"Cormorant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Rabbit. He it was whose hand in Autumn Painted all the trees with scarlet, 135 Stained the leaves with red and yellow; He it was who sent the snow-flakes, Sifting, hissing through the forest, Froze the ponds, the lakes, the rivers, Drove the loon and sea-gull southward, 140 Drove the cormorant and curlew To their nests of sedge and sea-tang In the realms of Shawondasee. Once the fierce Kabibonokka Issued from his lodge of snow-drifts, 145 From his home among the icebergs, And his hair, with snow besprinkled, Streamed behind him like a river, Like a black and wintry river, As he howled ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... over-nice. At a pinch he could eat any thing, which on sundry emergencies stood him in great stead. Wax and nuts, and tallow and grease mixed, carried him through one campaign, when the enemy thought to have starved out the English army and its cormorant commander. The courage and strength of Richard were always redoubled after dinner. It was then his greatest feats were ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... province, had assembled in the name of canals and railroads to compete for the bonded aid of the Legislature, and Judge Custis was leading the forlorn hope of the Eastern Shore for some of the subsidy so liberally showered upon the cormorant, Baltimore. ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... that man, Q., as you come away from the palace," said Mrs. Quiverful, pointing to an angry call for money from the Barchester draper, which the postman had left at the vicarage that morning. Cormorant that he was, unjust, hungry cormorant! When rumour first got abroad that the Quiverfuls were to go to the hospital, this fellow with fawning eagerness had pressed his goods upon the wants of the poor clergyman. ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... represented clouds low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea: all the distance was in eclipse; so, too, was the foreground; or, rather, the nearest billows, for there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-submerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam; its beak held a gold bracelet, set with gems, which I had touched with as brilliant tints as my pencil could impart. Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... and buzzing chatter of little birds and crickets among the leaves and grass. The egret has resumed his fishing in the tank where the rain is stored for the poppy and sugarcane fields, the sand-pipers bustle along the margin, or wheel in little silvery clouds over the bright waters, the gloomy cormorant sits alert on the stump of a dead date-tree, the little black divers hurry in and out of the weeds, and ever and anon shoot under the water in hot quest of some tiny fish; the whole machinery of ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... I was dealing with a cormorant. I made a hasty mental calculation. Half of one thousand rubles was about $375 a week, and the information I had led me to believe that Port Arthur was capable of holding out for another six months at least. To delay the sailing of the Baltic Fleet till then would cost roughly ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... the morning, and when the canto was over, Vernon took a great stone and rolled it for amusement over the cliff's edge. It thundered over the side, bounding down till it reached the strand, and a large black cormorant, startled by the reverberating echoes, rose up suddenly, and flapped its way with protruded neck to a rock on the farther side of the ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... return on the Creek that passes this mound about 2 M. distant S. a bird of heron kind as large as the Cormorant short tale long leggs of a colour on the back and wings deep copper brown with a shade of red. we could not kill it therefore I can not ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... is not to be seen walking with them. She is probably at the race-meet, being taken there by Captain Cormorant of the United States navy, which Mr. Spillikins considers very handsome of him. Every now and then the captain, being in the navy, is compelled to be at sea for perhaps a whole afternoon or even several ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... notches cut in the mandibles, as in the case of the carving of the wood duck (Fig. 168, Ancient Monuments), are perhaps meant for serrations, of which there is no trace in the bill of the buzzard. As suggested by Mr. Ridgway, it is perhaps nearer the cormorant than anything else, although not executed with the detail necessary for its ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... goblin-worlds,—"and Duach and Grathach and Nerthach the sons of Gwawrddur Cyrfach (these men came forth from the confines of hell); and Huell the son of Caw (he never yet made a request at the hands of any lord.) And Taliesin the Chief of Bards, and Manawyddan son of the Boundless, and Cormorant the son of Beauty (no one struck him in the Battle of Camlan by reason of his ugliness; all thought he was an auxiliary devil. Hair had he upon him like the hair of a stag). And Sandde Bryd Angel (no one touched him with a spear in the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... written by a woman who mothered an intellectual child of cormorant appetite. That child learned everything in sight from fairies to grease-traps. What was difficult to manage in that mass of whipcord mental fibre, was put into verse and sung. The book told how the child was nourished on all things that only specialists among men cared to litter their minds with. ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... stove chimneys of their forecastles. Thin wreaths of grey mist hung here and there over the still surface of the bay. Patches of purple slime lay unbroken on the unrippled surface. Scraps of shrivelled rack, sucked off the shores of the nearer islands, floated past the Tortoise. A cormorant, balanced on the top of one of the perches outside Delginish, sat with wings outstretched and neck craned forward, peering out to sea. A fleet of terns floated motionless on the water beyond the island. Two gulls with lazy flappings of their ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... people, and there is no want of deep thinkers on the little island; and therefore, Sir, taking all together, why England must stick up for her rights! Here is your Dutchman, for instance, a ravenous cormorant; a fellow with a throat wide enough to swallow all the gold of the Great Mogul, if he could get at it; and yet a vagabond who has not even a fair footing on the earth, if the truth must be spoken! Well, Sir, shall England give up her rights to a nation of such blackguards? No, Sir; ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... upturned gabion. Within this locked and stranded box lay two dead bodies. Crabs fought their way eagerly through the cracks of the water-sprung door, and over it, breasting the salt breeze, slowly circled a cormorant—curious and amazed at so strange a thing ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... pet cormorant, and Yaspard had taught him to seek food for himself in the voe. The affectionate bird, though allowed such licence, never failed to return to Boden when hunger was satisfied; and at all times he would come at once to ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... coast of Japan there is cormorant fishing. Men go in small boats with flaring torches, hundreds of them. The birds with their long bills reach down into the water and pick up a huge fish, then the master immediately takes it out of the bill, before it can be swallowed, and places it in his boat for market. These birds in a single ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... the devil: ay, I will, He gives his counsel freely, and the cause He for his clients pleads goes always with them: He in my cause shall deal then; and I'll ask him Whether a cormorant may have stuff'd chests, And see his brother starve? why, he'll say, ay[433], The less they give, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... guide to get pack ponies. Halfway back to Alessio was the stable, but the steeds were not ready, so Jan was ushered up into a top room where was a huge fire, over which an Albanian was stewing a cormorant with all its feathers on. There were other Albanians and a very old Montenegrin soldier. He admired everything English, even Jan's tobacco which ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... wonders of Eden—which far surpass all fairy tales,—Milton relates how Satan, springing lightly over the dividing wall, lands within its precincts, and in the guise of a cormorant perches upon a tree, whence he beholds two God-like shapes "in naked majesty clad." One of these is Adam, formed for contemplation and valor, the other Eve, formed for softness and grace. They two sit beneath a tree, the beasts of the earth playing peacefully ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... rich bookseller's shop, 25 Quoth he! we are both of one college! For I sate myself, like a cormorant, once Hard by the tree ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Leucothea beheld—Ino Leucothea, now a sea- goddess, but once a mortal and the daughter of Cadmus; she with pity beheld Ulysses the mark of their fierce contention, and rising from the waves alighted on the ship, in shape like to the sea-bird which is called a cormorant; and in her beak she held a wonderful girdle made of sea- weeds, which grow at the bottom of the ocean, which she dropped at his feet; and the bird spake to Ulysses, and counselled him not to trust any more to that fatal vessel against which god Neptune had levelled his furious wrath, ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... All time's holiday With idlers! Eunoae, pampered minx, the jug! Set it down here—you cats would sleep all day On cushions—Stir yourself, fetch water, quick! Water's our first want. How she holds the jug! Now, pour—not, cormorant, in that wasteful way— You've drenched my dress, bad luck t'you! There, enough: I have made such toilet as my fates allowed. Now for the key o' ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... banks of a larger tributary, to proceed towards the heights of the Sierra Erere. As dawn begins to redden the sky, large flocks of ducks and of a small Amazonian goose may be seen flying towards the lake. Here and there we see a cormorant, seated alone on the branch of a dead tree; or a kingfisher poises himself over the water, watching for his prey. Numerous gulls are gathered in large companies on the trees along the river-shore. Alligators ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... Once there was a break in the reef, too broad to be jumped, and then for the first time he had her fairly in his arms and swung her across, which was undoubtedly very delightful, but unfortunately soon over. At length, however, they reached the Doctor, who was seated like a cormorant on a wet ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... this time concentrating his attention on shags or cormorants. This species of cormorant is peculiar to the island, being found nowhere else. They are blue-black, with a white breast, and on the head they have a small black crest. At the top of the beak are golden lobes, while the skin immediately round the eye is pale blue. They remain on ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... aslant, Sails the fierce cormorant, Seeking some rocky haunt, With his prey laden, So toward the open main, Beating to sea again, Through the wild hurricane, Bore I ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... back; and in the early morning she was on the terrace, impatient to lead him down to the lake. There, at the boat-house, she commanded him to loosen a skiff and give her a paddle. Between exclamations, designed to waken louder from him, and not so successful as her cormorant hunger for praise of Steignton required, she plied him to confirm with his opinion an opinion that her reasoning mind had almost formed in the close neighbourhood of the beloved and honoured person providing it; for abstract ideas were unknown to her. She put it, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Cornishman, King of Gweek. Savory was the smell of fried pilchard and hake; more savory still that of roast porpoise; most savory of all that of fifty huge squab pies, built up of layers of apples, bacon, onions, and mutton, and at the bottom of each a squab, or young cormorant, which diffused both through the pie and through the ambient air a delicate odor of mingled guano and polecat. And the occasion was worthy alike of the smell and of the noise; for King Alef, finding that after ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... was tempted to amuse him in such a manner as would tend to his disgrace and confusion; but, considering that the case was of too criminal a nature to be tampered with, he withstood his desire of punishing this rapacious cormorant any other way than by telling him he would not impart the secret for his whole for-tune ten times doubled; so that the usurer retired, very much dissatisfied with ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... position. Was he not a baronet, and a gentleman, and a very handsome fellow, and a man of the world who had been in a crack regiment? If this surfeited sponge of speculation, this crammed commercial cormorant, wanted more than that for his daughter why could he not say so without asking disgusting questions such as these,—questions which it was quite impossible that a gentleman should answer? Was it not sufficiently plain that any gentleman proposing to marry the daughter of such a man as ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... edge of the pool where the octopus dwelt, a silly young cormorant was standing gazing into the water, so fascinated with something it saw there that it forgot even to jerk its ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... went and hid her head in the skirts of the little hostess. In the end two of the little girls danced with two of those who were grown up, to the lilting of one of them. The little hostess sat at the fire while they danced, plucking and drawing a cormorant for the men's dinner, and calling out to the girls when they lost the step ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... interfere with the flight. He promised to accompany Ralegh into France. Ralegh, with all his wit and experience of men, his wife, with her love and her clearness of vision, the shrewd French diplomatists, and honest King, were dupes of a mere cormorant, like Stukely, and of vulgar knaves, like Cottrell and Hart. Without the least suspicion of foul play Ralegh on that Sunday night, after le Clerc and de Novion had left, went down ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... Moorfields, honour from Chick Lane; Bankers from Paper Buildings here resort, Bankrupts from Golden Square and Riches Court; From the Haymarket canting rogues in grain, Gulls from the Poultry, sots from Water Lane; The lottery-cormorant, the auction-shark, The full-price master, and the half-price clerk; Boys who long linger at the gallery-door, With pence twice five—they want but twopence more, Till some Samaritan the twopence spares, And sends them ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... or you'll repent it. (Exit Peter.) The gudgeon takes the bait kindly. Peter, Peter, you had always an immense swallow. When Sally Stone nursed him, she was forced to feed the little cormorant with a tablespoon. As far as I can see, notwithstanding his partnership education with the young Squire, I think the grown babe should be fed with spoon-meat still. But what dainty lasses are these that come this way? Lucy and ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... whatever instinct they follow at other times for some real good. How often do we see birds which fly easily, gliding and sailing through the air obviously for pleasure? The cat plays with the captured mouse, and the cormorant with the captured fish. The weaver-bird (Ploceus), when confined in a cage, amuses itself by neatly weaving blades of grass between the wires of its cage. Birds which habitually fight during the breeding-season are generally ready to fight at all times; and the males of ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... to Cornwall, is made of leeks and pilchards, or of nettles, pepper cress, parsley, mustard, and spinach, with thin slices of pork. At the bottom of the Squab pie mentioned before was a Squab, or young Cormorant, "which diffused," says Charles Kingsley, "through the pie, and through the ambient air, a delicate odour of mingled guano and polecat." That "lovers live by love, as larks by leeks," is an old saying; and in the ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... thousand rice-plants. And for this purpose the princes and councillors and all the functionaries, the servants of the six farms of the country of Yamato—even to the males and females of them—have all come and assembled in the fourth month of this year, and, plunging down the root of the neck cormorant-wise in the presence of the sovran gods, fulfil their praise as the Sun of to-day rises ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... Great Blue Heron Golden-winged Woodpecker Bittern Barn-swallow Wilson's Snipe Whip-poor-will Long-biller Curlew Night Hawk Purple Gallinule Belted Kingfisher Canada Goose Kingbird Wood Duck Woodthrush Hooded Merganser Catbird Double-crested Cormorant White-bellied Nuthatch Arctic Tern Brown Creeper Great Northern Diver Bohemian Chatterer Stormy Petrel Great Northern Shrike Arctic ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... glided along by the side of the great granite cliffs, where the many black cormorants, which made the shelves and points their home, gave ample reason for the solitary island, far out among the rushing waters of the fierce currents, to be named Cormorant Crag by all who sailed that way, and avoided as the most dangerous rock-bound place ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... geese paddle hastily out of sight round a mud-cape; or a brown robber gull (generally Richardson's Skua) raises a tumult of screams, by making a raid upon a party of honest white gulls, to frighten them into vomiting up their prey for his benefit; or a single cormorant flaps along, close to the water, towards his fishing ground. Even the fish are shy of haunting a bottom which shifts with every storm; and innumerable shrimps are almost the only product of the shallow barren sea: beside, all is silence and desolation, as of a world ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... the wand wherewith he lulls the eyes of whomso he will, while others again he even wakes from out of sleep. With this rod in his hand flew the strong slayer of Argos. Above Pieria he passed and leapt from the upper air into the deep. Then he sped along the wave like the cormorant, that chaseth the fishes through the perilous gulfs of the unharvested sea, and wetteth his thick plumage in the brine. Such like did Hermes ride upon the press of the waves. But when he had now reached that far-off isle, he went forth from the sea of violet ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... said, there were still two stalls vacant, and here he put the nags. Whilst attending to them, however, he kept glancing uneasily at the supper before Malsain, which was diminishing at a frightful rate, for the thin man ate like a cormorant. At last, unable to endure this more, he stopped rubbing down the brown hackney, and, stepping up to the table, took a seat on a stool opposite Malsain. Then, drawing his dagger, he helped himself without further ceremony to some cheese and bread, and glanced somewhat ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... both of them—into the uppermost strata of local society where, owing to the rarefied atmosphere, her appetite, to say nothing of her person, soon gained notoriety. She was known, in briefest space of time, as "the cormorant," as "prime streaky," as "Jumbo," as "the phenomenon" and, by those who understood the French language, as the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... English. The Shoveller, white-eyed and common wild ducks; Merganser, Brahminee, and Indian goose (Anser Indica); common and Gargany teal; two kinds of gull; one of Shearwater (Rhynchops ablacus); three of tern, and one of cormorant. Besides these there were three egrets, the large crane, stork, green heron, and the demoiselle; the English sand-martin, kingfisher, peregrine-falcon, sparrow-hawk, kestrel, and the European vulture: the wild ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... these two tendencies in preparing a small Mysticism neither too hot nor too cold, a little less lukewarm than that of Saint Francis de Sales, and above all things much less ardent than that of Saint Teresa, ended in his turn by displeasing the cormorant of Meaux, and though he abandoned and denied Madame de Guyon, whose friend he had been for long years, he was persecuted and tracked down by Bossuet, condemned at Rome, and ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... If a hunting party kills an animal, a number soon collect and patiently await, standing on the ground on all sides. After eating, their uncovered craws are largely protruded, giving them a disgusting appearance. They readily attack wounded birds: a cormorant in this state having taken to the shore, was immediately seized on by several, and its death hastened by their blows. The Beagle was at the Falklands only during the summer, but the officers of the Adventure, who were there in the winter, mention ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... howl on the bank, as our boat shoots past, and the diabolical noise is echoed from knoll to knoll, and from ridge to ridge, as these incarnate devils of the night join in and prolong the infernal chorus. An occasional splash, as a piece of the bank topples over into the stream, rouses the cormorant and gull from their placid dozing on the sandbanks. They squeak and gurgle out an unintelligible protest, then cosily settle their heads again beneath the sheltering wing, and sleep the slumber of the dreamless. A sharp sudden plump, or a lazy surging ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... a bird diving down in the sunny water, and then suddenly come up again with a struggling fish in his bill. The fish was, however, always taken away from the cormorant, and thrown by one of the Fing Fangs into a well at the bottom of ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... whilst the outer lake beneath the lash Of the wind's scourge, foamed like a wounded thing, And the incessant hail with stony clash Ploughed up the waters, and the flagging wing Of the roused cormorant in the lightning flash 445 Looked like the wreck of some wind-wandering Fragment of inky thunder-smoke—this haven Was as a gem to ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... The Counsailor Heart, the Arme our Souldier, Our Steed the Legge, the Tongue our Trumpeter, With other Muniments and petty helpes In this our Fabricke, if that they- Men. What then? Fore me, this Fellow speakes. What then? What then? 2.Cit. Should by the Cormorant belly be restrain'd, Who is the ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... new ideas, who had kindled the fires of justice, who had spoken in the ear of all the people the doctrine of the essential brotherhood of man, the kinship of the throne and the shop, the idler in the palace and the idler in the cellar; the cormorant who dined off the labor of others at Lucerne, and the low-browed outcasts occupied in the same way but pursuing different methods, in the social sewer. And he would have noticed an unusual activity in this working world; secret meetings ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... believe, that Hunger, tho' they never felt the Extremities of it, is, in order to live, as requisite to a Man, as it is to a Cormorant, or to a Wolf; and that without Lust, if you give it a softer Name, our Species could not be preserv'd, any more than that of Bulls or Goats. But not One in a Thousand can imagine, tho' it be equally demonstrable, ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... hunt after in their lives, Live registered upon our brazen tombs, And then grace us in the disgrace of death; When, spite of cormorant devouring Time, The endeavour of this present breath may buy That honour which shall 'bate his scythe's keen edge, And make ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... The Cormorant is shaped very much like a duck, but its plumage is different and much more beautiful. This bird frequents the shores of the sea and of lakes, but rarely appears in rivers. Its usual food is fish; but as it is very voracious, it likewise eats dead flesh; and this it can tear to pieces by ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... columns, made your name familiar to the very water's edge of these islands. They have made you the only one of your kind; there is now but one Mr. Hunt in the world. Your ambition must be a cormorant indeed, if this does not satisfy it. No longer ago than Monday, they very seriously announced, that 'Hunt was SEEN, in his Tandem, going towards his home on Thursday last!' They seem to think that the public ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... domestic and mutton-suggesting prettiness, but can hardly be called either grand or beautiful. But on our southern coasts, the wall-sided cliffs, many hundred feet high, with vast needles and pinnacles standing out in the sea, sharp and solitary enough to serve as perches for the wary cormorant, confer a wonderful beauty and grandeur upon the chalk headlands. And in the East, chalk has its share in the formation of some of the most venerable of mountain ranges, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... land in the northern seas that was more truly her own. And the ship sailed on, over the blue waters and through breezy sounds and among verdant isles; into sunlit fiords, where the sea birds flew; on, under the dark weatherbeaten cliffs and lofty rocks, where the cormorant sat perched on high. And at last, as the dusk of the evening gathered and the light of the sunset silvered the waters, down went the chain with rattling noise, and we came to an anchor in the peaceful haven ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... character with lightning rapidity. It was in turn a ferry-boat—imitation of passengers descending the gangway by rhythmical patting of hand on thwart; a hospital ship chased by a submarine—cormorant's neck and head naturally mistaken for periscope; a destroyer attacking a submarine—said cormorant kindly obliging with quick diving act when approached; a food-ship laden with bananas represented by rushes culled from the banks; and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various |
