"Skylark" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Sometimes, young William, I envy the Indians. When the weather's right, an' the village is in a good place an' thar's plenty to eat you never see any happier fellers. The day's work an' huntin' over, they skylark 'roun' like boys havin' fun with all sorts o' little things. You wouldn't think they wuz the same men who could enjoy roastin' an enemy alive. Then, they ain't troubled a bit 'bout the future, either. Termorrer kin take care o' itself. I s'pose that's ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... summer of 1820 Mary had some of the delightful times she loved so dearly, of poetic wanderings with Shelley through woods and by the river, one of which she remembers long afterwards, when, making her note to the "Skylark," she recalls how she and Shelley, wandering through the lanes whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the firefly, heard the carolling of the skylark which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems. Precious memories which helped her through many after years devoid of the sympathy she ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... in them, and saucers holding what Violet, at home, would have called messes; the straw-bonnet lay on the floor, and beside it the Scotch terrier, who curled up his lips, showed his white teeth, and greeted the invaders with a growl, which became a bark as Arthur snapped his fingers at him. 'Ha! Skylark, that is bad manners. Where's your ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Horse Pegasus in Pound The Horse From "The Foray" On Landseer's Picture, "Waiting for Master" The Waterfowl Sea Fowl The Sandpiper The Birds of Killingworth The Magpie The Mocking-Bird Early Songs and Sounds The Sparrow's Note The Glow-Worm St. Francis to the Birds Wordsworth's Skylark Shelley's Skylark Hogg's Skylark The Sweet-Voiced Quire A Caged Lark The Woodlark Keats's Nightingale Lark and Nightingale Flight of the Birds A Child's Wish The Humming-Bird The Humming-Bird's Wedding The Hen and the Honey-Bee ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... mast-head and scan the horizon, and so did many others: but those who were stationed at the look-out were equally on the alert. The ship's company were now in a very fair state of discipline, owing to the incessant practice, and every evening the hands were turned up to skylark—that is, to play and amuse themselves. There was one amusement which was the occasion of a great deal of mirth, and it was a favourite one of the captain's, as it made the men smart. It is called, "Follow my leader." One of the men leads, and ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the long-drawn, half-human sigh of the mountain wind over the chimney seemed to mingle with the wail of the harmonium. And then, to their thrilled astonishment, a tenor voice, high, clear, but tenderly passionate, broke like a skylark over their heads in the lines of the ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... sweetest to memory of all nature's voices; then the American robin (the migratory thrush), a bold, cheery note, full of summer life; and after those the chief was the bobolink, singing up into the sky like the skylark, and with which we connected the ripening of the strawberry, the merriest and most rollicking of all bird songs, as that of the bluebird was the tenderest. Then came the hermit thrush, heard only in the depth of the forest, shy and remote in his life and nesting, and the whip-poor-will, in the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... covert, and the reeds and sedges of moors. The country people in some places call it the sedge-bird. It sings incessantly night and day during the breeding-time, imitating the note of a sparrow, a swallow, a skylark, and has a strange hurrying manner in its song. My specimens correspond most minutely to the description of your fen salicaria shot near Revesby. Mr. Ray has given an excellent characteristic ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... jasmine buds unfold And silver daisies star the lea, The crocus hoards the sunset gold, And the wild rose breathes for me. I feel the sap through the bough returning, I share the skylark's transport fine, I know the fountain's wayward yearning, I love, and the world ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... the Lixus," which he is observing in a cage, "continues, step by step, without the slightest emotion, his amorous by-play, as though nothing unusual were happening...The nightingale and the skylark may be silent, oppressed by fear; the bee may re-enter her hive; but is a weevil to be upset because the sun ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... that it was as disagreeable and agitating for her to sing in opera, as it was delightful in the concert-room; for here she poured forth her notes with such a genuine ecstasy in her own performance as that which seems to thrill the skylark or the nightingale. Though the circumstances of her marriage were of such a romantic kind, and she seems to have been deeply attached to her husband through life, M. Valle-bregue appears to have been a stupid, ignorant ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... and refinement? Oh, let 'em go home and eat coke. These fussy old footlers whose 'air stands on hend at a row-de-dow joke, The song of the skylark sounds pooty, but "skylarking" song's better fun, And you carn't do the rooral to-rights on a tract and ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... a very fine new kite that he and his father had made together. They named it the Skylark, because they thought it would fly higher than any of the other kites. But something was wrong. Instead of sailing up gracefully, as it should, the first time Bobby tried to fly it, the Skylark pitched about so violently that Bobby ...
— The Goody-Naughty Book • Sarah Cory Rippey
... winds the fallen leaves among." Then passed her tender thoughts, and loud and glad As our morn wakens, strong that yesternight slept sad, She sang. The song triumphant upward swelled, Unsorrowed by soft dreams or thoughts of eld— As fresh the full, free, mellow notes did rise As the blithe skylark's ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... position at Beetle Ring was not an enviable one. The men took scant pains to conceal their dislike for the young fellow who steadfastly refused to "chip in" when the camp jug was sent to the Skylark, the nearest saloon, some miles down the river, and who invariably declined to join in the camp's numerous sprees. But Bennett ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... everything went on as before—reading, working, and occasional conversation; but the subdued talking and moving about did not interfere with one's pleasure in the old man's musical speech any more than the soft murmur and flying about of honey bees would prevent one from enjoying the singing of a skylark. Emboldened by what I saw the others doing, I left my seat and made my way across the floor to Yoletta's side, stealing through the gloom with great caution to avoid making a clatter ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... in the great spaces. To idle together in the sweet fields of the mind—this is companionship, when thoughts come not by bidding, and argument is taboo; to have the mind as open as that of a child for all impressions, and speak as the skylark sings, this is the mood that ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... skylark! Just think of it, Hosy. I've heard a real lark. Well, Hephzibah Cahoon, you may never get into a book, but you're livin' among book things every day of your life. 'And singin' ever soars and soarin' ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Italy 1818; he was drowned on a voyage to welcome Leigh Hunt to Italy; his body burned on a funeral pyre in the presence of Byron, Hunt, and Trelawney. Some of his well-known poems are "Queen Mab," "Alastor," "The Revolt of Islam," "Prometheus Unbound," "Adonais," "To a Skylark," and "Ode to the West Wind"; he also wrote a poetical tragedy, ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... Sunday morning, and as fine a one as I can remember. It was in the month of May, and not likely to be otherwise than fine. The sun was shining brightly, and the birds filled the air with joyous music. The thrush and blackbird mingled their strong vigorous voices, with the mellowed trilling of the skylark, and over the fields could be heard almost continuously the call of the cuckoo—now here, now there, as the active creature plied her restless wing from one hedge-tree to another. There was a strong sweet perfume in the air like ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... the Frost is on the Stock Market and Wall Street is in the Shock, Milt and Henry would do a Skylark Ascension from the Home Nest and Wing ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... Turmutshire, CHARLIE, not this time; and now you know why. Carn't yer jest turn the tables, old hoyster, and come for a bit of a fly? Cut the chawbacons, run up to London, jine me, and we'll pal off to Parry; And if yer don't find it a 'Oliday Skylark, wy, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... "slimy things" that coil in the rotting sea; and the stages of his penance are marked by suggestions of his return to the privilege of human fellowship. The angels' music is like the song of the skylark, the sails ripple like a leaf-hidden brook—recollections of his happy boyhood in. England; and finally comes the actual land breeze, and he is in his "own countree." Observe the ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... "of a fellow we had in the office once, whose name was Hill. He was a black-faced, solemn-looking genius, and the look of him would sink the spirits of a skylark down to zero. 'What's come over you?' said Woodruff to me one fine afternoon, when I was feeling a bit bilious. 'Oh,' said I, 'I've been within the shadow of this Hill,' and he laughed till he was black in ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... Evening Grosbeak, the Kentucky Warbler, the Skylark, land birds all, are singers. They have music in their throats and in their souls, though of varying quality. The Grosbeak's note is described by different observers as a shrill cheepy tee and a frog-like peep, while one writer remarks ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... said, "I must run down to the barn and look after Skylark's foot. He cut himself when I was out on ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... was reading, in illustration of something, Wordsworth's poem, "To a Skylark," the earlier of the two with that title: when he came to the ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... burn, far away yonder where the pines stood by the sea, and how the flames had curled around the heart that men had done their best to break, and how it had remained unburnt in the midst, whilst all the rest drifted in ashes down the wind. He knew nought of the Skylark's ode, and nought of the Cor Cordium; but the scene by the seashore had burned itself as though with flame into his mind, and he spoke of it a thousand times if once, sitting by the edge of the sea that ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... nor Buddha could help or save me. One in his exquisite balance of body, a skylark-like song of eternal beauty, stood lightly advancing; the other sat in sombre contemplation, calm as a beautiful evening. I looked for sorrow in the eyes of the pastel—the beautiful pastel that seemed to fill with ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... on the flood; Fingers of frost where late the hawthorn cover Burgeoned with bud. Yet in the drift the patient primrose hiding, Yet in the stream the glittering troutlet gliding, Yet from the root the sap still upward springing, Yet overhead one faithful skylark singing, "Spring ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... arise, And make happy the skies; The merry bells ring To welcome the Spring; The skylark and thrush, The birds of the bush, Sing louder around To the bells' cheerful sound; While our sports shall be seen On ...
— Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience • William Blake
... day should pass, Without some kindness kindly shown,' The preacher said. Then down to the grass A skylark ...
— Eric - or, Under the Sea • Mrs. S. B. C. Samuels
... a skylark, so sprang Ivan at Gavryl, saying: "I will tear you into pieces! You shall not get away ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... When the artist thinks too little he lacks sense, when he thinks too much he loses fire. In the very highest and most strangely mysterious poetical flights of SHELLEY and KEATS, or WORDSWORTH, I find the very same Instinct which inspires the skylark and nightingale, but more or less allied to and strengthened by Thought or Consciousness. If human Will or Wisdom alone directed all our work, then every man who had mere patience might be a great original genius, and it is indeed true that Man can do inconceivably ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... not know how old that skylark was, but here was he, Savage Keith Rickman, played out at three and twenty. Was it, he wondered, the result, not of ordinary inebriety, but of the finer excesses of the soul? Was he a precocious genius? Had he taken to ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... writer, he is satisfied with nothing less than perfection. For that reason, a masterpiece from his pen has become almost an annual event. We know you will like "Spacehounds" even better than the "Skylark" series. ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... every throb responsive that My ardent spirit thrills Could, like the skylark's ecstasy, Be vocal in sweet melody, Beyond dividing hills In octaves of the atmosphere Were ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... to Chaulieu's wanton lyre; While, fluent as the skylark sings When first the morn allures its wings, The epicure his theme pursues: And tell me if, among the choir Whose music charms the banks of Seine, So full, so free, so rich a strain ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... see the skylark soar Nor hear the cuckoo nor the linnet, When Springtime comes, above the roar Of folk a-hollering each minute For yarn at thirty-two times more Than what I spent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... faded flowers drop from the home letter. The flowers are poor enough, and dead enough, but they once grew in a home garden, or blossomed in an English meadow. One of our great novelists tells us how two men in Australia walked many weary miles only to listen to the song of the skylark. That homely bird was precious in their eyes because it reminded them of home. I have read that when Swiss soldiers are abroad, they are not allowed to play, or listen to, their national airs. The music reminds them of their cow-bells ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... the skylark stuff, He praised the bird a few, And Shelley's ode sincerely showed ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... was no wondering what to say. By the time the lamb fell asleep questions poured forth and Dickon answered them all. He told them how he had found the lamb just as the sun was rising three mornings ago. He had been standing on the moor listening to a skylark and watching him swing higher and higher into the sky until he was only a speck in the heights ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... trains. They pushed on resolutely, grimly, like blind worms following some directing force from within. This peculiarity of action became more noticeable day by day. We were not on the trail, after all, to hunt, or fish, or skylark. We had set our eyes on a distant place, and toward it our feet moved, even ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... and again Lowell's extravaganza upon the story of Daphne, and can hear grandmother's laugh over his delicious puns. I can hear her voice as she reads Shelley's musical Arethusa, and then turns to his Skylark to compare their musical qualities. I feel downright sorry for the boy who has no such grandmother to teach him these poems, but not more sorry than I do for those boys who took that Diamond Dick book with them when they went visiting. Even now, ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... want my skylark. [As he steps up to her and takes the cage—thoroughly alarmed] I gave Bobbie thrippence ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of his power, a man of the very first rank, should have been content—even placidly content—to exercise it within a range by no means narrow, but plainly circumscribed, is certainly witness of limitation. "Delacroix is an eagle, I am only a skylark," he remarked once, with his characteristic cheeriness. His range is not, it is true, as circumscribed as is generally supposed outside of France. Outside of France his figure-painting, for example, is almost unknown. We see chiefly variations of his green and gray arbored pastoral—now idyllic, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... year is young, what sweets are flung By the violets, hiding, dim, And the lilac that sways her censers high, Whilst the skylark chants a hymn! How sweet is the scent of the daffodil bloom, When blithe spring decks each spray, And the flowering thorn sheds rare perfume Through the beautiful month of May! What a dainty pet is the mignonette, Whose sweets wide scattered are! But sweeter to me ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... "We all skylark together in the dog-watches," added another. "We put a seining-net round the quarter-deck, and play cricket or deck hockey every evening after tea to ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... of earth. The skylark springs Far up to catch thy glory on his wings; And thou dost bless him first that highest soars. The bee comes forth to see thee; and the flowers Worship thee all day long, and through the skies Follow thy journey with their ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... years, having no desire unfulfilled, and taking his part of every pleasure that wealth, high birth, and a splendid body can give him, may well ride gaily over a good white road and have leisure to throw back his head to hearken to a skylark soaring in the high blue heavens above him, to smile at a sitting bird's bright eyes peeping timidly at him from under the thick leafage of a hazel hedge, or at the sight of a family of rabbits scurrying over the ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... eating them is dainty and induces musing. The dewberry is a sister to the lotus, and an innocent sister. You eat: mouth, eye, and hand are occupied, and the undrugged mind free to roam. And so it was with the damsel who knelt there. The little skylark went up above her, all song, to the smooth southern cloud lying along the blue: from a dewy copse dark over her nodding hat the blackbird fluted, calling to her with thrice mellow note: the kingfisher ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in the midst of the explanation the curtain rose again. "You can't be a great artist without a great passion!" Madame Blumenthal was affirming. Before I had time to assent Madame Patti's voice rose wheeling like a skylark, and rained down its silver notes. "Ah, give me that art," I whispered, "and I will leave you your passion!" And I departed for my own place in the orchestra. I wondered afterwards whether the speech had seemed rude, and inferred that it had not on receiving ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... when Dorothy arose a song came from her heart as it comes from the skylark when it sees the sun at dawn—because it cannot help singing. It awakened Aunt Dorothy, and she began to live her life anew, in brightness, as she steeped her soul in the youth and joyousness of ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... knees and knotty hands made their kneeling real acts of devotional zeal. There were a dozen such altars and groups scattered over the perpendicular slant of the hill. The singing of the choir-boys, rising like skylark notes into the clear space of heaven, would be floating from one rocky-nested chapel, while below, in the one beneath which we, for a moment, were resting, there would be the groaning murmur of the peasant ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... paused, while she sat mute In the soft shadow of the apple-tree; The skylark's song rang like a joyous flute, The brook went prattling past her restlessly: She let their tongues be her tongue's substitute; It was the wind that sighed, it was not she: And what the lark, the brook, the wind, had said, We ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... no road; no paths, fences, hedges, walls; no land-marks of any sort. All round us, turn which way we might, nothing was to be seen but the majestic solitude of the hills. No living creatures appeared but the white dots of sheep scattered over the soft green distance, and the skylark singing his hymn of happiness, a speck above my head. Truly a wonderful place! Distant not more than a morning's drive from noisy and populous Brighton—a stranger to this neighborhood could only have found his way by ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... Jeanne, of course. You remind me of a bird. You have all the quick and easy graces of the skylark. Why should you not ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... (for, of course he was so called, as Tom said he would be) were as jolly as possible, and laughed at sea-sickness, or any of the ills landsmen are subject to; they were not going to be ill, not they. Already they began to consider themselves first-rate sailors, for they could go aloft and skylark as fearlessly as young monkeys, and box the compass; and had some notion when the helm was a-lee, and the head-sails backed against the mast, that the ship would come about. As yet, to be sure, they had ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... in our literature which have no palpable or deducible philosophy; but they are the utterance of deep, serious, imaginative natures, and they reach our minds and hearts. Wordsworth's "Daffodils," his "Cuckoo," his "Skylark," and scores of others, live because they have the freshness and spontaneity of birds and ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... dreams did I think I should live to do the same thing, to go where I listed; to fly like a bird, high above the clouds. It was like an adventure in fairyland to take this weird and wonderful creation of men, called an aeroplane, through the home of the skylark. ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... man in the standing-room of the Sea Foam was Samuel Rodman, a schoolmate of Donald, whose father was a wealthy man, and had ordered another boat like the Skylark, which had been the model for the new yacht. He had come down to see the craft, and had been invited to take a sail in her; but an engagement had prevented him from going as far as Turtle Head, and the boat-builder ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... musical expression unattainable by the Western chromatic scale of 12 semitones. Each one of the seven basic notes of the octave is associated in Hindu mythology with a color, and the natural cry of a bird or beast-DO with green, and the peacock; RE with red, and the skylark; MI with golden, and the goat; FA with yellowish white, and the heron; SOL with black, and the nightingale; LA with yellow, and the horse; SI with a combination of all colors, ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... must be made upon the threshold of Dickens criticism. Let them really read the thing and really see whether the humour is the gross and half-witted jeering which they imagine it to be. It is exactly here that the whole genius of Dickens is concerned. His subjects are indeed stock subjects; like the skylark of Shelley, or the autumn of Keats. But all the more because they are stock subjects the reader realises what a magician is at work. The notion of a clumsy fellow who falls off his horse is indeed a stock and stale subject. But Mr. Winkle is not a stock and stale subject. Nor is his ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... music. With those critics perhaps most of us agree, when we read books that gossip about Shelley, or Coleridge, or Byron. "Give us their poetry," we say, "and leave their characters alone: we do not want tattle about Claire and chatter about Harriet; we want to be happy with 'The Skylark' or 'The Cloud.'" Possibly this instinct is correct, where such a poet as Shelley is concerned, whose life, like his poetry, was as "the life of winds and tides," whose genius, unlike the skylark's, was more true to the point of heaven than the ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... would have been lacking. Sometimes the original manuscript turns up—unfortunately not in Shakespeare's case—to confute some or all of the ingenious editors. A learned professor changed the word "unbodied" in Shelley's "Skylark" to "embodied," and some critics approved the change; but the poet's manuscript in the Harvard University Library makes the former reading clear beyond question. One might say that in these cases the Imp of the Perverse plants himself like a fatal microbe in the brain of the unfortunate editor. ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... Mr. Harrod added that if Dr. Service would promise to come in the morning and attend to the matter, the government would take his word and let the witness go for the night. The doctor promised, and Jimmie was told that he was free till ten o'clock next morning. He went out like a skylark ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... were never seen by me till after I had lost him. Others, as for instance "Rosalind and Helen" and "Lines written among the Euganean Hills", I found among his papers by chance; and with some difficulty urged him to complete them. There are others, such as the "Ode to the Skylark and The Cloud", which, in the opinion of many critics, bear a purer poetical stamp than any other of his productions. They were written as his mind prompted: listening to the carolling of the bird, aloft in the azure sky of Italy; or marking the cloud as ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... all Kate Croy—a young person blessedly easy to take care of. She knew people, and people knew her, and she was the handsomest thing there—this last a declaration made by Milly, in a sort of soft mid-summer madness, a straight skylark-flight of charity, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... English and French contemporaries, and particularly in his descriptions of what he had never seen or experienced, but only read about. Take, for instance, his Australian scenes in "It is Never Too Late to Mend," where the effect of the song of the English skylark in the gold-diggings is told with touching brevity and pathos. Yet all his information concerning Australia had been gained by reading newspaper correspondence and books on that country. He made no secret of this, and said in substance, as frankly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... abstraction. His poems are not lyrics of life, but of an ideal world. His tendency was to insulate qualities or feelings, and hold them up to the mental vision as personalities. The words which he has addressed to his own skylark fitly describe his mind as it soared in the ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... arrived; and though winter lingered in spates, the song of the skylark and the thrush heralded the spring. When the dream-like voice of the cuckoo should be heard once more, Peter and Margaret had determined to take a long summer trip. They were to go first to Perth, where Captain Thorkald was stationed, and then to Glasgow and see Ronald. But God had ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... the other hand, is most satisfying and original when his individual spirit forms in night, cloud, skylark, and wind are made to sing, not as a reflection of his own mood, but as these spirit forces might themselves be supposed to sing, if they could express their song in human language without the aid of a poet. In the lyric, The Cloud, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... a drab or a Tory To hear critics disputing my claim to Empedocles, Maud, and the Laboratory. Yes, it's singular—nay, I can't think of a parallel (ain't it a high lark? As that Countess would say)—there are few men believe it was I wrote the Ode to a Skylark. And it often has given myself and Lord Albert no end of diversion To hear fellows maintain to my face it was Wordsworth who wrote the Excursion, When they know that whole reams of the verses recur in my authorized works Here and there, ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... circumstances we may owe the existence of Charles Lamb's letters, their quality is of course the fruit of the genius and temperament of the writer. Unpremeditated as the strain of the skylark, they have almost to excess (were that possible) the prime epistolary merit of spontaneity. From the brain of the writer to the sheet before him flows an unbroken Pactolian stream. Lamb, at his best, ranges with Shakspearian facility ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... amazement, their small guide stood rooted to the spot. "A skylark!" he muttered, staring at the four in their attitude of devotion. "Lookin' at a skylark!" he repeated as though unable to credit the testimony ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... Through the open casement, the scent of the pines blows in with the breeze from the neighbouring firwood. Keen airs sigh through the pine-needles. Grasshoppers chirp from deep tangles of bracken. The song of a skylark drops from the sky like soft rain in summer; in the evening, a nightjar croons to us his monotonously passionate love-wail from his perch on the gnarled boughs of the wind-swept larch that crowns the upland. But away below in the valley, ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... even in daylight fights. The broad white gun-deck, scrubbed to a gleaming white by hollystone and limejuice, on which the salt-water sailors gathered for their mess or drill, was replaced by a cramped room, with the roof hardly high enough to let the jolly tars skylark beneath without banging their skulls against some projecting beam. Truly it may be said, that, if the great civil war made naval architecture more powerful, it also robbed the war-vessels of all ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... than "The Choir Invisible." There is no poetry in the "beyond." The poetry is here—here in this world, where love is in the heart. The poetry of the beyond is too far away, a little too general. Shelley's "Skylark" was in our sky, the daisy of Burns grew on our ground, and between that lark and that daisy is room for all the real ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... shameless literary man does without any excuse. Sport is speechless poetry. It would be easy for a foreigner, by taking a few liberties with the facts, to make a satire about the sort of silent Shelley who decides ultimately to shoot the skylark. It would be easy to answer these poetic suggestions by saying that he himself might be responsible for ruining the choirs where late the sweet birds sang, or that the immortal bird was likely to be mortal when he was out with his gun. ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... clean, shining little kitchen, with the scoured deal table, chairs and cupboard, and the firelight from the grate winked so on pewter mugs, copper kettle, willow-patterned plates and diamond panes, that Bobby blinked too. Flowers bloomed in pots on the casement sills, and a little brown skylark sang, fluttering as if it would soar, in a gilded cage. After the morning meal Mr. Brown lighted his pipe and put on his bonnet to go out again, when he bethought him that Bobby might be needing something ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... resemble all their spurge relations. Adaptive likenesses of this sort, due to mere stress of local conditions, have no more weight as indications of real relationship than the wings of the bat or the nippers of the seal, which don't make the one into a skylark, or the other into ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... commenced to labour the moment he entered, and he never ceased, except during a short period for "kroust," until it was time to shoulder his tools, and mount to the regions of light. Above ground, he was as ready to skylark as the most volatile of his companions, but underground he was a pattern of perseverance—a true Cornish miner in miniature. His energy of character was doubtless due to his reckless father, but his ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... going on in the pilot-house. Island No. 63—an island with a lovely 'chute,' or passage, behind it in the former times. They said Jesse Jamieson, in the 'Skylark,' had a visiting pilot with him one trip—a poor old broken-down, superannuated fellow—left him at the wheel, at the foot of 63, to run off the watch. The ancient mariner went up through the chute, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... we had for some months on board, soon perceived this, and used to mock him: Jemmy, who was always rather jealous of the attention paid to this little boy, did not at all like this, and used to say, with rather a contemptuous twist of his head, "Too much skylark." It seems yet wonderful to me, when I think over all his many good qualities, that he should have been of the same race, and doubtless partaken of the same character, with the miserable, degraded savages whom we first met here. Lastly, Fuegia Basket was a nice, modest, ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... music of thy soul Breathes in the cloud and in the skylark's song, That float as an embodied dream along The dewy lids of Morning. In the dole That haunts the west wind, in the joyous roll Of Arethusan fountains, or among The wastes where Ozymandias the strong Lies in colossal ruin, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... his real triumphs over circumstance and his own weaker self were won. The influences at work upon a man whose life is spent on the sea are as different from those at work upon one who lives on the fields as the environment of a gannet is different from the environment of a skylark: and yet how often do we really attempt to make due allowance for this great factor and try to estimate the extent of its ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... poem—"The Raven:" a piece in which the music is highly artificial, and the "exaltation" (what there is of it) by no means particularly "vague." So a portion of the public know little of Shelley but the "Skylark," and those two incongruous birds, the lark and the raven, bear each of them a poet's name, vivu' per ora virum. Your theory of poetry, if accepted, would make you (after the author of "Kubla Khan") the foremost of the poets of the world; ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... That is to say, you watch a bird flying into a bush and guess where its nest is, and follow it up and find the nest. With some birds it is a most difficult thing to find their nests; take, for instance, the skylark or the snipe. But those who know the birds, especially the snipe, will recognize their call. The snipe when she is alarmed gives quite a different call from when she is happy and flying about. She has a particular call when she has young ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... a hook. And woe to the land if his cross be disturbed, for then, the peasant will tell you, the cattle die of plague and the crops fail. A little further on, just beyond Soroe, a village church rears twin towers above the wheat-field where the skylark soars and sings to its nesting mate. For seven hundred years the story of that church and its builder has been told at Danish firesides, and the time will never ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... hundreds of times, my children, and so have I. When I was a child I thought there was nothing so sweet; and I think so still. It was just the song of a skylark, mounting higher and higher from the ground, till it came so close that Prince Dolor could distinguish his quivering wings and tiny body, almost too tiny to contain such a ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... silence fell, like sudden sleep, On all the Fians waiting there In sharp suspense and half despair ... The morn was still. A skylark hung In mid-air flutt'ring, and sung A lullaby that grew more sweet Amid the stillness, in the heat And splendour of the sun: the lisp Of faint wind in the herbage crisp Went past them; and around the bare And foam-striped sand-banks gleaming fair, The ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... telling His love-tale to his mate; And the merry skylark swelling The choir at 'heaven's gate.' The cuckoo away in the thicket Is giving his two old notes; And the pet doves hung by the wicket Are talking with ruffled throats. The honey-bee hums as he lingers Where shadows on clover heads fall; And the wind with leaf-tipped fingers, ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... interesting and instructive to compare the tributes to the mocking-bird with Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale', Shelley's 'To a Skylark', and Wordsworth's 'To ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... bird in Mexico, says of his song (in "Mexican Notes"): "Its long, liquid, full-throated note is more sweet and thrilling than any other bird note I have ever heard; it is hardly a song, but a flood of melody, elevating, inspiring as the skylark, but with a touch of the tender melancholy of the ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... Come, come, my little skylark must not droop her wings. What is this! Is my little squirrel out of temper? (Taking out his purse.) Nora, what do you think I have ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... had commenced in the afternoon: and the following morning the ship's company were electrified by a general order, thus set forth and declared: "D'ye hear there, for and aft! all hands skylark!" ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... very learned lady; and, though the lines are irregular, and the thoughts diffused with too much verbosity, yet it cannot be denied to contain both philosophical argument and poetical spirit. Of the rest I cannot think any excellent; the "Skylark" pleases me best, which has, however, more of the ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... sunk so deeply into all hearts, the Shepherd might be singing among the wild mountains the affecting and popular ditty, the truth of which touched his own heart so powerfully, of "The moon was a' waning," or saying to the skylark— ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of cow-bells came soothingly to him. An owl called a little way off. Swallows flashed by in long graceful flights. A bat circled near, indecisively, as if with a message it hesitated to give. Once he heard the flute-like warble of a skylark. ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... rock," cried young "Skylark" as soon as he reached the top-gallant-yard and had taken the glass from his shoulders, across which he had slung it ...
— The Junior Classics • Various |
