Cassell's popular natural history, 3–4. köide;128. köide

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Page 103 - Tis the merry Nightingale That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates With fast thick warble his delicious notes; As he were fearful that an April night Would be too short for him to utter forth His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul Of all its music...
Page 164 - While birds, and butterflies, and flowers, Make all one band of paramours, Thou, ranging up and down the bowers, Art sole in thy employment: A Life, a Presence like the Air, Scattering thy gladness without care, Too blest with any one to pair; Thyself thy own enjoyment.
Page 103 - But never elsewhere in one place I knew So many Nightingales ; and far and near, In wood and thicket, over the wide grove, They answer and provoke each other's song, With skirmish and capricious passagings, And murmurs musical and swift jug jug, And one low piping Sound more sweet than all — Stirring the air with such an harmony, That should you close your eyes, you might almost Forget it was not day!
Page 164 - BENEATH these fruit-tree boughs that shed Their snow-white blossoms on my head, With brightest sunshine round me spread Of spring's unclouded weather, In this sequestered nook how sweet To sit upon my orchard-seat, And birds and flowers once more to greet, My last year's friends together...
Page 235 - Thrice welcome, darling of the spring! Even yet thou art to me No bird, but an invisible thing, A voice, a mystery; The same whom in my schoolboy days I listened to; that cry Which made me look a thousand ways In bush', and tree, and sky.
Page 101 - Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky, In joyless fields and thorny thickets, leaves His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man His annual visit. Half afraid, he first Against the window beats; then, brisk, alights On the warm hearth; then, hopping o'er the floor, Eyes all the smiling family askance, And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is; Till more familiar grown, the table-crumbs Attract his slender feet.
Page 142 - Leave to the nightingale her shady wood ; A privacy of glorious light is thine; Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood Of harmony, with instinct more divine; Type of the wise who soar, but never roam; True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home...
Page 334 - Part loosely wing the region; part, more wise, In common, ranged in figure, wedge their way, Intelligent of seasons, and set forth Their aery caravan, high over seas Flying, and over lands, with mutual wing Easing their flight...
Page 8 - No part of its behaviour ever struck me more than the extreme timidity it always expresses with regard to rain ; for though it has a shell that would secure it against the wheel of a loaded cart, yet does it discover as much solicitude about rain as a lady dressed in all her best attire, shuffling away on the first sprinklings, and running its head up in a corner.
Page 245 - I would have broke mine eye-strings, crack'd them, but To look upon him, till the diminution Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle ; Nay, followed him, till he had melted from The smallness of a gnat to air; and then Have turn'd mine eye, and wept.

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