"Cicada" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... bits of rurality, redolent of the fields and of field-life, with which it would be easy to fill up the measure of this rainy day, and beat off the Grecian couplets to the tinkle of the eave-drops. Up and down, the cicada chirps; the locust, "encourager of sleep," sings his drowsy song; boozy Anacreon flings grapes; the purple violets and the daffodils crown the perfumed head of Heliodora; and the reverent Simonides likens our life to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... Oliphant, "the force of habit. I'm so used to the sound, that I was utterly unconscious of it. It is made by the cicada, an insect very common in this country. And now, where do you suppose we're coming to? This little village or township before us is Norwood, and then comes Kensington. I've no doubt it will strike you as one of the oddest things ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... by inherited right only, and they were replaced by new cap-grades, nineteen in all, which were distinguished partly by their borders, partly by their colours, and partly by their materials and embroidery. Hair-ornaments were also a mark of rank. They were cicada-shaped, of gold and silver for the highest grades, of silver for the medium grades, and of copper for the low grades. The caps indicated official status without any reference ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... various birds, particularly the white cockatoo, were numerous; and the little bees came like flies on our hands, on my paper, and on our soup plates, and indicated abundance of honey; a small species of Cicada had risen from its slumbers, and was singing most cheerfully. One of our horses was seriously staked in the belly, by some unaccountable accident; I drew a seton through the large swelling, although, considering its exhausted ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... suddenly 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, ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... sounds. They are a means by which each indicates to others the fact of his comforting presence; and they still, to a large extent, retain their primary function. The chirping of grasshoppers, the song of the cicada, the piping of frogs in the pool, the bleating of lambs at the hour of dusk, the lowing of contented cattle, the call-notes of the migrating host of birds—all these, whatever else they may be, are the reassuring social links of sound, the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... corruption which a degenerate paganism condoned and palliated, but we must remember, as an extenuation of the Greek attitude, that the oracle of Delphi protested against them. The cyprus plains of Theocritus yet echo with the call of the cicada, and the anemones still bloom. The pipes of Pan are not all silent. The world would lose some of its beauty if Theocritus and the Sicilian poets did not entice us ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan |
