"Bird of prey" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his features will have reasserted themselves, and the harmony of lineament which was his when he was an infant, as his mother never tires of regretfully recalling, will be restored. Until that time Philip must be content to carry the suggestion of an attractive and eager young bird of prey. ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... powers of my nature to fling myself into the asylum, to cast myself into God's arms, to take shelter beneath the shadow of His wings. And unless a man does that, and swiftly, he is exposed to every bird of prey in the sky, and to every beast of prey ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... upward to the darkness. Like some black bird of prey the airship was already lost to sight, though it would have seemed as if her white planes might render her visible. But she had moved so swiftly that, during the short search, she ...
— Tom Swift and his Photo Telephone • Victor Appleton
... forehead low, the small eyes peered out snakelike from under heavy, puffy lids. The nose alone was cut with any measure of fineness, and that projected, wide-nostrilled, and aquiline as the beak of a bird of prey. It would have been difficult to imagine a face more gross and sensual in its lines, and the look of low admiration and eagerness which it now wore, was well calculated to bring out the sensuality in its most repulsive form. Marcia felt ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... floor; one had lost her tail; a traveller, who wished to be a hunter, had shot it off, because the creature had taken the hen for a bird of prey! ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... following his instincts! Or, better still," Adam went on, "the eyes of a bird of prey when he is following his instincts. Not when he is swooping, but merely when ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... deeply read. She knows as much As average sixth-form boys; But not the greatest sage could touch The high, aggressive joys That imp her wing, like bird of prey, When in my ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... mingling of personal advantage with any sort of service of God, ruins the whole, and turns it into mere selfishness. Samuel, in verse 19, puts the two sides of this 'evil in the sight of the Lord' as being disobedience and swooping down on the booty, like some bird of prey, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... fowls can see. What is more familiar than the old hen's cry to her chickens when she has found something eatable? and then there is the curious call uttered by all fowls when any large bird that they think is a bird of prey flies over them." ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... and as he entered it he heard a sound of screaming as if a little child were there. He followed the sound, and at last came to a high tree, and at the top of this a little child was sitting, for the mother had fallen asleep under the tree with the child, and a bird of prey had seen it in her arms, had flown down, snatched it away, and set it on ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... by it, or whether you do not, keep it to yourself. I know the bird better than you do, and I strongly caution you to beware of the bird. The bird is a bird of prey, and altogether an unclean bird. The bird wants a mate, and doesn't much care how she finds one. And the bird wants money, and doesn't much care how she gets it. The bird is a decidedly bad bird, and not at all fit to take the place of domestic hen in a decent farmyard. In plain English, ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... back in her chair smiling and satisfied. Then she sat up rigid. A change passed over her such as comes over a bird of prey when it draws its feathers in flat against its body to lessen friction in the swoop. She unconsciously closed the little fan, the little ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... I've ever been compared to that particular bird of prey," he said. "No, that has not been my occupation—in fact I am only very rarely conscious that one effect of my occupation has been that. Of course, it must have been if one comes to think of it. It is not ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... opened, and a man between thirty and forty came in. He was about the medium height; a dark olive skin, black curly hair, picturesque and disreputable, like a bird of prey in his blue ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... long black veil, closely encircled her thin, sallow face. A number of deep wrinkles had impressed their transverse furrows in her forehead of yellow ivory; her marked and prominent nose was bent like the beak of a bird of prey; her black eye was knowing and piercing; the expression of her countenance was at ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... On the other a threaded waterfall. The red morning-tint that shone in the drops had a strange look,—one would say the cliff was bleeding;—perhaps she did not mean it. Below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey, with his wings spread over some unseen object.—And on the very next page a procession wound along, after the fashion of that on the title-page of Fuller's "Holy War," in which I recognized without difficulty every boarder at our table in all the glory ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... haversack and a dead mule. Having breakfasted, and thereby given head and hand a little strength, he set to work to provide for the future by cutting slices from the carcass and spreading them out to dry, well knowing that this land of desolation could furnish neither wolf nor bird of prey to rob his larder. This work done, he pushed on at his best speed, found and fed his companions, and led them back to the mule, their storehouse. After a day of rest and feasting came a march to the Cactus Pass, where the three were presently picked up by ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... herself that her cousin had the eyes of a bird of prey. So black and fierce they were, in the greyish white face under the shaggy hair. But she was not afraid. Rather she felt her ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the inheritance of any habit may be believed, after what we have seen with respect to the Ground-tumbler of India. MM. Boitard and Corbie describe a pigeon[298] which has the singular habit of sailing for a considerable time through the air, without flapping its wings, like a bird of prey. The confusion is inextricable, from the time of Aldrovandi in 1600 to the present day, in the accounts published of the Draijers, Smiters, Finnikins, Turners, Claquers, &c., which are all remarkable ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... numerous Puna birds, the majority of which may be classed as water-fowl, I will notice only a few of the most characteristic. Next to the condor, the most remarkable bird of prey is the Huarahuau, or the Aloi (Polylorus megalopterus, Cob.),[68] one of the gyr-falcon species. This bird, which is a constant inhabitant of the level heights, preys on the carcases of dead horses, mules, &c., but never attempts to meddle ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... Cyrus, he understood suddenly the tragedy that underlies all comic things. Could there be a deeper pathos, after all, than simply being funny? This absurd old man, with his lean, crooked figure, his mottled skin, and his piercing bloodshot eyes, like the eyes of an overgorged bird of prey, appeared now as an object that moved one to tears, not to laughter. And yet because of this very quality which made him pitiable—this vulture-like instinct to seize and devour the smaller—he stood to-day the most conspicuously envied ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... envenomed from year to year, took him, while yet young, from those who loved him, and laid him in his still grave. As in the fair form of some beautiful victim, the marks of the grasping claws of the fierce bird of prey which has destroyed it, may be found; so, in the productions of which we have just spoken, the traces of the bitter sufferings which devoured his heart, are ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... and broken constitution. So a person may have faults and failings, but a want of principle is more serious. It is a radical defect which should prevent friendship. A small thing often shows us whether a person wants principle. The single claw of a bird of prey tells us its nature. According to the familiar saying, "We don't need to eat a leg of mutton to know whether it is tainted; a mouthful is sufficient." So a single expression may tell us whether there is a want of moral principle. A word showing us that a person thinks lightly of honesty, ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... I saw no moving thing in the whole apartment which I could attack, but unfortunately my eyes fell upon some shining brass nails which served as ornaments round the edge of a table. To my heated imagination each nail seemed glaring directly at me, menacing me like the evil eye of a bird of prey. I rushed madly toward the table, and climbing up one of its legs, I seized a nail in my beak. To my great delight I found I could easily pull it out, which I immediately did, and threw it spitefully away. ...
— Harper's Young People, November 18, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... earth, arousing from her long, cold sleep, Throws from her breast the coverlet of snow, Revealing Spring's soft charms which lie below. Suppressed emotions in each heart arise, The wooer wakens and the warrior dies. The bird of prey is vanquished by the dove, And thoughts of bloody strife give place ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... day but that bird of prey did not appear. "A watched pot never boils," said Henry at last, trying to conquer his impatience; and he turned his mind from the task of following the automobile driver to the even more difficult task of securing one of the dollars. For sooner or later ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... only just to Miss Tippet to say that the Eagle did not find her a congenial bird of prey in this region. On the contrary, she had to drag her unwilling friend down into it; and as Miss Tippet was too conscientious and kind-hearted to agree with her in her sweeping censures and caustic observations and wilful misconstructions, it is difficult to conceive wherein ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... the deputy, was a thin, tall young man of five-and-twenty, with a lengthy olive-hued countenance, black frizzled hair, and deep-set eyes; the wide, dark rings beneath them were completed by the wrinkled purple eyelids above. With a nose like the beak of some bird of prey, a pinched mouth, and cheeks worn lean with study and hollowed by ambition, he was the very type of a second-rate personage on the lookout for something to turn up, and ready to do anything if so he might get on in the world, while keeping within the limitations of the possible and the forms of ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... my mind's eye the fine small head and large eyes so far above me, as we sit beside each other at the deal table. He looked down on me like a bird of prey. His hair—gray, Martha told me, before he was thirty—was tufted out a little, like ruffled feathers, on each side. But the eyes were not those of an eagle; ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... way, woke a dull and melancholy echo. Large tracts of waste land, varied by the rank and profuse foliage of the South, lay before him; occasionally a wild goat peeped down from some rocky crag, or the discordant cry of a bird of prey, startled in its sombre haunt, was heard above the hills. These were the only signs of life; not a human being was met, not a hut was visible. Wrapped in his own ardent and solemn thoughts, the young man continued his way, till the sun had spent its noonday heat, and a breeze that announced the approach ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and appeared to doze in a happy dream. The North swooped above them like some greedy bird of prey. ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... observe a mouthful of teeth irregular but white. Then he extended a lean, brown hand whose fingers glittered with many rings, and caught Master Vallance by his fat shoulder, into whose flesh the grip seemed to sink like the resistless talons of a bird of prey. Slowly he swayed Master Vallance backward and forward, while over the dark face rippled a succession of leers, grins, and grimaces, which had the effect of making Master Vallance feel thoroughly uncomfortable. Nor did ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... which his glance searched the room, I saw that his face was flushed and his eyes swimming and bloodshot. There was in his look, as I remember it now, something of the inflamed yet bridled cruelty of a bird of prey. ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... lichen of old oaks, gray before its time, surrounded without grace a cruel brow, where religious intolerance showed its passionate brutality. The shape of the aquiline nose, which resembled the beak of a bird of prey, the black and crinkled lids of the yellow eyes, the prominent bones of a hollow face, the rigidity of the wrinkles, the disdain expressed in the lower lip, were all expressive of ambition, despotism, and power, the more to be feared ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... the upper teeth to the throat was a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone. The unnatural prominence of nose, the absence of chin, the fierce eyes, gave this man the appearance of a great bird of prey crimsoned in throat and breast by the blood of its quarry. The man rose to his knees, the child to his feet. The man shook his fist at the child; the child, terrified at last, ran to a tree near by, got upon ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... the huge mountaineer with interest. There was no more famous character in all those hills than the giant before him—yet his face was kind and was good-humoured, but the nose and eyes were the beak and eyes of some bird of prey. The little girl had disappeared for a moment. She came back with a blue-backed spelling-book, a second reader and a worn copy of "Mother Goose," and she opened first one and then the other until the attention of the visitor was caught—the black-haired ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... woman's small, pale eyes twinkled with a tiger's bloodthirsty greed. Her broad, flat nose, with nostrils expanded into oval cavities, breathed the fires of hell, and resembled the beak of some evil bird of prey. The spirit of intrigue lurked behind her low, cruel brow. Long hairs had grown from her wrinkled chin, betraying the masculine character of her schemes. Any one seeing that woman's face would have said that artists had failed in their conceptions ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... with an eye like a hawk's, and a certain suspicious turn of the head to this side and that which reminded one of the same bird of prey, was discussing ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... arrangements and building boats on the Rhine; he had propounded riddles which Maurice had spent three of the best campaigning months in idle efforts to guess, and when he at last moved, he had swept to his mark with the swiftness and precision of a bird of prey. Yet the greatest of all qualities in a military commander, that of deriving substantial fruits from victory instead of barren trophies, he had not manifested. If it had been a great stroke of art to seize reach Deventer, it was an enormous blunder, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... mountain; ¢ilhyÃli, black; çolÃji, blue; litsòï, yellow; lakà ie, white. These verses refer to four mountains surrounding Qadjinà ï, which are designated by colors only to indicate their topographical positions. 3, 7, 11, 15. 'Çaltsoï aça litsòï, "yellow wing," a large bird of prey; kini, hen hawk; bitselitsòï, "yellow tail," a bird of undetermined species; a'a'i, magpie; tse, a tail; bitse, its tail. 4, 8, 12, 16. Cija, my treasure; cigèl, my desideratum, my ultimatum, the only thing I will accept. When supposed to be said by a god, as in this song, it means the particular ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... said Therese, "what you want. As often as my unlucky star brings you here, you appear like a bird of prey, and I may be sure you have some malicious scheme against me. You know that you will not find any money with me, but you help yourself. Once before you came with a boat and carried off what we had saved for our own use, and turned it into money. Now ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... a man of about forty, thin, wiry, and with a nose resembling the beak of a bird of prey. His eyes, half buried under bushy eyebrows, twinkled like two stars. His mouth was large and smiling; his expression exceedingly benignant. From the face I passed to the costume. The worthy was clad in severe black, ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... was elaborately dressed, with a neat curl in the middle of the forehead: it was very black, shiny and hard, and it looked as though it could never be in the least disarranged. She had large black eyes and her nose was slightly aquiline; in profile she had somewhat the look of a bird of prey, but full face she was prepossessing. She smiled a great deal, but her mouth was large and when she smiled she tried to hide her teeth, which were big and rather yellow. But what embarrassed Philip most was that she was ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... of a large number of fishing craft congregated in a comparatively small area of sea, the destroyer dived to the attack like some giant bird of prey, unable in the gloom which shrouded the earth to distinguish the presence ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... marrying a well brought-up young man—most likely she would never marry. What tempted and charmed and delighted her was to lure other women's husbands away from them. She was a little daemonic wrecker; she often appeared to him like a little bird of prey, that would fain have made him, too, her booty. He had studied her very, very closely. For the rest, she had had no great success with him. "She did not get hold of me, but I got hold of her—for my play. Then I fancy" (here he chuckled ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... and understood at once that this was a man of worth, and no La Jonquiere. The mouth was benevolent and the eyes large, bold, and firm, like those of a king or a bird of prey; deep thought was written on his brow, prudence and some degree of firmness in the lower part of the face; all this, however, in the half-darkness, and in spite of the ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... promise you, the ancient freedom come down, O happiness, upon the smallest city, and love alone bind the races together; and if ever the black talon of the tyrant is seen, all the races will bound up to drive out the bird of prey!" ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... lazy contentment, and then started up in remembrance of the occasion of our being in this place as the shadow of Mother Borton fell across the table. Her keen eyes fixed on me and her sharp beak nodding toward me gave her the uncanny aspect of a bird of prey, and I felt a sinking of courage as I ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... little girl, his face shining warm and red above his pointed collar and broad black stock. He was very tall and spare, and his eyebrows, which hung thick and dark above his Roman nose, gave him an odd resemblance to a bird of prey. The smile flashed like an artificial light across ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... outward circumstances, the plastic forms of organic life have been remoulded. A little obscure plant, the food of an insect, dies out; the insect itself, deprived of its food, dies out or migrates; the bird which fed upon it dies out or migrates; the bird of prey follows the like course. Migration introduces them to an entirely new state of existence, temperature, food, and antagonists. The migrating animals are replaced by others, which likewise experience new surroundings; and thus the extirpation of a single plant may determine a long series ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... action and flourishing of weapons, particularly when boasting of his prowess. 20. A duck and a gull. 34. A corrobory, or native dance. 65. A crab. 30. A native in a hut, with portion of the matting with which they cover their habitations. 67. A kangaroo. 71. Appears to be a bird of prey, having seized upon a kangaroo-rat. ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... match-maker who does work for fashionable novels and social satires, and who is a truly awful personage. To her alone of mortals is it given to inspire, like the Harpies, at once contempt and fear. Keen-eyed and hook-nosed, like a bird of prey, she glowers from the corner of crowded ball-rooms upon the unconscious heir, hunts him untiringly from house to house, marries him remorselessly to her eldest daughter, and then never loses sight of him till ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... express the grand vengefulness, the ready suspicion, the promptitude in the execution of a thought, the strength of the Moor, and his childish lack of reflection. His black eyes had the fixity of the eyes of a bird of prey, and they were framed, like a vulture's, by a bluish membrane devoid of lashes. His forehead, low and narrow, had something menacing. Evidently, this man was under the yoke of some single and unique thought. His sinewy arm did not ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... off Tom's shoulder. And the latter, looking round at him was struck—in mingled admiration and repulsion—by his likeness to some shapely bird of prey, with fierce hooked beak and russet-grey eyes, luminous, cruel ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... columns, stretched far to right and left, moved parallel and threatened to outflank and enclose the enemy at every stand. So with wings beating and body steadily advancing, like some great kite or bird of prey, we have flapped ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... proof of your talent for investigation, now give my friend the benefit of the gentle indulgence for which we all admire you." The ladies smiled, the gentlemen turned away to hide their laughter, and Betty sat there with ruffled feathers, like some small bird of prey whom a larger has robbed ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... a colossal fowl, Like Sindbad's monstrous Roc, A bird of prey some say, a-prowl Like that Stymphalian flock, With iron claws and brazen beak, Intent to clutch and collar, Fired with devotion strong, yet weak, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... gas which served to buoy up the misshapen and semi-solid mass in the rarefied air. The creature moved swiftly along, keeping pace easily with the monoplane, and for twenty miles or more it formed my horrible escort, hovering over me like a bird of prey which is waiting to pounce. Its method of progression—done so swiftly that it was not easy to follow—was to throw out a long, glutinous streamer in front of it, which in turn seemed to draw forward the rest of the writhing body. So elastic and gelatinous was it that ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... on the grass as if listening to the secrets it told to the autumnal wind. The wild passion and excitement which flashed from his eyes when he spoke of the bird of prey had all vanished. Now the eyes which looked into the heavens above were sad and dreamy, and there rested in them ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... Anselm to represent the Saviour, the Fisher of Men, because he pounces from the highest sky on fish swimming on the surface of the water and carries them up, the eagle, classed in Leviticus and Deuteronomy with the unclean beasts, is transformed, as being a bird of prey, into a personification of the Devil snatching away souls to gnaw and ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... darkness invested the Indian village; while gusts of wind, sweeping with a moaning sound over the adjacent hills, and waking the forests from their repose, came rushing over the village, whirring and fluttering aloft like flights of the boding night-raven, or the more powerful bird of prey that had given its name to the chieftain of ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... consult what course were best, One, more mature in folly than the rest, 1110 Stood up, and told them, with his head aside, That desperate cures must be to desperate ills applied: And therefore, since their main impending fear Was from the increasing race of Chanticleer, Some potent bird of prey they ought to find, A foe profess'd to him, and all his kind: Some haggard Hawk, who had her eyrie nigh, Well pounced to fasten, and well wing'd to fly; One they might trust, their common wrongs to wreak: The Musquet and the Coystrel were too weak, 1120 Too fierce ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... satisfied wish begets a new one. So-called pleasures are only a mode of temporary relief. Pain soon returns in the form of satiety. Life is a more or less violent oscillation between pain and ennui. The latter, like a bird of prey, hovers over us, ready to swoop down wherever it sees ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... the Pike is a fish that breeds but once a year, and that other fish (as namely Loaches) do breed oftner; as we are certaine Pigeons do almost every month, and yet the Hawk, a bird of prey (as the Pike is of fish) breeds but once in twelve months: and you are to note, that his time of breeding or Spawning is usually about the end of February; or somewhat later, in March, as the weather proves colder ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... right plunged the bayonet deep into the wrinkled throat of the old woman. She grappled with him, and the struggle was dreadful; she caught his throat in one of her bony hands, and the nails pierced into it like the talons of a bird of prey—the fingers of the other she inserted into the jagged and gaping wound on his head, and forced the flesh still more asunder, exerting all her strength to force him on his back; but the bayonet was still in her throat, and with the point descending towards the body, ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to his master, and soon became such an expert that he could give points to all the huntsmen of the canton. None could equal him in tracing a dog; he knew all the passes, by-paths, and enclosures of the forest; swooped down upon the game with the keen scent and the velocity of a bird of prey, and never was known to miss his mark. Thus it was that the country people surnamed him the 'grand chasserot', the term which we here apply to the sparrow-hawk. Besides all these advantages, he was handsome, alert, straight, and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... fraudulent, and swooping relentlessly upon the victims of misfortune. The occupation revolted him, but at present he saw no other way of supporting the genteel appearances which—he knew not why—were indispensable to his life. He subsisted like a bird of prey; he was ever on the look out for carrion which the law permitted him to seize. From the point of view forced upon him, society became a mere system of legalised rapine. 'You are in debt; behold the bond. Behold, too, my authority for squeezing ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... that passeth by; They hang afar from men, they swing to and fro. As for the earth, out of it cometh bread: And underneath it is turned up as it were by fire. The atones thereof are the place of sapphires, And it hath dust of gold. That path no bird of prey knoweth, Neither hath the falcon's eye seen it: The proud beasts have not trodden it, Nor hath the fierce lion passed thereby. He putteth forth his hand upon the flinty rock; He overturneth the mountains by the roots. He cutteth out channels among ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... knight poetic comes. And Oh! ye fair! This black ENCHANTER's wicked arts beware! His subtle poison dims the brightest eyes, And at his touch, each grace and beauty dies: Love, gentleness and joy to rage give way, And the soft dove becomes a bird of prey. May this our bold advent'rer break the spell, And drive the demon to his native hell. Ye slaves of passion, and ye dupes of chance, Wake all your pow'rs from this destructive trance! Shake off the ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... chanced to look round, she saw the Swan sitting upon her tree. She was frightened at this, thinking that perhaps it was some bird of prey, come to devour her chicks. So she left her fishing, and at once flew up to the top of the cocoa-nut tree. The Swan looked harmless enough when she came closer, so plucking up courage, the ...
— The Talking Thrush - and Other Tales from India • William Crooke
... did not block prosecutions, but it hindered their effectiveness. The gallows was not yet done away with, but its use had been greatly restrained by the central government. Superstition was still a bird of prey, but its wings ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... off, but not without its evil implication; and I felt his eyes intently fixed upon me as he sat hunched up on the rail in his sodden sleeping-suit, like some huge, ill-omened bird of prey. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... twenty-five seconds, a.m., on the 31st of March, the comet became visible in daylight about two and a half degrees south-westward of the Morning Star. Twenty-four hours later the two wings came into view, and the next evening the Invader looked like some gigantic bird of prey swooping down from its eyrie somewhere in the heights of Space upon the trembling and terrified world. The professional prophets said, with an excellent assumption of absolute conviction, that it was nothing less awful than the ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... bird of prey he ran swiftly back across the flags and disappeared behind the mass of stones, and Cuxson, not daring to move for fear of tightening the thongs, sat almost numb with anxiety as he wondered if his luck would hold at the ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... ever infested the Frankfort forests and the foresters did their best to entrap him and make him their prisoner, but for a long time he eluded them. At length his time came, and he who had lived the wild, free life of a bird of prey was in a narrow cell at the top of Eschenheimer tower, judged guilty of so many crimes that he was sentenced ...
— Pixy's Holiday Journey • George Lang
... passed away; but the stranger had not altered her position. There she hung, like a dark shadow, indistinctly visible, yet causing no doubt of something ominous of evil being there, as some bird of prey hovering about, ready to pounce down any moment, ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... cranium, and, indeed, the whole skull, was so small as to be disagreeably suggestive of something animal. The nose, on the other hand, was abnormally large; so extravagant were its dimensions, and so peculiar its shape, it resembled the beak of some bird of prey. A characteristic of the face—and an uncomfortable one!—was that, practically, it stopped short at the mouth. The mouth, with its blubber lips, came immediately underneath the nose, and chin, to all intents and purposes, there was none. This deformity—for ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... severe even in so small an effort as taking from his broad back a reluctant coat, and the unvarying fixed intentness of the dark eyes over which the lids, loose with age, had partly folded, giving him the piercing look of a bird of prey; and the swarthiness of his face, massive, hairless, and acutely ridged, with its crown of tousled white hair, his was a figure which made it easy to believe the tales one had heard of him when he was the master of the Oberon, and drove his ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... Rogues, miscreants, felons, village-ravagers! They made great wars, they rode like heroes forth, And, worthy, won broad lands and towers and towns, So firmly won that thirty years of strife Made of their followers dukes, their leaders kings! While you! like jackal and the bird of prey, Who lurk in copses or 'mid muddy beds— Crouching and hushed, with dagger ready drawn, Hide in the noisome marsh that skirts the way, Trembling lest passing hounds snuff out your lair! Listen at eventide on lonesome ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... a fearsome bird, we deem; Though feathered tribes hold him in great esteem; A bird of prey, he whizzes through the air, And clutches his pale victim by the hair. Gory and grewsome,—he is the mainstay Of the historic novel ...
— A Phenomenal Fauna • Carolyn Wells
... lost self-control, as he half-unconsciously put his glass to his lips with increasing frequency, his companions grew cooler and more wary. Their eyes no longer beamed good-naturedly upon their victim, but began to emit the eager, cruel gleams of some bird of prey. ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... the air! The eagle swooping from his lair On bird-world's lesser creatures, Is spoiler less intent to slay Than this unsparing Bird of Prey, With Woman's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... covered by a small purple cap, from under which his snow-white hair curled downwards to his shoulders. With his long beak-like nose and his single gleaming eye, which shone brightly from under a thick tuft of grizzled brow, he seemed to Alleyne to have something of the look of some fierce old bird of prey. For a moment he smiled, as his eye lit upon the banner of the five roses waving from the hamlet; but his course lay for Pampeluna, and he rode on after ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... doomed to writhe, To rouse the Tartar, Russ, and Hun! Bid terror to the battle ride! Indignant honour, burning shame, Revenge, and hate, and patriotic pride! But not the quick unerring aim Of volley'd thunder winged with flame, Nor famine keener than the bird of prey, Nor death—avail the hard of heart to tame! Blow wind, and pierce the dire array, Flung, drifted by thy breath, athwart ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... compressed as with a keen scrutiny he marked all the characteristics of the strangers,—first of one, then deliberately of the other. A war captain (his flighty name was Watatuga, the Dragon-fly, although he looked with his high nose and eagle glance more like a bird of prey), assuming precedence of the others, pressed up beside the prophet, and the challenge of his eyes and the contempt that dilated his nostrils might have seemed more formidable of intent than the lacerating gaze of the cheera-taghe, except that to an Irishman there is always ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... like a bird of prey; Or where broad waters round him lay: But this wild Ruin is no ghost Of his devices—buried, lost! Within this little lonely isle There stood a consecrated Pile; Where tapers burned, and mass was sung, For them whose timid Spirits clung To mortal ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... of a bird of prey, while it buries its nails in the flesh of its victim, carries also the narcotic which ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... of a bird of prey is well defined; there is no mistaking him. His claws, his beak, his head, his wings, in fact his whole build, point to the fact that he subsists upon live creatures; he is armed to catch them and to slay them. Every bird knows a hawk and knows him from the start, and is on ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... which I had examined in the daylight. I wondered how often her eyes had rested on the same object. I pondered in a charming dream. A harsh, loud voice, over my shoulder, said suddenly: "A red stork—good! The stork is a bird of prey; it is vigilant, greedy, and catches gudgeons. Red, too!—blood red! Hal ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... watch-boys of the press, who have a love for flinging stones at the little innocents, and pretend that it is their duty, and that every wren or sparrow is likely to destroy a whole field of wheat, or to turn out a monstrous bird of prey. Leave we these vain sports and savage pastimes of youth, and turn we to the benevolent philosophy ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... interrupted the Sultan eagerly, 'desiring to see me? Nay, then, the boon is of thy giving, not of mine. Tell me more! Yet it matters not. Were she beauteous as the crescent at even, or ill-favoured as a bird of prey, she shall yet be welcome for thy sake, O faithful Servant, be she a slave or a queen. Tell me only her name and whence ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... small range, the insignificant number of individuals now living, the openness of the species to attack, and the danger of its extinction by poison. Originally this remarkable bird,—the largest North American bird of prey,—ranged as far northward as the Columbia River, and southward for an unknown distance. Now its range is reduced to seven counties in southern California, although it is said to extend from Monterey Bay to Lower ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... shape of small bronzes and terra-cottas, are accounted for. A human body is crowned with the head of an angry lion, with dog's ears and a horse's mane; the hands brandish long poignards, the feet are replaced by those of a bird of prey, the extended claws seeming to grasp the soil (Fig. 6). The gestures vary; the right arm is sometimes stretched downwards at full length, sometimes bent at the elbow, but the combination of forms, the character of the figure and ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... opened, and a thin, lank old man, with a fierce peaked face like a bird of prey, came out upon the steps. His face softened, however, into friendliness when he saw Feversham, and a smile played upon his lips. A stranger might have thought that he winked. But his left eyelid continually ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... with his purple skin and bristles for whiskers; he looks like a wild boar with the eyes of a bird of prey. But he'll make the finest chief-justice of a provincial court. Now don't be uneasy! in ten minutes he shall be singing to you Isabelle's air in the fourth act of Robert le Diable: 'At thy feet I kneel'—you promise, don't you? to send Arthur ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... little, sandy-haired man, of some sixty years of age, spare and wizened, with a sharp nose, like a beak, and thin, long arms, ending in large, claw-like hands, that were like the talons of a bird of prey. Altogether, Mr. Lark spur had very much of the aspect of an elderly vulture which had undergone partial transformation ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... humanity of our race has been enduring Promethean agonies. But even as Prometheus unflinchingly bore the cruelties of pain, of heat and of cold, of hunger and of thirst, and the tortures inflicted by an obscene bird of prey, so have endured the men of our nation and of those nations with whom we are proud to be allied. Much more remote than they seemed one little year ago, now seem the old stories of sunny Greece. But if we have studied the ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... we mysterious writers can seldom reach till we have got into our graves, whether it is that fame being a fruit grafted on the body, can hardly grow and much less ripen till the stock is in the earth, or whether she be a bird of prey, and is lured among the rest to pursue after the scent of a carcass, or whether she conceives her trumpet sounds best and farthest when she stands on a tomb, by the advantage of a rising ground and the echo of a ...
— English Satires • Various
... and hidden silence, a voice crying from an upper room, suddenly fell—a woman in the abandonment of utter pain, pain beyond all control, was screaming. Somewhere, above that dark forest that pressed in upon the house, a bird of prey hovered. It hung for a moment; it descended—its talons were fixed upon her flesh... then again it ascended. Shriek after shriek, bursting the silence, chasing the shadows, flooding the secrecy with horrible light, beat like blows upon the walls of the house—rose, fell, rose again. ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... rapidly gathering together for a fresh attack. This time their leading spirit was no longer Staupitz, disagreeably conscious of the difficulties of the enterprise, but the hunchback AEsop, who seemed to burn with a passion for slaughter. Lagardere likened him in his mind to some ungainly, obscene bird of prey, as he loomed out of the mirk waving his gaunt arms and shrieking in his rage and hate. "Kill them! kill them!" he screamed, as he rushed across the intervening space, and the bravos, heartened by his frenzy of fight, streamed after ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... toasts grew wild and were pledged less for the sake of the toasted than for that of the wine itself, wits grew more barbed and less restrained by caution; recklessness hung a moment, like a bird of prey, above us, then swooped abruptly down in the words ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... illusion. Happiness consists in devotion to a dream or to a duty; self-sacrifice is the surest means of securing repose. One of the early Buddhas who preceded Sakya-Mouni obtained the nirvana in a singular way. He saw one day a falcon chasing a little bird. "I beseech thee," he said to the bird of prey, "leave this little creature in peace; I will give thee its weight from my own flesh." A small pair of scales descended from the heavens, and the transaction was carried out. The little bird settled itself upon one side of the scales, and the saint placed ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... the old woman is before me ... but she sees! She gazes at me with large, evil eyes which bode me ill ... the eyes of a bird of prey.... I bend down to her face, to her eyes.... Again there is the same film, the same blind, dull visage ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the mighty ship. In a moment it was gone, and the titanic mass of glistening metal rose smoothly, quickly to the great roof of their world above them. On an even keel it climbed straight up, then suddenly it leaped forward like some great bird of prey sighting its victim. The ground beneath sped swiftly away, and behind it there came a long line of ships, quickly finding their position in the formation. They were heading toward the giant airlock that would let them out into space. There was but one lock large enough to permit so huge a ship ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... the Tigress, as has been said, was a mercenary and rapacious man, caring no more for a bleeding country than does a bird of prey for a bleeding dove. So long as he obtained the gold of his impoverished countrymen, and eluded the grasp of the blockading fleet that so vigilantly guarded every important port, he was contented. To the care of this man, this ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... a dead horse lay by the roadside, or in the fields, unburied, not grateful to gods or men. I saw no bird of prey, no ill-omened fowl, on my way to the carnival of death, or at the place where it had been held. The vulture of story, the crow of Talavera, the "twa corbies" of the ghastly ballad, are all from Nature, doubtless; but no black wing was ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... even seen the grasshopper, full of audacity, launch itself in pursuit of the Cigale, who fled in terror. So the sparrow-hawk pursues the skylark in the open sky. But the bird of prey is less ferocious than the insect; it pursues a creature smaller than itself. The locust, on the contrary, assails a colossus, far larger and far more vigorous than its enemy; yet the result is a foregone conclusion, in spite of this disproportion. With its ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... tied their forelocks with ribbons like horses on a holiday, and one had torn his yellow mantle in two and capered in advance, waving the halves in either hand like monstrous banners, or the flapping wings of some golden bird of prey. In the midst of them, pressing forward and pressed on by the riot behind, was the Rough Master of Coates, and with him, always hanging a little away and shrinking under her veil, Thea, whose right wrist he grasped in his left hand. ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... passion—who sees her baby, whose warm mouth had just left her breast, hurried off by a demon to a hideous death—bear her limbs aloft wherever there is dust to dust, till she reach that devouring den, and fiercer and more furious than any bird of prey that ever bathed its beak in blood, throttle the fiends that with their heavy wing would fain flap her down the cliffs, and hold up ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... one night at Longfellow's table, when one of the guests happened to speak of the photograph of Hawthorne which hung in a corner of the room, Lowell said, after a glance at it, "Yes, it's good; but it hasn't his fine 'accipitral' [pertaining to the look of a bird of prey; hawklike. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... screaming as before. On looking up in the direction in which she seemed to gaze I discovered a black spot just under the clouds, but was unable at first to determine what it was; however, it soon appeared to be a bird of prey, though at first at too great a distance to be distinguished. I have seen one of those animals continue in this agitated state, and her whole brood pinned down, as it were, to the ground for four hours together, whilst their formidable foe has ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst |
