"Bullfinch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... range of reading had been limited to infant story-books and easy school-lessons. She took from her book-shelves Cowper, and made me acquainted with his hares, Tiny and Bess, and enlisted my sympathies for his imprisoned bullfinch. She turned over many leaves of the Spectator and Rambler, till she found for me allegories and tales of Bagdad and Balsora, and showed me the Vision of Mirza, the Valley of Human Miseries, and the Bridge of Human Life; I caught something of their ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... never would incline me to be always sparkling, whether in wit or in diamonds. 'Twas only when I was in the nursery that I envied the good girl who spoke rubies and pearls. Now it seems to me only just better than not spitting toads and vipers." And she warbled a sprightly French ariette to a tame bullfinch that ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... sitting in her room, surrounded by her court. This consisted of five beings, almost equally dear to her heart—an educated bullfinch, to which she had taken an affection because it could no longer whistle or draw water, and which was afflicted with a swollen neck; a quiet and exceedingly timid little dog, called Roska; a bad-tempered cat, named Matros; a dark-complexioned, lively little girl of ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... BULLFINCH (Pyrrhula vulgaris).—It is charming to greet the black head and red waistcoat in the tops of the laurels or apple-trees, and surely this destroyer of insect devourers does more good than harm, if he does pick the buds to pieces in the search. ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... is, Greuze is as sentimental as a bullfinch, but he has hardly a natural note in his gamut. Nature is not only never his model, she is never his inspiration. He is distinctively a literary painter; but this description is not minute enough. His conventions are those ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... bullfinch mentioned by you as having arrived at the Returned Letter Office two days ago, having been posted as a letter contrary to the regulations of the Postal system, I now write to ask you to have the bird fed and forwarded at once to —-, and to apply for all fines and expenses to ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... a number of fascinating tricks. After a while you will be able to let him out of the cage at meal-times, when he will hop about from plate to plate and steal little tit-bits. No bird is so fond of sitting on its owner's shoulder as the bullfinch can be. Also, unhappily, few birds are so liable to fatal illness. A bullfinch can be apparently quite well one minute and the next you find him lying at the bottom of the cage. Over-eating is often the cause of his death, so that one must be careful. Hemp-seed and apple-pips, for instance, which ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... frogs, particularly during summer, croak loudly and discordantly until midnight, and then retire, and become silent. Birds also dream; and will sometimes, when frightened, fall from their roosting-perch, or flutter about their cage, in evident alarm. A bullfinch, says Bechstein, belonging to a lady, was subject to very frightful dreams, which made it drop off its perch; but no sooner did it hear the voice of its affectionate mistress than it became immediately tranquil, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... chavo; but, being a matter of fact kind of man—out of the region of romance, fantastical notions, enrapturing imagery, nicely coloured imagination, clever lying and cleverer deception, beautiful green fields, clear running rivulets, the singing of the wood songster, bullfinch, and wren, in the midst of woodbine, sweetbriar, and roses—with an eye to observe, a heart to feel, and a hand ready to help, I am led to contemplate, aye, and to find out if possible, the remedy, though my friends say it is impossible—just ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... on the common were the cirl bunting, bullfinch and goldfinch, the last two rarely seen. Linnets, however, were abundant, now gathered in small flocks composed mainly of young birds in plain plumage, with here and there an individual showing the carmine-tinted breast of the adult male. Unhappily, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson |
