"Albatross" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... detailed exploring work. In it, a trifle on the water, he completed a voyage which never lost its charm to him, notwithstanding the rude hardships. He wished to make all kind of inquiries into natural history, and when the weather fell calm he would go off in a boat and shoot sea birds. Not the airy albatross, perhaps, for in it he realised the melody of motion, and it was not rare to naturalists. To shoot, from ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... science; for Wordsworth's knowledge is a mystic insight wholly estranged from erudition; his celandine, his White Doe, belong to no fauna or flora. When Leconte de Lisle, on the other hand, paints the albatross of the southern sea or the condor of the Andes, the eye of a passionate explorer and observer has gone to the making of their exotic sublimity. The strange regions of humanity, too, newly disclosed by comparative religion ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... wire, and the portions of the German 'plane, which amid smoke were fluttering to earth. A rush, as always, commenced towards the scene. The aeroplane, brought down from a height, was half embedded in the mud. It was an Albatross, painted all colours, and possessed two machine-guns and several sorts of ammunition for use against balloons. I could see nothing of its former occupant, who must have been removed for burial, except a pool of bright blood ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... who lent a regrettably Pagan element to the assembly. But Lady ASTOR as CORNELIA, mother of the GRACCHI, was an austere and dignified figure in her panniered Botticelli stola, with pearl-embroidered red wings, and a flabellum (or fan) of albatross feathers with gold bells attached. The grandeur that was Rome, again, was revived in Mr. JOHN, who assumed the role of his namesake, AUGUSTUS, and in Mr. BOTTOMLEY, who as HORATIUS FLACCUS imparted a Sabine simplicity to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... Cartridge paper of various pale tints is best, as one can choose the ground that will best set off the colors of the feathers. Every other page may be white, and about three black sheets will be useful for swan, albatross and ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... know it, and wheeling albatross, Where the lone wave fills with fire beneath the Southern Cross. What is the Flag of England? Ye have but my reefs to dare, Ye have but my seas to furrow. Go forth, for ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... order to get better winds. What a dreary outlook it was! Nothing but sky and water with waves which were mountains high. The only bit of life outside of our ship's company was a number of birds of a different nature from any I had ever seen and they followed the ship day after day. Cape pigeons and albatross were in large numbers. We caught many of the latter and measured them. I remember one weighing thirty pounds and measuring fifteen feet from tip to tip of the wings. Cape hens about as large as good sized turkeys, ...
— Cape Cod and All the Pilgrim Land, June 1922, Volume 6, Number 4 • Various
... on the sea's azure floor,— No keel has ever ploughed that path before; The halcyons{1} brood around the foamless isles; The treacherous ocean has forsworn its wiles; The merry mariners are bold and free: Say, my heart's sister, wilt thou sail with me? Our bark is as an albatross whose nest Is a far Eden of the purple east; And we between her wings will sit, while Night And Day and Storm and Calm pursue their flight, Our ministers, along the boundless sea, Treading each other's heels, unheededly. It is an isle under Ionian{2} skies, Beautiful ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... strangely restless as they neared their goal. He had come thousands of miles and had seen nothing fresh with the exception of a few flying-fish, an albatross, and a whale blowing in the distance. Pacing the deck late one night with Captain Brisket he expressed mild ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... MARINER, A., traveler, albatross raiser. Gathered fame by making a voyage with some dead ones. His feat has frequently been duplicated on liners out of ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... you see it. Suffice it that a petrel wheeled somewhere between deepening carmine and paling blue, and it took my thoughts off at an earthy tangent. I thanked God there were no big sea-birds in these latitudes; no molly-hawks, no albatrosses, no Cape-hens. I thought of an albatross that I had caught going out. Its beak and talons were at the bottom with the charred remains of the Lady Jermyn. But I could see them still, could feel them shrewdly in my mind's flesh; and so to the old superstition, ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... lateen spread both her great wings like an albatross, and leaped and plunged, and flew before ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... the leafy tree, The bird in the cloudy sky, The fish in the wavy sea, The stag on the mountain high, The albatross asleep On the waves of the rocking deep, The bee on its light wing, borne Over the bending corn,— What is the thought in the breast Of the little bird at rest? What is the thought in the songs Which the lark in ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... weather—some beautiful, some very rough, but always contrary winds—and got within 200 miles of the coast of South America. We now have a milder breeze from the SOFT N.E., after a BITTER S.W., with Cape pigeons and mollymawks (a small albatross), not to compare with our gulls. We had private theatricals last night—ill acted, but beautifully got up as far as the sailors were concerned. I did not act, as I did not feel well enough, but I ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... ALBATROSS, the largest and strongest of sea-birds, that ranges over the southern seas, often seen far from land; it is a superstition among sailors that it is disastrous ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... character of the day. With a rush like a sudden thought the white-barred eave-swallows came down the arid road and rose again into the air as easily as a man dives into the water. Dark specks beneath the white summer clouds, the swifts, the black albatross of our skies, moved on their unwearied wings. Like the albatross that floats over the ocean and sleeps on the wing, the swift's scimitar-like pinions are careless of repose. Once now and then they came down to earth, not, as might be supposed, to the mansion or the ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... also shot an albatross or man-of-war bird, so called from its manner of skimming through the air after other birds, which the seamen compare to sailing. It measured seven feet from pinion to pinion. On the fifth week of our separation from the fleet we made ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... treacherous owner of the ill-fated "Albatross," for Captain Deering, it should be borne in mind, was ignorant of the ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... reedy brink Down winding to the Green Sea beach. Around its base the bare rocks stood Like naked giants, in the flood As if to guard the Gulf across; While on its peak that braved the sky A ruined Temple towered so high That oft the sleeping albatross[225] Struck the wild ruins with her wing, And from her cloud-rockt slumbering Started—to find man's dwelling there In her own silent fields of air! Beneath, terrific caverns gave Dark welcome to each stormy wave That dasht like midnight revellers ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... July, in the evening, the sailors saw innumerable birds going from the south-west to the north-east, which flight of birds was a sign that land was not far off. For several successive days birds were seen, and an albatross perched upon the admiral's vessel. Still the fleet went on without seeing land, and, as it was in want of fresh water, the admiral was thinking of changing his course, and, indeed, on Thursday, the 31st of July, ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... books on Antarctic exploration, a copy of Browning and one of "The Ancient Mariner." On reading the latter, we sympathized with him and wondered what he had done with the albatross; it would have made a very welcome addition to ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... to sunset the gloom quickly deepened. The sun sank early into banks of leaden clouds, and the Karluk slid on through the seething seas in a scene of strange loneliness, save for the suspended albatross that never varied its position by an inch or by ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... how to skirt the wrecks lying a hundred fathoms below water and dart like a rifle bullet in at one porthole and out at another as the fishes ran; how to dance on the top of the waves when the lightning was racing all over the sky, and wave his flipper politely to the stumpy-tailed Albatross and the Man-of-war Hawk as they went down the wind; how to jump three or four feet clear of the water like a dolphin, flippers close to the side and tail curved; to leave the flying fish alone because they are all bony; to take the shoulder-piece out of a cod at full ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... for his servant, had the fire replenished, opened his desk and began to write letters. First he resigned the presidency of the Hasheesh Club. Next he begged that Mrs. Rear-Admiral Albatross would excuse him from her Christmas dinner. Unforeseen circumstances, and the death of an intimate friend, were his apologies. Then he sent his regrets, and declined all the invitations to holiday parties. He canceled his engagements to make New-Year's calls[4] ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... that lead to the killing of the albatross; those that lead from the killing of the albatross to the blessing of the water snakes; and those that lead from this ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... heard his voice: It is the Hermit good! He singeth loud his godly hymns That he makes in the wood. He'll shrieve my soul, he'll wash away The Albatross's blood. ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... speed through the air, took flying leaps over outlying spurs of mountain ranges that lay in their path, swooped down into valleys, and flew over level plains fifty yards from the ground, like an albatross over the surface of a smooth tropic sea. Then he soared up from the earth again, until the horizon widened out to vast extent, and they could see the mighty buttresses of "the Roof of the World" stretching out below them in an endless succession ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... employed. Vultures are very greedy and ravenous; they will often eat so much that they are not able to move or fly, but sit quite stupidly and insensible. One of them will often, at a single meal, devour the entire body of an albatross (bones and all), which is a bird nearly as large as the vulture itself. They will smell a dead carcass at a very great distance, and will soon surround ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... of these Dagos, and I don't want a fracas until I see the lay of the old man. He's a queer one for sure, hey? Did you ever see a skipper with such a look? Sech bleeding eyes—an' nose, hey? Like the beak of an old albatross. He hasn't come out to lay the course yet, but let her go. She'll head within half a point of what she's doin' now. Sink me, but I don't believe there's three bloomin' beggars in my watch as can steer the craft, and she's got a new wheel gear on her too. Call me if the old man ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... deputation of Falmouth Whigs, headed by their Mayor, came on board to wish Macaulay his health in India and a happy return to England, nothing occurred that broke the monotony of an easy and rapid voyage. "The catching of a shark; the shooting of an albatross; a sailor tumbling down the hatchway and breaking his head; a cadet getting drunk and swearing at the captain," are incidents to which not even the highest literary power can impart the charm of novelty in the eyes ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... and tells how the ship sailed forth gayly, and how it met after a time with storms, and cold, and fog, until at last it was all beset with ice. Then when to the sailors all hope seemed lost, an albatross came sailing through the fog. With joy they hailed it, the only living thing in that wilderness of ice. They fed ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... ship broke in half in the storm. The Doctor had tied you down when he found you stunned. And the part you were on got separated and floated away. Golly, it was a storm! One has to be a gull or an albatross to stand that sort of weather. I had been watching for the Doctor for three weeks, from a cliff-top; but last night I had to take refuge in a cave to keep my tail-feathers from blowing out. As soon as I found the Doctor, he sent me off with some porpoises to look for you. A Stormy Petrel ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... trades behind me an' I'd leave the Southern Cross, An' the mollymawks an' flyin'-fish an' stately albatross, An' I'd come through wind an' weather an' the fogs as white as wool, Till I sighted old Point Lynas ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... seeing red. He raised himself upon his elbows and stared at the owl which stared back from red rimmed eyes, cold, emotionless, implacable. He had been terribly shaken, and now a superstitious fright overcame him. The raven and the albatross were in his mind and he murmured under his breath passages from their ominous poems. The scholar had his raven, the mariner had his albatross and now he alone in the forest had his owl, to his mind the most ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the picture-gallery, hung with the works of modern masters; then, through the room filled with specimens of stuffed animals. The lion and the tiger, the vulture of the Alps and the great albatross, looked like living creatures threatening me, in the supernatural light. I entered the third room, devoted to the exhibition of ancient armor, and the weapons of all nations. Here the light rose higher, and, leaving me in ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... nor albatross, nor flying-fish?" continued Cap, who kept his eye fastened on the guide, in order to see how far he might venture. "No such thing as a fish that can fly, ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... chaperon, Charlotte, because in my hour of need I simply fastened myself to you like a limpet, or an albatross, or a barnacle, or any other form of nautical vampire that you prefer. Still, I might as well confess that I cabled to Duke, or wirelessed, or did something awfully expensive of that sort at St. Thomas while you were having that interminable ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... for half the magic of our Flying Corps was its freedom from advertisement. But the British Army knew all about him, and the men in the trenches used to discuss him as if he were a crack football-player. There was a very big German airman called Lensch, one of the Albatross heroes, who about the end of August claimed to have destroyed thirty-two Allied machines. Peter had then only seventeen planes to his credit, but he was rapidly increasing his score. Lensch was a mighty man of valour and a good sportsman after his fashion. He was amazingly ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... followed the increased interest in humanity. The poems of Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, and Coleridge show this quickened feeling for a starved bird, a wounded hare, a hart cruelly slain, or an albatross wantonly shot. The social disorder of the Revolution might make Wordsworth pause, but he continued with unabated ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... North-east Trades In the Rigging Taking an Observation Ronne Felt Safer when the Dogs were Muzzled Starboard Watch on the Bridge Olav Bjaaland, a Member of the Polar Party 136 In the Absence of Lady Partners, Ronne Takes a Turn with the Dogs An Albatross In Warmer Regions A Fresh Breeze in the West Wind Belt The Propeller Lifted in the Westerlies The "Fram's" Saloon Decorated for Christmas Eve Ronne at a Sailor's Job The "Fram" In Drift-ice Drift-ice in Ross Sea A Clever Method of Landing ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... his words of sorrow are cries that seem cruel too: the screams of seabirds, gannets, gulls, and the wide-winged albatross, that have been long hovering above the Calypso, as if knowing her to be doomed, and hoping to find a feast among the floating ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... evening was deepening over the glassy surface of the water; but there was still light enough reflected from the sky to have enabled us to see any object within sight almost as distinctly as in broad day, but not an object of any description could we see, not even a solitary albatross. ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... sidewalk, and the man guiding it motioned to Hopkins to jump into it. He did so without slackening his speed, and fell into the turkey-red upholstered seat beside the chauffeur. The big machine, with a diminuendo cough, flew away like an albatross down the avenue into which the ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... but whether his travels had been those of a mercantile sea-captain or of a wandering gentleman of leisure would have been hard to determine. There was a neat walnut bookcase with well-filled shelves, on the top of which stood a large glass case containing a huge stuffed albatross, and just opposite was a small but exquisitely-carved Venetian cabinet adorned with grotesque heads of men and animals, and surmounted by a small square case in which was a beautifully-mounted specimen of the little spotted brown owl of Greece, the species ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... to Normanton from Thursday Island, where she had been relieving the "Albatross," she required a number of repairs which were executed, and she is now ...
— Report on the Department of Ports and Harbours for the Year 1890-1891 • Department of Ports and Harbours
... part as large. No other audience a millionth part as large. No human eye could look across it. Wing of albatross and falcon and eagle not strong enough to fly over it. A congregation, I verily believe, not assembled on any continent, because no continent would be large enough to hold it. But, as the Bible intimates, in the air. The law of gravitation ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... The halcyons brood around the foamless isles; The treacherous Ocean has forsworn its wiles; The merry mariners are bold and free: Say, my heart's sister, wilt thou sail with me? 415 Our bark is as an albatross, whose nest Is a far Eden of the purple East; And we between her wings will sit, while Night, And Day, and Storm, and Calm, pursue their flight, Our ministers, along the boundless Sea, 420 Treading each other's heels, unheededly. It is an isle under ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... length did cross an Albatross, Thorough the fog it came; As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it in ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... night. Between latitudes 56 and 57 degrees south of Cape Horn, the net was put astern several times; it never, however, brought up anything besides a few of two extremely minute species of Entomostraca. Yet whales and seals, petrels and albatross, are exceedingly abundant throughout this part of the ocean. It has always been a mystery to me on what the albatross, which lives far from the shore, can subsist; I presume that, like the condor, it is able to fast long; and that one good feast on the carcass of a putrid whale lasts ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... sailed in the year 1820 in a three-masted ship, the Albatross, for the South Sea, in pursuit of the spermaceti whale. When nearly under the Line, west of Washington's Island, they perceived a whale of an extraordinary size. The boats were all immediately lowered, ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... in after years that the suggestion for the poem came from a dream of a phantom ship told to Coleridge by a friend, and that he (Wordsworth) proposed the shooting of the albatross, the revenge of the "tutelary spirits," and the "navigation of the ship by the dead men," and contributed the fourth stanza of the poem and the last two lines of the first stanza of Part IV. He had been reading Shelvocke's "Voyages," a book in which he had found a description of albatrosses ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the leafy tree, The bird in the cloudy sky, The hart in the forest free, The stag on the mountain high, The fish inside the sea, The albatross asleep On the outside of the deep, The bee through the summer sunny Hunting for wells of honey— What is the thought in the breast Of the little bird in its nest? What is the thought in the songs The lark in the sky prolongs? What mean the dolphin's ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... at the wheel and the guard at the quarter-railing, he was alone on the deck. A few birds flew round about the vessel, and seemed to pass under her stern windows only to appear again at her bows. A lazy albatross, with the white water flashing from his wings, rose with a dabbling sound to leeward, and in the place where he had been glided the hideous fin of a silently-swimming shark. The seams of the well-scrubbed deck were sticky with melted pitch, and ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... largest of the sea birds and have an enormous expanse of wing, the Wandering Albatross, the largest of the family, sometimes attaining an expanse of fourteen feet. Their nostrils consist of two slightly projecting tubes, one on each side near the base of the bill. They are unsurpassed in powers of flight, but are ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... individually or collectively, and no reception could have seemed more special and dangerously cordial, yet no anxieties oppressed, no fears distracted him. The weight of excessive eligibility suddenly slipped off him, like the albatross from the neck of the Ancient Mariner, leaving him a thankful and a happy man, and in a week he had established himself firmly at the Bascombes', declined to accompany his uncle to Virginia, and definitely settled in his own mind that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... stood, stern and imposing, in its native brown. The outlines of all the rocks, and the shores of the different islands, had an appearance of volcanic origin, though the rocks themselves told a somewhat different story. The last was principally of trap formation. Cape pigeons, gulls, petrels, and albatross were wheeling about in the air, while the rollers that still came in on this noble sea-wall were really terrific. Distant thunder wants the hollow, bellowing sound that these waves made when brought in contact with the shores. Roswell fancied that it was like ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... coast, but nobody imagined it was merely a sort of backwater from the Gulf Stream that formed a great circular mill-race around the cone of a subterranean volcano, and rejoined the Gulf Stream off Cape Albatross. But it is! That is why papa bought a yacht three years ago and sailed about for two years so mysteriously. Oh, I did want to go with him ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... to convert man into a rival of the albatross did not come at once and together. Not the dream of flying but the need for quantity and speed in production to take care of the wants of a modern civilization compelled the invention of the internal combustion engine. Before it appeared in the realm of mechanics, experimenters ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... much of a look-out, as they would have to do in the channel or near land. And, besides, old fellow, you must recollect that although we can see her plainly, we to those on board would appear but the tiniest speck in the distance, if we were seen at all, and would be taken for a wandering albatross, or one of those Molly hawks like that we caught this morning. They don't see us, evidently, or they ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... Henry's gentlemen, And though our flagship lie Where white the great-winged albatross Came wheeling down the sky, Or black abysses yawned for us, We ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... feature of the southern seas is the multitude of birds which inhabit it. Huge albatrosses, molimorks (a smaller albatross), Cape hens, Cape pigeons, parsons, boobies, whale birds, mutton birds, and many more, wheel continually about the ship's stern, sometimes in dozens, sometimes in scores, always in considerable numbers. If a person takes two pieces of pork and ties them together, ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... nevertheless, is just what they themselves would like to remember, and just what they would like to tell to everybody. Be sure that the Ancient Mariner, though he remembered quite as much as his audience wanted to hear, and rather more, about the albatross and the ghastly crew, was inwardly raging at the sketchiness of his own mind; and believe me that his stopping only one of three was the merest oversight. I should like to impose on the world many tomes ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... put in here to-day with four men picked up from an open boat south of New Guinea, who reported that the Government survey vessel Albatross has run ashore in a storm on Ysabel Island, one of the Solomon group. The crew and passengers, including Dr. Thesiger Smith, the famous geologist, were saved, but the vessel is a complete wreck, and the unfortunate ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... three landward sides, they lay out the remaining part of the interior into equal little quadrangles, separated from each other by narrow foot-paths, crossing at right angles. In each crossing of these paths an albatross builds his nest, and in the middle of each quadrangle, a penguin, so that every albatross is surrounded by four penguins, and every penguin has albatross on four sides as neighbors. In this way the whole place is regularly ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... higher aspect ratio than is found in any bird or any flying machine would theoretically improve its powers of flight, but the practicable span of the plane, or length of the wing, is limited by the need for rigidity and strength. The albatross, nevertheless, the king of soaring birds, has enormously long and narrow wings; and the planes of some flying machines have an aspect ratio almost as high as the ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... to deliver some bags of mails. I have said that the trip was uneventful; it was even without incident save for some fooleries on reaching the Line, and such trifling distractions as an unsuccessful attempt to shoot an albatross, and the sighting of some flying-fish and sundry long-tailed birds which the sailors called ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... birch-trees where Gelert was sleeping. It could not free the Ancient Mariner from the remorse that clung to him like a poisoned garment till it made him a "world's wonder," because, when he shot the albatross, he thought he was benefiting his fellows. Not less accusingly did the voices of the sea wail in the ears of the desolate Viking, because, when the bitter arrow went aside, he was fighting hard to save Oriana. Nothing could be more correct ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... first and seemed content to wait so long as I thought best. My business expanded. I was sought after and consulted and drawn into the higher life of New York, and more and more felt that the woman was an albatross on my neck. I put her off with one excuse after another. Finally she began to suspect me and demanded that I should recognize her as my wife. I attempted to point out the difficulties. She met them all by saying that we should both go to Spain, there I could marry her and we ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... a man of about forty, tall and sinewy, clad in a short cape of white albatross feathers, and with a girdle of nautilus shells interspersed with red coral tied around his waist, came ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... was more than commonly tall, found his head being buffeted by big preserved wings of birds and other flying things—from the sweeping pinions of the albatross to the leathery covering of the bat. From the ceiling, too, hung models, cleverly constructed in various materials; and here—a cork with quills stuck into it, and with a kind of drill-bow—was the little flying ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... all birds dares to enter a white torrent. And though strictly terrestrial in structure, no other is so inseparably related to water, not even the duck, or the bold ocean albatross, or the stormy-petrel. For ducks go ashore as soon as they finish feeding in undisturbed places, and very often make long flights over land from lake to lake or field to field. The same is true of most other aquatic birds. But the Ouzel, born on the brink of ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... charge against Coleridge in his Lake Poets. It was not Coleridge who had been reading Shelvocke's Voyages, but Wordsworth, and it is quite conceivable, therefore, that the source from which his friend had derived the idea of the killing of the albatross may (if indeed he was informed of it at the time) have escaped his memory twelve years afterwards, when the conversation with De Quincey took place. Hence, in "disowning his obligations to Shelvocke," he may not by any means have intended to ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... an Albatross That fluttered round the Lamp: He looked again, and found it was A Penny Postage-Stamp. "You'd best be getting home," he said: "The nights ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... some years, was Le Bris, a French sea captain, who appears to have required only a thorough scientific training to have rendered him of equal moment in the history of gliding flight with Lilienthal himself. Le Bris, it appears, watched the albatross and deduced, from the manner in which it supported itself in the air, that plane surfaces could be constructed and arranged to support a man in like manner. Octave Chanute, himself a leading exponent of gliding, gives the best description of Le ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... his vague glances, luminous as that of an albatross, hovered for a long time over the sea, interrogating space, seeking ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... friendships or of deadly enmities as an Indiaman. There are very few people who do not find a voyage which lasts several months insupportably dull. Anything is welcome which may break that long monotony, a sail, a shark, an albatross, a man overboard. Most passengers find some resource in eating twice as many meals as on land. But the great devices for killing the time are quarrelling and flirting. The facilities for both these exciting ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... These birds were sitting upon their nests, and almost covered the surface of the ground, nor did they any otherwise derange themselves for the new visitors, than to peck at their legs as they passed by. This species of albatross is white on the neck and breast, partly brown on the back and wings, and its size is less than many others met with at sea, particularly in the high southern latitudes. The seals were of the usual size, and bore a reddish fur, much inferior in quality to that ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... iceberg in lat. 50 deg. 40' S., long. 2 deg. 0' E., on December 10, 1772. The next day he "saw some white birds about the size of pigeons, with blackish bills and feet. I never saw any such before."[2] These must have been Snowy Petrel. Passing through many bergs, where he notices how the albatross left them and penguins appeared, he was brought up by thick pack ice along which he coasted. Under the supposition that this ice was formed in bays and rivers Cook was led to believe that land was not far distant. Incidentally he remarks that in order ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... it for the rest of his days. Be assured that he understood very well the cash value of his old uniform. If he had a peg-leg or an empty sleeve, so much the more impudently could he pass around his property cap. For forty years, he and his mendicant band have been a cursed albatross hung around the necks of their honest fellows. Able-bodied men, they have lolled back and eaten up millions of dollars, belonging to a State which they pretend to love and which, as they well know, has needed every penny for the desperate struggle of existence. Since the ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... cranes—the two parts of the wrecked boat having been previously secured by her—and then hoisting everything to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby Dick. At the well known, methodic intervals, the whale's glittering spout was regularly announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing the deck, ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... vapoury twos and threes From western pile to eastern rack; As on from peaks of Pyrenees To Graians; youngness ruled the track. When songful beams were shut in caves, And rainy drapery swept across; When the ranked clouds were downy waves, Breast of swan, eagle, albatross, In ordered lines to screen the blue, Youngest of light was nigh, we knew. The silver finger of it laughed Along the narrow rift: it shot, Slew the huge gloom with golden shaft, Then haled on high the volumed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... other book of the kind, or else such a brief suggestion as might be offered by a person who had read the poem, and who said, for example, that the subject of The Ancient Mariner was a sailor who killed an albatross ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... trite distich you made hexameters tame; it gushed from that great young heart with a sweet infantine ardour, that even virtue can only pour when young, and youth when virtuous; and, at the words I have emphasised by the poor device of capitals, two lovely, supple arms flew wide out like a soaring albatross's wings, and then went all round the sad mother, and gathered every bit of her up to the generous ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... of the nature of a miracle—something not to be explained. Explanations which have been advanced have, it is true, been in many cases altogether untenable. For instance, some have asserted that the albatross, the condor, and other birds which float for a long time without moving their wings—and that, too, in some cases, at great heights above the sea-level, where the air is very thin—are supported by some gas within the hollow parts of their bones, as the balloon is supported by the hydrogen within ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... birds the albatross is the most skillful in the art of sailing in the air. It is a large sea-bird, about the size of a swan, and has very long and powerful wings. It lives far out upon the open ocean, hundreds of miles from ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... beautiful one! Whose harshest idea Will to melody run, O! is it thy will On the breezes to toss? Or, capriciously still, Like the lone Albatross, Incumbent on night (As she on the air) To keep watch with delight ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... Norfolk. Bass's association with him. Twofold Bay. Discovery of Port Dalrymple. Bass Strait demonstrated. Black swans. Albatross Island. Tasmanian aboriginals. ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... flying about the brig at the same time with a tropic bird, which is a remarkable occurrence, for I never saw the latter bird before so far without the tropic; but here was one nearly five hundred miles to the southward of it, and at least three hundred leagues from the nearest land; an albatross (Diomedea exulans, Linn.) was shot, but did not measure more than nine feet nine inches across the tips of ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... they did not require to be worked at all; but the greatest dread we laboured under was from the dangerous condition of the main and fore masts, that tottered to and fro, threatening to go by the board every minute. Before the hour of sunset, a large bird, called the albatross, with wings the length of four to five feet each, skimmed along the surface of the waves, close to and around us; this inspired the crew with hopes, as they supposed it to be a good omen. It remained hovering near our unfortunate wreck ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 275, September 29, 1827 • Various
... one! Whose harshest idea Will to melody run, O! is it thy will On the breezes to toss? Or, capriciously still, Like the lone Albatross, [23] Incumbent on night (As she on the air) To keep watch with delight ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... of the course to the north were uneventful, only marked by an occasional success of the naturalists in obtaining a fresh specimen, some of which were experimented on by the cook; an albatross, skinned, soaked all night in salt water, was stewed, served with savoury sauce, and was preferred to salt pork; a cuttle-fish of large size, freshly killed by the birds, and too much damaged for classification, was ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... and Peninsular Steam Packet Company's ship 'Albatross' has arrived at Liverpool, bringing all the passengers and crew of the 'Oceana,' wrecked on the banks of Newfoundland. They were picked up by the 'Santiago,' bound for Havana, and taken to that port, whence they sailed by the 'Cadiz' for the port of Cadiz, whence lastly they were brought by the ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... with its knife-like fin just showing above the water. It was Sunday, too, when no fishing was allowed—a fact of which he was evidently aware. These fellows are proverbially stupid, and will go at a bait again and again, even though they must know it to be a lure. Only once, too, did we catch an albatross, the bird of the Southern Ocean. That was by a line baited with a small piece of pork. This was fastened to a round ring of iron, in which the hooked beak of the bird caught, and so it was dragged on board. The captain knocked it on the head, and it was then cut up. It measured 13 feet ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... wealth builds round its owners. I don't think Mr. Peter Reid was kind, though perhaps he meant to be. Jean is such a conscientious, anxious pilgrim at any time, and I'm afraid the wealth will hang round her neck like the Ancient Mariner's albatross. ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... cable ran to the outskirts of a village situated on a railroad and a small stream. The location of enemy aviation fields was also shown pictorially, each one represented by a minute sketch, very carefully made, of an Albatross biplane. We noticed that there were several aerodromes not far ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... oiled, and all were completely armed; their muskets were loaded, their cartouch boxes were fastened round their waists, and their patoo-patoos were fixed to their wrists. Their hair was tied up in a tight knot at the top of their heads, beautifully ornamented with feathers of the albatross. As the opposite party landed, ours all crouched on the ground, their eyes fixed on their visitors, and perfectly silent. When the debarkation was completed I observed the chief, Ta-ri-ah, put himself at their head, ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... that southern constellations, snowy, white-winged albatross, leaping flying-fish, and white-capped mountain-coast, had been joined in her mind with something higher, deeper, and less personal, or their recurrence would have brought her nothing but pain unmitigated in the contrast with the time when first she had beheld ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... disappointed. We caught one or two with a baited hook which we floated astern upon a shingle. Their long, flapping wings, long legs, and large, staring eyes, give them a very peculiar appearance. They look well on the wing; but one of the finest sights that I have ever seen, was an albatross asleep upon the water, during a calm, off Cape Horn, when a heavy sea was running. There being no breeze, the surface of the water was unbroken, but a long, heavy swell was rolling, and we saw the fellow, all white, directly ahead of us, asleep upon the waves, with his ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... the market-place, expecting to find J——- at the Museum, but the keeper said he had gone away. We went into this museum, which contains the collections in Natural History, etc., of a county society. It is very well arranged, and is rich in specimens of ornithology, among which was an albatross, huge beyond imagination. I do not think that Coleridge could have known the size of the fowl when he caused it to be hung round the neck of his Ancient Mariner. There were a great many humming-birds from various parts of the world, and some of their breasts actually ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ill-omened strait of whirlpools, in a land of moors where no stranger came, unless it should be a sportsman to shoot grouse or an antiquary to decipher runes, the presence of these small pedestrians struck the mind as though a bird-of-paradise had risen from the heather or an albatross come fishing in the bay of Wick. They were as strange to their surroundings as my lordly evangelist or the old Spanish grandee ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gesture that wasn't far from despair—and in that gesture, such as only those can make who know in their hearts that they have shot the albatross, this preface brings itself to a close and at last ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... of Glarus, in Switzerland, corresponding to the English galt, in the chalk formation, the remains of a bird have been found. From a chalk bed near Maidstone, have likewise been extracted some remains of a bird, supposed to have been of the long-winged swimmer family, and equal in size to the albatross. These, it must be owned, are less strong traces of the birds than we possess of the reptiles and other tribes; but it must be remembered, that the evidence of fossils, as to the absence of any class of animals from ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... Mr. Marsden, in his notes to his translation of Marco Polo's Voyages, supposes the roc to be a description of the albatross or condor, under greatly ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... almost incapable of movement, being somewhat like a fowl's. Certainly it could not have been protruded even from the angle of the mouth, much less have extended along the parapet of that lower mandible, which reminded one of the beak of some mighty albatross or stork. ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... tossing surf in the moonbeam, The albatross lone on the spray, Alone know the tears wept in vain for the children Magic ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... chief who was steering the canoe, there could be no mistake. The sharpened albatross bone used by the Maori tattooer, had five times scored his countenance. He was in his fifth edition, and betrayed it in ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... and a berried branch, Which silenced them as if they had seen a Hand Writing with fiery letters on the deep, Then a black cormorant, vulture of the sea, With neck outstretched and one long ominous honk, Went hurtling past them to its unknown bourne. A mighty white-winged albatross came next; Then flight on flight of clamorous clanging gulls; And last, a wild and sudden shout of "Land!" Echoed from crew to crew across the waves. Then, dumb upon the rigging as they hung Staring at it, a menace chilled ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... is, by extracting the oxygen from the atmosphere as well as from the water in which it is dissolved. They pass a great part of their life in the air; but if they escape from the sea to avoid the voracity of the Dorado, they meet in the air the Frigate-bird, the Albatross, and others, which seize them in their flight. Thus, on the banks of the Orinoco, herds of the Cabiai, which rush from the water to escape the crocodile, become the prey of the jaguar, which ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... dread approach near enough to ascertain that the man-eater had already met his own death from some fisherman in the bay. In the same ramble I encountered a bird—a large gray bird—but whether a loon or a wild goose or the identical albatross of the Ancient Mariner was beyond my ornithology to decide. It reposed so naturally on a bed of dry seaweed, with its head beside its wing, that I almost fancied it alive, and trod softly lest it should suddenly ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... under the prevailing obscurity. As the Hartford attempted it the downward current caught her on the port bow, swung her head round toward the batteries, and nearly threw her on shore, her stem touching for a moment. The combined powers of her own engine and that of the Albatross, her consort, were then brought into play as an oarsman uses the oars to turn his boat, pulling one and backing the other; that of the Albatross was backed, while that of the Hartford went ahead strong. In this way their heads were pointed up stream and they ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... a perfect oval, a fleet of ships. By all appearances they had no right to be on land. There was no visible evidence that they could rise from the solid earth after once touching it, any more than the albatross can ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... birds, insects, and animals, there are many groups that have special attraction for children. For instance, among the "Birds we read about" are the flamingo, cassowary, condor, and quetzal; the eagle owl is contrasted with the pygmy owl, and the peacock, lyre bird, albatross, swan, and pelican ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... on as well as I could, with a stout heart and a steady arm, when—don't be afraid—a Catamaran caught me! If you haven't fainted (bless those pretty eyes of your's, my Emmy!) read on; and you will find that this alarming sort of animal is neither an albatross nor an alligator, but simply—a life-boat with a Triton in the stern. Yes, God's messenger of life to me and happiness to you, my girl, came in the shape of a kindly, chattering, blue-skinned, human creature, who dragged me out of the surf, landed me safely, and, I need not say, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and empearled sky, darkening in lagoons of azure down to the soft mountainous masses of white vapour lying like the coast of a continent on the larboard horizon. But one living thing there was besides myself: a grey-breasted albatross, of a princely width of pinion. I had not observed it till the hull went down, and then, lifting my eyes with involuntary sympathy in the direction pointed to by the upraised arms of the sailor, I observed the great royal bird hanging ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... the Fuegians, the abundance of whales, which had never before been disturbed, the immense flocks of albatross and petrels, did not change his resolve. Cape Horn was rounded more easily than could have been expected. Upon the 9th of February the expedition was in the Straits of Magellan, and upon the 24th anchor was cast in Concepcion Harbour, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... the meridian of Albatross Island, and by midnight cleared the Strait, when we steered a course for King George the ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... blowing fresh with squally, moist weather. Our course was then directed for Cape Leeuwin, with the wind usually a-beam; the sea being too high for the ship to make good way any nearer. In this passage we were accompanied by several petrels, and amongst them by the albatross, the first of which had been seen in the ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... mutiny, nothing to break the even course of the voyage but a little tossing among the huge waves that came rolling from the south-west, threatening to engulf the ship, but only dived beneath it, raising it upon a rolling bill, and then gliding onward to give room to the next. Nic saw the albatross till he was tired of watching its gliding flight. He fished and had very bad fortune, but better when he joined in with the sailors, who good-humouredly made room for him to help haul after they had hooked a shark, drawn the fierce ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... albatross—its docility was charming—soon occupied a splendid isolation on the tarpaulined covered hatchway platform.... I shall in future read Keats' 'Ancient Mariner' with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... Tristan da Cunha, Inaccessible and Nightingale Islands, about 37 south latitude, 12 longitude west. —Saw a great many whales, mostly sperm, thousands of birds, albatross, Cape pigeon, and many others, the names of which I ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... which Coleridge took from a dream which a friend of his had once dreamt concerning a person suffering under a dire curse from the commission of some crime.' 'I,' said Wordsworth, 'supplied the crime, the shooting of the albatross, from an incident I had met with in one of Shelvocke's voyages. We tried the poem conjointly for a day or two, but we pulled different ways, and only a few lines of it are mine.' From Coleridge, the discourse then turned to Scotland. Mr. Wordsworth, in his best manner, with earnest ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... yards covered with canvas, the albatross, eagles of the Atlantic desert, traced their long, sweeping circles, flashing across the purest blue their great, sail-like wings. From time to time the boat would meet floating prairies, great fields of seaweed dislodged from the Sargasso Sea. Enormous tortoises drowsed in the midst of these ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... curious things here. I have crossed the rolling plains, covered with hard stringy mosses, and I shall take away curious mineralogical and geological specimens with me. I have gone sealing, and taken sea-calves with your people. I have visited the rookeries where the penguin and the albatross live together in good fellowship, and that was well worth my while. You have given me now and again a dish of petrel, seasoned by your own hand, and very acceptable when one has a fine healthy appetite. I ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... Great albatross now began to wheel round the vessel and the sailors caught some of the monster white and gray birds with long strings to which they had attached bits of bread and other bait. These were flung out into the air and the greedy creatures, making a dive ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... the albatross sails proudly on his broad wings, and cares nothing for high winds or storms. He rests and sleeps on the billows at night with his little companions, the stormy petrels. He is the largest and strongest of our birds of flight, the very king ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... from a lurid red sea in the east. It was now daylight and five German aeroplanes of the Albatross pattern rose in the German lines and started boldly across our territory. Our machine guns spoke against the flying observer, and I knew that Captain McKessock's guns had still a few kicks left. The stream of wounded and gassed men continued. Many of ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... a reefed mainsail and jib, now rising, and presently disappearing behind the stormy heavings of the roaring sea, the rising moon shining brightly on her canvass pinions, as if she had been an albatross skimming along the surface of the foaming water, while her broad white streak glanced like a silver ribbon along her clear black side. She was a very large craft of her class, long and low in the water, and evidently very fast; and it was ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... doctor was in his office, when his servant brought him a visitor's card. This card, which was small as is usual in America, had the name of "Mr. Tudor Brown, on board the 'Albatross'" printed ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... Then followed the Albatross, with Mark Powers giving the orders. Then the Privateer, another fast one, but going sluggishly now because of a stove-in seine-boat wallowing astern. Then the North Wind, with her decks swept clear of ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... about an observer of long ago strolling so far from home and going forth in a high sea to make a call. I confessed to being an ancient Wanderer, but not an Ancient Mariner, and expressed disapprobation of the deplorable roughness of the California Albatross, a brute of a bird—a feathered ruffian that ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... any river on the west side, although he coasted along very near the shore. On this Too-gee asked with much earnestness, if Captain Cook had seen an island covered with birds. Gannet Island being pointed out, he immediately fixed on Albatross Point as the situation of the river, which Captain Cook's account seems to favour, who says, 'On the north side of this point (Albatross) the shore forms a bay, in which there appears to be anchorage and shelter for shipping.' Governor King on this subject remarks ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... of all sorts of sailor-superstitions. He hates to take a ship out of port on a Friday, and wouldn't kill an albatross for anything." ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... they settle their claim to the homestead? By what right of primogeniture? Once, the children of a man employed about the place ooelogized the nest, and the pewees left us for a year or two. I felt towards those boys as the messmates of the Ancient Mariner did towards him after he had shot the albatross. But the pewees came back at last, and one of them is now on his wonted perch, so near my window that I can hear the click of his bill as he snaps a fly on the wing.... The pewee is the first bird to pipe up in the morning; and, during the early summer he preludes his matutinal ejaculation of ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... barren—grey limestone, with the scantiest over-growth of rosemary and myrtle. A more desolate spot can hardly be imagined. But now the morning breeze springs up behind; sails are hoisted, and the boatmen ship their oars. Under the albatross wings of our lateen sails we scud across the freshening waves. The precipice of Capri soars against the sky, and the Bay of Naples expands before us with those sweeping curves and azure amplitude that all the poets of the world have sung. Even thus the mariners of ancient Hellas rounded this ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... thinking. Still, I don't know. She used to say Ben Dollard had a base barreltone voice. He has legs like barrels and you'd think he was singing into a barrel. Now, isn't that wit. They used to call him big Ben. Not half as witty as calling him base barreltone. Appetite like an albatross. Get outside of a baron of beef. Powerful man he was at stowing away number one Bass. Barrel of Bass. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... good an appetite as usual. I measured a very large male condor, and the width from the tip of one wing to the tip of the other was fourteen English feet and two inches—an enormous expanse of wing, not equalled by any other bird except the white albatross. (Diomedea exulans, Linn.). The snipes (Scolopax frenata, Ill.) found on the little plain between the bay and the light-house are in color precisely like those of Europe, from which, however, they differ in having two more feathers in their ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... we were in lat. 26 deg. 44' S., long. 103 deg. 50' E. I managed to go to the deck-house to-day for lunch, and remained on deck a little afterwards. Just before sunset we saw several sea-birds, and a splendid albatross with a magnificent spread of wing. It was wonderful to watch its quick turns and graceful skimming flight, so swift, and yet with hardly ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... condition of the adjacent land, it could hardly be a matter of surprise that all the sea-birds, the albatross, the gull, the sea-mew, sought continual refuge on the schooner; day and night they perched fearlessly upon the yards, the report of a gun failing to dislodge them, and when food of any sort was thrown ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... where he belonged. It was White-Jacket that loosed that main-royal, so far up aloft there, it looks like a white albatross' wing. It was White-Jacket that was taken for an albatross himself, as he flew ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... Christabel, where it has its effect, as it were antipathetically, in the vivid realisation of the serpentine element in Geraldine's nature; and in The Ancient Mariner, whose fate is interwoven with that of the wonderful bird, at whose blessing of the water-snakes the curse for the death of the albatross passes away, and where the moral of the love of all creatures, as a sort of religious duty, is ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... stranger among the fellow-beings he had come to meet. He found himself still a Selkirk of the world of trade and traffic and transfer of thought and well-wishing and strong-doing and of all social life. He was like a strange bird, like an albatross blown into unaccustomed seas, alighting upon an island ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... region, we climbed to a less dangerous height. Again we became the target for a few dozen H.E. shells. We broke away and swooped downward. Some little distance ahead, and not far below, was a group of five Albatross two-seaters. V. pointed our machine at them, in the ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... held their holiday in the stormy gale. The lordly and graceful Albatross, whose motion is a very melody, swept screaming by upon the blast. The smaller Cape pigeons followed us fast, passing and repassing across the vessel's track. At last one of them spies a fragment on the waters, which has been thrown overboard: a moment it hovers above, then plunges down. But the ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... the aerodromes. We visited several and lunched with a Wing-Commander, Colonel Freeman, who was most kind, a great lover of books, a lot of which Maurice used to supply him with. After this, we visited a squadron where there was to (p. 030) be a test fight between a German Albatross, which had been captured intact, and one of our machines. The fight was a failure, however, as just after they got up something went wrong with the radiator of the Albatross; but later Captain Little did some wonderful ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... includes all those which are able to support themselves upon the surface of the water. The varieties include the gaudy Flamingos; the Albatross that frighted the ancient mariner; the Pelicans with their pouches; the impetuous Gannets, and the remarkable Frigate Bird. And here, too, the visitor will find the varieties of ducks, geese, and swans, all classed ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... their glorious estate. Oh, what a fall was there! It was the fall of innocence and purity; it was the fall of happiness into the abyss of woe; it was the fall of life into the arms of death. It was like the fall of the wounded albatross, from the regions of light, into the sea; it was like the fall of a star from heaven to hell. When the jasper gate forever closed behind the guilty pair, and the flaming sword of the Lord mounted ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... did cross an Albatross, Thorough the Fog it came; And an it were a Christian Soul, We hail'd it in ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... Royal took charge, On the left near the railings, ears cocked, going large, Leaving Hadrian behind as a yacht leaves a barge. Though Hadrian's rider called something unheard, He was past him at speed like the albatross bird, Running up to Path Finder, they leaped, side by side, And the foam from Path Finder flecked ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... hearts of mariners. We sailed many leagues south of the Cape of Good Hope and much too far away even to catch a glimpse of it, but we realized its proximity by the presence of the Cape pigeons which hovered around our vessel. The albatross was also our daily visitor and one or two of them were caught by the sailors, regardless of the superstition of possible calamity attending such an act. Our only stop during the long voyage was at the Moluccas or Spice Islands, in the Malay Peninsula, and was made at the request of the passengers ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... objects within the circle of the horizon that presented the appearance of solidity were an albatross sailing in the air, and a little boat floating ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... In command is Prof. Leslie A. Lee, of the Biological Department of Bowdoin. With a life-long experience in all branches of natural history, the experience which a year in charge of the scientific staff of the U.S. Fish Commission Steamer "Albatross" in a voyage from Washington around Cape Horn to Alaska, and an intimate connection with the Commission of many year's standing, and the training that scholarly habits, platform lecturing and collegic instruction have given him, you see a man still young, for he was graduated from St. Lawrence ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... his homily to the wedding guest clearly pointed him out as the very man meant by Providence for a stipendiary curate to the good Dr. Bailey in his over-crowded church. [Footnote: St. James', according to my present recollection.] With an albatross perched on his shoulder, and who might be introduced to the congregation as the immediate organ of his conversion, and supported by the droning of a bassoon, she represented the mariner lecturing to advantage in English; the doctor overhead ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... were returning to the ship on the following morning, a large albatross alighted on the water close to the boat. As we passed it, it made several futile attempts to rise again on the wing. It is well known that this bird cannot fly while under the influence of fear, and ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... susceptible of explanation; but, at the time, it threw, as it were, around him the sackcloth of penitence. Sitting amid the shrouds and rattlings, in the tranquillity of the moonlight, churning an inarticulate melody, he seemed almost apparitional, suggesting dim reminiscences of him who shot the albatross" ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... Whilst she was hove down in a blow off the Horn an albatross came aboard. You know what they be—the one bird in all the seven seas that don't us'ally need a dry spot for the sole of his foot. If Noah had sent out one from the ark he'd never have come back with any sprig of promise for the land-hungry wanderers ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... Russian and German squadrons in the Baltic, between the Island of Oeland and the Courland coast; after a brief engagement the German squadron, outnumbered and outmatched in strength, flees; the German mine layer Albatross is wrecked by Russian gunfire and is beached by her crew; the Russian squadron then sails northward, sighting another German squadron, which is also outmatched in strength; the German ships flee after a thirty-minute fight, a German torpedo boat being damaged; Dutch lugger Katwyk 147 ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... squadron, under Vice-Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee, arrived at Port Stanley. There were seven warships, besides the Canopus. The Invincible and the Inflexible had left Plymouth on November 11, and had proceeded to the West Indies. Their mission was to avenge Coronel. They had picked up at Albatross Rock the Carnarvon, Cornwall, Bristol, Kent, Glasgow, now repaired, and Macedonia, an armed liner. All had then steamed southwards towards the Falklands. The vessels started coaling. Officers came ashore to stretch their legs. Certain stores were laid ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... the evening she smelt the sea to southward and sheered thither like the strong-winged albatross, to circle enormously amid green flats fringed by ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling |
