Poor little men, poor little cocks! As soon as they're old enough, they swell their plumage to be conquerors.... If they only knew... that it's enough to be just a little bit wounded and sad in order to obtain everything without fighting for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You never saw this room before a show, Full of lank, shivery, half-drowned birds... In separate coops, having their plumage done. The smell of the wet feathers in the heat!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He ...pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had seen the red Election-birds brought from their recesses on my comrades' string, and fancied that their plumage would assume ...stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of evening, in proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the forest. Still less have I seen such strong and wilderness tints on any poet's string.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In almost all climes the tortoise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song and gl...ancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve the equilibrium of nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, ...it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste,--sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill,--and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur. Those gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate men you hear of!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »