A songbird must have a clean beak to chirp with--no false notes!
But the duck swam quickly to her, seized her head in its beak and drew her into the water, and there the old witch had to drown.
—There's a riddle now might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts of the whole line of judges:—like a hawk's beak it pecks my brain.
A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
His scarlet beak blazes within the aureole of his straw hat.
Thus at the panting dove a falcon flies (The swiftest racer of the liquid skies), Just when he holds, or thinks he holds his prey, Obliquely wheeling through the aerial way, With open beak and shrilling cries he springs, And aims his claws, and shoots upon his wings: No less fore-right the rapid chase they held, One urged by fury, one by fear impell'd: Now circling round the walls their course maintain, Where the high watch-tower overlooks the plain; Now where the fig-trees spread their umbrage broad, (A wider compass,) smoke along the road.
One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-submerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam; its beak held a gold bracelet set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart.
Solitude would be no solitude—rest no rest—while the vulture, hunger, thus sank beak and talons in my side.
There are rough outlines in nature; there are, in creation, ready-made parodies; a beak which is not a beak, wings which are not wings, gills which are not gills, paws which are not paws, a cry of pain which arouses a desire to laugh, there is the duck.