"Bittern" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the heroes, the birds, to the sons of heroes, to the porphyrion, the pelican, the spoon-bill, the redbreast, the grouse, the peacock, the horned-owl, the teal, the bittern, the heron, the stormy petrel, the fig-pecker, ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... mounting from the lake, The pigeon in the pines, The bittern's boom, a desert make Which no false ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... will hear in the dead of the night— If the bittern will stay his toot, And the serpent will cease his hiss, And the wolf forget his howl, And the owl forbear his hoot, And the plaintive muckawiss, And his neighbour the frog, will be mute— A plash like the dip of a water-fowl, In the lake with mist so white; And two forms ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... feel the burden of his authority mightily. His importance expressed itself in many bellowing commands to his men. As he passed the door of headquarters, booming like a Prussian night-bittern, one of the officers there checked ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... "The bittern clamor'd from the moss, The wind blew loud and shrill; Yet the craggy pathway she did cross To the eiry ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... 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. At a sedgy spot ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... marshes boometh the bittern, Nicker the Soulless sits with his ghittern; Sits inconsolable, friendless and foeless, Bewailing his destiny, ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... could scarcely exist in such numbers without the quiet of preserved woods to breed in; nor could squirrels. Nor can the rarity of such birds as the little bearded tit be charged on game. The great bustard, the crane, and bittern have been driven away by cultivation. The crane, possibly, has deserted us wilfully; since civilisation in other countries has not destroyed it. And then the fashion of making natural history collections ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... last three 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 sent to me for identification by Mrs. Jago, which had been killed in the Islands ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... reach thine ear, Armour'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 wardens challenge here; Here 's no war-steed's neigh and champing, Shouting clans, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the horse and the boy with the boots walked away, and there was no one left at all. The sun went to bed wrapped in cloth of gold and purple, and long clouds, red and lilac, stretched across the sky, guarded its slumbers. Somewhere far away a bittern cried, a hollow, melancholy sound like a cow shut up in a barn. The cry of that mysterious bird was heard every spring, but no one knew what it was like or where it lived. At the top of the hill by ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... and wide, and drear, and desolate, She roam'd a wanderer thro' the cheerless night. Far thro' the silence of the unbroken plain The bittern's boom was heard, hoarse, heavy, deep, It made most fitting music to the scene. Black clouds, driven fast before the stormy wind, Swept shadowing; thro' their broken folds the moon Struggled sometimes with transitory ray, And made the moving darkness visible. And now arrived ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... the eye of the sportsman—and the Lancashire gentlemen of the sixteenth century were keen lovers of sport—the country had a strong interest. Pendle forest abounded with game. Grouse, plover, and bittern were found upon its moors; woodcock and snipe on its marshes; mallard, teal, and widgeon upon its pools. In its chases ranged herds of deer, protected by the terrible forest-laws, then in full force: and the hardier huntsman ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... mortal man. Remote it stood Within the precincts of a pathless wood To Dian sacred. Round its entrance grew A tangled copse, and one gigantic yew Towered at its mouth. The river ran near by, And on its bank was heard the bittern's cry, For May had ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... trappers, and bee-hunters. We fancy that we are strangers, and not so intimately domesticated in the planet as the wild man and the wild beast and bird. But the exclusion reaches them also; reaches the climbing, flying, gliding, feathered and four-footed man. Fox and woodchuck, hawk and snipe and bittern, when nearly seen, have no more root in the deep world than man, and are just such superficial tenants of the globe. Then the new molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and atom, shows that the world is all outside; it ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... all the floral beauty of the earth was created for man's sole delight 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
... and river-sides, and in the wet savannas, six species of the bittern will engage your attention. They are all handsome, the smallest not so large as the ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... in general as "the art of saying in a commonplace and inoffensive way what everybody knew long ago." There are a great many competent editorial writers, and the bittern carrying on his trade by the side of some swamp is about as influential as ten ordinary editorial writers rolled ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... Br comes chiefly from West Virginia and Ohio, over 300,000 pounds being produced from the salt (NaCl) wells there in 1884. The water taken from these wells is nearly evaporated, after which NaCl crystallizes out, leaving a thick liquid—bittern, or mother liquor—which contains the salts of Br. The bittern is treated with ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... Voyaging the Autumn breeze Like as fairy argosies: Time of quicker flash of wings, And of clearer twitterings In the grove, or deeper shade Of the tangled everglade,— Where the spotted water-snake Coils him in the sunniest brake; And the bittern, as in fright, Darts, in sudden, slanting flight, Southward, while the startled crane Films ...
— Riley Child-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... have enemies enough besides such unnatural fishermen; as namely, the Otters that I spake of, the Cormorant, the Bittern, the Osprey, the Sea-gull, the Hern, the King-fisher, the Gorara, the Puet, the Swan, Goose, Duck, and the Craber, which some call the Water-rat: against all which any honest man may make a just quarrel, but I will not; I will leave them ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... muddy rain, Beneath the shaggy southern hill Lies wet and low the Shawinut plain. And hark! the trodden branches crack; A crow flaps off with startled scream; A straying woodchuck canters back; A bittern rises from the stream; Leaps from his lair a frightened deer; An otter plunges in the pool;— Here comes old Shawmut's pioneer, The parson ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... way, O'er stock and stone, through watch and ward. Till past Clan-Alpine's outmost guard, 75 As far as Coilantogle's ford; From thence thy warrant is thy sword."— "I take thy courtesy, by Heaven, As freely as 'tis nobly given!"— "Well, rest thee; for the bittern's cry 80 Sings us the lake's wild lullaby." With that he shook the gathered heath, And spread his plaid upon the wreath; And the brave foemen, side by side, Lay peaceful down, like brothers tried, 85 And slept until the dawning beam Purpled the mountain ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... wafers of suction take hold of his body, and a sense of great compression, as if he was being pulled through a mortar bed. He opened his eyes on the summit of a stalagmite in a vast thicket or swamp of overthrown and decaying trees. Birds of buried ages, whose long, bittern-like cries flopped wofully through the silence, made ever and anon a call to each other, like the Nemesis of century calling to century. One of these birds, having authority and standing on one leg, observed to Mr. Waples, in ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend |
