"Cuckoo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... present the stand we then took, let us trace the antecedents of Mr. Scandril's opponent up to their source. It has been urged against Mr. Broskin that he spent some years of his life in the lunatic asylum at Warm Springs, in the adjoining commonwealth of Missouri. This cuckoo cry—raised though it is by dogs of political darkness—we shall not stoop to controvert, for it is accidentally true; but next week we shall show, as by the stroke of an enchanter's wand, that this great statesman's detractors would probably not derive any benefits from a residence in the same ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... night-singer,—and which no doubt excels the Old World bird in the variety and compass of its powers. The two birds belong to totally distinct families, there being no American species which answers to the European nightingale, as there are that answer to the robin, the cuckoo, the blackbird, and numerous others. Philomel has the color, manners, and habits of a thrush,—our hermit thrush,—but it is not a thrush at all, but a warbler. I gather from the books that its song is protracted and ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... in their exuberant haste for dividends, the introduction of foreign labourers. We doubt whether, under any circumstances, such a scheme is practicable; but of this we entertain no doubt, that it is as mischievous a device as ever was forged in the cabinet of Mammon! Some years ago the cuckoo cry of the political quacks was over-population. Now it seems there is a scarcity of hands, and in order to supply the want—for we have drained the Highlands—we are to have an importation from Baden or Bavaria, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... morning, to the Hotel Bellevue on the Little Scheideck. In spite of the rain and the squalls, tables had been laid outside in the shelter of the veranda, amid a great display of alpenstocks, flasks, telescopes, cuckoo clocks in carved wood, so that tourists could, while breakfasting, contemplate at a depth of six thousand feet before them the wonderful valley of Grindel-wald on the left, that of Lauterbrunnen on the right, and opposite, within gunshot as it seemed, the immaculate, ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... Through the open windows, between the massive bunches of lilacs, hawthorn, and laburnum blossoms, Julien de Buxieres caught glimpses of rolling meadows and softly tinted vistas. The gentle twittering of the birds and the mysterious call of the cuckoo, mingled with the perfume of flowers, stole into his study, and produced a sense of enjoyment as novel to him as it was delightful. Having until the present time lived a sedentary life in cities, he had had no opportunity of experiencing this impression of nature ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... the lyric night is set to song! The cuckoo calls, the plaining whippoorwill Cries faint and far away; more distant still The hoopoe, hid his marshy haunts among, Wails with the cry of some lost soul in pain; The nightingale engilds the pulsant dark With golden-throated ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... loathsome—the word implies that they are mutually loathsome—and that they are the veriest trash and refuse. He compares them to so many polecats, opossums, and crows, and finally likens them to the rain-crow (cuckoo; Coccygus), which is regarded with disfavor on account of its disagreeable note. He grows more bitter in his denunciations as he proceeds and finally disposes of the matter by saying that all the seven clans alike are uhisa[']'t[)i] and are covered with filth. Then follows another ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... the audience for a given time from certain of their fellow-men who were to come forward and pretend those parts. The lights—the orchestra lights—came up a clumsy machinery. The first ring, and the second ring, was now but a trick of the prompter's bell—which had been, like the note of the cuckoo, a phantom of a voice, no hand seen or guessed at which ministered to its warning. The actors were men and women painted. I thought the fault was in them; but it was in myself, and the alteration which those many centuries—of six short twelve-months—had wrought in me.—Perhaps ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... assumptions, viz., that some at least among migratory birds must possess, by inheritance alone, a very precise knowledge of the particular direction to be pursued. It is without question an astonishing fact that a young cuckoo should be prompted to leave its foster parents at a particular season of the year, and without any guide to show the course previously taken by its own parents, but this is a fact which must be met by any theory ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... infinitely-intermingled shadow and reflection which is the hope and the despair of the landscape-painter. Now, in this month of May, the shrubs that clung to the furrowed face of the white rock were freshly green, and the low plaint of the nightingale, and the jocund cry of the more distant cuckoo, broke the sameness of the great chorus of grasshoppers in the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... towers of Notre Dame. There were some colored prints of battles and shipwrecks wafered to the walls; a couple of flower-pots in the narrow space between the window-ledge and the coping outside; a dingy canary in a wire cage; a rival mechanical cuckoo in a Dutch clock in the corner; a little bed with striped hangings; a rush-bottomed prie-dieu chair in front of a plain black crucifix, over which drooped a faded branch of consecrated palm; and some few articles ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... the red-tiled floor shone in the half-light. I crossed a neat little kitchen, just as a cuckoo-clock was chiming five, and found myself on the threshold of a small room opening on a garden. Rose was sitting in ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... pleasant, honest fool poured out his heart even in the presence of Goneril herself, in many a bitter taunt and jest which cut to the quick, such as comparing the king to the hedgesparrow, who feeds the young of the cuckoo till they grow old enough, and then has its head bit off for its pains; and saying that an ass may know when the cart draws the horse (meaning that Lear's daughters, that ought to go behind, now ranked before their father); and that Lear was no longer Lear, but the shadow of ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... much an hour ago, and also that by some slip my poor knave slept not, as I had meant he should, but babbled of old things which have wellnigh turned his wits. He must not stay in this land, but back to England to feel the snow in his face, to hear the cuckoo and the lark, to serve you or Arden or Philip Sidney. What ancient news hath he ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... it not spring, when the cuckoo passes through the air, when the foam sparkles on the sea? The young ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... but I'm not sure how Joyeuse would take it. So I'll stroke you down verbally instead. I admired your attack on Sir Edward immensely, though of course I don't agree with a word of it. Your description of him building a hedge round the German cuckoo and hoping he was isolating it was rather sweet. Seriously though, I regard him as one of ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... visit, and had something else to show. It was a cuckoo; every ten-thousandth year it would appear to the hour and cry "Cuckoo!" The time would not be shown any longer—only the long, long course of time—which never comes to an end—eternity. The master looked at Anker bewildered. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... never weary of looking at the inscriptions on the great cliffs at the River of the Dog—the strange beauty of that name! It was like the place-names of native Ulster—Athbo, the Ford of Cows, Sraidcuacha, the Cuckoo's Lane—one name sounded to the other like tuning-forks. And the sweet strange harmony of it filled his heart, so that he could understand the irresistible charm of Lebanon—the high clear note like a bird's song. Here was the ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... species of retiring-room at one end of the hut, wherein the modest members of the mess might bathe and splash at ease. The remainder of the servants went out armed and returned with (1) a zinc bath, (2) a stove, (3) a cuckoo clock, (4) a large mirror, (5) a warming-pan. "Once let us make a home for ourselves," we said, "and our energies will be free to finish the War." We devoted every cunning worker in the battery to this great end. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... with the toughest of digestions would dare to include these prickly, strong-jawed, meatless insects in a bill of fare. Now and then I have found an ani, or black cuckoo, with a few in its stomach: but an ani can swallow a stinging-haired caterpillar and enjoy it. The most consistent feeder upon Attas is the giant marine toad. Two hundred Attas in a night is not an uncommon meal, the exact number being verifiable by a ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... but that I should play for both. What, are you beginning to remember now—is it coming back to you after a whole month? I am going to quicken your memory up presently, I can tell you; I have got a good deal to pay off, I'm thinking. I know what you are at; you want to play cuckoo, to turn 'Cousin Philip' out that 'Cousin George' may fill the nest. You know the old man's soft points, and you keep working him up against me. You think that you would like the old place when he's gone—ay, and I daresay that you will get it before ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... short too soon," said Gubblum. "My missis, she said to me last back end, 'Gubblum,' she said, 'dusta mind as it's allus summer when the cuckoo is in the garden?' 'That's what is is,' I said. 'Well,' she said, 'dusta not think it wad allus be summer if the cuckoo could allus be kept here?' 'Maybe so,' I says; 'but easier said nor done.' 'Shaf on you for a ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... (Bee-balm); Brake; Carnation (Bizarre Dianthus caryophyllus); Clover (Crimson Trifolium incarnatus); Columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris); Cowslip (Primula veris); Crowflower (Ragged Robin, Lychnis floscuculi); Cuckoo Buds (Butter cups, Ranunculus acris); Daisies (Bellis perennis); Eryngium M. (Sea Holly); Flax; Flower de luce (Iris Germanica, blue); Fumitory (Dicentra spectabilis; Bleeding Heart); Harebell (Campanula rotundifolia); ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... (Ranunculaceae) Common Meadow Buttercup, Tall Crowfoot or Cuckoo Flower; Tall Meadow Rue; Liver-leaf, Hepatica, Liverwort or Squirrel Cup; Wood Anemone or Wind Flower; Virgin's Bower, Virginia Clematis or Old Man's Beard; Marsh Marigold, Meadow-gowan or American Cowslip; Gold-thread or Canker-root; Wild Columbine; Black ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... represented, but rather the quiet scenes of domestic grief and joy. The peculiar relation of brother and sister, particularly among the Servians, often forms an interesting feature of the popular songs. To have no brother is a misfortune, almost a disgrace, and the cuckoo, the constant image of a mourning woman in Servian poetry, was, according to the legend, a sister who ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... I pass on to a speaker of a very very opposite personality—the well-proportioned, beauteous maiden with azure starry eyes, gilded hair, and teeth like the seeds of a pomegranate (oh, si sic omnes!), who vaunted, in the musical accents of a cuckoo, her right to work out her own life, independently of masculine companionship or assistance, and declared that the saccharine element of courtship and connubiality was but the exploded mask ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... woods and fields rival gardens even in the richness of colour. We have all seen meadows white with Narcissus, glowing with Buttercups, Cowslips, early purple Orchis, or Cuckoo Flowers; cornfields blazing with Poppies; woods carpeted with Bluebells, Anemones, Primroses, and Forget-me-nots; commons with the yellow Lady's Bedstraw, Harebells, and the sweet Thyme; marshy places with the yellow stars of the Bog Asphodel, the Sun-dew sparkling ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... laurel hedge. She had glimpses of unkempt grass paths and unclipped topiary work which had lost its original form. Among a tangle of weeds rose the heads of clumps of daffodils, stirred by a passing wind of spring. In the park beyond a cuckoo was calling. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... this season one may hear at intervals numerous bird voices during the night. The whip-poor-will was piping when I lay down, and I still heard one when I woke up after midnight. I heard the song sparrow and the kingbird also, like watchers calling the hour, and several times I heard the cuckoo. Indeed, I am convinced that our cuckoo is to a considerable extent a night bird, and that he moves about freely from tree to tree. His peculiar guttural note, now here, now there, may be heard almost any summer night, in any part of the country, and occasionally ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... suck their blood and so forth. A large number of suffrages in favour of maternal affection would be obtained, but most species of fish would repudiate it, while among the voices of birds would be heard the musical protest of the cuckoo. Though no agreement could be reached as to absolute morality, the essentials of Eugenics may be easily defined. All creatures would agree that it was better to be healthy than sick, vigorous than weak, well ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... pollards; dotted oaks of vast growth; here and there a weird hollow thorn-tree; patches of fern and gorse. Hoarse and loud cawed the rooks; and deep, deep as from the innermost core of the lovely woodlands came the mellow note of the cuckoo. A few moments more a wind of the road brought the house in sight. At its rear lay a piece of water, scarcely large enough to be styled a lake; too winding in its shaggy banks, its ends too concealed by tree and ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of this accidental experiment set me on trying my skill in the mechanical arts. Accordingly I took down and cleaned my landlady's cuckoo-clock, and in so doing, silenced that companion of the spring for ever and a day. I mounted a turning-lathe, and in attempting to use it, I very nearly cribbed off, with an inch-and-half former, one of the fingers which ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... in its trusting, foolish way, that it was going to bask out of doors for evermore. As he rode through Long-Ash Lane it was scarce recognizable as the track of his two winter journeys. No mistake could be made now, even with his eyes shut. The cuckoo's note was at its best, between April tentativeness and midsummer decrepitude, and the reptiles in the sun behaved as winningly as kittens on a hearth. Though afternoon, and about the same time as on the last ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... the streets of a low-roofed village, then followed a path bordered with wild mignonette and apple trees that wound up the side of a hill covered with vineyards. A couple of chattering magpies ran before us, an invisible cuckoo was heard between snatches of Italian melody warbled by the tenor sotto voce and the little ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... whence she had emerged. It was close at hand—a natural grotto, arched and apparently lofty. He resolved to explore it. Glancing at his watch he saw it was not yet one o'clock in the morning, yet the voice of the cuckoo called shrilly from the neighboring hills, and a circling group of swallows flitted around him, their lovely wings glistening like jewels in the warm light of the ever-wakeful sun. Going to the ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... flourishes in full vigour; and so long as there are cuckoos so long will there be fags. Many birds are imposed upon, one of the commonest victims being the hedge-sparrow. For days a sparrow has been watched while it fed a hungry complaining intruder. It used to fly on the cuckoo's back and then, standing on its head and leaning downwards, give it a caterpillar. The tit-bit having been greedily snatched and devoured, the cuckoo would peck fiercely at its tiny attendant—bidding it, as it were, ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... with sleep; secondly, a clerk, shining with fat, his dress, hair, and countenance expressive of restrained jollity, as he dreams voluptuous dreams of the cool drinks he means to absorb through a straw when the hour of deliverance shall sound from the frightful cuckoo clock, a relic of the French occupation, which ticks at the end of the room; thirdly, a creature whose position is difficult to determine—I think he must be employed in some registry; he is here as a mere manual laborer. This third person gives me the idea of being very much interested ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... The rain-crow or cuckoo (both species) is supposed by all hunters to foretell rain, when its "Kow, kow, kow" ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... When the cuckoo comes to the bare thorn, Sell your cow and buy your corn; But when she comes to the full bit, Sell your ...
— Rhymes Old and New • M.E.S. Wright
... master artists are all here; and the expectations excited by the robin and the song sparrow are fully justified. The thrushes have all come; and I sit down upon the first rock, with hands full of the pink azalea, to listen. With me the cuckoo does not arrive till June; and often the goldfinch, the kingbird, the scarlet tanager delay their coming till then. In the meadows the bobolink is in all his glory; in the high pastures the field sparrow sings ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... after a while he embarked again in the very same nut-shell of a boat that he had left Egypt in, passed right under the bows of the English vessels, and set foot once more in France. France acknowledged him; the sacred cuckoo flew from spire to spire; and all the people ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... steadily on, with its pitiless dropping out of seconds, minutes, and hours. The worst part of winter was over; the March gales had dried up the forests; April was tingeing the woods with its tender green; the song of the cuckoo was already heard in the tufted bowers, and the festival of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... ancient mystery—how is it that a man with such a face, and such insolence written all over him, can become a leader of other men and persuade them to hatch the eggs of treachery that he lays like a cuckoo in their nests? ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... aquaticum, mustard, sinapis, scurvy-grass cochlearia hortensis, horse-radish cochlearia armoracia, cuckoo-flower, cardamine, dog's-grass, dandelion, leontodon taraxacon, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... gum-trees, and the bombax very symmetrical. We saw no animals: here and there appeared the trail of a hyaena, the only larger carnivor that now haunts the mountains. The song of Mkuka Mpela, the wild pigeon, and Fungu, the cuckoo, were loud in the brake: the Abbe Proyart makes the male cuculus chant his coo, coo, coo; mounting one note above another with as much precision as a musician would sound his ut, re, mi: when he reached the third note, his mate takes ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the petals of the cuckoo-buds in the river-pastures; and untouched, we admire. But let old Falstaff, as he lies a' dying, "babble o' green fields," and all the long, long thoughts of youth steal over ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... bold push forward, and their feet would tread on their inheritance. But, as is so often the case, courage oozed out at the decisive moment, and cowardice, disguised as prudence, called for 'further information,'—that cuckoo-cry of the faint-hearted. There are three steps in this narrative: the despatch of the explorers, their expedition, and the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... and "sweet messenger of spring," the "cuckoo," imposed upon the poetic sensibilities of ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... the words here and there, but when he was singing it I saw the sun rise on the hill, not a slow grey, but suddenly in a smother of gold, and the hillside moved with deer. Birds whirred from the heather and the cuckoo ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... of bird and cloud, The grass shines windless, grey, and still, In dusky ruin the owl dreams on, The cuckoo echoes on the hill; Yet soft along Alulvan's walks ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... lazily on, Cabby dropping in a word of enlightenment here and there to the effect that this old tumble-down part of the ancient wall is the celebrated Arcade, which formed part of the wall of the King's Palace; and this queer old lane running up through the walls like a sewer is Cuckoo lane; and that is Bugle street, where in olden times the warden blew; and here are the remains of Canute's palace, with its elliptical and circular arches and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... day Buster Bumblebee arrived at Farmer Green's place just as the cuckoo clock in the kitchen was striking nine. And he knew at once that Jimmy Rabbit must have told him the truth about the raising bee, for the farmyard was crowded with wagons and carryalls and buggies and gigs. There ...
— The Tale of Buster Bumblebee • Arthur Scott Bailey
... him with sparkling eye as an old acquaintance: the cuckoo haunts him with sounds of early youth not to be expressed: a linnet's nest startles him with boyish delight: an old withered thorn is weighed down with a heap of recollections: a grey cloak, seen on some wild moor, torn by the wind, or drenched ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... woodlands are captured by blossoms, the hamlets grow fair, Broad meadows are beautiful, earth again bursts into life, And all stir the heart of the wanderer eager to journey, So he meditates going afar on the pathway of tides. The cuckoo, moreover, gives warning with sorrowful note, Summer's harbinger sings, and forebodes to the heart bitter sorrow. Now my spirit uneasily turns in the heart's narrow chamber, Now wanders forth over the tide, o'er the home of the whale, To the ends of the earth—and comes ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... discover beauties in nature? One can be so happy in a wood! What a charming thing to hear a leaf sing! I know few things more delightful than to watch the triumph of the month of May when the nightingale, the cuckoo, and the lark open the spring in our forests! And then, later, come those beautiful crystal days of autumn—days that are neither warm, nor yet are they really cold! And then the trees—how eloquent they ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... remained by her as a thing of permanent mirth. So it was hardly surprising, in face of the dominant direction of her thoughts to-night, that, when the Miss Minetts' name punctuated Theresa's discourse recurrent as a cuckoo-cry, remembrance of their merrily inglorious retirement from the region of Faircloth's Inn should present itself. Whereupon Damaris' serious mood was lightened as by ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... one which gives the unbeliever more opportunity to blaspheme. This ancestral house of a great rich race, which is kept up by the ministrations of a single aged female servant, stands in pure Cloud-Cuckoo Land. The absence of practical amenities in the Rosmer family might be set down to eccentricity, if all the other personages were not equally ill-provided. Rebecca, glorious heroine according to some admirers, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... Wayside Inn) sings exquisitely of the use and beauty and worth of birds. Shelley, in his "Skylark", describes in glowing verse "the unbodied joy" that "singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest". Wordsworth hears the blithe new comer, the Cuckoo, and rejoices ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... though thou, O scroll," he said, apostrophizing the letter, which lay on the table before his master, "dost speak with the tongue of the stranger? Hath not the cuckoo a harsh note, and yet she tells us of green buds and springing flowers? What if thy language be that of the stoled priest, is it not the same which binds hearts and hands together at the altar? And what though thou ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... poets, fare the worst: For they're a sort of fools which fortune makes, And, after she has made 'em fools, forsakes. With Nature's oafs 'tis quite a diff'rent case, For Fortune favours all her idiot race. In her own nest the cuckoo eggs we find, O'er which she broods to hatch the changeling kind: No portion for her own she has to spare, So much she dotes on ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... running on in so smart and fluent a manner, the Praenestine [king] directs some witticisms squeezed from the vineyard, himself a hardy vine-dresser, never defeated, to whom the passenger had often been obliged to yield, bawling cuckoo ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... mother slept, but the little son was not asleep. I saw the flowered cotton curtains of the bed move, and the child peep forth. At first I thought he was looking at the great clock, which was gaily painted in red and green. At the top sat a cuckoo, below hung the heavy leaden weights, and the pendulum with the polished disc of metal went to and fro, and said 'tick, tick.' But no, he was not looking at the clock, but at his mother's spinning wheel, that ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... myself love all these things, yet so as with a difference:—for example, some animals better than others, some men rather than other men; the nightingale before the cuckoo, the swift and graceful palfrey before the slow and asinine mule. Your humor goes to confound all qualities. What sports do ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... no true claim to be a Christian Church at all," said the general; "it is like the cuckoo, which, hatched in the nest of the hedge-warbler, by degrees forces out the other fledglings, and usurps their place. So did paganism treat Christianity; although, fostered by God, the latter was enabled to exist, persecuted ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... well cultivated, and produces much grain. The whole appearance of Lahuri Nepal, and its vegetable productions, strongly resemble those of the wilder parts of Britain; and, during my stay, I was entertained with the note of an old acquaintance, the cuckoo. The air of the higher part of the valley where we encamped is much cooler than that of Kathmandu, and was so sharp to our relaxed habits, that our winter clothing became comfortable, although Chitlong is situated nearly in twenty-seven ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... ere they repair last year's villages, and join excitedly in the chorus; while the great osprey wheels overhead, and the grey falcon sits on a bare branch, still as a sentinel, each waiting for an opportunity to take toll of the nutmeg pigeons. The channel-billed cuckoo shrieks her discordant warning of the approaching wet season; and the scrub fowl utters those far-off imitations of the exclamation of civilised hens. Sundown at Kumboola towards the end of September, when the sea laps and murmurs among the rocks, and great ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... due, Pluck me next an old Cuckoo; Emblem of the happy fates Of easy, kind, cornuted mates. Pluck him well—be sure you do— Who wouldn't be an old Cuckoo, Thus to have his plumage blest, Beaming ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... all well. I have no home—I'm one of the cuckoo tribe that has no resting-place of its own, and only now and then slips into the swallow's nest. For the short time I have to live, I shall have no trouble in finding quarters wherever I go. I can now climb up into a tree again, and look down upon the world in which I have no longer any ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... my pet aversion had been the cuckoo clock; now here I was, at last, right in the creature's home; so wherever I went that distressing "HOO'hoo! HOO'hoo! HOO'hoo!" was always in my ears. For a nervous man, this was a fine state of things. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ongoings of the seasons in and around Hampshire Selborne, watched the colonies of the rooks in the tall elms, looked after the swallows in the cottage and rectory eaves, played the affectionate spy on the private lives of chaffinch and hedge-sparrow, was eaves-dropper to the solitary cuckoo; so here I keep eye and ear open; take note of man, woman, and child; find many a pregnant text imbedded in the commonplace of village life; and, out of what I see and hear, weave in my own room my essays as solitary as the spider weaves ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... a bird, and that bird is the cuckoo, that seems to think it unnecessary to build its own nest, and so it occupies any nest that it happens ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... Asked to describe the cuckoo the other day, a small boy said it was the bird which put its eggs out to be laid by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... linnet; but we shall never reclaim the guinea-fowl, or accustom the swallow to a cage. Teach the Gipsy to read, or even to write; he remains a Gipsy still. His love of wandering is as keen as is the instinct of a migratory bird for its annual passage; and exactly as the prisoned cuckoo of the first year will beat itself to death against its bars when September draws near, so the Gipsy, even when most prosperous, will never so far forsake the traditions of his tribe as to stay long in any one ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... butterfly moon! Where the heavy-lidded Buddhas dream To the sound of the cuckoo's call.... The white wings of moon-butterflies Flicker down the streets of the city, Blushing into darkness the useless wicks of round lanterns ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... been so popular as, in my humble judgment, he deserves to be, but of course modern readers were better acquainted with him than with Godwin. Yet nine out of ten were always heard repeating this cuckoo cry about the latter's superiority, until the 'Iron Chest' came out, and Fashion induced them to read Godwin for themselves; which has very properly changed ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... and impulsive yet very earnest words, appealing to him in strenuous argument and persuasion. Each time he almost knew what they said, and strained after their meaning with a passionate desire, and then there would come a kind of cuckoo call, and everything would swing dancing off again into a ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... each turn of the mother's discourse. While Luigi is striving to make plain to her the "grounds for killing," he thinks to hear the cuckoo, and forgets all his array of facts; for April and June are coming! The mother seizes at once on this, and joins to it a still more powerful persuasion. In June, not only summer's loveliness, but Chiara, the girl he is to marry, is coming: she who ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... the trees was a beautiful cuckoo, of a chesnut brown, variegated with black, which was shot. But upon the shore were some egg-birds; a small sort of curlew; blue and white herons; and a great number of noddies; which last, at this time, laid their eggs a little farther up on the ground, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... the reference to the poet's old age "which dulleth him in his spirit," in the "Complaint of Venus," generally ascribed to the last decennium of Chaucer's life. If we reject the evidence of a further passage, in the "Cuckoo and the Nightingale," a poem of disputed genuineness, we accordingly arrive at the conclusion that there is no reason for demurring to the only direct external evidence in existence as to the date of Chaucer's birth. At a famous trial of a cause of chivalry held at Westminster ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... Seek for sweet surprise In the young children's eyes. But I have learnt the years, and know the yet Leaf-folded violet. Mine ear, awake to silence, can foretell The cuckoo's fitful bell. I wander in a grey time that encloses June and the wild hedge-roses. A year's procession of the flowers doth pass My feet, along the grass. And all you sweet birds silent yet, I know ...
— Poems • Alice Meynell
... were beautiful with all manner of comforts and luxuries. Low divans of rich and soft material, ottomans and rugs of Persian and Turkish wool, statues and statuettes of marble, graceful forms, filled the corners and the niches. Birds of many colors sang in golden cages, and curious cuckoo-clocks chimed the hours. Laura's mamma was a fine musician, and her harp and piano were always ready to yield sweet tones. The library shelves held books of all kinds and colors; and the cabinets of richly carved wood, before the glass doors of which Laura ...
— The Princess Idleways - A Fairy Story • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... weedy earth a rivulet break And purl along the untrodden wilderness; There the shy cuckoo comes his thirst to slake, There the shrill jay alights his plumes to dress; And there the stealthy fox, when morn is gray, Laps the clear stream ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... for our music than musicians may be willing to allow; but it is no more than justice to a despised bird to say, that from it we have derived the minor scale, whose origin has puzzled so many; the cuckoo's couplet being the minor third sung ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... lambastono. Cry (call out) krii. Cry (weep) plori. Cry out ekkrii. Cry (of animals, etc.) bleki. Crypt subterajxo. Crystal kristalo. Crystallise kristaligi. Cub (of lion) leonido. Cube kubo. Cuckoo kukolo. Cucumber kukumo. Cudgel bastonego. Cuff manumo. Cuirass kiraso. Cull kolekti. Cullender kribrilo. Culpable kulpa. Culprit kulpulo. Cultivate kulturi. Culture kulturo. Cunning ruzo. Cunning ruza. Cup taso. Cupboard sxranko. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... was by now within arm's-length of the green gate. He looked with pleasure at the six virgins fluttering in their green gowns, and peeping bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked under their green bonnets. Beyond them he saw the forbidden orchard, with cuckoo-flower and primrose, daffodil and celandine, silver windflower and sweet violets blue and white, spangling the gay grass. The twisted apple-trees were ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... brook, which had now swelled almost to a stream. A more romantic situation I had never witnessed. It was surrounded and almost overhung by huge mountains, and embowered in trees of various kinds; waters sounded, nightingales sang, and the cuckoo's full note boomed from the distant branches, but the village was miserable. The huts were built of slate-stones, of which the neighbouring hills seemed to be principally composed, and roofed with the same, but not in the neat tidy manner of English houses, for the slates were of all sizes, ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... Rhodope forests, the wild pheasant in the Tunja valley, the bustard (Otis tarda) in the Eastern Rumelian plain. Among the migratory birds are the crane, which hibernates in the Maritza valley, woodcock, snipe and quail; the great spotted cuckoo (Coccystes glandarius) is an occasional visitant. The red starling (Pastor roseus) sometimes appears in large flights. The stork, which is never molested, adds a picturesque feature to the Bulgarian village. Of fresh-water fish, the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... eyebrows like a bow, her nose like a parrot's, her teeth like a string of pearls, her lips like the red gourds, her neck like a pigeon's, her waist like a leopard's, her hands and feet like a soft lotus, her face like the moon, with the gait of a goose, and the voice of a cuckoo!" ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... new habitation. A few minutes active climbing brought us among the heath, formming a thick elastic carpet under our feet, on which we were glad to seat ourselves for a moment's rest. We heard the cuckoo upon every side, and when we rose to pursue our walk we frequently startled the moor-fowl, singly or in flocks. The time allowed by the game laws for shooting them had not yet arrived, but in the mean time they had been unmercifully hunted by the hawks, for we often found the remains of such as ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... Yes, so long As Spring revives the year, And hails us with the cuckoo's song, To show that she is here; So long as May of April takes, In smiles and tears, farewell, And windflowers dapple all the brakes, And primroses the dell; While children in the woodlands yet Adorn their little laps With ladysmock and violet, And daisy-chain their caps; While over ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... brain when she in early childhood roamed those dark, solemn woods, or sat at night on the lowly cottage stile, gazing on the wild, grotesque shadows cast by the moonbeams from the huge, forest trees; or how she listened to the solemn hootings of the lonesome owl, the monotonous cuckoo, and sudden whippoorwill; or laughed at the glowworm's light in the dark swamps, and asked her aunty if they were not a group of stars come down to play bo-peep in ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... her the cuckoo," said Mary Acton. "Do you remember the young one we found last spring, sprawling all over the nest, and opening its huge, ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... memories. I cried afresh to think I should never go again to the corner where I always found the earliest violets; and then I cried to think that the nightingale would soon be back, and how that very morning, when I opened my window, I had heard the cuckoo, and could tell that he was calling ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... 'Oho! That is how it stands? So she is to be cuckoo, hey?' He sat square and intent for a moment or two, working his mouth like a man who chews a straw. Then he slapped his big hand on his knee, and rose up. 'If I cannot spike this wheel of vice, trust me never. ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... all the other trees, and could be seen far out at sea, so that it served as a landmark to the sailors. It had no idea how many eyes looked eagerly for it. In its topmost branches the wood-pigeon built her nest, and the cuckoo carried out his usual vocal performances, and his well-known notes echoed amid the boughs; and in autumn, when the leaves looked like beaten copper plates, the birds of passage would come and rest upon the branches before taking their flight across the sea. But now it was winter, the ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... a cuckoo-clock in the next room, and I felt that my visit, fascinating as my angel was, must come to an end. I left her still standing on the veranda in her white brocade, and as I walked off she made ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... the grain is grown: I share my kopecks with the village priest, Who winnows peccadillos by the sheaf." Then Zanthon, laughing in his foxy beard: "When Amine meets me in the plane-tree walk (Where pairing little finches seek to build, We saw the cuckoo thieve their nests when boys), Shall I then tell her, in my peasant way, Your broken promise, and her troth denied?" And he was gone—gone, with the stud he bought From Schamyl's son, up by Caucasus way, Leaving me solitude ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... brief mis-understanding, during which they come near tearing the two human envoys to pieces, they listen to the exposition of the latters' plan. This is nothing less than the building of a new city, to be called Nephelococcygia, or 'Cloud-cuckoo-town,' between earth and heaven, to be garrisoned and guarded by the birds in such a way as to intercept all communication of the gods with their worshippers on earth. All steam of sacrifice will be prevented from rising to Olympus, and the Immortals will very soon be starved ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... Dumbarton Bridge its giant-shadow, clad in air and sunshine, appeared in view. We had a pleasant day's walk. We passed Smollett's monument on the road (somehow these poets touch one in reflection more than most military heroes)—talked of old times; you repeated Logan's beautiful verses to the cuckoo,* which I wanted to compare with Wordsworth's, but my courage failed me; you then told me some passages of an early attachment which was suddenly broken off; we considered together which was the most to be pitied, a disappointment in love where ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... the lute, viol, and other instruments, every day." Whether it was that she had no ear for music, she herself never became harmonious as the instrument she touched. All these ladies may be considered as rather too alert in thought, and too spirited in action; but a tame cuckoo bird who is always repeating the same note must be very fatiguing. The lady of Samuel Clarke, the great compiler of books in 1680, whose name was anagrammatised to "suck all cream," alluding to his indefatigable labours in sucking all the cream of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... proposed Chamber of Deputies, which was not to make laws affecting education, religious corporations, the registration of births and marriages; or to confer civil rights on non-catholics, or to touch the privileges and immunities of the clergy, might have suited Cloud-cuckoo-town, but would not suit the solid earth, were facts easy to recognise, but no one had time to pause and consider. It was sufficient to hear Pius proclaim that in the wind which was uprooting oaks and cedars might be clearly distinguished ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... to taunt me with his happier lot. Oh, how I envied him! No lessons, no tasks, no hateful school; nothing but holiday, frolic, green fields, and fine weather. Had I been then more versed in poetry, I might have addressed him in the words of Logan to the cuckoo: ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... of Ash, to propagate Balsams Bee, remedy for sting of Botanical names Butter, rancid Calendar, Horticultural Calendar, Agricultural Carts, Cumberland Cattle, to feed Clover crops College, agricultural Cropping, table of Cuckoo, note of Diseases of plants Drainage reports Evergreens, to transplant, by Mr. Glendinning Farming in Norfolk, high Farming, Mr. Mechi's, by Mr. Wilkins Farming, rule of thumb, by Mr. Wilkins Fruit trees, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... and see if we cannot gather a pretty handful of wild flowers for May to take home to mamma. Here are a few cowslips with their drooping golden bells and delicious scent; I am afraid we shall not find enough to make a cowslip ball. Here is cuckoo-flower, which, as old Gerarde says, "doth flower in April and Maie, when the cuckoo doth begin her pleasant notes without stammering." Old Gerarde, by the way, ought to have said "his pleasant notes," for it is the male bird alone that cries "cuckoo." Its flowers ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... Lakenfelders, pullet. Third prize Lakenfelders, pullet. Fifth prize Lakenfelders, breeding pen. First prize Lakenfelders, breeding pen. Second prize Lakenfelders, breeding pen. Third prize Lakenfelders, breeding pen. Fourth prize Campines, pullet. First prize Campines, breeding pen. First prize Cuckoo Cochins, cock. First prize Cuckoo Cochins, cockerel. First prize Cuckoo Cochins, hen. First prize Cuckoo Cochins, pullet. First prize Rose Comb Blues, cock. First prize Rose Comb Blues, cockerel. First prize Rose Comb Blues, hen. ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... towards the place where the cuckoo has been singing, nought remains but the moon in ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... excise officials. But the folk-lore origin of "Moonraker" is said by the Rev. J.E. Field to belong to a very early period, probably before the day of the Saxon and to be contemporaneous with the "Cuckoo Penners" of Somerset, who captured a young cuckoo and built a high hedge round it; there they fed it until its wings had grown, when it quietly flew away, much to the astonished chagrin of the yokels. This is a widespread legend and belongs to other parts ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... the nurslings that linger there, 65 Over that islet paved with flowers and moss, While the musk-rose leaves, like flakes of crimson snow, Showered on us, and the dove mourned in the pine, Sad prophetess of sorrows not her own? The crane returned to her unfrozen haunt, 70 And the false cuckoo bade the spray good morn; And on a wintry bough the widowed bird, Hid in the deepest night of ivy-leaves, Renewed the vigils of a sleepless sorrow. I, left like her, and leaving one like her, 75 Alike abandoned and abandoning (Oh! unlike ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... County, take his cavalry, dash to Charlottesville, break up the assembly then meeting there, and capture Jefferson. By hard riding on the nights of June 3 and 4 Tarleton nearly made it to Charlottesville undetected. But he stopped at Cuckoo Tavern in Louisa County, where he was spotted by militia Captain John Jouett, Jr. Guessing Tarleton's mission, Jack Jouett rode madly through the night over the back roads he knew well, and beat Tarleton's men to town. At Jouett's warning most of the legislators fled over ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... the sweet breath of spring played amidst its branches. The young cataracts, as they danced down the ravine, laughed to the budding flowers. Anon were heard the dreamy voices of summer with its myriad insects, the gentle pattering of rain, the wail of the cuckoo. Hark! a tiger roars,—the valley answers again. It is autumn; in the desert night, sharp like a sword gleams the moon upon the frosted grass. Now winter reigns, and through the snow-filled air swirl flocks of swans and rattling hailstones ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... cherry-trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume, The cherry-trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near to London!) And there they say, when dawn is high and all the world's a blaze of sky The cuckoo, though he's very shy, will sing a ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... rears the cuckoo's spurious offspring, tending with care the ultimate destroyer of its own young, does so in perfect ignorance of the results about to follow the misplaced affection. The cravings of the interloper are satisfied to the detriment of its own offspring; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... begin bellowing again in infernal concert. So there accumulates at breakfast in these spring days all that evidence which makes one proud to share with one's fellows the divine gift of reason, instead of a blind and miserable animal instinct. No wonder the cuckoo has a merry note! ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... remembrances of the fresh beauty of spring days, on which—sheltered by the light copse-wood from winds that are still keen—we have revelled in sunshine warm enough to persuade us that summer was come "for good," as we picked violets and primroses to the tolling of the cuckoo. ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... power. The sun of England is set for ever if the Catholics exercise political power. Give the Catholics everything else; but keep political power from them. These wise men did not see that, when everything else had been given, political power had been given. They continued to repeat their cuckoo song, when it was no longer a question whether Catholics should have political power or not, when a Catholic association bearded the Parliament, when a Catholic agitator exercised infinitely more authority than the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... during three seasons was perfectly black, but then annually became more and more red; and it deserves notice that this tendency to change, whenever it occurs in a bantam, "is almost certain to prove hereditary."[90] The cuckoo or blue-mottled Dorking cock, when old, is liable to acquire yellow or orange hackles in place of his proper bluish-grey hackles.[91] Now, as Gallus bankiva is coloured red and orange, and as Dorking fowls and both kinds of bantams are descended from this species, we ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... leaning over it, fresh green meadows lie reposing in the settled meaning of the summer day. For this is a safer time of year than the flourish of the spring-tide, when the impulse of young warmth awaking was suddenly smitten by the bleak east wind, and cowslip and cuckoo-flower and speedwell got their bright lips browned with cold. Then, moreover, must the meads have felt the worry of scarcely knowing yet what would be demanded of them; whether to carry an exacting load of hay, or only to feed a few ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... a gallantry that she resented it. If he had seemed to ask for the alms of a smile, she would have insulted him. Yet it was not altogether satisfactory to be denied the privilege. She fumed. Everything was wrong. She sat in her cuckoo's nest and glared ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... And thus, though an echo actually increases the quantity of sound heard, its repetition of the notes or syllables of sound, gives an idea of calmness attainable in no other way; hence the feeling of calm given to a landscape by the notes of the cuckoo. Understanding this, observe the anxious doubling of every object by a visible echo or shadow throughout this picture. The grandest feature of it is the steep distant cliff; and therefore the dualism is more marked ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... aid of a ram, or the Zeus who, in the shape of a swan, became the father of Castor and Pollux, or the Zeus who deceived Hera by means of a feigned marriage with an inanimate object, or the Zeus who was afraid of Attes, or the Zeus who made love to women in the shape of an ant or a cuckoo, is a being whose myth is felt to be unnatural and bewildering.(3) It is this IRRATIONAL and unnatural element, as Mr. Max Muller says, "the silly, senseless, and savage element," that makes mythology the puzzle which men have so long found it. For, observe, Greek myth does ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... philosophical Ranke, "not to pray, but to contemplate the Belvidere Apollo. They disgraced the most solemn festivals by open profanations. The clergy, in their services, sought the means of exciting laughter. One would mock the cuckoo, and another recite indecent stories about St. Peter." Luther, when he visited Italy, was extremely shocked at the infidel spirit which prevailed among the clergy, who were hostile to the circulation ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... birds, with their feathers barred across like those of a hawk or cuckoo, with lines of a darker green, started up from some grass and flew off, their long, pointed tails and rounded heads and beaks showing ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... just a line to say I am well and happy. I am here in my dear forest all day in the open air. It is very be—no, not beautiful exactly, just now, but very bright and living. There are one or two song birds and a cuckoo; all the fruit-trees are in flower, and the beeches make sunshine in a shady place. I begin to go all right; you need not be vexed about my health; I really was ill at first, as bad as I have been for nearly a year; but the forest begins to work, and the air, and the sun, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... slopes to a wheat-field that is like a wall of gold. Here I lie and laze away the time, or dip into a favorite book, Stevenson's Letters or Belloc's Path to Rome. Bees drone in the wild thyme; a cuckoo keeps calling, a lark spills jeweled melody. Then there is a seeming silence, but it is the ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... beautiful, after the Hindoo type;—that is, she should have the complexion of chocolate and cream; "her face should be as the full moon, her nose smooth as a flute; she should have eyes like unto lotuses, and a neck like a pigeon's; her voice should be soft as the cuckoo's, and her step as the gait of a young elephant of pure ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... familiar room. For the house had belonged to a brother millionaire; it had changed hands with certain shares of "Water Front,"—as some of Rushbrook's dealings had the true barbaric absence of money detail,—and was elegantly and tastefully furnished. The cuckoo had, however, already laid a few characteristic eggs in this adopted nest, and a white marble statue of a nude and ill-fed Virtue, sent over by Rushbrook's Paris agent, and unpacked that morning, stood in one corner, and ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... flowed up and out and round about, dancing like the brimstone butterflies out of reach before he could seize them, calling with voices like the cuckoos, themselves all the time just out of sight. Who ever saw a cuckoo when it's talking? Who ever foretold the instant when a butterfly would shoot upwards and away? Such darting, fragile thoughts they were, like hints, suggestions. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... expectations excited by the Robin and the Song-Sparrow are fully justified. The Thrushes have all come; and I sit down upon the first rock, with hands full of the pink Azalea, to listen. With me, the Cuckoo does not arrive till June; and often the Goldfinch, the King-Bird, the Scarlet Tanager delay their coming till then. In the meadows the Bobolink is in all his glory; in the high pastures the Field-Sparrow sings his breezy vesper-hymn; and the woods are unfolding ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... "You silly cuckoo, d'you mean to say you don't know she's gone on you? Lot of pains she takes to hide it. You've only got to ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... trees are answering your prayer In cooing cuckoo-song, Bidding Shakuntala farewell, Their ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... the sudden scream of a startled jay. Doves went happily from tree to tree and I never put my gun up. I had heard a very familiar sound, and wanted to be assured that my ears were not deceived. No, I was right; I could hear the cuckoo, calling through the depth of the forest, as though it were my favourite Essex copse at home. It was pleasant, indeed, to hear the homely notes so far from any other object, even remotely, ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... already a sweetheart," said he; "then the corn which is within it will be turned to flour; but if thou art still only a young cuckoo, then ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... or five emphatic notes for a finish. "Now, if you listen, you'll hear the next wren answer him!" said Father Payne. In a moment the same little song came like an echo from a bush a few yards away. "The wren sings in stricter time than any bird but the cuckoo," said Father Payne—"four quavers to a bar. That's very important! Those two ridiculous creatures will go on doing that half the morning. They are so excited that they build sham nests, you know, about now—quite useless piles of twigs and moss, not intended for eggs, just to show what they can ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... rather more real than himself. The picture is better, perhaps, than the bricks were, yet it is not enlivening. The only other objects in the room worth mentioning are, a particularly small book-shelf in a corner; a cuckoo-clock on the mantel-shelf, an engraved portrait of Queen Victoria on the wall opposite in a gilt frame, and a portrait of Sir Robert Peel in a frame of rosewood ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... unable to sleep for cold, though I was heaped with coverings, while my skin was all puckered with gooseflesh. I could eat nothing solid, without suffering immediately from violent hiccough, so that much of my time was spent lying prone on my back upon the hearthrug, awakening the echoes like a cuckoo. Miss Marks, therefore, cut off all food but milk-sop, a loathly bowl of which appeared at every meal. In consequence the hiccough lessened, but my strength declined with it. I languished in a perpetual catarrh. I was roused to ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... out I noticed among the groups of girls who smiled at our fellowship—old Mourteen says we are like the cuckoo with its pipit—a beautiful oval face with the singularly spiritual expression that is so marked in one type of the West Ireland women. Later in the day, as the old man talked continually of the fairies and the women they have taken, it seemed ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... Skelt itself has always seemed a part and parcel of the charm of his productions. It may be different with the rose, but the attraction of this paper drama sensibly declined when Webb had crept into the rubric: a poor cuckoo, flaunting in Skelt's nest. And now we have reached Pollock, sounding deeper gulfs. Indeed, this name of Skelt appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt it boldly to design these qualities. Skeltery, then, is a quality of much art. It is even to be found, with reverence be it ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dead. When the squirrels left the forests in the west and journeyed out upon the open prairies, they began to burrow in the ground. Finally, for want of use, they lost all power of climbing. Among the birds the lazy cuckoo began by stealing the nest another bird had built. But it paid a grievous price for its theft, for now when the cuckoo is confined by man and wants a nest of its own it toils aimlessly, and has lost all power to make for itself ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... surprised,' he said, 'when I tell them that within a few minutes' walk of Baker Street Station, and the incessant din of Marylebone Road, such birds as the cuckoo, flycatcher, robin and wren ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... is the year's pleasant king; Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring, Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing, Cuckoo, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... children greedily whenever they could catch them. Such a terror were they that the tribes had to protect their village with high walls, [Footnote: Can this have anything to do with the idea of walling-in the cuckoo?] and then they slept securely, for the Roh hunted by night. This old chieftain determined to watch the birds, and find out their nesting-places; so he had a series of towers built, in which the watchmen could sleep ...
— Welsh Fairy-Tales And Other Stories • Edited by P. H. Emerson
... enter the race of University-founding, but worked on the plan of the cuckoo, by laying its eggs in the nests of others. For two centuries, Scotchmen were almost shut out of England; and so could not make for themselves a career in Oxford and Cambridge, as in later times. They had, however, at home, good grammar ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... gates of dawn Still seems to circle, and the mossy lawn, As they glide gently onward, ever breathes A beauty and a fragrance, which enwreathes Within the being until every thought With a strange mystery of joy is fraught. And where the hazel forms a leafy screen Of verdant matting, the cuckoo, unseen, Chaunts forth her woodnotes through the stilly air, Whose silent motions far the accents bear. And thou hast come, sweet Nightingale! once more O'er our entranced spirits to outpour Thy liquid warblings! ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels |
