"Flit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... well for you to say," moaned Despard; "you flit about as if you had wings on your feet; while, as for me, it is true I move with equal speed, but so painfully that I wonder my footprints are ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... 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 to speak ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... thought, And does not ask that you should know The love that consecrates you so. No; furtive, awkward, restless, cold, I basely seemed to set at naught That sudden bliss, undreamt, unsought. What must she think, my girl of gold? I dare not ask; and baffled wit Droops—till sweet hopes begin to flit— Like butterflies that brave the cold— ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... of right 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 ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... the magic charm of poesy!" rejoined Sah-luma complacently.. "It makes the hours flit like moments, and long days seemed but short hours! ... Nevertheless 'tis time we were within doors and at supper,—for if we start not soon for the Temple, 'twill be difficult to gain an entrance, and I, at any rate, must be early in ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... 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 |
