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More "Flit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prefer a basilisk's kiss to mine? Because my short-lived joy may cause her eternal sorrow, shall I reject those pleasures sought so long, desired so earnestly? That will I not, by Heaven! Mine she is, and mine she shall be, though Reginald's bleeding ghost flit before me and thunder in my ear 'Hold! Hold!'—Peace, stormy heart, she comes." Reginald's ghost does not flit, because Reginald is still in the flesh, though not in very much flesh. He is Osmond's brother and Angela's father, and the wicked Earl thought that he had ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... basest crimes, put Shakespeare in the dock for murder, Milton for blasphemy, Scott for forgery, and Goethe for questionable financial deals with the devil. Byron's sins were as scarlet and the number not a few, but the moths that came just to flit about the flame were all of mature age. Byron set no snares for the innocent, and in all of the man's misdoings, he himself it was who ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... In the long summer afternoons when the nuns carried their sewing out to the orchard behind the house, or to the pine grove on the hill, where one could obtain such a lovely view of the river, Nita would flit about amongst them like a veritable woodland fairy. Her snatches of song and merry laughter made sylvan echoes ring and brought smiles to the faces of the simple women who watched ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... horse knew he was getting near the end of his journey for, contrary to expectation, he did "giddap" with a jerk which nearly unseated the doctor and caused a flicker of mild surprise to flit across ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... poet at his will Lets the great world flit from him, seeing all, Higher thro' secret splendours mounting still, Self-poised, nor fears ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... the same identity, spirit, animating principle—call it what you will—can flit from body to body, say in successive ages? Or that the dead ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... I woo her? I will stand Beside her when she sings, And watch her fine and fairy hand Flit o'er the quivering strings! But shall I tell her I have heard, Though sweet her song may be, A voice where every whispered word Was more than ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... balms into the wound Of bosom weak and sad, Till holy pleasures flit around And all the heart is glad; Till all is sweet that here before Was wrapped in bitter woe, And only gladness hurries ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... reveals a tender sadness resting in the depths of those powerful dark eyes. Lady Rosamond is in a deep study—one which is not of an agreeable nature—one which she is not most likely to reveal. Alternate shades of displeasure, rebellion and defiance, flit across her brow, which remain, in quiet and apparently full possession, until reluctantly driven forth by the final ascendancy of reason, at the cost of many conflicting feelings ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... Elizabeth watched a phantom landscape flit past the window of the sleeping-car. Sometimes a cloud of smoke, shot through with sparks, brushed the glass like a billowing curtain, and sometimes the thunderous darkness of a tunnel swept between her and spectral trees or looming hilltops. She lay there on her pillows, ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... sit, pretending to read, but in reality brooding in silence. One poignant sorrow had transformed him from a bright, happy youth, to a man sad-eyed, dull, morose. Sometimes, as I watched, I noticed how he would suddenly sigh heavily, and set his teeth as a bitter relentless expression would flit for an instant across his countenance, and I knew that at such moments there entered into his heart the contemplation of ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... "seem to take us into the dense forest among mocking echoes from, the life outside; others show us the trolls tobogganing down the highest peaks of Norway; in some we feel human souls hovering over reefs; in others, memories of the old sun-lit land flit before us; but in none do we meet with sentimentalism, despondency, or disconsolateness." But with their weird and minor strains, and their odd jumps from low tones to high, on first acquaintance they strike the hearer ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... have acquired this habit of chattering during the last month, while I have been lying for days together in a corner, feeding my mind on trifles. Come, why am I taking this walk now? Am I capable of THAT? Can THAT really be serious? Not in the least. These are mere chimeras, idle fancies that flit across my brain! ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... Skyline Drive is not a road To bring you near the skies Where you can sit and gather clouds That flit before your eyes, Or jump upon a golden fleece And sail to paradise— But it is a super-mountain road Where you can feast your eyes Upon the beauties of the world The Lord God gave to man For his enjoyment and his use; Improve ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... Certainly witches are constantly thought to ride through the air on broomsticks or other equally convenient vehicles; and if they do so, how can you get at them so effectually as by hurling lighted missiles, whether discs, torches, or besoms, after them as they flit past overhead in the gloom? The South Slavonian peasant believes that witches ride in the dark hail-clouds; so he shoots at the clouds to bring down the hags, while he curses them, saying, "Curse, curse Herodias, thy mother is a heathen, damned of God and fettered through the Redeemer's blood." ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... over her MS., and paused to reread some passage just penned, which she had laboriously composed, and thought particularly good as an illustration of the idea she was striving to embody perspicuously, a smile would flit across her countenance while ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... hawks are day birds, while the owls fly by night. There came the sound of footsteps; and I retreated, casting one glance backward at the black and white, the blue and brown colours that streaked the wall, while the dull green weasels were in perpetual shadow. By night the bats would flit round and about that gloomy place. It would not do to return by the same path, lest another keeper might be coming up it; so I stepped into the wood itself. To those who walk only in the roads, hawks and owls seem almost rare. But a wood is a place to which they all flock; and any wanderer from ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... The rain-clouds flit away, So from the maiden's eye Vanished the falling spray, Which lingered but awhile Her dimpled cheek upon— Then melted in her smile, Like vapor in ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom, And flit from room ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... if what I say isn't true!" said the man; "but we can't give anyone house-room just now, for every Christmas Eve such a pack of Trolls come down upon us, that we are forced to flit, and haven't so much as a house over our own heads, to say nothing of lending ...
— East of the Sun and West of the Moon - Old Tales from the North • Peter Christen Asbjornsen
... measured tone shouts the name of the station; he looks up from his paper or rouses from his doze, looks out at the cheerless prospect, and then settles himself for another thirty miles. Time passes as unobserved as the meadows or bushy pastures that flit by the jarring window at his ear. But with Greenleaf, the reader will believe, the case was far different. He had never noticed before how slowly the locomotives really moved. At each station where wood and water were to be taken, it seemed to him the delay was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... account for it by any process of reasoning, and was simply obliged to accept the fact and give up trying to solve the riddle. He found himself dragged into society and courted, wondered at and envied very much as if he were one of those foreign barbers who flit over here now and then with a self-conferred title of nobility and marry some rich fool's absurd daughter. Sometimes at a dinner party or a reception he would find himself the centre of interest, and feel unutterably uncomfortable in the discovery. Being obliged to say something, he ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... Cardo in bewilderment, as he saw through the doorway the graceful white figure flit up the narrow stairs. "Uncle John! Can that be Captain Powell? Of course, old Essec's brother, no doubt. I have ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... landscapes, and yet all the time to be dreaming. Faces grown familiar for a few days and never seen after—pictures photographed upon the memory in all their vividness—glimpses of cathedrals, of palaces, of ruins, of sunset and storm, sea and shore, flit before me for a moment, ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... the blue Hangs motionless the whole day through; Stars rise for them, and moons grow large And lessen in such tranquil wise As joys and sorrows do that rise Within their nature's sheltered marge; Their hours into each other flit, Like the leaf-shadows of the vine And fig-tree under which they sit; And their still lives to heaven incline With an unconscious habitude, Unhistoried as smokes that rise From happy hearths and sight elude In kindred blue of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... myself out upon the ground, and yielded without further struggle to my evil destiny. What I suffered from thirst, hunger, and heat cannot be described. At last I fell into a sort of trance, during which images of various kinds seemed to flit before my eyes. How long I remained in this state I know not: but I remember that I was brought to my senses by a loud shout, which came from persons belonging to a caravan returning from Mecca. This was a shout of joy for their safe arrival at a certain spring, well ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... because I must, staring up the hall at the empty throne. At first I saw nothing. Then figures seemed to flit around it. From among these figures emerged the shape of the Count Amenmeses. He sat upon the throne, looking about him proudly, and I noted that he was no longer clad as a prince but as Pharaoh himself. Presently hook-nosed men appeared who dragged him from his seat. He ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... menacing. Dust devils rise up from the plains and veil the crags. In the winter there are snows. In the summer great clouds gather over Shiwina and grow dark with rain. White corn tassels are waving, blue butterfly maidens flit among the ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... could. He had been baptized with a French name, and his son after him, but no Chippewa of pure blood and name looked habitually as he did into those whirlpools called the chutes, where the slip of a paddle meant death. Yet nobody feared the rapids. It was common for boys and girls to flit around near shore in birch canoes, balancing themselves and expertly dipping ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... very secondary for them; they spoke of them only to have something to talk about, and to hide their real feelings. They went on speaking in low, soft tones, as if fearing to frighten away the moments that remained, and so make time flit by more swiftly still. Their conversation was as a thing that had inexorably to come to an end; and the most insignificant things that they said seemed, on this day, to become ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... numbered about fifty souls—men, women, and children. Many Indians were seated on the beach, watching our departure with solemn and anxious faces; and some promised to follow us in a few days. The party with me seemed filled with solemn joy as we pushed off, feeling that their long-looked-for flit had actually commenced. I felt we were beginning an eventful page in the history of this poor people, and earnestly sighed to God for His ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... greater distinctness; the future is still, indeed, shadowy, but it is no longer uncertain; there is the dreadful prison-house, with the judge upon his throne—and the darker criminals are overtaken by the vengeance which was delayed in life. The thin phantoms of the great ones of the past flit to and fro, mourning wearily for their lost mortality, and feeding on its memory. And more than this, as if it were beginning to be felt that something more was wanted after all to satisfy us with the completeness of the Divine rule, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... loop, put the point to his lips, and paused. He was standing with his back to the failing light, so I could not see the expression of his mobile face. When he paused, I knew that no ordinary doubt beset him. He stood thus for nearly a minute. While he waited, I watched a pair of swans flit ghost-like over the silken surface of the lake. Between us and a dark bank of wood the lights of the house flamed red. The melancholy even-song of a blackbird wailed out from a shrubbery beside us. Then Herbert Brande wrote in his note-book, and tearing out the ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... through all things with his half-shut eyes) Sent up in vapours to the baron's brain New stratagems the radiant lock to gain. Ah, cease, rash youth! desist ere 'tis too late, Fear the just gods, and think of Scylla's fate! Changed to a bird, and sent to flit in air, She dearly pays ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... is no longer that of a man either despairing or fatigued. On the contrary, it is light and elastic; while his countenance shows bright and joyous as the beams of the ascending sun. His very shadow seems to flit over the frosted foliage of the artemisias as lightly as the figure of a gossamer-robed belle gliding across the waxed floor of ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... a dream, and through the little opening of your eyelids I shall slip into the depths of your sleep; and when you wake up and look round startled, like a twinkling firefly I shall flit out ...
— The Crescent Moon • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... that emphasise its foreignness far more than its people. People can travel. Turbaned heads are, for example, not unknown in England; but to have green parrots with long tails flitting among the trees, as they used to flit in my host's garden in Bombay, is to be in India beyond question. At Raisina we had mynahs and the babblers, or "Seven Sisters," in great profusion, and also the King Crow with his imposing tail; while the little striped squirrels were everywhere. These ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... brief the fruitful rest, As summer-clouds that o'er the valley flit:— To other tasks his genius he must fit; The Dane is in the land, uneasy guest! —O sacred Athelney, from pagan quest Secure, sole haven for the faithful boy Waiting God's issue with heroic joy And unrelaxing purpose in the ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... inconspicuous, and her movements, light, graceful, self-controlled, seemed to show a person of equable temperament, without any strong emotions. In her light cheerfulness, her perpetual interest in the things about her, she might have reminded a spectator of some of the smaller sea-birds that flit endlessly from wave to wave, for whom the business of life appears to be summed ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... rose lightly into the air and Perseus followed. By the time they had ascended a few hundred feet the young man began to feel what a delightful thing it was to leave the dull earth so far beneath him and to be able to flit about ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... he kept saying to himself; "an' sic sma' white han's! an' sic a bonny flit! Eh hoo she wad glitter throu' the water in a bag net! Faith! gien she war to sing 'come doon' to me, I wad gang. Wad that be to lowse baith sowl an' body, I wonner? I'll see what Maister Graham says to that. It's a fine question to put till 'im: 'Gien a body ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... gesture of mute yearning her hands went out to him. She stooped low and lower. A faint breeze seemed to flit across his forehead as if her lips, lightly brushing it, had ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... glad to help the cause, even so little as that," she answered. Pepperell thanked her for her words, and ignored the look of disappointment that he had seen flit across her ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... direction. The western end of the island ran out into a long low point covered with briars, rushes and saw-grass. As Alfred directed his gaze along the water line of this point he distinctly saw a dark form flit from one bush to another. He was positive he had not been mistaken. He got up slowly and unconcernedly, and strolled over ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... and rustling sedge, he spends the morning; and when in the heat of the day the fish refuse to nibble, he takes his hunk of bread out of his pocket and lies on his back among the rushes, while lazy dreams flit across his consciousness as the light summer clouds ...
— A Warwickshire Lad - The Story of the Boyhood of William Shakespeare • George Madden Martin
... the various phantoms keep; Of ev'ry one; whence flit, to mock the brain, Of winged lies a light fantastic train; The gate opposed pellucid valves adorn, And columns fair, encased with polished horn; Where images of truth for passage wait." See Pope's Homer's "Odyssey," bk. xix., 1. 637. See also Virgil, ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... to morals, as you say, our ideas do not agree, and cannot agree,' she responded, and something menacing seemed to flit over her brows, while her lips were faintly trembling ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... seclusion,—a splendor of abandoned glory. All the stir of life (if, indeed, one may dream of life in Pisa) is far away on the other side of the city; to this corner is left the wraith-like haunted atmosphere, where only shadows flit over the grass, and the sunset reflections linger on the Tower. A statue of Cosimo di Medici was near; the Lanfranchi palace, where Byron had lived, was not far away, on the banks of the Arno. They quite preferred the Duomo and the ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... the manor-house glowed as in a bengal light; the sleigh-bells were still tinkling in the yard, where the coachmen were quarrelling over accommodation for their horses. Crowds of village people were leaning against the railings to watch the dancers flit past the windows, and to catch the strains of the music. Around all this noise, brightness, and merriment lay the darkness of the winter night, and from the winter night emerged slowly the sledge, ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... and teach it rather A tune to drown the ballads of thy father. For thou hast nought to cure his fame, But tune and noise, and eccho of his shame. A rogue by statute, censured to be whipt, Cropt, branded, flit, neck-flockt: go, you ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... up before her. She would feel how great the trial must be to leave all the endeared scenes of youth and childhood, and go forth to toil, and perhaps die, among strangers in a strange land. Dark visions would often flit before her; and she felt how terrible it must be to sicken and expire on shores where no mother's kind hand could lift her anguished head nor smooth her fevered pillow. But at other times her spirit soared above ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... the main door with a massy key. "The lassie fund it," he whispered to Dickson, "somewhere about the kitchen—and I guessed it was the key o' this castle. I was thinkin' that if things got ower hot it would be a good plan to flit here. Change our base, like." The Chieftain's occasional studies in war had trained his tongue ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... dance, and flit about the studio, like an incarnate sprite of jollity, pausing at last on the extremity of one toe, as if that were the only portion of himself whereby his frisky nature could come in contact with ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... there is much to see in it; one of the crags of the aiguille-edge, on the southern slope of it, is struck sharply through, as by an awl, into a little eyelet hole; which you may see, seven thousand feet above the valley (as the clouds flit past behind it, or leave the sky), first white, and then dark blue. Well, there's just such an eyelet hole in one of the upper crags of the Diamond Valley; and, from a distance, you think that it is no bigger than the eye of a needle. But if you get up to it, they say you may drive ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... putting forth these efforts, the ass bad been flying along at an undiminished rate of speed, and the country swept past him on either side. He passed long lines of trees by the roadside, he saw field after field flit by, and the distant hills went slowly along out of the line of his vision. Hitherto he had met with no one at all along the road, nor had he seen any cattle of any kind. His efforts to arrest the ass had been fruitless, and he gave them up, and looked ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... hence! there's dwarfish Hildebrand; 100 He had a fever late, and in the fit He cursed thee and thine, both house and land: Then there's that old Lord Maurice, not a whit More tame for his gray hairs—Alas me! flit! Flit like a ghost away."—"Ah, Gossip dear, We're safe enough; here in this arm-chair sit, And tell me how"—"Good Saints! not here, not here; Follow me, child, or else these stones ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... for the present time, and assure posterity that there never was such a lamb as Catherine II., and that, so far from assassinating her own husband and Czar Ivan,[2] she wept over every chicken that she had for dinner. How crimes, like fashions, flit from clime to clime! Murder reigns under the Pole, while you, who are in the very town where Catherine de' Medici was born, and within a stone's throw of Rome, where Borgia and his holy father sent cardinals to the other world by hecatombs, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... the other, heartily, as he eyed the boy; and perhaps a dim suspicion that he might find the fugitive valuable as a guide began to flit through his mind then ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... roved back again over his talk with Lepine. Could it have been done by wireless? Not the ordinary wireless, but some subtle variant of ether waves, some new form of radio-activity, which in some way caused combustion? There was an enemy which could flit unseen from magazine to magazine, which no locks nor bars could ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... will ever desert, and Hetty likes us too well to leave us in the lurch; but suppose those typesetters take a notion to flit?" ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... dressed all in green, would flit across the moor. They would form tiny rings and dance on their tiny toes until ...
— Stories from the Ballads - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... of the elm avenue, beyond the square lawn and pepper-pot summer-houses, and pitied men who made such mistakes in the matter of matrimony as his brother William obviously had. The rose of the sunset faded in the west. Bats began to flit forth, hawking against the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... children pit-pat from their burrows on the hill; Hangs within the gloom its weary head the shining daffodil. In the valley underneath us through the fragrance flit along Over fields and over hedgerows little quivering drops of song. All adown the pale blue mantle of the mountains far away Stream the tresses of the twilight flying in the wake of day. Night comes; soon alone ...
— By Still Waters - Lyrical Poems Old and New • George William Russell
... guessed little of the secret anguish of that departure. She only knew that it was just like her mother, having perfectly arranged the entire house for the arrival of the honeymoon couple from Buxton, to flit early away so as to spare the natural blushing diffidence of the said couple. It was like her mother's commonsense and her mother's sympathetic comprehension. Further, Constance did not pursue her mother's ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... that flit my memory o'er, Deck'd in the smiles which then ye wore, In the same gay and varied dress, I cannot but admire and bless! What though some anxious throbs would beat, Some fears within my breast ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... everlasting and dense as the fumes of ascending hell. The visions of priest and of prophet beholding his enemies bruised of his rod Beheld but the likeness of this that is fallen on the faithful, the friends of God. Northward, and northward, and northward they stagger and shudder and swerve and flit, Dismantled of masts and of yards, with sails by the fangs of the storm-wind split. But north of the headland whose name is Wrath, by the wrath or the ruth of the sea, They are swept or sustained to the westward, and drive through ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 1828, not three months before the death of the composer. In the opening theme of No. 2, determination and confidence are expressed, while in the Scherzo and Rondo there is even sunshine, though now and again black clouds flit across the scene. But in the Adagio, and in all the movements of the other two sonatas, the mood is either one of sadness, more or less intense, dark despair, or fierce frenzy. Music can express both ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... ashamed of home and Joe,—from all those visions that had raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the wooden window of the forge, and flit away. In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... domestic animals. The sheep was unknown to native races in this pastureless land, and, though introduced by the earliest colonists, is still spoken of as "the Dutch goat," no other term existing for it in Malay parlance. Monkeys chatter and rustle in forest trees, gorgeous birds flit past on jewelled wings, and frogs in this rainy season make a deep booming like the tuning of numerous violoncellos. At length the little town of Garoet appears in a green valley, encircled by a diadem of peaks which suggest ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... tall hemlocks proceeds a very fine insect-like warble, and occasionally I see a spray tremble, or catch the flit of a wing. I watch and watch till my head grows dizzy and my neck is in danger of permanent displacement, and still do not get a good view. Presently the bird darts, or, as it seems, falls down a few feet in pursuit of a fly or a moth, and I see the whole of it, but in the dim light am undecided. ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... here; tell Ravenhurst I want to talk to him, or I'll simply flit back to Eros, and thank him much for a pretty retainer that didn't do him any good but gave me a nice ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... in silent cogitation, with despair almost paralysing his heart. He is unable to think steadily, or clearly. Doubtful, unfeasible schemes shape themselves in his mind; idle thoughts flit across his brain; all the while wild tumultuous emotions coursing ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... sand retarding progress. It was a gloomy, depressing scene in the spectral gray light, a wide circle of intense loneliness, unbroken by either dwarfed shrub or bunch of grass, a barren expanse stretching to the sky. Vague cloud shadows seemed to flit across the level surface, assuming fantastic shapes, but all of the same dull coloring, imperfect and unfinished. Nothing seemed tangible or real, but rather some grotesque picture of delirium, ever merging ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... asked abruptly, 'why, with pretty much all the known world to choose her friends from, this young woman should flit about with Siegmund Stein? It prejudices people against her. He's a most ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... lonely beach we flit, One little sandpiper and I, And fast I gather, bit by bit, The scattered drift-wood, bleached and dry. The wild waves reach their hands for it, The wild wind raves, the tide runs high, As up and down the beach we flit, One ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... in the breast. For more than a month he hung between life and death, and six weeks elapsed before he had strength to relate what had happened. He was lighting a cigar at his window when he thought he saw a woman's form flit through the garden. A suspicion that it might be his sister flashed through his mind; so he hastened down, stole noiselessly into the pavilion, and there he found his sister and a young man who was absolutely unknown to him. He might have killed the intruder, but instead of doing so, he told ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... most other countries. He visits her marts, her harbours, and her ports—men of all nations are met together there—fleets of rich argosies are ever arriving and departing—and myriads of steamers flit to and fro, happily now engaged in promoting the arts of peace, but ready at a moment's notice to become the defenders of his country's shores, and, as recent events have shown the world, able also to carry war and devastation along the coasts of her enemies, even to the uttermost parts of the earth. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... itself. Every moment of this portion of the ride is a delight. The senses are kept keenly alert, for not only have we the Lake, the bay and the mountains, but part of the way we have flowers and shrubs by the thousands, bees and butterflies flit to and fro, and singing streams come foaming white from the snowbanks above, eager to reach the Lake. As our car-wheels dash across these streamlets they splash up the water on each side into sparkling diamonds and on every hand come up the sweet scents of growing, living ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... 3. Un-con'scious, not knowing, not perceiving. 5. Clus'ter, a bunch. 7. Flit'ing, moving about in a lively manner. Ves'ture, clothing, covering. 9. Mon'i-tor, one who warns of faults. Or'a-cle, a ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... 302. The numerous moths and butterflies seem to pass from a reptile leaf-eating state, and to acquire wings to flit in air, with a proboscis to gain honey for their food along with their organs of reproduction, solely for the purpose of propagating their species by sexual intercourse, as they die when that is completed. ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... great terror came over her. She looked around her at the dark night. Dim forms flitted by. She seemed to recognize some of them, as they floated through the regions of death towards the dark curtain, where they vanished. Would her husband and her daughters flit past? No; their sighs and lamentations still sounded from above; and she had nearly forgotten them, for the sake of him ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... his lassitude left him, his senses became preternaturally acute, and a sense of well-being and complete satisfaction pervaded his whole being. The mist into which he was gazing became faintly luminous, and strange shapes began to flit across it; shapes the like of which he had never seen in his life before. Then something approached him and rested its head upon his knee. He looked down and saw that the "something" was a huge jaguar or South American tiger; and it bore a striking resemblance to ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... staggering as though wounded, but always righting himself. There would be the Mad Major each day, over the rearguard troops, seeming to shelter them. He would harry the German line; he would drop a bomb, flit back, and with a brave "We've got them, boys," cheer the sinking spirits of ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... which often flit about, but must not be trusted. Mr. Patch could not have given a better proof that ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... were already there, but, when the scout returned with such dire tidings, they decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and all made haste to get back to their rooms ere the enemy appeared. But, alack-a-day! that enemy could flit about in a surprisingly lively manner, and, ere some of them had reached safety behind their own doors, she came in view. To get to their rooms now was out of the question, so, making a virtue of necessity, they all ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... solitary, aimless existence. Sometimes, wildly as she struggled against such thoughts, there would come to Olive's fancy dreams of what her life might have been. The holiness of lovers' love, of wedded love, of mother-love, would at times flit before her imagination; and her heart, still warm, still young, trembled to picture the lonely old age, the hearth blank and silent, the utter isolation from all those natural ties whose place not even the dearest bonds of adopted affection can. ever entirely fill. But, whenever ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the crones have dozed by the palisade and the weapons find their way unseen into the village, revolution would be nearly certain, death the most probable result, and the spirit of the tyrant of Apemama flit to rejoin his predecessors of Mariki and Tapituea. Yet those whom he so trusts are all women, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the flesh of the English. In 1708 privateers from Port Royal had destroyed no less than thirty-five English vessels, chiefly from Boston, and had carried to the fort four hundred and seventy prisoners. Even in winter months French ships would flit out of Port Royal and bring in richly laden prizes. Can we wonder at Boston's deep resolve that now at last the pest ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... is matchless among you for wit; A Leyden jar always full charged, from which flit The electrical tingles of hit after hit. His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyric Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satiric; In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes That are trodden upon are ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... conscious life, till its huge head overlooks the mast! A million of lines intersect its surface, a myriad of bubbles fleck it with light; yet its terrible unity remains unbroken. Not a bubble or a line gives a thought of minuteness; they flash and flit, ere the eye can count them, leaving only their aggregate, in the indefinite sense of multitudinous motion: take them away, and you take from the mass the very sign of its power, that fearful impetus which makes it what it ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... could not fail to be discovered. I earnestly prayed that help might be sent me. How it was to come I could not tell. Notwithstanding what was before me, I still desired to be set free. Although I was not sleeping, strange fancies filled my brain. I saw people flit about in the darkness, suddenly coming into the light, and then disappearing. Some were people I knew, and others were strangers. Aunt Deb and Mr Butterfield came by, tripping it lightly, holding each other's hands, he in a bob wig with a sword by his side, ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... agony and fear for his own he was paying the price of his guilt. The sense of helplessness was crushing. In two hours the war party would start and it would flit southward like the wind, as silent but far more deadly. No, nothing could save the innocent people at Wareville; they were as surely doomed as if their destruction had ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... river, troubled her eyes; she closed them and reclined in stillness. She felt very tired, worn out with the stress of it, with the conflict and the strain. Strange notions, half fancies, half dreams, began to flit through her mind. She saw the end come in many ways, now while they were alone together, now in some public place, even in the House, or while he addressed his shareholders. She seemed to hear the buzz of talk that followed ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... history? Is it because our sun is declining to the horizon? Are they the shadows of evening, or are they, as I hopefully believe, but the mists which are exhaled by the sun as it rises, but which are to be dispersed by its meridian glory? Are they but the little evanishing clouds that flit between the people and the great objects for which the Constitution was established? I hopefully look toward the reaction which will establish the fact that our sun is still in the ascendant—that that ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... thou hast mocked my hungry soul; thy gilded fruits have crumbled to ashes in my grasp. In lieu of the holy faith of my girlhood, thou hast given me but dim, doubtful conjecture, cold metaphysical abstractions, intangible shadows, that flit along my path, and lure me on to deeper morasses. Oh, what is the shadow of death, in comparison with the starless night which has fallen upon me, even in the morning of my life! My God, save me! Give me light! Of myself I ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... I think I almost hear A horn's faint echo through the dusk-hour's veil As in the happy, golden days of yore— Mayhap, e'en now upon this magic mere Frail shallops will flit by and mermaids pale Will lure us ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... etching. Beyond them spreads the misty moon-irradiated plain of Umbria. Over all rise shadowy Apennines, with dim suggestions of Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Montefalco, and Spoleto on their basements. Little thin whiffs of breezes, very slight and searching, flit across, and shiver as they pass from Apennine to plain. The slowly moving population—women in veils, men winter-mantled—pass to and fro between the buildings and the grey immensity of sky. Bells ring. The bugles ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... family was to flit away to the country on the following afternoon. I was informed of this by the footman, whose duty it was to tell me that his mistress was superintending her packing at the moment, but would be down almost immediately. Meanwhile, Miss Cunningham was in Lady Tressidy's ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... will perhaps have discovered that a woman may be as changeable as the moon, and yet as true as the sun;—that she may flit from flower to flower, quite unheeding while no passion exists, but that a passion fixes her at once. Do you believe me?" Now she looked into his eyes again, but did not smile and did not ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... general term, yet how irksome, cold, uninteresting, uninviting, does it at best appear to you! how severe its voice! how forbidding its aspect! With what animation, on the contrary, do you enter into the mere pursuits of time and the world! What bright anticipations of joy and happiness flit before your eyes! How you are struck and dazzled at the view of the prizes of this life, as they are called! How you admire the elegancies of art, the brilliance of wealth, or the force of intellect! According to your opportunities you mix in the world, you meet and converse ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... is said to be an ancestress of mine, a Lady Cordelia Carne, who was murdered, when her husband was away, and buried down there, after being thrown into the moat. The old people say that whenever her ghost is walking, the water of the moat bursts in and covers the floor of the vaults, that she may flit along it, as she used to do. But of course one must not listen to that sort ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... their last courtesies, Flit from the scene, and couch them for their rest; The Meadow Lily folds her scarlet vest And hides it 'neath the Grasses' lengthening ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... arms about each other, and were so full of their own feelings that they never saw Uncle Fact's tall shadow flit across them, as he stole away over the soft sand. Poor old gentleman! he was in a sad state of mind, and didn't know what to do; for in all his long life he had never been so ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... swing from the higher branches like incandescent globes of colored glass. But it is usually impossible for one on the ground to see the finest blooms, which turn their faces to the sunlight above the canopy of green. Gray apes chatter in the tree-tops; strange tropic birds of gorgeous plumage flit from bough to bough, monstrous reptiles slip silently through the undergrowth; insects buzz in swarms above the putrid swamps; occasionally the jungle crashes beneath the tread of some heavy animal—a rhinoceros, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... that moment the sun came out. We were keeping to the side of the road where it is soft going. Suddenly Swallow leaped like a stag into the middle of the road all over the pave. Panic terror. He had seen the shadow of a starling flit across his path! ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... 'tis still I no sound to wake The primal forest's awful shade; And breathless lies the covert brake, Where many an ambushed form is laid. I see the red-man's gleaming eye, Yet all so hushed, the gloom profound, That summer birds flit heedlessly, And mocking nature ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... to nights on earth, which the spirits pass in these realms of bliss. At daybreak they revisit their old home on earth and take up their posts in the cemeteries where they are honoured; then at nightfall they flit away back to the spirit-land beneath the sea, there to resume their sport with oranges, green, golden, or withered, till dawn of day. On these repeated journeys to and fro they have nothing to fear from the grim fisherman and his net; it is only on their first passage to the nether ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... perfect in their form and alive with heavenly instincts, which complete with wondrous speed their rapid courses. Wherefore, my son, by you and by all just men that soul must be retained within its body's confines, nor can it be allowed to flit without command of him by whom it has been given to you. You may not escape the duty which God has trusted to you. Live, my Scipio, and shine with piety and justice, as your grandfather did and I have done. It is your duty to your ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... of Europe, not less than in the United States, these ideals had been arrived at, at least in name, and so far as concerned politics. Even in Germany, the most rigid of Absolute Despot isms, a phantasm of political liberty was allowed to flit about the Halls of Parliament. But through the cunning of Bismarck the Socialist masses were bound all the more tightly to the Hohenzollern Despot by liens which seemed to be socialistic. Nevertheless, the principles of the Social Revolution spread secretly from European country ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... strikes in upon you, and makes the reality a mere picture. The sky is blue, the sun is often fiercely hot; you could not perhaps prove that the pathetic radiance is not an efflux of your own consciousness that summer is but hanging over the land, briefly poising on wings which flit at the first dash of rain, and will soon vanish in long retreat before the snow. But somehow, from without or from within, that light of the North ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... circumscribes itself like Giotto's O is almost as tangible a thing as a statue; it has almost contour. But this melody afloat in the air, flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swaying poise, as the notes flit from strings to voice, and from voice to wood and wind, is more than a mere heightening of speech: it partakes of the nature of thought, but it is more than thought; it is the whole expression of the subconscious life, saying ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... the emotions through which he had been passing of late, that Roland felt but a faint interest at the prospect of meeting face to face a genuine—if exiled—monarch. The thought did flit through his mind that they would sit up a bit in old Fineberg's office if they could hear of it, but ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... darkened streets I'd walk: long lanterns writ With ghostly characters should dance Beside each door, or flit, Thin paper spirits, to and fro And mow the wind, when it Demanded of them reverence And passed ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... their appearance and manifested a feeling of nostalgia. Mother Carey's chickens, little birds resembling swallows, began to flit around us, skimming closely along the waves. There is a fiction among the sailors that nobody ever saw one of these birds alight or found its nest. Whoever harms one is certain to bring misfortune upon himself and possibly his companions. A prudent traveler would be careful ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... in this than might have been supposed. There were few things he did not think over as he sat looking into the fire. What if this young man should unwittingly steal away his darling's heart and then flit away to some other flower, and leave this, his own treasure, with all the soul gone out of her life. He believed Mr. Monteith to be an honourable man, but then he would hedge this blossom of his about and guard it carefully. There should be no opportunity ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... listening to the finest echoes I ever heard. We had a French horn with us, and there was an enchanting wildness in the dying away of the reverberation that quickly transported me to Shakespeare's magic island. Spirits unseen seemed to walk abroad, and flit from cliff to cliff to ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... no where to be heard. The bittern alone responded to his voice, as he flew screaming by; or the bull-frog croaked dolefully from a neighboring pool. At length, it is said, just in the brown hour of twilight, when the owls began to hoot and the bats to flit about, his attention was attracted by the clamor of carrion crows that were hovering about a cypress tree. He looked and beheld a bundle tied in a check apron and hanging in the branches of a tree; with a great vulture perched hard by, as if keeping watch upon it. He leaped with joy, for he recognized ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... is very notable how commonly the poets, creating for themselves an ideal of motion, fasten upon the charm of a boat. They do not usually express any desire for wings, or, if they do, it is only in some vague and half-unintended phrase, such as "flit or soar," involving wingedness. Seriously, they are evidently content to let the wings belong to Horse, or Muse, or Angel, rather than to themselves; but they all, somehow or other, express an honest wish for a Spiritual Boat. I will not dwell ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... and rivers, these birds are extremely numerous, especially in the latter end of summer. It is interesting to hear them rattling on the dead leaves of trees or see them on the roadside fences, where they flit from stake to stake. We remember a tremendous and quite alarming and afterwards ludicrous rattling by one of them on some loose tin roofing on a neighbor's house. This occurred so often that the owner, to secure ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... when I feed on rice and wild oats I am perfectly delicious. Some birds were, you see, born to sing, and flit about in the trees, and look beautiful, while some were born to have their feathers taken off, and be roasted, and to look fine in a big dish on the table. The Teal Duck is one of those birds. You see we are useful as well as pretty. We don't mind it ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... and go, They chortle and the coo. I laugh my scorn, for now I know The thing they cannot do. They flit like midges in the sun, But howso thick they be What matter, since there is not one That God has ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... and from this point of view he must be studied. We do not forget, in saying this, his angel with the flaming torch, strong and beautiful and of unearthly presence, nor the shadowy, half-portrayed figures which dart and flit across his easel; but as we may understand the power of Titian from his portraits, yet never revel in it fully until we look upon "The Presentation" or "The Assumption"—never comprehend the painter's joy or his divine rest in endeavor until the achievement lies before us—we must ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... light. Gradually all became silent and nothing was heard but the murmur of the stream, while birds of prey soared over our heads on their way to the mountains. The eastern sky was now wrapped in shade and the stars twinkled in the dark heavens, while on every bush animated sparks appeared to flit about. ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... is so full of thought that she does not heed the direction in which her steps turn. She walks like one in a dream, busy with her own thoughts. A thousand ideas flit through her brain. She lives over her miserable past. Even the early days at Copthorne return vividly. She is a merry child swinging on a gate; a lazy girl lolling on a hayrick; a frivolous wife, sporting her ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... you hear it?" asked the grasshopper, as he shivered and got ready to flit away again, "he said he was going ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Travels • Howard R. Garis
... the convent garden walls The wind blows from the silver seas; Black shadow of the cypress falls Between the moon-meshed olive-trees; Sleep-walking from their golden bowers, Flit disembodied orange flowers. ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... artistic credo. These three names do not swim in main currents, rather are they to be found in some morbid morass at the equivocal twilight hour, not the hour exquisite, but that indeterminate moment when the imagination recoils upon itself and creates shadows that flit, or, more depressing, that sit; the mood of exasperated melancholy when all action seems futile, and life a via crucis. Nor is this mood the exclusive possession of perverse poets; it is an authentic one, and your greengrocer around the corner may ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... and through our own open door I saw Felicity's white-clad figure flit down the stairs to Aunt Janet's room. From the room she had ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... shopkeepers dream of getting rid of the rusty sausages and "best brand" sardines that have been lying for ten years on their shelves; the inns and restaurants keep open all night; the Military Commandant, his secretary, and the local garrison put on their best uniforms; the police flit to and fro like mad, while the effect on the ladies is ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... flit round the young ferash? Does grass clothe a new-built wall? Is she under thirty, the woman who holds a boy ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... washed downe by the waues; that at a sudden, out breaketh the vpper part of the poole, and away goeth a great deale of the sand, water, and fish: which instant, if it take any passenger tardy, shrewdly endangereth him, to flit for company: ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... pane of the stained glass was open, to throw light upon the half-finished sketch and the box of colours, while the rest of the perfumed apartment was steeped in a soft subdued glow. Absorbed in his work he seemed not to have heard the carriage stop, the bell ring twice, and a lady's dress flit along the passage. He had: but it was not his mother's shabby black dress that he expected, it was not for her that he posed at his desk, nor for her that he had provided the delicate bouquets of fine irises and tulips, ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... breeze. Thou hast not seen the rich grape grow For miles, as far as eyes can go; Thou hast not seen a summer's night When maids could sew by a worm's light; Nor the North Sea in spring send out Bright hues that like birds flit about In solid cages of white ice— Sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Love-one-place. Thou hast not seen black fingers pick White cotton when the bloom is thick, Nor heard black throats in harmony; Nor hast thou sat on stones that lie Flat on the earth, that once did rise To hide proud kings ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... imagine, however, that to destroy insects is the only use of birds. The day is far more delightful when the birds sing, and when we see them flit in and out, giving us a glimpse now and then of their pretty coats and quaint ways. By giving them a home we can surround ourselves with many birds, sweet of song ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... fellow want to stand up for and lie down again? for I can swear he was not there half a minute ago. There is another farther on." He pinched himself to make sure that he was awake. Figure after figure seemed to flit along the deck and disappear. One of the guard rose and stretched his arms; put a fresh bit of some herb that he was chewing into his mouth; moved close to the prisoners to see if they were asleep; and then resumed his former position. During the time that he was on his ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... shore. May I not understand the poet's figure: "The green of spring overflows the earth like a tide"? I have felt the flame of a candle blow and flutter in the breeze. May I not, then, say: "Myriads of fireflies flit hither and thither in the dew-wet grass ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... against the panes, the wind blew tempestuously: "One lies there," I thought, "who will soon be beyond the war of earthly elements. Whither will that spirit—now struggling to quit its material tenement—flit when ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... subtlety, 'tis so piquant. Yes, he said, that must be in her; she must have womanly cleverness. "And yet I should like her to blush if only a cock-sparrow were to look at her hard," he said, "which brings me back to the girl again: and so I flit backwards and forwards. I must have what comes, I suppose," he said, "and whatever she may be, thank God she's no worse. However, if he might give a final hint to Providence," he said, "a child among pleasures, and a woman among pains was the ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... twinkling firmament on earth. On other evenings, sitting inside with lighted candles and wide opened doors, great bats flap inside, make a round of the apartment, and pass out again, whilst iris-winged moths, attracted by the light, flit about the ceiling, or long-horned beetles flop down on the table. In this way I made my first acquaintance with many entomological rarities.* (* In moths, numerous fine Sphingidae and Bombycidae; and in beetles, ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... mission house. She found there nothing but a desultory guard and an impression, rather than the traces, of an empty cage. About two minutes of cautious questioning of neighbors satisfied her where the missionaries were; nothing short of death seemed able to deprive her of ability to flit like a black bat through the shadows, and the distance to Howrah's palace was accomplished, by her usual bat's entry route, in less time than a pony would have taken by the devious street. Before Alwa had thundered on Jaimihr's gate Joanna had mingled in the ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... the operation of distillation, by which water may be purified; the Arabs called the apparatus for conducting that experiment an alembic. His treatise on the virtues and composition of waters was conveyed under the form of a dream, in which there flit before us fantastically white-haired priests sacrificing before the altar; cauldrons of boiling water, in which there are walking about men a span long; brazen-clad warriors in silence reading leaden books, and sphinxes with ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... dark; yet I could make out none of the objects I now and then ran against. I passed a mirror (I hardly know how I knew it to be such), and in that mirror I seemed to see the ghost of a ghost flit by and vanish. It was too much. I muttered a suppressed oath and plunged forward, when I struck against a closing door. It flew open again and I rushed in, turning on my light in my extreme desperation, when, instead of hearing the sharp report of a pistol, as I expected, ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... Sedition woo, Around the haunts of Peterloo! That hover o'er the meeting-halls, Where many a voice stentorian bawls! Still flit the sacred choir around, With 'Freedom' let the garrets ring, And vengeance soon in thunder sound On Church, and constable, ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... just why I want you to do it," he said, "because with you there will be no particular danger even if you are caught. You will know how to get yourself out of it better than one of these poor farm laborers. Flies get caught in a cobweb, but wasps flit straight through them. But what kind of a crime is it anyway to protect your own property against monsters that eat it up and ruin it?" he cried, the laugh on his face suddenly changing into an expression of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... saw a sudden square of light illuminate the wall of darkness into which they had been driving; a door had been opened. Evidently the dog's barking had aroused the inmates of the building, for as the buckboard drew nearer Hollis saw several figures flit out of the door-way. Norton drove the horses close to the building and brought them to a halt with a sonorous "whoa"! Then he turned to Hollis and spoke with a drawl: "This here building is the Circle Bar bunkhouse; them's ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... to the direction in which the strangers had gone, thus covering the spare man to whom she was talking from their backward glances. Bates, who was looking up at her face with his heart-hunger in his eyes, saw a look of contempt for the passing remark flit across her face, and because of the fond craving of his own heart, his sympathy, strangely enough, went out to the young man who had spoken, rather than to her sentiment of contempt. The angel of human loves alone could tell why John Bates loved this girl after all that had ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... manner of cool distinction and her polished, impersonal phrases, another feminine figure dared to flit between him and this lady of manifold merit. No sooner would he indignantly banish her image than she would come dancing back, a gay little figure, with too much color in her checks and too ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... and, moving his throat, pretended that he drank it. At the moment when he felt the moisture on his lips it seemed to him that his breast and stomach were aflame and that if he did not quench that flame he would drop dead. Before his eyes red spots began to flit, and in his jaws he felt a terrible pain, as if some one stuck a thousand pins in them. His hands shook so that he almost spilt these last drops. Nevertheless, he caught only two or three in his mouth with his tongue; the rest he ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... background. (Do you remember? Do you remember how keen and sweet the air was, with the scent of the wild thyme? and how the sand-martins circled round us?) As we passed through the long, bare, imposing rooms, something like a shadow of you seemed to flit before us. Or if I glanced out of one of the tall windows, it seemed as if you had just passed under them, along the Riva or across the Piazza. As for Isola Nobile, if I regret that it is n't mine, that is chiefly because I should be glad ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... in a small bronzed cubicle which began at once to rise rapidly. Just how rapidly, he was unable to tell. There were no indicators at all on the elevator, and the opaque doors made it impossible to see floors flit by. But his ears rang with the speed, and when the car finally stopped, it did so with a slight jerk that threw Forrester, stiff and worried, off balance. He almost fell out of the car as the door opened, and clutched at ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... process of reasoning, and was simply obliged to accept the fact and give up trying to solve the riddle. He found himself dragged into society and courted, wondered at and envied very much as if he were one of those foreign barbers who flit over here now and then with a self-conferred title of nobility and marry some rich fool's absurd daughter. Sometimes at a dinner party or a reception he would find himself the centre of interest, and feel unutterably uncomfortable in the discovery. Being obliged to say something, he would ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... from Nature's treasury, than all The golden dreams that cheat the care-worn crowd. His world is all within. He mingles not In their society; he cannot drudge To win the wealth they toil to realize. A different spirit animates his breast. Their eager calculations, hopes, and fears, Still flit before him, like dim shadows thrown By April's passing clouds upon the stream, A moment mirrored in its azure depths, Till the next sunbeam ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... not see his eye grow dim; or his little hand droop powerless; or the dew of agony gather on his pale forehead; I stood not with clasped hands and suspended breath, and watched the look that comes but once, flit over his cherub face. And yet, "little Benny," my tears are falling; for, somewhere, I know there's an empty crib, a vacant chair, useless robes and toys, a desolate hearth-stone, and ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... disappeared and became a bay of the great Lake itself. Every moment of this portion of the ride is a delight. The senses are kept keenly alert, for not only have we the Lake, the bay and the mountains, but part of the way we have flowers and shrubs by the thousands, bees and butterflies flit to and fro, and singing streams come foaming white from the snowbanks above, eager to reach the Lake. As our car-wheels dash across these streamlets they splash up the water on each side into sparkling diamonds and on every hand ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... glide across a small salient. I am thus qualified to describe a typical series of incidents preceding the announcement, "one of our machines is missing," and I do so in the hope that this may interest you, madam, as you flit from town to country, country to town, and so ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... I want to talk to him, or I'll simply flit back to Eros, and thank him much for a pretty retainer that didn't do him any good but gave me a nice ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... his wife was ignorant of his pecuniary liabilities until the crash of the Ballantyne firm told her for the first time that they were sharers in the ruin. A psychologist might trace this strange twist of his mind in the numerous elfish Fenella-like characters who flit about and keep their irritating secret through the long chapters of so many of ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... places where the grass is lit With lamp-like flowers, I seem to see thee flit On azure wings, as if to bless the glade; For, everywhere, thy form in shine and shade Doth come and go, conversant, as I deem, With Nature's whims; for thou'rt of great esteem In fairy haunts; and elves and fays confess How sweet thou art, my Love! ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... energies effectively, the young proselyte, who has embraced the new religion only that he may follow progress, tries to get a position as a school-teacher. But the apostleship of learning cannot satisfy his versatile mind: he continues to flit from one thing to another, like a gypsophilia, driven by the wind across the entire stretch of the steppes of ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... sending it to the island in the whaleship William and Nancy, Captain Thomas Cary, and in 1815 it was hung in the tower. Soon after the stroke of four the sparrows begin to chatter, but before long one hears through their uproar the clear whistle of meadow larks. These flit familiarly about the lower levels of the town singing from gate-post or shed-roof all day long and on the downs they vie with the song sparrows in breaking the lone silence of the place. Save for these, a crow or two and the ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... all were assembled. About a dozen were already there, but, when the scout returned with such dire tidings, they decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and all made haste to get back to their rooms ere the enemy appeared. But, alack-a-day! that enemy could flit about in a surprisingly lively manner, and, ere some of them had reached safety behind their own doors, she came in view. To get to their rooms now was out of the question, so, making a virtue of necessity, they all slipped into a large closet ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... States, where in Cleveland the mother tried many different kinds of occupations by which to support the child and herself. It was a strange life the young person remembered in those early days. She and her mother had to flit so often—suddenly, noiselessly. Often she remembered being roused from a sound sleep, sometimes being simply wrapped up without being dressed, and carried through the dark to some other place of refuge. Then, too, when other children walked in the streets or played, bare-headed ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... idealise, he could not idolise. The world was full of friendly, gracious, interesting people. Circumstance spun one to and fro among the groups and companies; how could one give a unique regard, when there were so many that claimed allegiance and admiration? He saw others flit from passion to passion, from friendship to friendship—Hugh's aim was rather to be the same, to be loyal and true, to be able to take up a suspended friendship where he had laid it down; the most shameful thing in the world seemed to him the ebbing away of vitality out of a relationship; and ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a duty in the face of his own scepticism that he had spoken thus, and he did not expect to see another shade of sadness flit across ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... are like poppies spread,— You seize the flower, the bloom is shed; Or like the snow-falls in the river,— A moment white, then lost for ever; Or like the rainbow's fleeting form, Evanishing amid the storm; Or like the borealis race, That flit ere you can point their place. No man can tether time or tide: The hour approaches,—we ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... away; and Mrs. Gaylor, who had brought her guest as far as the beginning of the bamboo grove; stood watching the white figure flit farther and farther away, among the intricate green pillars of the temple. Then, when the elusive form became ghostlike in the distance, Carmen went back to the house. She walked slowly and with dignified composure ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... and pounce eagerly on chairs and telephones; the usual Fussy Family waste precious minutes in trying to get seats together, and get separated in the end. Undecided persons flit from one side to another. Gradually they all settle down, and stop their ears with the telephone-tubes, the prevailing expression being one of anxiety, combined with conscious and apologetic imbecility. Nervous people catch the eye of complete strangers across the table, and are seized ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 30, 1892 • Various
... that he can hear the leaves falling a hundred yards away. The path from here to the vale of Onondaga may be lined on either side with the French and the hostile tribes, standing as thick as trees in the forest, but he will flit between them as safely and easily as you and I would ride along a highroad into Philadelphia. He will arrive at the vale of Onondaga, unharmed, at the exact minute he intends to arrive, and he will return, reaching Fort Refuge also on the exact day, and at the exact hour and ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the lads at this service as she had been elsewhere. Before the meeting she would flit through the dark passages in the tenements and knock, and rouse them up from sleep, and plead with them to turn out to it. Her influence over them was extraordinary, They adored her and gave her shy allegiance, and the result was seen in changed habits and transformed ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... "if ye don't care to take the collection wi' me, I won't press ye. I'll no' think ony worse o' ye if ye don't. Ye ha'e a big family, while I ha'e only the wife to look after. Sometimes I think it's lucky we ha'e nae weans; I can flit, and ye might no' be able to rise an' run. But I mean to take the collection onyway, for I don't like a man to order me what I ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... blossoms Such different hues? And the waves of the sea Such a number of blues? So many soft greens Flit over the trees? And little gray shadows Fly out ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... nurse who sat with him had seen him sink to sleep and retired, the young officer awoke under the impression that a delicate hand was passed lightly over his forehead. He opened his eyes, and saw the shadow of a woman flit behind the curtains. It was Ebba, who, unable even to sleep at night, had furtively come, when she thought no one would be aware of it, to be certain that his medicine was prepared, and ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... weathers you could take your dinner off any part of them without distaste. On them, to the note of the bugle, the mail did its sixty miles a day; innumerable chaises whisked after the bobbing post-boys; or some young blood would flit by in a curricle and tandem, to the vast delight and danger of the lieges. On them the slow-pacing waggons made a music of bells, and all day long the travellers on horseback and the travellers on foot (like happy Mr. St. Ives so little a while before!) kept ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to himself; "an' sic sma' white han's! an' sic a bonny flit! Eh hoo she wad glitter throu' the water in a bag net! Faith! gien she war to sing 'come doon' to me, I wad gang. Wad that be to lowse baith sowl an' body, I wonner? I'll see what Maister Graham says to that. It's a fine question to put till 'im: 'Gien a body was to gang wi' a mermaid, wha ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... gave a great feast to his lords and captains, and when they had been served with dainty food in dishes of silver and gold, and had tasted the rare fruits and the costly wines, the dancing girls came in to flit over the polished marble floor, and wave their airy scarfs to please the ...
— Child's Story of the Bible • Mary A. Lathbury
... chambers one with another. Strange deeds had been done in those low-roofed rooms with their dark carved furniture, and there were secret places in the castle where ghosts of the past had their habitation. Weird figures were said to flit through the castle at night, restless spirits which revisited the scene of former tragedies and crimes, and the room in which Graham slept was known to be haunted. Alas! he needed no troubled ancestor of the Strathmore house to visit him, for his own thoughts were sufficient torment, ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... and heat of the Piazza one comes into a cool cloister that surrounds a quadrangle open to the sky, in which a cypress still lives. The sun fills the garden with a golden beauty, in which the butterflies flit from flower to flower over the dead. I do not know a place more silent or more beautiful. One lingers in the cool shadow of the cloisters before many an old marble,—a vase carved with Bacchanalian women, the head of ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... infinite number of thin flakes joyned or generated one upon another so close & smooth, as with many hundreds of them to make one smooth and thin Plate of a transparent flexible substance, which with care and diligence may be flit into pieces so exceedingly thin as to be hardly perceivable by the eye, and yet even those, which I have thought the thinnest, I have with a good Microscope found to be made up of many other Plates, yet thinner; and it is probable, that, were ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... right, and now all wrong they go. Prisons, we all remember, oft would wear Three rings at once, then show his finger bare; First he'd be senator, then knight, and then In an hour's time a senator again; Flit from a palace to a crib so mean, A decent freedman scarce would there be seen; Now with Athenian wits he'd make his home, Now live with scamps and profligates at Rome; Born in a luckless hour, when every face Vertumnus wears was pulling a grimace. Shark Volanerius ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... with youthful pain at the glance of your eyes, the ascetic lays the fruit of his austerities at your feet, the songs of poets hum and swarm round the perfume of your presence. Your feet, as in careless joy they flit on, wound even the heart of the hollow wind with the ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... shadows which shift and tremble across the spirits of the gentle sex, when approaching to hold this tender communion with those whom they love. Nothing that we remember resembles the busy working of the soul on such occasions, so much as those lucid streamers which flit in sweeps of delicate light along the northern sky, filling it at once with beauty and terror, and emitting at the same time a far and almost inaudible undertone of ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... observation, the thorn-tree was silhouetted against the sky, for it stood on the edge of a slight descent. Every twig and leaf was distinctly visible, while the openings in the foliage were so numerous that not a wing could flit by without my seeing it. The nest itself was partially veiled by a bunch of leaves. What the view might be from the other side I did not investigate that morning; I preferred to leave the birds the slight screen afforded by the foliage, for since there ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... looking at everything, listening at the doors, looking up the chimney. Then they go to the clothes basket and raise the lid. Up come four arms, and then two house-fairies stand up in the basket, and get out with the help of the chair. They, also, flit about the room, looking at things. Meanwhile the brownies have taken the broom and dust pan, and begun to sweep, especially over by the outside door and by the wood box. The fairies take a chair, and climb up by the mantel shelf. They take down the colored ...
— The Christmas Dinner • Shepherd Knapp
... even read aloud, or have heard so read by another person, without an inward struggle?—In mere passive silent reading the thoughts remain mere thoughts, and these too not our own,—phantoms with no attribute of place, no sense of appropriation, that flit over the consciousness as shadows over the grass or young corn in an April day. But even the sound of our own or another's voice takes them out of that lifeless, twilight, realm of thought, which is the confine, the 'intermundium', as it were, of existence and non-existence. ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... been thrown into prison for her deed of madness and now the executioner's axe awaits her. She sits on the damp straw, rocking a bundle, which she takes for her baby, and across her poor wrecked brain there flit once more pictures of all the scenes of her short-lived happiness. Then Faust enters with Mephisto, and tries to persuade her to escape with them. But she instinctively shrinks from her lover, loudly imploring God's and the Saint's pardon. God has mercy ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... them is given a soul from among the stars, perfect in their form and alive with heavenly instincts, which complete with wondrous speed their rapid courses. Wherefore, my son, by you and by all just men that soul must be retained within its body's confines, nor can it be allowed to flit without command of him by whom it has been given to you. You may not escape the duty which God has trusted to you. Live, my Scipio, and shine with piety and justice, as your grandfather did and I have done. It is your duty to your parents ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... Georgia, from which he had come at the earnest request of his friend. He did not like the looks of himself bedraggled and wet, and dead, on the deck of the "Hatty," with that curious crowd looking at him, Mandy Ann with the rest. Strange that thoughts of Mandy Ann should flit through his mind as he decided against the cold bath in the St. John's and to face it, whatever it was. Occasionally some one spoke to him, and he always answered politely, and once offered his chair to a lady who seemed to be looking for one. But she ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... me, Mr. Carrollton. I sent Gritty home on purpose to see if you would be annoyed, for I felt vexed because you would not humor my whim and meet me at the bridge. I am sorry I caused you any uneasiness," she continued, as she saw a shadow flit over his ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... have been fancy on the part of Rosa but at that moment she saw an expression flit over the small part of the man's face that was visible, that she thought ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... one of them, who acted as spokesman, "on one of the bittherest days that God ever sent on the earth; out of shame, I believe, because your brother and ould Mary Casey died, he let us back for a few days, but after that we had to flit. Some of the houses he had pulled down, and then he had to build them again for his voters. Oh, if it was only ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... exclusion of the female sex in this conservative Mohammedan territory forbids them making any visible show of interest in the affairs of men whatsoever. When the hour arrives for the preparation of the evening meal, closely shrouded figures flit hastily through the dusk from house to house, bearing camel-thorn torches. They are women who have been to their neighbors to obtain a light for their own fire. From the number of these it is plainly evident that the housewives of ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... coming to pass. The King's forces are at Cartsdyke, and they'll be here the morn, and what's to come o' you then, wi' your covenanted havers? But, Sauners Paton, I hae ae thing to tell ye, and that's no twa; ye'll this night flit your camp; ye'll tak to the hills, as I'm a living woman, and no bide to be hang't at your ain door, and to get your right hand chappit aff, and sent to Lanerk for a show, as they say is done an ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... shall be glad to help the cause, even so little as that," she answered. Pepperell thanked her for her words, and ignored the look of disappointment that he had seen flit across ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... Shakespeare in the dock for murder, Milton for blasphemy, Scott for forgery, and Goethe for questionable financial deals with the devil. Byron's sins were as scarlet and the number not a few, but the moths that came just to flit about the flame were all of mature age. Byron set no snares for the innocent, and in all of the man's misdoings, he himself ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... bound together by a tangled mass of creepers, which mingle their foliage with that of the trees to form one huge canopy of leaves, in which birds of bright plumage and beautiful song live out their happy lives. Monkeys also make their home there, and strange insects and butterflies of rare beauty flit among the flowers, or hover in the few stray sunbeams which ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... by this conjecture, I take my stand at the foot of the rock, under a broiling sun; and, for half a day, I follow the evolutions of my flies. They flit quietly in front of the slope, at a few inches from the earthy covering. They go from one orifice to the next, but without even penetrating. For that matter, their big wings, extended crosswise even when at rest, would resist their entrance into a gallery, which ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... to-day a butterfly, With gorgeous wings of golden sheen, Flit lightly 'neath a sapphire sky Amid ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... jocund one. Lightly and brightly breaks away The Morning from her mantle grey, And the noon will look on a sultry day. Hark to the trump, and the drum, And the mournful sound of the barbarous horn, And the flap of the banners that flit as they're borne, And the neigh of the steed, and the multitude's hum, And the clash, and the shout, 'They come! they come!' The horsetails are plucked from the ground, and the sword From its sheath; and they form, and but wait ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... choice of crimes. The woods flit and fly—in summer there are bluebells; in the opening there, when Spring comes, primroses. A parting, was it, twenty years ago? Vows broken? Not Minnie's!... She was faithful. How she nursed her mother! All her savings on the tombstone—wreaths under glass—daffodils ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... these visions flown? Am I once more sunk to a level with my former self? Once I thought that religion was a substance with me,—not a shadow, to flit, to mock, and to vanish when its succour was most needed; yet ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... it all like a chart unrolled, But my thoughts are full of the past and old, I hear the tales of my boyhood told; And the shadows and shapes of early days Flit dimly by in the veiling haze, With measured movement and rhythmic chime Weaving like shuttles my web of rhyme. I think of the old man wise and good Who once on yon misty hillsides stood, (A poet who never measured rhyme, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... knew every historical and literary landmark better than Allan did. And when he drove through the fine part of Drumloch, and came in sight of the picturesque and handsome pile of buildings, he said with a queer smile, "The Promotors don't flit for a bare shelter, Maggie ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... have seen an uneasy expression flit across more than one face, darken more than one pair of eyes. Crillon remained on his guard facing the table, his eyes keenly vigilant. The Count of Soissons, one of the younger Bourbons, had already stepped to the king's side and taken place by his chair, his hand on his ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... will learn, and you shall teach— Our people shall have double speech: One to be homely, one polite, As you have robes for different wear; But this is all:—'tis just and right, And more our children will not bear, Lest flocks of buzzards flit along, Where ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... water-bird, such as a coot, swims right away when it is tumbled into water for the first time. So chicks peck without any learning or teaching, very young ducklings catch small moths that flit by, and young plovers lie low when the danger-signal sounds. But birds seem strangely limited as regards many of these instinctive capacities—limited when compared with the "little-brained" ants and bees, which have from the first such a rich repertory ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... blanket on a cold night. 'Tis said, an operator of the first class can always procure work, but there are times when even the best of them are on their uppers. For instance, when winter's chill blasts sweep across the hills and dales of the north, like swarms of swallows, operators flit southwards to warmer climes, and for this reason the supply is often ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... this door leads on to the roof, and this roof itself is a sight to see. Loftily domed over with glass, it is at once a conservatory, a vinery, and tropical aviary. Room here for trees even, for miniature palms, while birds of the rarest plumage flit silently from bough to bough among the oranges, or lisp out the sweet lilts that have descended to them from sires that sang in foreign lands. Yonder a fountain plays and casts its spray over the most lovely feathery ferns. The roof is very spacious, and the ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... Almost involuntarily Alfred's eyes sought the same direction. The western end of the island ran out into a long low point covered with briars, rushes and saw-grass. As Alfred directed his gaze along the water line of this point he distinctly saw a dark form flit from one bush to another. He was positive he had not been mistaken. He got up slowly and unconcernedly, ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... Benbow" in a second, and I seemed to hear the voice of the captain piping in the chorus. But soon the anchor was short up; soon it was hanging dripping at the bows; soon the sails began to draw, and the land and shipping to flit by on either side, and before I could lie down to snatch an hour of slumber the Hispaniola had begun her voyage to ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sickness, and take to thy bed. Hrut will not lose time in guessing what thy sickness can be, nor will he scold thee at all, but he will rather beg every one to take all the care they can of thee. After that he will set off west to the Firths, and Sigmund with him, for he will have to flit all his goods home from the Firths west, and he will be away till the summer is far spent. But when men ride to the Thing, and after all have ridden from the Dales that mean to ride thither, then thou must rise from thy bed ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... remain and dine off a leg of mutton. As the two visitors declined, Balzac said: "Ah! you think, perhaps, I am an ordinary host who invites his guests gratis. On the contrary, I intend to make you pay for your meal. Aha! You shall aid me afterwards to flit. To-morrow, the bailiffs are coming to seize my furniture; and I don't mean them to find anything to carry away. So, to-night, I am going to put everything in my gardener's cottage. The gardener will transport ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... light burned no more after that, and Hester was content till a new worry came to trouble her. On her way to her room late one night, she saw a tall shadow flit down one of the side corridors that branched from the main one. For a moment she was startled, but, being a woman of courage, she followed noiselessly, till the shadow seemed to vanish in the gloom of the ...
— The Mysterious Key And What It Opened • Louisa May Alcott
... ever heard. We had a French horn with us, and there was an enchanting wildness in the dying away of the reverberation that quickly transported me to Shakespeare's magic island. Spirits unseen seemed to walk abroad, and flit from cliff to cliff to soothe my soul ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... content in her voice when she spoke, and a ripple of content in her laugh when she laughed. But the light quivered on Dolly's lip, and gleamed and sparkled in her brown eyes, and light and shadow could flit over her face with quick change; ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... mile down the mountain, a rider on a white horse was seen to flit rapidly across a heathy open and vanish among the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all Persons who flit from one Paroch to another have sufficient Testimonials, This is to be extended to all Gentlemen and Persons of quality and all their followers, who come to reside with their Families at Edinburgh, or elswhere, and let the Minister ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... its bright yet murky storm of the cloud and the lightning-flash, though but few boys pause to record the crisis from which slowly emerges Man. And these first desultory grapplings with the fugitive airy images that flit through the dim chambers of the brain had become with each effort more sustained and vigorous, till the phantoms were spelled, the flying ones arrested, the Immaterial seized, and clothed with Form. Gazing on his last effort, Leonard felt that ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Mr. Keats's Eve of St. Agnes lately made me regret that I was not young again. The beautiful and tender images there conjured up, "come like shadows—so depart." The "tiger-moth's wings," which he has spread over his rich poetic blazonry, just flit across my fancy; the gorgeous twilight window which he has painted over again in his verse, to me "blushes" almost in vain "with blood of queens and kings." I know how I should have felt at one time in reading such passages; and that is all. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Bernald heard a step on the gravel, and saw the red flit of a cigar through the shrubs. Then a loosely-moving figure obscured the patch of sky between the creepers, and the red spark became the centre of a dim bearded face, in which Bernald discerned only a ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... associate Vulcan and his Cyclops with the idea of a forge. These gentry would be the very last people in the world to flit across my mind whilst gazing at the forge from the bottom of the dark lane. The truth is, they are highly unpoetical fellows, as well they may be, connected as they are with Grecian mythology. At the very mention of their names the forge burns dull and dim, as if snow-balls had been suddenly ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... might have identified him with all. In a word, we apprehend he was a tolerably fair example of what vague generalities, when acting on a temperament not indisposed to moral impressions, render the great majority of men; who flit around the mysteries of a future state, without alighting either on the consolations of faith, or discovering any of those logical conclusions which, half the time unconsciously to themselves, they seem to expect. When Bluewater made his last remark, therefore, the vice-admiral ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... The moonlight was falling weirdly through the big trees, stretching itself over the grass in shapes that seemed to spell unearthly things. And there were mystical lights on the water down there, flitting about with the movement of the stream as ghosts might flit. Because it looked so other-world-like she wondered if it knew what it had just missed. She had never thought anything about water save as something to look beautiful and have a good time on. It seemed now that perhaps it ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... l. 302. The numerous moths and butterflies seem to pass from a reptile leaf-eating state, and to acquire wings to flit in air, with a proboscis to gain honey for their food along with their organs of reproduction, solely for the purpose of propagating their species by sexual intercourse, as they die when that is completed. By the use of their wings they have access to each other on different branches or on different ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... unresolved melody. The melody which circumscribes itself like Giotto's O is almost as tangible a thing as a statue; it has almost contour. But this melody afloat in the air, flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swaying poise, as the notes flit from strings to voice, and from voice to wood and wind, is more than a mere heightening of speech: it partakes of the nature of thought, but it is more than thought; it is the whole expression of the subconscious life, saying more of himself than ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... or tracing out the figure of the casement on my chamber-floor, still I recognize the Sabbath sunshine. And ever let me recognize it! Some illusions, and this among them, are the shadows of great truths. Doubts may flit around me, or seem to close their evil wings, and settle down; but so long as I imagine that the earth is hallowed, and the light of heaven retains its sanctity, on the Sabbath,—while that blessed sunshine lives within me,—never can my soul have lost the instinct of its faith. If ...
— Sunday at Home (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... life must be equal, and how do we lack in this? There are thousands today who flit along on the crest of the wave of life's current, butterfly-like; they never really have a conscious thought. If "it only does not affect me" is their watchword, and freedom from anything serious is their only really serious problem. They know in an indifferent way that hearts break, ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... skilful oratory, accepted his plan by acclamation, and returned home to push with the utmost haste the preparations for their stupendous task. The idea of a migration en masse did not frighten them. They were nomads and the descendants of nomads, who for ages had been used to fold their tents and flit away. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... maidenhair; dark rocks, wrapped in velvet moss. Trees holding up screens of green lace between your eyes and the blue water of the loch. Pebbles white and round as pearls, or silver coins dropped by fairies in a big "flit." That's one of your similes! Grass running down to the edge of the water, and full of bluebells. Water the colour of drowned wallflowers. I don't believe your Highland lochs can be prettier or more idyllic, though this ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... wish'd success. Yes Tooke! tho' foul Corruption's wolfish throng Outmalice Calumny's imposthum'd Tongue, 20 Thy Country's noblest and determin'd Choice, Soon shalt thou thrill the Senate with thy voice; With gradual Dawn bid Error's phantoms flit, Or wither with the lightning's flash of Wit; Or with sublimer mien and tones more deep, 25 Charm sworded Justice from mysterious Sleep, 'By violated Freedom's loud Lament, Her Lamps extinguish'd and her ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and mist and midges, Now the tired planes drone homeward through the haze, And distant wood-fires wink behind the ridges, And the first flare some timorous Hun betrays; Now no shell circulates, but all men brood Over their evening food; The bats flit warily and owl and rat With muffled cries their shadowy loves pursue, And pleasant, Corporal, it is to chat In this hushed moment with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... "Ye scenes, that flit my memory o'er, Deck'd in the smiles which then ye wore, In the same gay and varied dress, I cannot but admire and bless! What though some anxious throbs would beat, Some fears within my breast retreat, Yet then I found sincere delight, Whenever beauty met my sight, ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... lake reposing, Calmly I'll watch, while light and gloom Flit o'er its face till night is closing— Emblem of life's short doom! But tho', by turns, thus dark and shining, 'Tis still unlike man's changeful day, Whose light returns not, once declining, Whose cloud, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the stained glass was open, to throw light upon the half-finished sketch and the box of colours, while the rest of the perfumed apartment was steeped in a soft subdued glow. Absorbed in his work he seemed not to have heard the carriage stop, the bell ring twice, and a lady's dress flit along the passage. He had: but it was not his mother's shabby black dress that he expected, it was not for her that he posed at his desk, nor for her that he had provided the delicate bouquets of fine irises and tulips, or the sweetmeats and elegant decanters ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... kinds of money and I might as well be a bum!—no automobile or nothin'. I should have had a car long ago; all the big leaguers own their own tourin' cars. There's no class to you any more, if you don't flit from place to place ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... right and left, keeping a little in the advance, and with its muzzle close down to the surface, as if searching for a spoor. Most of the time it was out of sight, hidden by the darkness, but every now and then it would flit like a shadow across their track, and they could hear an occasional sniff as it lifted ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... half-shut eyes) Sent up in vapours to the baron's brain New stratagems the radiant lock to gain. Ah, cease, rash youth! desist ere 'tis too late, Fear the just gods, and think of Scylla's fate! Changed to a bird, and sent to flit in air, She dearly pays for ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... Seaton. "Going to pass that star we were headed for—too fast to stop. I'm giving it a wide berth and picking out another one. There's a big planet a few million miles off in line with the main door, and another one almost dead ahead—that is, straight down. We sure are traveling. Look at that sun flit by!" ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... saw nothing of the sunset. Dusk came on, and the fireflies began to flit round them, before the two, who were so occupied with each other, came to the Cottage gate. When they did so, they had yet a few last words ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... with the sun nearly below the horizon, its rays illuminate the tops of the trees, while all below is dark and gloomy. Bats are on the wing, the night-hawk careers above the trees, fire-flies flit about, ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... now and then showing a black stripe and a little gleam of red or yellow on its head, it is this Kinglet. If you see such a pygmy again in autumn, exploring the bare twigs, it is this Kinglet. When light snow is first powdering the spruces and bending the delicate hemlock branches, dusky shapes flit out of the green cover. Are they dry leaves blown about by the gust? No, leaves do not climb about in the face of the wind, or pry and peep into every cone crevice, crying 'twe-zee, twe-zee, twe-zee!' They are not leaves, ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... watching the little dark things flit by, like the gibbering ghosts of the suitors in the Odyssey, into the darkness of the cave; and then turned to long talk of things concerning which it is best nowadays not to write; till it was time ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... may be allowed so far to indulge the imagination, as to suppose a being entirely confined to the nether world—some 'dusky melancholy sprite,' like Umbriel, who could 'flit on sooty pinions to the central earth,' but who was never permitted to 'sully the fair face of light,' and emerge into the regions of water and of air; and if this being should busy himself in investigating the structure of the globe, he might frame theories the exact converse ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... garden walls The wind blows from the silver seas; Black shadow of the cypress falls Between the moon-meshed olive-trees; Sleep-walking from their golden bowers, Flit disembodied ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... White shapes flit to and fro From mast to mast; 10 They feel the distant tempest That nears them fast: Great rocks are straight ahead, Great shoals not past; They shout to one another ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... desert of their shore lies in its nakedness beneath the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the tideless pools and the sea-birds flit from their margins with ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... make certainty doubly sure, I visited the place a week or so later, and found that my previous conclusion had been correct. I flushed the little madame from the nest, and saw her flit with a chirp to the twigs above, where she sat quietly watching her visitor, exhibiting no uneasiness whatever about her cot in the bushes with its three precious eggs. It was pleasing to note the calmness and dignity with which she regarded me. But where was that important personage, the ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... man of near forty who had rarely fired a shot in sport, never in anger, and a stoutly built irascible Irishman, for whom a good shot meant lynching or lasting opprobrium. Visions of Bob Acres and Sir Lucius O'Trigger flit before us. We picture Tierney quoting "fighting Bob Acres" as to the advantage of a sideways posture; and we wonder whether the seconds, if only in regard for their own safety, did not omit to insert bullets. The ludicrous side of the affair soon ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... your little letter. Here there are lots of funny little lizards that run about in the dusty roads very fast, and then stand still with their heads up. Beautiful red cardinal birds and tanagers flit about in the woods, and the flowers are lovely. But you never saw such dust. Sometimes I lie on the ground outside and sometimes in the tent. I have a mosquito net because ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... without shadow; there was a murmur of content in her voice when she spoke, and a ripple of content in her laugh when she laughed. But the light quivered on Dolly's lip, and gleamed and sparkled in her brown eyes, and light and shadow could flit over her face with quick ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... forth these efforts, the ass bad been flying along at an undiminished rate of speed, and the country swept past him on either side. He passed long lines of trees by the roadside, he saw field after field flit by, and the distant hills went slowly along out of the line of his vision. Hitherto he had met with no one at all along the road, nor had he seen any cattle of any kind. His efforts to arrest the ass had ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... bathing itself in that glory-giving light, I noticed a fluttering bird, and stood still to watch its antics. Now it would cling, head downwards, to the slender twigs, wings and tail open; then, righting itself, it would flit from waving line to line, dropping lower and lower; and anon soar upwards a distance of twenty feet and alight to recommence the flitting and swaying and dropping towards the earth. It was one of those birds that have a polished plumage, ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... of the door behind Zachariah was reassuring. At any rate he was alive and far too sprightly to have suffered a broken leg or a cracked skull. A few seconds later she saw Kenny's shadow flit hurriedly past the window as he dashed toward the kitchen. For some time she stood perfectly still, listening to the confused jumble of voices in the house across the way, debating whether she should hurry over to explain,—and perhaps to assist in dressing poor Zachariah's ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... then the islands of the Papefigues and the Papimanes, where Rabelais begins his most obvious and boldest meddling with the great ecclesiastical-political questions of the day—all these things and others flit past the reader as if in an actual voyage. Even here, however, he rather skirts than actually invades the most dangerous ground. It is the Decretals, not the doctrines, that are satirised, and Homenas, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... longitudinal sections of the mental column, it is no less difficult with respect to transverse sections. Under ordinary circumstances, external impressions persist so that they can be transfixed by a deliberate act of attention, and objects rarely flit over the external scene so rapidly as to allow us no time for a careful recognition of the impression. Not so in the case of the internal region of mind. The composite states of consciousness just described never remain perfectly uniform for the shortest conceivable duration. ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... and the whitened skull, They crouch in fear or in whispers wail, For the lingering night, and the coming gale. But at even-tide, when the shore is dim, And bubbling wreaths with the billows swim, They rise on the wing of the freshened breeze, And flit with the wind o'er the ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... and inheritance of Lady Digby, by Daventry, Norbrook, the residence of Grant, Huddington, the house of Robert Winter, and Shrewsbury, to Holt, in Flintshire. In some uneasy nightmare during that pilgrimage, did a faint prescience of that which was to come ever flit before the eyes of Ambrose Rookwood, as to the circumstances wherein he should journey that road again? From Holt the ladies walked barefoot to the "holy well," which, according to tradition, had sprung up on the place where Saint Winifred's ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... is often a military band. And to organize the dancers—not always an easy task in a crowded hall—and see that the business of introductions goes on duly, a small staff of energetic professional gentlemen, styled M.C.'s (which in London, you know, stands for Master of the Ceremonies), flit ever hither and thither amongst the throng, now catching a wildly errant waltzing couple in politely resolute arms and sending them back into the regular ring, now getting up sets for Lancers and quadrilles, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... all nevah seen her no mo'. Mahs Larue done sold that Georgy plantation 'bout five yeahs back an' move up fo' good on one his wife own up heah. An' little while back I hear tell they gwine sell it, too, an' flit way cross to Mexico somewhah. This heah war jest broke ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... we are going to start directly," cried Lady Louisa, who was a fluttering creature of three-and-thirty, always eager to flit from one scene to another. "If we don't, I really think we shall be late—and there is some dreadful law, isn't there, to prevent people being ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... closer, are countless forms of brightness and of beauty. You will find them among the shining coals that glimmer in scarlet and gold before you when the embers lie clear and warm upon the hearth. You will behold them among the shadows that flit across the embers with delicate grace ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... of this portion of the ride is a delight. The senses are kept keenly alert, for not only have we the Lake, the bay and the mountains, but part of the way we have flowers and shrubs by the thousands, bees and butterflies flit to and fro, and singing streams come foaming white from the snowbanks above, eager to reach the Lake. As our car-wheels dash across these streamlets they splash up the water on each side into sparkling diamonds and on every hand come up the sweet scents of growing, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... soldierly stuff; but he felt a distinct shiver flit along his back. His past life had not lacked thrilling adventures and strangely varied experiences with desperate men. Usually he met sudden emergencies rather calmly, sometimes with phlegmatic indifference. This passionate outburst on the priest's part, however, surprised ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... me Was there but One who—but of her anon. I said with men, and with the thoughts of men, 60 I held but slight communion; but instead, My joy was in the wilderness,—to breathe The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,[131] Where the birds dare not build—nor insect's wing Flit o'er the herbless granite; or to plunge Into the torrent, and to roll along On the swift whirl of the new-breaking wave Of river-stream, or Ocean, in their flow.[132] In these my early strength exulted; or To follow through the night the moving moon,[133] 70 The stars and their ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... pointed them to the nave; but they dared not demand more minute instructions. They had not the courage to ask for It. Priam could not speak. There were moments with him when he could not speak lest his soul should come out of his mouth and flit irrecoverably away. And he could not find the tomb. Save for the outrageous tomb of mighty Newton, the nave seemed to be as naked as when it came into the world. Yet he was sure he was buried in the nave—and ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... to flit through Green Valley streets like a chattering blue-jay. But now nobody saw her, only now and then at night, slinking along through the dark. And many a kindly heart ached for her, remembering how Fanny loved ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... it sooner,' whispered one. 'Unseen we flit into those homes of men where there are children, and for every day that we find a good child who gives pleasure to its parents and deserves their love God shortens our time of probation. The child does not know when we fly through the room, and when we smile with pleasure at it one year ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... had been assiduous in laying up money, which before I had squandered as fast as I obtained it, and had realised a considerable sum. I could not help comparing myself to a chrysalis previous to its transformation. I had before been a caterpillar, I was now all ready to burst my confinement, and flit about as a gaudy butterfly. Another week I continued my prudent conduct, at the end of which I was admitted to my superior, in whose hands I placed a sum of money which I could very conveniently spare, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... persons whose conduct intimated no purpose of plunder, and who, in all other points, appeared to consult his welfare and his wishes, it occurred to our hero, that, during the worst crisis of his illness, a female figure, younger than his old Highland nurse, had appeared to flit around his couch. Of this, indeed, he had but a very indistinct recollection, but his suspicions were confirmed when, attentively listening, he often heard, in the course of the day, the voice of another female conversing in whispers with his attendant. Who ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... out with great skill; the hero is a madman, not in itself an attractive arrangement, but there is such admirable method in his madness, such fine poetic feeling in the conception of character, and the ghosts who flit through the pages of the story are so exceedingly human, that one feels quite at home with Peter, and is really sorry when, all too soon, his madness passes away, and he awakes to a new life, to find himself an old man. Apart from its strong dramatic interest, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, Jan. 2, 1892 • Various
... shapes of human existence are not cast in iron nor hewn in everlasting adamant, but moulded of the vapors that vanish away while the essence flits upward to the Infinite. There is a spiritual essence in this gray and lean old shape that shall flit upward too. Yes; doubtless there is a region where the lifelong shiver will pass away from his being, and that quiet sigh, which it has taken him so many years to breathe, will be brought to a close for ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... because it rests upon the insight of a poet who has sounded the darkest depths of human nature. Had Hawthorne passed mutely through life, these gloomy-grounded pictures of Puritanism might have faded from the air like the spectres of things seen in dazzling light, which flit vividly before the eye for a ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... have these visions flown? Am I once more sunk to a level with my former self? Once I thought that religion was a substance with me,—not a shadow, to flit, to mock, and to vanish when its succour was most needed; yet now does my ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... this beach we stand, And o'er our heads the sea-fowl flit, Our eyes behold a glorious land, And soon shall ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the Riviera shoulder to shoulder. I had the will to be the same, but he was different now; and though we left Gaeta in the flesh at her villa, entertaining guests, Gaeta in the spirit would still flit between us as we went. The Boy would be thinking of her; I should know that he was thinking of her, and—there would be an end ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... has covered it, Deep in the sand it lies; While over me the long weeds flit And veil ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Arthur. He had no command over himself or his horses for some minutes; and at intervals during the afternoon the full felicity of the idea would steal upon him, and the smile of reminiscence would flit across his ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... doubtful expression flit rapidly across his face, and noticed that Mr. Crayford was already surrounded. Adelaide Shiffney kept him in conversation. Margot Drake stood close to him, and fixed her dark eyes upon him with an expression of still determination. Paul Lane had come ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... wildly as she struggled against such thoughts, there would come to Olive's fancy dreams of what her life might have been. The holiness of lovers' love, of wedded love, of mother-love, would at times flit before her imagination; and her heart, still warm, still young, trembled to picture the lonely old age, the hearth blank and silent, the utter isolation from all those natural ties whose place not even the dearest bonds of adopted ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... few feet, then his mouth flew open, but no sound came out. Had he seen a white streak flit across the snow? He had. ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... civilization; and the knight warring to recover the tomb of God was the poem among soldiers, and in entire consonance with his nature, Tennyson's poetic genius flits back into the poetic days, as I have seen birds flit back into a forest. In Tennyson's poetry two things are clear. They are mediaeval in location; they are modern in temper. Their geography is yesterday, their spirit is to-day; and so we have the questions and thoughts of our era as ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... of crimes. The woods flit and fly—in summer there are bluebells; in the opening there, when Spring comes, primroses. A parting, was it, twenty years ago? Vows broken? Not Minnie's!... She was faithful. How she nursed her mother! All her savings on the tombstone—wreaths under glass—daffodils ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... not an easier or a pleasanter height to climb than the Motterone, if, in Italian heat, you can endure the disappointment of seeing the summit, as you ascend, constantly flit away to a farther station. It seems to throw its head back, like a laughing senior when children struggle up for kissings. The party of five had come through the vines from Stresa and from Baveno. The mountain was strange ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to Fifth had to be. And, as long as they lived or until the Procyon made port, all responsibility rested: First, upon First Officer Deston; and second, upon Second Officer Jones. Therefore Theodore and Bernice Jones came aboard Lifecraft Two, and Deston asked Newman to flit across to ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... object beyond gives a full view, which reveals a tender sadness resting in the depths of those powerful dark eyes. Lady Rosamond is in a deep study—one which is not of an agreeable nature—one which she is not most likely to reveal. Alternate shades of displeasure, rebellion and defiance, flit across her brow, which remain, in quiet and apparently full possession, until reluctantly driven forth by the final ascendancy of reason, at the cost of many conflicting feelings of emotion ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... sublimity around; a river runs through, and bright flowers grow to the waters' edge. There is a thick, warm mist that the sun seeks vainly to pierce; trees, lofty and beautiful, wave to the airy motion of the birds; but there, a group of Indians gather; they flit to and fro with something like sorrow upon their dark brow; and in their midst lies a manly form, but his cheek, how deathly; his eye wild with the fitful fire of fever. One friend stands beside him, nay, I should say kneels, for he is ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... which beetled far above; and the convent-bells were proclaiming the festival of the ensuing day. The ravine was overshadowed by fig-trees, vines, and myrtles, and the outer towers and walls of the fortress. It was dark and lonely, and the twilight-loving bats began to flit about. At length the soldier halted at a remote and ruined tower apparently intended to guard a Moorish aqueduct. He struck the foundation with the buttend of his spear. A rumbling sound was heard, and the solid stones yawned apart, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of former ages, methinks he ought to do as much for the present time, and assure posterity that there never was such a lamb as Catherine II., and that, so far from assassinating her own husband and Czar Ivan,[2] she wept over every chicken that she had for dinner. How crimes, like fashions, flit from clime to clime! Murder reigns under the Pole, while you, who are in the very town where Catherine de' Medici was born, and within a stone's throw of Rome, where Borgia and his holy father sent cardinals to the other world by hecatombs, are surprised to hear that there is such ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... Young looked back at the hut. It was dark. He saw three boats flit silently by him toward the city, as if phantoms guided them. They crossed the moonbeams, and Young lost them in the dark shadows near ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... And all my comfort flies; Like Noah's dove, I flit between Rough seas and stormy skies. Anon the clouds depart, The wind and waters cease, While sweetly o'er my gladdened heart Expands the bow of peace; Bow of peace, bow of peace, ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... to a standstill, the shops were closed, the streets silent. From time to time an inhabitant, intimidated by their silence, would flit rapidly along the pavement, keeping close ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... they set sail; the great lateen swinging lazily under the pressure of those light airs that flit to and fro over the islands at evening and sunrise. All the arts of civilization have as yet failed to approach the easiest of all modes of progression and conveyance—sailing on a light breeze. For here is speed without friction, ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... own emancipation by the murder of those who hold him in bondage. Take away from him this cause of dissatisfaction, and this incentive to insurrection, and then these "impracticable hopes," which now sometimes flit before his imagination, will no longer embitter his hours of labor, and urge him to the commission of those horrid deeds of massacre, which, though they may glut a momentary revenge, must result disastrously, not only to the slaves engaged ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... with the flying steel. As night draws on, the single figures melt into the dusk, until only an obscure stir and coming and going of black clusters is visible upon the loch. A little longer, and the first torch is kindled and begins to flit rapidly across the ice in a ring of yellow reflection, and this is followed by another and another, until the whole field is full of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have been lying for ten years on their shelves; the inns and restaurants keep open all night; the Military Commandant, his secretary, and the local garrison put on their best uniforms; the police flit to and fro like mad, while the effect on the ladies is beyond ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... worthily of the fullness of childhood? We cannot behold the little creatures which flit about before us otherwise than with delight, nay, with admiration; for they generally promise more than they perform and it seems that nature, among the other roguish tricks that she plays us, here also especially designs to make sport of us. The first ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... power. Non omnibus dormio, said Mecenes, and in this state more than one husband has acquired a sad certainty. Some ideas yet originate but are incoherent. There are doubtful lights, and see indistinct forms flit around. This condition does not last long, for sleep soon ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... glimmer in the tents, and as I sit at my desk in the open doorway, there come mingled sounds of stir and glee. Boys laugh and shout,—a feeble flute stirs somewhere in some tent, not an officer's,—a drum throbs far away in another,—wild kildeer-plover flit and wail above us, like the haunting souls of dead slave-masters,—and from a neighboring cook-fire comes the monotonous sound of that strange festival, half pow-wow, half prayer-meeting, which they know only as a "shout." These fires ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... trace it home. It was in that enchanting time when men are still asleep in their nests, and even "My Lord Sun" has not arisen from his; when the air is sweet and fresh, and as free from the dust of man's coming and going as if his tumults did not exist. It was so still that the flit of a wing was almost startling. The water lapped softly against ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... Teiresias alone among the shades of the dead was possessed of understanding, for all the others flitted about like shadows (Odyssey, x., 487-495). And can it be said that the others, apart from Teiresias, had really overcome death? Is it to overcome death to flit about ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... of this interesting idea; if they will contemplate it in all its attitudes, and trace it to all its consequences, they will not hesitate to part with trivial objections to a Constitution, the rejection of which would in all probability put a final period to the Union. The airy phantoms that flit before the distempered imaginations of some of its adversaries would quickly give place to the more substantial forms of dangers, ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... the unhappy political fate of the Slav. Their countries are mere eddies left by the mighty currents of European conquest and reconquest, backward lands untouched by machine industry and avoided by capital, whose only living links with the moving world are the birds of passage, the immigrants who flit between the mines and cities of America and these isolated European villages. Held together by national costume, song, dance, festival, traditions, and language, these people live in the pale glory of a heroic past. Most of those who come to America are peasants who have ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... weare chaplets on their hede Of fresh Woodbine, be such as never were To love untrue in word, thought, ne dede, But aye stedfast; ne for pleasaunce ne fere, Though that they should their hertes al to-tere, Would never flit, but ever were stedfast Till that ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... common relations of life,—to the hour of business and the hour of repose, to the hall of audience and the garden-walk, and giving equally its deceptive coloring to the thoughts that stir him when borne on the shoulders of men through a prostrate crowd, and those that flit dimly through his brain as he lays a weary head upon a solitary pillow. And hence, too, he becomes for himself, as well as for others, an object of constant contemplation,—valuing things as they contribute to his pleasure, and men as they subject themselves ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... soliloquizes: "What though she prefer a basilisk's kiss to mine? Because my short-lived joy may cause her eternal sorrow, shall I reject those pleasures sought so long, desired so earnestly? That will I not, by Heaven! Mine she is, and mine she shall be, though Reginald's bleeding ghost flit before me and thunder in my ear 'Hold! Hold!'—Peace, stormy heart, she comes." Reginald's ghost does not flit, because Reginald is still in the flesh, though not in very much flesh. He is Osmond's brother and Angela's father, and the wicked Earl thought that he had murdered him. It turns out, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... warbles a sweet assurance of this as I pass near by. Breaking off the clear crystal song, he turns his wee head from side to side eyeing me wisely as slowly I plod with moccasined feet. Then again he yields himself to his song of joy. Flit, flit hither and yon, he fills the summer sky with his swift, sweet melody. And truly does it seem his vigorous freedom lies more in his little spirit than in ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... my beer I sit, While golden moments flit. Alas! They pass Unheeded by; And, as they fly, I, Being dry, Sit idly sipping here ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... about the room, looking at everything, listening at the doors, looking up the chimney. Then they go to the clothes basket and raise the lid. Up come four arms, and then two house-fairies stand up in the basket, and get out with the help of the chair. They, also, flit about the room, looking at things. Meanwhile the brownies have taken the broom and dust pan, and begun to sweep, especially over by the outside door and by the wood box. The fairies take a chair, and climb up by the ...
— The Christmas Dinner • Shepherd Knapp
... filly, witch-ridden, Skims over the meadow; The house-dog is barking, The night-owl is hooting, The glow-worm is sparkling, The meteor is shooting; And forms, which lie So stiff and still, In their shrouds so chill, Through the live-long day, Now burst their clay, And flit through the sky, On their dusky pinions: Hell's dominions Keep holiday. Sisters, sisters, wherever your watches Are kept, fleet hither to me, Fleet hither, fleet hither, and leave earth's wretches ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... the lily blooms," he muses as he issues out of the forest and reaches the top of the mountain, "to the cliffs round which the eagles flit,—what a glorious promontory! What a contrast at this height, in this immensity, between the arid rocky haunts of the mountain bear and eagle and the spreading, vivifying verdure surrounding the haunts of man. On one side are the sylvan valleys, the thick grown ravines, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... leg swings 'cross on an outlaw hawse And my spurs clinch into his hide, He kin r'ar and pitch over hill and ditch, But wherever he goes I'll ride. Let 'im spin and flop like a crazy top, Or flit like a wind-whipped smoke, But he'll know the feel of my rowelled heel Till he's ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... of the luxury of the Renaissance, traveling was at that time very disagreeable; everywhere in Europe it was as difficult then as it is now in the Orient. Great lords and ladies, who to-day flit across the country in comfortable railway carriages, traveled in the sixteenth century, even in the most civilized states of Europe, mounted on horses or mules, or slowly in sedan-chairs, exposed to all the inclemencies of wind and weather, and unpaved ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... along the Rue de Rivoli and in the great square of the Revolution, the garden was left to the silence of its statues and its thousand memories. I often used to wonder, as I looked through the iron railing at nightfall, what might go on there and whether historic shades might not flit about in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... daffodil, and so on. They advance with slowly swaying motion, with wreaths uplifted until they reach the stage, where sit the guests of honor. There they bow low, then lay the garlands at their feet, and retire, forming ingeniously pretty groups and figures, while bees and butterflies flit in and out. See the bees pursuing the little pink rosebuds until at last they join hands and dance gaily away, only ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... rich and near at hand as in England, but a sort of voice of the woods, thin and far away, as fits these solemn places. Or you hear suddenly the hollow, eager, violent barking of dogs; scared deer flit past you through the fringes of the wood; then a man or two running, in green blouse, with gun and game-bag on a bandolier; and then, out of the thick of the trees, comes the jar of rifle-shots. Or perhaps the hounds are out, and horns are blown, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... morals, as you say, our ideas do not agree, and cannot agree,' she responded, and something menacing seemed to flit over her brows, while her lips ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... there were plenty of living men only biding their time and waiting their opportunity. It was only night that these people desired; a good black night so that no one could see them flit about. You felt in the small of your back as you rode along that ugly faces were looking at you from the silent houses, and that at any moment shots might ring out suddenly and bear you to the ground. But that was merely a preliminary feeling. Soon it added zest to the entertainment. What, ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... giant-mother, 'which thou beholdest to the left, is the gallery of the Unborn. The shadows that flit onward and upward into the world, are the souls that pass from the long eternity of being to their destined pilgrimage on earth. That which thou beholdest to thy right, wherein the shadows descending ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... know, by what time the moonlight On her nest of shadows will sit, Out on the dim lawn gliding That shadow of shadows will flit. ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... fox, baying in the moonlight, steals into the gloom; the wolves howl in the ravine as thou rushest through—thou hearest not their cries, they fly before the wild splendor of thine eyes! Thou readiest the plain. Corpse-lights from the swamps flit on with thee; wildly laughing, thou criest: 'Race on with me, friends!' They dance round thy cap, and bathe thy breast with streams of pale, blue light; then, joined in brotherly embrace, for a moment ye speed together on; but the grave-lights are the first to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... evil spirits did flit about the banished Sintram, but it was without his calling them up. In his dreams he often saw the wicked enchantress Venus, in her golden chariot drawn by winged cats, pass over the battlements of the stone fortress, and heard ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... simple tone can rouse it; a smile, or even a sigh Can make the ghost-like shadows flit before my dreaming eye; 'Tis one of life's deep mysteries; in vain we seek to trace The hidden spell's dark origin that chains our feeble race: But, oh! may we not fancy, may we not sweetly think, 'Tis between us and another ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... The furrows of care shall be smoothed out of your manly brow: gentle hands will bind up your wounds—even the one you got from that girl a dozen years ago, if it isn't healed yet. The shadows of gloomy and soul-debasing Theory will flit away from your bewildered brain, and in this healthful atmosphere your spirit will regain its long-lost tone, and embrace once more the ethereal images of Hope and Joy and Faith. Probably you will yet find some one to love in this wide world of sorrow; anyway, ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... goin' to bother us any! Make up yer mind to that same, boy," continued the tall vagrant, complacently. "When the time comes, an' the weather lets up on us a bit, why, we'll jest flit outen this region by the back door. I'm only mad as hops 'bout ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... pale head. "Look at these clouds which flit across the heavens; at these swallows which cut the air. D'Artagnan moves more quickly than the clouds or the birds; D'Artagnan is the wind which ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to you! how severe its voice! how forbidding its aspect! With what animation, on the contrary, do you enter into the mere pursuits of time and the world! What bright anticipations of joy and happiness flit before your eyes! How you are struck and dazzled at the view of the prizes of this life, as they are called! How you admire the elegancies of art, the brilliance of wealth, or the force of intellect! According to your opportunities you mix in the world, you meet and converse with ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... such as a coot, swims right away when it is tumbled into water for the first time. So chicks peck without any learning or teaching, very young ducklings catch small moths that flit by, and young plovers lie low when the danger-signal sounds. But birds seem strangely limited as regards many of these instinctive capacities—limited when compared with the "little-brained" ants and bees, which have from the first ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... guessing what thy sickness can be, nor will he scold thee at all, but he will rather beg every one to take all the care they can of thee. After that he will set off west to the Firths, and Sigmund with him, for he will have to flit all his goods home from the Firths west, and he will be away till the summer is far spent. But when men ride to the Thing, and after all have ridden from the Dales that mean to ride thither; then thou must rise from thy bed and summon ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... in the same field. You can't stand still half a minute except against a wall. Even when he makes friends with you, his favors never taste right. Messing with him is like drinking out of a pewter mug. And so it is everywhere. Let your shadow once flit across a Spaniard's path, and he'll always see it there. If you've never lived in any but these damned clockworky European towns, you can't imagine the state of things in a South American seaport—one half the population waiting round the corner for the other half. But I don't see that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... night. But few flowers are open; only those of the sweet-scented Paullinia greet me with a balmy fragrance, and thine, lofty mango, the dark shade of whose leafy crown shields me from the dews of night. Moths flit, ghost-like, round the seductive light of my lantern. The meadows, ever breathing freshness, are now saturated with dew, and I feel the damp of the night air on my heated limbs. A Cicada, a fellow-lodger ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... of butterflies would go into ecstasies over the splendid varieties that flutter and flit in the air, and the countless multitude of different insects would be well worth special study; amongst the latter are verified the most curious mimetic facts that ever the unprejudiced mind of a man of ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... with a massy key. "The lassie fund it," he whispered to Dickson, "somewhere about the kitchen—and I guessed it was the key o' this castle. I was thinkin' that if things got ower hot it would be a good plan to flit here. Change our base, like." The Chieftain's occasional studies in war had trained his tongue to a ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... ancient ribs of granite rock, Else to yon depths profound it you will hurl. A murky vapor thickens night. Hark! Through the woods the tempests roar! The owlets flit in wild affright. Hark! Splinter'd are the columns that upbore The leafy palace, green for aye: The shivered branches whirr and sigh, Yawn the huge trunks with mighty groan, The roots, upriven, creak and moan! In fearful and entangled fall, One crashing ruin whelms them all, While through the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... she'll be done honestly by, even if she is of humble station. 'Tis best, and cheapest too, in the long run.' The coachman was apparently imagining the dove about to flit away to be one of the pretty maid-servants that abounded in Enckworth Court; such escapades as these were not unfrequent among them, a fair face having been deemed a sufficient recommendation to service in ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... air. All the faculties are on the alert, and the motion is astonishingly smooth and elastic. The machine responds instantly to the slightest movement of the operator; the air rushes by one's ears; the trees and bushes flit away underneath, and the landing comes all too quickly. Skating, sliding, and bicycling are not to be compared for a moment to aerial conveyance, in which, perhaps, zest is added by the spice of danger. For ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... It was getting cold fast! He wished that he had a com-unit. Because of the interference in the Burn he had left it behind—but with one he might be able now to locate some settlement. All that remained was to find the seashore and, with it as a guide, flit south towards the ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... of Povi-whah have melted again into Mother Earth. Silent are the groves where the Ancient Others carved their homes from the rock walls of the heights. Wings of vivid blue flit in the sunlight from the portal of the star to bough of the pinyon tree—and a brooding silence rests over those high levels;—only the wind whispers in the pines, and the old Indians point to the bird of azure and tell of a Demon-maid who came once from ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... morning, and the piercing wind makes the khaki uniforms that flit here and there look altogether unseasonable. On the other side of the station is Rev. Father Ryan, the Roman Catholic chaplain, in khaki uniform and helmet, looking a soldier every inch of him,—a good man, too, and a gentleman, as we Aldershot folks ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... the flag! Up, up, betimes, and proudly speak of it; A lordly thing to see on tower and crag, O'er which,—as eagles flit, With eyes a-fire, and wings of phantasy,— Our memories hang superb! The foes we frown upon shall feel the curb Of our full sway; and they shall shamed be Who wrong, with sword or pen, The Code that keeps us free. For there's no sight, in summer or in spring, Like ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... of the happy hours Enjoyed by thee in fair Italia's bowers, Where, lingering yet, the ghost of ancient wit Midst modern monks profanely dares to flit. And pagan spirits, by the Pope unlaid, Haunt every stream and sing through every shade. There still the bard who (if his numbers be His tongue's light echo) must have talked like thee,— The courtly ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... with the fret-saw, and even in the long vacation on the seashore your time is taken up with rowing, sailing, and swimming; while I lie lost in idle thought on the sand, staring at the mysteriously changing expressions that flit over the countenance of the sea. And that is why your eyes are so clear. To be like ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... around them. Empires may rise and may fall, dynasties may perish, great wars may come and go, but, heedless of it all, those two shall embrace each other for ever and aye, in their lonely shrine by the side of the sounding ocean. I sometimes have thought that their spirits flit like shadowy sea-mews over the wild waters of the bay. No cross or symbol marks their resting-place, but old Madge puts wild flowers upon it at times, and when I pass on my daily walk and see the fresh blossoms scattered over the sand, I think of the strange couple who came from afar, ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... valuable to you. It has been said that the difference between clever and ordinary men is often mainly {58} a difference in the power of directing and controlling the mind through the attention. Some minds go wool gathering or day dreaming, and flit from one thing to another in a desultory manner. Others go straight ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... is the great thing, the saving thing, after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place. And so, when M. Bourget said that bright thing about our grandfathers, I broke all up. I remember exploding its American countermine once, under that grand hero, Napoleon. He was only First Consul then, and I was Consul-General—for the United ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Emperor replied, Who deemed it a lesson to cure them of pride; "And I trust that the thread of our lives will spin out, Ere we ever again attempt such a rout. Alas! we must own we were never designed To flit in the sunshine, or soar on the wind; Nature's changeless decree has allotted its share To each beast of the field, to each bird of the air, To each reptile that creeps, to each insect that flies; And who dares to rebel against ...
— The Emperor's Rout • Unknown
... November, therefore, whenever the weather is anything like favourable, presents an animated scene. Eight-oars pass along, the measured pull of the oars in the rowlocks marking the time in musical cadence with their plashing dip in the water; perilous skiffs flit like fire-flies over the glassy surface of the river; men lounge about in the house-boats and barges, or gather together at King's, or Hall's, and industriously promulgate small talk and tobacco-smoke. All is gay and bustling. Although the feet of the strollers ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... Shades that flit, besides the shades of the night; Rustling sobs besides the sobs of the wind; Steps of feet that pace with his on the right, Steps that pace on the left, and steps behind. "Nay, no fear that I shall be lone, at least! Lo, there are throngs ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... dies with sorrow! and where most I love, Sheds all its bitterness; delighting still To tell the many miseries that flit At times across me! Those I lightly prize Partake the sunshine of my happier hours, Although I seek them with far less delight! The loud laugh dwells not here, the sportive dance, The carol of unconscious levity, And yet how oft, how willingly ...
— Poems • Matilda Betham
... world was full of friendly, gracious, interesting people. Circumstance spun one to and fro among the groups and companies; how could one give a unique regard, when there were so many that claimed allegiance and admiration? He saw others flit from passion to passion, from friendship to friendship—Hugh's aim was rather to be the same, to be loyal and true, to be able to take up a suspended friendship where he had laid it down; the most shameful thing in the world seemed to him the ebbing away ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Square, or the Piazza, is more than the centre of Venice: to a large extent it is Venice. Good Venetians when they die flit evermore among ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... who is fairer than the children of men, who is all love, and hath no spot in him. Is it not a sweet word, a Redeemer to captives, a Saviour to sinners? And will not the soul rise up, and go forth out of itself? And will it not choose to flit(480) unto him who is the desire of all nations? Will it not go unto him for food and clothing? Love then is the soul's journey and motion towards Jesus, whom faith hath brought in such a good ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... because our sun is declining to the horizon? Are they the shadows of evening, or are they, as I hopefully believe, but the mists which are exhaled by the sun as it rises, but which are to be dispersed by its meridian glory? Are they but the little evanishing clouds that flit between the people and the great objects for which the Constitution was established? I hopefully look toward the reaction which will establish the fact that our sun is still in the ascendant—that that cloud which has so long covered ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... himself told us what fancies he is willing shall flit through the minds of listeners to the overture to his opera. It was performed at a concert under his direction while he was a political refugee at Zurich, and for the programme of the concert he wrote a synopsis of its musical and poetical contents which I shall ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... cushions, presented a pitiful profile. She appeared much older, as though her age had been doubled by her tears. The brutal blow had made her freshness and her marvelous youth flit away with doleful suddenness. Her half-opened eyes were encircled with temporary wrinkles. Her nose had taken on the livid sharpness of the dead; her great mass of hair, reddening under the blow, was disheveled in golden, undulating tangles. Something ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... my theme Has died into an echo. It is fit The spell should break of this protracted dream. The torch shall be extinguished which hath lit My midnight lamp,—and what is writ, is writ; Would it were worthier, but I am not now That which I have been, and my visions flit Less palpably before me—and the glow Which in my spirit dwelt, is fluttering, faint ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... the woodland, the home of wild beasts and of hostile ghosts, of deadly spirits and of fierce enemies, gleams luridly through every line. The fen and the forest are dim and dark; will-o'-the-wisps flit above them, and gloom closes them in; wolves and wild boars lurk there, the quagmire opens its jaws and swallows the horse and his rider; the foeman comes through it to bring fire and slaughter to the clan-village ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... cried Patty, jumping up and dancing about the room; "but I must flit, girls,—I have an engagement at five. Wait, what about motors? I'm sure we ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... mine, a Lady Cordelia Carne, who was murdered, when her husband was away, and buried down there, after being thrown into the moat. The old people say that whenever her ghost is walking, the water of the moat bursts in and covers the floor of the vaults, that she may flit along it, as she used to do. But of course one must not listen to ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... stones that held the houses of the dead. They are tapu; about them flit the veinahae, the matiahae, and the etuahae, dread vampires and ghosts that have charge of the corpse and wait to seize the living. Well have these ghoulish phantoms feasted; whole islands are theirs, and soon they will sit upon the paepae ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... having been duly invited, its eight occupants come in, and each finds a place on a palliasse. It is a warm, still night. The great doors of the Coach-house stand wide open. The stars are out thick by this time. Little black bats flit and swoop about in the darkness. If you keep very still you can just hear the gentle "hshshsh, hshshsh" of the sea. The candle flickers as the night gives a little sigh. A few Cubs are rolling about on their straw beds. "Shut up, all!" commands an imperious ...
— Stories of the Saints by Candle-Light • Vera C. Barclay
... emptiness of this silent mansion, Pierre continued seeking somebody, a porter, a servant; and, fancying that he saw a shadow flit by, he decided to pass through another arch which led to a little garden fringing the Tiber. On this side the facade of the building was quite plain, displaying nothing beyond its three rows of symmetrically disposed windows. However, the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... should be as easy to expel an obnoxious thought from your mind as it is to shake a stone out of your shoe; and till a man can do that it is just nonsense to talk about his ascendancy over Nature, and all the rest of it. He is a mere slave, and prey to the bat-winged phantoms that flit through the ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... streets are alive with the rush of numerous cahars[10] and sadoes, drawn by the agile native pony, and with itinerant vendors, who, bearing their baskets suspended from their shoulders by the pikulan, or cross-piece, each with a lamp fixed to the rearmost basket, flit to and fro ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... landlady, found it wise to change her quarters. She had taken a room in an apartment house two blocks removed from her former home, and Win, not being able to afford a "flit," remained at the old address. At first, when her pay was increased by two dollars a week, she had intended to save and follow Sadie. One had, however, to live mostly on ice-cream soda in the hot ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... on his. She had seen a curious expression of mingled annoyance and contempt flit across his face as she came in. Why, why had she allowed Julian to over-persuade her? She was looking horrible, a scarecrow, a ghost of a woman. She was certain of it. For a moment she felt almost angry with Julian for placing her in such a bitter ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the men, who stood silent and grim at their quarters on the American ship, waiting for the fight to begin. At such a moment, even the most courageous must lose heart, as he thinks upon the terrible ordeal through which he must pass. Visions of home and loved ones flit before his misty eyes; and Jack chokes down a sob as he hides his emotion in nervously fingering the lock of his gun, or taking a squint through the port-holes at ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... finer than the last. Every summer hour, a messenger from heaven, is charged with the waiting landscape, and drapes it with its own garment of woven light, celestial broidery. Sunshine crowns the crests, and stamps their kinship to the skies. Shadows nestle in the dells, flit over the ridges, hide under the overhanging cliffs, to be chased out in gleeful frolic by the slant sunbeams of the mellow afternoon. Clouds and vapors and unseen hands of heaven flood the hills with beauty. They have drunk in the warmth and life of the sun, they quiver beneath ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... spirits did flit about the banished Sintram, but it was without his calling them up. In his dreams he often saw the wicked enchantress Venus, in her golden chariot drawn by winged cats, pass over the battlements of the stone fortress, and ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... fanciful, picturesque, romantic. Chivalry was the poetry of the Christ in civilization; and the knight warring to recover the tomb of God was the poem among soldiers, and in entire consonance with his nature, Tennyson's poetic genius flits back into the poetic days, as I have seen birds flit back into a forest. In Tennyson's poetry two things are clear. They are mediaeval in location; they are modern in temper. Their geography is yesterday, their spirit is to-day; and so we have the questions and thoughts of our era as themes for Tennyson's voice and lute. His treatment ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... were plenty of living men only biding their time and waiting their opportunity. It was only night that these people desired; a good black night so that no one could see them flit about. You felt in the small of your back as you rode along that ugly faces were looking at you from the silent houses, and that at any moment shots might ring out suddenly and bear you to the ground. But that was merely a preliminary feeling. Soon it added zest to the ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... that exciting moment it carried me back to the old "Admiral Benbow" in a second, and I seemed to hear the voice of the captain piping in the chorus. But soon the anchor was short up; soon it was hanging dripping at the bows; soon the sails began to draw, and the land and shipping to flit by on either side, and before I could lie down to snatch an hour of slumber the Hispaniola had begun her voyage to the Isle ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from herb to herb she flies, From flower to flower, and loads her labouring thighs 490 With treasured sweets, robbing those flowers, which, left, Find not themselves made poorer by the theft, Their scents as lively, and their looks as fair, As if the pillager had not been there. Ne'er doth she flit on Pleasure's silken wing; Ne'er doth she, loitering, let the bloom of Spring Unrifled pass, and on the downy breast Of some fair flower indulge untimely rest; Ne'er doth she, drinking deep of those rich dews Which chemist Night prepared, that faith ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... keeper at Whitby Saw a couple of Zeppelins flit by; Though she felt a sharp sting, It's a curious thing That she never knew ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... relations of life,—to the hour of business and the hour of repose, to the hall of audience and the garden-walk, and giving equally its deceptive coloring to the thoughts that stir him when borne on the shoulders of men through a prostrate crowd, and those that flit dimly through his brain as he lays a weary head upon a solitary pillow. And hence, too, he becomes for himself, as well as for others, an object of constant contemplation,—valuing things as they contribute to his pleasure, and men as ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the byrny all hoary, The sword stately-good, and spell after he said: This raiment of war Hrothgar gave to my hand, The wise of the kings, and therewithal bade me, That I first of all of his favour should flit thee; He quoth that first had it King Heorogar of old, The king of the Scyldings, a long while of time; But no sooner would he give it unto his son, 2160 Heoroward the well-whet, though kind to him were he, This weed of the breast. Do thou brook it full well. On these fretworks, so heard ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous
... weary horses had slowed down to a walk, the heavy sand retarding progress. It was a gloomy, depressing scene in the spectral gray light, a wide circle of intense loneliness, unbroken by either dwarfed shrub or bunch of grass, a barren expanse stretching to the sky. Vague cloud shadows seemed to flit across the level surface, assuming fantastic shapes, but all of the same dull coloring, imperfect and unfinished. Nothing seemed tangible or real, but rather some grotesque picture of delirium, ever merging into another yet more hideous. The very silence ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... actually been thrown into prison for her deed of madness and now the executioner's axe awaits her. She sits on the damp straw, rocking a bundle, which she takes for her baby, and across her poor wrecked brain there flit once more pictures of all the scenes of her short-lived happiness. Then Faust enters with Mephisto, and tries to persuade her to escape with them. But she instinctively shrinks from her lover, loudly imploring God's and the Saint's pardon. God has mercy on ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... out a scrap of cambric, dried her eyes like magic, and began to flit about the garden, humming a light air under her breath. Her dress was of an old-fashioned sort of book-muslin—it was made full and billowy; her figure was round and yet lithe, her hair was a mass of frizzy soft rings, and when the ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... watched her flit about the room, and listened to her gay conversation, and observed her animated face, said to herself: "A more charming companion could not fall to the lot of any woman. Now what is the matter, Bertha?" she said. "Your face quite amuses me; you burst out into ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... They flit about, the yellow birds, And rest upon the jujube trees [1]. Who followed duke Mu in the grave? Dze-kue Yen-hsi. And this Yen-hsi Was a man above a hundred. ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... what time the moonlight On her nest of shadows will sit, Out on the dim lawn gliding That shadow of shadows will flit. ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... little boys and girls, but also chickens, small birds, and shrew-mice, evidently alarmed at his minatory attitude. So, too, the bumble-bee flies, which are inoffensive insects got up in sedulous imitation of various species of wild bee, flit about and buzz angrily in the sunlight, quite after the fashion of the insects they mimic; and when disturbed they pretend to get excited, and seem as if they wished to fly in their assailant's face and roundly sting him. This curious instinct may ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... brae are clad in green, An' scatter'd cowslips sweetly spring; By Girvan's fairy-haunted stream, The birdies flit on wanton wing; By Cassillis' banks, when e'ening fa's, There let my Mary meet wi' me, There catch her ilka glance o' love, The bonnie ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... sunlit plots. It might have been a deer. He studied the rolling, rounded tree-tops, the narrow strips between the black trunks, and the open places that were clear in the sunshine. He had nearly come to believe he had seen a small animal or bird flit across the white of the sky far in the background, when he distinctly saw dark figures stealing along past a green-gray rock, only to disappear under colored banks of foliage. Presently, lower down, they reappeared and crossed an open patch of yellow ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... one of her mother's dark-coloured handkerchiefs over her head and put her darkest-coloured petticoat on the top of all the others. She had also wrapped her mother's dark shawl round her shoulders, and thus muffled up she was able to flit unperceived down the street, a swift little dark figure undistinguishable from the surrounding darkness ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... reflection of the lighted windows, stretched over the dark sea. The captain of the ship was giving a ball. The gay music floated across to me in snatches at long intervals. I recall in particular the trill of a little flute in the midst of the deep blare of the trumpets; it seemed to flit, like a butterfly, about my boat. I bade the man row to the ship; twice he took me round it. ... I caught glimpses at the windows of women's figures, borne gaily round in the whirl-wind of the waltz.... I told the boatman to row away, far away, straight into the darkness.... ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Carrollton. I sent Gritty home on purpose to see if you would be annoyed, for I felt vexed because you would not humor my whim and meet me at the bridge. I am sorry I caused you any uneasiness," she continued, as she saw a shadow flit over his ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... have heard so read by another person, without an inward struggle?—In mere passive silent reading the thoughts remain mere thoughts, and these too not our own,—phantoms with no attribute of place, no sense of appropriation, that flit over the consciousness as shadows over the grass or young corn in an April day. But even the sound of our own or another's voice takes them out of that lifeless, twilight, realm of thought, which is the confine, the 'intermundium', as it were, of existence ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... Like chrysalids impatient for the air, The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run Along the furrows, ants make their ado; Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark Soars up and up, shivering for very joy; Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek Their loves in wood and plain—and ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... what time the moonlight On her nest of shadows will sit, Out on the dim lawn gliding That shadowy shadow will flit. ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... aimless existence. Sometimes, wildly as she struggled against such thoughts, there would come to Olive's fancy dreams of what her life might have been. The holiness of lovers' love, of wedded love, of mother-love, would at times flit before her imagination; and her heart, still warm, still young, trembled to picture the lonely old age, the hearth blank and silent, the utter isolation from all those natural ties whose place not even the dearest ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the alcoves of death, in the charnels of time, Where flit the dark spectres of passion and crime, There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung, There are heroes yet silent ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... called her name repeatedly, but she was no where to be heard. The bittern alone responded to his voice, as he flew screaming by; or the bull-frog croaked dolefully from a neighboring pool. At length, it is said, just in the brown hour of twilight, when the owls began to hoot and the bats to flit about, his attention was attracted by the clamor of carrion crows that were hovering about a cypress tree. He looked and beheld a bundle tied in a check apron and hanging in the branches of a tree; with a great vulture perched hard by, as if keeping watch upon it. He leaped with joy, ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... that they appeared to flow from so many different sources. Then, like an impetuous torrent, he seemed to unite these streams into a foaming waterfall; over the tossing waves the rainbow presently stretches its peaceful arch, while on the banks butterflies flit to and fro, and the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... dignity of high walls and guarded gateways), constitutes the great university of Massachusetts. The yard, or college-precinct, is traversed by a number of straight little paths, over which, at certain hours of the day, a thousand undergraduates, with books under their arm and youth in their step, flit from one school to another. Verena Tarrant knew her way round, as she said to her companion; it was not the first time she had taken an admiring visitor to see the local monuments. Basil Ransom, walking with her from point to point, admired them all, and thought several of them exceedingly ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... copia narium, that clothe the mountain-skirts of the silent Lautulae! Shall we rest at the Volscian Anxur,—the modern Terracina,—where the lofty rock stands like the giant that guards the last borders of the southern land of love? Away, away! and hold your breath as we flit above the Pontine Marshes. Dreary and desolate, their miasma is to the gardens we have passed what the rank commonplace of life is to the heart when it has ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... instructions of the Advocate had so highly complimented him, was not strong enough to carry him much beyond a vigorous phraseology. He had not awoke from the delusive dream of the Spanish marriage which had dexterously been made to flit before him, and he was not inclined, for the sake of the Republic which he hated the more because obliged to be one of its sponsors, to risk the animosity of a great power which entertained the most profound contempt for him. He was destined ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... lesson of the cessation of the wrath of God and the return of the earth to its former state. Of this he had more certain proof however, when the dove, having been sent out the third time, did not return: for not only did it find food on earth, but was able to build nests and to flit to ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... with the foam beneath their bows, Whose streaming ensigns charm the waves by day, Whose carols and whose watch-bells cheer the night, Moor'd as they cast the shadows of their masts In long array, or hither flit and yond Mysteriously with slow and crossing lights, Like spirits on the darkness ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... white owl entered the casement high, O'er the brow of the dying I saw it fly; Presager of death! I hailed its wing, She scorned the omen but felt the sting Of bitter grief, when another day Bore her angel Mother from earth away. I warned her, when on the coming blast I saw the phantom-like shades flit past; She smiled on my words as idle play, But wept when her sire, in the midnight fray, Felled to the dust by the Tory's blade, Died in the home where his bones are laid; When the cold drops stood on the forehead fair, And the curdling ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... tell Ravenhurst I want to talk to him, or I'll simply flit back to Eros, and thank him much for a pretty retainer that didn't do him any good but gave me a nice ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... not so dark; yet I could make out none of the objects I now and then ran against. I passed a mirror (I hardly know how I knew it to be such), and in that mirror I seemed to see the ghost of a ghost flit by and vanish. It was too much. I muttered a suppressed oath and plunged forward, when I struck against a closing door. It flew open again and I rushed in, turning on my light in my extreme desperation, when, instead of hearing the sharp report of a pistol, ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... vaine labours of terrestriall wit, That buildes so stronglie on so frayle a soyle, As with each storme does fall away and flit, And gives the fruit of all your travailes toyle 515 To be the pray of Tyme, and Fortunes spoyle, I saw this towre fall sodainlie to dust, That nigh with griefe thereof my ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... learn the true remorse for crime Should watch (when slumbers innocence, and guilt Or wakes in sleepless pain, or dreams of blood) The convict stretched on his reposeless bed. Then conscience plays th' accusing angel; Spectres of murder'd victims flit before His eyes, with soul-appalling vividness; Hideous phantasma shadow o'er his mind; Guilt, incubus-like, sits on his soul With leaden weight,—types of the pangs of hell. His memory to the scene of blood reverts; He hears the echo of his victims' cry, Whose agonizing eyes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... merely a spectator, seated in the royal box, applauding now and again. There is a wrench at my heart, a pang in every nerve. When I have put out the light and am in my bed, little touches, little glances, little words flit about and fill the darkness. When I get up in the morning, I thrill with lively anticipations, my blood seems to course through me to ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... my eyes fixed on Lucy, as did Van Helsing, and we saw a spasm as of rage flit like a shadow over her face. The sharp teeth clamped together. Then her eyes ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... on the same spot, some practical joker amused himself with a magic-lantern by making a spirit form flit over the fall, against its face, or in the misty air. The whole city turned out to see it, and great was their marvelling, and greater the fear among the negroes ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Dr. Rauparaha had much writing to do, and passed his mornings and afternoons in the quiet library. Sometimes, as he wrote, a shadow would flit across the wide, sunlit veranda, and Helen Torringley would flit by, nodding pleasantly to him through the windows. Only two or three times had he met her alone since he came to Te Ariri, and walked with her through the grounds, ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... home and Joe,—from all those visions that had raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the wooden window of the forge, and flit away. In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... musician, as well as the student of aesthetics, will do well to examine by what means these various effects are produced. In the second nocturne, F sharp major, the brightness and warmth of the world without have penetrated into the world within. The fioriture flit about as lightly as gossamer threads. The sweetly-sad longing of the first section becomes more disquieting in the doppio movimento, but the beneficial influence of the sun never quite loses its power, and after a little there ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... she returned. 'He has nobody knows what money, and every year it increases. Yes, yes, he's rich enough to live in a finer house than this: but he's very near—close-handed; and, if he had meant to flit to Thrushcross Grange, as soon as he heard of a good tenant he could not have borne to miss the chance of getting a few hundreds more. It is strange people should be so greedy, when they ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... sounds the cymbal's voice, where the tambour resounds, where the Phrygian flautist pipes deep notes on the curved reed, where the ivy-clad Maenades furiously toss their heads, where they enact their sacred orgies with shrill-sounding ululations, where that wandering band of the Goddess is wont to flit about: thither 'tis meet to hasten with ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... by lonely meres To sit, with heart and soul awake, Where water-lilies lie afloat, Each anchored like a fairy boat Amid some fabled elfin lake: To see the birds flit to and fro Along the dark-green reedy edge. ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... that now flit and hover From the blossom of white to the blossom of red, Take heed, for I was a lordly lover Till the little day of my life had sped; As straight as a pine-tree, a golden head, And eyes as blue as an austral bay. Ladies, when loosing your evening array, Reflect, had you lived in my years, my prayers ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help questioning, at such moments, whether Pearl were a human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage floor, would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and intangibility; it was as if she were hovering in the air and might vanish, like ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Upon her complete recovery of strength she always rose with the dawn. At the moment she was feeding the quail she had tamed. And she had begun to tame the mocking-birds. They fluttered among the branches overhead and some left off their songs to flit down and shyly hop near the twittering quail. Little gray and white rabbits crouched in the grass, now nibbling, now laying long ears flat ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... Then I got up and went out. I had forgotten "Little Frank" and hoped that she had. If she was to flit about Europe seeing "Little Frank" on every corner I foresaw trouble. "Little Frank" was likely to be the bane of ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of his article will be coming down. In an hour or so his work will be over, and he will pass out into the street exhausted, but happy with the sense of function fulfilled. Fleet Street is quieter now. The lamps gleam through the fog, a motor-'bus thunders by, a few late messengers flit along with the latest telegrams, and some stragglers from the restaurants come singing past the Temple. For a few moments there is silence but for the leader-writer's quick footsteps on the pavement. He is some hours in front of the morning's news, and in a few hours more half a million ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... to be my wife. I know not how she deceived me so terribly, but you know, and I have sought this interview to hear the story from your own lips. Will you tell it to me, darling—Miss Leyton, I mean," he added hastily, as he saw a shadow of pain flit over her face. ...
— Rosamond - or, The Youthful Error • Mary J. Holmes
... seriously a duel between a slim man of near forty who had rarely fired a shot in sport, never in anger, and a stoutly built irascible Irishman, for whom a good shot meant lynching or lasting opprobrium. Visions of Bob Acres and Sir Lucius O'Trigger flit before us. We picture Tierney quoting "fighting Bob Acres" as to the advantage of a sideways posture; and we wonder whether the seconds, if only in regard for their own safety, did not omit to insert bullets. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... passage. Once or twice, when a passer-by, muffled warmly from the bitter air, hurried past, the phantom shrank closer to the wall, till he was gone. Its vague, mournful face seemed to watch for some one. The twilight darkened gradually, but it did not flit away. Patiently it kept its piteous look fixed in one direction,—watching,—watching; and, while the howling wind swept frantically through the chill air, it still seemed to shudder ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... breadth of light without shadow; there was a murmur of content in her voice when she spoke, and a ripple of content in her laugh when she laughed. But the light quivered on Dolly's lip, and gleamed and sparkled in her brown eyes, and light and shadow could flit over her face with quick change; they ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... stopped in the street outside, the bell rang, and she watched the figure of a trim mulatto maid flit through the hall to the door. An instant later Arthur's name was announced, and Gabriella, with her hands in his clasp, stood looking into his face. It had been eighteen years since they parted, and in those eighteen years she had carried his image like some ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... on into four acres of low slop, brambles, shoots, and blackthorns, where they were winded by half the pack, while the other half were running the first fox up the fence. The crash and music of the hounds re-echoed from the trees and the enfolding hills above, the shrieking of the jays as they flit protesting from tree to tree, the hearty ring of the huntsman's voice cheering his hounds—surely all this should send each fox flying out over the fields beyond! But a fox has no nerves. He keeps his head with the coolness of a Red Indian, and a "slimness" all his ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... suspicion took me. While Trewlove tortured himself to my model, was I, by painful degrees, exchanging brains with him? I laughed; but I was unhinged. I had been smoking too many cigarettes during these three weeks, and the vampire thought continued to flit obscenely between me and the pure seascape. I saw myself the inheritor of Trewlove's cast-off personality, his inelegancies of movement, his religious opinions, his bagginess at the knees, ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... day in June. Out of the town the air is soft and pure. Bird and bee flit from tree to tree, from blue-bell to rose, till at sun-set they hie away to ...
— The First Little Pet Book with Ten Short Stories in Words of Three and Four Letters • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... returned with such dire tidings, they decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and all made haste to get back to their rooms ere the enemy appeared. But, alack-a-day! that enemy could flit about in a surprisingly lively manner, and, ere some of them had reached safety behind their own doors, she came in view. To get to their rooms now was out of the question, so, making a virtue of ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... for a little while, and, as usual, this time brings with it thronging remembrances of absent friends. Their forms flit before me; their spirits are around me; I feel their presence—almost; dear friends, almost I clasp you in my arms. My soul yearns for love and sympathy. I do bless and praise my God for all His goodness to me in this respect, for my many tender and faithful and devoted friends. Part of ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... while was to re-dig some wells his father had dug before him. The first time he saw his sweetheart Rebecca, whom another man had to go and get for him, he lifted up his voice and cried like a boob. He had become soft on the mutton and grape juice of his father. Tender little doves flit around the home cote, but the eagle sweeps from sun to sun. Anyhow, in these modern days children are very largely bringing ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... earth's little children pit-pat from their burrows on the hill; Hangs within the gloom its weary head the shining daffodil. In the valley underneath us through the fragrance flit along Over fields and over hedgerows little quivering drops of song. All adown the pale blue mantle of the mountains far away Stream the tresses of the twilight flying in the wake of day. Night comes; soon alone shall fancy follow sadly in her flight Where the ...
— By Still Waters - Lyrical Poems Old and New • George William Russell
... you sign anything?-Yes, I signed a paper, stating that I would rather stay and fish for him than that I would flit. ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... "Going to pass that star we were headed for—too fast to stop. I'm giving it a wide berth and picking out another one. There's a big planet a few million miles off in line with the main door, and another one almost dead ahead—that is, straight down. We sure are traveling. Look at that sun flit by!" ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... locket two portraits; one the portrait of a fair English lady, and the other that of a still fairer English child. So, before the eyes of one dying on the blood-stained veldt did visions of home and loved ones flit. Life's last look turned thither! In war, the cost in cash is clearly the cost that is of least consequence. Who can appraise aright the price of ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... he would be loth to do without a dash of womanly subtlety, 'tis so piquant. Yes, he said, that must be in her; she must have womanly cleverness. "And yet I should like her to blush if only a cock-sparrow were to look at her hard," he said, "which brings me back to the girl again: and so I flit backwards and forwards. I must have what comes, I suppose," he said, "and whatever she may be, thank God she's no worse. However, if he might give a final hint to Providence," he said, "a child among pleasures, and a woman among pains was the rough ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... when he lay sleepless, sick for his mother's presence, her voice, her kisses, her soothing touch, the boy would rise to sit at the window—there to watch shadowy figures flit through the street-lamp's circle of light. Once he fancied that his mother came thus out of the night, that for a moment she paused with upturned glance, then disappeared in woe and haste: returning, halted again; ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... my flit-pouch, I was the same. If you'd had your priming-horn, and I my flints, mind ye, we should have been there now? Then, forty-whory, that we are not is the fault o' Government for not supplying ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... the first to go on guard and during the initial hour of his vigil practically nothing came to disturb him. He heard the occasional cry of the nightbirds and the booming of the surf on the reefs and the shore of the isle, and saw numerous fireflies flit to and fro, and ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer
... husky fellow, had been rowing a long hour when we put into a cove under the high shore of an island. I could see a moving glow back in the bushes. It swung slowly, like a pendulum of light, with a mighty flit and tumble of shadows. We tied our boat, climbed the shore, and made slowly for the light. Nearing it, his Lordship whistled twice, and got answer. The lantern was now still; it lighted the side of a soldier in high boots; ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... than that. First, with the instinctive selfishness of human nature, you will recognize your own future habitation; perhaps your eye will mark the identical spot where the body you love must lie through all seasons and weathers, through the slow centuries that will flit so fast for you, till the crash of doom. It is good that you should think of that, although it makes you shudder. The English churchyard takes the place of the Egyptian mummy at the feast, or the slave in the Roman conqueror's car—it ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... shaded with high trees and lit softly with orange glowlights; while down the centre the tramway of the road will go, with sometimes a nocturnal tram-car gliding, lit and gay but almost noiselessly, past. Lantern-lit cyclists will flit along the track like fireflies, and ever and again some humming motor-car will hurry by, to or from the Rhoneland or the Rhineland or Switzerland or Italy. Away on either side the lights of the little country homes up ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the wild bee roams, Then buried within the cowslip's cup, He murmurs his low and music tones, Till she folds the wanton intruder up; The spring bird, wakening, soars on high, Gushing aloft its melting lay; Whilst painted clouds flit o'er the sky, All ushering ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was ignorant of his pecuniary liabilities until the crash of the Ballantyne firm told her for the first time that they were sharers in the ruin. A psychologist might trace this strange twist of his mind in the numerous elfish Fenella-like characters who flit about and keep their irritating secret through the long chapters of so many of ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the years of youth. They are the sweetest in life; and these memories constitute most of the happiness of declining life. Incidents in our pilgrimage awaken the almost forgotten, and then how many, many memories flit through the mind, and what a melancholy pleasure fills the soul! We think, and think on, calling this and that memory up from the grave of forgetfulness, until all the past seems present, and we live ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... and anon, as swiftly held they onward, other Indians, singly or in squads, would fall into the file, gliding from out the mingled gloom of forest shade and night, as suddenly and silently as the shapes which flit through troubled dreams. Among these, by and by, appeared a warrior of gigantic stature, who putting himself at the head of the file, stalked on a little in advance, and seemed to ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... then went on: "An' once I saw an Annir Choille, a girl of the green people, flit like a shade of green fire through Carntogher woods, an' once at Dunchraig I slept where the ashes of the Dun of Cormac MacConcobar are mixed with those of Cormac an' Eilidh the Fair, all burned in the nine flames that sprang from the ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... and who, in all other points, appeared to consult his welfare and his wishes, it occurred to our hero, that, during the worst crisis of his illness, a female figure, younger than his old Highland nurse, had appeared to flit around his couch. Of this, indeed, he had but a very indistinct recollection, but his suspicions were confirmed when, attentively listening, he often heard, in the course of the day, the voice of another female conversing in whispers with his attendant. ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... was simply obliged to accept the fact and give up trying to solve the riddle. He found himself dragged into society and courted, wondered at and envied very much as if he were one of those foreign barbers who flit over here now and then with a self-conferred title of nobility and marry some rich fool's absurd daughter. Sometimes at a dinner party or a reception he would find himself the centre of interest, and feel unutterably uncomfortable in the discovery. Being obliged ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... who spoke; and amongst other labels on his baggage was one marked Khartoum. His hands were sinewy and his face was bronzed, while his eyes, brown and deep-set, held in them the glint of the desert places of the earth: the mark of the jungle where birds flit through the shadows like bars of glorious colour; the mark of the swamp where the ague mists lie dank and stagnant in the rays ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... few feet of buoy and boat, the body of De-deed disappears for the last time. We search for an hour or more with grappling irons, but he is never seen again. A strange silence settles down above and below deck, and all night long two faces flit before us—the grave face of the mother calling down blessings on her boy, the rallying smile of De-deed bidding her good-by and telling her all is well. It is a brave and happy spirit which, in the "Little Lake" of the Mackenzie, ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... mingling here serious and even reproachful reflections, I rather turn my look away from those beautiful times; for who is able to speak worthily of the fulness of childhood? We cannot behold the little creatures which flit about before us otherwise than with delight, nay, with admiration; for they generally promise more than they perform: and it seems that Nature, among the other roguish tricks that she plays us, here also especially designs to make sport of us. The first organs she bestows ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... flag! Up, up, betimes, and proudly speak of it; A lordly thing to see on tower and crag, O'er which,—as eagles flit, With eyes a-fire, and wings of phantasy,— Our memories hang superb! The foes we frown upon shall feel the curb Of our full sway; and they shall shamed be Who wrong, with sword or pen, The Code that keeps us free. For there's no sight, in summer or in spring, Like ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... oft-regretted Cube; and in my nightly visions the mysterious precept, "Upward, not Northward", haunts me like a soul-devouring Sphinx. It is part of the martyrdom which I endure for the cause of the Truth that there are seasons of mental weakness, when Cubes and Spheres flit away into the background of scarce-possible existences; when the Land of Three Dimensions seems almost as visionary as the Land of One or None; nay, when even this hard wall that bars me from my freedom, these very tablets on which I am writing, and ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... had been before, even though we walked from Aix-les-Bains all the way down to the Riviera shoulder to shoulder. I had the will to be the same, but he was different now; and though we left Gaeta in the flesh at her villa, entertaining guests, Gaeta in the spirit would still flit between us as we went. The Boy would be thinking of her; I should know that he was thinking of her, and—there would be ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... on the dusky plain, Where flit the shadows with their endless cry, You reach the shore where all the world goes by, You leave the strife, the slavery, the pain; But we, but we, the mortals that remain In vain stretch hands; for Charon ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang
... shimmering ghosts that flit around, While spade and mattock death-fields glean, Open with words from the unseen The mysteries now in ...
— The Mound Builders • George Bryce
... was playing with the letter was still for a moment, and an almost imperceptible quiver straightened the white figure. For a moment Guest saw, or imagined that he saw, a shadow flit across the girl's face, but it passed as quickly as it came. She tilted ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Holyoke, and cloud-clapped Monadnock, the cities of Worcester and Fitchburg—all these and many other beautiful objects are spread out before the spectator. But it cannot be described—it must be seen to be appreciated; and the throngs of visitors that flit through the town every summer afford abundant evidence that the love of the beautiful and grand in nature still lives in the hearts of ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... a small bronzed cubicle which began at once to rise rapidly. Just how rapidly, he was unable to tell. There were no indicators at all on the elevator, and the opaque doors made it impossible to see floors flit by. But his ears rang with the speed, and when the car finally stopped, it did so with a slight jerk that threw Forrester, stiff and worried, off balance. He almost fell out of the car as the door opened, and ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... griefs, my passions, and my powers, Made me a stranger. Though I wore the form, I had no sympathy with breathing flesh. My joy was in the wilderness—to breathe The difficult air of the iced mountain's top. Where the birds dare not build, nor insect's wing Flit o'er the herbless granite; or to plunge Into the torrent, and to roll along On the swift whirl of the new-breaking wave Of river, stream, or ocean, in their flow— In these my early strength exulted; or To follow through the night the moving moon, The stars, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... those old days when I was young and strong, He used to sing on yonder garden tree, Beside the nursery. Ah, I remember how I loved to wake, And find him singing on the self-same bough (I know it even now) Where, since the flit of bat, In ceaseless voice he sat, Trying the spring night over, like a tune, Beneath the vernal moon; And while I listed long, Day rose, and still he sang, And all his stanchless song, As something falling ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... humble office to all honours among the godless. He was shut out by some unknown circumstances from external participation in the Temple rites, and longs to be even as one of the swallows or sparrows that twitter and flit round the sacred courts. No doubt to him faith was much more inseparably attached to form than it should be for us. No doubt place and ritual were more to him than they can permissibly be to those who have heard and understood the great charter of spiritual ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... trees, stretching itself over the grass in shapes that seemed to spell unearthly things. And there were mystical lights on the water down there, flitting about with the movement of the stream as ghosts might flit. Because it looked so other-world-like she wondered if it knew what it had just missed. She had never thought anything about water save as something to look beautiful and have a good time on. It seemed now that perhaps it knew a great deal ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... is vast, and cold, and drear; The board with faded flowers is spread: Shadows of beauty flit around, But beauty ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... fellowship of voluntary grief— He read the tear-stained book of poor men's souls, As we must learn to read it. Lady! lady! Wear but one robe the less—forego one meal— And thou shalt taste the core of many tales, Which now flit past thee, like a minstrel's songs, The sweeter for ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... we flit, One little sandpiper and I; And fast I gather, bit by bit, The scattered driftwood bleached and dry. The wild waves reach their hands for it, The wild wind raves, the tide runs high, As up and down the beach we flit, One little sandpiper ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... don't see each other often," the old fairy woman had said. "You flit in like, and flit away again as if you was a butterfly, I think sometimes when I'm sitting here alone. When you come to stay you're mostly flitting about the wood and I only see you bit by bit. But I couldn't tell you, Miss, my dear, what it's like to me. ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... doan' like him?' says Liza. 'He come a sto'min' round hyah like he gwine to pull de whole place up by de roots an' transport hit ovah Lexington way. Fust he's boun' fo' to take dat hoss what's done win all dem good dollahs. Den his min' flit f'om dat to Miss Sally, an' he's aimin' to cyar her off like she was a 'lasses bar'l or a yahd ob calico. Who is dem Dillons, anyway? De Goodloes owned big lan' right hyar in Franklin County when de Dillons ain' nothin' but Yankee trash back in Maine or some other ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... roar; Or carolled in his light canoe content, As, bound from creek to creek, it grazed the shore; Gods of the storm the dreary space might sweep, And shapes of death, and gliding spectres gaunt, Might flit, he thought, o'er the remoter deep; And whilst strange voices cried, Avaunt, avaunt! Uncertain lights, seen through the midnight gloom, Might lure him sadly on ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... a spider, who peeps out carefully, and quickly pulls it down again. On a karoo-bush a green fly is laying her silver eggs. We carry them home, and see the shells pierced, the spotted grub come out, turn to a green fly, and flit away. We are not satisfied with what Nature shows us, and we see something for ourselves. Under the white hen we put a dozen eggs, and break one daily, to see the white spot wax into the chicken. We are not excited or enthusiastic ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... there Dick saw the figure of a man flit, by him. The stranger was dressed in citizen's clothes. There was nothing suspicions in that, since there is no law to prevent citizens from visiting the Military Academy. But there was something ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... joining in an ideal sort of game, where, in place of the mawkish sentimentality of "Sally Walker," of obnoxious memory, we see all sorts of healthful, poetic, childlike fancies woven into song. Rudeness is, for the most part, banished. The little human butterflies and bees and birds flit hither and thither in the circle; the make-believe trees hold up their branches, and the flowers their cups; and everybody seems merry and content. As they pass out the door, good-bys and bows and kisses are wafted backward into the room; for the manners of polite ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... by words, as petticoats are lifted by the wind; tricks of language, cleverly disguised audacities; sentences which reveal nude images in covered phrases, which cause the vision of all that may not be said to flit rapidly before the eyes of the mind, and allow well-bred people the enjoyment of a kind of subtle and mysterious love, a species of impure mental contact, due to the simultaneous evocations of secret, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... flagged path than back flitted the bevy of girls again into the study, until the small room was full to overflowing. It was like seeing a company of fat bumble-bees, their portly bodies resplendent in black and gold, buzz heavily out of a room, and a gay flight of pale-blue and lemon butterflies flit back in their places. All the daughters fell upon their father, Margaret, Bridget, Isabel, Sarah, Mary, and Susanna; there they all were! tugging off his heavy riding-boots and gaiters, putting away the whip on the whip-rack, while little Mary perched herself proudly on his knee and put up her face ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... feelings might have identified him with all. In a word, we apprehend he was a tolerably fair example of what vague generalities, when acting on a temperament not indisposed to moral impressions, render the great majority of men; who flit around the mysteries of a future state, without alighting either on the consolations of faith, or discovering any of those logical conclusions which, half the time unconsciously to themselves, they seem to expect. When Bluewater ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... beholding his enemies bruised of his rod Beheld but the likeness of this that is fallen on the faithful, the friends of God. Northward, and northward, and northward they stagger and shudder and swerve and flit, Dismantled of masts and of yards, with sails by the fangs of the storm-wind split. But north of the headland whose name is Wrath, by the wrath or the ruth of the sea, They are swept or sustained to the westward, and drive through the rollers ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... protect her by night as well as by day. Those hideous hyenas of the midnight streets are never deceived. By one glance they can distinguish between a good woman and those poor wandering ghosts of dead modesty and honour, who flit restlessly back and forth from alleys dark to bright gas glare; but bring one of these men to book, and he will declare that "decent women have no right to be in the streets after nightfall," as though citizens were to maintain public highways for ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... affirmed the other, heartily, as he eyed the boy; and perhaps a dim suspicion that he might find the fugitive valuable as a guide began to flit through ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... Amleth that to his trick he owed his salvation, observed that latterly he had been singly devoted to Amleth. The young man's reply was apt. Not to seem forgetful of his informant's service, he said that he had seen a certain thing bearing a straw flit by suddenly, wearing a stalk of chaff fixed in its hinder parts. The cleverness of this speech, which made the rest split with laughter, rejoiced the ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... not seen the rich grape grow For miles, as far as eyes can go; Thou hast not seen a summer's night When maids could sew by a worm's light; Nor the North Sea in spring send out Bright hues that like birds flit about In solid cages of white ice— Sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Love-one-place. Thou hast not seen black fingers pick White cotton when the bloom is thick, Nor heard black throats in harmony; Nor hast thou sat on stones that lie Flat on the earth, that once did rise To hide proud kings ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... ready, and etiquette was waived. "Time!" she repeated, and then the two battering-rams, revolving their fists country-fashion, engaged. Half-forgotten Homeric phrases began to flit from a faraway schoolroom back into the little teacher's mind and she began to be consoled for the absence of gloves—those tough old ancients had used gauges of iron and steel. The two boys were evenly matched. After a few thundering body blows they grew wary, and when the round closed their faces ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... before. Those little clasped hands gave each other courage, for Ruth needed it as much as Eva, and her heartbeats could almost be heard in the silence. What a study her sweet little face was, as the emotions of love, pity, fear, and hope, crossed it, as shadowy clouds flit across ...
— The Big Nightcap Letters - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... very well. Rather an imbecile old gentleman, one would say, with his mouth open; a face such as one may see hanging about railway-stations, and, what is curious, a New-England style of countenance. Let us flit again, and just take a look at the level sheets of water and broken falls of Trenton,—at the oblong, almost squared arch of the Natural Bridge,—at the ruins of the Pemberton Mills, still smoking,—and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... our sun is declining to the horizon? Are they the shadows of evening, or are they, as I hopefully believe, but the mists which are exhaled by the sun as it rises, but which are to be dispersed by its meridian glory? Are they but the little evanishing clouds that flit between the people and the great objects for which the Constitution was established? I hopefully look toward the reaction which will establish the fact that our sun is still in the ascendant—that that cloud which has so long covered our political ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... the most tiresome things, they are so monotonous. Women crowd in the salons, shake hands, leave a pile of cards on the tray in the hall, and flit ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... had to be. And, as long as they lived or until the Procyon made port, all responsibility rested: First, upon First Officer Deston; and second, upon Second Officer Jones. Therefore Theodore and Bernice Jones came aboard Lifecraft Two, and Deston asked Newman to flit across ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... than the Parisians have been during the last two days of sunshine. The Jardins des Tuileries are crowded with well-dressed groups; the budding leaves have burst forth with that delicate green peculiar to early spring; and the chirping of innumerable birds, as they flit from tree to tree, announces the approach of ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... mullioned windows revealed shaded reading lamps and disciplined shelves of brown bound books. Now and then a dignitary in gaiters would pass him, "Portly capon," or a drift of white-robed choir boys cross a distant arcade and vanish in a doorway, or the pink and cream of some girlish dress flit like a butterfly across the cool still spaces of the place. Particularly he responded to the ruined arches of the Benedictine's Infirmary and the view of Bell Harry tower from the school buildings. He was stirred to read the Canterbury Tales, but he could not get on with Chaucer's ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... unheard commands, The abysses and vast fires between, Flit figures that with clanking hands Obey a hideous routine; They are not flesh, they are not bone, They see not with the human eye, And from their iron lips is blown A dreadful and monotonous cry; And ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... fastened their horses, and were ascending the precipitous slope which led up to the object which had excited their curiosity. They advanced rapidly and noiselessly, with the confidence and dexterity of practised scouts. The watchers from the plain below could see them flit from rock to rock until their figures stood out against the skyline. The young man who had first given the alarm was leading them. Suddenly his followers saw him throw up his hands, as though overcome with astonishment, and on joining him they were affected ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... him the use of his limbs again at any rate, though they would not have been worth much to him had the ghost or hobgoblin appeared whom he half expected to see the next moment. Then came a screech, which seemed to flit along the rough meadow opposite, and come towards him. He drew a long breath, for he knew that sound well enough; it was nothing ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... artist's object was unusual; for it was his chief aim to make it as little like the original before him, as possible. Shall we reveal the fact that another image, wearing a gentler aspect than the stern, rigid features of the minister's portrait, seemed to flit before the young painter's fancy, coming unbidden, and mingling more especially with recollections of the past? As a ray of moonlight stole into the low dormer-window, the young man turned on his humble bed, a sigh burst from his lips, followed by the ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... their shore lies in its nakedness beneath the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the tideless pools and the sea-birds flit from their margins with ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... of laughter followed. In the midst of his rage and mortification Mr. Clinch fancied he saw a shade of pain and annoyance flit across the face of the maiden. He was puzzled, but pressed her hand, in spite of his late experiences, reassuringly. She made a gesture of silence to him, and then slipped away ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... from the water below to the mill pond above. The child could hardly believe his eyes, and for a little while it seemed that the whole world was turned topsy-turvy, especially as the shadows continued to flit from the water below ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... some homely magic of his own, hint the commerce of another world with man's discarded domain. Men and women are asleep, and as in an early walk you may startle the hares at their play, or see the creatures of the darkness—owls and night-hawks and heavy moths—flit with fantastic purpose over the familiar scene, so here it comes upon you suddenly that you have surprised Nature's self at her mysteries; you are let into the secret; you have caught the spirit of the April woodland as she glides over ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... "The Doldrums" will do pretty nicely. PAYN's right. With "high rank and no manners," a man His guests may "evict" at his pleasure; But BLOGGS—till he hits on some "Chamberlain" plan— Must leave 'em to flit at their leisure. I made up my mind when I came to this place; For a month, at the least, to remain meant. Though now my amusement at BLOGGS's wry face Is nearly my ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... and you shall teach— Our people shall have double speech: One to be homely, one polite, As you have robes for different wear; But this is all:—'tis just and right, And more our children will not bear, Lest flocks of buzzards flit along, Where ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... cot is taken for a few weeks by a party of boating-people. Then the quaint, old-fashioned gardens blossom with a sudden luxuriance of striped tents and flaming umbrellas, while bright women in many-hued boating-costumes flit among cabbages and onions like curious tropical birds and butterflies. As a rule, however, the Dean is abandoned to its usual rustic population and to artists, numbers of the latter remaining all winter in the haunts whence the majority ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... of minor figures, graceful and poetic, brilliant and spirituelles, flit across the canvas, leaving the fragrance of an exquisite individuality, and tempting one to extend the list of the versatile women who toned and colored the society of the period. But we have to do, at present, especially with those who gathered ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... more after that, and Hester was content till a new worry came to trouble her. On her way to her room late one night, she saw a tall shadow flit down one of the side corridors that branched from the main one. For a moment she was startled, but, being a woman of courage, she followed noiselessly, till the shadow seemed to vanish in the gloom of the ...
— The Mysterious Key And What It Opened • Louisa May Alcott
... bring And lay upon my sore and bleeding breast, Grim-visaged Recollection's thorny rose. I gained, and failed. One day could ride and walk, The next would find me prostrate: while a flock Of ghostly thoughts, like phantom birds, would flit About the chambers of my heart, or sit, Pale spectres of the past, with folded wings, Perched, silently, upon the voiceless strings, That once resounded to ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... said. The man at the reins drove rapidly, and paid little attention to anything but his horses. The sick man dozed and rested. The boy sat, wistful-eyed and silent, watching the trees and houses flit by. The sun had long ago set, but it was not dark, for the moon was round and bright, and the sky was cloudless. Where the road forked sharply the man drew his horses ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... is a phantom; the phantom gazes into the darkness with wild, baleful eyes, rises, grows bigger and blue, hovers for an instant and then speeds away to the zenith to open the door of the palace of the sun where butterflies flit from flower to flower and angels ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... last details escape me. As I put it in my pocket I remember thinking, "Some poor devil made miserable!" for there had been hint in it of the husband. But I had no thought—I swear it before God—of who that husband was till I beheld her flit back through the open doorway, with terror in her mien and searching eyes fixed on the floor. Then hell opened before me, and I saw my happiness go down into gulfs I had never before ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... our coldness grieves you sore, Ye quit betimes that solitude's cold shore Where ye forsaken dwell, And flit about in darkness' sad constraint, The while from spectral lips your mournful plaint Upon the ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... usually impossible for one on the ground to see the finest blooms, which turn their faces to the sunlight above the canopy of green. Gray apes chatter in the tree-tops; strange tropic birds of gorgeous plumage flit from bough to bough, monstrous reptiles slip silently through the undergrowth; insects buzz in swarms above the putrid swamps; occasionally the jungle crashes beneath the tread of some heavy animal—a rhinoceros, perhaps, or a wild bull, or an orang-utan. (I might mention, parenthetically, that ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom And flit from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... description; and yet, listen! I will paint it for you, if I can. It is a lovely spot. Tall mountains, crowned with verdure, rise in awful sublimity around; a river runs through, and bright flowers grow to the water's edge. But there a group of Indians gather. They flit to and fro, with something like sorrow upon their dark brows. In their midst lies a manly form, but his cheek, how deathly! His eyes are wild with the fitful fire of fever. One friend stands before him—nay, I should say, kneels; for see, he is pillowing that poor head ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... with a strange brilliancy, and a delightful grove of green leafy trees presents itself to the eyes and charms the sight with its verdure, while the ear is soothed by the sweet untutored melody of the countless birds of gay plumage that flit to and fro among the interlacing branches. Here he sees a brook whose limpid waters, like liquid crystal, ripple over fine sands and white pebbles that look like sifted gold and purest pearls. There he perceives a cunningly wrought fountain of many-coloured jasper ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... remains the same; and the same feelings fill and elevate the soul in contemplating these mighty works of an Almighty hand. The eye is never weary in watching the thousand varieties of light and shade, as they flit over the mountain and gleam upon the lake; and the ear is satisfied with the awful stillness of nature in ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... sad and sodden street, To and fro, Flit the fever-stricken feet Of the freshers as they meet, Come and go, Ever buying, buying, buying Where the shopmen stand supplying, Vying, vying All they know, While the Autumn lies a-dying Sad and low As the price of summer suitings when the winter ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... pass Scatheless from war, as once did Tydeus' son. Though thou didst 'scape his fury, will not I Suffer thee to return alive from war. Ha, in thy many helpers dost thou trust Who with thee, like so many worthless flies, Flit round the noble Achilles' corpse? To these Death and black doom shall my ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... well let you know now why I can't be known in this," Thomas Smith said smoothly, even if the same gray hue did flit like a shadow a second time across his countenance—a thing that did not escape the shrewd eye of ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... deeper purpose in this than might have been supposed. There were few things he did not think over as he sat looking into the fire. What if this young man should unwittingly steal away his darling's heart and then flit away to some other flower, and leave this, his own treasure, with all the soul gone out of her life. He believed Mr. Monteith to be an honourable man, but then he would hedge this blossom of his about and guard it carefully. There should be ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... the cushions, presented a pitiful profile. She appeared much older, as though her age had been doubled by her tears. The brutal blow had made her freshness and her marvelous youth flit away with doleful suddenness. Her half-opened eyes were encircled with temporary wrinkles. Her nose had taken on the livid sharpness of the dead; her great mass of hair, reddening under the blow, was disheveled in golden, undulating ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Authors are supposed to write when they "feel like it," and at no other time. Visions of Byron with a gin-bottle at his side, and a beautiful woman hanging over his shoulder, dashing off a dozen stanzas of Childe Harold at a sitting, flit through the brains of sentimental youth. We hear of women who are seized suddenly by an idea, as if it were a colic, or a flea, often at midnight, and are obliged to rise and dispose of it in some way. We are told of very delicate girls who carry pencils ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... witness to this description of scene so frequently, that he began to believe it to be a part of the debtor's craft. As some people can regard the most beautiful varying tints of heaven, the lights and shadows which flit across the face of nature, and see nothing more in them than a part of that vast and complicated machinery that governs the world—so he, in these lights and shadows of life, only beheld the natural workings of ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... distressed it. It was, to a certain extent, occupied with the marks on the teapot; it is true that the mournful idea strove hard with the marks on the teapot for the mastery in my mind, and at last the painful idea drove the marks of the teapot out; they, however, would occasionally return and flit across my mind for a moment or two, and their coming was like a momentary relief from intense pain. I thought once or twice that I would have the teapot placed before me, that I might examine the marks at leisure, but ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... back, while I thought I perceived a slight shadow flit across his face. A singer came forward at the moment, and ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... hastning to his fall Remaines of all. O world's inconstancie! That which is firme doth flit and fall away, And that is flitting doth ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... silver frames, lighted the broad white staircase. Under the inner curve of the vaulted gateway a black-faced man on guard, with a bell-mouthed gun, rose from a stool at our passing. I thought I saw Castro's peaked hat and large cloak flit in the gloom into which fell the light from the small doorway of a sort of guardroom near the closed gate. We continued along the arcaded walk; a double curtain was drawn to right and left before me, while ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... from danger, and cherish his home as tenderly as if he were one of themselves. Robin the Red-breast and shy little Veery, Pewee the plaintive and cheerful Chewink, Long-sparrow, Bluebird, and sweet Chickadee, all glide freely in and out of their green and golden halls, flit through their winding streets, and take part in all their delights. Nor have the Leaflanders any trouble to understand bird-language. They have not, like the old Ger-men, eaten the hearts of birds, but by a more excellent way have they ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... that help might be sent me. How it was to come I could not tell. Notwithstanding what was before me, I still desired to be set free. Although I was not sleeping, strange fancies filled my brain. I saw people flit about in the darkness, suddenly coming into the light, and then disappearing. Some were people I knew, and others were strangers. Aunt Deb and Mr Butterfield came by, tripping it lightly, holding each other's hands, he in a bob wig with ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
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