gauze-winged

Updated: May 9, 2025

It has not feathers of the usual sort, is not fledged all over like some, nor provided with quill- feathers like other birds, but resembles locusts, grasshoppers, and bees in being gauze-winged, this sort of wing being as much more delicate than the ordinary as Indian fabrics are lighter and softer than Greek.

of Samosata Lucian - Works of Lucian of Samosata — Volume 03

Never more may you bask and blink in the glare, or doze in the knife-edged shadows, or pounce upon gauze-winged flies. Thou hast learned too late that snakes, like democracy, never restore anything. I waited for the finish, which came with painful slowness.

E. J. (Edmund James) Banfield - My Tropic Isle