In the agreeable communications of your correspondents, they seem in their quotations to have overlooked the following, from Dryden:—
"Secure as when the halcyon breeds, with these
He that was born to drown might cross the seas."
Astraea Redux.
And again, in his stanzas on the death of Oliver Cromwell—
"And wars have that respect for his repose
As winds for halcyons when they breed at sea."
Cowley likewise, in his preface to his Miscellanies, says, talking of his mind, "It must, like the halcyon, have fair weather to breed in."
The story of Ceyx and Alcyone is beautifully told in Ovid, Met. 11. fab. 10.