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More "Butterfly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Why shouldn't we dress a little gayly? I am sure if we did we should be happier. True, it is a little thing, but we are a little race, and what is the use of our pretending otherwise and spoiling fun? Let philosophers get themselves up like old crows if they like. But let me be a butterfly. ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... acquiring and saving, that his old acquaintance, Mr. Winterblossom, tapping his morocco snuff-box with the sly look which intimated the coming of a good thing, was wont to say, that he had reversed the usual order of transformation, and was turned into a grub after having been a butterfly. After all, this narrowness, though a more ordinary modification of the spirit of avarice, may be founded on the same desire of acquisition, which in his earlier days sent him to ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... heaven, as we now understand these two actions, you must not infer from this that the sense of taste shall not be gratified in the blessed. It most certainly will be, as well as every other sense of the human body, though not by the corruptible food of the present life. When the butterfly was a caterpillar, it devoured green leaves with pleasure and avidity. They were its very life. But now that it is changed into a beautiful butterfly, it lives on the honey and exquisite perfume of flowers. ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... exclaimed, a little surprised, surveying her dress of palest and softest Indian muslin; for she looked to me far too much of a butterfly for such serious work. "Do you really mean it; or are you one of the ten thousand modern young ladies who are in quest of a Mission, without understanding that Missions are unpleasant? Nursing, I can tell you, is not all crimped cap and ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... of the tulip cup When blossoms clothe the trees, How sweet to throw the lattice up And scent thee on the breeze; The butterfly is then abroad, The bee is on the wing, And on the hawthorn by the road ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... Many's the weary night I've spent in bed thinkin' about you w'en I might 'ave bin snorin'. That reminds me. Did y'ever notice yer can niver tell exactly w'en yer drop off? I've tried all I know, but ye're awake one minit, an' chasin' a butterfly wi' a cow's 'ead the next. But that ain't wot I'm a-talkin' about. Paasch 'e's blue mouldy, an' couldn't catch a snail unless yer give 'im a start; an' if yer went ter Packard's, yer'd tell the ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... can't possibly know how slowly the time has gone. I am sure I could live all the rest of my life on a desert island if I had the Semper Fidelis crowd with me. Of course, Ruth helped a whole lot, but you know Ruth isn't a butterfly like I am. She has had so many cares and disappointments that she isn't as gay in her wildest moments as I am in my ordinary ones. Besides, it was so hard to be sure that I was doing and saying the right thing. I was so afraid of hurting some one's ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... titbit, Darwin took up a hump-backed position near at hand, his bright little eyes fixed on his friend's activities. Funny Face would nibble relishingly at his prune for a moment or so; then an altogether astonishing butterfly would flitter by just overhead. Funny Face, lost in ecstasy would gaze skyward after the departing marvel. This was Darwin's opportunity. In two hops he was at Funny Face's side. With great deliberation, but most ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... further and further from the historical fact on which it has been supposed to rest. Arguments derived from material things such as the seed and the ear of corn or transitions in the life of animals from one state of being to another (the chrysalis and the butterfly) are not 'in pari materia' with arguments from the visible to the invisible, and are therefore felt to be no longer applicable. The evidence to the historical fact seems to be weaker than was once supposed: it is not consistent ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feasts Excited the spleen of the Birds and the Beasts: For their mirth and good cheer—of the Bee was the theme, And the Gnat blew his horn, as he danced in the beam; 'Twas humm'd by the Beetle, 'twas buzz'd by the Fly, And sung by the myriads that sport through ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... Holyrood with him, and whose daughter he was about to marry, giving any sign of acquaintance to the disgraced preacher. And Knox was human: he loved the cold shade as little as any man, and the impertinences of all those butterfly courtiers moved him as such a man ought not to have been moved. He burst out suddenly upon the ladies who sat and whispered and tittered among themselves (no doubt) at his discomfiture. He would not have us think even ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... Indian dances, follows somewhat the lines of a Virginia Reel. The Indian maidens stand in a line facing each other, their blankets wrapped about them. The head couple, facing each other, spread wide their blankets behind them like great butterfly wings. Then they dance forward and back, forward and back, beckoning, retreating, gesturing, and finally dance off, with one blanket wrapped about two pairs of shoulders. Then the next couple, and so on. All sorts of fantastic steps, gestures, bendings, and swayings can be introduced. ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... for it. I'll forgive you, though. Say, are you going to see "Madam Butterfly"? You don't know? Well, I'm going tomorrow night with Jack. He asked me today when I called him up about the other. He has got seats in the second row. I'm going to put on all my best regalia. No, not the blue. A pink chiffon. You've never ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... butterfly, trailing an odd flavour of Pawkins with it, kept coming into that walk, though he did his best to keep his mind off it. Once he saw it quite distinctly, with its wings flattened out, upon the old stone wall that runs along the west edge of the ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... lithe, graceful, mirthful, was divinely dressed and in a fashion too young for her age, counting her twenty-five years as a wife. Nevertheless, she wore well a gown with small pink stripes, a cape embroidered and edged with lace, boots pretty as the wings of a butterfly. She carried in her hand a ...
— A Street Of Paris And Its Inhabitant • Honore De Balzac
... acting thus, intent on their work, slow in executing it, because of the immaturity of their structure, just as they walk slowly because their legs are still short, we feel intuitively that life is being elaborated within them, as a chrysalis slowly elaborates the butterfly within the cocoon. To impede their activity would be to do violence to their lives. But what is the usual method with young children? We all interrupt them without compunction or consideration, in the manner of masters to slaves who have no human rights. To show "consideration" ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... lower wings, in the form and extent of the yellow band, and in the size of the specimens. The most extreme forms, as well as the intermediate ones, are often found in one locality and in company with each other. A small butterfly (Terias hecabe) ranges over the whole of the Indian and Malayan regions to Australia, and everywhere exhibits great variations, many of which have been described as distinct species; but a gentleman in Australia ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... parallel is drawn between the life of man and the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly; but the comparison may be more just as well as more novel, if for its former term we take the mental progress of the race. History shows that the human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge, periodically ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... romanticism? After a long conversation, they receive this final definition. "Romanticism, my dear sir! No, of a surety, it is neither the disregard of the unities, nor the alliance of the comic and tragic, nor anything in the world expressible by words. In vain you grasp the butterfly's wing; the dust which gives it its color is left upon your fingers. Romanticism is the star that weeps, it is the wind that wails, it is the night that shudders, the bird that flies and the flower that breathes perfume: it is the sudden ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... haven't found it so yet," said Alice, "but when you have to turn into a chrysalis, you know, and then after that into a butterfly, I should think it'll feel a little queer, don't you ...
— Alice's Adventures Under Ground • Lewis Carroll
... verdict of time, nor feel that injustice has been done to Thamis or to Cawdor. There are singers of a day, but not less singers because they are of a day. The insect that flashes in the sunbeam does not survive like the elephant. The splendor of the most gorgeous butterfly does not endure with the faint hue of the hills that gives Athens its Pindaric name. And there are singers who do not sing. What says Holmes, with eager sympathy and pity, in one of his most familiar and ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... physical body is merely a temporary vehicle for the soul which the latter discards at the proper time. It has nothing to do with the real being of the soul. It is merely the shell which is discarded by the soul, as the chrysalis shell is discarded by the butterfly when it spreads its wings for its aerial flight into ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... surely must have wings—great, butterfly ones—only we are too dull to see them. You were exactly like one of my pictures come to life." He ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... vegetative form is here seen withdrawing in order that a higher manifestation of the spirit may take place. The same principle can be seen at work in the insect kingdom, when the caterpillar's tremendous vitality passes over into the short-lived beauty of the butterfly. In the human being it is responsible for that metamorphosis of organic processes which occurs on the path from the metabolic to the nervous system, and which we came to recognize as the precondition for the appearance ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... an endless monotony of pine trees, vividly green and far apart, into which Diane presently rode. A buzzard floated with uptilted wings above the sparse woodland to the west. A gorgeous butterfly, silver-spangled, winged its way over the saw palmetto and sedge between the trees to an inviting glade beyond, cleft by a shallow stream. Swamp, jungle, pine and palmetto were vocal with the melody of ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... forest-clad hills possessed a something that drew the mind open to their largeness and grandeur. Earth is always beautiful—always. Without colour, or leaf, or sunshine, or song of bird and flutter of butterfly's wing; without anything sensuous, without advantage or gilding of summer—the power is ever there. Or shall we not say that the desire of the mind is ever there, and will satisfy itself, in a measure at least, even with the barren wild? The heart from the moment of its first beat instinctively ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... continued the professor, speaking of this incident to some of his friends, "I was richly repaid for all my trouble and peril, for when I reached the foot of the mountain I captured a new and very rare species of butterfly." Multitudes of practical men cannot appreciate such devotion to pure science, but it is this absorbing passion and pure grit that enable the devotees of science to enlarge its ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... the floor at the holy name. "You are a fool, Angelique des Meloises, to speak thus to me! Do you know who and what I am? You are a poor butterfly to flutter your gay wings against La Corriveau; but still I like your spirit! women like you are rare. The blood of Exili could not have spoken bolder than you do; you want the life of a woman who has kindled the hell-fire ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... beautiful orange brown butterfly covered with dark spots, dancing here and there over the sylvan nook, and the next minute Dexter as he lay on his back felt cool, and began wondering while he looked straight up at the stars, ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... morning is like May. Yesterday I saw bluebirds and a butterfly; so this winter of a fortnight is over. I fancy a trifle less coughing in the camp. We hear of other stations in the Department where the mortality, chiefly from yellow fever, has been frightful. Dr. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... dream—that of awaking a joyful sympathy between himself and Cyrene through this highly congratulatory matter. She would smile upon him so divinely, so highly applaud his zeal, and begin to compare him favourably with that new butterfly, Repentigny, whose day must thenceforth come to ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... treasure of Franchard," replied her husband, "See, here are the first-fruits; a pine-apple, a dress for my ever-beautiful—it will suit her—trust a husband's, trust a lover's taste! Embrace me, darling! This grimy episode is over; the butterfly unfolds its painted wings. To-morrow Casimir will come; in a week we may be in Paris—happy at last! You shall have diamonds.—Jean-Marie, take it out of the boot, with religious care, and bring it piece by piece into the dining-room. We shall have plate at table! Darling, hasten and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... found the half-drunken servant arranging these packages under the direction of a secretary. These favours had been made for the occasion by a famous jeweller; a diamond pin of peculiar design, a gold death's head with diamond teeth and eyes surmounted by a butterfly and a caterpillar. The stones in each piece were worth a hundred dollars. They lay on a table in little open jewel boxes, fifty in a box, and each box contained five thousand dollars' worth of ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... struggle to save yourself. Eh? I see the fear of death in your eyes. You beat the air with your arms. You exert all your puny strength to struggle to live. Your hand is clutching my arm, lightly it feels as a butterfly resting there. Your chest is heaving, your tongue protruding, your skin turning dark, your eyes swimming. 'To live! To live! To live!' you are crying; and you are crying to live here and now, not hereafter. You doubt your immortality, ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... rigid form, and to the awful yet strangely beautiful face of the messenger of gloom, she had given the streaming hair, the sunken, cavernous but wonderfully radiant eyes of Moritz Retzsch's weird image of Death. A white butterfly fluttered upward, and in mid-air—neither descending nor drifting, but waiting—poised on outspread pinions, hovered the Angel of the Resurrection holding out his hands. Behind and beneath the Destroyer, rolled dense shadows, and all the light in this picture rayed out from the plumes ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... they had together been pursuing some slight thing, a butterfly, a bubble, and now, when it was under their hands, they saw that the thing itself was not what mattered. It was the race. They had kept step, and still together now, they had run into ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... to watch the polo, or else playing tennis with her at the Amusement Club. He dined with her every evening and escorted her to the dances, concerts or theatricals that filled the nights during the Season. He hardly recognised her in the gay social butterfly with seemingly never a care in the world; and she made him wonder every day if she had any love left for him or wanted him to have any for her. For she showed no desire to be sentimental and treated him very much as she had in the early days of their acquaintance. ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... circling swallows; and in a snug little alcove of the cottage you can read "The Butterfly" from a first edition; and then you can go sit in the orchard, white with blossoms, and see the butterflies that suggested the poem. And if your eye is good you can discover down by the lakeside the daffodils, and listen the while to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... pain. She had not looked so young, so fresh, so fragilely fair for many months. She wore a dress of corn-flower blue that deepened the violet of her eyes. In the mass of flax hued thistle-down that is her hair a blue argus butterfly completed the chord of colour. There was the faintest tinge of pink in her cheek applied with delicate art. Her dress seemed made of unsubstantial dream stuff—I believe they call it chiffon—and it covered her bosom and arms like the spray of a fairy sea. She had the air of an impalpable ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... shot their icy spires, And Chillan[193] trailed its smoke and smouldering fires. A glen beneath, a lonely spot of rest, Hung, scarce discovered, like an eagle's nest. Summer was in its prime;—the parrot-flocks Darkened the passing sunshine on the rocks; 10 The chrysomel[194] and purple butterfly,[195] Amid the clear blue light, are wandering by; The humming-bird, along the myrtle bowers, With twinkling wing, is spinning o'er the flowers, The woodpecker is heard with busy bill, The mock-bird sings—and all beside is still, And look! ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... no fool,— As good a heart as hers, but somewhat given To hunt the nearest butterfly, and light The fire of fancy without hanging o'er it The porridge-pot of practice. He shall ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... but carriages, with coronets and mitres emblazoned, guarded by the tallest and most obsequious of footmen, and driven by the fattest and most lordly of coachmen; also the neatest of broughams, adorned internally with pale pink and blue butterfly bonnets; dashing dogcarts, with neat grooms behind, mustached guardsmen driving; and stately cabriolets prance in, under the guidance ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... the marsh in which he swam—and thus in his humble way a physiologist too, depicts the habits, size, appearance of the beings whereof he has to treat;—traces this slimy reptile through the mud, and describes his habits filthy and rapacious; prods down this butterfly with a pin, and depicts his beautiful coat and embroidered waistcoat; points out the singular structure of yonder more important animal, the megatherium ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sure, Aunt Molly," she said, "that Phelim would rather you bought the butterfly, I'll take care of your subscription to ...
— The Turquoise Cup, and, The Desert • Arthur Cosslett Smith
... fresh toilettes that have bloomed but yesterday, or it may be this very morning, in the conservatories of Worth and Laferriere. The butterflies of this garden of sweets are the jaunty hats whose tender wings of azure or of rose have but just unfolded themselves to the light of day. My figure of "butterfly hats" has been ventured upon in the hope that it may be found somewhat newer than that of the "gentlemen butterflies" which the reporters of the press have chased so often and so long that the down ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... for aught I know,—certainly, they had fallen, like blades of grass at the sweep of the scythe, before the charge to which his spirit imparted its triumphant energy;—but, be that as it might, there was never in his heart so much cruelty as would have brushed the down off a butterfly's wing. I have not known the man to whose innate kindliness I would more confidently ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sake I must do nothing openly. As for defying Carmona to use his knowledge of my true name, and challenging him to fight, that must not be thought of. Monica's fair fame would never survive such a scandal, especially in Spain, where a girl's reputation is as easily damaged as the down on a butterfly's wing. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... delusions of our stupor cases. We presume that in each case they represent a fulfillment of a primitive human demand. In one of our cases a vision of Heaven and a conscious longing to be there was followed by a stupor. On recovery the patient compared her condition to that of a butterfly just hatched from a cocoon. No clearer simile of mental rebirth ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... 'ee," Vernon looked at the beautiful girlish face pensively, and thought—well, who can tell what a man thinks at such moments? Perhaps he was thinking of the hundred and one useless women of his class who, throughout the whole of their butterfly lives, had never won a single breath of gratitude from the ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... and to the world a Janet in whom were released all those longings hitherto disguised and suppressed, and now become insupportable! This was what the purchase meant, a change of existence as complete as that between the moth and the butterfly; and the realization of this fact, of the audacity she was resolved to commit made her hot as she gazed at the suit. It was modest enough, yet it had a certain distinction of cut, it looked expensive: twenty dollars was not cheap, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... introduced ourselves, I could not help thinking that there was a sort of hostility between the women. Certainly it was evident that there was as much difference in temperament as between the butterfly and the bee. ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... of a butterfly has its ichneumon parasite, a microscopic wasp, which lays its own egg within the larger one, which ultimately hatches a wasp ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... 'yes'! He come," said Toby, in awe. "An' what d'ye s'pose? He done buyed a heap of Corson's spec'mens an' paid him more'n a hundred dollars for 'em. And that ain't countin' that there dead-head butterfly ye ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... hastily attired herself in dry clothes, a single garment more filmy and daring than that she had worn to swim aboard the schooner, and from her mistress's store had borrowed jewels that transformed her into a beautiful little golden butterfly. ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... In the windward rolls against the storm-gusts one was pinned helplessly, like a butterfly, against the rigging. At such times, so great was the pressure one could not lift hand nor foot. Also, there was no need for holding on. As I have said, one was pinned against the ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... hands were too white and well cared for at the nails. His hair was pale brown, curling a little at the ends, and carefully brushed and looking as if it had been freshened by some faintest application of perfumed essence. Three pearl studs fastened his shirt front, and his necktie was tied in a butterfly bow. He displayed some of the nonchalant ease which wealth and position create, smiled a little on catching sight of the jersey worn by a lady who had neglected to fasten the back of her bodice, ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... the new much the same relation that the chrysalis bears to the butterfly. It was little more than an ordinary country town, the capital of a district comparable in size to a modern county. Pisistratus and his sons had built some temples, and had completed a part of the Dionysiac theatre, but the ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... flower. This flower was made by stringing the petals which were made of coral on very fine brass wire, also the leaves which were made of pure jade. She took this flower and placed it on the right side of her headdress. Then she opened another box and took from it a magnificent jade butterfly made in the same way. This was an invention of her own and it was done by carving the coral and jade into petals and leaves and boring holes in the lower ends through which brass wire was run. The other two boxes contained bracelets and rings of different patterns. ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling
... look at. "Now," cried Star, "I will go down-stairs and wait for Daddy Captain, and perhaps he will think I am a real fairy. Oh, wouldn't that be fun? I am sure I look like one!" and down the stairs she flitted like a golden butterfly. Once in the kitchen, the housewife in her triumphed for a moment over the fairy: she raked up the fire, put on more wood, and swept the hearth daintily. "But Ariel did such things for Prospero," she said. "I'm Ariel just the same, so I may ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... study of insect and animal life we gain some hint of what we have been and what we may become—something corresponding to the grub, a burrowing thing; to the caterpillar, a crawling thing; and finally to the butterfly, a radiant winged creature. ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... whiteness in that dark and miserable wilderness, no bigger than a man's hand, no bigger than a flower. 'There is something,' I said unwillingly; 'it has no shape nor form. It is a gossamer-web upon some bush, or a butterfly blown ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... yourself up in my affairs at all?' he went on. Again she made no reply, but the question set her thinking: why had she mixed herself up in this mysterious business? It was quite at variance with the usual methods of her gay and butterfly existence to meddle at all with serious things. Had she acted merely from a desire to see justice done and wickedness punished? Or was it the desire of adventure? Or was it, perhaps, the desire to ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... brougham. He saw a chariot in distress, a chariot such as would have become an Ondine by the waters of the Serpentine, and the very last sort of equipage that you could expect to see smashed in the Poultry. It was really breaking a butterfly upon a wheel to crush its delicate springs, and crack its dark brown panels, soil its dainty hammer-cloth, and endanger the lives of its young coachman in a flaxen wig, and its two tall footmen in short coats, worthy ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... what I've been trying to tell you? I wonder if you will? Or if I am too incoherent. I feel that perhaps I am. I started out to say things that were bubbling within me, and I am oddly reluctant to say them. I am like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. I am an explorer setting out upon a momentous journey. I am making an experiment that fascinates me. Yet I have regrets. I am uncertain. I am doing the thing which my nature and my intelligence impel me to do, ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... rowan-berries, mixed with heather and silvery-leafed honesty; a basket of the same rowan-berries occupied the centre of the round table; an Oriental scarf draped the ugly horsehair sofa, and a comfortable-looking rug was thrown over the shabby easy-chair. The fishing-tackle, butterfly-nets, pipes, and all other heterogeneous matters, were consigned to a small bare apartment, known as 'Michael's den,' and which soon ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... language, without the formality of an after all impossible description; to be, in fact, rather than to express; that is what Mallarme has consistently, and from the first, sought in verse and prose. And he has sought this wandering, illusive, beckoning butterfly, the soul of dreams, over more and more entangled ground; and it has led him into the depths of many forests, far from the sunlight. He would be the last to permit me to say that he has found what he sought; but (is it possible to avoid saying?) how heroic a search, and what marvellous ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... manifestations are conditioned by the opportunity that nature or art furnishes for his spirit to exercise itself. In the reading of poetry, for example, we seek the expression of ourselves. Our first emotion is, perhaps, a simple, unreflecting delight, the delight which a butterfly must feel among the flowers or that of a child playing in the fields under the warm sun; it is a delight wholly physical,—pure sensation. A quick taking of the breath, the escape of a sigh, inarticulate ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... admirers? You see through them, you say. Is it not possible that a lady who has the reputation of caprice,—a flirt, as the world is apt to call her,—though ever so brilliant, witty, and accomplished, may not attract the kind of men that can bear scrutiny, but only the butterfly race, fit for a brief acquaintance? Believe me, Marcia, there is a reason for everything, and, with all your beauty and fascination, you must yourself have the element of constancy, to win the admiration of the best and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... something touching in the self-abnegation of a tobaccoite who will devote five mortal minutes and the sweat of his refined intelligence, with the skill of his delicate fingers, to the preparation of a tiny capsule of the weed, which burns itself to ashes in five minutes more. There is a butterfly-beauty about the cigarette to which the cigar and the pipe can lay no claim—a summer charm to stir the dreamy rapture of a poet, and to excite the Lotus-eating philosopher even to analogy. Just as the suns, and flowers, and balmy zephyrs of a century have gone to form the gauzy, ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... strangely fascinated Nick's gaze, there was a hole through the gristle of his right ear, scarred about as if it had been burned, and through this hole the fellow had tied a bow of crimson ribbon, like a butterfly alighted upon his ear. ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... honeysuckle where the linnets nested, the mocking birds that sang all night long; the perfume of the jasmine, of the orange-blossoms, the pink flame of the peach trees in April, the ever-changing color of the mountains. And I remember Ninette, my little Creole mother, gay as a butterfly, carefree as a meadow-lark. 'Twas ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... market."—LOCKE: Joh. Dict. "By instructing children, the affection of which will be increased."—Nixon's Parser, p. 136. "He had a comely young woman which travelled with him."—Hutchinson's Hist., i, 29. "A butterfly, which thought himself an accomplished traveller, happened to light upon a beehive."—Inst., p. 143. "It is an enormous elephant of stone, who disgorges from his uplifted trunk a vast but graceful shower."—Zenobia, i, 150. "He was met by ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... history of Attraction, capillary Barley, to transplant, by Messrs. Hardy Beetle, instinct of Books noticed Butterfly, instinct of Calendar, horticultural ——, agricultural Columnea Schiedeana Dahlia, the, by Mr. Edwards Digging machine, Samuelson's Eggs, to keep Farm leases, by Mr. Morton Frost, plants injured by Grapes, colouring Green, German, by Mr. Prideaux Heat, bottom Heating, gas, by Mr. Lucas ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various
... all nature shows that it must be to the end of improvement and upward growth, the increase in real virtue, in knowledge, and in wisdom. Nature is a silent preacher which holds forth upon week-days as on Sabbaths. We see the acorn grow into the oak, the egg into the bird, the maggot into the butterfly. Shall we doubt, then, that the human soul, the most precious of all things, is also upon the upward path? And how can the soul progress save through the cultivation of virtue and self-mastery? What other ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... obliged, Mr. Bartlett," said Yates. "Of course Renmark went out there merely to show the difference between the ant and the butterfly. You'll find out what a humbug he is by and by, Mrs. Bartlett. He looks ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... stubborn sand-bank, without injury. Sand-martins are much smaller than any other species of hirundines, and also differ from them in colour, being what is termed mouse-colour, instead of black. They fly also in a peculiar manner, by jerks, somewhat resembling a butterfly. They are by no means so common as the other species; for there are few towns or large villages that do not abound with house-martins; few churches, towers, or steeples, but what are haunted by swifts; scarcely a cottage chimney that has not its swallow; whilst the bank-martins, scattered here ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... OF POE. Most people read Poe's poetry for the melody that is in it. To read it in any other way, to analyze or explain its message, is to dissect a butterfly that changes in a moment from a delicate, living creature to a pinch of dust, bright colored but meaningless. It is not for analysis, therefore, but simply for making Poe more intelligible that we record certain facts or principles concerning ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... with inestimably good things; that is, the act of dying, and not merely the being dead. It is no doubt as necessary to the nature of the soul, to its psychology, its soul-life, as the changes of the worm, chrysalis, and butterfly, are to the insect. And thus, as in all other things, where sin abounded, grace much more abounds, and even death, like a cross, is turned into ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... have only to remember how rare it is to find a perfect song, good to read and good to sing, combining the merits of Coleridge and Shelley with the capabilities of Tommy Moore and Haynes Bayly, to appreciate the unique and unapproachable excellence of Herrick. The lyrist who wished to be a butterfly, the lyrist who fled or flew to a lone vale at the hour (whatever hour it may be) "when stars are weeping," have left behind them such stuff as may be sung, but certainly cannot be read and endured by any one with an ear for verse. The author of the Ode on France and the ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... was rowed ashore by a boy who, for aught that either knew, might three months before have jostled him at some ill-favoured lunch counter. For in America, dreams of gold—not, alas, golden dreams—do prevalently come true; and of all the butterfly happenings in this pleasant land of larvae, few are so spectacular as the process by which, without warning, a man is converted from a toiler and bearer of loads to a taker of his bien. However, to none, one must believe, is the changeling ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... wishes to exhibit the embryo monarch in this particular stage of his development, and the scientific process proceeds with as little regard to the victim's wishes, as if he were indeed that humble product of nature to which the Poet likens him. 'There's a differency between a grub and a butterfly; yet your butterfly was a grub.' Just on that step between 'the casque and the cushion,' the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... looking back on my own boyish journal of that time. My mother made me keep a log, as I hope yours does. But it is strange to see how little of the action it tells. The truth is, I was nothing but a butterfly of a youngster. To save my conceit, the first lieutenant, Wallis, told me I was assigned to keep an eye on the after-battery, where were two fine old fellows as ever took the King's pay really commanding ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... attention to the most enticing caterpillars if the latter take refuge in a tuft of thyme, at a few inches above the ground. This is a great pity. If only the beetle could climb how rapidly three or four would rid our cabbages of that grievous pest, the larva of the white cabbage butterfly! Alas! the best have always ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... shall. You shall dance all the evening, if you like. I'll play the fiddle, and you and the minister—no, no, I don't mean the minister! Don't look like that! you and Deacon Weight shall dance together. It will be the elephant and the fl—butterfly. But I am going to do this, ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... fixed on the mammoth butterfly upon whose iridescent wings Asia was putting the finishing touches, but ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... and wheat buyer, wore a paper collar and a butterfly necktie, as befitted a man of his station in life. He was a short, squarely made Scotchman, with sandy whiskers much grayed and with a keen, in-tensely ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... be made a Fire Maker at this Council, and when the time came for the bestowing of rank Nyoda called for "Kamama the Butterfly" to stand and present her qualifications. Gladys stood, and before the initiation began asked if she might make a request. Nyoda nodded and Gladys asked if it would be possible for her to change her Camp Fire name. "State ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... rear nudged a ploughboy, and said in a low tone, "Jim! The old harnet out o' the 'ollow tree be in luck to-day. Wot'll he do with her, now he's ketched a butterfly?" ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... The memory was sweet but it was bitter too; and the bitterness rose and filled her heart. She threw her head back proudly, and laughed a strange, hollow laugh. "A bastard's bride, ha, ha! A fine tale were that for the parish gossips." A yellow butterfly lighted on her arm, and with a fierce frown on her face she caught it between her fingers. Then she looked pityingly on the dead wings, as they lay in her hand, and murmured between her teeth: "Poor thing! Why did you ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... have arrived at one conclusion. It is only because I have met so few men, that one dare make such an overwhelming impression on me. I rebel; and shall amaze Maman by becoming a social butterfly for a season. So, in future bring all your most charming friends to see me; but ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... me see: The world seems one e-nor-mous flower-garden, and Me the butterfly it all belongs to." She spake, and to confirm her words the airy thing went waltzing, sailing, and fluttering round the room, and sipping mamma every now and ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... freshness of a new day. Loch Barvas was ruffled into a dark blue by the westerly wind, and doubtless the sea out there was rushing in, green and cold, to the shore. The sunlight was warm about the house. The trout were leaping in the shallow brown streams, and here and there a white butterfly fluttered across the damp meadows. Was not that Duncan down by the river, accompanied by Ingram? There was a glimmer of a rod in the sunshine: the two poachers were after trout ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... Jook, however, was all that could be desired. The shyest of men—shy and proud as only an Englishman can be—he could not make up his mind to walk directly up to Kitty, as an American would do, as all the young Americans in the room would have done if Kitty had let them. But Kitty, flighty little butterfly as she seemed, had stores of tact and finesse in that little brain of hers, and the power of developing a fine reserve which had already wilted more than one of the young men of the house. For Kitty was none of your arrant and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... dining-room—"they would not behave so in the Palazzo Sansevero!" Then, without another word, she followed where she had pointed, so fast that her thin draperies fluttered behind the lithe lines of her figure like butterfly wings. On the threshold of the dining-room she paused, like the bad fairy at ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... An occasional butterfly drifted in and out through the patches of light and shade. And from all about rose the low and sleepy hum of mountain bees—feasting Sybarites that jostled one another good-naturedly at the board, nor found time for rough discourtesy. So quietly did the little stream ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... and pick orchids," Bertram suggested, leaning over the gate. "Just see how pretty they are! The scented white butterfly! It loves moist bogland. Now, Mrs. Monteith, wouldn't a few long sprays of that lovely thing look charming on ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... ribbons, and her kind old face, very pink and plump and charming, looked out pleasantly upon, the world. She wore her best mantle, heavily trimmed with jet bugles, and her alpaca skirt was looped up uncompromisingly with an old-fashioned skirt-hook made like a butterfly. Hung on one arm was her umbrella, and she carried her reticule in both hands for safety. So, with all her accoutrements on, she sat, pleasantly aware that she was at ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... all that had occurred since that day on the beach of Ringmanu when he first heard the sound and plunged into the jungle after it. Sagawa had protested. He could see him yet, his queer little monkeyish face eloquent with fear, his back burdened with specimen cases, in his hands Bassett's butterfly net and naturalist's shot-gun, as he quavered, in Beche-de-mer English: "Me fella too much fright along bush. Bad fella boy, too ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... answered her, "since being dressed as a butterfly does not prevent one from being an insect, and the best sustained preservation lasts at most till the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... morning light; on our left, foothills, and beyond these the mountains. We stopped at a Japanese tea-house to rest the jinrikisha men, and soon after, we came to a point in the landscape said to be represented in the opera of "Madame Butterfly." Reaching the Mogi, we found another tea-house, and we all alighted and roamed around the point, where we had a magnificent, far-reaching panorama. The descent was quite as enjoyable, and altogether we voted the ride an ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... poised on a wild-rose spray, As a child tripped by one summer day, And he thought: "How sorrowful she must be To know she can never have wings like me!" But the child passed on, with a careless eye Of the gay-winged, proud, young butterfly, While he fluttered about, as butterflies will, Sipping of honey and ...
— Pages for Laughing Eyes • Unknown
... spare time was spent almost entirely in the company of little Emily. I was never tired of attending on her. As was then the custom, she wore a little red mantle as a walking dress. One day we were out in the fields, when she ran off in chase of a butterfly. At the further end of the field a bull was grazing, having been turned out to indulge his sulky humour by himself. The sight of the red cloak fluttering over the green meadow suddenly excited his rage, and with a loud roar he came rushing up towards ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... inclined. She was supposed to be coming to see Nina, who was going to Paris in a few weeks to be "finished," but I am sure that my mother thought Owen would like her, and that she would like him. And as it happened, they were both botanists and butterfly-catchers, at least Miss Read knew a lot about butterflies, though her time for catching them had gone by, and they ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... brief hours, Ellice gave herself up to a happiness that she knew could be but fleeting. To-day she would be the butterfly, living and rejoicing in the sun. The darkness would come soon enough, but to-day was ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... prejudiced, may oppose its beginnings, there is no danger but they will at last fling around her conquering footsteps more lavish praises than ever greeted the opera's idol,—more perfumed flowers than ever wooed, with intoxicating fragrance, the fairest butterfly of the ball-room. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... of unsticking itself. Both figures, thou wilt find, seem to be in a contention, the bigger, whether it should pull down the lesser about its ears—the lesser (a chubby fat little varlet, of a fourth part of the other's bigness, with wings not much larger than those of a butterfly) whether it should raise the larger to a Heaven it points to, hardly big enough to contain ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... several minutes and the canoe drifted slowly on while the two boys gazed with delight at the novel beauty that surrounded them. The dark, stagnant water through which they drifted was nearly hidden from view by great white and gold water-lilies and the butterfly flowers of water hyacinths, the trees on either side stood like beautiful gray ghosts under their festoons of Spanish moss through which flashed the blazing hues of flowering orchids. Brilliant-hued paroquets and other birds flitted amongst the tree-tops, while to finish the delicious ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... event for wretches for whom the universe was reduced to a flooring of a few toises in extent, who were the sport of the winds and waves, as they hung suspended over the abyss; an event then happened which happily diverted our attention from the horrors of our situation. All at once a white butterfly, of the species so common in France, appeared fluttering over our heads, and settled on our sail. The first idea which, as it were, inspired each of us made us consider this little animal as the harbinger, which brought us the ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... most gaudy of the Ceylon Lepidoptera is the great black and yellow butterfly (Ornithoptera darsius, Gray); the upper wings of which measure six inches across, and are of deep velvet black, the lower ornamented by large particles of satiny yellow, through which the sunlight passes. Few ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... entertained a deep and secret hatred of the young prince, and set himself to destroy him; so, weaving a most curious net, Clarion was soon caught, and Aragnol gave him his death-wound by piercing him under the left wing.—Spenser Muiopotmos or The Butterfly's Fate (1590). ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... pressed a delicately flushed cheek to Norah's, and attempted a butterfly kiss, which she evaded ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... done?' the rose asked the butterfly. 'What have you done?' the mimosa blossom asked the little blue bird, whose wings fluttered amongst her leaves. 'You have taken love from me, love which is ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... course, and half petrified with horror though she was, she yet fluttered away from that stagnant water. But alas, in the very effort to escape, she had caught the eye of the Professor; he sprang up—pond, animalcule all forgotten in the chase of this extraordinary butterfly. The fairy's courage failed her: her presence of mind vanished, and the wild gyrations of the owl, who, too late, realised the peril of his companion, only increased her confusion. In another moment she was a prisoner under ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... to review all that had occurred since that day on the beach of Ringmanu when he first heard the sound and plunged into the jungle after it. Sagawa had protested. He could see him yet, his queer little monkeyish face eloquent with fear, his back burdened with specimen cases, in his hands Bassett's butterfly net and naturalist's shot-gun, as he quavered, in Beche-de-mer English: "Me fella too much fright along bush. Bad fella boy, too ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... thirty years. His cheerfulness was so infectious, that Sylvia already began to forget her gloom, and hurried away to do her part. Putting on a short, girlish gown, kept for scrambles among the rocks, she improvised a pinafore, and braided her long hair a la Morlena Kenwigs, with butterfly bows at the ends. When she went down, she found her husband in garden jacket, collar turned over a ribbon, hair in a curly tumble, and jackknife in hand, seated on the rug before a roaring fire, and a semicircle of apples, whittling and whistling like a very boy. They examined one another ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... you put the spider's web back in its place, that once has been swept away? Can you put the apple again on the bough, which fell at our feet to-day? Can you put the lily-cup back on the stem, and cause it to live and grow? Can you mend the butterfly's broken wing, that you crushed with a hasty blow? Can you put the bloom again on the grape, or the grape again on the vine? Can you put the dewdrops back on the flowers, and make them sparkle and shine? Can you put the petals back on ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... of the red sham to her skirt, Sissy was able to chaperon her senior all the more effectively at Crosby Pemberton's party. Irene danced like a thing whose vocation is motion. She was a twig in a rain-storm, a butterfly seeking sweets, a humming-bird whose wing beat the air with a very rhapsody of rhythm. She was on the floor with the first note Professor Trask struck, and she danced down the side of the little hall, when the waltz was over and all the other couples had seated themselves, as though the ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... He bent and kissed the hand he held, and said with tears saturating his words, just as tears do permeate speech sometimes: "Pshaw now, Little White Butterfly! I never was more pleased to hear anything in my life. Ma and I have talked for years of having some city children here for summer, but we've been slow trying it because we hear such bad reports from many of them, and it's natural for ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... as he carried his eyes from the contemplative stare with which they had been regarding the vagaries of a butterfly on the skylight. "What have ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... smaller than any other species of hirundines, and also differ from them in colour, being what is termed mouse-colour, instead of black. They fly also in a peculiar manner, by jerks, somewhat resembling a butterfly. They are by no means so common as the other species; for there are few towns or large villages that do not abound with house-martins; few churches, towers, or steeples, but what are haunted by swifts; scarcely a cottage chimney that has not its swallow; ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... there is but one woman in this State who feels the injustice of her position, she should not be denied her inalienable rights, because the common household drudge and the silly butterfly of fashion are ignorant of all laws, both human and Divine. Because they know nothing of governments, or rights, and therefore ask nothing, shall my petitions be unheard? I stand before you the rightful representative ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... almost silent and always high-bred dominance over her existence she accepted as the inevitable, even while she fretted helplessly. Without him, she would be tossed, a broken butterfly, into the gutter. She knew her London. No one would pick her up unless to break her into smaller atoms and toss her away again. The freedom he allowed her after all was wonderful. It was because he ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... unique way of looking at life, of seeing the humor of everyday things, which exactly suits the butterfly fancy ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... being, who yielded like the reed, to every gust of passion—this deep, clear, vigorous thinker! It was indeed a change to puzzle sager heads than that of Arvina! a transformation, sudden and beautiful as that from the torpid earthy grub, to the swift-winged etherial butterfly! He gazed at her, until she smiled in reply to his look of bewilderment; and then he met her smile with a ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... garden," Inez whispered, "where many a painted favourite has flitted for a few happy, summer hours, till winter came and the butterfly was broken," and, as she spoke, she dropped her veil over her face and ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... pretty fool her short day! Since, with her summer's sun, when her butterfly flutters are over, and the winter of age and furrows arrives, she will feel the just effects of having neglected to cultivate her better faculties: for then, lie another Helen, she will be unable to bear the reflection ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... seated either at the open windows of the second or third floor, or out on the pavement below. The city seemed to be exuding the soaked-in heat of the long summer's day. The women who floated by were dressed in the lightest of muslins; even the plainest of them gained a new charm in their airy and butterfly-looking costumes. The men walked bareheaded, waistcoatless, fanning themselves with straw hats. Here and there, as they turned into Shaftesbury Avenue, an immaculately turned-out young man in evening dress passed along the baked pavements ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... stretched away for acres of untenanted expanse, with not a skater to explore those dark mysterious coves, or strike across the slanting sunlight poured from clefts in the impendent hills. Inshore the substance of the ice sparkled here and there with iridescence like the plumelets of a butterfly's wing under the microscope, wherever light happened to catch the jagged or oblique flaws that veined its ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... however; for as the superintendent approached he, without altering his gaze or his attitude in the slightest particle, said with the utmost calmness: "Superb, are they not, my friend? What a pity they should be scentless. It is as though Heaven had created a butterfly and deprived it of the secret of flight. Walk on, please, without addressing me. I am quite friendly with that policeman yonder and I do not wish him to suspect that the elderly gentleman he is so kind to is in any way connected with The Yard. Examine the tulips. That's right. You came in your limousine, ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... ministry"; and des Lupeaulx, unable to keep from laughing, let the matter pass. The most harmless of Bixiou's jokes perpetrated among the clerks was the one he played off upon Godard, presenting him with a butterfly just brought from China, which the worthy man keeps in his collection and exhibits to this day, blissfully unconscious that it is only painted paper. Bixiou had the patience to work up the little masterpiece for the sole purpose ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... Then a butterfly came and sat on a cluster of heliotrope and waved his crimson-banded wings in the hot sunshine. Hastings knew him for a friend, and before his eyes there came a vision of tall mulleins and scented milkweed alive with painted wings, a vision ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... reaped an excellent harvest both of seeds and plants. Here as well as at every other place that we had landed upon within the tropic, the air is crowded with a species of butterfly, a great many of which were taken. It is doubtless the same species as that which Captain Cook remarks are so plentiful in Thirsty Sound. He says, 'We found also an incredible number of butterflies, so that for the space of three or four acres the air was so crowded with them, that millions were ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... to the presumption of Glaucus; he mentioned his name, but not more often than that of Clodius or of Lepidus. He affected to class them together as things of a low and ephemeral species; as things wanting nothing of the butterfly, save its innocence and its grace. Sometimes he slightly alluded to some invented debauch, in which he declared them companions; sometimes he adverted to them as the antipodes of those lofty and spiritual natures, to whose order that of Ione belonged. Blinded alike by the pride of Ione, and, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... him angrily, but was too sore and sulky to reply. Lester mildly summarized the situation. Coryston whistled. Then he deposited the butterfly-net and tin case he had been carrying, accepted a cigarette, and hoisting himself onto the corner of a heavy wooden pedestal which held the periwigged bust of an eighteenth-century Coryston, he flung an arm affectionately round the bust's neck, and sat ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... shirt-sleeves, carrying a butterfly-net and a botany-can. He goes straight up to the bookshelf and takes down a book, which he begins ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... of God will touch that man's heart and transform him into one of the holiest and most useful of men. It has often occurred in the past and will doubtless often occur in the future. There sits before you a woman, who is a mere butterfly of fashion. She seems to have no thought above society and pleasure and adulation. Why preach to her? Without the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, it would be foolishness and a waste of time; but you can never tell, perhaps this very night the Spirit of God will ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... unlucky mice, and (I do not regret to say) getting well stung by the bumble-bees. Others went after butterflies and birds' eggs in their seasons; and Tom found on Hazeldown, for the first time, the beautiful little blue butterfly with golden spots on his wings, which he had never seen on his own downs, and dug out his first sand-martin's nest. This latter achievement resulted in a flogging, for the sand-martins built in a high bank close to the village, consequently out of bounds; ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... rainbow?" Walter ceased his paddling for several minutes and the canoe drifted slowly on while the two boys gazed with delight at the novel beauty that surrounded them. The dark, stagnant water through which they drifted was nearly hidden from view by great white and gold water-lilies and the butterfly flowers of water hyacinths, the trees on either side stood like beautiful gray ghosts under their festoons of Spanish moss through which flashed the blazing hues of flowering orchids. Brilliant-hued paroquets and other birds flitted amongst the tree-tops, while to finish the delicious languor of ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... once thought to play a trick on Charles Darwin. They took the body of a centipede, the wings of a butterfly, the legs of a grasshopper and the head of a beetle, and glued these together to form a weird monster. With the composite creature in a box, ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... ran after the butterfly, but when the butterfly saw Pinkie Whiskers coming, he thought how nice it would be to have a ride on Pinkie Whiskers' back, so ...
— Hazel Squirrel and Other Stories • Howard B. Famous
... a difficult man to deal with," she replied, drawing her thick white eyebrows together. "But I like difficult men. That is why I admire Mr. Hay: he is not a silly, useless butterfly like that ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... who took charge of the family in her mother's place, could not. It was well that the girl had no evil tendencies and was, upon the whole, well-principled, warm-hearted, and good-natured, or she might have gone very grievously astray. As it was, she was now at seventeen a bright butterfly, flitting from one to another of the flowers of life, and sipping as much honey as she could from each. She was fond of all sorts of bright, pretty things, handsome clothes and jewelry included. She liked to sing ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... insisted. "It matters a lot. The point is that it isn't you at all. Some day you'll slough it the way a butterfly ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... It was that butterfly's beauty so in keeping with waltzing, darting about the garden, laughter and gaiety, and incongruous with serious thought, grief, and repose; and it seemed as though a gust of wind blowing over the platform, or a fall of rain, would be enough to wither the fragile body and scatter the capricious ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Wun-lee, combing her hair, Saw a blue butterfly float through the air— Saw a blue butterfly flicker and settle On an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... to him, and had entirely ceased to attract his attention. He was far more interested in the sight of a fair breeze stealing up the river after them than he was in the sight of the most beautiful flower, the most gorgeous butterfly, or the most dainty and brilliant colibri, for he knew that all these things he would see again a thousand times or more; but a wind that would relieve them of the labour of paddling in that scorching climate—ah! that was indeed a ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... footprints distinct in the soil, signifying that the lady had stood there a long time. She returned homeward, musing on what she had seen, as she might have mused on a rainbow or the Northern Lights, a rare butterfly or a cameo. ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... of mud in paper, and then drop it on the pavement. I shall buy a bundle of wood and tie a piece of cord to it, and when some one goes to pick it up, lo! it has vanished—not lost, but gone before. I shall go butterfly-catching, and catch some fish at Snob's Brighton (Lea Bridge). I shall finish up by having a whacking, tearing my breeches, giving a boy two black eyes, and then wake up on Monday morning refreshed and quite happy to make ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... a butterfly flits around a baby's cradle, it is believed to be either an angel or a baby's soul, and a like belief prevails in other parts of the world; and we have the classic personification of Psyche, the soul, as ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... of his passion in the tone of a man who would have a rival's life if he crossed his path. The elderly butterfly of the Empire came down with his whole weight on the poor poet, and tried to frighten and crush him by his self-importance. He grew taller as he gave an embellished account of his perilous wanderings; but while he impressed the poet's imagination, the lover was ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... transformation and knowledge of the growth of hidden things. The bud bursting into the glory of the rose, must, if there be feeling in a rose, undergo some such effort before it can make its beauty known; the butterfly but newly freed from the dull husk that hid its splendours, at first must feel the imperfect wings it stretches in the sun to be irksome to its unaccustomed sense. And so it was with Angela; she spread her half- grown ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... dance all the evening, if you like. I'll play the fiddle, and you and the minister—no, no, I don't mean the minister! Don't look like that! you and Deacon Weight shall dance together. It will be the elephant and the fl—butterfly. But I am going ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... them to the stage and found her the best place to sit and see the rehearsal. He made some one get chairs, and he sat with her chatting while men in high hats and overcoats and women in bonnets and fur-edged butterfly-capes came in one after another. Godolphin arrived among the first, with an ulster which came down to where his pantaloons were turned up above his overshoes. He caught sight of Louise, and approached her with outstretched hand, and Grayson gave up his chair to the actor. Godolphin ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... Diana stood silent, staring at her sister; then her big black eyes, which had been full of the deepest gloom, brightened. A butterfly passed the entrance to the summer-house, and Diana flew after it, chasing it with a loud shout and a gay, ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... hear his step, and there he is, bending through the lattice, from which he has thrust away the woodbine with unsparing hand, disturbing two bees and a butterfly. ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... any serious historical criticism of these stories would be to break a butterfly. So much as this even has been said only because these wretched fables have gone throughout the world, and it is time that they were swept away into the dust-heaps of history. They represent Mr. and Mrs. Washington as affected and priggish people, given to cheap moralizing, ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... fragrant viands, but as the knight will partake of none of them, in chagrin the lady takes a lute, which she touches with exquisite skill. He listens unmoved, till, casting away her instrument, she dances to him, circling round and round about him, flitting about his chair like a butterfly, until at length she sinks down near him and lays her head upon his mailed bosom. Upward she turns her face to him, all passion-flushed, her eyes brimming with love. Sir Roland falters. Fascinated by her unearthly beauty, he is about to stoop down to press ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... This message was accompanied by a curious little device like the letter C with a line drawn through it, and I said to myself: 'If this should prove to be a mark which "Ernest" used in signing his manuscript, something like Whistler's butterfly, I shall have a fine ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... her flounces all in commotion, her face wreathed with insipid smiles, and her hair done up in a marvellous combination of puffs, curls and braids under a tiny bonnet, that hovered over them like a butterfly just ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... had seen one earthly sight, The sun, the day; the stars, the night; Or tree, or butterfly, or flower, Or fish in stream, or bird in bower, Or woman, ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... to fragile silks and laces. Gillian kissed the top of his head, shook solemnly an insistent paw, and put him on one side. She moved to the dressing table and inspected herself critically in the big mirror. She looked with grave amusement. Was that Gillian Locke? She wondered did a butterfly feel more incongruous when it shed its dull grub skin. For so many years she had worn the sombre garb of the convent schoolgirl, the change was still new enough to delight and the natural woman within her responded to the fascination of pretty clothing. The dark draperies of the convent had ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... methinks that thou dost grow more unmannerly each day. Thou art as unthinking as the butterfly, else thou wouldst not have burdened my fore-wearied flesh with ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... much as you like, but that does not thin the darkness one bit. The unborn child has no more faculty or opportunity for knowing what the life upon earth is like than man here, in the world, has for knowing that life beyond. The chrysalis' dreams about what it would be when it was a butterfly would be as reliable as a man's imagination of what ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... dancing," Polly laughed. "Thanks, ever so much, Betty dear; I'll lend you my butterfly stockings when you go ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... of corruption. Through sunshine and rain, through the long days of summer, through the long nights of winter, for ever, for ever, Baby lies silent and dreamless under that waving grass. The bee will hum overhead for evermore, and the swallow glance among the cypress. The butterfly will flutter for ages and ages among the rank flowers—Baby will still lie there. Come away, come away; your cheeks are pale; it cannot be, we cannot believe it, we must not remember it; other Baby voices will kindle our life and love, Baby's toys will pass to ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... of Scott's becomes especially striking. Hetty and Dinah are in very much the same situation and condition as Effie and Jeanie Deans. But Hetty is a frivolous little animal, in whom vanity and silliness do duty for passion: she has no heart: she is only a butterfly broken on the wheel of the world. Doubtless there are such women in plenty, yet we feel that her creator persecutes her, and has a kind of spite against her. This was impossible to Scott. Effie has heart, sincerity, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... ballast, and we rose again. We ran along more than 120 feet, at a distance of one or two feet from the ground, and had the appearance of travelling in a sledge. The peasants ran after us without being able to catch us, like children pursuing a butterfly in ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... for the pieces of Bristol board which were to form the backs of the needlebook, and brought them to the library; and explained how room was to be left in the middle of each for a painting, a rose on one, a butterfly on the other; the writing to be as elegant as possible, above, beneath, and roundabout, as the fancy ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... home with Mistress Pauncefort, but Lady Annabel's little daughter was not in her usual lively spirits; many a butterfly glanced around without attracting her pursuit, and the deer trooped by without eliciting a single observation. At length she said, in a thoughtful tone, 'Mistress Pauncefort, I should have liked to have gone and seen the ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... Stephen walked with the dignity of a man close to the horse's head, Worm stumbled along a stone's throw in the rear, and Elfride was nowhere in particular, yet everywhere; sometimes in front, sometimes behind, sometimes at the sides, hovering about the procession like a butterfly; not definitely engaged in travelling, yet somehow chiming in at points with the ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... completely happy—the ability to forget all and enjoy the moment. I have watched you for years. It has been so in the past, and will be so in the future. Other men who see me, men born to the plane, have the quality—call it butterfly if you will—to enjoy the 'now.' It appeals to me—I am of their manner born." Their eyes met and she finished slowly, "It's injustice to you, I know; but I ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... had burst like a butterfly into space, crawled back into his cocoon and pondered upon the stars from a worm's eye point ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... abroad at the shooting star's season. The female bumblebees, which, by striking the protruding stigma before they jar out any pollen, cross-fertilize it, are the flower's chief benefactors, but one often sees the little yellow puddle butterfly about it. Very different from the bright yellow cowslip of Europe is our odd, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... ensconced amid so much of the old and hoary, were as if a stray hour from the nineteenth century had wandered like a butterfly into the ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... abundant and slightly-waving brown hair, that could only be parted, with the sweetest sorrow, in the centre of his well-shaped, almost philosophical head, and movements light and temperate as those of a meditative squirrel. Having just dined he was naturally in evening dress, with a butterfly tie, gleaming pumps, and a buttonhole of violets. He shut the door gently, glanced at his nice-looking grandmothers, and, walking forward very quietly and demurely, applied his eye to the telescope, lowering himself slightly by a Sandow exercise, which he had practised ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... stern and coarse old warrior before her in that public homage?.... it was not difficult to say what.... But why should that make Hypatia or any one else attractive? And the poor little child of nature gazed in deep bewilderment at a crowd of new questions, as a butterfly might at the pages of the book on which it has settled, and was sad and discontented—not with herself, for was she not Pelagia the perfect?—but with these strange fancies which came into other people's heads.—Why should not every one be as happy as they ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... Mayflower a mile or more in advance of the flag-ship New York, the merchant steamship Pedro hove in sight. The Mayflower suddenly swung sharply to the westward, and a moment later a string of butterfly flags went fluttering to ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... was she so late? True, it was a long way to come with a single paddle. With what skill and what endurance could those small hands manage a heavy paddle! It was very wonderful—such small hands, such soft little palms that knew how to touch his cheek with a feel lighter than the fanning of a butterfly's wing. Wonderful! He lost himself lovingly in the contemplation of this tremendous mystery, and when he looked at the moon again it had risen a hand's breadth above the trees. Would she come? He forced himself to lay still, overcoming the impulse to rise and rush round the clearing again. ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... in the company of little Emily. I was never tired of attending on her. As was then the custom, she wore a little red mantle as a walking dress. One day we were out in the fields, when she ran off in chase of a butterfly. At the further end of the field a bull was grazing, having been turned out to indulge his sulky humour by himself. The sight of the red cloak fluttering over the green meadow suddenly excited his rage, and with a loud roar he came rushing up ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... grown up under the south side of the garden wall; a hedge of butterfly-brown and saffron. They gave out a hot, velvet smell, like roses and ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... all so surprising. I did not expect it. We have lived so long and gone our own ways, and you have seemed until just lately so utterly content, that I quite forgot that anywhere in this butterfly little body there might be such a thing as a soul. Will you give ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... great cross, not to say an embarrassment, when she was gleefully rolling in pursuit of a charming red and gold butterfly, to find herself suddenly stopped short by an armed knight with his ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... voices from the hills told him that in this wide conflict his life was an insignificant fact, and that his death would be an insignificant fact. They portended the whirlwind to which he would be as necessary as a butterfly's waved wing. The solemnity, the sadness of it came near enough to make him wonder why he was neither solemn nor sad. When his mind vaguely adjusted events according to their importance to him, it appeared that the uppermost thing was ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... by some ingenious and lucky accident, and the colours are of such clear transparency that we think the whole of the variegated fabric may be blown away with a breath. The fairy world here described resembles those elegant pieces of arabesque, where little genii with butterfly wings rise, half embodied, above the flower-cups. Twilight, moonshine, dew, and spring perfumes, are the element of these tender spirits; they assist nature in embroidering her carpet with green leaves, many-coloured flowers, and glittering insects; in the human world they ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... his young descendant? No matter now! Behold, he is a light-hearted and airy child! Thought passes over his brow like a cloud in a summer sky, or the shadow of a bird over the sunshiny earth; and he skims away from the silent hall and his momentary reverie to fly a kite or chase a butterfly! ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... god, my idolized brother, my young, passionate nature, stimulated by that love of admiration which carries many a high and noble soul down the stream of folly to the whirlpool of an unhallowed marriage, I had rushed into this lifelong misery. Happily for me, this butterfly life did not last long. My ardent nature had another channel opened for it, through which it rushed with its usual impetuosity. I was converted, and turned over to ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... skimmed this tall grass without bending it, like a gigantic butterfly: not an obstacle was in sight; it was an ocean of ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... upper-class ladies who spend their time at cards, at teas, at the theater, who think of little but dress and gossip, or of the latest novels and music, who evade their natural duties of motherhood or give over care of home and children to hired servants, that they may be freer to live the butterfly life, are still too little rebuked by their hard-working sisters and by men. We must impress it upon all that the inheritance of money does not excuse laziness; if the pressure to earn a living is removed, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... served. In the center was a pyramid of spongecake in the form of a temple with melonlike sides, and on the top was an artificial rose with a butterfly of silver paper hovering over it, held by a gilt wire. Two drops of gum in the heart of the rose stood for dew. On the left was a deep plate with a bit of cheese, and on the other side of the pyramid was a dish of strawberries, which had ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... his expenses, though lavish, were so unostentatious, so regularly defrayed; he was so wholly the reverse of the character assigned to criminals, that it seemed as absurd to bring a charge of homicide against a butterfly or a goldfinch as against this seemingly innocent and delightful ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... shreds of our older sermons. The composition and harmony of the work, accordingly, is much like the pattern of that patch-work drapery that is sometimes to be met with in the mansions of the industrious, where a blue tree overshadows a shell-fish, and a gigantic butterfly seems ready to swallow up Palemon and Lavinia. The author has the merit merely of cutting out each of his figures from the piece where its inventor had placed it, and stitching them down together in ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... womanward, brave with machetes; on the divans Cuban senoritas—refugees at Tampa—dark-eyed, of course, languid of manner, to be sure, and with the eloquent fan, ever present, omnipotent—shutting and closing, shutting and closing, like the wings of a gigantic butterfly; adventurers, adventuresses; artists, photographers; correspondents by the score—female correspondents; story writers, novelists, real war correspondents, and real draughtsmen—artists, indeed; and a ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... root of anything except Self? You moth, you butterfly, you thread of floating gossamer! How can you understand the incalculable value of Self—of that which is all to me and nothing to you, or which, being yours, is everything to you and to me nothing? You are so young—you ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... nor glancing butterfly; They fled on rapid wings before the snow: Your sister lilies laid them down ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... to-day were admirers of her youthful beauty. In less than fifteen days she had regained that frank confidence, that childish chatter, which seemed for awhile to have been left behind in the narrow walls of the convent. It seemed as though the butterfly upon leaving its shell knew all the flowers at once. It was enough that she be given a moment of flight and an opportunity to warm herself in the golden rays of the sun, in order to throw off the rigidity of the chrysalis. New life shone out in every part of her young being. Everything ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... we find big, ugly fish as well as pretty little ones of strange shapes and lovely colours. There are several kinds of small Blennies in our rock-pools. The Eyed Blenny, or Butterfly Blenny is not very common along our shores, but may be seen now and again. It is only a few inches in length, with eyes like jewels, a kind of tuft over each eye, and a pretty spot ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... are two bodies—the rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call "death," is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Three months had elapsed, and the beautiful colours of Autumn just unfurled themselves in order to be struck at the first broadside of a November frost—the sun was shining so warmly, that the leaves had every reason to be ashamed of their yellow complexions; and a young lady—like a butterfly awakened by the brightness of the day—fluttered forward from the porch of Surbridge Hall, dressed in all the hues of the rainbow. A green bonnet, a pink pelisse, a red shawl, and lilac parasol, were scarcely in keeping with the sylvan scene on which she hurriedly entered. She was very ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... a far more imaginative boy. He stuck to the work of the farm as conscientiously as his brother did, but his attention was by no means of the same concentrated kind. A new butterfly, an uncommon insect, would be irresistible to him; and not unfrequently, when he went out with his gun to procure some game which Mr. Hardy had wanted upon the arrival of some unexpected visitor, he would come back in a high state of triumph ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... fascination, till at last, quite breathless and pink as a moss rosebud, Alice dropped upon a chair near her husband. He stood grim, stiff, and vexed, all the more because Peregrine had taken her fan and was using it so as to make it wave like butterfly's wings, while poor Charles looked, as the Doctor whispered to his father, far more inclined to lay ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had succeeded in recovering that frank confidence, that childish prattle, which seemed to have been benumbed between the narrow walls of the nunnery. It might be said that on leaving the cocoon the butterfly recognized all the flowers, for it seemed to be enough for her to spread her wings for a moment and warm herself in the sun's rays to lose all the stiffness of the chrysalis. This new life manifested itself in her whole nature. Everything she found good and ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... legal lore to Mr. Besant's varied and accurate literary equipment. The brilliant series of novels that followed includes 'Ready-Money Morti-boy,' 'My Little Girl,' 'With Harp and Crown,' 'The Golden Butterfly,' 'The Seamy Side,' and 'The Chaplain of the Fleet.' The latter story, that of an innocent young country girl left to the guardianship of her uncle, chaplain of the Fleet prison, by the death of her father, is delicately ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of our set have something to do! Either they are in the army, or in Parliament, or managing estates, but the women—well, they live a butterfly life. There seems to me no escape for them. Do what they will, unless they become suffragettes and smash windows or smack fat policemen, their life drifts one way. Charity?—it ends in a charity ball. Politics?—it means just garden-parties or stodgy week-ends at country ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... that those colours shall be arranged in a particular manner, forming imaginary figures or fancied resemblances to certain objects. Hence the peculiarities of their markings have been denoted by distinctive designations. What is termed 'the blue butterfly smut' was, for some time, considered the most valuable of fancy rabbits. It is thus named on account of having bluish or lead-coloured spots on either side of the nose, having some resemblance to the spread wings of a butterfly, what may be termed the groundwork of the rabbit's face being white. ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... change for her from the past! Her room was a small one, plastered, but unpapered, and with a few articles of furniture of the cheapest. The poor woman was too evidently in a state of frightful depression, and well she might be. Hers had been a butterfly existence, life all one Summer holiday, no hostages given to fortune, no bond taken against future wreck or change. Like the butterfly, she had roamed from flower to flower, sipping the sweet only, or, like the cricket, had merrily piped all the Summer through, thinking sunshine and ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... butter that kills the Beautiful," said Denzil Cantercot bitterly. "Many of us start by following the butterfly through the verdant meadows, ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... long wreaths of creamy foam,—and presently one or two light gusts of a rather chill wind warned him that he had best be returning homeward. While he yet hesitated, a leaf of paper blew towards him, and danced about like a large erratic butterfly, finally dropping just where the stick on which he leaned made a hole in the sand. He stooped and picked it up. It was covered with fine small handwriting, and before he could make any attempt to read it, a man sprang up from behind one of the rocky ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... 'Why did you mix yourself up in my affairs at all?' he went on. Again she made no reply, but the question set her thinking: why had she mixed herself up in this mysterious business? It was quite at variance with the usual methods of her gay and butterfly existence to meddle at all with serious things. Had she acted merely from a desire to see justice done and wickedness punished? Or was it the desire of adventure? Or was it, perhaps, the desire to be of service to His Serene Highness Prince Aribert? 'It is no fault of ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... and Innocence! The moment when the fatal fruit was eaten, They parted ne'er to meet again; and Malice Has ever since been playmate to light Gaiety, From the first moment when the smiling infant Destroys the flower or butterfly he toys with, To the last chuckle of the dying miser, Who on his deathbed laughs his last to hear His wealthy neighbour has become ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... against spiders and every insect in the known world with scarcely an exception. There is a horrid sensation created by their ugly forms that makes me wish them all to Jericho. The butterfly's wings are pretty, but he is dreadful ugly. The is no affectation in this, for my pride will not permit me to show this prejudice to any great degree when I can help it. I do not fear the little wretches, but I ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... cuckoo when April is fair, And her blue eye the brighter the more it may weep: The frog and the butterfly wake from their sleep, Each to its element, water ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the previous caterpillar lives on vegetable leaves, while the maggots of large flies require flesh for their food. What induces the bee, who lives on honey, to lay up vegetable powder for its young? What induces the butterfly to lay its eggs on leaves when itself feeds on honey?... If these are not deductions from their own previous experience or observation, all the actions of mankind must be ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... it is here! How lovely it is in the country! There are moments when I should like to be a fly or a butterfly and hide in the flowers," said ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... in full force without the thing produced being of the same kind as that which produced it. Very few creatures reproduce after their own kind; they reproduce something which has the potentiality of becoming that which their parents were. Thus the butterfly lays an egg, which egg can become a caterpillar, which caterpillar can become a chrysalis, which chrysalis can become a butterfly; and though I freely grant that the machines cannot be said to have more than the germ of a true reproductive system ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... the chrysalis, and taking a position on a branch of the tree, it discovered that instead of a caterpillar, it was now a beautiful butterfly. ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... completely deceive so many people for such a long time seems to prove him far cleverer than appears from any actual evidence furnished. If, however, this portrait is not in the artist's best manner, I can praise without reserve the picture of Lady Feo, a little Society butterfly, very frivolous on the surface, but concealing a lot of nice intuition and sympathy, and I welcome her as a set-off to the silly caricatures we commonly get of the class to which she belonged. Let me add that in the telling of this tale Madame ALBANESI ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... Tuberosa), is also known as White-root, and Butterfly-weed. It is a valuable remedy, well adapted to break up inflammations and disease of the chest. Dose—Of infusion, one to two ounces; of fluid extract, one-fourth to one-half teaspoonful; of the concentrated principle, Asclepin, one ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the butterfly, without volition or effort? Human appointments are different. Work is the inevitable, and with the proper tools, it ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... not Johnson's turgid style, That gives an inch the importance of a mile; Casts of manure a wagon-load around To raise a simple daisy from the ground; Uplifts the club of Hercules—for what?— To crush a butterfly or brain a gnat; Creates a whirlwind from the earth to draw A goose's feather or exalt a straw; Sets wheels on wheels in motion—such a clatter! To force up one poor nipperkin of water; Bids ocean labour with tremendous roar, To heave a cockle-shell upon the shore. Alike in every theme his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... oak-tree tall; And silver caskets at his left support Toy-gardens, Syrian scents enshrined in gold And alabaster, cakes of every sort That in their ovens the pastrywomen mould, When with white meal they mix all flowers that bloom, Oil-cakes and honey-cakes. There stand portrayed Each bird, each butterfly; and in the gloom Of foliage climbing high, and downward weighed By graceful blossoms, do the young Loves play Like nightingales, and perch on every tree, And flit, to try their wings, from spray to spray. Then see the gold, the ebony! ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... Yes, that's me, I mean that was me, only now I've come out like the butterfly out of a grub. (Aside.) I forgot that ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand
... and from infancy up we do this thing, but the cause can not be in any loathsomeness which its presence occasions in the mind, for we perceive the same boy destroying with measured torture the gaudiest butterfly ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... makes a butterfly gesture—"M. Hammerstein came, and just like that"—a duplicate gesture—"I made up my mind that I would come here. If his offer to me had been seven days later I should not have signed, and if I had not I should undoubtedly never have come, for a contract that I might have signed to go elsewhere ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... flower transported cries. "Not to myself alone I bud and bloom; With fragrant breath the breezes I perfume, And gladden all things with my rainbow dyes. The bee comes sipping, every eventide, His dainty fill; The butterfly within my cup doth ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... let us kiss each other! But, O tell me, where shall be our meeting? In thy garden, love, or in my garden? Under thine or under mine own rose-trees? Thou, sweet soul, become thyself a rose-bud; I then to a butterfly will change me; Fluttering I will drop upon the rose-bud; Folks will think I'm hanging on a flower, While a lovely maiden I ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... sight. The crimson lamps of the magnetic ray bloomed like huge desert flowers on the sand two thousand feet below us; the rays flamed up with the glory of an Italian sunset and, poised in space like a dark butterfly, floated the huge platform bathed in its rosy light. It was beautiful. It was unbelievable. It was horrible. I gazed, fascinated. When would Fraser reach the lamp? When would he turn it on? I stared at the dark shadow that I knew was the laboratory building. My eyes strained through ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... yellow"—we must say what red and what yellow, and how much of each. A magenta-coloured dahlia and a lemon put together would set, I should think, any teeth on edge; yet ripe corn goes well with poppies, but not too many poppies—while if one wing of our butterfly were of its present yellow and the other wing of the same scarlet as the spot, it would be an ugly object instead of one of the delights of God. It is interesting, it is fascinating to take the hint ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... being a novel-reader. It is not in the nature of a woman. The crown of woman's character is her devotion, which incarnate delicacy and tenderness exalt into perfect beauty of sacrifice. Those qualities could no more live amid the clashings of indiscriminate human passions than a butterfly wing could go between the mill rollers untorn. Women utterly refuse to go on with a book if the subject goes against their settled opinions. They despise a novel—howsoever fine and stirring it may be—if there is any taint of unhappiness to the favorite ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... weapon, playing with the lightness of a sun-beam, had evaded a stroke of the great flail and touched for an instant the shoulder of its wielder. Had he put a pound more force into the thrust—A groan crept down the Danish line when the bright blade rose, as lightly as it had fallen, and continued its butterfly dance. It consoled them a little, however, that no cheer went up from the English,—only a low buzz that was half of ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... above stairs or on the street, and the birds came out of the trees to take a peep at him. One of these garments was a frock of silk covered with golden dragons, lotus-flowers, and gilded fringes; and with it he wore a golden butterfly with jeweled wings on his ...
— Little Sky-High - The Surprising Doings of Washee-Washee-Wang • Hezekiah Butterworth
... professor producing his revolver, a weapon that might have proved fatal to a butterfly, but certainly would not be of any effect against the shaggy foes they ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... is always so pleasant and kind, So gentle in manner, so humble in mind, E'en the worms at her feet She would never ill-treat, And to Bird, Bee, and Butterfly always is sweet." ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... boy! Me boy!" he said tenderly. "The old house at Exham is not a futile ruin. 'Tis the cocoon that gave birth to the butterfly wings of a great hope. Look up, Still! You've friends with you till ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... skater to explore those dark mysterious coves, or strike across the slanting sunlight poured from clefts in the impendent hills. Inshore the substance of the ice sparkled here and there with iridescence like the plumelets of a butterfly's wing under the microscope, wherever light happened to catch the jagged or oblique flaws that veined its ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... by tubers under the hot climate of St. Domingo vary much; Sir R. Schomburgk gives the case of the "Butterfly variety," which the second year produced on the same plant "double and single flowers; here white petals edged with maroon; there of a uniform deep maroon." (11/77. 'Journal of Proc. Linn. Soc.' volume 2 Botany page ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... tell but that very night, the Spirit of God will touch that man's heart and transform him into one of the holiest and most useful of men. It has often occurred in the past and will doubtless often occur in the future. There sits before you a woman, who is a mere butterfly of fashion. She seems to have no thought above society and pleasure and adulation. Why preach to her? Without the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, it would be foolishness and a waste of time; but you can never tell, perhaps this very night the Spirit of ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... have a yellow streak." His lip curled as he studied the pallid features of the heir to the Van Cleft millions. Fearless himself, he could still understand the tremors of this care-free butterfly: yet he knew he must crush the dangerous thoughts which were developing. "If you mistrust me, hustle for yourself. You have the death-certificate, the services will be over in a few days, and then you will have enough money to live on your father's yacht or terra firma for the rest of your life, ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... means of subsistence for herself and her family. When she first returned to Cartside a few religious friends called to welcome her home. The gay and wealthy part of her former acquaintances, who, like the butterfly, spread their silken wings only to bask in the warmth of a summer sun, found not their way to the lonely cottage of an afflicted widow. Her worth, though in after-life rendered splendid by its own fruits, was at this time hidden, excepting ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... come to me at last, Prince Cruel," she said. "Butterfly! Well, and am I not to kiss your hand?" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... closed, I could see that she was already asleep, and her calm and reasonable sleep reminded me of her agitated and unreasonable life; and I stood looking at her, at this poor butterfly who was lying here all alone, robbed by her friends and associates. But she slept contentedly, having found a few francs that they had overlooked amid the bedclothes, enough to enable her to pass her evening at the Elysee! The prince might be written to; but he, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... the glory of that Being who made and preserves you, and before whom you must stand to be judged. Made in His image, with an immortal soul, you might dwell forever with the Redeemer, in the mansions he has gone to prepare. But, like the butterfly, you fritter away your earthly existence, and, by so doing, throw away the only cup of real, unadulterated pleasure of this present life; and, when Time, with all its fleeting joys, has passed away forever, where, oh, where! do ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... reascended the stairs towards the terrace. The white horse was still galloping in the direction of the Loire, at the extremity of which, melting into the vapors of the water, a little sail appeared, wave-balanced like a water-butterfly. "Oh!" cried the musketeer, "only a man who wants to fly would go at that pace across plowed lands; there is but one Fouquet, a financier, to ride thus in open day upon a white horse; there is no ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... on the elm are seen, The crawling wretches, like its leaves, are green; Ere chill October shakes the latest down, They, like the foliage, change their tint to brown; On the blue flower a bluer flower you spy, You stretch to pluck it—'tis a butterfly; The flattened tree-toads so resemble bark, They're hard to find as Ethiops in the dark; The woodcock, stiffening to fictitious mud, Cheats the young sportsman thirsting for his blood; So by long living ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... heart I must have a fixed determination, and not a mere fluctuating and soon broken intention. I must have a steadfast affection, and not merely a fluttering love, that, like some butterfly, lights now on this, now on that, sweet flower, but which has a flight straight as a carrier pigeon to its cot, which shall bear me direct to God. And I must have a continuous realisation of my dependence upon God, and of God's ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Sage, Regnard, Piron, Marmontel, and even J.-J. Rousseau, and gave it a body and a living interest, till it became the comedie-vaudeville, and then, discarding even the little snatches of song, the couplets that still marked its origin, spread its butterfly wings as the modern ...
— Bataille De Dames • Eugene Scribe and Ernest Legouve
... through life on stumps instead of legs? The boyish officer—why should he have died? The little sixteen-year-old soldier who had been blinded and who sat all day by the phonograph, listening to Madame Butterfly, Tipperary, and Harry Lauder's A Wee Deoch-an'-Doris—why should he never see again what I could see from the window beside him, the winter sunset over the sea, the glistening white of the sands, the flat line of the surf as it crept in to ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... than mortal beauty ever really be his—his in the common prose of possession that can never be disassociated with marriage—the prose that is to the delicate subtle beauty of love, what the rough touch is to the wings of the butterfly, the bloom of ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... dear friend,' said he, 'this is a sublime moment! To see you, the gay companion, the good fellow, the butterfly, I may say, of other days, a member of this great body is certainly soul-stirring! So you have realized your ambition? What next? The Senate? And then—then?' he pointed upward, 'higher yet? and still higher? Ha! The White House? Who knows?' he ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... of affection and aspiration, its flight must of necessity be higher. Hence the high rank of those strains of song which the soul gives forth when stirred by affection, by love to the children of God, whether they be addressed by Wordsworth to a butterfly, by Burns to a mouse, or by Byron to a friend. You have in English eight brief lines which for this kind of song are a model from their simplicity, tenderness, ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... or none had known and loved you in the world: May be! flower that's full-blown tempts the butterfly, not flower that's furled. But more learned sense unlocked you, loosed the sheath and let expand Bud to bell and out-spread flower-shape at the least warm touch of hand —Maybe throb of heart, beneath which,—quickening farther than it knew,— Treasure oft was disembosomed, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... in a wife, is not a butterfly of the sunshine, not a giggling nonentity, not a painted doll, not a gossiping gadabout, not a mixture of artificialities which leave you in doubt as to where the humbug ends and the woman begins, but an earnest soul, one that cannot only laugh when you laugh, but ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... the idea of the Soul (the Life) awakened by Love, grasping too soon and impatiently, then losing it, and, unable to rest, struggling on through severe toils and labours till her hopes are crowned even at the gates of death. Psyche, the soul or life, whose emblem is the butterfly, thus even in heathen philosophy strained towards the higher Love, just glimpsed ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... inexpressible, the incomprehensible God. His terrible hand swirls, with unresting power, yonder innumerable congregation of suns in their mighty orbits, and yet stoops, with tender touch, to build up the petals of the anemone, and paint with rainbow hues the mealy wings of the butterfly. ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... the disturbed history of their father and mother at rest as well; his conscience in relation to the marriage likewise at rest. Chillon had a wife. Her writing of the welcome to poverty stirred his knowledge of his wife's nature. Carinthia might bear it and harden to flint; Henrietta was a butterfly for the golden rays. His thoughts, all his energies, were bent on the making of money to supply her need for the pleasure she flew in—a butterfly's grub without it. Accurately so did the husband and lover read his wife—adoring ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... already began to forget her gloom, and hurried away to do her part. Putting on a short, girlish gown, kept for scrambles among the rocks, she improvised a pinafore, and braided her long hair a la Morlena Kenwigs, with butterfly bows at the ends. When she went down, she found her husband in garden jacket, collar turned over a ribbon, hair in a curly tumble, and jackknife in hand, seated on the rug before a roaring fire, and a semicircle ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... than the rest, gathered more flowers than any of them. On being praised by Venus, her companions, being envious of her, told the goddess that Astery had been assisted by Cupid, Venus's son, in culling the blossoms. For this supposed offence she was immediately turned by Venus into a butterfly, and her wings, which before were white, were stained with the colours of all the flowers she had gathered, "for memory of her pretended crime, though crime none ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... smiled, these two, who had never felt more than the merest butterfly wings of love brushing them, light as lashes. No word between them, only an unfinished sweetness, waiting to ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... little white feet were certainly much prettier to look at. "Now," cried Star, "I will go down-stairs and wait for Daddy Captain, and perhaps he will think I am a real fairy. Oh, wouldn't that be fun? I am sure I look like one!" and down the stairs she flitted like a golden butterfly. Once in the kitchen, the housewife in her triumphed for a moment over the fairy: she raked up the fire, put on more wood, and swept the hearth daintily. "But Ariel did such things for Prospero," she said. "I'm Ariel just the same, so I ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... us that this poem is not built broadly on the human heart; there is too much discussion about the difficulty of becoming a Christian, and the subtile genius flits so quickly through the lines that an ordinary butterfly-net does not catch it. That is well for the genius. But we are of opinion that the human heart will always find in this great poem the solemn and glorious things that belong to it, and more and more so as new and clearer thought is born into the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... rare and beautiful butterfly fluttered close over Mr. Medland's head. He paused and watched it for a moment. Then he looked carefully round him: no one was in sight: the butterfly settled for a moment on a flowerbed. Mr. Medland looked round again. Then he cautiously lifted his soft hat ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... the bee-maggots; in the same way butterflies live on honey, but the previous caterpillar lives on vegetable leaves, while the maggots of large flies require flesh for their food. What induces the bee, who lives on honey, to lay up vegetable powder for its young? What induces the butterfly to lay its eggs on leaves when itself feeds on honey?... If these are not deductions from their own previous experience or observation, all the actions of mankind ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... not, then, ask too much of history. The more beautiful is the dawn, the less one can describe it. The most beautiful things in nature, the flower and the butterfly, should be touched ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... "It's certainly breaking a butterfly," agreed Raymonde. "I'm afraid there's something seriously wrong with Mademoiselle. She's completely altered this last week. She never used to worry about things, and she's suddenly turned as fussy ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... first pulse of the new strength, shaking itself free from the old mouldy remnants of earth-garments, that it may begin in freedom the new life that grows out of the old. The caterpillar dies into the butterfly. Who knows but disease may be the coming, the keener life, breaking into this, and beginning to destroy like fire the inferior modes or garments of the present? And then disease would be but the sign of the salvation of fire; of the agony of the greater life to lift us to itself, out of that ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... well cared for at the nails. His hair was pale brown, curling a little at the ends, and carefully brushed and looking as if it had been freshened by some faintest application of perfumed essence. Three pearl studs fastened his shirt front, and his necktie was tied in a butterfly bow. He displayed some of the nonchalant ease which wealth and position create, smiled a little on catching sight of the jersey worn by a lady who had neglected to fasten the back of her bodice, and strove to decipher the impression the faces conveyed to him. ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... pictures of General Kitchener, William Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini. Against one wall was a plaster of Paris plaque of an O'Callahan in a Roman helmet. Near it was a violent oleograph of a lemon-coloured child assaulting an inflammatory butterfly. This was Dulcie's final judgment in art; but it had never been upset. Her rest had never been disturbed by whispers of stolen copes; no critic had elevated his ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... come to me at last, Prince Cruel,' she said. 'Butterfly! Well, and am I not to kiss ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... end? He loved a will-o'-the-wisp; he had married a butterfly. Why continue to play the martyr and follow the fruitless path of rectitude? Hadn't she said, "I can only live once, and so I shall make life spin whichever way I want it to go?" He could only live once, and if life was not to spin with her, let it spin without her. "Who cares?" he said ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... outlook—were alike unimpeachable; and since he had lamentably failed in this respect, she never ceased to reproach him. Diane she regarded with chronic disapprobation, exaggerating all her faults and opposing her joy-loving, butterfly nature with an aloofly ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... as the founder puts his old bronzes into the melting pot in order afterwards to cast them in a mould whence the metal will issue in a different shape, so life liquefies the grub, a mere digesting machine, now thrown aside, and out of its running matter produces the perfect insect, bee, butterfly or beetle, the final ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... the nectar, hustling the noisy honey-eaters and the querulous sun-birds. The radiant blue butterfly sips and is gone, or if it be his intent to pause, tightly folds his wings on the instant of settling, and is transformed from a piece of living jewellery to a brown mottled leaf caught edgeways among the red flowers. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... beneath the harrow knows Exactly where each tooth-point goes. The butterfly beside the road Preaches contentment to ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... sense of the beautiful by looking at something which is beautiful; and there is much around us which costs us nothing to look at were we to observe it—the cloud, the sunlight, the tree, the flower, a butterfly—anything of that kind studied for a few minutes each day would continue to develop in man's mind the sense of the beautiful. We should also appreciate carefully our actions and govern them and measure them, as to whether they are just to others—a matter which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... she said, with pretty diffidence, "I would like to thee Butterfly Thenter." And she blushed like the inside of those pink ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... dropped from the sky to the desert below as softly as a butterfly alighting on a flower, and stood there in all his gracious whiteness. And on his back was the veiled ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... to see me alone, my child?" he said, seeing a faint trembling like that of a butterfly beginning in her. "All you say to me will be under the seal of confession. It will never ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... part of his body were attached the tail and flukes of a shark. To conceal these monstrous appendages he wore over his shoulders a kihei of kapa and allowed himself to be seen only while in the sitting posture. He sometimes took the form of a worm, a moth, a caterpillar, or a butterfly to escape the hands of his enemies. On land he generally appeared as a man squatting, after the manner of a Hawaiian gardener while ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... coming from Noirmoutiers, laden to the very edge with white salt sparkling all over with shining spangles, and worked by picturesque crews; men with the great three-cornered hat of the Breton salt-worker, and women whose great cushioned caps with butterfly wings were as white and glittering as the salt. Then there were coasting vessels like floating drays, their decks piled with sacks of flour and casks; tugs dragging interminable lines of barges, or perhaps some three-master ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... say, a large part in my life during my childhood, as did also the flies, beetles and lady-bugs and all the insects that are found upon flowers and in the grass. Although it gave me a great deal of pain to kill them, I was making a collection of them, and I was almost always seen with a butterfly net in my hand. Those flying about in our yard, that had strayed our way from the country, were not very beautiful it must be confessed, but I had the garden and woods of Limoise which all the summer long was a hunting-ground ever full of ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... face of these brilliant strangers a sudden and unexpected timidity came upon him. He had heard of a cheap popular hotel, much frequented by the returning gold-miner, who entered its hospitable doors—which held an easy access to shops—and emerged in a few hours a gorgeous butterfly of fashion, leaving his old chrysalis behind him. Thence he inquired his way; hence he afterwards issued in garments glaringly new and ill fitting. But he had not sacrificed his beard, and there ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... arresting its flight, hovered waiting. So soon as I came under its radiance, it flew slowly on, lingering now and then above spots where the ground was rocky. Every time I looked up, it seemed to have grown larger, and at length gave me an attendant shadow. Plainly a bird-butterfly, it flew with a certain swallowy double. Its wings were very large, nearly square, and flashed all the colours of the rainbow. Wondering at their splendour, I became so absorbed in their beauty that I stumbled over a low rock, and lay stunned. When I came to myself, the ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... not afraid of her, are you? You never seemed so before. I thought—I thought you and she were rather good friends." There was a vague tinge of sarcasm in her words and tone but like a wobbly legged pup trying to catch a butterfly he mentally leaped at this offering and began cudgeling his memory in quest of women who ran chocolate shops. Could it be that she was the daughter of the widow Haynes who owned the Bon-Ton in Detroit? Impossible! The widow was ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... slender poplar Shiver aloft in air their rustling leaves. Cool breaths the rising breeze, and with it wakes The worn out spirit from its state of stupor. The lazy boy springs from his mossy bed, To chace the gaudy tempting butterfly, Who spreading on the grass its mealy wings, Oft lights within his reach, e'en at his seer, Yet still eludes his grasp, and o'er his head Light hov'ring round, or mounted high in air Temps his young eye, ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... but here and there one flamed out like a gold or red torch among the green, and all the way-sides were blue and gold with asters and golden-rod. It was a very warm morning for the season. When they stopped at one of the stations, a yellow butterfly flew in through an open window and flitted airily about the car. Maria removed her coat, with the solicitous aid of her companion. She cast a conscious glance at the orange and blue ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... gifts, but of more tranquil and phlegmatic composition. But who is ignorant that there is a class of minds characterized by qualities like those I have mentioned; minds with many bright and even beautiful traits; but aimless and fickle as the butterfly; that settle upon every gayly-colored illusion as it opens into flower, and flutter away to another when the first has dropped its leaves, and stands naked in the icy ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... through the long, long summer hours, The golden light should lie, And thick young herbs and groups of flowers Stand in their beauty by. The oriole should build and tell His love-tale, close beside my cell; The idle butterfly Should rest him there, and there be heard ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... or bein' pleased." And what to make of it he didn't know. Then Polly's cap was about the loveliest thing, next to Polly herself, he had ever seen. It was more like a May blossom than anything else, or a beautiful butterfly on the top of a water-lily. In fact, all the rural images of a rude but not inartistic mind came and went as this country boy thought of his beautiful Polly. As he ploughed the field, if he saw a May-blossom in the hedgerow, it reminded him ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... with my dancing," Polly laughed. "Thanks, ever so much, Betty dear; I'll lend you my butterfly stockings when you go up to ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... of Gaiety and Innocence! The moment when the fatal fruit was eaten, They parted ne'er to meet again; and Malice Has ever since been playmate to light Gaiety, From the first moment when the smiling infant Destroys the flower or butterfly he toys with, To the last chuckle of the dying miser, Who on his deathbed laughs his last to hear His wealthy neighbour has ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... was tied under her chin with black ribbons, and her kind old face, very pink and plump and charming, looked out pleasantly upon, the world. She wore her best mantle, heavily trimmed with jet bugles, and her alpaca skirt was looped up uncompromisingly with an old-fashioned skirt-hook made like a butterfly. Hung on one arm was her umbrella, and she carried her reticule in both hands for safety. So, with all her accoutrements on, she sat, pleasantly aware that she was at once self-respecting ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... his hands as they turned the pages; they were clever and kind, she thought, and she wondered if he was an artist or a doctor. Those fingers might set a butterfly's wing, and yet they seemed very strong. She did not know she had sighed until he said, "Am ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... him. "You did it anyhow. And in the second place you got me out of a villainous bad temper and turned an ugly goblin into a very happy butterfly. I'm downright ashamed of myself for being so horrid about Rose de Vigne. She isn't at all a bad sort though she is so impossibly beautiful. Your brother is going to dance with her now. See! There ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... the old Morris chair and smoke and watch her make lacey stuff in a little, round frame. Battenberg, she said it was. He loved to see her fingers manipulate the needle and the thread, and take wonderful pains with her work—but once she showed him a butterfly whose wings did not quite match, and he pointed it out to her. She had been listening to him tell a story of Indians and cowboys and with some wild riding mixed into it, and—well, she used the wrong stitch, but no one would notice it in a thousand ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... time and mellowing, the butterfly eventually merges from the chrysalis; and it was with rapturous delight early June saw us exchange Camp Dodge for Camp Mills, Long Island! We were now on the shores of the Atlantic, and would soon tread the deck of our ship of dreams—a transport ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... the treasure of Franchard," replied her husband, "See, here are the first-fruits; a pine-apple, a dress for my ever-beautiful—it will suit her—trust a husband's, trust a lover's taste! Embrace me, darling! This grimy episode is over; the butterfly unfolds its painted wings. To-morrow Casimir will come; in a week we may be in Paris—happy at last! You shall have diamonds.—Jean-Marie, take it out of the boot, with religious care, and bring it piece by piece into the dining-room. We shall have plate at table! Darling, hasten and prepare ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... perilous escape, she made a second, dashed through La Vendee, embarked at St. Malo for Dunkirk, was captured by the fleet of the Parliament, was released by the Governor of the Isle of Wight, unable to imprison so beautiful a butterfly, reached her port at last, and in a few weeks was intriguing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... Arranged motion-picture presentations for the Famous Players-Lasky Theatres. In association with Ben Ali Haggin produced several tableaux, including "Simonetta," "Dubarry," and "The Green Gong," which were presented in many of the principal cities. Staged the musical comedy "Lady Butterfly," at ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... to Yen-ping he had been stationed at the city of Futsing, about thirty miles from Foochow. Much of his work consisted of itinerant trips during which he visited the various mission stations under his charge. He almost invariably went on foot from place to place and carried with him a butterfly net and a rifle, so that to so keen a naturalist each day's walk was ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... took flight for the Heavenly Country, happier in its escape from the worn chrysalis of his weak and weary body than any glad-winged butterfly that flitteth over the fells ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... platform, and forgot Tony, just as Eagle had forgotten me. Behind Eagle's slight figure towered massively Major Vandyke's splendid bulk; and as I waved my handkerchief to Eagle, while the train slid slowly out, I was vaguely aware of Diana's outstretched arm and a butterfly flutter of something white and small. Eagle's eyes went past me to her, though his smile was for me also; and Di was able deftly to kill her two birds with one stone, at the last. Her farewell look and gesture did equally well ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Most of them had brought silver—shall I say alas! or happily? Generally some pretty trifle which vouched for the sentiment and taste of the gift horse without seeming to tax the poor animal's resources. For instance, Mrs. Guy Sloane brought a silver butterfly intended for a pen-wiper, and my old friend Sam Bolles a silver paper-knife. Polly Flinders (I never remember her married name), who has babies of her own, gave Josephine a silver whistle, ostensibly ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... Ibsen has given us Nora Hebler, a Disagreeable Girl of mature age, who, beyond a doubt, first set George Bernard Shaw a-thinking. Then looking about, Shaw saw her at every turn in every stage of her moth-and-butterfly existence. ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... and spoke almost calmly, for his anger, like most things he did, was a matter of acting. The Signor understood, and again he smiled faintly. Before he answered he carefully snuffed and trimmed the three wicks of the tall brass lamp on the table. It had a big metal shade in the shape of a butterfly, which he turned so that it screened the light from his eyes and reflected it into his ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... this chapter is merely one of definitions and that a definition is a description of something given to it after—not before—it is finished. A definition is a tag, like the label the entomologist ties to the pin after he has the butterfly nicely dead. Of questionable profit it would be to you, struggling to waken your playlet into life, to worry about a definition that might read ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... Drake's essays a minute account of the numerous essayists who flourished, or who made an effort to live, between the close of the eighth volume of the Spectator and the beginning of the present century. Of these a few have still a place on our shelves, but for the most part they enjoyed a butterfly existence, and serve but to prove the immeasurable superiority of the writers who created the ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... eagerness. She flitted about like a butterfly, bent on choosing the best position for the desired snap-shot. Blanche, Mabel, and Elsie came hurrying up anxious to join the group, and fixed themselves ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... and married a third time, died as the Princesse de Chimay. The ninth of Thermidor saved them both from the guillotine. In the days immediately subsequent they had abundant opportunity to display their light but clever natures. Mme. Beauharnais, as well as her friend, unfolded her wings like a butterfly as she escaped from the bars of her cell. Being a Creole, and having matured early, her physical charms were already fading. Her spirit, too, had reached and passed its zenith; for in her letters of that time she describes herself as ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... and my library lacks the presence of madame, it ceases truly to be home, and if I've got to stay here during the month of August alone I must have diversion, else I shall find myself as badly off as the butterfly man, to whom a vaudeville exhibition is ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... working according to fixed laws. See plants springing up under the sunlight, learn the secrets of plant life, and how their scents and colours attract the insects. Read how insects cannot live without plants, nor plants without the flitting butterfly or the busy bee. Realize that all this is worked by fixed laws, and that out of it (even if sometimes in suffering and pain) springs the wonderful universe around us. And then say, can you fear for your own little life, even though it may have its troubles? Can ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... poet, Burns's model, once saw a butterfly at the Town Cross; and the sight inspired him with a worthless little ode. This painted countryman, the dandy of the rose garden, looked far abroad in such a humming neighbourhood; and you can fancy what moral considerations a youthful poet would supply. But the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would be overwhelmed. It wouldn't matter to her that you could bring forward arguments in your own defence. She wouldn't be capable of understanding them. You must see for yourself that mentally—and spiritually—just as bodily—she's as fragile as a butterfly. She couldn't withstand a storm. She'd be crushed ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... with which we need not desire to be too familiar, such as Mosquitoes, Fleas, Wasps, and Bees; but when a "bug" is harmless as well as beautiful, there is no reason why we should not treat it as a friend. Who is afraid of a Butterfly? ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... the necessity of a southern continent as a balance was supposed to be unanswerable; and so it was, till Captain Cook found there was no such thing. We are poor silly animals: we live for an instant upon a particle of a boundless universe, and are much like a butterfly that should argue about the nature of the seasons and what creates their vicissitudes, and does not exist itself to see one ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... could not attend to the education of his little girl as he would like to do. His wife was not of our faith and was also too busily occupied to look after the child. He did not mention that her occupation was that of society butterfly, who sacrificed homelife, husband and child in the pursuit of pleasure. Would Reverend Mother kindly undertake the charge of his little Nita's education, spiritual as well as intellectual? Would she be to the child what father and mother ought to ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... its mere vegetative form is here seen withdrawing in order that a higher manifestation of the spirit may take place. The same principle can be seen at work in the insect kingdom, when the caterpillar's tremendous vitality passes over into the short-lived beauty of the butterfly. In the human being it is responsible for that metamorphosis of organic processes which occurs on the path from the metabolic to the nervous system, and which we came to recognize as the precondition for the appearance of ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... BUTTERFLY AND MOTH (the former from "butter" and "fly," an old term of uncertain origin, possibly from the nature of the excrement, or the yellow colour of some particular species; the latter akin to O. Eng. mod, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... common experience that people's ideals of manhood and womanhood vary considerably. The hardened materialist pictures perfection solely in terms of wealth, the butterfly-woman wants little but physical beauty, charm, and the qualities that attract. The sensitive man is apt to depreciate the powers he possesses and exaggerate those he lacks; while his self-satisfied neighbour can see no good in any virtues but his own. It is quite conceivable ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... beating heart lies still. One word from conscience, one touch of an awakened reflectiveness, one glance at the end—the coffin and the shroud and what comes after these—slay your worldly satisfactions as surely as that falling snow would crush some light-winged, gauzy butterfly that had been dancing at the cliff's foot. Your jewellery is all imitation. It is well enough for candle-light. Would you like to try the testing acid upon it? Here is a drop of it. 'Know thou that for all ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... have another original piece, entitled, 'The Redbreast and the Butterfly,' of which our readers will probably be contented with the ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... seen the butterfly In braw claithing drest? 'T is the poor man gotten rich, In rings ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... her bowed head. "Yes," she whispered. "After all, I have some pride, you know. You mustn't presume to be the butterfly preaching contentment to the toad ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... having approved our aim and accepted the job from us, were to try to force a new aim upon the party and insist that we should all join him in the sport of catching butterflies, we would soon break up. If we could agree on the butterfly program that would be one thing, but if we held to our plan and Bill stood out, he would be a traitor to his party and a fellow of very bad manners. As long as the aims of my party are, in the main, right, I believe ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... Joe drove up to the gate, and Hepsey emerged from her small back room, like a butterfly from a chrysalis. She was radiant in a brilliant blue silk, which was festooned at irregular intervals with white silk lace. Her hat was bending beneath its burden of violets and red roses, starred here and there with some unhappy buttercups which had survived the wreck of a previous ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... could be found among New York society transferred for the summer to the world of Nature. There was to be a dance or a house party or something of the sort at the end of the drive. Hazel scarcely knew, and cared less. She was becoming utterly weary of her butterfly life. ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... which spread out over her shoulders, her dainty breasts, her slender figure, her hips widening like the curves of a lyre, her two rounded thighs, the dimples around her knees, and her delicate feet. Not far from her mouth a butterfly is fluttering. The splendour of her body sheds around her a halo of brilliant mother-of-pearl; and all the rest of Olympus is bathed in a rosy dawn, which, by insensible degrees, reaches the heights of ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... divisions of the Animal Kingdom. There are many Insects that pass through their metamorphoses within the egg, appearing as complete Insects at the moment of their birth; but the series of changes is nevertheless analogous to that of the Butterfly, whose existence as Worm, Chrysalis, and Winged Insect is so well known to all. Take the Grasshopper, for instance: with the exception of the wings, it is born in its mature form; but it has had its Worm-like stage within the egg as much ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... farmers see a swallow-tail, or any other rare butterfly hovering over their gardens, they don't know the difference, and it passes safely. If that same farmer knew the value of the specimen he would leave all else to chase the ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... Spring.—One of the earliest intimations of approaching spring is the appearance of the Phalaena primaria, and of one or two other moths, floating with expanded wings on the surface of ponds and still water. A butterfly, Caltha palustris, is commonly drawn forth from its winter quarters by one of the first warm and sunny days that happen to occur in the month of March: hence it has been termed fallax veris indicium, (the deceitful token of spring.) In the Isle of Wight it has been seen on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... these few brief hours, Ellice gave herself up to a happiness that she knew could be but fleeting. To-day she would be the butterfly, living and rejoicing in the sun. The darkness would come soon enough, but to-day was ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... now audible outside the door; she opens wide her tawny-hazel eyes, that have a look of gazing on the world in surprise, a smile parts her lips and her whole aspect is as completely changed as that of a butterfly which escapes from the shade into the sunshine where the bright beams are reflected in the metallic lustre ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a little, and rising from the bed went to the window and leaned out. A large white clematis pushed its moonlike blossom up to her face, as though asking to be kissed, and a bright red butterfly danced dreamily up and down in the late sunbeams, now poising on the ivy and anon darting off again into the mild ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... dark, and that touch is my reality. You might as well say that a sight which makes you glad, or a blow which brings the stinging tears to your eyes, is unreal as to say that those impressions are unreal which I have accumulated by means of touch. The delicate tremble of a butterfly's wings in my hand, the soft petals of violets curling in the cool folds of their leaves or lifting sweetly out of the meadow-grass, the clear, firm outline of face and limb, the smooth arch of a horse's neck and the ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... cocoon or chrysalis in which, as by a miracle (for here natural and supernatural seem one and the same), the caterpillar has undergone his transformation and emerging spreads his wings and forthwith takes his flight a full-grown butterfly with all its senses ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... was served. In the center was a pyramid of spongecake in the form of a temple with melonlike sides, and on the top was an artificial rose with a butterfly of silver paper hovering over it, held by a gilt wire. Two drops of gum in the heart of the rose stood for dew. On the left was a deep plate with a bit of cheese, and on the other side of the pyramid was a dish of strawberries, which had ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... variegation; colors, dichroism, trichroism; iridescence, play of colors, polychrome, maculation, spottiness, striae. spectrum, rainbow, iris, tulip, peacock, chameleon, butterfly, tortoise shell; mackerel, mackerel sky; zebra, leopard, cheetah, nacre, ocelot, ophite[obs3], mother-of-pearl, opal, marble. check, plaid, tartan, patchwork; marquetry-, parquetry; mosaic, tesserae[obs3], strigae[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... it was if possible a more absolute and transcendental Nameless than that of Lao Tzu. He dwells on the relativity of knowledge; as when asleep he did not know that he was a man dreaming that he was a butterfly, so when awake he did not know that he was not a butterfly dreaming that he was a man. [10] But "all is embraced in the obliterating unity of the tao, and the wise man, passing into the realm of the Infinite, finds rest therein." And this tao, of which we hear so much in Chinese philosophy, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... of course, in her being crushed as flat as is a broken-winged butterfly that comes in the path of a garden roller. He stood up ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... work booting himself; though by no law of propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be private when putting on his boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition stage—neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manners. His education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not been a small degree civilized, he very probably would not have troubled himself with boots ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... ropes, and when these were pulled through the rings they rode in, they made a screech which compelled the bearer to stop his ears; and often it was necessary to duck his head not to be hit by the heavy ropes or by the awning itself. But Arsinoe only remembered these things to-day as a butterfly sporting in the sun may remember the hideous pupa-case that it has burst and left ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... curtain rose, a little butterfly creature, in the blue-and-scarlet costume of a man,—all frills and fluffs and lace and linen,—came forward, with many trips and skips and grimaces, and pronounced a prologue, which consisted of a panegyric on the King and his government in their ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... passion in the tone of a man who would have a rival's life if he crossed his path. The elderly butterfly of the Empire came down with his whole weight on the poor poet, and tried to frighten and crush him by his self-importance. He grew taller as he gave an embellished account of his perilous wanderings; but while he impressed the poet's imagination, the lover ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... interrogationis carried his ever present question mark from one dry leaf to another asking always that unanswerable "why?" Here Pyrameis huntera, well named the hunter's butterfly, flashed red through the woodland, scouting silently and becoming invisible in ambush as a hunter should. Here a tiny fleck of sky, the spirit bluebird of the spring which the entomologists have woefully named Lycaema pseudargiolus, fluttered along the ground ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... now have my feet on a hearthstone where even he might warm his boot. So get thy best dresses and jewels in order, and look thyself; proud as any in the land. A simple burgher's daughter now, Grete; but so shalt thou not end, my butterfly, or there's neither worth nor wit ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... inner soul, too, eye and ear, With which it can both see and hearken well? 'Tis true it is with eyes of flesh I see The richly glowing color of the rose; But with the spirit's eye I see within A lovely elf, a fairy butterfly, Who archly hides behind the crimson leaves, And singeth of a secret power from heaven That gave ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... that hot day in the steamy jungle, and the band was refreshed—Mark having hard work to refrain from chasing some gorgeous butterfly of green and gold, or with wings painted in pearl-blue, steel, and burnished silver. At other times some lovely kingfisher, with elongated tail, settled almost within reach. Then it would be a green barbet, with bristle-armed beak and bright ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... is Holiday Time, and all such as can pay, For the Summer-green country are up and away; But what of the poor pale-faced waifs of the slums? Oh, the butterfly flits, and the honey-bee hums O'er the holt and the heather, the hill and the plain, But they flit and they hum for Town's children in vain; Unless—ah! unless—there is hope in that word!— Mrs. JEUNE'S kindly plea by the Public is heard. Heard? Everyone feels 'tis a duty to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... met Mr. Hop Toad and his wife out for a stroll," added Limpy-toes. "Yes, and we saw Pete and Dickie Grasshopper, and Madame Butterfly, also." ...
— The Graymouse Family • Nellie M. Leonard
... shrank a little, as if our admiration were something of an affront to her maiden modesty, and blushed, and then she laughed to cover it, and swept a courtesy in her circling shimmer of blue, and tossed her head and flirted a little fan, which looked like the wing of a butterfly, before her face. ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... be much in London during the session—it will be session, not season, that takes us there.... The longer I live the more I condemn and deplore a rackety life for any girl, and therefore if I do what I myself think right by her and not what others may think right, she shall never be a London butterfly. Would that we could give our girls the ideal society which I suppose we all dream for them—that of the wise and the good of all ages, of the young and merry of their own. No barbarous crowds, no despotic fashions, ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... kept faith; she might have been honest, and abided by the bargain. If she had not done so, it was because honesty was beyond her shallow nature. He should have seen before what he now saw so clearly. He should have known her for a lovely, empty husk; a silly, fluttering butterfly; a toy; a thing of ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... labyrinth he had made for her. Grimshaw offered no apologies. He was the uncrowned laureate and kings can do no wrong. He was painted by the young Sargent, of course, and by the aging Whistler—you remember the butterfly's portrait of him in a yellow kimono leaning against a black mantel? I, for one, think he was vastly amused by all this fury of admiration; he despised it and fed upon it. If he had been less great, he would have been utterly destroyed ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... composition and harmony of the work, accordingly, is much like the pattern of that patch-work drapery that is sometimes to be met with in the mansions of the industrious, where a blue tree overshadows a shell-fish, and a gigantic butterfly seems ready to swallow up Palemon and Lavinia. The author has the merit merely of cutting out each of his figures from the piece where its inventor had placed it, and stitching them down together in these ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... A little girl. Uncle Elbert," said Varney, "is a bit of a social butterfly. Mrs. Carstairs is an earnest domestic character. As I gather, that was what they clashed on—the idea of what a home ought to be. When the split came, Mrs. Carstairs took the child and Uncle Elbert was willing enough to have her do it. That was natural enough, ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... go away, but as the Fairy wished it she said nothing—only when the two months were over she stepped joyfully into the butterfly chariot, and could not get back quickly enough to the Flower-Fairy, who, for her part, was equally delighted to ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... "Miss Butterfly sent word one day to all the garden people That she would give a social tea beneath the hollyhock. A robin read the message from a slender pine-tree steeple— A note that begged them sweetly to be there by six o'clock. They came a-wing, they came a-foot, they came ...
— Zodiac Town - The Rhymes of Amos and Ann • Nancy Byrd Turner
... prettily dressed in a costume of white linen with a cloud of chiffon tied about her small hat and a parasol that she had purchased this summer in Paris, which consisted of an enormous gold lace butterfly. She was fuller in figure than before her child had come and in perfect health, though still pale. Fresh and well cared for, she was if not beautiful very attractive and dainty—all that money could make of her human person. Adelle was ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... me before Sir Percy," murmured the young girl, casting shy glances at the elegant cavalier before her, vainly trying to find in the indolent, foppish personality of this society butterfly, some trace of the daring man of action, the bold adventurer who had snatched her and her lover from out the very tumbril that bore them both ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... gracefully. I envied that man his ability to write and say what he thought. I studied his profile and admired its worldly distinction. It was a fine modern profile, the straightness of it broken by the silken point of his well-kept moustache, by the perfect curve of his shoulder, and by the butterfly's wing of ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... wings, in the form and extent of the yellow band, and in the size of the specimens. The most extreme forms, as well as the intermediate ones, are often found in one locality and in company with each other. A small butterfly (Terias hecabe) ranges over the whole of the Indian and Malayan regions to Australia, and everywhere exhibits great variations, many of which have been described as distinct species; but a gentleman in Australia bred two of these ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... taken off her hat, and her hair was coiled close about her exquisite head. White and black, regular, significant, antique—like a cameo of some Greek woman, long dead. She stood by a little table, one hand on it, the other like some butterfly against her gown.... It was like a pose—but ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... was much at Selwoode. Many people came there now—masculine women and muscleless men, for the most part. They had, every one of them, some scheme for bettering the universe; and if among them Margaret seemed somewhat out of place—a butterfly among earnest-minded ants—her heart was in every plan they advocated, and they found her purse-strings infinitely elastic. The girl was pitiably anxious to be of some use ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... and sunny Sunday morning. The church windows were wide open, and a butterfly came in and set the choir boys to giggling. At the end of my pew a stained-glass window to Carlo Benton—the name came like an echo from the forgotten past—sent a shower of colored light over Willie, turned my blue silk to most unspinsterly ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... all snapped costume crackers and adorned themselves with the caps that they discovered inside them, and they set the new Victrola going and danced the butterfly dance that they had learned at Chautauqua and had given at their entertainment for the Christmas Ship. Dusk was coming on when the Ethels said that they must go to the Old Ladies' Home or they would have to run all the way. Grandfather Emerson offered ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith
... had introduced ourselves, I could not help thinking that there was a sort of hostility between the women. Certainly it was evident that there was as much difference in temperament as between the butterfly and ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... desire to kill them, even for the sake of bringing back a valuable collection. It would have been easy to capture them, as you could touch them several times with your fingers before they would fly away. One butterfly particularly took a great fancy to my left hand, in which I held the reins of my mule, and on which it sat during our marches for several days—much to my inconvenience, for I was afraid of injuring it. It would occasionally fly away and then return. At night ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... turned thy weak brain. But an hour agone enfranchised from Grub Street, thou must sing 'I'd be a butterfly.' Thou art vanity absolute, conceit beyond measure, and presumption out of all whooping. Yea, and but as a fool Pygmalion, not content with loving thine own handiwork, thou must needs fall in love with the goddess that breathed life into its stiff limbs; must yearn, not for Galatea, ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... urgent passion of appealing love, gave her approach the quality of a sacred ceremonial. She bent lower, not breathing, fearful, helpless, and dropt on his forehead a kiss, light as the touch a honey-seeking butterfly leaves on an unstirred flower. He moved a little; she rose in alarm and backed to the door. "Oh! why did I?" she said to herself, reproachful for a moment's delicious weakness. She looked back at the motionless ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... village that shoots up over-swiftly to a city's dimensions. They knew people, to be sure, for the Abbey influence would have opened the way for them into any circle. Stella had made many friends and pleasant acquaintances that summer on the lake, but part of that butterfly clique sought pleasanter winter grounds before she was fit for social activity. Apart from a few more or less formal receptions and an occasional auction party, she found it pleasanter to stay at home. Fyfe himself had spent only ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
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