"Blackbird" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of peculiar volume, mellowness, and flexibility was heard. The whistler was trilling 'Come lasses and lads' in tones as delightful as a blackbird's. ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... once more; he was not yet half awake. So she went past him on tiptoe to the window, turned the handle, and opened the white tall framework-like door. A gush of air, sweet as wine, laden with the smell of dew and spring flowers and wet lawns, stole in to meet her; and a blackbird, in the shrubbery across the garden, broke into song, interrupted himself, chattered melodiously, and scurried out to vanish in a long curve behind the yews. The very world itself of beast and bird was still but half awake, and from the hamlet outside the fence, beyond the trees, ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... kind of blackbird, smaller than the former, and speckled very much like a starling. Indeed, I believe it is a species of that bird; for it frequents marshes, and lodges amongst the reeds at night. This bird is ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... wish to," said Edna, who, strange to say, could whistle like a blackbird. "You would only have people always telling you, it is not ladylike. I don't know I'm whistling half the time when mamma tells me not to. It ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... Rowena fluttering along the highroad like a red-winged blackbird! Are you going to fly ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... "purple emperors," or spread "the tiger moth's deep damasked wings" before the enraptured eyes of the noble poet. These two caterpillars and a few house-flies are all I saw, heard, or felt, by day or night, of the native fauna of England, except a few birds,—rooks, starlings, a blackbird, and the larks of Salisbury Plain just as they rose; for I lost sight of them almost immediately. I neither heard nor saw the nightingales, to my great regret. They had been singing at Oxford a short time before my visit to that place. The only song I heard was that which I have mentioned, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... pasture and tillage, and men had no longer a reason to consider every cry of the birds or change of the night. Finn, who was always in the woods, whose battles were but hours amid years of hunting, delighted in the "cackling of ducks from the Lake of the Three Narrows; the scolding talk of the blackbird of Doire an Cairn; the bellowing of the ox from the Valley of the Berries; the whistle of the eagle from the Valley of Victories or from the rough branches of the Ridge of the Stream; the grouse of the heather of Cruachan; the call of the otter of Druim re Coir." ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... breathes forth its aspirations in a language unknown to common minds; and that language is Poetry. Here annually, from year to year, I had renewed my friendship with the first primroses and violets, and listened with the untiring ear of love to the spring roundelay of the blackbird, whistled from among his bower of May blossoms. Here, I had discoursed sweet words to the tinkling brook, and learned from the melody of waters the music of natural sounds. In these beloved solitudes ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... chimneys curled in dusky columns into the blue sky. The caw of the rooks that followed the plough, whose shining share turned up the aromatic soil, the merry whistle of the bonneted ploughboys, the voices of the blackbird and the mavis, made him sad, and pleased was Lemercier to leave behind him all such sounds of life, and reach the wild and solitary place where the obelisk stood—a grim and time-worn relic of the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... into the wood, parting the tangled branches every now and then to get through, and all the time looking carefully round for nests. They very soon heard the harsh cry of the jay, who was letting all the inhabitants of the woodlands know that enemies were at hand, and away flew the birds. The blackbird was the first to take the alarm from the jay, and away he flew, crying, "Kink, kink, kink," as he started from his nest in a great ivy tod on an old pollard-tree. The lads soon found the nest, and peeped in, but instead of eggs there were four wretched-looking ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... forward-step, and his springy side-wise series of hops, and his impudent air, and his cunning way of canting his head to one side upon occasion, he reminds one of the American blackbird. But the sharp resemblances stop there. He is much bigger than the blackbird; and he lacks the blackbird's trim and slender and beautiful build and shapely beak; and of course his sober garb of gray and rusty black is a poor and humble thing compared ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... church, the narrow seats—and we That through the open window saw the ridge Of Fergus, and the peak Of utmost Cior Mohr—nor held it wrong, When vext with platitude and stirless air, To watch the mist-wreaths clothe the rock-scarps bare And in the pauses hear the blackbird's song. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... 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 with sensations responsive to the objects ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... fields of the North. The departure of what was called the Grand Brigade was signalized by an artillery salute from Fort Douglas, which resounded through the wretched ruins of the houses burnt the previous year, and over the fields deserted by the Colonists and left to the chattering blackbird and the howling wolf. Almost every race of people—however small—has its bard. Among the Bois-brules was the son of old Pierre Falcon, a French-Canadian, of some influence among the natives. This young poet was a character. He had the French vivacity, the prejudice of race, the ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... Poor Blackbird! If only he had not spoken! The Cat, with a great leap, sprang upon him, and without even giving him time to say "Oh!" ate him in a ...
— Pinocchio - The Tale of a Puppet • C. Collodi
... seek a shade, And hear what music's made— How Philomel Her tale doth tell, And how the other birds do fill the choir: The thrush and blackbird lend their throats, Warbling melodious notes. We will all sport ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... in the garden Hanging out the clothes, Then came a little blackbird And snapped off ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... as an orange, and not unlike an orange in complexion, either; he had twinkling gray eyes and a pronounced Roman nose, the numerous freckles upon which were deepened by his funereal dress-coat and trousers. He reminded me of Alfred de Musset's blackbird, which, with its yellow beak and sombre plumage, looked like an undertaker ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... King was in his counting-house Counting out his money, The Queen was in the parlour Eating bread and honey, The maid was in the garden Hanging out the clothes, When by came a blackbird And ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... justice from her They say now a common mistress to the King Through the Fleete Ally to see a couple of pretty [strumpets] Upon a small temptation I could be false to her Waked this morning between four and five by my blackbird Whose voice I am not to be reconciled Wife and the dancing-master alone above, not dancing but talking Would not make my coming ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Diary of Samuel Pepys • David Widger
... women always say; they're all alike; no more idea o' savin' anything than a skunk-blackbird! I can't spare any money for gew-gaws, and you might as well understand it first as last. Go up attic and open the hair trunk by the winder; you'll find plenty there to last you for ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the nightingale? Must all the lesser voices cease? Lark, thrush and blackbird hold their peace? The woods ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... know the value of a lark. He scratches his head and asks whatever comes into it, a rouble, or three kopecks, according to the purchaser. There are expensive birds too. A faded old blackbird, with most of its feathers plucked out of its tail, sits on a dirty perch. He is dignified, grave, and motionless as a retired general. He has waved his claw in resignation to his captivity long ago, and looks ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... We have no more reason to believe in such a relation than we have to believe that the similar bones in the hand of a man, wing of a bat, and fin of a porpoise, are related to similar conditions of life. No one supposes that the stripes on the whelp of a lion, or the spots on the young blackbird, are of any ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... animals named, birds are most destructive, while the peanuts are in shock. Such birds as the blue-jay, crow, partridge, yellow hammer, wild turkey, and blackbird, coming, as some of them do, not singly, but in companies and flocks of hundreds and thousands at a time, carry off vast quantities, unless the planter is always on the alert, gun in hand, ready to meet them at every turn. Near the James, and other large rivers, it ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones
... thorns Then white with blossom; and you saw the horns, Through last year's fern, of the shy fallow-deer Who come at noon down to the water here. You saw the bright-eyed squirrels dart along Under the thorns on the green sward; and strong The blackbird whistled from the dingles near, And the weird chipping of the woodpecker Rang lonelily and sharp; the sky was fair, And a fresh breath of spring stirr'd everywhere. Merlin and Vivian stopp'd on the slope's brow, To gaze on the light sea of leaf and bough Which glistering plays all round them, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... garments of a wonderful make; these clothes of mine are by no means beautiful like those. And his face was wonderful to behold; and his voice was calculated to gladden the heart; and his speech was pleasant like the song of the male blackbird. And while listening to the same I felt touched to my inmost soul. And as a forest in the midst of the vernal season, assumes a grace only when it is swept over by the breeze, so, O father! he of an excellent and pure smell looks beautiful when fanned by the air. And his mass of hair ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... different Berkeley, Grantley, and Landor Berington's Middle Ages Berti Palazzo, in Florence, Bezzi, Signor A. and Landor Bible, persecution for reading the Bier, open, used in Florence Biglow Papers, Lowell's Biographies, G. Eliot on Birmingham, my return from Blackbird, Song of the Black Down, Tennyson's house at Black Forest, Leweses in the Blackwood's Magazine, Mary Mitford on Blagden, Isa, Miss her poems her death note from Lewes inquires after and George Eliot Blandford Square, Leweses at Blaze de Bury, Madame Blessington, Lady Bob Acres, my ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... King and the flower! And the girl of my heart's delight, The blackbird sings in the bower, And the nightingale sings in the night A song ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... the sun came up with his great, round, red face, for there was a light smoky haze floating above the eastern horizon, and threw his light like a stream of crimson flame across the water; and the meadow lark perched upon his fence stake, the blackbird upon his alderbush, the brown thrush on the topmost spray of the wild thorn, and the bob-o'-link, as he leaped from the meadow and poised himself on his fluttering wings in mid air, all sent up a shout of gladness as if hailing ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... was piping lustily in a young tree as she began her task; a blackbird answered from somewhere among the hawthorns with a bewildering ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... returned the man, taking off his paper cap and rubbing up his bristly gray hair. 'We call Jack "The Blackbird" among us; he is a famous whistler, ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... something in this appearance which made a sorrowful impression on Gabriele. The star of the church tower glittered over the grave of her brother, and the look of the moon made her involuntarily think on the pale, mild countenance of her mother. For the rest, the evening was so lovely, the blackbird sang among the alders by the brook, and the heaven lay clear and brightly blue over the earth, whilst the wind and every disturbing sound became more and ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... to my taking two of them and a blackbird that one of the mountaineers had given me. And so we returned ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... of their own room upstairs, Briggs said his head ached ready to split, and that he should wish himself dead if it wasn't for his mother, and a blackbird he had at home Tozer didn't say much, but he sighed a good deal, and told Paul to look out, for his turn would come to-morrow. After uttering those prophetic words, he undressed himself moodily, and got into bed. Briggs was in his bed too, and Paul in ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... briony, overrunning the thicket with its emerald leaves and luxuriant flowers. And here and there, silvering the bushes, the elder offered its snowy tribute to the summer. All the insect youth were abroad, with their bright wings and glancing motion; and from the lower depths of the bushes the blackbird darted across, or higher and unseen the first cuckoo of the eve began its continuous and mellow note. All this cheeriness and gloss of life, which enamour us with the few bright days of the English summer, make the poetry in an angler's life, and convert every idler ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... an' the rowan tree, Wild roses speck our thicket sae breery; Still, still will our walk in the greenwood be— O, Jeanie, there 's naething to fear ye! List when the blackbird o' singing grows weary, List when the beetle-bee's bugle comes near ye, Then come with fairy haste, Light foot, an' beating breast— O, Jeanie, there ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... the bushes Were blackbird's nests and thrush's, Soon to be hidden In leaves on green leaves thickening, Boughs over long boughs quickening ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... years," says Samson, "de rale sugar-corn, de blackbird gits. None of dem white gulls and pigeons gits dat corn. A white feller ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... 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
... like to fix it," said Earl, "eggs or calf's blood I wont quarrel with you about the eggs, though I never heerd o' blue ones afore, 'cept the robin's and bluebird's and I've heerd say the swamp blackbird lays a handsome blue egg, but I never happened to see the nest myself; and there's the chippin' sparrow; but you'd want to rob all the bird's nests in creation to get enough of 'em, and they aint here in sugar time, nother; but, anyhow, any eggs 'll do, I s'pose, if you ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... clearness of its azure tints. The birds too were warbling forth a happy song; not, however, with the full swelling chorus of spring, but yet sufficiently to give cheerfulness to the otherwise silent woods. It is a calumny on the feathered tribes of Canada to assert that they have no song; the blackbird can sing when he is inclined, as sweetly as his brother in England, and the Canadian robin's notes are as full of glee as those of his smaller namesake ...
— The Log House by the Lake - A Tale of Canada • William H. G. Kingston
... David Street. Nor is the town so large but a holiday schoolboy may harry a bird's nest within half a mile of his own door. There are places that still smell of the plough in memory's nostrils. Here, one had heard a blackbird on a hawthorn; there, another was taken on summer evenings to eat strawberries and cream; and you have seen a waving wheatfield on the site of your present residence. The memories of an Edinburgh boy are but partly memories of the town. I look back with delight on many an escalade ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lived alone. Safe were the two, with their frugal store, From all of the many who passed their door; For Jennie's mother was strange to fears, And Jennie was large for fifteen years; With vim her eyes were glistening, Her hair was the hue of a blackbird's wing; And while the friends who knew her well The sweetness of her heart could tell, A gun that hung on the kitchen wall Looked solemnly quick to heed her call; And they who were evil-minded knew Her nerve was strong and ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... Hubbard, who claimed the crow would eat animal food in any form, and might not be rightly classified as a grain-eating bird, Prof. Stearns said the crow was thus classified by reason of the structure of its crop being similar to that of the finches, the blackbird, the sparrows, and other ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... going to my own hearth-stone, Bosomed in yon green hills alone,— A secret nook in a pleasant land, Whose groves the frolic fairies planned; Where arches green, the livelong day, Echo the blackbird's roundelay, And vulgar feet have never trod A spot that is sacred to thought ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... its glassy surface, or dipped in search of its finny prey, and here and there a heron might be detected standing in some shallow nook, and feasting on the smaller fry. A flight of cawing rooks were settling upon the tall trees on the right bank, and the voices of the thrush, the blackbird, and other feathered songsters burst in redundant ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Morland, a young woman rather tall and fully developed; not strikingly beautiful, but with a lovely reddish-brown tint on her face, indicative of healthy, warm, rich pulsations. She possessed a contralto voice, of a quality like that of a blackbird, and it fell to her and to Frank to sing. She was dressed in a fashion perhaps a little more courtly than was usual in the gatherings at Mr Palmer's house, and Frank, as he stood beside her at the piano, could not restrain his eyes from straying ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... introduced into the state parlour with the six mahogany-backed, haircloth-seated chairs, the two narrow arm-chairs, the four ugly mirrors, and the little wire basket full of odds and ends of crockery and foreign coins—covered by the skin of a white blackbird, found on the farm and prepared for stuffing—he looked a very dapper, respectable, personable man. But my Aunt Jen would have none of his compliments on the neatness of the house or the air of bien comfort that everything about the farm had ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... crossed their path at every point; snakes were seen gliding out of their way—a fortunate tendency on the part of most snakes!—and the woods resounded with the singing of the yapu, a bird something like a blackbird, with yellow tips to its wings, and somewhat like the mocking-bird in that it imitated every other bird in the forest. Whether there is jealousy between the yapu and the parrot we have not been able to ascertain, but if birds are like men in their sentiments, ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... the forest suddenly encompassed them. The morning was pretty far advanced; the merry birds twittered in their dun covert, brushing the dewdrops from the boughs with their restless wings. The thrush and blackbird poured forth a more melancholy note; whilst the timid rabbit, scared from his morning's meal, rushed by and sought his burrow. The wood grew thicker, and the sunbeams that shot previously in broad slopes across their path soon became ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... girl seemed unaware of his presence, and read steadily, occasionally looking up and chirping with a pair of ravishing lips at a blackbird, which hung in a wicker ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... the young of allied species resemble one another much more than the mature forms. The stripes on the young Lion, the spots on the young Blackbird, are well-known cases; and we find the same law prevalent among the lower animals, as, for instance, among Insects and Crustacea. The Lobster, Crab, Shrimp, and Barnacle are very unlike when full grown, but in their young stages go ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... might pursue her mission of mercy and succour at night. Thus passed some days, and then Jessica's blood grew restless; the narrow room seemed to her stifling and unendurable, and she pined for the open air, as a caged blackbird ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... La Fontaine, "is that Vanel, that determined blackbird, knowing that I was coming to Saint-Mande, implored me to bring him with me, and, if possible, to present him ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... often heard her 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 ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing; And wasn't this a dainty dish to set before the king? The king was in the parlour, counting out his money; The queen was in the kitchen, eating bread and honey; The maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes, There came a little blackbird and nipt off ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies - Without Addition or Abridgement • Munroe and Francis
... tender boughs loaded with young fruit, pricked by the sharp claws and beak of the insolent blackbird, complained to the blackbird with pitious remonstrance entreating her that since she stole its delicious fruits she should not deprive it of the leaves with which it preserved them from the burning rays of the sun, and that ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... Residency every step of the siege and relief can be followed. I was there first on a serene evening after rain; and but for some tropical trees it might have been an English scene. All that was lacking was a thrush or blackbird's note; but the grass was as soft and green as at home and the air as sweet. I shall long retain the memory of the contrast between the incidents which give this enclosure its unique place in history and ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... flail and such gaiters, Ohone! But the bullocks, as they eyed me, they seemed for to say too, “You may do your best, Paddy, we’re blest if we go.” “Gee whoa! Redman! come hither, Damper! Hoot, Magpie! Gee, Blackbird! Come hither, Whalebone!” ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... vaguely of my last night's adventure, listening to the spring-time chorus of the birds, lazily and listlessly watching a bough that bent and waved its fan of foliage across my face, or the twinkle of the tireless kingfisher flashing down-stream in loops of light, when a blackbird lit on a branch hard by my left hand, and, all unconscious of an audience, began to pour forth his ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Blackbird was by this time prevailed on to sing, and burst out as melodious as ever, while all heads were cocked on one side in ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... doing something agreeable, and, by preference, two agreeable things at once. In his house he had a box of carpenter's tools, two dogs, an eagle, a canary, and a blackbird that whistled tunes, lest, even in that full life, he should chance upon an empty moment. If he had to wait for a dish of poached eggs, he must put in the time by playing on the flageolet; if a ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... slaves of women, beastly and murderous brutality to their poor children. There is a terrible reckoning coming for the "Gipsy man," who can chuckle to his fowls, and kick, with his iron-soled boot, his poor child to death; who can warm and shelter his blackbird, and send the offspring of his own body to sleep upon rotten straw and the dung-heap, covered over with sticks and rags, through which light, hail, wind, rain, sleet, and snow can find its way without let or hinderance; who can take upon his knees a dog and fondle it in his bosom, and, at the ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... fitted, and a stricken bird was fluttering at their feet in a few seconds. The flutterings of the fallen bird were more than equalled by those of Foster's heart, as he held the still quivering crow-blackbird which his arrow had brought from the highest twig of a tall spruce. Proud and exultant, yet tears glistened in his eyes as he silently gazed upon the soiled plumage of the bird's beautiful neck and breast, and felt its last faint gaspings as its reproachful ...
— Harper's Young People, July 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... altitude has much to do with bird life, some, as the meadow-lark and blackbird never being found higher than the Lake shore, others at the intermediate elevations where the Alpine hemlock thrives, while still others, such as the rosy finch and the rock-wren, are found only on the highest and most ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... "Blessed are the"—There's a blackbird, outside, sittin' on a limb,— Gosh! I wish it wasn't Sunday, p'raps I wouldn't go for him. Sis says stonin' birds is wicked, but she's got one on her hat,— S'pose that makes it right and proper, if ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Poor little Blackbird! If he had only kept his words to himself! In the twinkling of an eyelid, the Cat leaped on him, and ate ...
— The Adventures of Pinocchio • C. Collodi—Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini
... morning. She sat down at the desk and set to work to arrange her papers. It was a warm spring evening, and the window was open. A crowd of noisy sparrows seemed to be delighted about something. From somewhere, unseen, a blackbird was singing. She read over her report for Mrs. Denton. The blackbird seemed never to have heard of war. He sang as if the whole world were a garden of languor and love. Joan looked at her watch. The first gong would sound in a few minutes. She pictured the dreary, silent dining-room ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... tint every blushing neck glows, In our eyes are all shapes that the blackbird's egg shows; And the plains of thine Erin, though pleasing to see, When the Great Plain is ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... bewildered. She was even larger than our Sally; her dress was pale green, like I thought a Fairy's should be; her eyes were deep and dark as Laddie had said, her hair hung from a part in the middle of her forehead over her shoulders, and if she had been in the sun, it would have gleamed like a blackbird's wing. She was just as Laddie said she would be; she was so much more beautiful than you would suppose any woman could be, I stood there dumbly staring. I wouldn't have asked for any one more ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... few birds with part of their sustenance, and the principal of these are two well known songsters, the blackbird and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 379, Saturday, July 4, 1829. • Various
... day, Chasing the clouds of the night away And bidding the dreams of the dawn depart Over the freshening April blue, Till the blossoms awake to welcome the May, And the world is made anew; And the blackbird sings on the dancing spray With eyes of glistening dew; "Happy, happy, happy day;" For he knows that his love is true; He knows that his love is true, my heart, He knows that his love ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... back, when the man, looking up, caught sight of a bundle of oaten pipes among the miscellaneous wares. He plucked one to him, and in a moment the air was full of tender liquid notes—a thrush's roundelay. Then a blackbird called and his mate answered; a cuckoo cried the spring-song; a linnet mourned with lifting cadence; a nightingale poured ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... think I do,' said Elizabeth; 'and he said that he had seen Susan and the children go down the blind walk. Then I said Dora had talked of seeing a blackbird's nest there, and he answered, with a most comical look, 'Ah! ha! Miss Woodbourne, I fancy they be two-legged blackbirds as Susan is ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... adjunct, growing out of the back of the monster, without possessing any original and substantive share in its nature. The snake's head is at the end of the tail. The object most really interesting was a Roman eagle, the standard of the Twenty-fourth Legion, about the size of a blackbird. ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... at eight o'clock, musing, was with her lover and her lips and eyes again were his to do with what he would. Later Doctor Lanning came in and she roused to hear the news about the snow. Between Sleepy Cat and Bear Dance two passenger trains were stalled, and on Blackbird hill the snow was reported four feet deep on ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... I not tell thee surly Winter's flown, That the brook's verge is green;—and bid thee hear, In yon irriguous vale, the Blackbird clear, At measur'd intervals, with mellow tone, Choiring [1]the hours of prime? and call thine ear To the gay viol dinning in the dale, With tabor loud, and bag-pipe's rustic drone To merry Shearer's dance;—or jest retail From festal ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... was not inferior in height to the old one's, but his shoulders were narrower, his features less broad and full, and his hair and beard had the glossy raven hue of the blackbird's plumage. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to all good landscape lovers, the beasts, birds, and insects of Nature were dear to these ancient people. One of the things Finn most cared for was not only his hounds, but the "blackbird singing on Letterlee"; and his song, on page 114, in the praise of May, tells us how keen was his observant eye for animal life and how much it delighted him. The same minute realisation of natural objects is illustrated ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... raptures swelled the heart of the wanderer, as he gazed around him! The Poet and the Freeman alike stirred within his shattered heart! He paused to contemplate the berries of the icy trees, to listen to the sharp glee of the blackbird; and once—when he found beneath a hedge a cold, scentless group of hardy violets—he laughed aloud in his joy. In that laughter there was no madness, no danger; but when as he journeyed on, he passed through a little hamlet, and saw the children at play upon the ground, and heard ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VIII • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and male house-sparrow, or much greater brightness of male Parus caeruleus (both of which build under cover) than of female Parus, are related to protection. I even misdoubt much whether the less blackness of female blackbird is ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... statue-fair Now the low wind may lift her hair, Motionless in lip and limb; E'en the fearful mouse may skim O'er the window-sill, nor stir From the crumb at sight of her; Through the lattice unheard float Summer blackbird's evening note;— E'en the sullen foe would bless That ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... one; there was a certain geniality in the appearance of things. The weather had changed to fair; the day, one of the last of the treacherous May-time, was warm and windless, and the air had the brightness of the hawthorn and the blackbird. If it was sad to think of poor Touchett, it was not too sad, since death, for him, had had no violence. He had been dying so long; he was so ready; everything had been so expected and prepared. There were tears in Isabel's eyes, but they were not tears ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... whom the kingbird seemed suspicious was a purple crow blackbird, who every day passed over. This bird and the common crow were the only ones he drove away without waiting for them to alight; and if half that is told of them be true, he ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... himself as, after looking vainly for more stray leaves, he trudged on, enjoying the bobolink's song, the warm sunshine, and a comfortable sense of friendliness and safety, which soon set him to whistling as gayly as any blackbird in the meadow. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... years after, remain there, very busy, for three weeks, sketching innumerable corbels, gargoyles, goblins, arches, weather-worn saints and sinners. And in the Cathedral I found the original of the maid in the garden a-hanging out the clothes. She is a fair sinner, and the blackbird is a demon volatile, who, having lighted on her shoulder, snaps her by the nose to get her soul. The motive often occurs ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Robert's attention. There was something odd about him—something distressful and indignant. Whilst he prayed he made jerky, irritable movements which fluttered out the wings of his gown, so that with his sleek black hair and pointed face he looked like a large angry blackbird, trapped and ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... in language is to put two words of this kind which express but one idea under a single accent, and when this has taken place, no one but the student of language any longer observes what the elements really mean. When the ordinary man talks of a "blackbird" it is certainly not present to his consciousness that he is talking of a black bird, unless for some reason conversation has been dwelling upon the colour rather than other ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... Donkey; and the random chords changed to a crooning melody which wonderfully pleased Buddie, whose opportunities to hear music were sadly few. As for the White Blackbird, he tucked his little head under his wing ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... didn't like this. It made me somehow feel as though I were one of Asp's Fables, or were being translated into English as that old school-room horror of Androclus and the Lion. In the bottom of my soul I don't believe that Georgiana cares for birds, or knows the difference between a blackbird and a crow. I am going to send her a little story, "The Passion of the Desert." Mrs. Walters is now confident that Georgiana regrets having broken off her engagement. But then Mrs. Walters can be a great fool when she puts her whole ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... Atlantic weather in Lent. The downs were dilated and clear as though seen through crystal. A far company of pines on the high skyline were magnified into delicate inky figures. The vacant sward below them was as lucent as the slope of a vast approaching wave. A blackbird was fluting after a shower, for the sky was transient blue with the dark rags of the squall flying fast over the hill towards London. The thatched roof of a cottage in the valley suddenly flamed with a light of no earthly fire, as though a god had arrived, and that was the sign. Miss Muffet, ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... to get the V.C.," said Stalky. "Why, he might have been dead and buried by now. But he wasn't. But he didn't. Ho! ho! He just nipped through the hedge like a lusty old blackbird. Extra-special, five hundred lines, an' ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... the choicest in America. She always has from twenty to twenty-five cats, and the cat-lover who obtains one of her kittens is fortunate indeed. A beautiful pair of blacks in Mrs. Locke's cattery have the most desirable shade of amber eyes, and are named "Blackbird" and "St. Tudno"; she has also a choice pair of Siamese cats called ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... little foster-parents have in all probability no suspicion of the trick that has been played on them. Birds do not take deliberate notice of the size or colour of their own eggs. Kearton somewhere relates how he once induced a blackbird to sit on the eggs of a thrush, and a lapwing on those of a redshank. So, too, farmyard hens will hatch the eggs of ducks or game birds and wild birds can even be persuaded to sit on eggs made of painted wood. Why then, since they are so ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... swelling the Queen's Anthem. The brook, though it had sung all night, and had need of a little respite, seemed to say—"No, I shall go warbling on; she shall have my very best treble of a ripple." And then there were minor performers in this nature-choir. The Blackbird and Redbreast, Goldfinch and Linnet, and Chaffinch, each took part with striking effect. Even the Swallow in his own quiet way twittered, and the Tomtit chattered, and the Beetle droned, and the Bee hummed, and the big Dragon-fly, in armour of brightest cobalt, whirred; and the Grasshopper, ...
— The Story of a Dewdrop • J. R. Macduff
... Now, the sun, whose ardour was already melting into the tenderness of evening, shone upon a broad valley, where the grass stood high in rich meadows separated from other meadows and green cornfields by hedges, from the midst of which rose many a tall tree. The blackbird's low, flute-like note sounded above the shrilling ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... 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 King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... Before the blackbird pecked the turf they woke; At dawn the deer's wet nostrils blew their last. To forest, haunt of runs and prime repast, With paying blows, the yokel strained ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... built a hut of green branches under the great trees. Tristan had known, ever since his childhood, that art by which a man may sing the song of birds in the woods, and at his fancy, he would call as call the thrush, the blackbird and the nightingale, and all winged things; and sometimes in reply very many birds would come on to the branches of his hut and sing their song full-throated ...
— The Romance Of Tristan And Iseult • M. Joseph Bedier
... for all his trussed and helpless plight, Jack Ryder grinned. He moved his head slightly. "That blackbird of ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... the blue, Above the barley fields at Loo, The blackbird whistles loud and clear Upon the hills at Windermere; But oh, I simply LOVE the way Our organ-grinder plays ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... has settled near his house. It is such an excellent mimic of other birds' notes that no 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 Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... The blackbird sang, the skies were clear and clean We bowled along a road that curved a spine Superbly sinuous and serpentine Thro' silent symphonies of summer green. Sudden the Forth came on us—sad of mien, No cloud to colour it, no breeze to line: A sheet of dark, dull glass, ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... Chimney Sweeps' Day, Blackbird is gay, Here he is singing, you see, in the "May." He has feathers as black as a chimney sweep's coat, So on Chimney Sweeps' Day he must pipe a ...
— London Town • Felix Leigh
... had cleared away by now, and the moon was up. To their right, on the crest of a rise some two hundred yards away, a low wood stood out black against the sky. As they passed it, a blackbird rose up screaming, and a brace of ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... she cried, "'you must find your fun'—are those the words of the song, Margot?—Oh, look, look!" she pointed joyously to a blackbird on top the swaying maple outside her window. He whistled—she whistled, ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... ordinarily delights to linger. She rode beneath a natural avenue of trees, whose branches met overhead like the arches of a cathedral, and was scarcely conscious of their pleasant shade. She heard neither the song of the wooing thrush, nor the cry of the startled blackbird, nor the evening hymn of the soaring lark. Alike to her was the gorse-covered common, along which they swiftly speeded, and the steep hill-side up which they more swiftly mounted. She breathed not the delicious fragrance of the new-mown hay, nor listened to ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... blackbird sings but a box-wood flute, But I lose him best of all For his song is all of the joy ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... dined nobly together upon two fat sparrows, and again we had a blackbird for dinner. He had killed it that morning from his window, while shaving, for I saw the lather dried on the stock of his ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... the thicket, was very nearly like the same bird in England. For the mellow-throated thrush of the old land they found a mate in the new, of the same size, color, and general habits, though less musical. The blackbird was nearly the same in many respects, though the smaller American wore a pair of red epaulettes. The swallows had their coat tails cut after the same old English pattern, and built their nests after the same model, and twittered under the eaves with the ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... wakes to sound, for not a bird is mute: The robin pipes the piccolo; the blackbird plays the flute; While high upon a cedar-top a thrush with bubbling throat Lifts up to this accompaniment her clear ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... before the concert ended; they were leaning forth from the narrow window-ledges of a straw-roofed cottage; the music gave to their blinking old eyes the same dreamy look we had read in the ruminating cattle orbs. For an aeronaut on his way to bed, I should have felt, had I been in that blackbird's plumed corselet, that I had had a gratifyingly ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... and everything to gain. The prevailing trait in their mental attitude is incredulousness. You cannot make them believe that the bill will pass. "We'll get Home Rule when a pair o' white wings sprouts out o' me shoulders an' I fly away like a blackbird," said an old market woman with great emphasis; and a Dublin jackeen, piloting an American over the city, said: "This, Sorr, is College Green, an' that, Sorr, is Thrinity College, an' that Sorr,"—here he pointed to the grand pile opposite the College—"that Sorr, is the ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... camping-place under a buttonwood-tree, from out an exuberant swamp of yellow water-lilies and the rearing sword-blades of the coming cat-tail, a swamp blackbird, on his glossy black orange-tipped wings, flung us defiance with his long, keen, full, saucy note; and as we sat down under our buttonwood and spread upon the sward our pastoral meal, the veery-thrush—sadder and stranger than any nightingale—played ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... "Glickhican saw a blackbird flitting in the shadow of the moon. The bird hovered above the Village of Peace, but sang ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... called her my whistling mother. It's a queer title, but it's hers in a peculiar way. She always could whistle like a blackbird. She never did it for exhibition; I don't mean that—I should say not—but she did do it for calls to her family, in the woods or in the house when there were no guests about; and she often whistled softly over her work. Perhaps you don't think that's ...
— The Whistling Mother • Grace S. Richmond
... "I never waste time wishing I could do things it was never meant I should do. It's funny where Old Mr. Toad is. He said that he was coming down here to sing, and Redwing the Blackbird seemed to be expecting him. I've looked everywhere I can think of without finding him, but I don't believe in giving up without another try. Stop your dreaming and come help ...
— The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad • Thornton W. Burgess |
