"Cicada" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... appearing out of the black shadows and when looked for, noiselessly vanishing again in their mysterious ghost-like manner. Not a sound disturbed the silence except the faint, melancholy trill of one small night-singing cicada from somewhere near—a faint, aerial voice that seemed to be wandering lost in infinite space, rising and floating away in its loneliness, while earth listened, hushed into preternatural stillness. Presently a large owl came noiselessly flying by, and, perching on the topmost boughs of ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... over a small tobacco-shop in York—which has no authority, and on etymological grounds is indefensible. The derivation of "cigar" is not altogether clear; but the probabilities are strongly in favour of its connexion with "cigarra," the Spanish name for the cicada, the shrilly-chirping insect familiar in the southern countries of Europe, and the subject of frequent allusions by the ancient writers of Greece and Rome, as well as by modern scribes. A Spanish lexicographer of authority says that ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... thou gav'st a field to till; I have a larger on my window-sill. A farm, d'ye say? Is this a farm to you, Where for all woods I spay one tuft of rue, And that so rusty, and so small a thing, One shrill cicada hides it with a wing; Where one cucumber covers all the plain; And where one serpent rings himself in vain To enter wholly; and a single snail Eats all and exit fasting to the pool? Here shall my gardener be the dusty mole. My only ploughman the . . . mole. ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the object of the music, Dr. Hartman, in speaking of the Cicada septemdecim of the United States, says (26. I am indebted to Mr. Walsh for having sent me this extract from 'A Journal of the Doings of Cicada septemdecim,' by Dr. Hartman.), "the drums are now (June 6th and 7th, 1851) heard in all directions. ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... moisture, and vegetation, the myriads of insects in Ceylon form one of the characteristic features of the island. In the solitude of the forests there is a perpetual music from their soothing and melodious hum, which frequently swells to a startling sound as the cicada trills his sonorous drum on the sunny bark of some tall tree. At morning the dew hangs in diamond drops on the threads and gossamer which the spiders suspend across every pathway; and above the ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
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