A Popular Natural History of Quadrupeds and Birds

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Page 314 - Tis the merry Nightingale That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates With fast thick warble his delicious notes, As he were fearful that an April night Would be too short for him to utter forth His love-chant, and disburden his full soul Of all its music...
Page 44 - By wintry famine rous'd, from all the tract Of horrid mountains which the shining Alps, And wavy Apennine, and Pyrenees, Branch out stupendous into distant lands; Cruel as death, and hungry as the grave; Burning for blood; bony, and gaunt, and grim. Assembling wolves in raging troops descend; And, pouring o'er the country, bear along, Keen as the north wind sweeps the glossy snow. All is their prize.
Page 313 - And hark ! the Nightingale begins its song, " Most musical, most melancholy"* bird ! A melancholy bird ? Oh ! idle thought ! In nature there is nothing melancholy. But some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced With the remembrance of a grievous wrong, Or slow distemper, or neglected love, (And so, poor wretch...
Page 336 - Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky, In joyless fields and thorny thickets leaves His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man His annual visit. Half-afraid, he first Against the window beats ; then brisk alights On the warm hearth ; then, hopping o'er the floor, Eyes all the smiling family askance, And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is : Till more familiar grown, the table-crumbs Attract his slender feet.
Page 313 - Or slow distemper, or neglected love, (And so, poor wretch ! filled all things with himself, And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale Of his own sorrow) he, and such as he, First named these notes a melancholy strain. And many a poet echoes the conceit...
Page 12 - Finding that the few indifferent hounds we had made little impression on the enemy, they divided themselves into two or three parties, and rode round the jungle, firing into the spot where the dogs were barking round him — but without effect. At length, after some hours spent in thus beating about the bush, the Scottish blood of some of my countrymen began to get impatient, and three of them announced their determination to march in and beard the lion in his den, provided three of the...
Page 11 - Hottentots on foot : commencing from the spot where the horse was killed, they followed the spoor through grass and gravel and brushwood, with astonishing ease and dexterity, where an inexperienced eye could discern neither footprint nor mark of any kind,— until at length, we fairly tracked him into a large bosch, or straggling thicket of brushwood and evergreens, about a mile distant. The next object was to drive him out of this retreat, in order to attack him in a close phalanx, and with more...
Page 308 - ... to fell them in such a manner that in their descent they might bring down several others; by which means the falling of one large tree sometimes produced two hundred squabs, little inferior in size to the old ones, and almost one mass of fat.
Page 314 - But never elsewhere in one place I knew So many Nightingales ; and far and near, In wood and thicket, over the wide grove, They answer and provoke each other's song...
Page 44 - Or shake the murdering savages away. Rapacious, at the mother's throat they fly, And tear the screaming infant from her breast. The godlike face of man avails him nought.

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