"Skylark" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dewberries. Indeed the act of 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 flashed emerald out of green osiers: a bow-winged heron travelled aloft, seeking solitude ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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
... 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 escaping from ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... are really abundant on the Nilgiris are the black crow, the sparrow, the white-eye, the Madras bulbul, the myna, the purple sunbird, the tailor-bird, the ashy wren-warbler, the rufous-backed shrike, the white-browed fantail flycatcher, the Indian pipit, the Indian skylark, the common kingfisher, the pied crested cuckoo, the scavenger vulture, the Pondicherry vulture, the white-backed vulture, the shikra, the spotted dove, and ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... hard fight, and now at last it was won. To me the whole battle with the slum had summed itself up in the struggle with this dark spot. The whir of the lawn-mower was as sweet a song in my ear as that which the skylark sang when I was a boy, in Danish fields, and which gray hairs do ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... rest I cannot think any excellent: the Skylark pleases me best, which has, however, more of the epigram ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... the most remarkable birds of the West seems to be a species of skylark, met with on the plains of Dakota, which mounts to the height of three or four hundred feet, and showers down its ecstatic notes. It is evidently akin to several of ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... poet 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 had killed ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the road grew white, and the walls likewise; and at the wall's foot grew long grass and gay flowers, all drenched with dew; and instead of the groaning of the pit engines, they heard the skylark saying his matins high up in the air, and the pit bird warbling in the sedges as he ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... self-made man. The strongly marked and energetic swing of the rhythm, fitting in so well with the vigorous out-of-door experiences suggested, has made "A Boy's Song" a great favorite. Other poems of his that are still read are "The Skylark" and the verse fairy ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... we know not; What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see, As from thy presence showers a rain of melody." SHELLEY'S "SKYLARK." ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... out to sea and again we were living the life of seiners, having it hard and easy in streaks. There were the times when we went along for a week and did not do a tap but eat, sleep, stand a trick at the wheel, a watch to the mast-head, and skylark around the deck, and read, or have a quiet game of draw or whist or seven-up below. But again there were times when we were on fish, and our skipper being a driver, it was jump, jump, jump for a week on end. There was that time ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... 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
... stalking. For instance, if you want to find a bird's-nest you have to stalk. 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 ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... muscovy duck, or dodo, trying to keep pace with a humming-bird. Their voices were well suited to their small brilliant forms; not loud, though high-pitched and singularly musical and penetrative, like the high clear notes of a skylark at a distance. They also reminded me of certain notes, which have a human quality, in some of our songsters—the swallow, redstart, pied wagtail, whinchat, and two or three others. Such pure and beautiful sounds are sometimes heard in human voices, chiefly in children, when they ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... Mary and Jane on the steps, and Susanna saw with astonishment that her needles were moving to and fro and she was knitting as serenely and correctly as a mother in Israel; singing, too, in a delicate little treble that was like a skylark's morning note. Susanna could hear her distinctly as she delightedly flung out the long words so dear to her soul and so difficult to dull ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... "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 ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... 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 with ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... in which he included its American recruits, and included above 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, to ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... 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
... by my friend, the Skylark," said the Grasshopper, who just then happened to be on a leaf near her. "He is a very good-tempered bird, and ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... more," said Carew, sternly, "I shall call thee Master Skylark from this time forth—dost hear? And when I bid thee go, thou'lt go; and when I bid thee come, thou'lt come; and when I say, 'Here, follow me!' thou'lt follow like a dog to heel!" He drew up his lip until his white teeth showed, and Nick, ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... 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 ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... An early poem on The Bobolink, delightful and widely popular, was omitted from later editions of his poems by Lowell, perhaps because to his maturer taste the theme was too much moralized in his early manner. "Shelley and Wordsworth," says Mr. Brownell, "have not more worthily immortalized the skylark than Lowell has the bobolink, its ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... guard the sumac; but his eyes were wide open to all that went on around him, and he envied the blackbird his glossy, devoted little sweetheart, with all his might. He almost strained his voice trying to rival the love-song of a skylark that hung among the clouds above a meadow across the river, and poured down to his mate a story of adoring love and sympathy. He screamed a "Chip" of such savage jealousy at a pair of killdeer lovers that he sent them scampering down the river bank without knowing ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... this playful flight of the Woodcock without interest; and it is remarkable that a bird with short wings and difficult flight should be capable of mounting to so great an altitude. It affords me a vivid conception of the pleasure with which I should witness the soaring and singing of the Skylark, known to me only by description. I have but to imagine the chirruping of the Woodcock to be a melodious series of notes, to feel that I am listening to that bird, which is so familiarized to our imaginations by English poetry that in our early days we always expect his greetings with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... wood pigeons, soon absorbed even the echo of the young human voices passing away. A light breeze stirred the tender green grass, shaking down a shower of pink almond bloom as it swept fan-like through the luminous air,—a skylark half lost in the brilliant blue, began to descend earthwards, flinging out a sparkling fountain of music with every quiver of his jewel- like wings, and away in the sheltered shade of a small hazel copse, the faint ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... 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 ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... character will occur to anyone who has read much poetry. There is a notable example in Shelley's 'Skylark.' ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... Perch and the Sturgeon feign death; according to Couch,[42] the Landrail, the Skylark, the Corncrake adopt the same device. Among mammals, the best-known example is probably ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... 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, reserved ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... people living in the Southwest will lead fuller and richer lives if they become aware of what it holds. I once thought that, so far as reading goes, I could live forever on the supernal beauty of Shelley's "The Cloud" and his soaring lines "To a Skylark," on the rich melancholy of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," on Cyrano de Bergerac's ideal of a free man, on Wordsworth's philosophy of nature—a philosophy that has illuminated for me the mesquite ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... the physical spleen of 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 ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 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
... 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, "The Cenci." ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... that state in which we all are before sorrow comes, to test the temper of the metal of which our souls are made, when the spirits are unbroken and the heart buoyant, when a fresh morning is to a young heart what it is to the skylark. The exuberant burst of joy seems a spontaneous hymn to the Father of all blessing, like the matin carol of the bird; but this is not religion: it is the instinctive utterance of happy feeling, having as little of moral character in it, in the happy human being, ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... has been telling us you have a voice like a skylark,' observed Elspeth, 'but I have been thinking it must be more like an angel's voice, my bairn, since you mostly use it to sing the Lord's praises, and to cheer the sick folk round you: that is more ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... 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, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... stand straight into the sky. Let the road, thin and white, wander on alone; we shall meet it again, and it shall lead us if it will to some comfortable inn; but now we are for the footpath and the stile—we are to stand in the fields and listen to the skylark. ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... I remember the days of which my husband has written—our childhood in the old Danish town where to this day, in spite of my love for America, the air seems fresher, the meadows greener, the sea more blue, and where above it all the skylark sings his song clearer, softer, and sweeter than anywhere else in the world! I—it is too bad that we cannot tell our own stories without all the time talking about ourselves, but it is so, and there is no help for it. Well, then, I was a happy ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... knitting; When glow-worms twinkle under coverts dark, And silver clouds o'er summer stars are flitting, With jocund elves invade "the Moone's sphere, Or hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear;"* Or, list! what time the roseate urns of dawn Scatter fresh dews, and the first skylark weaves Joy into song, the blithe Arcadian Faun Piping to wood-nymphs under Bromian leaves, While slowly gleaming through the purple glade Come Evian's panther car, and ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... Lovers," and none loftier or purer 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 ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... and conventional narrating thereof. According to them, no doubt, it is for the man to talk and the maid to listen; but I state the facts as they were, honestly. And Lily knew no more of the formalities of drawing-room life than a skylark fresh from its nest knows of the song-teacher and the cage. She was still so much of a child. Mrs. Braefield was right—her mind was ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... eve! The morn was racked with storm: 'Tis past; the skylark sings; the tide at flood Sighs a soft joy: alone those lines of weed Report the wrath foregone. Yon watery plain Far shines, a mingled sea of glass and fire, Even as that Beatific Sea outspread Before the Throne of God. 'Tis Paschal ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... on this skylark in the Barnum were Alfred Ford, of the Graphic; Edmund Lyons, of the Sun; Samuel MacKeever, of the Herald; W. W. Austin, of the World (every one of these good fellows now dead, alas!) and myself, ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... Shelley's poems, are his lyrics. 'The Skylark' and 'The Cloud' are among the most dazzling and unique of all outbursts of poetic genius. Of the 'Ode to the West Wind,' a succession of surging emotions and visions of beauty swept, as if by the wind itself, through the vast spaces of the world, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... hilltops? At Perugia, last spring, through weeks of tramontana, how one yearned for the sight of yellow English primroses! Not love England, indeed! Milton's England, Shelley's England; the England of the skylark, the dog-rose, the honeysuckle! Not love England, forsooth! Why, I love every flower, every blade of grass in it. Devonshire lane, close-cropped down, rich water-meadow, bickering brooklet: ah me, how they tug at one's heartstrings in Africa! No son of the soil can ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... in his culinary profession, I believe, as well as from his innate sense of hospitality, the ex-cook will—as regularly as he was accustomed to do on board ship in his caboose, towards the end of the second dog-watch, when, you may recollect, the hands were allowed to skylark and divert themselves—take up his banjo, which is the identical same one that he brought home with him from ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... suffocation, while utterance intensifies experience and leads to fresh expression; religion, like Shelley's Skylark, "singing still doth soar, and soaring ever singeth." Above all, the instinct for the Unseen is developed by exercise; obedience to our heavenly visions sharpens the eyes of the heart. Charles Lamb pictures his sister and himself "with a taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit." ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... varieties, whose stiffened or rheumatic 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 ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... occupies the second place to the nightingale in British poetical literature is the skylark, a pastoral bird as the Philomel is an arboreal,— a creature of light and air and motion, the companion of the plowman, the shepherd, the harvester,—whose nest is in the stubble and whose tryst is in the clouds. Its life affords that kind of contrast which the imagination loves,—one ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... the skylark down, And it hears the singing of the town; And youth on the highways And lovers in byways Follows and sees: And hearkens the song of the leas And sings the songs ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Jeanne, of course. You remind me of a bird. You have all the quick and easy graces of the skylark. Why should you not ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... the hills, in the hour of our tryst!" came the far-away answer of the woman's voice, faint and plaintive as an echo, soft and sweet and clear as the notes of the skylark, falling in silvery, rippling cadences of melody from out the gold, ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown |
