"Starling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... many kinds are extremely abundant on the undulating grassy plains around Maldonado. There are several species of a family allied in structure and manners to our Starling: one of these (Molothrus niger) is remarkable from its habits. Several may often be seen standing together on the back of a cow or horse; and while perched on a hedge, pluming themselves in the sun, they sometimes attempt to sing, or rather to hiss; the noise being very peculiar, resembling ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... thinke your self a Baby, [Sidenote: I will] That you haue tane his tenders for true pay, [Sidenote: tane these] Which are not starling. Tender your selfe more dearly; [Sidenote: sterling] Or not to crack the winde of the poore Phrase, [Sidenote: (not ... &c.] Roaming it[3] thus, you'l tender me a foole.[4] [Sidenote: ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... healthful poverty, how remote from squalid penury, the whitewashed walls, the homely furniture within. Creepers lately trained around the doorway; Christmas holly, with berries red against the window-panes; the bee-hive yonder; a starling, too, outside the threshold, in its wicker cage; in the background (all the rest of the neighbouring hamlet out of sight), the church spire tapering away into the clear blue wintry sky. All has an air of repose, of safety. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a starling, as I consider this bird the very best for the amateur's purpose, not only on account of the toughness of the skin, but also because, being a medium-sized bird, it presents no difficult points in skinning, and with this bird before me I shall minutely ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... for a fortnight or more, and where we spent Xmas Day, was a good cut above Dranoutre. Except for the first three days, when we lived with a doctor,—and his stove smoked frightfully till we discovered a dead starling in the pipe,—we dwelt in exceeding comfort, comparatively speaking. It was a brewer's house, about the biggest in the village—which was three times the size of Dranoutre,—with real furniture in it, a real dining-room ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... also his office. A table stands near the window; on it are ledgers, letter scales, and papers of every description. Near by stands a smaller table belonging to ASTROFF, with his paints and drawing materials. On the wall hangs a cage containing a starling. There is also a map of Africa on the wall, obviously of no use to anybody. There is a large sofa covered with buckram. A door to the left leads into an inner room; one to the right leads into the front hall, and ...
— Uncle Vanya • Anton Checkov
... 'Wake! wake!' the Starling chattered, 'For the hand of rising day Has gripped one edge of the blanket night And ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... the skins of things I want to preserve. Don't touch it. You have to wash your hands ever so many times when you've been using it. Look, that's a starling I began to stuff, but it don't look much ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... the starling's courtship quaint, Heart made much of; 'twas a boon Won from silence, and too soon Wasted in the ample air: Building rooks far distant were. Scarce at all would speak the rills, And I saw the idle hills, In their amber hazes deep, ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... witnesses, made arrests in every quarter, and created a consternation in the camps of the saints greater than any they had ever witnessed before, since Mormondom was born. At last accounts terrified elders and bishops were decamping to save their necks; and developments of the most starling character were being made, implicating the highest Church dignitaries in the many murders and robberies committed upon the Gentiles during the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... evidently tired out." And two days later, 17th March, "Over fifty of the birds cooped on 15th died, though fed. Sparrows, finches, water-wagtails, two small birds, name unknown, one kind like a linnet, and a large bird like a starling. In all there have been on board over seventy birds, besides some that hovered about us for some time and then fell into the sea exhausted." Easterly winds and severe weather were experienced at the time.[171] The spot where this remarkable flight ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... A starling never reveals the richness of its hues until we see it in the sunlight. A duty never discloses its beauties until we set it in the light of the Lord. It is amazing how a dull road is transfigured when the sunshine falls upon it! God's ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... those poplar trees; What tall and stalely things! See! on the top of one just now A starling sits and sings. He'll fall!—the twig bends with his weight! He likes that danger best. I see the red upon his wings,— Dark shining is the rest. I ween his little wife has built On that ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... his theft," said the sage old starling; "and it's neither bread nor cheese he'll get here. He's a thief; ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... for it does not become thee to dirty thy hands."—"Very well," said the serpent; "he shall make the boiling water ready!" So they ordered the little Tsar to go and chop wood and get the hot water ready. Then he went and chopped wood, but as he was doing so, a starling flew out and said to him, "Not so fast, not so fast, little Tsar Novishny. Be as slow as thou canst, for thy dogs have gnawed ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous
... this voice belong, in a house which had already been ransacked in vain for other occupants? It seemed to come from the roof, and, sure enough, when Mr. Gryce looked up he saw, swinging in a cage strung up nearly to the top of one of the windows I have mentioned, an English starling, which, in seeming recognition of the attention it had drawn upon itself, craned its neck as Mr. Gryce looked up, and shrieked again, with fiercer insistence ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... Starling, "conjectur'd 'twas so; It must of necessity follow: For more moss, straw, and feathers, I know, It requires, to be soft, ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... flitting, a magpie drooping across from elm to elm; young rooks that have escaped the hostile shot blundering up into the branches; missel thrushes leading their fledglings, already strong on the wing, from field to field. An egg here on the sward dropped by a starling; a red ladybird creeping, tortoise-like, up a green fern frond. Finches undulating through the air, shooting themselves with closed wings, and linnets ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... neck, breast, wings and tail of the rosy starling are glossy black, and the remainder of the plumage is pale salmon in the hen and the young cock, and faint rose-colour ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... number build about houses and towers and outbuildings. The titmouse with us is exclusively a wood-bird; but in Britain three or four species of them resort more or less to buildings in winter. Their redstart also builds under the eaves of houses; their starling in church steeples and in holes in walls; several thrushes resort to sheds to nest; and jackdaws breed in the crannies of the old architecture, and this in a much milder climate than ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... heaps of stupid letters) earlier noticed your three last letters, which as usual are rich in facts. Your letters make almost a little volume on my table. I daresay you hardly knew yourself how much curious information was lying in your mind till I began the severe pumping process. The case of the starling married thrice in one day is capital, and beats the case of the magpies of which one was shot seven times consecutively. A gamekeeper here tells me that he has repeatedly shot one of a pair of jays, and ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the door by the comely looking grey-haired woman who had played the part of nurse, and she drew back, smiling, to show them into a cheerful sitting room, well-furnished, with a canary on one side of the window and a particularly sage-looking starling in a wicker ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... often conquer, as by a sudden spell, those whom the boy loved. Towards those, however, whom he did not love he could be vindictive. His relative, the laird of Raeburn, on one occasion wrung the neck of a pet starling, which the child had partly tamed. "I flew at his throat like a wild-cat," he said, in recalling the circumstance, fifty years later, in his journal on occasion of the old laird's death; "and was torn from him with no little difficulty." And, judging ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... will: that's flat. He said, he would not ransom Mortimer; Forbad my tongue to speak of Mortimer; But I will find him when he lies asleep, And in his ear I'll holla—'Mortimer!' Nay, I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him, To keep his ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... me your spaniel, your starling, take me and treat me as these, I would be anything, darling! aye, whatsoever you please. Brian and Basil are "punting", leave them their dice and their wine, Bertha is butterfly hunting, surely one hour shall be mine. See, I have done with all duty; see, I can dare all disgrace, ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... parodied the enjoyment of the savage—"With this cow by my side, and this grass at my feet, what can a bull wish for more?" Contentment! Nothing with vitality must, or ever will be contented, save a vegetable, or a toad in the centre of a rock, and he probably is sighing, with Sterne's starling, "I ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... to undertake At the same high pitch as an altercation. It's not for me, of course, to judge How much a Deaf Lady ought to begrudge; But half-a-guinea seems no great matter— Letting alone more rational patter— Only to hear a parrot chatter: Not to mention that feather'd wit, The Starling, who speaks when his tongue is slit; The Pies and Jays that utter words, And other Dicky Gossips of birds, That talk with as much good sense and decorum, As many Beaks ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... with Prothero. Really he was not disgusted at all. There was something about Prothero like a sparrow, like a starling, like a Scotch terrier.... These, too, are morally objectionable ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... to go straight on or to turn left along the road. Not a soul, not a single vehicle in sight; it was hard to believe that three Divisions were to make a big attack on the morrow. I halted the waggons on the road, and turned to Wilde. "Let's send Sergeant Starling (the signalling sergeant) to find where this track leads to. We'll walk up the road and find some one who can show it us on the map. There are bound to be dug-outs ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... A professor at King's College, London, giving his testimony, affirmed that "no student in England has EVER SEEN PAIN in an animal experiment"—a statement which in one sense everyone can accept, for who can say that he ever SAW a pain anywhere? Professor Starling, of the University College in London, declared that during his seventeen years of experimentation "on no occasion HAVE I EVER SEEN PAIN inflicted in any experiment on dog, cat, or rabbit in a physiological laboratory in this country." The experimenter is undoubtedly correct. Neither he ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... starling, from a tree near by, flew down, lighted on the sheep's back, and helped in the good work of ...
— The Nursery, February 1877, Vol. XXI. No. 2 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... know what would be the best food for a starling in the winter?—[A sort of stock food is made of the fine-ground oats called "fig-dust," made into a stiff dough with milk and water, adding every day a pinch of soaked currants or a little fine-shredded ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... ornithologists agreed that the curious starling-like bird known as the spotted-wing (Psaroglossa spiloptera) was a kind of aberrant starling, but systematists have lately relegated it to the Crateropodidae. At Mussoorie the natives call it the Puli. Its upper ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... and our horses ploughed up a living spray, as they drove forward through the meadows. Every spear of grass was destroyed, and the wheat and rye fields were terribly cut up. We passed a large crag where myriads of starlings had built their nests, and every starling had a grasshopper ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... a starling in the cover of the kneading trough, and she taught it to speak, and she taught the bird what manner of man her brother was. And she wrote a letter of her woes, and the despite with which she was treated, and she bound the letter ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... course," said the woman. "He says you are teaching him to speak just as if he were a starling, and we are very much obliged ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... oval face was like ivory, and her lips, instead of being scarlet, had the tender red of apple-blossom, after the unfolding of the bright bud. Her hair was black and smooth and heavy, and lay on either side of her face like a starling's wings. Her eyes too were as black as midnight, and sometimes like midnight they were deep and sightless. But when she was neither working nor spinning she would steal away to the millstones, and stand there ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... as much for another of the much-quoted pieces from the Sentimental Journey—the description of the caged starling. The passage is ingeniously worked into its context; and if we were to consider it as only intended to serve the purpose of a sudden and dramatic discomfiture of the Traveller's somewhat inconsiderate moralizings on captivity, it would be well enough. But, regarded as a substantive appeal ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... the corn, Watching his falcon in the blue. How could he hear my song so far,— The song of the blood where the pulses are! Straight through the fields he came to me, (Oh I saw his soul as I saw the dew!) But I hid my joy that he might not see, I hid it deep within my breast, As the starling hides in the ...
— Songs of Two • Arthur Sherburne Hardy
... up a starling that had tumbled out of a nest," said Prissie, "and it was always perfectly tame, and would let me stroke it, and would perch on my hand. I had it for years. Do you think we could have ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... man never marry, nor have children, What takes that from him? Only the bare name Of being a father, or the weak delight To see the little wanton ride a-cock-horse Upon a painted stick, or hear him chatter Like a taught starling. ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster
... caught. Jacques lays many a snare or nets for the birds of the mountains,' she added, as if to turn the conversation; 'and once Margot found a young one caught, but she cried so bitterly about it that we took it home and nursed it till it got well. Did you ever see our starling, neighbour?' ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... said a young lad, Robby Starling, addressing another of the men. "You can't tell what beautiful things are said; and then there's praying and singing; it does one's heart good to hear ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... be found in winter in nearly every neighbourhood, and it is astonishing under what adverse natural conditions one may find them. As I write these lines on a dark February afternoon, here in New York City, I can see through the window a Starling sitting ruffled up on the bare twig of an elm tree. Every minute or two he calls, and as he is looking this way perhaps he is growing impatient for the little girl of the house to give him his daily supply of crumbs. A few minutes ago there was a Downy ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... cacique—of which there are several—like the blue jay of the northern part of the continent, is celebrated for its imitative powers. It is one of the handsomest in form of the feathered tribe, in size somewhat larger than a starling. On each wing it has a yellow spot; and its rump, belly, and half the tail are of the same colour. All the rest of the body is black; while the beak is of the ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... pale blue from a greenish one, the colour of a starling's egg, to a grey ultramarine colour, hard to use because so full of colour, but incomparable when right. In these you must carefully avoid the point at which the green overcomes the blue and turns it rank, or that at which the ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... life, my darling, And I your love were death, We 'd shine and snow together Ere March made sweet the weather With daffodil and starling And hours of fruitful breath; If you were life, my darling, And I your love ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... scorn and defiance in the bird's make-up. By the aid of these, it can almost emit a flash as it struts about the fields and jerks out its sharp notes. They give a rayed, a definite and piquant expression to its movements. This bird is not properly a lark, but a starling, say the ornithologists, though it is lark-like in its habits, being a walker and entirely a ground-bird. Its color also allies it to the true lark. I believe there is no bird in the English or European fields that answers to this hardy pedestrian of our meadows. He is a true American, ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... via Saxony and Australia, is the basis of the flocks. The black swan and magpie represent the birds of New Holland. The Indian minah, after becoming common, is said to be retreating before the English starling. The first red deer came from Germany. And side by side with these strangers and with the trees and plants which colonists call specifically "English"—for the word "British" is almost unknown in the Colony—the native flora is beginning to be cultivated ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... simply. "I should like to see it—just to see it, as one looks through a grating into the king's grapehouses here. But I should not like to live in it. I love my hut, and the starling, and the chickens—and what would the garden do without me?—and the children, and the old Annemie? I could not anyhow, anywhere be any happier than I am. There is only ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... if I 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
... could not fly away through the pane. It was not a white butterfly, but a tortoise-shell, very pretty, and in order to let it enjoy itself more, she opened the window and it fluttered out into the garden. Before it had flown many yards, a starling ate most of it up, so the ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... No. —— Snargate Street, Dover, Susan, highly esteemed and greatly beloved mother of Alfred Starling, Wesleyan Minister, in her 71st year. Lost in the ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... sister. Mozart was very fond of animals. In a letter from Vienna to his sister on August 21, 1773, he writes: "How is Miss Bimbes? Please present all manner of compliments to her." "Miss Bimbes" was a dog. At another time he wrote a pathetic little poem on the death of a starling. While in the midst of the composition and rehearsal of "Idomeneo" he wrote to his father: "Give Pimperl (a dog) a pinch of Spanish snuff, a ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... course, to judge How much a deaf lady ought to begrudge; But half-a-guinea seems no great matter - Letting alone more rational patter - Only to hear a parrot chatter: Not to mention that feathered wit, The starling, who speaks when his tongue is slit; The pies and jays that utter words, And other Dicky Gossips of birds, That talk with as much good sense and decorum As many Beaks ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... received His life from God. And why is it of consequence that we should look to that? Because Christ Jesus had in that the starling-point of His whole life. He said: "The Father sent me;" "The Father hath given the Son all things;" "The Father hath given the Son to have life in Himself." Christ received it as His own life, just as God has His life in ...
— The Master's Indwelling • Andrew Murray
... cleanliness, most of us welcome them back each year, if only for the sake of the glad season of their stay. If, moreover, it is a question of choice between these untiring travellers resting in our eaves and the stay-at-home starling or sparrow, the choice will surely fall ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... I will; that's flat. He said he would not ransom Mortimer; Forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer; But I will find him when he lies asleep, And in his ear I'll holla Mortimer! Nay, I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak Nothing but Mortimer, and give it him, To keep his anger ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... hung a couple of cages, neatly made of bamboo, in one of which was a pair of the little lovebird paroquets side by side upon a perch; and in the other a minah, a starling-like bird, that kept leaping from perch to perch, and repeating with a very clear ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... with a smile of gravity and with much candor in his blue eyes, "in China, such a one as you are as safe as a Javanese starling in a nest of hungry yellow snakes. You will travel by daylight, or not at all. You will go from Kowloon to your venerable grandmother by train. You will carry a knife, and you will use it without hesitation. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... little Bijou, who leaped about, and barked, and whined with delight at having her out of doors again. There was a seat in the wall, and her ladies spread cushions and cloaks for her to sit on it, warmed as it was by the sun; and there she rested, watching a starling running about on the turf, his gold-bespangled green plumage glistening. She hardly spoke; she seemed to be making the most of the repose of the fair calm day. Humfrey would not intrude by making ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... darling, Dawn wakes the starling, The sparrow stirs when he sees day break; But all the meadow Is wrapped in shadow, And you must sleep till ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... The starling rolls his "r's" with unctuous joy And, preening, wonders whom he may annoy, Then imitates a hen, a water-fowl And next the "Be quick" of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... grown-up birds to helpless orphans in need of their aid. A redbreast was mentioned lately in Science Gossip as doing a deed of kindness towards a young starling one bitterly cold morning. The starling had left the nest, and was sitting frightened and shivering in a cellar, whither it had crept, too weak and hungry to fly. In vain kindly human hands offered it bread; it refused all food, till ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... Before starling for work this morning, it was agreed that Jose should act as cook for the day; it being stipulated that he was to have the afternoon to himself for digging. Horry was left in charge of the horses. I worked hard, keeping near Bradley, and conversing with him as I shovelled the gravel into the ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks
... John was certain to give an unusually strong blessing, perhaps insuring, on top of freedom from poverty and disease, the prolongation of life until the coming of the Messiah. Yet it is not improbable that all these tales were insecurely based upon a single instance wherein one Starling Driggs, believing himself to stand in urgent need of a blessing, had offered to pay Uncle John for the service in vinegar. It had been unexceptionable vinegar, as Uncle John himself admitted, but being a hundred miles from home, and having no way to carry it, the ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... birds, are interesting as connected with the principle of imitation to which languages in part owe their origin, but in the cases of forced imitation, the mere acquisition of a vocal trick, they only serve to illustrate that power of imitation, and are without significance. Sterne's starling, after his cage had been opened, would have continued to complain that he could not get out. If the bird had uttered an instinctive cry of distress when in confinement and a note of joy on release, there would have been a nearer approach to language than ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... on the surface, this may arise from their having been at some former period under cultivation.—The prevailing trees on the surrounding heights are firs, Pinus pendula and cedroides. No fish are to be seen in the river. The birds are the raven, white-necked starling, bullfinch, crimson and yellow shrikelets, blue tomtits, lesser ditto with two stripes on the head, white-rumped ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... torpid stair Will grumble at our feet, the table cry: 'Fetch my belongings for me; I am bare.' A clatter! Something in the attic falls. A ghost has lifted up his robes and fled. The loitering shadows move along the walls; Then silence very slowly lifts his head. The starling with impatient screech has flown The chimney, and is watching from the tree. They thought us gone for ever: mouse alone Stops in the middle of the floor to see. Now all you idle things, resume your toil. Hearth, put your flames on. Sulky ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... her, because there is no knowing what even a false alarm may do at such a time; but I suppose he knew his own business best, and I must say that if she had been MY wife, I never could have left her endearing and bright face behind. They drew the Clock Room. Alfred Starling, an uncommonly agreeable young fellow of eight-and-twenty for whom I have the greatest liking, was in the Double Room; mine, usually, and designated by that name from having a dressing-room within it, with two large and cumbersome windows, which no wedges I was ever ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... I hold was borne by her; And now, though far away, My lonely spirit hears the stir Of water round the starling spur Beside the ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not lazy, but his thoughts were always wandering. Learning did not interest him. He had other things to think about: would the last leaves in the garden have fallen when he got home from school at noon? And would the starling, for whom he had nailed the little box high up in the pine-tree, come again next spring? It had picked off all the black berries from the elderberry, and had then gone away screaming; if it did not find any more elderberries, what would ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... was sick of life. He walked away from his unhappy home, and, sick not only of his own existence but of everybody else's, turned aside down Gaswork Lane to avoid the town, and, crossing the wooden bridge that goes over the canal to Starling's Cottages, was presently alone in the damp pine woods and out of sight and sound of human habitation. He would stand it no longer. He repeated aloud with blasphemies unusual to him that he would ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... these to have been sincere expressions—inside his motley garb he had a heart of tenderness. It went forth to all, even to the animal world—to the caged starling. Some may attribute the ebullitions of feeling in his works to affectation, but those who have read them attentively will observe the same impulses too generally predominant to be the work of design. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... suspended in the air with wings vibrating so swiftly as to be unseen; then suddenly jerk themselves a few yards to recommence hovering. A greenfinch rises with a yellow gleam and a sweet note from the grass, and is off with something for his brood, or a starling, solitary now, for his mate is in the nest, startled from his ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... must recall This florid "Fairy's Bower," This wonderful Swiss waterfall, And this old "Leaning Tower;" And here's the "Maiden of Cashmere," And here is Bewick's "Starling," And here the dandy cuirassier You thought was "such ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... Walled from the healthful air of hardy man; Reared by cold hearts, and watched by jealous eyes, His guardians jailers, and his comrades spies. Each trite convention courtly fears inspire To stint experience and to dwarf desire; Narrows the action to a puppet stage, And trains the eaglet to the starling's cage. On the dejected brow and smileless cheek, What weary thought the languid lines bespeak; Till drop by drop, from jaded day to day, The sickly life-streams ooze themselves away. Yet oft in HOPE a boundless realm was thine, That vaguest Infinite,—the Dream of Fame; Son ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... always teasing him to go and have another look at, though he had never noticed the painter's name. When the public are so eager to be amused, and care so little who it is that amuses them, it is not amiss to remind them of it now and then; or even to have a starling taught to repeat the name, to which they owe such misprised obligations, in their drowsy ears. On any other principle I cannot conceive how painters (not without genius or industry) can fling themselves at the head of the public ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... sought again its shrine, and Mistress Damaris Sedley, who was of a nature admirably poised and a wit most ready, lifted with the latest French shrug the jest from her own shoulders to those of another: "Oh, madam! was it you who spoke? Surely I thought it was your dead starling that you taught to call you by that name—but whose neck you wrung when it ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston |
