United States or China ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There was nothing to disturb one in the land, after the musical mania, save the clang of the combers on the long, lonely beach; the cry of the sea-bird wheeling overhead, or the occasional bang of a rifle. Even the narrow-gauge railway, that stopped discreetly just before reaching the village, broke the monotony of local life but twice in the twenty-four hours.
"What great bird is that, Ready?" inquired William. "It is an albatross, the largest sea-bird we have. Their wings are very long. I have seen them shot, and they have measured eleven feet from the tip of one wing to the tip of the other when the wings have been spread out." "It is the first one that I have seen," said William.
And in sorrow for thy fall the trees cast down their fruit, and all the flowers have faded.... Nor ever sang so sweet the nightingale on the cliffs,... nor so much, by the grey sea-waves, did ever the sea-bird sing, nor so much in the dells of dawn did the bird of Memnon bewail the son of the Morning, fluttering around his tomb, as they lamented for Bion dead.... Echo, among the reeds, doth still feed upon thy songs.... This, O most musical of rivers, is thy second sorrow, this, Meles, thy new woe.
The bound of the hare and the flight of the sea-bird lose their charm for me. The world is robbed of its wonder and its witchery when my eyes grow accustomed to the gaudy blinding glare. Jenny Lind was asked why she renounced the stage. She was sitting at the moment on the sands by the seaside, with her Bible on her knee.
It was as if God had said to the heavens and the earth and the chord of the seven colours, 'Comfort ye, comfort ye my people. And I said to my soul, 'Let the tempest rave in the world; let sorrow wail like a sea-bird in the midst thereof; and let thy heart respond to her shivering cry; but the vault of heaven encloses the tempest and the shrieking bird and the echoing heart; and the sun of God's countenance can with one glance from above change the wildest winter day into a summer evening compact of poets' dreams.
Not even a wandering sea-bird was to be seen, and the only sound that disturbed the dread silence of the place was the roar of the breakers mingling with the muffled groanings and heavings of the still struggling and mighty forces of Nature in the heart of the island forces which, ninety-five years before, had found a vent and destroyed every living thing, man and beast, in one dreadful outburst of flame, whose awful reflection was seen a hundred leagues away.
But soon, held by Meroë, while her husband managed the tiller, the sail filled, and bellied out to the blast. The boat leaned gently, and seemed to fly over the crests of the waves like a sea-bird. Meroë, dressed in her mariner's costume, stayed at the prow, her black hair streaming in the wind.
Ravenel had pushed forward only two or three pawns of conversation when she moved at one step from news to politics. She played with the ugly subject girlishly, even frivolously, though not insipidly at least to a young man's notion riding its winds and waves like a sea-bird. Politics, she said, seemed to her a kind of human weather, no more her business and no less than any other kind.
"Thou true land-bird! sea-bird! air-bird! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger and awe and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou should'st walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble."
If a land-bird perishes at sea, a sea-bird is equally cast away upon the land; and I have known the sooty tern, with its almost omnipotent wing, to fall down, utterly famished and exhausted, two hundred miles from salt water. But my interest in these things did not last beyond the third day.
Word Of The Day