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And it was full of trees covered with blossoms, the soil overgrown with the softest and greenest grass, extending for many miles around, and echoing with the sweet notes of winged warblers. And it resounded with the notes of the male Kokila and of the shrill cicala. And it was full of magnificent trees with outstretched branches forming a shady canopy overhead.
The noon had been unusually sultry, the stifling heat of the upper chambers oppressed her and the ceaseless, rasping whir of the cicala smote her with weariness, but she resisted the attempt of her ladies to detain her in the cooler atmosphere of the voto, for in these underground chambers she could have no sight of the great plain beyond the boundaries of the palace-gardens and she preferred remaining in the halls that overlooked the terraces turning her eyes often in the direction of the forest.
After my first night under the stars wondrous night of wakefulness and hopeful music, throughout which I lay entranced at the foot of a wooded hill and was never for a moment uncompanioned by nightingale, cicala and firefly I began to suffer from footsoreness, a bodily affliction against which romance, that certain salve for the maladies of the soul, is no remedy, or very little.
With thee to lead me, O Day of mine, Down the grass path grey with dew, Under the pine-wood, blind with boughs, Where the swallow never flew Nor yet cicala dared carouse No, dared carouse!" From "Pippa Passes" Robert Browning As Pippa leaves her room in the full spirit of this hymn, full of joy, hope and love, she passes into the street.
Thou fox, and where would be our even betting then? Who ever chose hair to shear, in place of wool? and who prefers to milk a filthy bitch, when he can have a she-goat, nursing her first kid? Comatas. Why, he that deems himself as sure of getting the better of his neighbour as thou dost, a wasp that buzzes against the cicala.
The stars were shining by thousands in the deep azure sky; the constant chirrup of the shrill-voiced cicala, not mute as yet, although his days of tuneful life were well nigh ended, rose cheerfully above the rippling murmurs of the waters, and the mysterious rustling of the herbage rejoicing to drink up the copious dew; and heard by fits and starts from the thick clumps of arbutus on the hills, or the thorn bushes on the water’s brink, the liquid notes of the nightingale gushed out, charming the ear of darkness.
Thus I love to hear the young girl's low, merry song, floating from the window of a country-house, half-broken by the cicala, the swallow's twitter, or the rustling leaves; I love to hear the joyous ripple of the harpsichord, bringing back, with some old music, times when that merry music stamped the hours, and took possession of them in the heart forever more!
Thorns, though figurative, remind one of the cicala, a creature which leaves nothing else untouched here. Surely their clamours and depredations have no equal. I used to walk in the Boboli Gardens, defying the heat, till they had eaten up the little shade some hedges there afforded me; and till, by their incessant noise, all thought is disturbed, and no line presented itself to my memory but
May the fallows be broken for the seed-time, while the cicala, watching the shepherds as they toil in the sun, in the shade of the trees doth sing on the topmost sprays. May spiders weave their delicate webs over martial gear, may none any more so much as name the cry of onset!
The Turks, less prone to desperation than the Christians, had been utterly overthrown in the early part of the action, but when the victors were, as usual, greedily bent upon plunder before the victory had been fairly secured, the tide of battle was turned by the famous Italian renegade Cicala.
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