Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Pelican
What, wouldst thou have me turn pelican, and feed thee out of my own vitals?
Congreve—Love for Love. Act II. Sc. 1.
By them there sat the loving pelican,
Whose young ones, poison’d by the serpent’s sting,
With her own blood to life again doth bring.
Drayton—Noah’s Flood.
Nature’s prime favourites were the Pelicans;
High-fed, long-lived, and sociable and free.
Montgomery—Pelican Island. Canto V. L. 144.
Nimbly they seized and secreted their prey,
Alive and wriggling in the elastic net,
Which Nature hung beneath their grasping beaks;
Till, swoln with captures, the unwieldy burden
Clogg’d their slow flight, as heavily to land,
These mighty hunters of the deep return’d.
There on the cragged cliffs they perch’d at ease,
Gorging their hapless victims one by one;
Then full and weary, side by side, they slept,
Till evening roused them to the chase again.
Montgomery—Pelican Island. Canto IV. L. 141.
The nursery of brooding Pelicans,
The dormitory of their dead, had vanish’d,
And all the minor spots of rock and verdure,
The abodes of happy millions, were no more.
Montgomery—Pelican Island. Canto VI. L. 74.