ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... affect us like translations; the very fauna and flora are alien, remote; the dog's-tooth violet is but an ill substitute for the rathe primrose, nor can we ever believe that the wood-robin sings as sweetly in April as the English thrush. — THE ATHENAEUM. ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... think it necessary to qualify, or speak of this our fine bird as the "American robin, or red-breasted thrush," because a different bird is called the robin in England. This our bird is the Robin; and we shall call it so without apology, ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... Mr. Burroughs or some of our naturalists write one of their pleasant papers and explain the mystery of the wood-thrush's advent in our gardens and upon our lawns. Until a year ago the wood-thrush was not one of the birds which ever raised its note in our pleasure-grounds. We heard them in the woods, and looked at them, when we intruded upon their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... that the 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 peck my fingers, which I durst ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... the open current tries, Where with his line and feather'd fly He sports, and takes the scaly fry. Meanwhile each hollow wood and hill Doth ring with lowings long and shrill, And shady lakes with rivers deep Echo the bleating of the sheep; The blackbird with the pleasant thrush And nightingale in ev'ry bush Choice music give, and shepherds play Unto their flock some loving lay! The thirsty reapers, in thick throngs, Return home from the field with songs, And the carts, laden with ripe corn, Come groaning to the well-stor'd barn. Nor pass we by, as the least good, ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... gathering dusk, Jonathan decided to halt for the night. He whistled one more note, louder and clearer, and awaited the result with strained ears. The deep silence of the wilderness prevailed, suddenly to be broken by a faint, far-away, melancholy call of the hermit-thrush. It was the answering signal the borderman had ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... 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, and pig, almost all the ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... The thrush of all the birds that sing Of nests and little wives in Spring Alone confides the secret way:— "What does she line ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... 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
... out in the 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 they had not been warned; neither had they Peggy's ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... was a sign, however, that her life was very quiet and peaceful, that she had leisure to think upon the thing at all; and often she forgot it entirely in her low, chanting song, or in listening to the thrush warbling out his afternoon ditty to his patient ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Mrs 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 ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... 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 ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... important meteorological observations were made and yielded results, as regards the diminution of temperature, which were very definite. All over the country rooks and pigeons were seen returning home during the greatest obscuration; starlings in many places took flight; at Oxford a thrush commenced its evening song; at Ventnor a fish in an aquarium, ordinarily visible in the evening only, was in full activity about the time of greatest gloom; and generally, it was noted that the birds stopped singing and flew low from bush to bush. The darkness, though ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... 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 ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... swallow is said to have caused the decrease of another swallow species in North America; the recent increase of the missel-thrush in Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush; the brown rat has taken the place of the black rat in Europe; in Russia the small cockroach has everywhere driven before it its greater congener; and in Australia ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... of the thrush and the pipe of the plover Sweet voices come down through the binding lead; O queens that every age must discover For men, that man's delight may be fed; Oh, sister queens to the queens I wed. For the space of a year, a month, a day, No thirst but mine could ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... they use as ornaments. Those which frequent the woods, are crows and ravens, not at all different from our English ones, a blueish jay or magpie, common wrens, which are the only singing bird that we heard, the Canadian or migrating thrush, and a considerable number of brown eagles, with white heads and tails, which, though they seem principally to frequent the coast, come into the Sound in bad weather, and sometimes perch upon the trees. Amongst some other birds, of which the natives either brought fragments, or dried ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... 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 with ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... neared the place he put his fingers to his mouth and blew a whistle of three quick notes that reminded me of the piping of a thrush. And immediately I started back: a black man had risen almost from beneath our feet. So well hidden was he in a low-growing bush that we might have passed within a yard of him and been none the wiser. I perceived that he carried a long knife ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... chased bees and butterflies to ask for news of the elves; they waded in the brook, hoping to catch a water-sprite; they ran after thistle-down, fancying a fairy might be astride; they searched the flowers and ferns, questioned sun and wind, listened to robin and thrush; but no one could tell them any thing of the little people, though all had gay and charming bits of news about themselves. And Daisy thought the world got younger ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... 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 cherry time can dispel. A bird's song contains a clew to its life, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... 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, bristling ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... projects were sufficiently ripe he went one day to the Wood of Conils. A thrush sang in a tree and a little hedgehog crossed the stony path in front of him with awkward steps. Agaric walked with great strides, muttering fragments of sentences ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... 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 this ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... 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 his title as an authority; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... 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 bird tugs at it ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... Gowing made 'axeth' to rhyme with 'taxeth.' No word is more common in Suffolk than 'fare'; a pony is a 'hobby'; a thrush is a 'mavis'; a chest is a 'kist'; a shovel is a 'skuppet'; a chaffinch is a 'spink.' If a man is upset in his mind, he tells us he is 'wholly stammed,' and the Suffolk 'yow' is at least as old as ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... overeating results in vomiting and gas, and thus interferes with normal nursing, as also may tongue-tie. A condition in the mouth, medically known as "stomatitis," and commonly known as "thrush," often gives rise to a fretful cry when nursing is attempted. In the first place, the baby cannot "hold on" to the nipple; while, in the second place, it hurts his inflamed mouth when he makes an effort ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... a drowsy noon, A flight of geese and an autumn moon, Rolling meadows and storm-washed heights, A fountain murmur on summer nights, A dappled fawn in the forest hush, Simple words and the song of a thrush, Rose-red dawns and a mate to share With comrade soul my gypsy fare, A waiting fire when the twilight ends, A gallant heart and the ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... consider a less extreme and more familiar case. We possess a considerable number of birds which, like the redbreast, sparrow, the four common titmice, the thrush, and the blackbird, stay with us all the year round These lay on an average six eggs, but, as several of them have two or more broods a year, ten will be below the average of the year's increase. Such birds as these often live from fifteen to ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... 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, ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... warmth of the sun that my body embraces, For the cool of the waters that run through the shadowy places, For the balm of the breezes that brush my face with their fingers, For the vesper-hymn of the thrush when the twilight lingers, For the long breath, the deep breath, the breath of a heart without care,— I will give thanks and adore thee, God of ...
— Music and Other Poems • Henry van Dyke
... (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, she ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... her companion advanced towards the well known spot. The mellow voice of the thrush, and the clear pipe of the blackbird, diversified at intervals with the tender notes of the nightingale, formed the most agreable natural concert. The breast of Delia, framed for softness and melancholy, was filled ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... Are there streams like ours? Is God white-headed, or youthful and strong? Hang there the rainbows o'er happy bowers? Are there sun and moon and the thrush's song?" ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... came to a river in the deep woods. It was an exquisite bit of forest with the bells of a hermit thrush ringing in one of its towers. Their call and the low song of the river were the only sounds in the silence. The glow of the setting sun which lighted the western windows of the forest had a color like that of the music-golden. Long shafts of it fell ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... 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 ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... linnets from the hedges green, Blackbird and lark and thrush and dove, And every nightingale And cuckoo tells its tale, And all they ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... 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 ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... which floated to the river-bank. As winter advances, butterflies gradually disappear: one species (a Vanessa) lingers; three others have vanished since I came. Mocking-birds are abundant, but rarely sing; once or twice they have reminded me of the red thrush, but are inferior, as I have always thought. The colored people all say that it will be much cooler; but my officers do not think so, perhaps because last winter was so unusually mild,—with only ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... 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 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 cheery time can dispel. A bird's song contains ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... that springs frae the dews o' the lawn [lark] The shepherd to warn o' the grey-breaking dawn, And thou, mellow mavis, that hails the night-fa', [thrush] Give over for pity—my ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... evening, fluted as April by a thrush in the lilacs, Prosper and the Countess walked together on the terrace. A guard or two, pike in hand, lounged by the balustrade; the deer-hound, with his muzzle between his paws, twitched his ears or woke to snap at a fly: it seemed as if the earth, ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... its long, delicate white root dangling like a needle, and pot it in a small paper pot. When two score pots are ready, I set them in a cold-frame, sprinkle them, stretch the kink out of my back, listen to the wood-thrush a moment (he came on the fourteenth and is evidently planning to nest in our pines), and then return to my job. Patience is required to pot four or five hundred snapdragons; but patience is required, after all, in most things that are rightly performed. I think as I work of the glory ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... 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 ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... the fields and woods, song sparrows flitted busily among the hedges and sang their delicious, "Maids, maids, maids, hang on your tea kettle-ettle-ettle!" From the densest portions of the woods above the quarry a thrush sang—all nature seemed atune with Phoebe's mood, blithe, ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... In the open pastures the heat still quivers, but here the woodland deities are building night, block on block, for the cooling and soothing of the world. The heliographing ceases. The foam writing blurs in the shadows. Down long aisles of perfumed green the voice of the wood thrush rings mellow and serene. Here is a woodland chorister who sings of peace and calls to holy thoughts, voicing the evening prayer of the woodland world. As his angelus rings out I fancy all wild heads bowed in adoration. Certainly the wood thrush's call touches that chord in the human ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... 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] ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... nature, classic and medieval heroes, problems of society, questions of science, the answer of faith,—almost everything that could interest an alert Victorian mind found some expression in his poetry. It ranges in subject from a thrush song to a religious philosophy, in form from the simplest love lyric to the labored ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... I could—the water had washed away the blood and tended to stop inflammation. The sun rose high in the heavens. Not a sound was heard except the wild cry of the eagle or kite, blending with the song of the thrush and the mocking-bird, interrupted every now and then by the impudent observation of a stray parrot and the ominous rattle of a huge snake as it wound its way among the leaves. Every moment I expected to hear the grunts and cries of the redskins, as with tomahawk in hand they came eagerly ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... him I held myself softly still and felt just that. I did not know he was a robin. The truth was that he was too young at that time to look like one, but I did not know that either. He was plainly not a thrush, or a linnet or a sparrow or a starling or a blackbird. He was a little indeterminate-colored bird and he had no red on his breast. And as I sat and gazed at him he gazed at me as one quite without prejudice unless it might be with the slightest ...
— My Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... flocks of thousands—flying low and following the line of hill and vale, whilst emitting a curious sound from the movement of so many wings. In the Deres would be seen an occasional blackbird and thrush, which were later on joined by the robin. On one occasion a visitor from the Balkans—an eagle with a very large spread of wings—hovered over Cheshire Ridge and, by a few, was thought to be an aeroplane flying ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... plain-tunes in church without taking any particular thought about it; and he sang easily, with a clear young voice which had a full, flute-like note in it like the high, sweet song of a thrush singing in deep woods. ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... linger there, listening to the pleading passion of the blackbird's note, the thrush's call to joy and hope. He loved her gentle ways. From the bold challenges, the sly glances of invitation flashed upon him in the street or from some neighbouring table in the cheap luncheon room he had always shrunk confused ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... tender corn is springing, And the merry thrush is singing; When the swallows come and go, On light wings flitting to and fro— Thou wilt think ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... nor does it, like that bird, run up the trunks of trees, but industriously, after the manner of a willow-wren, hops about, and searches for insects on every twig and branch. In the more open parts, three or four species of finches, a thrush, a starling (or Icterus), two Opetiorhynchi, and several hawks ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... differ considerably, and both species build in holes or conceal their nests. The female blackbird (Turdus merula) differs much, the female ring- ouzel (T. torquatus) differs less, and the female common thrush (T. musicus) hardly at all from their respective males; yet all build open nests. On the other hand, the not very distantly-allied water-ouzel (Cinclus aquaticus) builds a domed nest, and the sexes differ about as much as in the ring-ouzel. The black ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... generally eaten half raw. The best way of 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, and ducks; which last are very fat, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... I am still here, a pledge from my brothers. When yon dim grey woods grow green, and the brown hollows are yellow with kingcups and primroses, the old melody you know so well shall begin again, and the thrush from the oak top shall answer to the goldentoned blackbird in the copse, saying—'Our mother is not dead, but has been sleeping. She is awake again—let ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... say against every one, but she made herself especially merry over a good king who stood quite high up in the row, and whose chin had grown a little crooked. "Well," she cried and laughed, "he has a chin like a thrush's beak!" and from that time he got ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... our lifetime we spent three delicious days in the Isle of Wight, and then crossed the water to Portsmouth. After taking a turn on the ramparts in memory of Fanny Price, and looking upon the harbor whence the Thrush went out, we drove over Portsdown Hill to visit the surviving member of that household which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... warblers are described by Davie in his "Nests and Eggs of North American Birds," and the Kentucky Warbler is recognized as one of the most beautiful of the number, in its manners almost the counterpart of the Golden Crowned Thrush (soon to delight the eyes of the readers of BIRDS), though it is altogether a more conspicuous bird, both on account of its brilliant plumage and greater activity, the males being, during the season of nesting, very pugnacious, ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... trunk of a fallen tree, in the topmost corner of the field. In the hedge, close at hand, was a commotion of birds. In the elm tree, a little further away, a thrush was singing. A soft west wind blew in their faces; the air immediately around them was filled with sunlight. Yet almost to their feet stretched one of those great arms of the city—a suburb, with its miles of villas, its clanging ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... away with her hand, turning her face to one side, and leaned back in her cushions, while Ellery waited, hardly breathing. There was a deep hush on the opal waters under the April morning sky, and no sound but the far-off note of a wood-thrush. ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... There was a thrush singing in the birches and a sound of bees in the air, when George prayed in a low, soft voice, with a little ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... 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 tubercle ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... investigation, such as the relative numbers of the two sexes, and especially on polygamy. Can you aid me with respect to birds which have strongly marked secondary sexual characters, such as birds of paradise, humming-birds, the rupicola or rock-thrush, or any other such cases? Many gallinaceous birds certainly are polygamous. I suppose that birds may be known not to be polygamous if they are seen during the whole breeding season to associate in pairs, or if the male incubates, or aids in feeding ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... 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
... wayfarers, and there must be one, full of food, and wine, and physic, and sweet, health-restoring cordials. And the birdies must have a breakfast daily. Dorothy, the cookmaid, must boil bread in skimmed milk, and throw it on the lawn; then Master Robin and Master Thrush and Mistress Jenny Wren will all feast together. I once saw the little princes, in King Edward's time, feed the birdies thus; and so did Willie Shakespeare, in Stratford town.' Alas, I thought, alas, all is now too plain. This child must have been akin to some great scholar, who taught ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... brother-in-law, partly to let her see the capital, but still more to carry out an artful scheme of his own. Descoings had no children. Madame Descoings, twelve years older than her husband, was in good health, but as fat as a thrush after harvest; and the canny Rouget knew enough professionally to be certain that Monsieur and Madame Descoings, contrary to the moral of fairy tales, would live happy ever after without having any children. The pair might therefore become attached ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... partridge drum in the woods; He heard the woodcock's evening hymn; He found the tawny thrush's broods, And the shy hawk did wait for him. What others did at distance hear And guessed within the thicket's gloom Was shown to this philosopher, And at his bidding ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... eyes from him. Something told her that he knew her secret, or part of it. Her heart was fluttering like a caged thrush. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... and incessant as it balanced on a rosin-weed, of the lark bunting and lark finch, poured forth melodiously; twittering blue-birds looked into the air and back to their perch atop the dead cottonwood as they gathered luckless insects; the brown thrush, which sings the night through in the bright starlight, rivaled the robin and grosbeak as Philip gazed over the blue-skyed, green-grassed land. The blue-green of the ocean had not so fascinated as the mysticism of this broad view. He was glad to be alive, and anxious to be in the riot of life on ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... is difficult to distinguish male from female birds when young; but the darkest generally are males. Their food consists of German paste, bread, meat, and bits of apple. The same treatment as given for the thrush (See par. 2456) applies ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... top o' t'grass, Clois to a runnin' brook, An' harken'd t'watter wagtails sing Wi' t'sparrow, thrush, ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... mother, accepting Dumps's proffered arm; and the little party entered the hackney-coach that was to take them to the church; Dumps amusing Mrs. Kitterbell by expatiating largely on the danger of measles, thrush, teeth-cutting, and other interesting diseases to which children ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... she 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 Rose ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... even for man's own boasted powers. Set the man who has been accustomed to make engines of one type, to make engines of another type without any intermediate course of training or instruction, and he will make no better figure with his engines than a thrush would do if commanded by her mate to make a nest like a blackbird. It is vain then to contend that the ease and certainty with which an action is performed, even though it may have now become matter of such fixed habit that it cannot be suddenly and seriously modified without ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... and thrush Shall hail the rising day, Nor warble on their native bush, Nor charm me with ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... about music beyond what M. Roussillon, a jack of 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 ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... prided himself on his special knowledge of 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 boyhood at Callerton and ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... rarely see. But late some afternoon, when the sun is lifting along the trunks of the hardwood forest, if you are very lucky and very quiet, you will hear him far in the depth of the blackest swamps. Musically expressed, his song is very much like that of the wood thrush—three cadenced liquid notes, a quivering pause, then three more notes of another phrase, and so on. But the fineness of its quality makes of it an entirely different performance. If you symbolize the hermit thrush by the flute, you must call the wood thrush a chime of little tinkling ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... clean, one would readily share with them, for there would be enough for all; but the dainty little epicures puncture an indefinite number of berries, merely taking a sip from each. Then the wasps and bees come along and finish the clusters. The cardinal, cat-bird, and our unrivalled songster the wood-thrush, all help themselves in the same wasteful fashion. One can't shoot wood-thrushes. We should almost as soon think of killing off our Nilssons, Nevadas, and Carys. The only thing to do is to protect the clusters; and this ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... beautiful as it all was in theory, wonderful as was the indescribable power of Islam, it gave few, if any, of its children the true conception of God. They learned nothing of the tender Father, of the beauty of Aton. In Islam there is no consciousness of God in the song of the thrush to its mate, no sacredness in the bud of a lily. In spite of all the exquisite names by which a Moslem addresses his God, His seat is ever in the high heavens, He still remains to him the Omnipotent God of ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... the dawn while men-folk sleep, Unseen spreads on the light, Till the thrush sings to the coloured things, And earth ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... 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 ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... 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
... continued, 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, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... himself, for there was plenty of time before five o'clock, and he stopped every few moments to examine some wayside plant, and to listen with the ardor of a true lover of nature to the merry voices of the thrush and blackbird singing a ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... 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 ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... 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
... voice ceased, and the angel was gone, and when I looked up there was naught but the growing dawn across yon window, and the voice of the thrush that sings outside." ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... offered company, and they set out in the 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 they had not been warned; neither had they Peggy's ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... He realized that he had plunged far into the Black Forest. Here it was gloomy; a dreamy quiet prevailed, that deep calm of the wilderness, unbroken save for the distant note of the hermit-thrush, the strange bird whose lonely cry, given at long intervals, pierced the stillness. Although Isaac had never seen one of these birds, he was familiar with that cry which was never heard except in the deepest woods, far from the haunts ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... by the blue and scarlet plumage 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
... 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
... That snuffed round every home and was not seen, There should be some to watch and keep alive All beautiful beliefs. And such was that,— By solitary shepherd first surmised Under Thessalian oaks, loved by some maid 140 Of royal stirp, that silent came and vanished, As near her nest the hermit thrush, nor dared Confess a mortal name,—that faith which gave A Hamadryed to each tree; and I Will hold it true that in this willow dwells The open-handed spirit, frank and blithe, Of ancient Hospitality, long since, With ceremonious thrift, bowed out ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... all the birds With full cry were singing; There the blackbird's melody Sweet and true was ringing; Wood-dove, lark, and thrush on high Jocund anthems flinging, With the nightingale, who still To ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... and takes the scaly fry. Meanwhile each hollow wood and hill Doth ring with lowings long and shrill, And shady lakes with rivers deep Echo the bleating of the sheep; The blackbird with the pleasant thrush And nightingale in ev'ry bush Choice music give, and shepherds play Unto their flock some loving lay! The thirsty reapers, in thick throngs, Return home from the field with songs, And the carts, laden with ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... product of other skies. They affect us like translations; the very fauna and flora are alien, remote; the dog's-tooth violet is but an ill substitute for the rathe primrose, nor can we ever believe that the wood-robin sings as sweetly in April as the English thrush."—The Athenaeum. ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... the 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 ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... 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 cherry time can dispel. A bird's song contains ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... nose, poring over a gazette by a feeble oil lamp. The old man was so eager for news that it was difficult to fix him to the object of our inquiries; and then he expatiated on the attractions of the neighbourhood, and the “chasse magnifique de grèves,” as he called thrush-shooting, in the country round, if we came to Porto-Torres in the month of December. We laughed at the idea of such sport; but I think it is said that the thrushes, fattening on the olive ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... unseen, and to kill the very birds that are most friendly with man, and most helpful to him in his farming and fruit-growing business. The quail is about the only game bird that the cat affects seriously, and to it the cat is very destructive. It is the robin, catbird, thrush, bluebird, dove, woodpecker, chickadee, phoebe, tanager and other birds of the lawn, the garden and orchard that afford good hunting for sly and ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... draw much of their subsistence from them. In the woods, the principal sorts are large brown hawks or eagles; crows, nearly the same as ours in England; yellowish paroquets; and large pigeons. There are also three or four small birds, one of which is of the thrush kind; and another small one, with a pretty long tail, has part of the head and neck of a most beautiful azure colour; from whence we named it motacilla cyanea. On the shore were several common and sea gulls; a few black oyster-catchers, or sea-pies; and a pretty plover ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... 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 ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... air, and the goldfish swam among the water-lily leaves; ants left their nests and foraged about the paths, the butterflies danced and fluttered over the flowers, which lifted their heads as though to drink in the rays of the sun. In every tree in the garden a thrush woke up and began to sing; sparrows chirped, jays screamed, blue-tits chattered, and the chiff-chaff uttered his strange note. In the woods a cuckoo called and blackbird fluted to blackbird in the hedge. In the stables the ...
— The Sleeping Beauty • C. S. Evans
... spirit to the day of his death, as old at his birth as the classic source from which he sprang, he invented a method essentially his own, in which to express his new-old message. In our work-a-day, materialistic age, like a thrush singing in a boiler-shop, he is the quiet but triumphant vindication of the truth that all great art has its roots firmly implanted in the earth of Hellenic civilization, though its expression may be, as in Corot's case, through an art ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... inspiration of the poet in all ages. And this is not all that we owe to sex. In all organic life we find the same force at work. The song of the nightingale is a call to his mate, the chirp of cricket, the song of the thrush, the note of the grasshopper, every charming voice in wild nature are notes of love, and were it not for these, field and forest would be silent. Among the animals we can trace the beauty of form and of covering to ...
— Almost A Man • Mary Wood-Allen
... the river's stony marge The sand-lark chants a joyous song; The thrush is busy in the wood, And carols loud and strong. A thousand lambs are on the rocks, All newly born! both earth and sky Keep jubilee, and more than all, Those boys with their green coronal; They never hear the cry, That plaintive cry! which up the hill ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 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
... 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 face, and her eyes ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... 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
... 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
... going of the birds is more or less a mystery and a surprise. We go out in the morning, and no thrush or finch is to be heard; we go out again, and every tree and grove is musical; yet again, and all is silent. Who saw them ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... path, or 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 story—the introduction, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... some bird among the evergreens uttered a shrill, plaintive cry, rather than song—a sound which the thrush occasionally makes in the winter, and which seems to express something of fear, and pain, and impatience. "What does she say?—can you tell me?" ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... food failed us in 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 them; I ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... 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 ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... 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 his own acres with his own oxen, and training the vine to the unwedded ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... puddings compressed within the compass of a thimble, exclusive of the sauce; chocolates, oceans of which lay in mimic lakes, each of which the bill of a humming-bird might expand; tongues of most melodious singing birds—the nightingale, the thrush, and the goldfinch; lambs en supreme, each eliminated of earthly particles, and spiritualized in scarcely tangible results. Over all hovered the memories of exquisite beverages, which became realities when you ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... may consist of a single word or word-group, able in itself to complete a sentence: [The thrush sings. The thrush has been singing]. Some require a following word or words: [William struck John (object complement, or object). Edward became king (attribute complement). The people ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... darkness as—Shall I tell you 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
... 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 Acharnians • Aristophanes
... the thrush sings. One of the worst weaknesses of many people is that they do not have the perseverance to stick to what they have to do. They are always wanting to change. Whatever you take up, do it with all your might, and stick ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... oh! so early, my beloved, my beloved, All the birds were singing blithely, as if never they would cease; 'Twas a thrush sang in my garden, "Hear the story, hear the story!" And the lark sang, "Give us glory!" And the dove said, ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... scarce knows how, from their foreign home; the buck-bean perchance grows in the water, or the Rhodora fixes here one of its shy camping-places, or there are whole skies of lupine on the sloping banks;—the catbird builds its nest beside us, the yellow-bird above, the wood-thrush sings late and the whippoorwill later, and sometimes the scarlet tanager and his golden-haired bride send a gleam of the tropics ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... say that she loved birds dearly. Not wild songsters, however, who sing best in their native freedom of the skies, like the spotted-breasted, circle-carolling lark, the thicket-haunting blackbird, and the sweet-throated thrush.—It would have afforded her no pleasure to prison up one of these in a cage. But, a little fledgling that had never known what it was to roam at its own sweet will, and who, when offered the liberty of the air, would hardly care to "take advantage of the situation;" that would be the bird which ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... I,—to touch that heart? Only a poet, made to pour Love's silver phrase with subtle art In tides of music at her door. What though she bore a brightened blush, As if the echo linger'd long? Even so she listens to the thrush That thrills the air with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... plant we in this apple-tree? Buds, which the breath of summer days Shall lengthen into leafy sprays; Boughs where the thrush, with crimson breast, Shall haunt, and sing, and hide her nest; We plant, upon the sunny lea, A shadow for the noontide hour, A shelter from the summer shower, When we ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
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