Explore "The Song of Hiawatha" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Never stoops the soaring vulture / On his quarry in the desert, / On the sick or wounded bison, / But another vulture, watching / From his high aerial look-out, / Sees the downward plunge, and follows; / And a third pursues the second, / Coming from the invisible ether, / First a speck, and then a vulture, / Till the air is dark with pinions.
So disasters come not singly; / But as if they watched and waited, / Scanning one another's motions, / When the first descends, the others / Follow, follow, gathering flock-wise / Round their victim, sick and wounded, / First a shadow, then a sorrow, / Till the air is dark with anguish.