And what if ospreys, cormorants, herons cry, Amid tempestuous vapours driving by, 255 Or hovering over wastes too bleak to rear That common growth of earth, the foodful ear; [70] Where the green apple shrivels on the spray, And pines the unripened pear in summer's kindliest ray; Contentment shares the desolate domain 260 With Independence, child of high Disdain.

Mid stormy vapours ever driving by, Where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry; 1815.

Where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry, 'Mid stormy vapours ever driving by, 1836.]

Mid stormy vapours ever driving by, Where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry, Where hardly giv'n the hopeless waste to chear, Deny'd the bread of life the foodful ear, 320 Dwindles the pear on autumn's latest spray, And apple sickens pale in summer's ray, Ev'n here Content has fix'd her smiling reign With Independance child of high Disdain.

Saints of one order or another are as thick here as ordinary priests in Malta, whom the late facetious Major Wright was accustomed to call crowsfrom their black dressbut better, cormorants, as agreeing with their habits of fleecing the poor people.

The larger of these in calm weather is frequented by cormorants, and has gained the name of "Cormorant Rock."

There were three of these birds on it one very rough day, and we saw a scene enacted whichwith due apologies to the late Rev. Charles Kingsley for thus adapting his pathetic verseswe have commemorated in the following lines, under the title of "THE THREE CORMORANTS.

For cormorants fish, and cormorants catch, And they swallow their prey with the utmost despatch, Without all the trouble of boning!

For cormorants fish, and cormorants catch, And they swallow their prey with the utmost despatch, Without all the trouble of boning!

For cormorants fish, and cormorants catch, But if waves dash high they should use despatch, Or their loved ones will always be groaning!

For cormorants fish, and cormorants catch, But if waves dash high they should use despatch, Or their loved ones will always be groaning!

One or two cormorants were almost always about the river.

Two or three solitary cormorants would be shooting back and forth at a furious rate, or swimming in midstream; and sometimes a few spotted sandpipers and killdeer plovers were feeding along the shore.

Understand the creature gall'd to death and desperation by gad flies, cormorants winged, worse than beset Inachus' daughter.

One species of cormorants eats fishes.

He was surrounded by a screaming garrison of gulls, cormorants, and sea-mews.

Sea-mews and cormorants flew about him restlessly, as if anxious to warn him of his danger.

When we went into the dining-room of the hotel we always had to pass through a throng of these cormorants, who thrust jewelry, ivory carvings, photographs, embroideries, cashmere shawls, silks and other goods in our faces and begged us to buy them.

Rich, lonely, and vain, he must have been fair game for the race of social sycophants and cormorants; and it's much to the credit of his sharpness and that instinct of self-defence which nature bestows even on the weak, that he has not been despoiled and exploité.

He was a thin, restless man with weak and shifting eyes; he said grace at dinner, giving thanks for the scanty rations of hash and brown beans over which his hungry workmen were poised like cormorants.

Cormorants, "as feeding only on fish," were allowable food on fast days, as also were otters.

The distant moaning of the sea, the harsh screams of the cormorants with the desolate nature of the spot, chilled my spirits.

Cormorants, of course, are not fastidious birds.

They became gulls, cormorants, ravens, rats, mice, black sheep, swelling waves, whales, and very frequently cats and hares."

Ah, but ye that extrude from the ocean your helpless faces, Ye over stormy seas leading long and dreary processions, Ye, too, brood of the wind, whose coming is whence we discern not, Making your nest on the wave, and your bed on the crested billow, Skimming rough waters, and crowding wet sands that the tide shall return to, Cormorants, ducks, and gulls, fill ye my imagination!