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Updated: June 22, 2025
To every traveller it was a sight of beauty, but to me it was the world the great wide free world and my heart thrilled and fluttered as the young bird's may when it first hears the whirr of its own flight, and skims along with the blue heaven above it and the green fields beneath.
Some say, it is only a craft of mist, that skims the top of the seas, like a sailing water-fowl, and others think it is the sprite of a vessel that was rifled and burnt by Kidd, in the Indian Ocean, looking for its gold and the killed. I saw him once, myself, but the distance was so great, and his manoeuvres so unnatural, that I could hardly give a good account of his hull, or rig."
A barrier reef encloses a lagoon passable for boats: and the traveller skims there, on smooth, many-tinted shallows, between the wall of the breakers on the one hand, and on the other a succession of palm-tree capes and cheerful beach-side villages. Beyond the great plantation of Vailele, the character of the coast is changed.
But sometimes the flying-fish merely skims the surface, so as to touch the tops of the successive waves, without rising and falling to follow the undulations of the sea; that they also rise as high as twenty feet out of the water is certain, being sometimes found in the channels of a line-of-battle ship; and they frequently fly into a 74 gun-ship's main-deck ports.
There is nothing which so completely unnerves him as long periods of silence. He has the talking habit in its most virulent form. The trifling talker is equally objectionable. He talks much, but says little. He skims over the surface of things, and is timid of anything deep or philosophical. He does not tarry at one subject. He talks of the weather, clothes, plays, and sports.
Each gondola glided along the element apparently with that ease with which a light-winged swallow skims the lake, and with no visible advantage to any one of the ten.
At some distance from the net, they have a rough and ready retreat in the brambles, an ambush made of a few leaves held together by stretched threads. It is here that, for the most part, they remain in the daytime, motionless and sunk in meditation. But the shrill light that vexes them is the joy of the fields. At such times, the Locust hops more nimbly than ever, more gaily skims the Dragon- fly.
"Hear me, ye first chop mandarins, peers, lords, and princes of the empire. Listen to the words of Youantee. Hath not each bird that skims the air its partner in the nest? Hath not each beast its mate? Have not you all eyes which beam but upon you alone? Am I then so unfortunately great, or so greatly unfortunate, that I may not be permitted to descend to love?
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er th' unbending corn or skims along the main." Essay on Criticism. The teachings of Anchises to Aeneas, respecting the nature of the human soul, were in conformity with the doctrines of the Pythagoreans. He is therefore sometimes called "the Samian," and sometimes "the philosopher of Crotona."
Then there is the industrious Mason, which bores a hole in the earth, makes the walls of its little tunnel as smooth as if it worked with trowel and mortar, and then hangs them with delicate silken curtains of its own spinning and weaving; the Trap-door spider, so called because the mouth of its burrowed nest is fitted with a cleverly hinged door, which the owner of the nest can shut with its claw when it leaves home; the Pirate, which makes a leafy raft, and skims along the water after the insects which suit its taste; the Gossamer spider, which rises so high in the air, and floats at its ease in its own balloon and Epeira, the Garden spider, whose beautiful web, covered with dewy diamonds, we have all seen, laid like some fairy lacework, over the hedges, on an autumn morning, as if the little weaver had been early at its work, as "wise" people usually are; and, as God has deigned to tell us, He Himself has been.
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