"Lark" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with his plans for the rich contractor, M. Gandelu, who wanted as much ornamental work on the outside of his house as he had florid decorations within. He rose with the lark, and having gazed for a moment on Sabine's portrait, started for the abode of M. Gandelu, the proud father of young Gaston. This celebrated contractor lived in a splendid house in the Rue Chasse d'Antin, until his more ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... Hugo's generosity, which, so long as I consulted his wishes, was free enough. Of my own I had a few hundred pounds left me by my mother. I took that and came to this country. I was introduced into society by a fellow-countryman, who thought my change of name a mere lark, and who soon went home, and then straightway I fell in love ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... hadn't been homesick she would have thought her adventure a great lark. But somehow she couldn't get Mrs. Green's house out of her mind. Especially the thought of the kitchen, with its delicious odors of seven-layer cakes baking in the oven, and doughnuts frying on top of the range, made Miss Kitty's nose twitch. And her own particular warm spot under the range, where ...
— The Tale of Miss Kitty Cat - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... I used to catch of her at that time, slim-legged and swift, and shrilly sweet of voice as a lark, and as shyly a-flutter at the motion of a hand toward her, or else seated prim as any grown maiden, with grave eyes of attention upon her task ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... leading the mind by varied paths toward Jerusalem the Holy. Flowers bloom in this terrestrial paradise, once beautiful and verdant with waving trees; singing birds enchant the ear; the turtle-dove soothes with its soft note; the crested lark sends up its song toward heaven, and the grave and stately stork inspires the mind with thought, and leads it on to meditation and repose. Life here was once idyllic, charming; here were once no rich, no poor, no high, no low. It was a world of ease, simplicity, and beauty; now ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that's a pretty thing?" she asked. "Did you hear how the lark went singing, bright and clear, up and up and up into the ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... Warton, in 1790, was, as a poet, regularly made fun of. In his New Year Odes there were perpetual references to the coming spring: and, in the dearth of more important topics, each tree and field-flower were described: and the lark, and every other bird that could be brought into rhyme, were sure to appear; and his poetical and patriotic olla podrida ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... did not see the lark for a long time, but he would have heard him, far out of sight in the endless sky, thrilling and thrilling until the world seemed to have no other sound but that clear sweetness; and what a world it was to make that sound! Whistles ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... acquaintance, as she had done mine, and sending them away in the firm belief of her individual happiness, and the conviction that the melancholy which breathes through her poems was assumed, and that her real nature was buoyant and joyous as that of a lark singing between earth and heaven! If they could but have seen how the cloud settled down on that beaming face, if they had heard the deep-drawn sigh of relief that the little play was played out, and noted the languid step with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... you were here to enjoy this fine spring morning. It is like April, bright, calm, warm, and dreamy, sparrows singing, robins and blue birds calling, hens cackling, crows cawing, while now and then the ear detects the long drawn plaint of the meadow lark. The ice in the placid river floats languidly by and I dare say your hunting ground is alive with ducks. I am boiling sap on the old stove set up here in the chip yard. I have ten trees tapped and lots of sap. I wish you had some of the syrup. Your mother came back ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... slope of orchard, Francis laid A damask napkin, wrought with horse and hound; Brought out a dusky loaf that smelt of home, And, half-cut down, a pasty costly made, Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay, Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks Imbedded and injellied; last, with these A flask of cider from his father's vats, Prime which I knew;—and so we sat and ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lark singing in the blue infinite heaven, at this distance with something ethereal and heavenly in his voice; but now the wide circling wings that brought him for a few moments within hearing, have borne him beyond ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... the "village," and a vast amount of good business might be done. I'm dashed if it isn't the very country for a steeple-chase!' continued Watchorn, casting his eye over Cloverly Park, round the enclosure of Langworth Grange, and up the rising ground of Lark Lodge. ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... during the past twenty-four hours was to her a lark, a blindman's buff for grown-ups. It was not in her to tremble, to shudder, to hesitate, to weigh this and to balance that. Irish curiosity. Perhaps in the original that immortal line read: "The Irish rush in where angels fear to tread," and some proofreader ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... and sat down by Robin, still humming the refrain of the Cornish song he had heard at his window. "By Jove, I'm late—mustard, Robin, my boy—can't think how I slept like that. Why, in New Zealand I was always up with the lark—had to be, you know, there was always such heaps to do—the bread, old boy, if you can get hold of it. I remember once getting up at three in the morning to go and play cricket somewhere—fearful hot day it was, but I knocked up fifty, I remember. Probably the bowling was awfully soft, although ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... of my whole military career, I have never met a soldier who could compare with Private Perenna. And yet I saw plenty of fine fellows over there, the sort of demons whom you only find in the Legion and who will get themselves cut to bits for the sheer pleasure of the thing, for the lark of it, as they say, ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... for, while it is the spontaneous movement of a mean nature to contract and swoop, a generous nature prefers to expand and soar. The vulture pounces on rottenness with a cry of obscene satisfaction; but the lark seeks the sunrise with a song of worship. So let the ingenuous mind, studying human character and life, bestow a shunning glance at evil, a fixed gaze on good. So, should any one wish to write a ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... the asperities of his lot have closed the doors of worldly academies, may nevertheless have some special vocation for the poetic life. Academies cannot shut him out from the odour of the violet or the song of the nightingale. He hears the lark's song filling the heavens, as the happy bird fans the milk-white cloud with its wings. He listens to the purling of the brook, the bleating of the lamb, the song of the milkmaid, and the joyous cry of the reaper. Thus his mind is daily fed with the choicest influences of nature. ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... the high downs standing over it on either side, with, at some points, the memorials of antiquity carved on their smooth surfaces, the barrows and lynchetts or terraces, and the vast green earth-works crowning their summit. Up here on the turf, even with the lark singing his shrill music in the blue heavens, you are with the prehistoric dead, yourself for the time one of that innumerable, unsubstantial multitude, invisible in the sun, so that the sheep travelling as they graze, and the shepherd following them, pass through ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... near day, my sweet one; love be my help, the lark lies." In these songs, the women are slight and lithe; they are more gentle than doves; their faces are all pink and white: "If the flowers of the hawthorn were united to the rose, not more delicate would be their colour than that on my lady's ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... 'neath open sky, I live like lark or swallow: There's not a bird more free to fly Than I am free to follow. And when grim Death his bow shall bend, My mortal course suspending, Oh may my life, howe'er it end, Have music ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... the sea-bird if it loves the sea, Ask of the roses if they love the rain, Ask of the little lark, that will not sing Till day break, if it loves to see the day:- And yet, these are but empty images, Mere shadows of my love, which is a fire So great that all the waters of the main Can not avail to quench it. ...
— The Duchess of Padua • Oscar Wilde
... attend, Be honest, and you'll always find a friend: Your uncle Gilbert, stronger far than I, Will see you safe; on him you must rely; I've walk'd too far; this lameness, oh! the pain; Heav'n bless thee, child! I'll halt me back again; But when your first fair holiday may be, Rise with the lark, and ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... squeezed the young inventor's arm. "You know Bud's high spirits, skipper," he said. "He may have taken off on some crazy lark." ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... in fer it, 'stead o' you, Dick,' said Peterson. 'Mus' be an awful lark to have Hamlet layin' it on, an' you not ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... the cool sky; And the feel of the sun-warmed moss; And each cardoon, like a full moon, Fairy-spun of the thistle floss; And the beech grove, and a wood dove, And the trail where the shepherds pass; And the lark's song, and the wind-song, And the scent of ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... be judged of by my extracts or by anybody's extracts from his last-published volume.[68] Do you remember his grand ode upon Childhood—worth, to my apprehension, just twenty of Dryden's 'St. Cecilia's Day'—his sonnet upon Westminster Bridge, his lyric on a lark, in which the lark's music swells and exults, and the many noble and glorious passages of his 'Excursion'? You must not indeed blame me for estimating Wordsworth at his height, and on the other side I readily confess to you that he is occasionally, and not unfrequently, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... sleep that night. Stiff in the dark He groaned and thought of Sundays at the farm, When he'd go out as cheerful as a lark In his best suit to wander arm-in-arm With brown-eyed Gwen, and whisper in her ear The simple, silly ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... hill-top, near the axis of the range (alt. 6,062 feet). Here there is a village, and some cultivation, surrounded by hedges of Erythrina, Pieris, Viburnum, Pyres, Colquhounia, and Corylopsis, amongst which grew an autumn-flowering lark-spur, with most foetid flowers.* [There is a wood a mile to the west of the bungalow, worth visiting by the botanist: besides yew, oak, Sabia and Camellia, it contains Olea, Euonymus, and Sphaerocarya, a small tree that bears a green pear-shaped ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... Margaret; 'nothing but here and there a lark high in the air. Sometimes I used to hear a farmer speaking sharp and loud to his servants; but it was so far away that it only reminded me pleasantly that other people were hard at work in some distant place, while I just sat on ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... beside the tee, We meet in storm or calm, Lady, and worship thee; While the loud lark sings free, Piping his matin psalm ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... themselves on a piratical cruise against a whole flotilla of butterflies, which is rising and falling over the sunny parterres beyond. "The well-greaved grillus" bounds twenty feet at a spring, and having thighs as thick as a lark's to double under him, makes little use of his wings. Many a callow bee is buzzing helplessly in the path. The gray curculio walks with snout erect, snuffing the morning air; and here we fall upon a party of apprentice pill-beetles, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... she could not explain. And that was not all. It was worse that the people in this book—the extraordinary person who was married, and had children, and yet ate biscuits out of a bag and said she didn't; the man who called her his lark and his squirrel—as if any man ever did call his wife such names!—all these people seemed eternally to be meaning something different from what they said; something that was for ever eluding her. It was most irritating.— There was, moreover, no mention of a doll's house ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... GUNN At it once more! Oh Lords, what fun To see them drive, and cut, and run! A May-day lark For elderly and paunchy lads! Ah, Time his annual inches adds. We cannot buckle on the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 20, 1893 • Various
... killed or made to kill yourself. Since you cannot be found you will stay alive until you can be rehabilitated with the Emperor. If that cannot be done or is not done, at least you will be alive. My deduction is, disappear at once and completely. You have many times, for a lark, disguised yourself as an ordinary country proprietor or small farmer and mingled with the crowd at a fair without being recognized. What you have done for an evening in jest now attempt in earnest and for as long a period as is necessary. And to begin with, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... to enter with a tender gentle mien, like Mascarillo, who expects a beating and becomes merry as a lark when he finds his master in a good humor! Well—that is the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... were made and Captain Pomery professed himself ready to cast off. I returned to the house for the last time, to awake and fetch Nat Fiennes. As I crossed the wet sward the day broke and a lark sprang from the bracken and soared above me singing. But I went hanging my head, heavy with ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... the work neither dull nor tiresome; for as he marched up and down the field, collecting and piling the flints with cheery goodwill, he sang his Folk Songs with all the spontaneous happiness of a soaring lark. ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... out of breath, Heaven knows where she had sprung from at that time of night! was running her hand down my sleeve almost caressingly, with the innocent bold affection of a girl. "Got you in!" she said. "It's been no end of a lark." ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... room we seem to see the great group of their faces. The best furniture we ever had in our parlor was a circle of well-wishers. Here is the bed-room where we slept off the world's cares, and got up glad as the lark when the morning sky beckons it upward. Many a time this room has been full of sleep from door-sill to ceiling. We always did feel grandly after we had put an eight-hour nap between us and life's perplexities. We are accustomed to ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... found him at home busy about his breakfast, apparently unaware of anything uncomfortable in the weather. Presently he flew out to a stone against which the icy current was beating, and turning his back to the wind, sang as delightfully as a lark in springtime. ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... you are!" Launce says, coming up at this moment. "Such things, as you call them, never happened and never will; it's all a hoax—some scamps doing it for a lark; and one of these nights when I've nothing better to do, I'll go down ...
— Only an Irish Girl • Mrs. Hungerford
... we took to this sort of teaching, given in the fresh outdoors, the air pleasant with honeysuckle, and a lark carolling high above us! We could scarcely restrain our shouts when Angel's first trout was landed with the aid of a net, and lay golden and white as a daffodil on the grass. So absorbed were we that no one gave any heed to The Seraph, stationed farther down stream, till a ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... Moti had always loved adventures; and she had been in the throat of several. But this was no lark; it was more serious than funny. Thirty-eight of the most valuable elephants in India were rolling away before her toward the Vindha Hills. If they once arrived there, no man could say how many of them, or if any ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... was in high spirits. He had grown very thin. With his nervous, jerky gestures, and the trepidation in his speech, he was like a caged lark. He was always with Yakob Somov, taciturn ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... have a look at them in bed, and, if Mary is still with Mamma, will get in between them. Won't that be a lark, Gert?" ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... where it is stated that Rene, King of Sicily and Duke of Anjou, who died in 1480, introduced the red-legged partridge into the latter country. Attempts have been made, and I believe with success, to naturalize the European lark on Long Island, and the English sparrow has been introduced into various parts of the Northern States, where he is useful by destroying noxious insects and worms not preyed upon by native birds. The ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... [Motion upwards] Ascent. — N. ascent, ascension; rising &c. 309; acclivity, hill &c. 217; flight of steps, flight of stairs; ladder rocket, lark; sky rocket, sky lark; Alpine Club. V. ascend, rise, mount, arise, uprise; go up, get up, work one's way up, start up; shoot up, go into orbit; float up; bubble up; aspire. climb, clamber, ramp, scramble, escalade[obs3], surmount; shin, shinny, shinney; scale, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... resinous or gum trees, the banana, sugar-cane, yams, aniseed, and lastly a plant called "Binao," which is used by the natives as bread. Cockatoos, wood pigeons, lories, and black-birds, somewhat larger than those of Europe, abounded in the woods. In the marshes the curlew, sea lark, a species of snipe, and ducks were to be found. The only quadrupeds the country produced were goats and ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... a phantom dawn, it fades to dark, This vision of a world made new and better; And he whose heavenly notes recalled the lark Soaring, in air without an earthly fetter— WILSON is gone, the mystic, Whose views, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... the riven stones. There are terraces over-rioted with pergolas of vine, and houses shooting forward into balconies and balustrades, from which a Romeo might launch himself at daybreak, warned by the lark's song. A sudden angle in the road is turned, and we pass from airspace and freedom into the old town, beneath walls of dark brown masonry, where wild valerians light their torches of red bloom in immemorial shade. Squalor ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... would naturally suppose that all the poems, in this set of five, were composed during the same pedestrian tour, and that they all referred to the same time. But the series contains 'Alice Fell' (1802), 'Beggars' (1802), 'To a Sky-Lark' (1805), and ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... himself to be garroted in the manacles and frozen in the conventions of systems, if he did not like confinement although enclosed in the safe symmetry of a gilded cage, it was not because he preferred the license of disorder, the confusion of irregularity. It was rather that he might soar like the lark into the deep blue of the unclouded heavens. Like the Bird of Paradise, which it was once thought never slept but while resting upon extended wing, rocked only by the breath of unlimited space at the sublime height at which it reposed; he obstinately refused to descend ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... hear the lark's ecstatic gush From his clear ambush in the sky; A blackbird (if it's not a thrush) Sings from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... for a lark," said the supposed footman, in a hearty, cheerful voice. "I wondered what you really thought of the good-for-nothing nephew, and how you would receive him if he returned like the prodigal ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... the delight of her mother's life. She was a pretty, cheery little thing, and could sing like a lark. Joe too was of a cheerful disposition, but from scraping the chins of aristocrats came to imbibe some of their ideas, and rather too early in life bid fair to be a dandy. But his father encouraged him, for, said he, "It 's de p'opah thing fu' a man what waits on quality to have quality ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the planet knows And to his joy replies; To the lark's trill unfolds the rose, Clouds ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... may all get the measles yet. The fact is, I have set my heart on this thing. Miss Westonhaugh said she had never seen a tiger, except in cages and that kind of thing, and so I made up my mind she should. Besides, it will be no end of a lark; just when nobody is thinking about tigers, you go off and kill a tremendous fellow, fifteen or sixteen feet long, and come back covered with glory and mosquito bites, and tell everybody that Miss Westonhaugh shot him herself with a pocket ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... whose gloomy shore Sky-lark never warbles o'er,[2] Where the cliff hangs high and steep, Young St. Kevin stole to sleep. "Here, at least," he calmly said, "Woman ne'er shall find my bed." Ah! the good Saint little knew What that wily ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... some beer," Said the deer. "But I prefer cider," Whispered a spider. "You must not think So much about drink," Said the cow With a bow. "It's a bad habit," Shouted the rabbit. At last the fly, With a tear in his eye, Gave his arm to the lark And went off in the dark. Away in a trice ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... myself would be as great a bother as to have to cook my dinner as well as eat it. I suppose it is a healthy amusement—indeed, I know it is when you take it as I do; for when all you people come down the morning after a dance with haggard eyes and no power to do anything, I am as fresh as a lark, and have decidedly the best ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... much sweeter than by day; The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark, When neither is attuned; and I think The nightingale, if she should sing by day When every goose is cackling, would be thought No better a musician than the wren. How many things by season, seasoned are To their right praise and true perfection! Peace, there, ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... have been thinking all day," said gently the Puritan maiden, "Dreaming all night, and thinking all day, of the hedgerows of England,— They are in blossom now, and the country is all like a garden; Thinking of lanes and fields, and the song of the lark and the linnet, Seeing the village street, and familiar faces of neighbors Going about as of old, and stopping to gossip together. Kind are the people I live with, and dear to me my religion; Still my heart ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... Accord fell into the Imitation of several Singing-Birds. My Friend and I toasted our Mistresses to the Nightingale, when all of a sudden we were surpriz'd with the musick of the Thrush. He next proceeded to the Sky-Lark, mounting up by a proper Scale of Notes, and afterwards falling to the Ground with a very easy and regular Descent. He then contracted his Whistle to the Voice of several Birds of the smallest Size. As he is a Man of a larger Bulk and higher Stature than ordinary, you would fancy him a Giant when ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... reach thine ear, Armor's clang or war-steed champing Trump nor pibroch summon here Mustering clan or squadron tramping. Yet the lark's shrill fife may come At the daybreak from the fallow, And the bittern sound his drum Booming from the sedgy shallow. Ruder sounds shall none be near, Guards nor warders challenge here, Here's no war-steed's neigh and champing, Shouting clans ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... to tell Joe Smith," she cried in delight. "You must sing in the Children's Choir." The expectation that these words aroused was sufficient to make Pearl happy as a lark for a week. Joe heard her and Peri sing and both were admitted in ...
— Pearl and Periwinkle • Anna Graetz
... the administration of his favourite blow, the Auctioneer, by the silent eloquence of a village church. The humble homes of England, with their domestic virtues and honeysuckle porches, urge both heroes to go in and win; and the lark and other singing birds are observable in the upper air, ecstatically carolling their thanks to Heaven for a fight. On the whole, the associations entwined with the pugilistic art by this artist are much in the ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... it roused her poetic faculty—oh, how different in its outcome from Phemy's!—far more than the summer. That very afternoon, leaving Steenie with his mother, she paid a visit to the weem, and there, in the heart of the earth, made the following little song, addressed to the sky-soaring lark:— ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... part deliberately?" she asked. "Having her little fun after those horrible years? She looks quite equal to it, and a personal drama would have its attractions after an experience during which a nurse felt about as personal as an amputated limb. And while one is still young and beautiful—what a lark!" ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... topic which by a sort of instinct she refrained from was Judy herself. When Jasper was in the house Hilda was always glad when Judy retired to her own room. When the gay little voice, happy now, and clear and sweet as a lark's, was heard singing snatches of gay songs all over the house, if Jasper were there, Hilda would carefully close the door of the ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... rays Now call forth every songster's praise; Now the lark, with upward flight, Gaily ushers in the light; While wildly warbling from each tree, The ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... mechanics were few and transportation difficult. He loved work for its own sake, and was ill at ease when he had not a tool in his hand. The exercise of his skill gave him a pleasure akin to that which the fish feels in swimming, the eagle in soaring, and the lark in singing. A finless fish, a wingless eagle, or a dumb lark could not have been more miserable than Grim was when a succession of holidays, like Easter or Christmas, compelled him ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... should be Robinson, and ended with another to check the arrogance of Friday. Now, however, he was but an hour or so from an uninhabited island (of course it was uninhabited) and bothered by no rival for chief honours. He decided that to fall into the sea from a steamer at night was a lark. But a little while afterwards he thought of sharks and remembered, with something of a pang, good times in England; then he wondered what would happen on the ship when they missed him; then he glowed at the anticipation of the other boys' envy when they learned where he had ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... of the air sacs, I know, but I have not his work at hand. It may be that opening one of the air-cells interferes with flight, but I hold it very difficult to conceive that the interference can take place in the way you suppose. How on earth is a lark to sing for ten minutes together if the air-cells are to be kept distended all the while he is up in ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... 'I am ever gay—gay as the lark; gay in the morning, gay at eve. It is my nature so to be. My mother is a Frenchwoman—a kinswoman of the Lord of Joinville—and scarce knows what sadness is. I inherit her spirit; and I doubt not that, if I am slain by the Saracens, I ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... it on your return, before you enter the house, and tie the chicken firmly to the end of it. Then, when the right time comes, I can haul it up. And look here, don't let's explain to the other chaps how we came by the chicken. Let's make a complete mystery of it for a day or two, and have a lark over it." ...
— Jack of Both Sides - The Story of a School War • Florence Coombe
... well look like a thunder-cloud," said Coleman, "if that was the notion he had got in his head; what a jolly lark, to be sure!" ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... And I all that night so vexed that I did not sleep almost all night, which shows how unfit I am for trouble. So, after a little supper, vexed, and spending a little time melancholy in making a base to the Lark's song, I ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... the first achievements in the country is early rising: with the lark—with the sun—while the dew is on the grass, "under the opening eye-lids of the morn," and so forth. Early rising! What can be done with five or six o'clock in town? What may not be done at those hours in the country? With the hoe, the rake, the dibble, ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... the procession was passing at that moment. First came a splendid cock-a-doodle, all in black and gold, like a herald, blowing his trumpet, and marching with a very dignified step. Then came a rook, in black, like a minister, with spectacles and white cravat. A lark and bullfinch followed,—friends, I suppose; and then the bride and bridegroom. Miss Wren was evidently a Quakeress; for she wore a sober dress, and a little white veil, through which her bright eyes shone. The bridegroom was a military man, in his scarlet uniform,—a ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... while I coach for a degree next June? There is no such educator as travel, you know, and we'll make a point of going to all sorts of places where we can pick up ideas. At the same time it'll be no end of a lark." ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... of point to him, you know, was the fact that he did seem within limits to have found himself out. The mess he had made of haunting had depressed him terribly. He had been told it would be a 'lark'; he had come expecting it to be a 'lark,' and here it was, nothing but another failure added to his record! He proclaimed himself an utter out-and-out failure. He said, and I can quite believe it, that he had never tried to do anything ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... veracious; but give us high spirits now and then, a light heart, a sharp sword, a fair wench, a good horse, or even that old Gascon rouncy of D'Artagnan's. Like the good Lord James Douglas, we had liefer hear the lark sing over moor and down, with Chicot, than listen to the starved-mouse squeak in the bouge of Therese Raquin, with M. Zola. Not that there is not a place and an hour for him, and others like him; but they are not, if ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... of a lark, His militia he never would call out, He then made them shoot at a mark Till they had shot all their powder ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... principles of efficiency we must continually go back to nature. Listen—really listen—to the birds sing. Which of these feathered tribes are most pleasing in their vocal efforts: those whose voices, though sweet, have little or no range, or those that, like the canary, the lark, and the nightingale, not only possess a considerable range but utter their notes in continual variety of combinations? Even a sweet-toned chirp, when reiterated without change, may grow maddening to ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... sleep at the abbey, Lord Cadurcis was now as much an habitual inmate of Cherbury Hall as in the days of his childhood. He was there almost with the lark, and never quitted its roof until its inmates were about to retire for the night. His guns and dogs, which had been sent down from London with so much pomp of preparation, were unused and unnoticed; and he passed his days in reading Richardson's novels, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... gone on swallows' wings, And Earth has buried all her flowers: No more the lark,—the linnet—sings, But Silence sits in faded bowers. There is a shadow on the plain Of Winter ere he comes again,— There is in woods a solemn sound Of hollow warnings whisper'd round, As Echo in her deep ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... with the aria, "On mighty Pens," describing in a majestic manner the flight of the eagle, and then blithely passes to the gayety of the lark, the tenderness of the cooing doves, and the plaintiveness of the nightingale, in which the singing of the birds is imitated as closely as the resources of music will allow. A beautiful terzetto describes with inimitable grace the gently sloping ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... instincts, and fulfil their destinies. Thus, myriads of pigeons, and ducks, and geese, etc., are to be found in the virgin woods, while the companionable and friendly robin, the little melodious wren, the thrush, the lark, the swallow, the marten, and all those pleasant little winged creatures, that flit about our dwellings and grounds, and seem to be sent by Providence, expressly to chant their morning and evening hymns to God in our ears, most frequent ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... AUNT,—Just for a lark, we concluded, ten minutes ago, to start to Ellsworth to-night instead of in the morning. It will be so much cooler traveling at night, you know. As our trunks were sent down to the station this afternoon, we will have no trouble going, and will not wake you to ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... attention, and she darted right and left much to the amusement of the brakeman who sat within the car and watched her. As they hurried through one of the irrigated spots, she heard a bird sing—a clear, jubilant, rollicking song. Could it be the meadow-lark of which Virginia had always spoken? At six they had passed through a prairie-dog town, whose inhabitants had thus far existed for Priscilla only in books and in Virginia's stories. Her fascinated ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... various projects of carrying the revolution into their own countries. Plans were being discussed for organizing legions to invade foreign countries, and a number of the German communists entered heartily into the plan of Herwegh, the erratic German poet—"the iron lark"—who led a band of revolutionists into Baden. "We arose vehemently against these attempts to play at revolution," says Engels, speaking for himself and Marx. "In the state of fermentation which then existed in Germany, to carry into our country an invasion which was destined ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... November weather might have been rosy June; the dull routine of the Monroe home a life rich and full for Martie now. She sang like a lark, feeding the chickens in the foggy mornings; she dimpled at her own reflection in the mirror; she walked down town as if treading the clouds. Anything interested her, everything interested her. Mrs. Harry Locker, born Preble, said that Martie just seemed inspired, the ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... MUD LARK. A fellow who goes about by the water side picking up coals, nails, or other articles in the mud. ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... George, that there are more dangerous companions than poor Jack. And then, Mary, who is the sweetest, dearest young woman I know, is not impulsive in that way. She is such a very child. I don't suppose she understands what passion means. She has the gaiety of a lark, and the innocence. She is always soaring upwards, ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... There would be few who would not deem me mad, Or say my mind the falsest image had Of my condition and your loftiness. But Heaven has seen that for no moment's space Have I forgotten you to be the king, Or me myself to be a lowly thing— A little lark, enamoured of the sky, That soared to sing, to break its breast, and die. But, as you better know than I, the heart In choosing chooseth not its own desert, But that great merit which attracteth it: 'Tis law, I struggled, but I must submit, And having seen a worth all worth above, ...
— How Lisa Loved the King • George Eliot
... hair curls in ringlets over her neck. She is one of the neatest and most gentle children I ever saw, and gives her mother but little trouble. Indeed, she is so orderly, and active, that she is quite an assistance to her. She sings like a lark, and is patient as a lamb. She is ...
— The Nest in the Honeysuckles, and other Stories • Various
... pardon, my boy," he said. "The question is withdrawn. You're perfectly right—and you're setting us an example by taking things seriously. This war isn't going to be a lark. But you can tell me a few things. You're scouts, I see. I was myself, once—before I went to ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... horizon against the sky; the line is only broken in one place by a small grove of Scotch firs, which always look black and shadowed even at mid-day, when all the rest of the landscape seems bathed in sunlight. The lark quivers and sings high up in the air; too high—in too dazzling a region for you to see her. Look! she drops into sight; but, as if loth to leave the heavenly radiance, she balances herself and floats in the ether. Now she falls suddenly right into her nest, hidden among the ling, ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... beginning to build their nests, and strange to say they did not pay the slightest attention to the shelling. The lark we noticed several times would continue to soar and sing higher and higher, intoxicated with the joy of his own song until he came in the way of an exploding shell. Then the beautiful song would be ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... he fared full lowly: The Staff of Jesus was in his hand: Twelve priests paced after him chaunting slowly, Printing their steps on the dewy land. It was the Resurrection morn; The lark sang loud o'er the springing corn; The dove was ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... not believe in this sort of thing, you know,—of course not. But he had lived a long time among Orientals, and he just happened to wish to know how certain speculations would fall out, and he loves, above all things, a lark, or anything out of the common. So he went in. And when alone with the sybil, she began to talk to him ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... was that the Roman rose. Not that the earliest lark rises so early in Latium as the earliest lark in England; that is, during summer: but then, on the other hand, neither does it ever rise so late. The Roman citizen was stirring with the dawn—which, allowing for the shorter longest-day and longer shortest-day of Rome, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... her forehead. De Blacquaire's crutches had long since ceased to crunch along the road towards the hospital, and Jervase's broad shoulders had gone out of sight. There was no human creature near, but far and far away overhead a lark was soaring and singing. Many and many a pair of English lovers had heard the same song as the bird had hailed the rising or the setting sun, and both the young hearts beat to that native sounding music which rang so far away from home. Their lips came together, ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... such a lark, Torchy!" says she. "I've passed as Miss Hemmingway for six days, and I don't believe more than three or four persons have suspected. Thank goodness, Belcher wasn't one of them. For I've learned—oh, ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... Princess Anne, hastened to tie on her young mistress's walking-shoes, and, as they all stepped from the happy old church, where Vesta's voice had so often pierced, in her flights of harmony, to a bliss that seemed to carry her soul, like a lark, to heaven's gate, that ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend |
