"Nightingale" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is the peer of Howard. Who, among men, have been found to excel the world-honored Florence Nightingale in intelligent arrangements and administrative talent, as displayed in her management of the important department to which she devoted herself, and where her courage, promptitude, and sound judgment were as conspicuous as her ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time- devouring nightingale we ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... eaves of Anne Hathaway's house. Doubtless to his mood of elation or depression, and to his quick and intimate response to the wild life round him, we owe those clear impressions that connect certain scenes and phases of our life with his more familiar utterances. To hear the cuckoo and the nightingale to-day in the woods round Shottery and Wilmcote is to recall some of the poet's most inspired moods. But it is not the familiar birds alone that caught the poet's eye and stimulated his imagination. In the days of his youth, before he went to London, he must have studied bird life ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... this motif was already popular then. It is found also in much older poetry and more remote countries, for Jeanroy quotes a Chinese poem, written before the seventh century of our era, where, it is true, a mere cock and mere flies play the part of the Verona lark and nightingale: "It was not the cock, it was the hum of flies," or in the Latin translation of Father Lacharme: "Fallor, non cantavit gallus, sed muscarum ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... Nightingale Island, the smallest and most southerly, is in latitude 37 degrees 26' S., longitude 12 degrees 12' W. Off its southern extremity is a high ledge of rocky islets; a few also of a similar appearance are seen to the northeast. The ground ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... whom I had dwelt there, not even my mother. The brick edifice of the bank was in the clouds; the foundations of what was to be a great block of buildings had vanished, ominously, as it proved; the dry-goods store of Mr. Nightingale seemed a doubtful concern; and Dominicus Pike's tobacco manufactory an affair of smoke, except the splendid image of an Indian chief in front. The white spire of the meeting- house ascended out of the densest heap of vapor, as if that shadowy ...
— Passages From a Relinquised Work (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of what is now called Phocis, but which at that time was inhabited by Thracians. It was in this land that the women perpetrated the outrage upon Itys; and many of the poets when they mention the nightingale call it the Daulian bird. Besides, Pandion in contracting an alliance for his daughter would consider the advantages of mutual assistance, and would naturally prefer a match at the above moderate distance ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... according to Zakary ben Mohamed al Caswini, "say the bulbul has a passion for the rose, and laments and cries when he sees it pulled."—OUSELEY'S Oriental Collections, vol. i. p. 16. According to Pallas it is the true nightingale of Europe, Sylvia luscinia, which the Armenians call boulboul, ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... No nightingale did ever chant So sweetly to reposing bands 10 Of travellers in some shady haunt Among Arabian sands: No sweeter voice was ever heard In spring time from the cuckoo-bird Breaking the silence of the seas ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... at first," said the major; "but I have been in Africa as well as India, and have heard lions roar. When one of these gentlemen is doing a bit of nightingale he roars in one direction, then in another, now with his head up, and now with it down; and when you add to it that he roars loud and roars soft, he seems to be quite a ventriloquist, and ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... thought it was a footpad advancing in the dark, and behold 'tis an old friend. We may shake hands, colonel, in the dark, 'tis better than fighting by daylight. Why should we quarrel, because I am a Whig and thou art a Tory? Turn thy steps and walk with me to Fulham, where there is a nightingale still singing in the garden, and a cool bottle in a cave I know of; you shall drink to the Pretender if you like, and I will drink my liquor my own way: I have had enough of good liquor?—no, never! There is no ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in the sun, or on a balcony," he was saying, his eyes twinkling. "And pretty gentlemen with long curls and their hats tucked under their arms should be feeding you nightingale tongues, or whatever it ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... very easy to laugh at the optimist, and to accuse him of "poetizing the truth." No doubt, an optimist will see excellence, beauty, and truth where pessimists see only degradation, vice, and ugliness. The one hears the nightingale, the other the raven only. To one, the sunsetting forms a magic picture; to the other, it is but a presage of bad weather tomorrow. Some people seem to look at nature through a glass of red wine or in a Claude Lorraine mirror; to them the landscape has ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... then for the same reason call each of them in the same kind beautiful, or each beautiful for something peculiar? And you will judge of this matter thus. Since we see a dog naturally formed for one thing, and a horse for another, and for another still, as an example, a nightingale, we may generally and not improperly declare each of them to be beautiful then when it is most excellent according to its nature; but since the nature of each is different, each of them seems to me to be beautiful in a different ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... Madam was taking her rest, Miss Isobel, feeling like Machiavelli one moment and Florence Nightingale the next, stepped into the carriage, already loaded with delicacies, and proceeded on her errand of mercy. She invariably returned in a twitter of subdued excitement, and recounted her experiences with ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... him, though by no means uniformly; and so sensitive is he, that, when connected with you by any intimate rapport, even if but momentary, he almost divines your thoughts. He is full of perpetual surprises. I am sure he was a nightingale before he was Rose. An iridescence like sea-foam sparkled in him that evening, he laughed as lightly as the little tinkling mass-bells at every moment, and seemed to diffuse a rosy glow wherever he went in the room. Yet gayety ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... preferred the society of ladies, as less apt to force him into subsequent relations. He willingly spent whole evenings in playing blind man's buff with the young people, telling them little stories to make them break into the silvery laughs of youth, sweeter than the song of the nightingale. He was fond of a life in the country, or the life of the chateau. He was ingenious in varying its amusements, in multiplying its enjoyments. He also loved to compose there. Many of his best works written ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... Prince's father grew a rose-tree, a very beautiful rose-tree. It only bloomed every five years, and then bore but a single rose, but oh, such a rose! Its scent was so sweet that when you smelt it you forgot all your cares and troubles. And he had also a nightingale which could sing as if all the beautiful melodies in the world were shut up in its little throat. This rose and this nightingale the Princess was to have, and so they were both put into silver caskets and sent ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... Lincoln's policy towards the free and freed negroes, for Johnson and Lincoln have been in intimate relations from the beginning.... Have you read details about the U.S. Sanitary Commission? It is a magnificent development of high historical importance to the future of wars, carrying out Florence Nightingale's ideas and wishes on to the vastest scale, and adding to it the tending ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... their proofs and sketches; and from this he took a dozen twelve-by-fourteen-inch photographs of beautiful women, most of them stage beauties of bygone years. The one on top happened to be Patti. The adorable Patti!... Linda, Violetta, Lucia. Lord, what a nightingale she had been! He laughed laid the photograph on the desk, and dipped his hand into a canvas bag filled with polished green stones which would have great commercial value if people knew more about them; for nothing else in the world is quite ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... died: 200 She clos'd the door, she panted, all akin To spirits of the air, and visions wide: No uttered syllable, or, woe betide! But to her heart, her heart was voluble, Paining with eloquence her balmy side; As though a tongueless nightingale should swell Her throat in vain, and ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... sing as sweetly as the lark When neither is attended; 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 reason reasoned are To their right ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... it would; but felt too shy to talk about such things before Thorny, so hastily retired to put the chair away, and the others went in to tea. But later in the evening, when Miss Celia was singing like a nightingale, the boy slipped away from sleepy Bab and Betty to stand by the syringa bush and listen, with his heart full of new thoughts and happy feelings; for never before had he spent a Sunday like this. And when he went to bed, instead of saying "Now I lay me," he repeated ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... no more learning about bird-music than would help me to guess that a dull dissyllabic refrain in the heart of the wood came from the cuckoo; and when at moments I heard a twitter of fuller tone, with a more suggestive modulation, I could only hope it was the nightingale. I have listened for the nightingale more than once in places so charming that his song would have seemed but the articulate expression of their beauty, and have never heard much beyond a provoking snatch or two—a prelude that came to nothing. In spite of a natural grudge, however, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... Nanny, more jocund than any, As blithe as the month of June, Do carol and sing like birds of the spring, No nightingale sweeter in tune; To bring in content, when summer is spent, In pleasant delight and play, With mirth and good cheer to end the whole year, And drive the ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... pound box of fancy assorted chocolates—in brown paper cups; and assured of at least a generous disposition, plus his lovely collar-advertisement hair, she will say yes. On the sofa, side by side, one light dimly shining, the nightingale singing in the sycamore tree beside the front window, their two hearts will beat as one—for the time being. They will eat the chocolates I packed and life will seem a very sweet and peaceful thing indeed. Nor will any disturbing notion of how my feet felt ever reach them, no jarring "you heifer!" ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... Dolaucothy Elegiac In Memoriam To Clara E.H.R. A.R. Venus and Astery To a Royal Mourner Beautiful Wales Gwalia Deg The Welsh Language: to Caradawc, of Abergavenny Englyn i'r Iath Gymraeg A Foolish Bird I'd Choose to be a Nightingale: to Mary (Llandovery) True Philanthropy: to J. D. Llewellyn, Esq., Penllergare Disraeli Down in the Dark: the Ferndale Explosion DAISY MAY:—Part the First Part the Second Part the Third Lines, accompanying a Purse Forsaken Christmas ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... discussing a bottle of excellent wine, and looking out upon the dark woods which surrounded the building, watching the full moon soar into the cloudless sky from behind the gently-swaying foliage, and listening to the song of the nightingale, amidst which we once or twice thought we detected the tinkling sounds of a guitar apparently issuing from one of the open windows in another wing of ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... your beauty in the rose, your glory in the dawn, Your sweetness in the nightingale, your ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... remarked that it would be much pleasanter if the pressure would confine its operations to the bow instead of coming bothering us here aft. Amidst the noise we caught every now and again from the organ a note or two of Kjerulf's melody—'I could not sleep for the nightingale's voice.' The hurly-burly outside lasted for about twenty minutes, and then all ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... Cole, proceeded after the enemy to Panella, where it was joined by another, under General Nightingale, and on the enemy seeing how closely they were followed they retreated from Miranda de Corno, setting fire to that town also. We again fell in with them on the banks of a river near the village of Poz de Aroce, where a brisk attack was made on them by the British, and they ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... of Madam Jenny Lind-Goldschmidt shocked horror is similarly expressed by Canon Scott Holland at the possibility of the Swedish Nightingale, who was arranging to give a concert there, encountering ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... whose fearful face, like a red cherub's, the children fled, and who wore a garland like a hoop; the Miller with his short red hair and bagpipes and brutal head, with which he could break down a door; the Lover who was as sleepless as a nightingale; the Knight, the Cook, the Clerk of Oxford. Pendennis or the Cook, M. Mirabolant, is nowhere so vividly varied by a few merely verbal strokes. But the great difference is deeper and more striking. It is simply that ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... perhaps the same as that underlying the words attributed to Florence Nightingale: "I must strive to see only God in my friends and ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... on or exist. For instance, those who knew him a little might call him a loose man in money matters; those who knew him closer laughed at the idea of coupling any notion of pecuniary or other like responsibility with his nature. You might as well attack the character of the nightingale, which may have nipped up your five-pound note and torn it to shreds to serve as nest-building material. Only immediate craving necessities could ever extract from him an acknowledgment of the common vulgar agencies ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... further we encamped at Moreau creek, a stream of twenty yards width, on the southern side. The next morning, we passed at an early hour, Cedar island on the north, so called from the abundance of the tree of that name; near which is a small creek, named Nightingale creek, from a bird of that species, who sang for us during the night. Beyond Cedar island, are some others of a smaller extent, and at seven miles distance a creek fifteen or twenty yards wide, entering from the north, and known by the name of Cedar creek. At ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... the flute! Now it's mute! Birds delight, Day and night, Nightingale, In the dale, Lark in sky,— Merrily, Merrily, merrily to ...
— Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience • William Blake
... deity whose servants they are. But men, through their own fear of death, belie the swans too, and say that they, lamenting their death, sing their last song through grief; and they do not consider that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold, or is afflicted with any other pain, not even the nightingale, or swallow, or the hoopoes, which, they say, sing lamenting through grief. But neither do these birds appear to me to sing through sorrow, nor yet do swans; but, in my opinion, belonging to Apollo, they are prophetic, and, foreseeing the blessings of Hades, ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... a watch dog. The only noises that interrupt the stillness of the night are the lugubrious cry of the coyote and the wailing note of the whip-poor-will; these, at intervals blending with the sweeter strain of the tzenzontle—the Mexican nightingale—intermittently silenced as the marching troop passes near the spot where it ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... Middle-Temple-Gate in Fleet-street," includes No. 20, "Dean Smedley, gone to seek his Fortune," and also a poem, "The Pheasant and the Lark. A Fable." In the poem, several writers are compared to birds, Swift being the nightingale: ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... have proved to him that he knew nothing in comparison with Monsieur Gourdon the doctor. "Adolphe Nourrit with his thread of a voice," remarked the notary with patronizing indulgence, "was scarcely worthy to accompany the nightingale of Soulanges." As to the author of the "Cup-and-Ball" (which was then being printed at Bournier's), society was satisfied that a poet of his force could not be met with in Paris, for Delille ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... waters spread over the plain in thousands of irrigating streams and rills. Blooming gardens and fields of waving grain lent beauty to the plain; orchards and vineyards clothed the slopes of the hills; in the orange and citron groves the voice of the nightingale made the nights musical. In short, all was so beautiful below and so soft and serene above that the Moors seemed not without warrant for their fond belief that Paradise lay in the skies overhanging ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... side of the wall of osiers, was always in voice, whether sighing or shouting. The larks and blackbirds had a predilection for this nest of color, announcing their preference loudly in a combat of trills. And once or twice, we were quite certain, a nightingale with Patti notes had been trying its liquid scales in ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... West-End people—living on the fat of the land (which forms a stout portion of an honest youth's romance), Ripton Thompson breakfasted next morning with his chief at half-past eight. The meal had been fixed overnight for seven, but Ripton slept a great deal more than the nightingale, and (to chronicle his exact state) even half-past eight rather afflicted his new aristocratic senses and reminded him too keenly of law and bondage. He had preferred to breakfast at Algernon's hour, who had left word for eleven. Him, however, it ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... time of the year is mine, When all the little birds combine To sing until the earth and air Are filled with sweet sounds everywhere; And most the tender nightingale Makes joyful every wood and dale, Singing her love-song o'er and o'er, For which we thank ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... laugh as it rippled on, the wind laughed as it bent the tall branches, the nightingale singing in the wood stopped suddenly, and its next burst of song was like ringing laughter; the mountains quivered over the mill-stream, the stars seemed to tremble as ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... clumps, and near the Strand was a great patch of Solomon's seal. It was a continual pleasure to see the wood clothe itself from the nakedness of early April and increase in fulness of life until we left at midsummer. The nightingale sang there unwearingly, but other birds were few, and I never noticed a nest in the wood. The few pheasants which survived a winter with the 4th Division were, I fear, exterminated by us. Rabbits continued plentiful in spite ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... had been the white, cloistered life of the silent nun: with its pallid loveliness, it was as a flower that had taken the veil. It could never have uttered the burning passion of a lover for his mistress; the nightingale could have found no thorn on it to press his aching poet's heart against; but sick and weary eyes had dwelt gratefully upon it; at most it might have expressed, like a prayer, the nun's stainless ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... corresponds to that of Nature's sanitary commission for the removal of material nuisances. It is not the butterfly, but the beetle, which she employs for this duty. It is not the bird of paradise and the nightingale, but the fowl of dark plumage and unmelodious voice, to which is entrusted the sacred duty of eliminating the substances that infect the air. And the force of obvious analogy teaches us not to expect all the qualities which please the ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... man stepped down very softly to the second tier. A nightingale was calling low its liquid invocation, "Ho-ren-k-y-y-o-o-o!" Perhaps old Kano moved so softly that he might not lose the echoes of this cry. The two men seemed alone in the silent scene. Once Tatsu thought his ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... than a veil of sorrow. In deep and infinite joy and sorrow the two lovers wandered silently together through the flowery groves; now and then a branch waving in the night-air would touch the guitar on the lady's arm, and it would breathe forth a slight murmur which blended with the song of the nightingale, or the delicate fingers of the girl would tremble over the strings and awaken a few scattered chords, while the shooting stars seemed as if following the tones of the instrument as they died away. Oh, truly happy was this night both to the youth and the maiden, ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... note to his beautiful poem, 'The Nightingale,' lest he should be supposed capable of speaking with levity of a single line in Milton. The note was hardly necessary, but one loves the spirit that prompted him to make it. Sainte-Beuve remarks: 'Parler des poetes est toujours une chose bien delicate, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... the Khoja, "I am not the person you imagine me to be. Do you not see that I am a nightingale? I am ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... sweet mellow tone, join'd the lessons of art With the accents of nature, which flow'd from his heart. The CANARY, a much admir'd foreign musician, [p 8] Condescended to sing to the Fowls of condition. While the NIGHTINGALE warbled and quaver'd so fine, That they all clapp'd their wings, and pronounc'd it divine! The SKY LARK, in extacy, sang from a cloud, And CHANTICLEER crow'd, and the YAFFIL laugh'd loud. The dancing began, when the ...
— The Peacock 'At Home:' - A Sequel to the Butterfly's Ball • Catherine Ann Dorset
... in June and a dip into the familiar old Americanized clangor at the Cecil; or Chinkie's place in Devonshire about a month earlier, sitting out on the terrace wrapped in steamer-rugs and waiting for the moon to come up and the first nightingale to sing. Of Fifth Avenue shining almost bone-white in the clear December sunlight and the salted nuts and orange-blossom cocktails at Sherry's, or the Plaza tea-room at about five o'clock in the ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... O lyre disconsolate! Our wonted music is in tune no more. Lament we while the heavens revolve, and let The nightingale be conquered on Love's shore! O heaven, O earth, O sea, O cruel fate! How shall I bear a pang so passing sore? Eurydice, my love! O life of mine! On earth I will no more without thee pine! I will go ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... peasant of Devoluy "often goes a distance of five hours over rocks and precipices for a single [man's] load of wood;" and he remarks on another page, that "the justice of peace of that canton had, in the course of forty-three years, but once heard the voice of the nightingale."—Histoire, etc, des Hautes Alpes, pp. ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... came on, and the gnats played in the warm air and in the red clouds, the nightingale came and sang to the roses; sang that the beautiful is as the sunshine in this world, and that the beautiful lives for ever. But the roses thought that the nightingale sang his own praise, which one might very well have fancied; for that the song related to them, of that ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... land; and a live crab discovered among them would surely seem to indicate it. The sea is smooth, the air clear. It is like "Andalusia in April, all but the nightingales," exclaims the admiral. What would you give to hear a nightingale just now, brave-hearted admiral, gazing into the moonlit infinity of silence that enspheres you! You can not bear the crystal tension; go below to the relief of the narrow room and ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... I want to start living. Red wine, streets of the nightingale cries to the rose," said one of ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... winter heaped his rattling hail High on the window sill, With pipe and wassail, rime and tale, I'd never miss the nightingale Or cuckoo ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... especial feeling the relations between man and the animal world, an attitude to be connected with several familiar episodes in Sterne.[2] The two chapters, "Der Heerd" and "Der Taubenschlag," tell of a sentimental farmer who mourns over the fact that his son has cut down a tree in which the nightingale was wont to nest. Asimilar sentimental regard is cherished in this family for the doves, which no one killed, because no one could eat them. Even as Yorick meets a Franciscan, Jacobi encounters a Jesuit whose heart leaps to meet his own, and later, after the real ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... no motion abroad, nor sound: even the voice of the nightingale was stilled, because the passion of his desire had become ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... full of wonder and delight; her brother too was admiring him. Pandalevsky was watching Darya Mihailovna and was filled with envy. Pigasov thought, 'If I have to give five hundred roubles I will get a nightingale to sing better than that!' But the most impressed of all the party were Bassistoff and Natalya. Scarcely a breath escaped Bassistoff; he sat the whole time with open mouth and round eyes and listened—listened as he had never listened to any one ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... at the moment of hearing it. It is objective when, affected only by the purely physical sensation of sound, we listen to it passively, and it suggests to us impressions. A march, a waltz, a flute imitating the nightingale, the chromatic scale imitating the murmuring of the wind in the "Pastoral Symphony," may be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... the discovery, I had never been aware that there was anything of the nightingale about me; but I was now promoted to the place of court-minstrel, in which capacity I was afterwards perpetually called ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... against whom 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 ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... consistently and chivalrously to causes once great and resplendent, now only fit subjects for elegies. As a writer, he is a master of the critique spirituelle,—that species which is so brilliant in display, so unsubstantial in results. He sparkles and glows; but his light only directs the brown nightingale where to find its repast. Armed cap-a-pie, glittering with epigram, rhetoric, and irony, he entered the lists against M. Sainte-Beuve, ostensibly to defend the reputation of Chateaubriand, provoked in reality by the causes already noticed. We have no space for the controversy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... "Art," or professional tradition, has reappeared with new interest. I say the old question, for Hippocrates stated the case on the side of "Nature" more than two thousand years ago. Miss Florence Nightingale,—and if I name her next to the august Father of the Healing Art, its noblest daughter well deserves that place of honor,—Miss Florence Nightingale begins her late volume with a paraphrase of his statement. But from a very early time to this there has always been a strong party against "Nature." ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... from Thirty Languages and Dialects. By George Borrow. 'The Raven ascended to the Nest of the Nightingale.'—Persian Poem. St. Petersburgh. Printed by Schulz ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... here, let me take this,"—and I picked up Miss Nightingale's new thoughts thereon. "Thus armed and fortified, do you think they'll ask other reference ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... note beloved of men Comes flying over many a windy wave To Britain, and in April suddenly Breaks from a coppice gemm'd with green and red, And he suspends his converse with a friend, Or it may be the labor of his hands, To think or say, "There is the nightingale;" So fared it with Geraint, who thought and said, "Here, by God's grace, is ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... carts amidst firewood; mutton and kangaroo strung on the branches of trees; idle and uncleanly men, of different civil condition but of one class; tribes of dogs and natives. No green hedges or flowery meadows, or notes of the thrush or nightingale; but yet there was the park-like lands, the brilliant skies, the pure river; and, above all, the untainted breath ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... in the garden, like a sort of pool, With walls of honeysuckle and orchids all around; The humming birds are always making a sleep sound; In the night there's the Aztec nightingale; But when the moon is up, in Nicaragua, The moon of Nicaragua and the million stars, It's the human heart that sings, and the heart of Nicaragua, To the pleading, plaintive ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... to the point of finishing off, I sat up all through one beautiful night in May, till the farewell words were written. At the very moment when, with a sigh of satisfaction, I laid down my pen, a wandering nightingale on the pear-tree outside my library window, burst into such a flood of song as I have never heard before or since. The pear-tree was in full blossom; the sky behind it was blue and cloudless; and as I listened to the unwonted music, I could ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... attractive to him than boys. They commanded him, as the nightingale did the gypsy steward, and he followed them into untrodden wildernesses. Thomas Bradford undertook to publish Wilson's colossal "Ornithology." It was to be distinctly an "American" work. It was to be printed on American paper; and Amies, the paper-maker, ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... later), which clambers, lawlessly if you will, but at least freely and simply, twining the bare stem of old tradition with graceful sentiment and lively natural sympathies. I find a few sweet and flowing verses in Dunbar's "Merle and Nightingale,"—indeed one whole stanza that has always seemed exquisite to me. ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... on walking, one came to beautiful woods with lofty trees and deep lakes. The wood extended to the sea, which was deep and blue, deep enough for large ships to sail up right under the branches of the trees. Among these trees lived a nightingale, which sang so deliciously, that even the poor fisherman, who had plenty of other things to do, lay still to listen to it, when he was out at night drawing in his nets. 'Heavens, how beautiful it is!' he said, but then he had to attend to his business and ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... women. Then there would have been one family exquisitely happy instead of two struggling against misery. I would have made the rose stem downy, and put all the thorns on the thistles. I would have gouged out the jewel from the toad's head, and given the peacock the nightingale's voice, and not set everything ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... light-hearted view of life is proportional to our interest in it, our belief in it, our hopes of it. Of course, if we conclude from our little piece of remembered experience, that life is a woeful thing, we shall be apt to do as the old poets thought the nightingale did, to lean our breast against a thorn, that we may suffer the pain which we propose to utter in liquid notes. But that seems to me a false sentiment and an artificial mode of life, to luxuriate in sorrow; even that is better than being crushed by it; but we may be sure that if we wilfully ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to the tragic story of Progne and Philomela, turned the one into a swallow, the other into a nightingale. Dante found the tale in Ovid's ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... better prepared they will be for your book. The moment for its publication seems well chosen. There is always in England a floating fund of sympathy for what is above the everyday sordid cares of life; and these better feelings, so nobly invested for the last two years in Florence Nightingale's career, are just set free. To what will they next be attached? If you can lay hold of them, they may bring about a deeper abolition than any legislative one,—the abolition of the heart- heresy that man's worth comes, not from ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... in question; not only does it explain the development of the complex instincts of the beaver, the cuckoo, the bee, and the ant, as also the dazzling brilliancy of the humming-bird, the glowing tail and neck of the peacock, and the melody of the nightingale; the perfume of the rose and the violet, the brilliancy of the tulip and the sweetness of the nectar of flowers; not only does it help us to understand all these, but serves as a basis of future research ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... of the Persian nightingale to the Persian rose, "wine, wine, wine," was the cry to which hearts responded most readily in all the Georgian era. Walpole the father made Walpole the son drink too much, that he might not be unfilially sober while his father was unpaternally drunk. A generation later the younger Pitt ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... it by dividing the time. "You," she said to Cicada, "can take charge of the music by day, and you," she said to the Green one, "must take it up at sundown in place of the nightingale, and keep it up, till the night breaks, and both of you continue till the frost comes, or until the birds are back on ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... hears the lark in the morning; the pensive man hears the nightingale in the evening. The cheerful man sees the cock strut, and hears the horn and hounds echo in the wood; then walks, "not unseen," to observe the glory of the rising sun, or listen to the singing milkmaid, and view the labours of the ploughman and the mower: then ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... but one came: May again, but not so chilly as ten years before. The air in the park was flower-perfumed, full of lark trills, and nightingale ditties. ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... to see thee when t' June rose Is wet wi' fallin' dew, When t' nightingale maks t' owd woods ring Wi' music ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... partridges were in equal repute according to the season. The bec-figue, a small bird like a nightingale, was so much esteemed in Provence that there were feasts at which that bird alone was served, prepared in various ways; but of all birds used for the table none could be compared to the young cuckoo taken just as ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... violet glow of sunset, and silvery light of moon, the peaches ripening on sunny walls, and the odors of mint and sweet-smelling herbs rising through the gathering damps of evening, the birds singing their vesper songs, and in the deep forest glades the lonely nightingale pouring out his soul ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... nothing more, stood erect, and while Monte Cristo was completing his disguise had advanced straight to the secretary, whose lock was beginning to crack under his nightingale. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Spring should vanish with the Rose! That Youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close! The Nightingale that on the branches sang, Ah whence, and ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... love, this morn when the sweet nightingale Had so long finished all he had to say, That thou hadst slept, and sleep had told his tale; And midst a peaceful dream had stolen away In fragrant dawning of the first of May, Didst thou see aught? didst thou hear voices sing Ere ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... the day, when the hamlet is still, And mortals the sweets of forgetfulness prove; When nought, but the torrent, is heard on the hill; And nought, but the, nightingale's song, in the grove; 'Twas then, by the cave of the fountain afar; A hermit his song of the night thus began; No more with himself, or with nature at war, He thought as a sage, while he felt as ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... free as nature's. The content which the sun shines to celebrate from morning to evening, is unsung. The muse solaces herself, and is not ravished but consoled. There is a catastrophe implied, and a tragic element in all our verse, and less of the lark and morning dews, than of the nightingale and evening shades. But in Homer and Chaucer there is more of the innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and moral poets. The Iliad is not Sabbath but morning reading, and men cling to this old song, because they still have moments of unbaptized and uncommitted life, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... gave a clever imitation of the notes of all birds, ending up with the prolonged 'jug-jug' of the nightingale, which he did to such perfection that you could hardly believe there was not a grove full of those ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... 'Tis only the nightingale's warbled strain, That floats through the evening sky: With his note of love, he replies again, To the muezzin's holy cry; As it sweetly sounds on the rosy air, "Allah, il allah! come to prayer!" Warm o'er the waters the red sun is glowing, 'Tis the last parting glance ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... Ledenberg had been. He was kept in a mean, commonplace, meagerly furnished, tolerably spacious room, and he was allowed the services of his faithful domestic servant John Franken. A sentinel paced day and night up the narrow corridor before his door. As spring advanced, the notes of the nightingale came through the prison-window from the neighbouring thicket. One day John Franken, opening the window that his master might the better enjoy its song, exchanged greeting with a fellow-servant in the Barneveld mansion who happened to be crossing the courtyard. Instantly workmen were sent to close ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... part of the mountain is so well inhabited by the feathered race of beings as this delightful spot. Perhaps indeed, they have sagacity enough to know that there is no other so perfectly secure. Here the nightingale, the blackbird, the linnet, and an infinite variety of little songsters greater strangers to my eyes, than fearful of my hands, dwell in perfect security, and live in the most friendly intimacy ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... my powers. I know they'll shout at me: 'Hold your peace!' They'll tell me: 'Keep silence!' They will say it wisely, they will say it calmly, mocking me, they will say it from the height of their majesty. I know I am only a small bird, Oh, I am not a nightingale! Compared with them I am an ignorant man, I am only a feuilleton-writer, a man to amuse the public. Let them cry and silence me, let them do it! A blow will fall on my cheek, but the heart will nevertheless keep on throbbing! And ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... that she had discovered a treasure. She inquired who was the owner of this exquisite organ, and was informed that it was little Anne Arnould. The Princess sent for the child, who came readily, and was not in the least abashed by the presence of the great lady, but sang like a nightingale and chattered like a magpie. The wit and beauty of the girl charmed the Princess, and she threw a costly necklace about her throat. "Come, my lovely child," said she; "you sing like an angel, and you have more wit than ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... grieved to read of the death of Nightingale.[5] Himself an O.A., he was in the Modern Sixth about 1900. He was a master at the dear old school from 1907, or thereabouts. I regarded him as one of my best friends among the masters. The year I took ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... faint flavor of turpentine which at that time pervaded the saloon, and (as he confessed afterwards) made him somewhat less hearty than usual in tackling his food. But there was nothing of the sort to interfere with his enjoyment of her singing. "Mrs. Whalley is a regular out-and-out nightingale, sir," he would pronounce with a judicial air after listening profoundly over the skylight to the very end of the piece. In fine weather, in the second dog-watch, the two men could hear her trills and roulades going on to the accompaniment of the piano in the cabin. ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... praeterea nihil.—Whence come these oft-quoted words? Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy (not having the book by me, I am unable to give a reference), quotes them as addressed by some one to the nightingale. Wordsworth addresses the cuckoo similarly, vol. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... streets walk pigs, cows, and other domestic creatures. The houses look cordial and friendly, rather like kindly grandmothers; the pavements are soft, the streets are wide, there is a smell of lilac and acacia in the air; from the distance come the singing of a nightingale, the croaking of frogs, barking, and sounds of a harmonium, of a woman screeching.... I stopped in Kulikov's hotel, where I took a room for seventy-five kopecks. After sleeping on wooden sofas and washtubs it was a voluptuous sight ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... train themselves for their duties as consumers or else continue to lie under the sentence of condemnation pronounced upon them by Florence Nightingale. "Three-fourths of the mischief in women's lives," said she, "arises from their excepting themselves from the rule of training ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... in England, instead of with a rapier, as in France.—Poh! All England is one great menagerie, and, all at once, the jackal, who admires the gilded cage of the royal beast, must protest against the vulgarity of the talking-bird's and the nightingale's being willing to become a part of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy Spray Warbl'st at eeve, when all the Woods are still, Thou with fresh hope the Lovers heart dost fill, While the jolly hours lead on propitious May, Thy liquid notes that close the eye ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... these (as they often will fail him, in the wild wandering life which he must live), those human angels of whom it is written—'The barren hath many more children than she who has an husband.' And such will not be wanting. As long as England can produce at once two such women as Florence Nightingale and Catherine Marsh, there is good hope that Esau will not be defrauded of his birthright; and that by the time that Jacob comes crouching to him, to defend him against the enemies who are near at hand, Esau, instead of borrowing Jacob's religion, may be able to teach ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... the air. I remarked the abid's camel that it kicked up and pranced, and, throwing the abid, danced into the wilderness. I said: "O reverend Shaikh! that spiritual strain threw a brute into an ecstasy, and it is not in like manner working a change in you!—Knowest thou what that nightingale of the dawn whispered to me? What sort of man art thou, indeed, who art ignorant of love?—The camel is in an ecstasy of delight from the Arab's song. If thou hast no taste to relish this, thou art a cross-grained brute.—Now that the camel is elated with rapture ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... learning from her, and they hope to get her other pupils; for she is anxious not to eat the bread of idleness, but to work, like my girls. Mab says our life has become like a fairy tale, and all she is afraid of is that Mirah will turn into a nightingale again and fly away from us. Her voice is just perfect: not loud and strong, but searching and melting, like the thoughts of what has been. That is the way old people like me feel a ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... breathing, Nightingale's long trill, Silver moonlight and the rocking Of the dreaming rill; Nightly light and nightly shadow, Shadow's endless lace— Neath the moon's enchanted changes The Beloved's face. Blinking stars as flash of ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... displayed before the sun his gorgeous tail. 'Observe (said he) how the vivid blue of the sapphire glitters in my neck; and when thus I spread my tail, a gemmy brightness strikes the eye from a plumage varied with a thousand glowing colours.' At this moment, a nightingale began to chant forth his melodious lay; at which the peacock, dropping his expanded tail, cried out, 'Ah what avails my silent unmeaning beauty, when I am so far excelled in voice by such a little russet-feathered wretch as that!' And, by retiring, ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... Tristram was playing upon his harp and singing before King Mark, and the King sat brooding upon these things as he gazed at Tristram. And Sir Tristram, as he ofttimes did nowadays, sang of the Lady Belle Isoult, and of how her face was like to a rose for fairness, and of how her soul was like to a nightingale in that it uplifted the spirit of whosoever was near her even though the darkness of sorrow as of night might envelop him. And whilst Sir Tristram sang thus, King Mark listened to him, and as he listened a thought entered his heart and therewith ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... had sunk behind a bed of clouds—the nightingale began its song, and the fresh green leaves rustled beneath the mild breath of the evening breeze. The bee hummed joyously on its homeward way, loaded with the sweets of the spring flowers. Down in the valley, the voice of the hinds driving their herds to rest, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... Lawton, his dark eyes swimming with the bumpers he had finished, though his head was as impenetrable as a post; "I am not much of a nightingale, but, under the favor of your good wishes, I consent to comply with ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... and dreadful suffering, by those who were never until then suspected of possessing so great a spirit, and who, but for such an occasion occurring for its manifestation, might have been doomed for ever to remain helplessly among the most commonplace incapables. Had a Grace Darling or a Florence Nightingale been known only as a sitter or pewholder in a congregation, they might have been deemed unfit for any work requiring courage, self-sacrifice, or perseverance. But these noble qualities were all the while ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... house, and lawn, and flowers, and fair human creatures, and shining water, all sleeping breathless in the glorious light beneath the glorious blue, till we doze off, lulled by the murmur of a thousand insects, and the rich minstrelsy of nightingale and blackcap, ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... but it is manifestly clarifying its light. When I came, it was copper-coloured, now it is honey-coloured, the horn of it is almost white like milk. This little bird's incantation has, without question, produced this fortunate effect. This little bird, halfway on the road between the nightingale and the cicada, is doubtless an enchanter, and one whose art possesses a more than respectable property. My sister's attention should be drawn to this highly interesting ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... as a salmon flounces in a net, oversets the economy of my bed, belches the fumes of his drink in my face, then twists himself round, leaving me half naked, and listening till morning to that tuneful nightingale, his nose.' It is at least forty-three years since I read the BEAUX' STRATAGEM, and I now quote from memory; but the passage has always occurred to me whenever I have seen a sottish husband; and though that ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... Father Letheby, with a slight touch of flattery and sarcasm, "I am more disposed to take you for a nightingale!" ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... whose name will live in song and story, when this generation shall have passed away. Many noble English ladies bravely went out to nurse the suffering soldiers; but in this noble band was one whose name remains a synonym for kindly sympathy, tenderness and peace—Miss Florence Nightingale. ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... should think so, an' you had the doing of it," said Barbara complacently. "Up ere the lark, and abed after the nightingale! What with scouring, and washing, and dressing meat, and making the beds, and baking, and brewing, and sewing, and mending, and Mrs Clare and you atop of ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... success. "It is in all the forests, from spring to fall," he says in his letter, "and never but on the tops of the tallest trees, from which it perpetually serenades us with some of the sweetest notes, and as clear as those of the nightingale. I have followed it for miles, without ever but once getting a good view of it. It is of the size and make of the mockingbird, lightly thrush-colored on the back, and a grayish-white on the breast and belly. Mr. Randolph, ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... just let loose from school, The watch-dog's voice that bayed the whispering wind, And the loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind,— These all in sweet confusion sought the shade, And filled each pause the nightingale had ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... only four of dem are livin' now. De livin' are James, Sidney, Helen an' Florence who wus named fer Florence Nightingale. ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... available capital, and easily exchangeable for birds' eggs or young birds, Martin's pound invariably found its way in a few hours to Howlett's the bird-fancier's, in the Bilton road, who would give a hawk's or nightingale's egg or young linnet in exchange. Martin's ingenuity was therefore for ever on the rack to supply himself with a light. Just now he had hit upon a grand invention, and the den was lighted by a flaring cotton wick issuing from a ginger-beer bottle full of some doleful composition. When light ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... the green trees and thick undergrowth, and from the holes and caves in the rocks, to listen to the music that the child's fingers made. The coo of the dove to his mate, the flute-clear trill of the blackbird, the song of the lark, the liquid carol of the nightingale—all ceased when the boy made music. The winds that whispered their secrets to the trees owned him for their lord, and the proudest trees of the forest bowed their heads that they might not miss one exquisite sigh that his ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... was here some tragedy was done, And here the chorus sang each coming change? Sure this is deep in some sweet, southern wood, These are not pines, but cypress tall and dark; That is no thrush which sings so rapturously, But the nightingale in his most passionate mood Bursting his little heart with anguish. Hark! The tread of ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... but nevertheless appearances seem against him until he explains that the lady with whom he has been seen in a cab is his daughter by a former marriage, and the young man who seems to have been making love to Eden is his son. Characteristic of Saltus is the use of the Spanish word for nightingale. There are no deaths, no suicides, no murders in these pages: a very eunuch of a book! A motto from Tasso, "Perdute e tutto il tempo che in amor non si spende" adorns the title page and the work ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... color, but if well cared for, will live to a considerable age. They are generally known by the names: Red Bird, Virginia Red Bird, Virginia Nightingale, and Crested Red Bird. It is said that the female often sings nearly as well as ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... the nightingale sings in a low bush, but never from a tree; and in the second place, there never was a nightingale seen or heard on the banks of the Dee, or on the banks of any other river in Scotland. Exotic rural imagery ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... that if you had Antinous himself in a booth of the world's fair, and killed yourself in protesting that his soul was as perfect as his body, you wouldn't get one per cent. of the crowd struggling next door for a sight of the Double- headed Nightingale or of some weak-kneed giant ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... fling of the voice, that happy rapture, that bravura which makes the listener's heart go near to burst with her joy. If rain made the leaves to droop, or scudded in sheets along the causeways, she sang plaintively, the wounded, aggrieved, hurt notes of the nightingale. Her song then would be some old-remembered sorrow of her land—of Ginevra degli Almieri, the wandering wife; of the Donna Lombarda, who poisoned her lover; or of the Countess Costanza's violated vow. So she shared ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... gone? It is not yet neere day: It was the Nightingale, and not the Larke, That pier'st the fearefull hollow of thine eare, Nightly she sings on yond Pomgranet tree, Beleeue me Loue, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... so changed, Mr. Marshfield?' she asked. And all at once I knew her: the girl whose nightingale throat had redeemed the desolation of the evenings at Rathdrum, whose sunny beauty had seemed (even to my celebrated cold-blooded aestheticism) worthy to haunt a man's dreams. Yes, there was the subtle curve of the waist, ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... cannot say that we never saw a swan: there are some here and there towards the fens, which make a low dull noise: but as for any harmony, a rook or a jackdaw, in comparison of them, may be looked upon as a nightingale. ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... morning, hung in the air. Regularly, every day, there was a single bird, not singing, but awkwardly chirruping among the green madronas, and the sound was cheerful, natural, and stirring. It did not hold the attention, nor interrupt the thread of meditation, like a blackbird or a nightingale; it was mere woodland prattle, of which the mind was conscious like a perfume. The freshness of these morning seasons remained with me far on ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... houses by visitors before they enter. Lffyr Carolan, or the Book of Carols, contains sixty-six for Christmas, and five summer carols. Blodengerdd Cymrii, or the Anthology of Wales, contains forty-eight Christmas carols, nine summer carols, three May carols, one winter carol, one nightingale carol, and a carol to Cupid. On the Continent, the custom of carolling at Christmas is almost universal. During the last days of Advent, Calabrian minstrels enter Rome, and are to be seen in every street, saluting the shrines of the Virgin mother with their wild music, under the traditional notion ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... efforts will please you," said Prunella. "I have here some lines to a nightingale, which have been very much praised in our village. Shall I ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... even by day when I am attending to my duties and looking after the servants, I am still weeping and lamenting during the whole time; then, when night comes, and we all of us go to bed, I lie awake thinking, and my heart becomes a prey to the most incessant and cruel tortures. As the dun nightingale, daughter of Pandareus, sings in the early spring from her seat in shadiest covert hid, and with many a plaintive trill pours out the tale how by mishap she killed her own child Itylus, son of king Zethus, even so does my mind toss and turn in its uncertainty ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... not singular in this, for my cousins and many of my acquaintances came to the same resolution. How long we kept it I do not remember. Patty Smith and I became great friends, and I knew her sisters; but only remember her niece Florence Nightingale as a very little child. My friend Patty was liberal in her opinions, witty, original, an excellent horsewoman, and drew cleverly; but from bad health she was peculiar in all her habits. She was a good judge of art. Her father had a valuable collection of pictures of the ancient masters; and I learnt ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... went for a walk, Joe usually dawdled along trying to think of rhymes for "nightingale," and "poppy," and "windmill," and the other beauties of Nature which met his eye or ear; while Magnus stopped behind to vault gates (which always caught his foot as he went over), and do "sprints" with wayside ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... Small Birds. It is not known to everybody, least of all, I think, to poets, that the nightingale sings best of all in a cage in broad daylight and amongst a lot of other birds, all twittering away like anything. We should like to take Mr. ROBERT BRIDGES to the Small Birds' House. We should like to take Mr. ROBERT SMILLIE there too, and introduce him to the bird just underneath the nightingale, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... and formal order—always the unexpected; and you cannot say, 'I will go and find this or that.' The sowing of life in the spring time is not in the set straight line of the drill, nor shall you find wild flowers by a foot measure. There are great woods without a lily of the valley; the nightingale does not sing everywhere. Nature has no arrangement, no plan, nothing judicious even; the walnut trees bring forth their tender buds, and the frost burns them—they have no mosaic of time to fit in, like a Roman tesselated pavement; nature is like a child, who will sing and ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... abide, with more than a Cleophon's pride— On the lips of that foreigner base, of Athens the bane and disgrace, There is shrieking, his kinsman by race, The garrulous swallow of Thrace; From that perch of exotic descent, Rejoicing her sorrow to vent, She pours to her spirit's content, a nightingale's woeful lament, That e'en though the voting be equal, his ruin ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... death must at length quail before the divine rights of intelligence, and then the power of Mind over the entire functions and organs of the 385:1 human system will be acknowledged. It is proverbial that Florence Nightingale and other philanthropists en- 385:3 gaged in humane labors have been able to undergo without sinking fatigues and expo- sures which ordinary people could not endure. The ex- 385:6 planation lies in the support which they derived from the divine law, rising above the human. The spiritual demand, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... "is because they come from all parts to accompany the song of the Talking Bird, which your majesty may see in a cage in one of the windows of the hall we are approaching; and if you attend, you will perceive that his notes are sweeter than those of any of the other birds, even the nightingale's." ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... fellow-creatures, however deeply his public reputation and his balance at the banker's may be benefited by the most moderate kindness to them? If every man were a Howard or a Wilberforce, and every woman a Fry or a Nightingale, the truth would be ever the same, and they would be the first to acknowledge it.—Man is unfit ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... Golden Harvest the lesson of patience taught by the little apple tree's experience will bear rich fruit I do not doubt, and the wisdom of the little brown hen cannot help but teach us all to listen for the nightingale's song of harmony in ...
— The Little Brown Hen Hears the Song of the Nightingale & The Golden Harvest • Jasmine Stone Van Dresser
... of drawers contain the nests and eggs, scientifically labelled, of many Canadian species, and of some of the most melodious songsters of France and England; pre-eminent stands the Italian, French and Devonshire nightingale and its eggs. Our time was much too limited to allow us to treasure up all the anecdotes and theories anent birds, their mysterious spring and autumn migrations, their lively memory of places, ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... geese giving note at the early hours of the night, and at midnight to the cocks crowing together, and to the boding crows with three-fold note greeting the ruddy torch of the rising dawn; and in the half light of the morning to hear the nightingale warbling in the bushes, and the swallow twittering among the beams.... Between whiles, the shepherds play in their rustic fashion. Not far off is a wood where the branches of two huge limes interlace, though their trunks are apart (in their shade ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... lamenting, as I look to mine own housewiferies and to the tasks of the maidens in the house. But when night comes and sleep takes hold of all, I lie on my couch, and shrewd cares, thick thronging about my inmost heart, disquiet me in my sorrowing. Even as when the daughter of Pandareus, the nightingale of the greenwood, sings sweet in the first season of the spring, from her place in the thick leafage of the trees, and with many a turn and trill she pours forth her full-voiced music bewailing her child, dear Itylus, whom on a time she slew ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... night came to John Derringham as he went out into the garden before going to bed. A young setting half-moon still hung in the sky, and there were stars. One of those nights when all the mystery of life seems to be revealing itself in the one word—Love. The nightingale throbbed out its note in the copse amidst a perfect stillness, and the ground was soft ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... no bird whose song will match the nightingale's in compass, none whose note is so rich as that of the European blackbird; but for mere rapture I have never heard the bobolink's rival. But his opera-season is a short one. The ground and tree sparrows are our most constant performers. It is now late in August, and one ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... nightingale's sequestered tower, Who with her love-lorn melody So bewitched thee in the vernal hour: When she ceased to love, she ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... found its situation a great comfort to him. He was not more than five hundred yards from her now, and gained a new pleasure in feeling that all sounds which greeted his ears, in the day or in the night, also fell upon hers—the caw of a particular rook, the voice of a neighbouring nightingale, the whistle of a local breeze, or the purl of the fall in the meadows, whose rush was a material rendering of Time's ceaseless scour over themselves, wearing them ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... me in her quaint, broken English. But they miss the earnest eyes and dramatic gestures of the little story-teller as she sat in the glow of the hibachi fire, with a background of paper doors, with shadow pictures of pine-trees and bamboo etched by the moonlight, the far-off song of a nightingale, and the air sweet with incense ...
— Mr. Bamboo and the Honorable Little God - A Christmas Story • Fannie C. Macaulay
... question of even the hypercritical, the hermit thrush has a more exquisitely beautiful voice than any other American bird, and only the nightingale's of Europe can be compared with it. It is the one theme that exhausts all the ornithologists' musical adjectives in a vain attempt to convey in words any idea of it to one who has never heard it, for the ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan |
