"Bittern" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... more as men. To strong, susceptible characters, the music of nature is not confined to sweet sounds. The defiant scream of the hawk circling aloft, the wild whinny of the loon, the whooping of the crane, the booming of the bittern, the vulpine bark of the eagle, the loud trumpeting of the migratory geese sounding down out of the midnight sky; or by the seashore, the coast of New Jersey or Long Island, the wild crooning of the flocks of gulls, repeated, continued by the hour, swirling sharp ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... domain, And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain: 40 No more thy glassy brook reflects the day, But chok'd with sedges, works its weedy way. Along thy glades, a solitary guest, The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest; Amidst thy desert walks the lapwing flies, 45 And tires their echoes with unvaried cries. Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all, And the long grass o'ertops the mould'ring wall; And trembling, shrinking ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... or four years. They seem now, however, to be confined to occasional autumnal and winter visitants. Mr. Couch says ('Zoologist' for 1871):—"On the 30th December, 1874, after a heavy fall of snow, I had a female Bittern brought to me to be stuffed, shot in the morning in the Marais; and on the 2nd of January following another was shot on the beach near the Vale Church. I had also part of some of the quill-feathers of a Bittern ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... Little Green Heron Black-crowned Night Heron Yellow-crowned Night Heron Egret Brown Pelican Bittern King Rail Virginia Rail Yellow Rail Clapper Rail Carolina Rail Little Black ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... ducks mounting from the lake, The pigeon in the pines, The bittern's boom, a desert make ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Knowall when the whole tale is told: forsooth I can lead thee thither; but tell me, what shall I do of valiant deeds at the Long Pools? for there is no fire-drake nor effit, nay, nor no giant, nor guileful dwarf, nought save mallard and coot, heron and bittern; ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris
... Handgemeiner Schlacht! Es entscheide das Treffen, Wer heute sich drfe der Harnische rhmen Oder der Brnnen beider walten!" Da sprengten zuerst mit den Speeren sie an In scharfen Schauern; dem wehrten die Schilde. 65 Dann schritten zusammen sie (zum bittern Schwertkampf),[11] Hieben harmlich die hellen Schilde, Bis leicht ihnen wurde das Lindenholz, Zermalmt mit ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... pines which covered the little islands that so gracefully rose to render the terrific ocean beautiful. The fishermen were calmly casting their nets, whilst the sea-gulls hovered over the unruffled deep. Everything seemed to harmonise into tranquillity; even the mournful call of the bittern was in cadence with the tinkling bells on the necks of the cows, that, pacing slowly one after the other, along an inviting path in the vale below, were repairing to the cottages to be milked. With what ineffable pleasure have I not gazed—and gazed again, losing my breath through my eyes—my very ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... will wonder why a flower so exquisitely beautiful as this dainty little orchid should be hidden in inaccessible peat-bogs, where overshoes and tempers get lost with deplorable frequency, and the water-snake and bittern mock at man's intrusion of their realm by the ease with which they move away from him. Not for man, but for the bee, the moth, and the butterfly, are orchids where they are and what ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... not shoot Mr. Clyde, nor did he shoot anything else. Mr. Clyde did shoot a bird, but it fell into the water at a place where the shore was very marshy, and it was impossible for him to get it. He thought it was a heron, or a bittern, or perhaps a fish-hawk, but whatever it was, both ladies said that it was a great pity to kill it, as it was not good to eat, and must have been very happy in its life in the ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... the boy, "there is a marsh hard by would swallow all the horses of the Queen's guard. I will into it, and see where you will go then. You shall hear the bittern bump, and the wild-drake quack, ere you get hold of me without my consent, I ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... the birds which now constitute feathered game the heron, the crane, the crow, the swan, the stork, the cormorant, and the bittern. These supplied the best tables, especially the first three, which were looked upon as exquisite food, fit even for royalty, and were reckoned as thorough French delicacies. There were at that time heronries, as at a later period there were pheasantries. ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... It met me here a featureless, brimming ditch, and wound away in torpid coils to the monotonous horizon. And now this shrunken city, its edges dead and fallen to decay, these naked levels, where not even a bittern's voice had courage to startle the stillness, filled me, in spite of myself, with a vague apprehensiveness. Just as one who is groping in profound darkness feels his eyes dilate in the effort to catch the least glimmer of light, I found ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the fitful gale Doth carry past the bittern's boom, The dingo's yell, the plover's wail, While lumbering shadows start, and loom, And ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... "The bittern clamor'd from the moss, The wind blew loud and shrill; Yet the craggy pathway she did cross To the ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... effect. The fashion of wearing birds is regarded by most men with pain and reprobation; and it is possible that before long it will be thought that there is not much difference between the action of the woman who buys tanagers and humming-birds to adorn her person, and that of the man who kills the bittern, hoopoe, waxwing, golden oriole, and Dartford-warbler to enrich his ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... described. We read that on the 5th of November (1791) "there was a fog so thick that one might have spread it on bread. In order to write I had to light a candle as early as eleven o'clock." Here is a curious item—"In the month of June 1792 a chicken, 7s.; an Indian [a kind of bittern found in North America] 9s.; a dozen larks, 1 coron [? crown]. ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... plants. It has long been esteemed for its bark and leaves as a [54] capital astringent, these containing much tannin; also for its fruit, which is supplied with malic and citric acids, pectin, and albumen. Blackberries go often by the name of "bumblekites," from "bumble," the cry of the bittern, and kyte, a Scotch word for belly; the name bumblekite being applied, says Dr. Prior, "from the rumbling and bumbling caused in the bellies of children who eat the fruit too greedily." "Rubus" is from the Latin ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... are included the white wagtail, the pied flycatcher, the nightjar, the black redstart, the lesser redpole, the snow bunting, the redwing, the reed, marsh, and grasshopper warblers, the siskin, the dotterel, the sanderling, the wryneck, the hobby, the merlin, the bittern, and the shoveller. As occasional visitors may be reckoned the wax-wing, golden oriole, cross-bill, hoopoe, white-tailed eagle, honey buzzard, ruff, puffin, great bustard, Iceland gull, glaucous gull, ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... openings. The morning was yet young, and the banks were vocal with the noises of birds, that chattered, whistled, chirruped, croaked, cooed, warbled, or made discordant cries. I doubt if any other part of the earth's surface could show a greater variety of the feathered tribe. A large brown bittern stood motionless amongst the stones of a rapid portion of the stream, crouching down with his neck and head drawn back close to his body, so that he looked like a brown rock himself. Kingfishers flitted up and down, or dashed into the water with a splashing thud. ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... for them; pools and lakes slept in it, undisturbed save by millions of water fowl and their pursuers. The ruins of temples and palaces were overgrown by its wild berries and wild flowers. The buffalo browsed where emperors had feasted, and the bittern winged its slow flight over the fields of ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... prepare it, I at first employed the bitter saline liquor called bittern, which remains in the pans after the evaporation of sea water. But as that liquor is not always easily procured, I afterwards made use of a salt called epsom-salt, which is separated from the bittern by crystallization, and is evidently composed of ...
— Experiments upon magnesia alba, Quicklime, and some other Alcaline Substances • Joseph Black
... forest, stepping from tuft to tuft of rushes and roots, which afforded precarious footholds among deep sloughs, or pacing carefully, like a cat, along the prostrate trunks of trees, startled now and then by the sudden screaming of the bittern, or the quacking of a wild duck, rising on the wing from some solitary pool. At length he arrived at a firm piece of ground, which ran like a peninsula into the deep bosom of the swamp. It had been one of the strongholds of the Indians during their wars ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... whose feet were fleeter than the deer's, now walked feebly, and rested oft; she, whose tongue outchirped the merriest birds of the grove, and warbled sweeter music than the song-sparrow, now spoke in strains as gloomy and sad as the bittern that cries in the swamps when night is coming on, or the solitary bird of wisdom perched among the leaves of the oak. The father sat down by her, and asked her whence ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... rude sound shall reach thine ear, Armor's clang or war-steed champing Trump nor pibroch summon here Mustering clan or squadron tramping. Yet the lark's shrill fife may come At the daybreak from the fallow, And the bittern sound his drum Booming from the sedgy shallow. Ruder sounds shall none be near, Guards nor warders challenge here, Here's no war-steed's neigh and champing, Shouting ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott |
