"Cormorant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... evidently not far removed from its reptilian ancestors—a bird that is at home under the water and hunts its prey there on the wing—is the black cormorant. There is a colony of several hundred of them on the face of a sea-cliff a ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... all day long They picked their scanty fare, a blackening train Of clamorous rooks thick urge their weary flight And seek the closing shelter of the grove, Assiduous, in his bower, the wailing owl Plies his sad song. The cormorant on high Wheels from the deep, and screams along the land. Loud shrieks the soaring heron, and with wild wing The circling sea-fowl cleave the flaky skies. Ocean, unequal pressed, with broken tide And blind commotion heaves, while from the shore, Eat into caverns by the restless wave And forest-rustling ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... have shown reason for believing that it was in his mind when one passage of his book was dictated.[10] The use of Tea, though he travelled through the Tea districts of Fo-kien, is never mentioned;[11] the compressed feet of the women and the employment of the fishing cormorant (both mentioned by Friar Odoric, the contemporary of his later years), artificial egg-hatching, printing of books (though the notice of this art seems positively challenged in his account of paper-money), besides a score of remarkable arts and customs which one would have ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... from the injurious influence, the stork placed in its nest some branches of the maple, which frightened away every intruding bat. [2] There is an amusing legend of the origin of the bramble:—The cormorant was once a wool merchant. He entered into partnership with the bramble and the bat, and they freighted a large ship with wool. She was wrecked, and the firm became bankrupt. Since that disaster the bat skulks about till midnight to avoid his creditors, the cormorant is for ever diving ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... gardens," as Charles Kingsley called them—as useful in the way of ornament, and pass their tanks without paying further heed to them. This is not the case with respect to the diving birds, which are beyond all question the centre of attraction in the fish-house. The birds comprise a darter, a cormorant, a guillemot, and a penguin. The first-named is seldom seen in this country. It is a largish bird with webbed feet, long thin neck, and spear-like bill. When swimming in the water with its body entirely submerged, it looks not unlike a snake forging along. Hence it is also known ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... water-colours. The first represented clouds low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea: all the distance was in eclipse; so, too, was the foreground; or, rather, the nearest billows, for there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-submerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam; its beak held a gold bracelet, set with gems, which I had touched with as brilliant tints as my pencil could impart. Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it.... They shall call the nobles thereof to the kingdom, but none shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing. And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... hunt after in their lives, Live registered upon our brazen tombs, And then grace us in the disgrace of death, When, spite of cormorant devouring time, The endeavor of this present breach may buy That honor, which shall bait his scythe's keen edge To make ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... country of his own servants, that they might not interfere with the flight. He promised to accompany Ralegh into France. Ralegh, with all his wit and experience of men, his wife, with her love and her clearness of vision, the shrewd French diplomatists, and honest King, were dupes of a mere cormorant, like Stukely, and of vulgar knaves, like Cottrell and Hart. Without the least suspicion of foul play Ralegh on that Sunday night, after le Clerc and de Novion had left, went down to ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... with a hen, with a cock, with a pullet, with a calf's skin, with a hare, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an attorney's bag, with a montero, with a coif, with a falconer's lure. But, to conclude, I say and maintain, that of all torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers, and ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... with his wings aslant, Sails the fierce cormorant, Seeking some rocky haunt, With his prey laden, So toward the open main, Beating to sea again, Through the wild ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... hake; more savory still that of roast porpoise; most savory of all that of fifty huge squab pies, built up of layers of apples, bacon, onions, and mutton, and at the bottom of each a squab, or young cormorant, which diffused both through the pie and through the ambient air a delicate odor of mingled guano and polecat. And the occasion was worthy alike of the smell and of the noise; for King Alef, finding that after the Ogre's death ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... of the port. Explanations, certainly when the luggage came; and off went Jan with a guide to get pack ponies. Halfway back to Alessio was the stable, but the steeds were not ready, so Jan was ushered up into a top room where was a huge fire, over which an Albanian was stewing a cormorant with all its feathers on. There were other Albanians and a very old Montenegrin soldier. He admired everything English, even Jan's tobacco which he ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... soulless thing which has become notoriously infamous as a "corporation." Around this thing, this engine of extortion and oppression, our laws have placed bulwarks which the defrauded laborer, the widow and orphan, and even the sovereign public, cannot overleap. Here is where Monopoly first shows its cormorant head. ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... fear no assault, In at the window climbs, or o'er the tiles: So clomb this first grand thief into God's fold; So since into his church lewd hirelings climb. Thence up he flew, and on the tree of life, The middle tree and highest there that grew, Sat like a cormorant; yet not true life Thereby regained, but sat devising death To them who lived; nor on the virtue thought Of that life-giving plant, but only used For prospect, what well used had been the pledge Of immortality. So little knows Any, but God alone, to value ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... and retain, at the same time, any, even the smallest degree of affection, for parents or brethren. You may supplicate, you may implore, you may leave yourself pennyless, and your virtuous children without bread; the invisible cormorant will still call for more; and, as we saw, only the other day, a wretch was convicted of having, at the instigation of his prostitute, beaten his aged mother, to get from her the small remains of the means necessary to provide her with food. In HERON'S collection of God's judgments on wicked ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... the skeleton, or cormorant, so to speak, of the banquet, eating them almost out of house and home, it must be mentioned in all due confidence; and, taking watch of his depravity of behaviour in this respect, the thoughtful Conny registered an inward determination never ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... that all hunt after in their lives, Live registered upon our brazen tombs, And then grace us in the disgrace of death; When, spite of cormorant devouring Time, The endeavour of this present breath may buy That honour which shall 'bate his scythe's keen edge, And make us ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... American pointed out a species of black shag or cormorant, which had evidently been on a fishing expedition and was returning home with the fruits of his spoil in his bill for the delectation of the ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... Mersey shell German right flank; Cattaro again bombarded by French fleet, attack of Austrian submarines being repulsed; German cruiser Emden sinks five British steamships and captures a sixth in Indian Ocean; British steamer Cormorant sunk. ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... since I see you passing every morning, noon and evening—precisely. Immured in my apartment for political reasons, I am reduced to this species of amusement; and this hook attached to this thread contained a grain of wheat. It floated far up, and some cormorant devoured it; then the wind ceasing, it had the misfortune ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... side of your mouth afore long," bawled back the skipper. "We ain't fur from the Cormorant Rocks; the wind p'r'aps will shove us on ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... The Cormorant is shaped very much like a duck, but its plumage is different and much more beautiful. This bird frequents the shores of the sea and of lakes, but rarely appears in rivers. Its usual food is fish; but as it is very voracious, it likewise eats dead ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... deep purple of the heather, broken here and there, perhaps, by a dark-green pine; and beyond those heights again rose the rounded tops and shoulders of the distant cloud-stained hills. It was after Miss Honnor had industriously but unsuccessfully fished the Horseshoe and the Cormorant Pool that she chanced to be regarding that mountainous line along the sky; and she then perceived that one of those far shoulders was gradually changing from a sombre blue into ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... what to be at with this poor old cormorant," he said, slow and cogitating. "I'm looking for a home for him. But there are no bidders. A bit too good a doer, I guess. Eat 'em out of ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... written by a woman who mothered an intellectual child of cormorant appetite. That child learned everything in sight from fairies to grease-traps. What was difficult to manage in that mass of whipcord mental fibre, was put into verse and sung. The book told how the child was ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... A cormorant, sitting on a rock near by, twisted its thin neck to stare fearlessly at the visitor. But Charles Turold was not thinking of cormorants. Where was Thalassa? Where was his wife? He believed they were still in Cornwall, but they might have left the ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... banished the numerous seals that played about the rock, they were now seen in great numbers, having been in an almost undisturbed state for six months. It had now also, for the first time, got some inhabitants of the feathered tribe: in particular the scarth or cormorant, and the large herring-gull, had made the beacon a resting-place, from its vicinity to their fishing-grounds. About a dozen of these birds had rested upon the cross-beams, which, in some places, were coated with their dung; and their flight, as the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the cuckoo, ever unkind; The popinjay, full of delicacy; The drake, destroyer of his owne kind; The stork, avenger of adultery; The cormorant, hot and full of gluttony The crows and ravens with their voice of care; And the throstle old, ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... torrent of his grief, he hires other mourners to accompany the corpse to the grave, and sing its requiem in sighs and lamentations; another hypocritically weeps at the funeral of one whose death at heart he rejoices for; here a gluttonous cormorant, whatever he can scrape up, thrusts all into his guts to pacify the cryings of a hungry stomach; there a lazy wretch sits yawning and stretching, and thinks nothing so desirable as sleep and idleness; some are extremely industrious in other men's business, and sottishly neglectful of their own; ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... peculiar to Cornwall, is made of leeks and pilchards, or of nettles, pepper cress, parsley, mustard, and spinach, with thin slices of pork. At the bottom of the Squab pie mentioned before was a Squab, or young Cormorant, "which diffused," says Charles Kingsley, "through the pie, and through the ambient air, a delicate odour of mingled guano and polecat." That "lovers live by love, as larks by leeks," is an old saying; and in the classic story of Pyramus and Thisbe, reference is ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... Autumn Painted all the trees with scarlet, Stained the leaves with red and yellow; He it was who sent the snow-flake, Sifting, hissing through the forest, Froze the ponds, the lakes, the rivers, Drove the loon and sea-gull southward, Drove the cormorant and curlew To their nests of sedge and sea-tang In the realms ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow |
