"Skylark" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... autumn of 1820, Shelley produced some of his most genial poems: the "Letter to Maria Gisborne", which might be mentioned as a pendent to "Julian and Maddalo" for its treatment of familiar things; the "Ode to a Skylark", that most popular of all his lyrics; the "Witch of Atlas", unrivalled as an Ariel-flight of fairy fancy; and the "Ode to Naples", which, together with the "Ode to Liberty", added a new lyric form to English literature. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... off the pearly sheep Along the upland steep Follow their shepherd from the wattled fold, With tinkling bell-notes falling sweet and cold As a stream's cadence, while a skylark sings High in the blue, with eager outstretched wings, Till the strong passion of ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... melodious songsters; the bobolink in the meadows for instance, the vesper sparrow in the pastures, the purple finch in the groves, the winter wren, or any of the thrushes in the woods, or the wood-wagtail, whose air song is of a similar character to that of the skylark, and is even more rapid and ringing, and is delivered in nearly the same manner; but our birds all stop when the skylark has only just begun. Away he goes on quivering wing, inflating his throat fuller and fuller, mounting ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... death-dirge should have been written by the one and set to music by the other—brothers doloroso, sent into this rough world unprepared for its buffets, passing away in manhood's morning. Yet all heard the song of the skylark. Giorgione died broken-hearted, through his ladylove's inconstancy. He was exactly the same age as Titian, and while he lived surpassed that giant far, as the giant himself admitted. He died aged thirty-three, the age at which a full dozen of the greatest ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... seemed there to be," until he learns to feel the sacredness of life even in the water-snakes, the "slimy things" that coil in the rotting sea; and the stages of his penance are marked by suggestions of his return to the privilege of human fellowship. The angels' music is like the song of the skylark, the sails ripple like a leaf-hidden brook—recollections of his happy boyhood in. England; and finally comes the actual land breeze, and he is in his "own countree." Observe the marginal ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... above them, But not their hearts that roam! We learned from our wistful mothers To call old England 'home'; We read of the English skylark, Of the spring in the English lanes, But we screamed with the painted lories As we rode ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... blooms, has made the New Zealand fields "green pictures set in frames of gold." The very birds which rise from the clover or wheat, and nest in the trees or hedgerows of furze or quickset, are for the most part English—the skylark, the blackbird, finches, green and gold, thrushes, starlings, and that eternal impudent vagabond the house-sparrow. Heavy is the toll taken by the sparrow from the oat-crops of his new home; his thievish nature grows blacker there, though his plumage often ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... nor Buddha could help or save me. One in his exquisite balance of body, a skylark-like song of eternal beauty, stood lightly advancing; the other sat in sombre contemplation, calm as a beautiful evening. I looked for sorrow in the eyes of the pastel—the beautiful pastel that seemed to fill with a real presence the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... and Shelley have wasted powder upon the skylark; for never such "profuse strains of unpremeditated art" issued from living bird before. Skylark! pooh! who would rise at dawn to hear the skylark if a catbird were ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... vanished from her mind; everything else counted for nothing, went like chaff upon the wind. The one fact alone remained: Glenn loved her! Her senses were in a delicious tumult from the power and the glory of it: Glenn loved her! It was as if a skylark sang in her breast, as if she walked in a rosy and new-born world. Had Nancy been called upon to die for him then, she would have gone to her death shining-eyed, ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... this. I walk And hear more birds than people talk; I hear the birds that sing unseen, On boughs now smothered with leaves green; I sit and watch the swallows there, Making a circus in the air; That speed around straight-going crow, As sharks around a ship can go; I hear the skylark out of sight, Hid perfectly in all this light. The dappled cows in fields I pass, Up to their bosoms in deep grass; Old oak trees, with their bowels gone, I see with spring's green finery on. I watch the ...
— Foliage • William H. Davies
... necessary even in daylight fights. The broad white gun-deck, scrubbed to a gleaming white by hollystone and limejuice, on which the salt-water sailors gathered for their mess or drill, was replaced by a cramped room, with the roof hardly high enough to let the jolly tars skylark beneath without banging their skulls against some projecting beam. Truly it may be said, that, if the great civil war made naval architecture more powerful, it also robbed the ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... formalities of well-bred life 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 ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... monny color'd feather, Please us as they skim along, But ther charms all put together, Connot equal th' skylark's song. ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, Second Series - To which is added The Cream of Wit and Humour - from his Popular Writings • John Hartley
... from them and wander in the great spaces. To idle together in the sweet fields of the mind—this is companionship, when thoughts come not by bidding, and argument is taboo; to have the mind as open as that of a child for all impressions, and speak as the skylark sings, this is the mood ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... not 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 spent to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... from the sowing of the scale-like parsnip-seed in which he was then engaged, and said, "Listen." Remote yet distinct, like a dream of a bird-song, came a simple melody from a distant field. "Welcome," he said. "That's our meadow-lark, Amy; not equal to your skylark, I admit. Indeed, it is not a lark at all, for Dr. Marvin says it belongs to the oriole family. Brief and simple as is its song, I think you will agree with me that spring brings few more lovely sounds. That is the first one that I ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... only for the sake of a higher design. He is one who appreciates, and expresses his appreciation so fittingly that it becomes a kind of truth, and a permanently communicable object. That "unbodied joy," the skylark's song and flight, is through the genius of Shelley so faithfully embodied, that it may enter as a definite joy into the lives of countless human beings. The sensuous or suggestive values of nature are caught by the poet's quick feeling for beauty, and fixed by his creative activity. ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... seated with 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 ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... unfold And silver daisies star the lea, The crocus hoards the sunset gold, And the wild rose breathes for me. I feel the sap through the bough returning, I share the skylark's transport fine, I know the fountain's wayward yearning, I love, and the world ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... arise, And make happy the skies; The merry bells ring To welcome the Spring; The skylark and thrush, The birds of the bush, Sing louder around To the bells' cheerful sound; While our sports shall be seen On ...
— Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience • William Blake
... three: first, that the common cuckoo, with rare exceptions, lays only one egg in a nest, so that the large and voracious young bird receives ample food. Secondly, that the eggs are remarkably small, not exceeding those of the skylark—a bird about one-fourth as large as the cuckoo. That the small size of the egg is a real case of adaptation we may infer from the fact of the mon-parasitic American cuckoo laying full-sized eggs. Thirdly, that the young cuckoo, soon after birth, has the instinct, the strength and a properly ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... were not one but a hundred pictures. To hang it in a different place in the room was to recreate it; it never was the same, whereas the complete portraits of the old masters have this fault—that they never rise above themselves. But a ray of light set Evelyn's portrait singing like a skylark—background, face, hair, dress—cadenza upon cadenza. When the blinds were let down, the music became graver, and the strain almost a religious one. And these changes in the portrait were like Evelyn herself, ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... 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 has young ones about. So that those who have watched ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... "Rosalind and Helen" and "Lines written among the Euganean Hills", I found among his papers by chance; and with some difficulty urged him to complete them. There are others, such as the "Ode to the Skylark and The Cloud", which, in the opinion of many critics, bear a purer poetical stamp than any other of his productions. They were written as his mind prompted: listening to the carolling of the bird, aloft in the azure sky of Italy; or marking the cloud as it sped across the heavens, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... failing to subdue the rabbits, have themselves become a serious nuisance. Of small birds there were introduced the house-sparrow, which is too prolific, and is hated by the farmers; the greenfinch, a pest; the bullfinch, a failure. The introduced skylark and the blackbird (alas! poor colonists) are not the joy of New Zealanders—the farmers hate them. The European settlers had the audacity to introduce also the most beautiful and beloved of all birds, our own perfect "Robin Redbreast," ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... a small 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 ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... explanation. Thus died perhaps the greatest lyric poet that even England had ever borne, an exile, and yet not an exile, for he died in Italy, the fatherland of us all. Ah! "'tis Death is dead, not he," for in the west wind you may hear his song, and in the tender night his rare mysterious music; when the skylark sings it is as it were his melody, and in the clouds you may find something of the refreshment of ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... the day of prayer! Who hath not felt how fancy's mystic power With holier beauty decks that solemn hour; A softer lustre in its sunshine sees; And hears a softer music in its breeze? Who hath not dreamed that even the skylark's throat Hails that sweet morning with a gentler note? Fair morn, how gaily shone thy dawning smile On the green valleys of my native isle! How gladly many a spire's resounding height With peals of transport hailed thy newborn light! Ah! little thought the peasant then, who blest The peaceful ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... 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 than a ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... anniversary of the death of Robert Southey in 1843. Perhaps his most celebrated poem is the delightful 'Ode to a Skylark,' the beginning of which 'Hail to thee, blithe spirit,' is known to every ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... responsive that My ardent spirit thrills Could, like the skylark's ecstasy, Be vocal in sweet melody, Beyond dividing hills In octaves of the atmosphere Were music wafted to ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... Bharadwaj.—(A skylark. Name of a great Brahman Rishi or saint.) One of the common eponymous sections of Brahmans. Also a section of Joshi, Lohar, Prabhu, Sunar, and of several clans ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... 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. ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... very learned lady; and, though the lines are irregular, and the thoughts diffused with too much verbosity, yet it cannot be denied to contain both philosophical argument and poetical spirit. Of the rest I cannot think any excellent; the "Skylark" pleases me best, which has, however, more of the ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... lute, Were night-owl's hoot To my low-whispered coo - Were I thy bride! The skylark's trill Were but discordance shrill To the soft thrill Of wooing as I'd woo - Were ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... Swift silence fell, like sudden sleep, On all the Fians waiting there In sharp suspense and half despair ... The morn was still. A skylark hung In mid-air flutt'ring, and sung A lullaby that grew more sweet Amid the stillness, in the heat And splendour of the sun: the lisp Of faint wind in the herbage crisp Went past them; and around the bare And foam-striped sand-banks gleaming fair, The faintly-panting waves ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... utterly from the genuine cactus, and closely resemble all their spurge relations. 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 the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... 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 ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... and occasional 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
... on in the pilot-house. Island No. 63—an island with a lovely 'chute,' or passage, behind it in the former times. They said Jesse Jamieson, in the 'Skylark,' had a visiting pilot with him one trip—a poor old broken-down, superannuated fellow—left him at the wheel, at the foot of 63, to run off the watch. The ancient mariner went up through the chute, and down the river outside; and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... the nicest people you could possibly meet, Jack," Tamara said. "And don't imagine because they skylark like this, and sit up all night, that they aren't most dignified when they have to be. That is their charm, this sense of the fitness of things. They have not got to have any pretence like some of us have. Not one of them has ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... course he was so called, as Tom said he would be) were as jolly as possible, and laughed at sea-sickness, or any of the ills landsmen are subject to; they were not going to be ill, not they. Already they began to consider themselves first-rate sailors, for they could go aloft and skylark as fearlessly as young monkeys, and box the compass; and had some notion when the helm was a-lee, and the head-sails backed against the mast, that the ship would come about. As yet, to be sure, they ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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
... now you know why. Carn't yer jest turn the tables, old hoyster, and come for a bit of a fly? Cut the chawbacons, run up to London, jine me, and we'll pal off to Parry; And if yer don't find it a 'Oliday Skylark, wy, never trust. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... best long poem is the Adonas, an elegy on the death of John Keats. It is written in the Spenserian stanza. But this true poet will be best remembered by his short lyrical poems, such as The Cloud, Ode to a Skylark, Ode to the West Wind, Stanzas written in Dejection, and others. —Shelley has been called "the poet's poet," because his style is so thoroughly transfused by pure imagination. He has also been called "the master-singer of our modern race ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... gleaming helmet above the mantelpiece, then finding the apartment empty hopped on into the kitchen to watch Flamby at work. Sunlight gladdened the garden and the orchard where blackbirds were pecking the cherries; a skylark rose from the meadow opposite the cottage, singing rapturously of love and youth—so that presently, the while she worked, Flamby began ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... very fine new kite that he and his father had made together. They named it the Skylark, because they thought it would fly higher than any of the other kites. But something was wrong. Instead of sailing up gracefully, as it should, the first time Bobby tried to fly it, the Skylark pitched about so violently that Bobby had to ...
— The Goody-Naughty Book • Sarah Cory Rippey
... for his wife to fall in love with him; and we have to thank, I believe, the high romanticks for it. They must have devilry, it seems, or cayenne pepper. But I say, Scorn not the sentimental, though it be barley-sugar to ambrosia, a canary's flight to a skylark's. Scorn it not; it's the romantic of the unimaginative; and if it won't serve for a magic carpet, it makes ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... which he is observing in a cage, "continues, step by step, without the slightest emotion, his amorous by-play, as though nothing unusual were happening...The nightingale and the skylark may be silent, oppressed by fear; the bee may re-enter her hive; but is a weevil to be upset because the sun ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... self, but in a still higher field than mere protest. Accordingly, he attempted in his second part of "Dead Souls" to paint an ideal Russia, just as in the first part he had painted the real Russia. Here, however, he undertook what was above his genius: the skylark is indeed a noble bird, but is unfit for the flight of the eagle. Who was by nature only a protester could not by sheer force of will be transformed into the idealizing constructor. And of this, Gogol himself soon became aware. To the very end he was discontented with his second part, and ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... a yacht and take a party," he continued, "and come back when you are all tired of it. I'll ask Sir Robert to let me have the 'Skylark,' because his captain is so reliable. What do you say, ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... it was as disagreeable and agitating for her to sing in opera, as it was delightful in the concert-room; for here she poured forth her notes with such a genuine ecstasy in her own performance as that which seems to thrill the skylark or the nightingale. Though the circumstances of her marriage were of such a romantic kind, and she seems to have been deeply attached to her husband through life, M. Valle-bregue appears to have been ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... game hangin' up everywhar to be cured. Sometimes, young William, I envy the Indians. When the weather's right, an' the village is in a good place an' thar's plenty to eat you never see any happier fellers. The day's work an' huntin' over, they skylark 'roun' like boys havin' fun with all sorts o' little things. You wouldn't think they wuz the same men who could enjoy roastin' an enemy alive. Then, they ain't troubled a bit 'bout the future, either. Termorrer kin take care o' itself. I s'pose that's what downs 'em, an' gives all ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... 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
... sluggard hearts, Warm-nestled in the down of Prejudice, And be content, though clad with angel-wings, Close-clipped, to hop about from perch to perch, In paltry cages of dead men's dead thoughts? Oh, rather, like the skylark, soar and sing, And let our gushing songs befit the dawn And sunrise, and the yet unshaken dew 90 Brimming the chalice of each full-blown hope, Whose blithe front turns to greet the growing day! Never had poets such high call before, Never can poets hope for higher ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... on earth. One who has lived twenty-eight years, having no desire unfulfilled, and taking his part of every pleasure that wealth, high birth, and a splendid body can give him, may well ride gaily over a good white road and have leisure to throw back his head to hearken to a skylark soaring in the high blue heavens above him, to smile at a sitting bird's bright eyes peeping timidly at him from under the thick leafage of a hazel hedge, or at the sight of a family of rabbits scurrying ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Feb. 26. A. Goring Thomas's cantata "The Swan and the Skylark" given at a Seidl Concert in the Metropolitan Opera House, ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... sent some in his hand to Paul. Through a festooned arch of the pavilion giving upon the terraces, we saw a bird dart down to the fountain, tilt and drink, tilt and drink again, and flash away. Immediately the multitudinous rejoicing of a skylark dropped from upper air. When men would send thanks to the very gate of heaven their envoy ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... to Chaulieu's wanton lyre; While, fluent as the skylark sings When first the morn allures its wings, The epicure his theme pursues: And tell me if, among the choir Whose music charms the banks of Seine, So full, so free, so rich a strain ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... that the songs came floating from his lips and pen as music from the throat of birds. So he held his own orthodoxy more orthodox than that of the schools. In which view poor John Clare was decidedly wrong, seeing that his music was not offered gratis like that of the skylark and nightingale, but was looking out for the pounds, shillings, and pence of a ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... circumstance but that he was gone. Yet afterwards, long afterwards, she remembered the exact motion of a bright green beetle busily meandering among the wild thyme near her, and she recalled the musical, balanced, wavering drop of a skylark into her nest near the heather-bed where she lay. The sun was sinking low, the hot air had ceased to quiver near the hotter earth, when she bethought her once more of the note which she had impatiently ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... of slumber he woke; but it was not that morn had unroll'd O'er the pale, cloudy tents of the Orient, her banners of purple and gold: It was not the song of the skylark that rose from the green pastures near, But the sound of his bells that fell softly, as dew on the slumberer's ear. At that sound he awoke and arose, and went forth on the bead-bearing grass— At that sound, with his loving Francesca, he piously knelt at the Mass. If the sun shone in splendour ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... chocolate feathers, that have greatly faded into dull browns when we see them in the late autumn. In the far north only does it sing, and, according to Audubon, the charming song is flung to the breeze while the bird soars like a skylark. In the United States we ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... with rude winds, and beaten down with rain, How can the roses dare to trust again The tricksy mistress whom they once adored? Even the glad heaven, chilled with stormy stain, Grudges its skylark ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... with the rich abundance of the same in which some more delicately-constituted organisms habitually revel. If we would understand of what development emotional delight is capable, we should watch the skylark. As that 'blithe spirit' now at heaven's gate 'poureth its full ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... far away there's green valleys, An' greeat craggy, towerin' hills, An' breezes at mingle their sweetness Wi' t' music o' sparklin' rills; An' meadows all decked wi' wild-flaars, An' hedges wi' blossom all white, An' a blue sky wheer t' skylark is singin', Just to mak known his ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... spake;—and as her echo, I Take up her parable, and prophesy: Here, as from spring to spring the swallows pass, Perennial daisies shall adorn the grass; Here the shrill skylark build her annual nest, And sing in heaven, while you serenely rest; On trembling dewdrops morn's first glance shall shine, Eve's latest beams on this fair bank decline, And oft the rainbow steal through light and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... have been lacking. Sometimes the original manuscript turns up—unfortunately not in Shakespeare's case—to confute some or all of the ingenious editors. A learned professor changed the word "unbodied" in Shelley's "Skylark" to "embodied," and some critics approved the change; but the poet's manuscript in the Harvard University Library makes the former reading clear beyond question. One might say that in these cases the Imp of the Perverse plants himself ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... than Pierre de Ronsard's "Odes," with "Mignonne! allons voir si la Rose," and "The Skylark" and the lines to April—itself verily like nothing so much as a jonquil, in its golden-green binding and yellow edges and perfume of the place where it had lain—sweet, but with something of the sickliness of all spring flowers since the days ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... Nearly all of his music is sweet and tender, lapsing from his round breast like water over the smooth lip of a pool, then breaking farther on into a sparkling foam of melodious notes, which, glow with subdued enthusiasm, yet without expressing much of the strong, gushing ecstasy of the bobolink or skylark. ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... audible,—and the call of the cuckoo shrilling above the plaintive murmur of the 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 fluty notes of a nightingale trembled with ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... spring had really come with a plaintive song, the sweetest to memory of all nature's voices; then the American robin (the migratory thrush), a bold, cheery note, full of summer life; and after those the chief was the bobolink, singing up into the sky like the skylark, and with which we connected the ripening of the strawberry, the merriest and most rollicking of all bird songs, as that of the bluebird was the tenderest. Then came the hermit thrush, heard only in the depth of the forest, shy and remote in his life and nesting, and the whip-poor-will, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... earth. The skylark springs Far up to catch thy glory on his wings; And thou dost bless him first that highest soars. The bee comes forth to see thee; and the flowers Worship thee all day long, and through the skies Follow thy journey with their earnest eyes. River of life, thou pourest on the woods; And ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... recollect how we used to skylark in the lee scuppers with those jolly fellows, Buntline and Reeftackle, until the Luff had to hail, and send a Middy with his compliments to the gentlemen of the larboard watch, and to say, that ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... group, and Captain Joshua Wilson, and Mr. and Mrs. Alec Waterman, and General and Mrs. Wilks, and the wife of Congressman Reynolds—representatives of Montgomery's oldest and best. Phil shook hands with Wayland Brown Bayless and told him she was glad he had quoted Shelley's "Skylark," her favorite poem, whereupon he departed hurriedly to catch a train. It was then that Mrs. King took advantage of the proximity of so many leading citizens and citizenesses, who had just heard pessimism routed and optimism glorified, to address Phil ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... cottages, and away up to where the pines 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
... "It's a precious sight better than this pestilential West Coast at all events, say what you will. And as to work, that's all right; I don't care how hard you work me in reason, Dick. I know that I've been an atrociously lazy beggar, always more ready to skylark than to do anything useful, but I'm going to turn over a new leaf now; I am, indeed—you needn't look incredulous; I've wasted time enough, and I intend now to buckle to and make myself useful. And the commodore may 'jacket' me as much as he pleases to- night—I know I deserve it—and I'll ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... busy at his work, While blithe as skylark's song His merry, mellow whistle rang The pleasant street along. "Oh, that's the kind of lad I like!" I thought as I passed by; "These busy, cheery, whistling boys Make grand men by ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... are, to the world, the poet of one poem—"The Raven:" a piece in which the music is highly artificial, and the "exaltation" (what there is of it) by no means particularly "vague." So a portion of the public know little of Shelley but the "Skylark," and those two incongruous birds, the lark and the raven, bear each of them a poet's name, vivu' per ora virum. Your theory of poetry, if accepted, would make you (after the author of "Kubla Khan") the foremost of the poets of the world; at no long distance ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... and the peasant-farmers, mostly of the older 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 peasant groups ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... are kept together in one large cage containing gymnastic properties, many species develop humor, and indulge in play of many kinds. They remind me of a group of well- fed and boisterous small boys who must skylark or "bust." From morning until night they pull each other's tails, wrestle and roll, steal each other's playthings, and wildly chase each other to and fro. There is no end of chattering, and screeching, ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... interesting and instructive to compare the tributes to the mocking-bird with Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale', Shelley's 'To a Skylark', and Wordsworth's 'To ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... had commenced in the afternoon: and the following morning the ship's company were electrified by a general order, thus set forth and declared: "D'ye hear there, for and aft! all hands skylark!" ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... gone up into her belfry to play the sunset hymn on the noble old carillon. Through the sunset sky the lovely bell-notes floated far and wide, exquisitely chaste and aloof as the high-showering ecstasy of a skylark. ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... Harrod added that if 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 ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... quiet, and rest, and refinement? Oh, let 'em go home and eat coke. These fussy old footlers whose 'air stands on hend at a row-de-dow joke, The song of the skylark sounds pooty, but "skylarking" song's better fun, And you carn't do the rooral to-rights on a tract ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... restraining him, or advising him. He knew no more of discipline than a skylark does. He was either the best scout in the world or no scout at all, as you choose to look at it. He was going upon this business in reckless haste, without forethought or caution. He would stake his life to save twenty yards of distance. There was no discretion in ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... brain that everything takes place. We know now that we do not see with the eyes or hear with the ears. They are really channels for the transmission, adequate or inadequate, of sense impressions. It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings. ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... parrots in Kentucky, and there were in Ohio pigeons and birds of prey, eagles and buzzards, but the birds we know to-day and the bees were later immigrants from lands that remembered Aristophanes or the hills of Hymettus, or that knew Shelley's skylark or Keats's nightingale or Rostand's ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... year is young, what sweets are flung By the violets, hiding, dim, And the lilac that sways her censers high, Whilst the skylark chants a hymn! How sweet is the scent of the daffodil bloom, When blithe spring decks each spray, And the flowering thorn sheds rare perfume Through the beautiful month of May! What a dainty pet is the mignonette, Whose sweets wide scattered are! But ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... wakens, strong that yesternight slept sad, She sang. The song triumphant upward swelled, Unsorrowed by soft dreams or thoughts of eld— As fresh the full, free, mellow notes did rise As the blithe skylark's strain, anear ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... 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
... skylark stuff, He praised the bird a few, And Shelley's ode sincerely showed He liked ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... the Romantic Revival, describe a perfectly definite outward object or scene by a figure drawn from the most complex abstract conceptions. So Shelley, with whom these inverted figures are habitual, compares the skylark to ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... the topmost twig of a tree, or on some long flaunting weed; and as he rises and sinks with the breeze, pours forth a succession of rich tinkling notes; crowding one upon another, like the outpouring melody of the skylark, and possessing the same rapturous character. Sometimes he pitches from the summit of a tree, begins his song as soon as he gets upon the wing, and flutters tremulously down to the earth, as if overcome with ecstasy at his own music. ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... course. You remind me of a bird. You have all the quick and easy graces of the skylark. Why should you ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... fingers at his throat and turned his face upward. All the blue air seemed glittering with the sun-tipped wings of gulls. The skylark's song, piercingly sweet, seemed to penetrate his soul. And, as his life-suit fell about him, so seemed to fall the heavy weight of dread like a shroud, dropping at his feet. And he stepped clear—took his first free step toward ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... sea); To us the absent are the dead, The dead to us must absent be. We, too, the absent ranks must join; And friends will censure and forget: There's metal base in every coin; Men vanish, leaving traces yet Of evil and of good behind, Since false notes taint the skylark's hymn, And dross still lurks in gold refined— ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... "Mexican Notes"): "Its long, liquid, full-throated note is more sweet and thrilling than any other bird note I have ever heard; it is hardly a song, but a flood of melody, elevating, inspiring as the skylark, but with a touch of the tender melancholy of the nightingale in ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... of the hunted Hare A fibre from the Brain does tear A Skylark wounded in the wing A Cherubim does ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... | | Perhaps it is a bit unethical and | | unusual for editors to voice their | | opinion of their own wares, but when | | such a story as "The Skylark of | | Space" comes along, we just feel as | | if we must shout from the housetops | | that this is the greatest | | interplanetarian and space flying | | story that has appeared this year. | | Indeed, it probably will rank as one | | of the great space flying stories | | for many years to come. ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... a desperate effort to display the astonishment suitable to such a marvel, whilst Satan, who was trying all he knew to get his tail out, cursed freely. How long the superstitious captain of the Skylark would have let him remain there will never be known, for just then the mate came on deck and caught sight of it before he was quite aware of the part ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... the political bile or 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 and there, ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... have just read "The Readers' Corner" of the March issue and noticed that bright remark about that super-rotten story, "Skylark Three." Anyone who liked that story is certainly not hard to please. It does not compare with the worst story ever published. I also read that "other magazine" and I say that it has disgraced itself ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... hail the sacred morn, That slowly wakes while all the fields are still! A soothing calm on every breeze is borne; A graver murmur gurgles from the rill; And echo answers softer from the hill; And sweeter sings the linnet from the thorn: The skylark warbles in a tone less shrill. Hail, light serene! hail, sacred Sabbath morn! The rooks float silent by in airy drove; The sun a placid yellow lustre throws; The gales that lately sighed along the ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... porch the Skeptic said, "I must run down to the barn and look after Skylark's foot. He cut himself when I was out on ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... adjusted as to convert him into a perfectly dirigible parachute. Swift as his descent was, he alighted on the ground as lightly as a tuft of down. It was the poetry of motion. One or two writers have insisted that the horned lark's empyrean song compares favorably with that of the European skylark; but, loyal and patriotic an American as we are, honesty compels us to concede that our bird's voice is much feebler and less musical than that of his celebrated relative across the sea. It sounds like the unmelodious clicking of pebbles, ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... at a skylark, so sprang Ivan at Gavryl, saying: "I will tear you into pieces! You shall not get away from ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... shades of musical expression unattainable by the Western chromatic scale of 12 semitones. Each one of the seven basic notes of the octave is associated in Hindu mythology with a color, and the natural cry of a bird or beast-DO with green, and the peacock; RE with red, and the skylark; MI with golden, and the goat; FA with yellowish white, and the heron; SOL with black, and the nightingale; LA with yellow, and the horse; SI with a combination of all ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... a favourite funeral hymn. The only difficulty would be in keeping Aunt Becky Burnham from pitching it in a key where nobody but a soprano skylark, accustomed to warble at a great height, could possibly sing it. It was generally given at the grave, when Elder Weeks officiated; but it never satisfied Aunt Hitty, because the good elder always looked so unpicturesque when he threw a red bandanna handkerchief over his ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... purred softly. 'You will have a name some day,' he said, 'and a great name, too. Why are you called Skylark now?' ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... 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 ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... your mother, and I'd forgot who I was talking to. She wahn't like a stranger—it was just as if I'd known her always. I haven't understood it yet. And after a while I told her about that verse, and she wanted to see it—the verse about the skylark, you know—" ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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
... Miss Gordon, just a stepping in at that open door—that's what we want. That sawbones feller is right when he says the progress will be slow. Slow! Slow ain't quite the word. No more ain't progress the word—that's my opinion. He just lies on that bed, and the most he can do is to skylark a bit with Nestorius. He don't take no interest in nothin', least of all in his victuals—and a man's in a bad way when he takes no interest in his victuals. Yes, I'll take another pancake, thankin' you kindly. You've got a rare ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... spontaneous or original. When the artist thinks too little he lacks sense, when he thinks too much he loses fire. In the very highest and most strangely mysterious poetical flights of SHELLEY and KEATS, or WORDSWORTH, I find the very same Instinct which inspires the skylark and nightingale, but more or less allied to and strengthened by Thought or Consciousness. If human Will or Wisdom alone directed all our work, then every man who had mere patience might be a great original genius, and it is indeed true that Man ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... and amber and gold it grows When the sun sinks late in the West; And the breeze sweeps over the rippling rows Where the quail and the skylark nest. Mountain or river or shining star, There's never a sight can beat— Away to the sky-line stretching far— A ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... to 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith |
