“She had scarcely uttered this when down came her old stumbling mare to the ground. Her every egg was smashed to atoms; and whilst she lay sprawling ... she was perfectly convinced in her own mind that the raven had clearly foreseen her irreparable misadventure.”
If one alighted on a church-tower the whole parish trembled, and when a cottager saw one perched on his roof-tree he made his will; or if it happened that a man or woman was ill in his house the death of that person was regarded as certain. The more learned would quote for you how Tiberius, Plato, Cicero and other great men of the past had been similarly warned, and doubtless many a person has died in these circumstances of nervous fright and discouragement. It is to this dread that Marlowe refers in his Jew of Malta:
Like the sad presaging raven that tolls
The sick man’s passport in her hollow beak,
And, in the shadow of the silent night,
Does shake contagion from her sable wing.
The last line contains a new and heinous calumny widely credited. So Shakespeare makes Caliban threaten Prospero and Ariel with
As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed
With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen.
I wonder, by the way, who first spoke—the simile is, at any rate, as old as Chaucer’s time—of the wrinkles that gather about the corners of our eyes when we get on in life, as “crow’s feet”? Frederick Locker sings of his grandmother: