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More "Flit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... revisiting one beloved? Why did its presence cause me to awake and Leo to dream? Why did it draw out the tress; indeed, how knew it that this tress was hidden there? And why—oh! why, at those tender and passionate words did it flit away at ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... young water-bird, such as a coot, swims right away when it is tumbled into water for the first time. So chicks peck without any learning or teaching, very young ducklings catch small moths that flit by, and young plovers lie low when the danger-signal sounds. But birds seem strangely limited as regards many of these instinctive capacities—limited when compared with the "little-brained" ants and bees, which have from the ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... echoes I ever heard. We had a French horn with us, and there was an enchanting wildness in the dying away of the reverberation that quickly transported me to Shakespeare's magic island. Spirits unseen seemed to walk abroad, and flit from cliff to cliff to soothe my soul ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... at her disposition, always restless and capricious as a bird's, quite as likely to sit down beside him in warm intimacy as to flit away with ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... pity and patronize ourselves, because we had thought that nothing could be as beautiful as our ways of yesterday. The ways of to-day were the most beautiful of all. We were going to Bretton Woods, and on the way we learned a great secret—this: that when the Fairies made their flit—the well-known Dymchurch Flit—they decided to emigrate to the White Mountains. Somebody had told them—probably it was the Moon—that the scenery there was marvellously suited to their tastes, and would give them a chance to try experiments in landscape gardening according to Fairy ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... other evenings, sitting inside with lighted candles and wide opened doors, great bats flap inside, make a round of the apartment, and pass out again, whilst iris-winged moths, attracted by the light, flit about the ceiling, or long-horned beetles flop down on the table. In this way I made my first acquaintance with many entomological rarities.* (* In moths, numerous fine Sphingidae and Bombycidae; ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... Then, like an impetuous torrent, he seemed to unite these streams into a foaming waterfall; over the tossing waves the rainbow presently stretches its peaceful arch, while on the banks butterflies flit to and fro, and the nightingale ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... likeness, something besides pink and white prettiness. Perhaps in two or three centuries an artist is born, one who in painting a portrait produces almost a living, breathing creature; and is able by his magic touch, to paint in the thoughts which flit through the brain; the feelings which move the heart, and is able to ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... our friends Unfamiliar traits she lends— Quaint, white witch, who looketh down With a glamour all her own. Hushed are laughter, jest, and speech, Mute and heedless each of each, In the glory wan we sit, Visions vague before us flit; Side by side, yet worlds apart, Heart ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... she see it, and I fancy then only indistinctly as she would peer about excitedly, as if uncertain what it was, until near enough to be in the focus of clear vision, and then, by a sudden dart, she would seize and flit away ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... been thrown into prison for her deed of madness and now the executioner's axe awaits her. She sits on the damp straw, rocking a bundle, which she takes for her baby, and across her poor wrecked brain there flit once more pictures of all the scenes of her short-lived happiness. Then Faust enters with Mephisto, and tries to persuade her to escape with them. But she instinctively shrinks from her lover, loudly imploring God's and the Saint's ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... Flutters when noon-heats are near, 105 Glad the shelving banks to shun, Red and steaming in the sun, Where the shrew-mouse with pale throat Burrows, and the speckled stoat; Where the quick sandpipers flit 110 In and out the marl and grit That seems to breed them, brown as they. Naught disturbs its quiet way, Save some lazy stork that springs, Trailing it with legs and wings, 115 Whom the shy fox from the hill Rouses, creep ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... taken her in aversion; either event might have brought about some kind of catastrophe, and a catastrophe might have led to some parley. It was my idea that she would have been sociable, and I myself on various occasions saw her flit to and fro on domestic errands, so that I was sure she was accessible. But I tasted of no gossip from that fountain, and I afterward learned that Pasquale's affections were fixed upon an object that ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... sings, And swarms of bright and happy things Flit all about with sunlit wings, But I am cheerless, Rosaline! The violets in the hillock toss, The gravestone is o'ergrown with moss; For nature feels not any loss, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... been! Ay! did he remember her? Did a thought of her, his first and best love, flit across him, as the words fell on his ear? Did a past vision of the time when she had sat there and sung it to him arouse his ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... ran away with a soldier that day, And took with her your trifle of money; Bless your heart, they don't mind - they're exceedingly kind - They don't blame you - as long as you're funny! It's a comfort to feel If your partner should flit, Though YOU suffer a deal, THEY don't mind it a bit - They don't blame you - ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... with his spectacles. The gardeners had severest instructions not to approach their nests. It was one of the minor griefs of his life that, being so short-sighted, he could never discover a bird's nest; no, not even as a child. Memories of boyhood began to flit through his mind; they curled upwards in the scented wreaths of his Havana. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... and bending sky, Like joyous living things, And rainbow-tinted birds flit by With swiftly glancing wings: O summer, summer! joyful time! Singing a gentle strain, Thou comest from a warmer clime ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... own too, as if, like our red houses, we came from a quarry that supplies no other place. But we are not one family. In the old days, those of us who were of the Tenements seldom wandered to the Croft head, and if we did go there we saw men to whom we could not always give a name. To flit from the Tanage brae to Haggart's road was to change one's friends. A kirk- wynd weaver might kill his swine and Tillyloss not know of it until boys ran westward hitting each other with the bladders. Only the voice of the dulsemen could be heard all over Thrums ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... reorganization of the world must see the whole plan as well as the multiplicity of detail, and must work with the whole plan vividly before their eyes if they are not to be blinded and led astray by the multitude of will-o'-the-wisps that flit across the path. ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... can for yourself. You may at least learn to know by sight and by sound some of our own songsters. It is often said that English birds have sober plumage; and so they have, compared with the parrots and the humming-birds that "flit about like living fires, scarce larger than a bee," and the wonderful bird of paradise, which the natives of New Guinea call "God's bird," because it shines with silver and gold—but still we have some very ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... day in June. Out of the town the air is soft and pure. Bird and bee flit from tree to tree, from blue-bell to rose, till at sun-set they hie away to ...
— The First Little Pet Book with Ten Short Stories in Words of Three and Four Letters • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... firm the various phantoms keep; Of ev'ry one; whence flit, to mock the brain, Of winged lies a light fantastic train; The gate opposed pellucid valves adorn, And columns fair, encased with polished horn; Where images of truth for passage wait." See Pope's Homer's "Odyssey," bk. xix., 1. 637. See also ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... Massachusetts. The yard, or college-precinct, is traversed by a number of straight little paths, over which, at certain hours of the day, a thousand undergraduates, with books under their arm and youth in their step, flit from one school to another. Verena Tarrant knew her way round, as she said to her companion; it was not the first time she had taken an admiring visitor to see the local monuments. Basil Ransom, walking with her from point to point, admired them all, and thought several of them exceedingly ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... whole world-full of victims of injustice, whose souls flit restlessly around, because they died under a weight of undeserved shame—because they lost a battle in which the right was theirs—because they suffered and strove for truth, but went down because falsehood was the stronger. Truth? Right? Is there no one, then, who will one day ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... her good-by and watched the slight form glide away, flit to and fro, white in the dark patches, grow indistinct and vanish. He was left alone in the ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... are all aflame. And there are candles being carried to and fro, lighting up a scene of bustling activity: while the clack of voices— none of them in laughter—is heard commingled with the rattling of chains, and the occasional stroke of a hammer. The forms of men and women, are seen to flit athwart the shining ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... identified him with all. In a word, we apprehend he was a tolerably fair example of what vague generalities, when acting on a temperament not indisposed to moral impressions, render the great majority of men; who flit around the mysteries of a future state, without alighting either on the consolations of faith, or discovering any of those logical conclusions which, half the time unconsciously to themselves, they seem to expect. When ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... her hat, laid them, with the floating white veil and her coat, on a chair in one corner, and began to move softly about in her restful, capable way. Her very presence, I had once said of her, would make a home, and I remembered this a little later as I watched the shadow of her head flit across the faded walls above the fine old wainscoting, from which the white paint was peeling in places. Her touch, swift and unfaltering, released some spirit of beauty and cheerfulness which must have lain imprisoned for a generation in the superb old rooms. On the floor with ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... death, in the charnels of time, Where flit the gaunt spectres of passion and crime, There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung, There are heroes yet silent to speak ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom, And flit from room ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... religious awe the solemn scene Commands your steps! as if the reverend form Of Minos or of Numa should forsake 290 The Elysian seats, and down the embowering glade Move to your pausing eye! Behold the expanse Of yon gay landscape, where the silver clouds Flit o'er the heavens before the sprightly breeze: Now their gray cincture skirts the doubtful sun; Now streams of splendour, through their opening veil Effulgent, sweep from off the gilded lawn The aerial ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... get up at six, and when I have had my breakfast and fixed a lunch, I go over into the Park. There are only birds and squirrels and a few tramps about then, and it is glorious. Sometimes I am so happy that I do not want to read; later come the squalling children and the hot sun; but I flit about from place to place. I wonder what they ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... boat, the body of De-deed disappears for the last time. We search for an hour or more with grappling irons, but he is never seen again. A strange silence settles down above and below deck, and all night long two faces flit before us—the grave face of the mother calling down blessings on her boy, the rallying smile of De-deed bidding her good-by and telling her all is well. It is a brave and happy spirit which, in the "Little Lake" of the Mackenzie, goes out with ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... was handsome and gay, Why, he'd ne'er given marriage a thought, But he dallied too long by a flower one day, And before he could flit he was caught! ...
— Why They Married • James Montgomery Flagg
... budless twigs Are bare above the snow, And where sweet winter-loving birds Flit softly to and fro; There with the sun for altar-fire, The earth for kneeling-place, The gentle air for chorister, Will I ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... one, they fall asleep And the pension agents awake to weep, And orphaned statesmen are loud in their wail As the souls flit by on the evening gale. O Father of Battles, pray give us release From the horrors of peace, the ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... we flit, One little sandpiper and I, And fast I gather, bit by bit, The scattered drift-wood, bleached and dry. The wild waves reach their hands for it, The wild wind raves, the tide runs high, As up and down the beach we flit, One little sandpiper ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... see them sometimes, of a summer evening, walking along the quays. The great river sweeps slowly down, the busy lights which flit about the houses or point the span of the bridges with golden dots, fling long reflections on its surface. Overhead, more peaceful lights are shining. All about us is the rush of tumult and change, men drifting here and there, struggling, ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... second a spasm shot over her face; then a ray of light seemed to flit across it, ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... fire, So like to that which warmed and lit My youthful days, how doth it flit Back on the periods nigher! Re-lighting and re-warming with its glow The bright scenes of my youth,—all ...
— The Olden Time Series: Vol. 2: The Days of the Spinning-Wheel in New England • Various
... explain everything; failed; broke off to question O'Reilly; O'Reilly answered; Beverley exclaimed; and among them, all was confusion. Clo, looking through half-shut eyes over her bearer's shoulder, saw a shadow flit between the portieres. Had some one come in? If so, who could it be? Or was it only the shadow of a blowing curtain she had seen? The question did not strike her as important just then, for if any one had ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Mr. Rogers are but passing shadows in the play, and even nice Laura is only to flit across its few pages for a moment on her way to happier things. We scarcely notice them in the presence of Mrs. Don, the gracious, the beautiful, the sympathetic, whose magnetic force and charm are such that ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... higher," said the Archbishop, "than the reputation with which you vouchsafe to compare it! but a blaze may be extinguished as well as a spark; and I tell the Constable of Chester, that the fame which has set on his basnet for so many years, may flit from it in one moment, never ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... "frumentie with venyson," brawn, fat swan, boar, conger, sea-hog, and other delicacies crown the feast, while the merry music of the minstrels or the performance of the players delights the gay throng. Pictures of ancient pageantry, their triumphs, their magnificent shows and gorgeous ceremonies, flit before our eyes when we visit the ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... alike its friends. Of the whole wide atmosphere it does not desire a single finger-breadth more than what is necessary for its sails to turn round in. But this space must be left free and unimpeded. Gnats, beetles, wasps, butterflies, and the whole tribe of ephemerals and insignificants, may flit in and out and between; may hum, and buzz, and jar; may shrill their tiny pipes, and wind their puny horns, unchastised and unnoticed. But idlers and bravadoes of larger size and prouder show must beware, how they place ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... human heart for a single day in ordinary circumstances. The lights and shadows that flit ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... section and looked deep within, I could see large chambers with the larvae in piles, besides being held in the mandibles of the components of the walls and ceilings. Now and then a curious little ghost-like form would flit across the chamber, coming to rest, gnome-like, on larva or ant. Again and again I saw these little springtails skip through the very scimitar mandibles of a soldier, while the workers paid no attention to them. I wondered if they were not quite odorless, intangible to the ants, ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... go on guard and during the initial hour of his vigil practically nothing came to disturb him. He heard the occasional cry of the nightbirds and the booming of the surf on the reefs and the shore of the isle, and saw numerous fireflies flit to and fro, and that ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... thoughts flit over one's mind in looking at any phase of work, or any piece of work. In the right choice of work lies the fullest use of one's capacities; in the right conditions of work lies the freest play of one's energies; in the right ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... threw their arms about each other, and were so full of their own feelings that they never saw Uncle Fact's tall shadow flit across them, as he stole away over the soft sand. Poor old gentleman! he was in a sad state of mind, and didn't know what to do; for in all his long life he had ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... veil of orange tinted mystery that at dawn hung like a curtain across that region where sea and sky awaited, breathless, the advent of day. I suppose the placid lagoons still mirror the drifting pageants of cloudland, while the purple kingfishers flit from rock to rock, or poise, fluttering in the air, before they, plunge into ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... infernal, worthier far to sit About the sun, whence you your offspring take, With me that whilom, through the welkin flit, Down tumbled headlong to this empty lake; Our former glory still remember it, Our bold attempts and war we once did make Gainst him, that rules above the starry sphere, For which like ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... fingers on the table, Balzac said, he made music, so exquisitely sensitive was his touch. Ah me! what a tympanist was lost to the world. What shading, what delicacy, what sunlight and shadow he would have made flit across my little darlings on their tripods! No wonder I hate the piano; and yet, hideous mockery of fate! I play upon an old grand to earn my bread and wine. I can't play with an orchestra—it is torture for me. They do ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... who had rarely fired a shot in sport, never in anger, and a stoutly built irascible Irishman, for whom a good shot meant lynching or lasting opprobrium. Visions of Bob Acres and Sir Lucius O'Trigger flit before us. We picture Tierney quoting "fighting Bob Acres" as to the advantage of a sideways posture; and we wonder whether the seconds, if only in regard for their own safety, did not omit to insert ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... of timbrels, and suddenly appear A troop of ruddy damsels and herdsmen drawing near: They reach the castle greensward, and gayly dance across; The white sleeves flit and glimmer, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... large for a cottage, and the door, which opened immediately into the living-room, stood ajar, so that a ribbon of light fell through the opening into the dark atmosphere without. Every now and then a moth, decrepit from the late season, would flit for a moment across the out-coming rays and disappear again ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... mushrooms, or watches the peasants catching fish with a net. When the sun sets he takes a towel and soap and saunters to the bathing-shed, where he undresses at his leisure, slowly rubs his bare chest with his hands, and goes into the water. And in the water, near the opaque soapy circles, little fish flit to and fro and green water-weeds nod their heads. After bathing there is tea with cream and milk rolls.... In the evening a walk or vint ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... this beach we stand, And o'er our heads the sea-fowl flit, Our eyes behold a glorious land, And soon shall ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... blighted, and when Selby said he must go, Clifford went too, and when Selby, not to be outdone, insisted on accompanying Clifford back to his door, Clifford determined to see Selby back half way, and then finding it hard to part, they decided to dine together and "flit." To flit, a verb applied to Clifford's nocturnal prowls, expressed, perhaps, as well as anything, the gaiety proposed. Dinner was ordered at Mignon's, and while Selby interviewed the chef, Clifford kept a fatherly eye on the butler. ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... the breezes warm; The violet lends the poppy her sweet breath; The song of nightingales is heard, a swarm Of butterflies flit hov'ring o'er the heath. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the embrace of his friend. The Baron de Willading was troubled, but he was still so far from suspecting the real fact, that he could not have easily told the reason why. He gazed wistfully at the working features of the fine old man who stood before him, and though memory seemed to flit around the truth, it was in gleams so transient as completely to baffle ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... no argument ready, and etiquette was waived. "Time!" she repeated, and then the two battering-rams, revolving their fists country-fashion, engaged. Half-forgotten Homeric phrases began to flit from a faraway schoolroom back into the little teacher's mind and she began to be consoled for the absence of gloves—those tough old ancients had used gauges of iron and steel. The two boys were evenly matched. After ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... commands, The abysses and vast fires between, Flit figures that with clanking hands Obey a hideous routine; They are not flesh, they are not bone, They see not with the human eye, And from their iron lips is blown A dreadful and monotonous cry; And whoso of our mortal race Should find that city unaware, ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... of cool distinction and her polished, impersonal phrases, another feminine figure dared to flit between him and this lady of manifold merit. No sooner would he indignantly banish her image than she would come dancing back, a gay little figure, with too much color in her checks and too much ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... also came down in the same conveyance. The distinguished gentleman was fast asleep on his arrival, and I am informed by the guard that he had been so the whole way. He was, no doubt, preparing for his approaching fatigues; but what gigantic visions must those be that flit through the brain of such a man when his body is ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... lays himself liable to the accusation of having forsaken democracy. For all that, "fundamental brainwork" is behind every respect-worthy piece of writing, whether it be a lightsome lyric that seems as careless as a redbird's flit or a formal epic, an impressionistic essay or a great novel that measures the depth of human destiny. Nonintellectual literature is as nonexistent as education without mental discipline, or as "character building" in a school that ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... had come at the earnest request of his friend. He did not like the looks of himself bedraggled and wet, and dead, on the deck of the "Hatty," with that curious crowd looking at him, Mandy Ann with the rest. Strange that thoughts of Mandy Ann should flit through his mind as he decided against the cold bath in the St. John's and to face it, whatever it was. Occasionally some one spoke to him, and he always answered politely, and once offered his chair to a lady who seemed to be looking for ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... tender sadness resting in the depths of those powerful dark eyes. Lady Rosamond is in a deep study—one which is not of an agreeable nature—one which she is not most likely to reveal. Alternate shades of displeasure, rebellion and defiance, flit across her brow, which remain, in quiet and apparently full possession, until reluctantly driven forth by the final ascendancy of reason, at the cost of many conflicting feelings of emotion ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... memories as well as his own. Dickens seems to expect all his characters, like amusing strangers arriving at lunch: as if they gave him not only pleasure, but surprise. But Thackeray is everybody's past—is everybody's youth. Forgotten friends flit about the passages of dreamy colleges and unremembered clubs; we hear fragments of unfinished conversations, we see faces without names for an instant, fixed for ever in some trivial grimace: we smell the strong smell of social cliques now quite incongruous ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... all, all, not one, but all, Not only he, but by my mother's soul, Whatever man lies wounded, friend or foe, Shall enter, if he will. Let our girls flit, Till the storm die! but had you stood by us, The roar that breaks the Pharos from his base Had left us rock. She fain would sting us too, But shall not. Pass, and mingle with your likes. We brook no further insult but are gone.' She turned; the very nape ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... the most tiresome things, they are so monotonous. Women crowd in the salons, shake hands, leave a pile of cards on the tray in the hall, and flit to ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... object was unusual; for it was his chief aim to make it as little like the original before him, as possible. Shall we reveal the fact that another image, wearing a gentler aspect than the stern, rigid features of the minister's portrait, seemed to flit before the young painter's fancy, coming unbidden, and mingling more especially with recollections of the past? As a ray of moonlight stole into the low dormer-window, the young man turned on his humble bed, a sigh burst from his lips, followed by ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... Europe, and Polygonums almost identical as to species, surround the water, the surface of which is covered with the broad leaves of Villarsia, exactly resembling those of Nymphaea alba, and with several species of Potomogeton. Small grey birds, like the warblers of the reeds, flit from stem to stem; hosts of brilliant gyrinus play on the water; notonectes and beetles, resembling the hydrophili, live within it—now rising to respire, now swiftly diving. Limnaea, similar to those of Europe, creep along the surface of the water; small Planorbis live on the water-plants, to ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... me Was there but One who—but of her anon. I said with men, and with the thoughts of men, 60 I held but slight communion; but instead, My joy was in the wilderness,—to breathe The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,[131] Where the birds dare not build—nor insect's wing Flit o'er the herbless granite; or to plunge Into the torrent, and to roll along On the swift whirl of the new-breaking wave Of river-stream, or Ocean, in their flow.[132] In these my early strength exulted; or To follow through the night the moving moon,[133] 70 The stars and their development; ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... I think I almost hear A horn's faint echo through the dusk-hour's veil As in the happy, golden days of yore— Mayhap, e'en now upon this magic mere Frail shallops will flit by and mermaids pale Will lure us ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... you never once heard a voice raised yet against the company as a company. Individual complaints get into the Times, of course, about the crowding of the train de luxe, the breach of faith as to places, and the discomforts of the journey; but never a glimmering conception seems to flit across the popular mind that here is a Colossal Wrong, compared to which Monte Carlo is but as a flea-bite to the Asiatic cholera. This chartered abuse connects the three biggest towns in France—Paris, ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... pike away for the Heated Term, Clara surprised her Friends by guessing that she would remain at Home. It was a Nervy Thing to do, because all the Social Head-Liners who could command the Price were supposed to flit off to a Summer Hotel, and loiter on the Pine Veranda and try ...
— More Fables • George Ade
... his companions flit about, ridiculing, mocking, and laughing at him; eventually prodding and pinching him until, shivering, with aching joints, he staggers away. The revelry then continues, the song of the lovers becoming more and more prominent until, somewhat ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... which circumscribes itself like Giotto's O is almost as tangible a thing as a statue; it has almost contour. But this melody afloat in the air, flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swaying poise, as the notes flit from strings to voice, and from voice to wood and wind, is more than a mere heightening of speech: it partakes of the nature of thought, but it is more than thought; it is the whole expression of the subconscious life, saying more of himself than any person of the ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... Mr. Keats's Eve of St. Agnes lately made me regret that I was not young again. The beautiful and tender images there conjured up, "come like shadows—so depart." The "tiger-moth's wings," which he has spread over his rich poetic blazonry, just flit across my fancy; the gorgeous twilight window which he has painted over again in his verse, to me "blushes" almost in vain "with blood of queens and kings." I know how I should have felt at one time in reading such passages; and that is all. The sharp luscious flavour, the fine aroma is fled, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... that waiteth no seer's observations,[40] accuses thee faithfully; but to the birds that flit above my head I bid a ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... supernal with celestial ray, Yet death hath not erased from mental scroll The image which th' Eternal painted there. (Enters Halstrom): The twain are gone, my Liege, but to the page They for manana did bespeak return. Francos: Tis well! Good gentlemen, my mind doth backward flit On wings of happy mem'ry to that hour When we, amid the plaudits of the hosts, Did well proclaim to all the happy words Which Caesar to expectant ears did send. My heart doth overflow, when I recall ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... attractive, studies? And again, how can all this wide range of activity be controlled? Who is going to teach, or look after, all these things? How are they to be kept going? Are they, or any of them, to be compulsory, or is a boy or girl to be allowed to do anything or nothing, or to flit, butterfly-fashion, from one to another, learning nothing except to fritter away ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... the sun shines with a strange brilliancy, and a delightful grove of green leafy trees presents itself to the eyes and charms the sight with its verdure, while the ear is soothed by the sweet untutored melody of the countless birds of gay plumage that flit to and fro among the interlacing branches. Here he sees a brook whose limpid waters, like liquid crystal, ripple over fine sands and white pebbles that look like sifted gold and purest pearls. There he perceives a cunningly wrought fountain ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... saw and heard nothing of the crowd. He walked on by Tony's side; with feeble and tottering steps, deaf and blind, but whispering all the while, with trembling lips, to One whom no one else could see or hear. Once or twice Tony saw a solemn smile flit across his face, and he nodded his head and raised his hand, as one who gives his assent to what is said to him. So they passed on through the noisy streets till they reached quieter ones, were there were neither shops nor many passers-by, and there they found ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... plase, sur!' Martin remained in his station. When the successor of Mr. Van Buren came in, the door-keeper presented himself soon after to the new President, with the civil inquiry: 'I suppose I'll hev to flit, too, with the other Martin?' He was smilingly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... it lent. What coward counsels would thy madness move Against the word, the will reveal'd of Jove? The leading sign, the irrevocable nod, And happy thunders of the favouring god, These shall I slight, and guide my wavering mind By wandering birds that flit with every wind? Ye vagrants of the sky! your wings extend, Or where the suns arise, or where descend; To right, to left, unheeded take your way, While I the dictates of high heaven obey. Without a sign his sword the brave man draws, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... and seek the blooming bower, Where some ripe Virgin courts thy power, Or bid provoking dreams flit round her bed; On Damon's amorous breast repose; Wanton—on Chloe's lip of rose, Or make her blushing cheek ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... by the miraculous infusion of a modern impulse and yet, for all the sudden freedom of folds and footsteps forsaken after centuries by their pedestal, keeping still the quality, the perfect felicity, of the statue; the blurred, absent eyes, the smoothed, elegant, nameless head, the impersonal flit of a creature lost in an alien age and passing as an image in worn relief round and round a precious vase. She had always had odd moments of striking him, daughter of his very own though she was, as a figure thus simplified, "generalised" in its grace, a figure with which ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... Schuyler, standing still, saw her slim figure flit across a strip of frost-bleached sod ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... top of the upright strata, and a thick coat of moss and wood sedge clusters about the oak-scrub roots, round which the delicate and rare oak-fern mingles its fronds with great blue campanulas; while the "white admirals" and silver-washed "fritillaries" flit round every bramble bed, and the great "purple emperors" come down to drink in the road puddles, and sit, fearless flashing off their velvet wings a blue as of that empyrean which is "dark ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... and brightened every now and then as a form that I loved glided amongst them, but even that form dragged after it a chain of painful, fettering considerations, and the gleams of light that it threw round it were only like those weak, pallid flashes of sun that flit through the clouds of thunder and storm in ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... natural, with his fertile imagination, narrow perceptions and limited knowledge, that he would see strange sights and hear strange sounds. Images and visions which have been portrayed in tales of romance and given interest to the pages of poetry were made by him to throng the woods, flit through the air and hover over the heads of terrified officials, whose learning should have placed them beyond the bounds of superstition. The ghosts of murdered wives, husbands and children played their part with a vividness of representation and artistic ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... as I recline in the shade is teeming with busy insects, and the trees are swarming with the beautiful winged life of the tropical air. Flocks of paroquets with most gorgeous plumage—blue, red, green, gold, and every conceivable hue—flit hither and thither, or sweep past in ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... heard a step on the gravel, and saw the red flit of a cigar through the shrubs. Then a loosely-moving figure obscured the patch of sky between the creepers, and the red spark became the centre of a dim bearded face, in which Bernald discerned only a broad white ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... and warm heart; in want of a wife mayhap; a man that can earn his own bread and another's;—half a dozen others' when the half dozen come? Would not that be a good sort of lodger? Such a question as that too did flit, just flit, across the widow's sleepless mind. But then she thought so much more of the wolf! Wolves, she had taught herself to think, were more common than stalwart, honest-minded, ...
— The Courtship of Susan Bell • Anthony Trollope
... declare Luther spiritually unfit for translating the Bible. They say that all the time that Luther spent at the Wartburg he was haunted by the devil. He would hear strange noises and see weird shadows flit before him. He felt that he had come under the sway of the powers of darkness. This, we are assured, was because he had risen in rebellion against the divine power of the papacy. The Holy Father whom he had attacked was being avenged upon Luther by an accusing ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... clump of sweet-williams, and indeed, the flowers appeared plain compared with it! Butterflies have changed their habits since then. They fly so high! They are all among the treetops now. They used to flit around the cinnamon pinks, larkspur, ragged-robins and tiger lilies, within easy reach of little fingers, every day. I called them 'flying flowers,' and it was a pretty conceit, for they really were more delicate in texture and brighter in ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... feeling of thy worth I dedicate. My verse was offered to an older friend; The humbler prose has fallen to thy share: Nor could I miss the occasion to declare, What spoken in thy presence must offend— That, set aside some few caprices wild, Those humorous clouds that flit o'er brightest days, In all my threadings of this worldly maze, (And I have watched thee almost from a child), Free from self-seeking, envy, low design, I have not found a whiter ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... thought, you will see more than that. First, with the instinctive selfishness of human nature, you will recognize your own future habitation; perhaps your eye will mark the identical spot where the body you love must lie through all seasons and weathers, through the slow centuries that will flit so fast for you, till the crash of doom. It is good that you should think of that, although it makes you shudder. The English churchyard takes the place of the Egyptian mummy at the feast, or the slave in the Roman conqueror's car—it mocks ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... of the ride is a delight. The senses are kept keenly alert, for not only have we the Lake, the bay and the mountains, but part of the way we have flowers and shrubs by the thousands, bees and butterflies flit to and fro, and singing streams come foaming white from the snowbanks above, eager to reach the Lake. As our car-wheels dash across these streamlets they splash up the water on each side into sparkling diamonds and on every hand come up the sweet scents of growing, living things. ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... gabled houses, and its luxuriant gardens rich with pale-blossomed laurels, which no frost dwarfs, and crimson fuchsias gnarled with age, and its hill-embosomed harbour, where the people of all grades and ages, and of both sexes, flit hither and thither in their boats as landlubbers would take an evening stroll—that I felt somewhat justified in the romantic love I ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... indeed, something like a human expression, the look of having both known and suffered. From many a porch, and many a latticed oriel, a long shadow stretched eastward, like a death flag streaming in a wind unfelt of the body—or a fluttering leaf, ready to yield, and flit away, and add one more to the mound of blackness gathering on the horizon's edge. It was the main street of an old country town, dwindled by the rise of larger and more prosperous places, but holding and exercising a charm none of them ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... and hook By a babbling brook, The fisherman's sport we ply; And list the song Of the feathered throng That flit in the branches nigh. At last we strip For a quiet dip; Ah, that is the best of joy. For this I say On a summer's day, What's so fine as being a ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... immaculata. Among others are the anagrammatic answer to Pilate's question, "Quid est veritas''—namely, "Est vir qui adest''; and the transposition of "Horatio Nelson'' into "Honor est a Nilo''; and of "Florence Nightingale'' into "Flit on, cheering angel.'' James I.'s courtiers discovered in "James Stuart'' "A just master,'' and converted "Charles James Stuart'' into "Claimes Arthur's seat.'' "Eleanor Audeley,'' wife of Sir John Davies, is said to have been brought before the High Commission in 1634 for ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... long perspective of rare palaces where beings of a loftier nature glide. The incense of all prosperities sends up its smoke, the altar of all joy flames, the perfumed air circulates! Beings with divine smiles, robed in white tunics bordered with blue, flit lightly before the eyes and show us visions of supernatural beauty, shapes of an incomparable delicacy. The Loves hover in the air and waft the flames of their torches! We feel ourselves beloved; we are happy as we breathe a joy we understand ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... deemed immortal are more mortal than the rose. "Why," he asks, "should any one be interested in my stories any more than in the thousand and one stories published this year? Mine are among the number of trivial things that compose the tedium which we call life." His thoughts will flit back over the past, and his own life will seem hardly more real than the day's work on the easel if he be a painter, on the secretaire if he be a writer. He will seem to himself like a horse going round and round a well. But the horse is pumping water—water is necessary; but art, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... dropped something on the ground. He stooped to raise and twist it rapidly round his left arm, under the sleeve. The incident was so very trifling that it scarcely drew the notice of Simon, though the thought did flit across his mind that it was strange that his brother, on the eve of battle, could pause to pick up anything so utterly valueless as a slight skein of unbleached flax. It was valueless indeed, save from the associations which, in the mind of ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... these visions flown? Am I once more sunk to a level with my former self? Once I thought that religion was a substance with me,—not a shadow, to flit, to mock, and to vanish when its succour was most needed; yet now ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... little living things. Now a green and gold lizard flashes across a bit of grey rock, now a dragon-fly disports its sapphire wings amid the yellowing ferns or purple ling, butterflies, white, blue, and black and orange, flit hither and thither, whilst little beetles, blue as enamel beads, ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... circle had its limitations and degrees of intimacy. Now it is possible motor fifty miles to lunch and home to dine with guests from the remotest corners of the earth. Oceans are crossed in six days, and the eager flit from continent to continent. Engagements can be made by cable and the truly enterprising can accept an invitation to dine in America on a fortnight's notice. Telephones communicate in a few seconds and no one is secure from social intercourse for fifteen minutes. Acquaintances and correspondence ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Flit from the scene, and couch them for their rest; The Meadow Lily folds her scarlet vest And hides it 'neath the Grasses' ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... all kinds of money and I might as well be a bum!—no automobile or nothin'. I should have had a car long ago; all the big leaguers own their own tourin' cars. There's no class to you any more, if you don't flit from place to place ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... saw nothing of the sunset. Dusk came on, and the fireflies began to flit round them, before the two, who were so occupied with each other, came to the Cottage gate. When they did so, they had yet a few last words ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... Shut up his ears and soul as he would against the coarse gibes that were often uttered at his expense, he could not fail to perceive the strange difference between himself and the crowd that hurried by him, nor to take in the wondrous beauty that would sometimes flit before his longing vision. The very thought that in his own person he was denied the excellence and majesty of a perfect development enhanced so much the more the value of these perfections in his estimation, ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... so do the servants, that he has no shadow; and we should think he shouldn't, because our ghosts hereaway have none that ever I heard of. But that's a lie of their foolish religion; for I could swear I one night saw his shadow flit like that of a sun-dial, when the sun's in a hurry to get the curtains round his head, away past the east end of the house, and disappear in a moment. But I'll tell you what, Aminadab, he may, like our spirits, be a shadow himself. I could hardly speak for fear, though five minutes ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... in, and pounce eagerly on chairs and telephones; the usual Fussy Family waste precious minutes in trying to get seats together, and get separated in the end. Undecided persons flit from one side to another. Gradually they all settle down, and stop their ears with the telephone-tubes, the prevailing expression being one of anxiety, combined with conscious and apologetic imbecility. Nervous people catch the eye of complete strangers across the table, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 30, 1892 • Various
... thanks and the cheerful face of him that profiteth by the funeral. Kakusuke was his main aid in connection with the Go Inkyo[u]'s last appearance. Occasionally a timid white-faced woman was seen, but she would flit away from the scene of these festivities, to seek the companionship of her panic-stricken fellows. Entering the funereal chamber the body was found, laid out and decently swathed so as to cover, as far as possible, ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... which declared itself to be unrivalled for toothache. The horses on the roads are sometimes protected from the sun by a kind of oblong sail, which works on a swivel attached to the harness. Black velvety butterflies as big as wrens flit about. (There are twice as many butterflies and moths in Japan as at home.) Snakes, ordinarily of harmless varieties, are frequently seen, ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... hydrogen, by which, in accordance with the most ordinary natural laws, you would not only rise to the ceiling and float there in quasi-angelic posture, but perhaps, as one of your feminine adepts is said to have done, flit swifter than train or telegram to "still-vexed Bermoothes," and twit Ariel, if he happens to be there, for a sluggard? We have not the presumption to deny the possibility of anything you affirm; only, as our brethren are particular about evidence, do give us as much to go upon as may ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... cloud come over the moon? No, there is none in the heavens. But why the useless speculation? for it is gone now, leaving the sleeper's face again visible, and wearing a more unquiet and disturbed air than before. His features twitch nervously, and expressions of terror and surprise flit over them. He dreams, and his dream is a troubled one. Let the novelist's license ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... she exists chiefly as a Member or President of innumerable Committees. No sooner does the shadow of a political idea flit through her brain, than she forms a Committee to promote its development. When not engaged in forming or in sitting upon Committees, she occupies herself in delivering lectures "to Women only," or in discussing the Woman's Suffrage question ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 29, 1890 • Various
... watching the little dark things flit by, like the gibbering ghosts of the suitors in the Odyssey, into the darkness of the cave; and then turned to long talk of things concerning which it is best nowadays not to write; till it was time to feel our way indoors, by such light as Venus gave, over the slippery rocks, and ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... there Dick saw the figure of a man flit, by him. The stranger was dressed in citizen's clothes. There was nothing suspicions in that, since there is no law to prevent citizens from visiting the Military Academy. But there was something ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... of death, in the charnels of time, Where flit the dark spectres of passion and crime, There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung, There are heroes yet silent ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and the air is full of song; In those old days when I was young and strong, He used to sing on yonder garden tree, Beside the nursery. Ah, I remember how I loved to wake, And find him singing on the self-same bough (I know it even now) Where, since the flit of bat, In ceaseless voice he sat, Trying the spring night over, like a tune, Beneath the vernal moon; And while I listed long, Day rose, and still he sang, And all his stanchless song, As something falling unaware, Fell out of ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Mrs. Horton's kitchen," he tried to say, but the words had an empty and ridiculous sound, as if there was no meaning in them. They flew about him in the air like little butterflies trying to settle. They settled on one meaning, only to flit elsewhere the next minute and settle on another meaning. They could mean anything and everything. They did mean everything. They meant one thing. Finally they settled back into his heart. And their meaning caught him by the throat in a most delicious ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... the child's face was one of such concentrated attention that it seemed to me an extraordinary manifestation; up to this time none of the children had ever shown such fixity of interest in an object; and my belief in the characteristic instability of attention in young children, who flit incessantly from one thing to another, made me peculiarly alive to ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... did the wonder flit, Or heart's desire of her, all earth in it. We saw the heavens fling down their rose; On rapturous waves we saw her glide; The pearly sea-shell half enclose; The shoal of sea-nymphs flush the tide; And we, afire ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is a great scandal to the Moslemin. I mark their weakness, and I have worked upon it. Thy mere defeat or death will not blot out the stain upon their standard and their faith. The public mind is wild with fantasies since Alroy rose. Men's opinions flit to and fro with that fearful change that bodes no stable settlement of states. None know what to cling to, or where to place their trust. Creeds are doubted, authority disputed. They would gladly account for thy success by other than human means, yet must deny thy mission. There also is the fame ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... on tree-top high, The sentry elf his call has made, A streak is in the eastern sky, Shapes of moonlight! flit and fade! The hill-tops gleam in morning's spring, The sky-lark shakes his dappled wing, The day-glimpse glimmers on the lawn, The cock has ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... appearing for a moment at his wife's side on the balcony above the public square, withdrew quietly to his own apartments. The casement of his closet stood wide, and he leaned against the window-frame, looking out on the silent radiance of the gardens. As he stood there he saw two figures flit across the farther end of one of the long alleys. The moonlight surrendered them for a moment, the shade almost instantly reclaiming them—strayed revellers, doubtless, escaping from the lights and music of ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... and I nearly had to do this, but were just able to glide across a small salient. I am thus qualified to describe a typical series of incidents preceding the announcement, "one of our machines is missing," and I do so in the hope that this may interest you, madam, as you flit from town to country, country to town, and so ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... remarked the Bishop, gravely, "life is but a mirror which reflects themselves. Other forms and faces may flit by, in the background; dimly seen, scarcely noticed. There is but one face and form occupying the entire foreground. Life is, to such, the mirror which ministers to vanity. Should a husband appear in the picture, he is soon relegated to the background, ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... Fred Forrester rode on at the rear of his little detachment, longing to get to Newton Abbot and be rid of his painful charge. The evening grew more pleasant and cool, the moths came out, and with them the bats, to dart and flit, and capture the myriad gnats which danced here and there beneath the trees. Then, as they passed beneath some umbrageous oak, which stretched its ponderous and gnarled arms across the road, a night-hawk swooped ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... echo; it is fit The spell should break of this protracted dream. The torch shall be extinguished which hath lit My midnight lamp—and what is writ, is writ - Would it were worthier! but I am not now That which I have been—and my visions flit Less palpably before me—and the glow Which in my spirit dwelt is ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... it was a far cry back to the lost heights, and wrote the story of his broken life in the song of "the bird with the broken pinion, that never flew as high again." Sooner or later each life passes under bondage. For all strength will vanish as the morning dew our joys take wings and flit away; the eye dim, the ear dull, the thought decay, our dearest die. Oft life's waves and billows chill us to the very marrow, while we gasp and shiver midst the surging tide. Then it is a blessed thing to look out through blinding tears upon a friendly face, to ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... are birds with very bright colors. There are birds called sunbirds. Often green, yellow, scarlet, and purple feathers are found on these birds. What a pretty sight it must be to see them flit ...
— Big People and Little People of Other Lands • Edward R. Shaw
... break away, tear oneself away, slip away, slink away, steel away, make away from, scamper away from, sneak away from, shuffle away from, sheer away from; slip cable, part company, turn one's heel; sneak out of, play truant, give one the go by, give leg bail, take French leave, slope, decamp, flit, bolt, abscond, levant, skedaddle, absquatulate [obs3][U.S.], cut one's stick, walk one's chalks, show a light pair of heels, make oneself scarce; escape &c. 671; go away &c. (depart) 293; abandon &c. 624; reject &c. 610. lead one a dance, lead ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the severity of his requirements of woman, and saw his own image reflected in the polish of his ideal; and now a fear whose presence he would not acknowledge began to gnaw at his heart, a vague suggestion's horrid image, to which he would yield no space, to flit ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... that flit before my eyes when I am between sleeping and waking," said Lady Delacour, "I am willing to believe, are the effects of opium; but, Belinda, it is impossible I should be convinced that my senses have deceived me with respect to what I have beheld when I have been as broad awake, and ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... Virginia was put into great agitation. She began to flit about the room like a moth, wringing her ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... I am makin' all kinds of money and I might as well be a bum!—no automobile or nothin'. I should have had a car long ago; all the big leaguers own their own tourin' cars. There's no class to you any more, if you don't flit from place to place in ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... avenue, beyond the square lawn and pepper-pot summer-houses, and pitied men who made such mistakes in the matter of matrimony as his brother William obviously had. The rose of the sunset faded in the west. Bats began to flit forth, hawking against the still ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... him into the conversation yourself. You think of him much more than I do." Her voice drooped sadly to a hopeless note. "I hardly ever do. He is not the sort of person to merely flit through one's mind and so I have no time. Look. I had eleven letters this morning and there were also five telegrams before midday, which have tangled up ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... a duel between a slim man of near forty who had rarely fired a shot in sport, never in anger, and a stoutly built irascible Irishman, for whom a good shot meant lynching or lasting opprobrium. Visions of Bob Acres and Sir Lucius O'Trigger flit before us. We picture Tierney quoting "fighting Bob Acres" as to the advantage of a sideways posture; and we wonder whether the seconds, if only in regard for their own safety, did not omit to insert bullets. The ludicrous ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... game of billiards, more work, dinner, and, if we are not going to a dance or any frivolity, a quiet talk, a smoke, a few more papers gone through, bed, and the long Indian day is over. All day chuprassis, like attendant angels, flit in and out bearing piles of documents marked Urgent, which they heap on his writing-table. I begin greatly to dislike ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... this unnatural sanity of intellect: it is like the calm in the whirlwind's centre, where the waves run higher though the air is deadly still, and the surly mariner wishes the mad wind back again.—To and fro you flit, goaded on and strengthened by untiring anguish. You are but the body of a man; your thought and emotion are abroad, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Paul said. Because of the bats, Jesus answered, and looking up they saw the vermin hanging among the clefts, a sort of hideous fruit, measuring three feet from wing to wing, Paul muttered, and as large as rats. We shall see them drop from their roosts as the sky darkens and flit away in search of food, Jesus said. Paul asked what food they could find in the desert, and Jesus answered: we are not many miles from Jericho and these winged rats travel a long way. In Brook Kerith they are destructive among our figs; we take many ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... reports, Mr. Sikes, which often flit about, but must not be trusted. Mr. Patch could not have given a better proof that ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... worm. I selected the plumpest and most comely of the lot; I put a new hook on my line; I looped him about it in graceful coils, and cautiously approached the water, as before. Now a worm never attempts to wildly leap across a flowing brook, nor does he flit in thoughtless innocence through the sunny air, and over the bright transparent stream. If he happens to fall into the water, he sinks to the bottom; and if he be of a kind not subject to drowning, he generally endeavors to secrete himself under a stone, or to ...
— Amos Kilbright; His Adscititious Experiences • Frank R. Stockton
... cause of a young woman, who passed at the moment; she told me, with an artless countenance, that "it was haunted." I smiled, and asked how she knew it. "Ah, Sir," said she, "its nothing to laugh at—every body here-abouts knows it well enough—such strange noises are heard in it, and such lights flit about it at midnight."—Have you seen them? "No, Sir, but I knows those that have, and I'm sure its true." Seeing a labouring man at a distance, I enquired what he knew of the haunted house, when he told me, with a face full of faith, that "he ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... and I can be ready for my plunge into Gotham vanities by—let me see—we will say Saturday night. I am at the Lady Louise. You may call for me there about eight. Good-by. Don't be late, Gentlemen." And with that she does the abrupt flit, leavin' us ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... anything?-Yes, I signed a paper, stating that I would rather stay and fish for him than that I would flit. ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... Shines on the slaughter-field of rooks: The owlets hoot, from ivy bower, In the grey embattled tower— "Tuwit, tuwit, towhoo!" they say, And echoing through the ruins grey, The sound disturbs the daily sleep Of bats who dwell in dungeon keep, Who 'mong the ruins nightly flit, And ...
— CAW! CAW! - The Chronicle of Crows, A Tale of the Spring-time • RM
... you've hit the truth, And I with grief can but admit Hot-blooded haste controls my youth, My idle fancies veer and flit From flower to flower, from tree to tree, And when the moment catches me, Oh, love goes by Away I fly And ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... other, heartily, as he eyed the boy; and perhaps a dim suspicion that he might find the fugitive valuable as a guide began to flit through his mind ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... agents and her spies, Gliding through temples, baths, and theatres; Possess all angles, corners, noonday halts, And darknesses; they flit with casual poison Softly; the city secretly is filled With murmurs, lifted eyebrows, and with sighs. The mischief's in the very blood of Rome Unless the sore that feeds ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... tak' some ither mode o' payin' the debt!" said John. "Stick spaud in yird here, ye sall not! You or I maun flit first!" ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... valley far below, doubtful of its being the broad Hudson, upon whose bosom we had so lately floated in a huge vessel crowded with passengers: for this vessel we searched in vain; but, by the aid of a telescope, made out one of the same kind, which appeared to flit along like some fairy skiff over a pantomimic lake made all ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... So she goes from t'one to t'other, till at last she says, 'There's poor Tommy Johnson, as used to live in the stone row; he's flitted with his wench Betty, and nobody knows where they've gone.' 'That's strange,' says I, 'what made 'em flit that fashion?' 'Oh,' she says, 'they'd a deal of trouble. Thomas wasn't right in his head arter his lad Sammul went off, so he took up with them Brierleys, and turned teetotaller; and then his missus,'—but I canna tell ye what ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... cannot, unfortunately, boast of being merely a spectator, seated in the royal box, applauding now and again. There is a wrench at my heart, a pang in every nerve. When I have put out the light and am in my bed, little touches, little glances, little words flit about and fill the darkness. When I get up in the morning, I thrill with lively anticipations, my blood seems to course through me to the strains ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... the elated son of Vulcan, as he descended the companion ladder, "we're goin' to flit, lad. We're about to rise in the world, so get up your bellows. It's the last time we shall have to be bothered with them in the boat, ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... barnacles, perhaps, on the keel of some greater ship of space. He remembered how at home there had been a certain burning twinkle that peeped through the screen of the dogwood tree. As he moved on his porch, it seemed to flit to and fro, appearing and vanishing. He was often uncertain whether it was a firefly a few yards away, or a star the other side of Time. Possibly Truth was ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... said, "so we must even flit hence to the mainland and wait until Harald is tired of seeking us. It is in my mind that he seeks not so much for revenge as for payment of scatt from our islands. Now he has a reason for taking it by force. He will seek to fine us, and then make plans by which I shall hold the ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... there that were as men 15 And men that were as phantoms flit and roam; Marked shapes that were not living to my ken, Caught breathings acrid as with Dead Sea foam: The City rests for man so weird and awful, That his intrusion there might seem unlawful, 20 And phantoms there may have ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... is scarcely seen Through the curtain of vapour that waves between, O'er city and hamlet, o'er hill and plain, O'er forest green, and o'er mountain hoar, They flit like shadows, and pass the shore, And wing their way o'er the ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... boughs are swoln with blooms Like chrysalids impatient for the air, The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run Along the furrows, ants make their ado; Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark Soars up and up, shivering for very joy; Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek Their loves in wood and plain—and ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... or left. The sun went down, the moon came up, on those Canadian wilds. Ever and anon, as swiftly held they onward, other Indians, singly or in squads, would fall into the file, gliding from out the mingled gloom of forest shade and night, as suddenly and silently as the shapes which flit through troubled dreams. Among these, by and by, appeared a warrior of gigantic stature, who putting himself at the head of the file, stalked on a little in advance, and seemed to ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... the sun As if that morn were a jocund one. Lightly and brightly breaks away The Morning from her mantle grey, And the noon will look on a sultry day. Hark to the trump, and the drum, And the mournful sound of the barbarous horn, And the flap of the banners that flit as they're borne, And the neigh of the steed, and the multitude's hum, And the clash, and the shout, 'They come! they come!' The horsetails are plucked from the ground, and the sword From its sheath; and they form, and but ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... lost in splendid vistas: it sees a long perspective of rare palaces where beings of a loftier nature glide. The incense of all prosperities sends up its smoke, the altar of all joy flames, the perfumed air circulates! Beings with divine smiles, robed in white tunics bordered with blue, flit lightly before the eyes and show us visions of supernatural beauty, shapes of an incomparable delicacy. The Loves hover in the air and waft the flames of their torches! We feel ourselves beloved; we are happy as we breathe a joy we understand not, as we bathe in ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... service in his life's work, and he has stood the test. Many young fellows of his age would have abused their opportunities. He has not done so. My only disappointment has been that he has developed no definite taste, but has been content to flit from one fancy to the next, always carried away by the latest novelty ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... twinge of remorse, any pang of painful recollection, pierce at that moment the incense of glory which she was inhaling? Did any vision flit across her of a sad mourning figure which once had stood where she was standing, now desolate, neglected, sinking into the darkening twilight of a life cut short by sorrow? Who can tell? At such a time, that figure would have weighed heavily ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... putting forth these efforts, the ass bad been flying along at an undiminished rate of speed, and the country swept past him on either side. He passed long lines of trees by the roadside, he saw field after field flit by, and the distant hills went slowly along out of the line of his vision. Hitherto he had met with no one at all along the road, nor had he seen any cattle of any kind. His efforts to arrest the ass ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... cigarette and was lighting it when he heard a swift, stealthy step close behind him. He dropped the match as he swung round, pushing back his canvas chair, and found his eyes dazzled by the sudden darkness. Still he thought he saw a shadow flit across the veranda and vanish into the mist. Next moment there were heavier footsteps, and a crash as a man fell over the projecting legs of the chair. The fellow rolled down the shallow stairs, dropping a pistol ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... led the way from the assembly, and the other sceptred kings rose with him in obedience to the word of Agamemnon; but the people pressed forward to hear. They swarmed like bees that sally from some hollow cave and flit in countless throng among the spring flowers, bunched in knots and clusters; even so did the mighty multitude pour from ships and tents to the assembly, and range themselves upon the wide-watered ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... remove or increase your Irish anxiety about my being 'in a wisp[77],' I answer your letter forth-with; premising that, as I am a 'Will of the wisp,' I may chance to flit out of it. But, first, a word on the Memoir;—I have no objection, nay, I would rather that one correct copy was taken and deposited in honourable hands, in case of accidents happening to the original; for you know that I have ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... haue layed vs aboord, and there stept vp some of his men in armour, and commanded vs to strike saile: whereupon we sent them some of our stuffe, crossebarres, and chaineshot, and arrowes, so thicke, that it made the vpper worke of their shippe flit about their eares, and then we spoiled him with all his men, and toare his shippe miserably with our great ordinance, and then he began to fall a sterne of vs, and to packe on his sailes, and get away: and we seeing that, gaue him foure or fiue good pieces more for his farewell; and thus ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... vapour wandered round and betwixt them and the sea; and each was well content to wonder whether the time need ever come when he must have to think again. Suddenly a light form flitted over the rocks, as the shadows flit; and though Frida ran away for fear of interrupting them, they knew who it was, and both, of course, began to ...
— Frida, or, The Lover's Leap, A Legend Of The West Country - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... in that house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom And flit from room to room. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Does the woodpecker flit round the young ferash? Does grass clothe a new-built wall? Is she under thirty, the woman who holds a boy in ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... look of having both known and suffered. From many a porch, and many a latticed oriel, a long shadow stretched eastward, like a death flag streaming in a wind unfelt of the body—or a fluttering leaf, ready to yield, and flit away, and add one more to the mound of blackness gathering on the horizon's edge. It was the main street of an old country town, dwindled by the rise of larger and more prosperous places, but holding and exercising a charm none of them ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... the ground, and yielded without further struggle to my evil destiny. What I suffered from thirst, hunger, and heat cannot be described. At last I fell into a sort of trance, during which images of various kinds seemed to flit before my eyes. How long I remained in this state I know not: but I remember that I was brought to my senses by a loud shout, which came from persons belonging to a caravan returning from Mecca. This was a shout of joy for their safe arrival at a certain spring, ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... do not belong to the fields as I do." He pointed ironically to her handsome riding skirt. "You are of the cities, of people. You will flit from this Indiana landscape one day, from provincial Torso, and spread your gay wings among the houses of men. While I—" He made a gesture of despair,—half comic, half serious,—and his dark face ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... Dr. Deming made some reference to stories. Once in a while a story does flit across my mental horizon. I want to tell you how the word "nut" may have a very humorous interpretation. Once upon a time in Michigan a man died. After he died the local minister went around to console ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... the Niblung slippeth and the shame that anger hath bred, And the heavy wings of the dreamtide flit over Gunnar's head: But he doth by his brother's bidding, and Sigurd's hand he takes, And he looks in the eyes of the Volsung, though scarce in the desert he wakes. There Hogni sits in the saddle aloof from the King's ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... confined himself, and from this point of view he must be studied. We do not forget, in saying this, his angel with the flaming torch, strong and beautiful and of unearthly presence, nor the shadowy, half-portrayed figures which dart and flit across his easel; but as we may understand the power of Titian from his portraits, yet never revel in it fully until we look upon "The Presentation" or "The Assumption"—never comprehend the painter's joy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... a picture to gaze upon and to return to; one of those visages which, after having once beheld, haunt us at all hours and flit across our mind's eye unexpected and unbidden. So great was the effect that it produced upon the present visitors to the gallery, that they stood before it for some minutes in silence; the scrutinising glance of the gentleman was more ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... quietly sit, Unmindful of moments, tho' fast they may flit Towards the hour of midnight, till gently at last Their daughter reminds them ...
— Grandma's Memories • Mary D. Brine
... have taken place in the House itself, and of the ghosts that flit about the benches where twenty years ago they sat in flesh and bone, I shall have ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... year 1860, the sun shone on the great day, and there were exhilarating tokens of spring, singing birds, opening buds, sparkling drops, and a general sense of festivity; as the gray and green began to flit about the streets, and while Mr. Mayor repaired to the Town Hall to administer the oaths to the corps, his unmartial sons and his daughters started for the Grange to assist Flora in the reception ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fisher maiden Is wand'ring up the path to where unseen I lie; She comes with some light spoil from off the shore beladen. And softly singing of the sea goes slowly by. And slowly rise great sun-tipped white cloud masses, Sublimely still their shadows flit and flee: How silently the work of nature passes— The roll of worlds, the growth of flower and tree! Angels of God in heaven! give him to ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... the great camp near Springfield, it seemed to John Barclay that all the soldiers in the world were gathered. It is difficult for a boy under a dozen years to remember things consecutively; because boys do not do things consecutively. They flit around like butterflies, and so the picture that they make of events jumps from scene to scene. One film on a roll of John's memory showed a hot August day in the camp of "C" Company; the men are hurrying about the place. The tents are down; ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... the felicity of my parents are motives too sacred, not to annihilate every ambiguity and every doubt. Oh, that I could escape at once! Oh, that like the tender bird, that hops before me in my path, I could flit away along the trackless air! Why should the little birds that carol among the trees be the only beings in the domains of Roderic, that know the sweets of liberty? But it will not be. Still, still ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... phosphorescent lights playing in front of the curtain forming the front of the cabinet. These lights will consist of small globules or balls of phosphorescent light that will dance about, like the familiar will-o'-the-wisp seen over swamps and in damp, woody places. These lights will flit here and there, will alternately appear and disappear. Sometimes they will appear as if a multitude of fire-flies were clustered in front of the curtain. When these fire balls appear the circle may know that it is well on the way to ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... reverie of pleasurable expectation, regarding the outcome of his investigations of the moat-house murder, that the stages of his promotion through the grades of detective, sub-superintendent, and superintendent, flashed through his mind as rapidly as telegraph poles flit past a traveller in a railway carriage. The crime which had struck down one human being in the dawn of youth and beauty, turned another into a murderer, and plunged an old English family into horror and misery, afforded Detective Caldew's optimistic temperament such ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... down, if the clouds broke: not that there is much to see in it; one of the crags of the aiguille-edge, on the southern slope of it, is struck sharply through, as by an awl, into a little eyelet hole; which you may see, seven thousand feet above the valley (as the clouds flit past behind it, or leave the sky), first white, and then dark blue. Well, there's just such an eyelet hole in one of the upper crags of the Diamond Valley; and, from a distance, you think that it is no bigger than the eye of a needle. But if you get up to it, they say you may drive ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... days Dr. Rauparaha had much writing to do, and passed his mornings and afternoons in the quiet library. Sometimes, as he wrote, a shadow would flit across the wide, sunlit veranda, and Helen Torringley would flit by, nodding pleasantly to him through the windows. Only two or three times had he met her alone since he came to Te Ariri, and walked with her through ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... Master's figure running across the snow toward that camp amid the trees, where fighting was still forward and men were shouting and firing. Brian rushed off, with Turlough staggering after him; but with a sob of despairing anger he saw the Dark Master flit into the trees, and heard his voice ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... been so absorbed as to forget himself, suddenly felt a cold tightening of the skin of his face, and a hard swell of his breast. The dance of Snap's eyes, the downward flit of his hand seemed instantaneous with a red flash and loud report. Instinctively Hare dodged, but the light impact of something like a puff of air gave place to a tearing hot agony. Then he slipped down, back to the stone, with a bloody ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... the name of the station; he looks up from his paper or rouses from his doze, looks out at the cheerless prospect, and then settles himself for another thirty miles. Time passes as unobserved as the meadows or bushy pastures that flit by the jarring window at his ear. But with Greenleaf, the reader will believe, the case was far different. He had never noticed before how slowly the locomotives really moved. At each station where wood and water were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... you do, you will perhaps have discovered that a woman may be as changeable as the moon, and yet as true as the sun;—that she may flit from flower to flower, quite unheeding while no passion exists, but that a passion fixes her at once. Do you believe me?" Now she looked into his eyes again, but did not smile and did not ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... nurses,' said Leonora, when they had gone to Washington. Indeed we could not stay where we were, nor flit off to Newport to banish care. I grew sleepless, and a sudden sound would send the blood to my heart. Leonora maintained an undaunted front, but she grew thin in spite of her cheerfulness. At ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... present time, and assure posterity that there never was such a lamb as Catherine II., and that, so far from assassinating her own husband and Czar Ivan,[2] she wept over every chicken that she had for dinner. How crimes, like fashions, flit from clime to clime! Murder reigns under the Pole, while you, who are in the very town where Catherine de' Medici was born, and within a stone's throw of Rome, where Borgia and his holy father sent cardinals to the other world by hecatombs, are surprised to hear that ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... He did not like the looks of himself bedraggled and wet, and dead, on the deck of the "Hatty," with that curious crowd looking at him, Mandy Ann with the rest. Strange that thoughts of Mandy Ann should flit through his mind as he decided against the cold bath in the St. John's and to face it, whatever it was. Occasionally some one spoke to him, and he always answered politely, and once offered his chair to a lady who seemed to be looking for one. ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... open, to throw light upon the half-finished sketch and the box of colours, while the rest of the perfumed apartment was steeped in a soft subdued glow. Absorbed in his work he seemed not to have heard the carriage stop, the bell ring twice, and a lady's dress flit along the passage. He had: but it was not his mother's shabby black dress that he expected, it was not for her that he posed at his desk, nor for her that he had provided the delicate bouquets of fine irises and tulips, ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... arrear. He got the first brash at Whitsunday put ower wi' fair word and piping; but when Martinmas came, there was a summons from the grund-officer to come wi' the rent on a day preceese, or else Steenie behoved to flit. Sair wark he had to get the siller; but he was weel-freended, and at last he got the haill scraped thegether—a thousand merks—the maist of it was from a neighbour they ca'd Laurie Lapraik—a sly tod. Laurie had walth o' gear—could hunt wi' ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... of laughter followed. In the midst of his rage and mortification Mr. Clinch fancied he saw a shade of pain and annoyance flit across the face of the maiden. He was puzzled, but pressed her hand, in spite of his late experiences, reassuringly. She made a gesture of silence to him, and then slipped away in ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... life have turned, but so slowly do they run these soft and fragrant days that they seem almost still, as at flood. A blue jay is gathering acorns overhead, letting one drop now and then to roll out of sight and be planted under the mat of leaves. Troops of migrating warblers flit into and through the trees, talking quietly among themselves as they search for food, moving all the while—and to a fixed goal, the far-off South. Bob-white whistles from the fodder-field; the odor of ripened fox grapes is brought with a puff of wind ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... to London, and did pretty well for a bit; Then the business dropped to nothing, and the manager took a flit,— Stepped off one Sunday morning, forgetting the treasury call; But our luck was in, and we managed right ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... She amused herself by gazing out of the car windows at the towns which seemed to flit by. At length, both Ida and her ...
— Timothy Crump's Ward - A Story of American Life • Horatio Alger
... poet at his will Lets the great world flit from him, seeing all, Higher thro' secret splendours mounting still, Self-poised, nor ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... thou hast no canoe to seek me there; farewell!" "I see thine eyes, O Segwun, laugh behind the buds; "The Manitou is love, and gives me love, and love "Gives all of power." His moccasins wide laid Red tracks upon the waves: When Segwun leap'd Gold-red and laughing from the lily-pads, To flit before him like a fire-fly, she found The golden arms of Gheezis round her cast, the buds Burst into flower in her hands, and all the earth Laughing where Gheezis look'd; and Mudjekeewis, Heart friend of Gheezis, ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... teapot; it is true that the mournful idea strove hard with the marks on the teapot for the mastery in my mind, and at last the painful idea drove the marks of the teapot out; they, however, would occasionally return and flit across my mind for a moment or two, and their coming was like a momentary relief from intense pain. I thought once or twice that I would have the teapot placed before me, that I might examine the marks at leisure, but I considered that it would be as well ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... wit, the boy heard the appointment settled betwixt them, to take place in the Pleasance, and resolved to add a third to the party, in hope that, either in coming or returning, he might find an opportunity of delivering the letter to Leicester; for strange stories began to flit among the domestics, which alarmed him for the lady's safety. Accident, however, detained Dickon a little behind the Earl, and as he reached the arcade he saw them engaged in combat; in consequence of which he hastened to alarm the ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... of the morning, or haunted only by those whose business—whether for good or evil—forced them out of doors, he met no one and saw no lights. The man's mind was evidently filled with pleasant thoughts, for ever and anon a smile would flit across his face, as though he dwelt upon the surprised look of his daughter when she would behold him. These agreeable anticipations, which had taken the place for the moment of the sterner purposes which had of late engrossed ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... Whitby Saw a couple of Zeppelins flit by; Though she felt a sharp sting, It's a curious thing That she never knew which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... little dark things flit by, like the gibbering ghosts of the suitors in the Odyssey, into the darkness of the cave; and then turned to long talk of things concerning which it is best nowadays not to write; till it was time to feel our way indoors, by ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... a question of wages—" began the young man, who was watching the various expressions flit over Darry's face with ...
— Darry the Life Saver - The Heroes of the Coast • Frank V. Webster
... their shore lies in its nakedness beneath the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the tideless pools, or the sea-birds flit from their margins with a questioning cry; and he will be enabled to enter in some sort into the horror of heart with which this solitude was anciently chosen by man for his habitation. They little thought, who first drove the stakes into the sand, and strewed ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... than the Parisians have been during the last two days of sunshine. The Jardins des Tuileries are crowded with well-dressed groups; the budding leaves have burst forth with that delicate green peculiar to early spring; and the chirping of innumerable birds, as they flit from tree to tree, announces the ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... through whose trees Earth's feathered songsters flit unharmed, Where soft-eyed cattle graze at ease, And every whispering breeze seems charmed, Can it be true that human blood Hath ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... had as happy been! Ay! did he remember her? Did a thought of her, his first and best love, flit across him, as the words fell on his ear? Did a past vision of the time when she had sat there and sung it to him arouse his heart ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... for the hour of sleep is near. All day long I keep at my tasks to try to forget my grief, for the gods have visited me with sore misfortunes. I teach my maids to spin and weave and care for the palace. But when night comes strange dreams flit through my mind, and new sorrows spring ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... said: "Nay, nay, let me grow a few days older yet. Nevertheless there is this new thing, that this morning I have brought thee a gift which I deem I may to flit to thee, and I shall give it to thee with a good will if thou wilt promise that thou wilt ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... fair Careerers with the foam beneath their bows, Whose streaming ensigns charm the waves by day, Whose carols and whose watch-bells cheer the night, Moor'd as they cast the shadows of their masts In long array, or hither flit and yond Mysteriously with slow and crossing lights, Like spirits on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... to their Lenten diet, jack-of-the-clock[4] told them the hour; Jack priests held rule over them; and gentle exercise at the jack, at bowls, helped them to digest their dinners. We ride upon jack-asses; jacks flourish in our fish-ponds; jack-a-lanterns and jack-snipes flit over our bogs, the one scarcely less difficult to capture than the other; jack-daws multiply in our steeples, and jack-herons still linger about ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... honor in the person of the "no-good husband" bursting in on games of cards with wild charges which only the payment of big money could suppress—suppress you understand, purely for the sake of the lady: outraged honor could accept no atonement. Then the lady would flit for the winter to those beauty doctors of Paris and New York, who operate on wrinkles and lay up muniments for fresh campaigns; and the "colonel" would betake himself to resorts where balm is accorded wounded honour; while loose-mouthed, simple-eyed young fellows went ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... sky The rain-clouds flit away, So from the maiden's eye Vanished the falling spray, Which lingered but awhile Her dimpled cheek upon— Then melted in her smile, ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... the second case, however, the body is sustained in the air by a limb in which the bones of the hand are enormously increased in length, and so sustain a great expanse of naked skin, which is the flying membrane of the bat's wing. Certain fishes and certain reptiles can also flit and take very prolonged jumps in the air. The flying-fish, however, takes these by means of a great elongation of the rays of the pectoral fins—parts which cannot be said to be of the same nature as the constituents of the wing of either the bat or the bird. The ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... would go into ecstasies over the splendid varieties that flutter and flit in the air, and the countless multitude of different insects would be well worth special study; amongst the latter are verified the most curious mimetic facts that ever the unprejudiced mind of a man of politics ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... a dream, and through the little opening of your eyelids I shall slip into the depths of your sleep; and when you wake up and look round startled, like a twinkling firefly I shall flit out into ...
— The Crescent Moon • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... peculiar way. Authors are supposed to write when they "feel like it," and at no other time. Visions of Byron with a gin-bottle at his side, and a beautiful woman hanging over his shoulder, dashing off a dozen stanzas of Childe Harold at a sitting, flit through the brains of sentimental youth. We hear of women who are seized suddenly by an idea, as if it were a colic, or a flea, often at midnight, and are obliged to rise and dispose of it in some ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... doors in the black night, they would sometimes see a ghost flit about under the trees at the edge of the woods; and the second schoolmaster, well wrapped up in a sheet, seems to have made as good a ghost as could have been found anywhere. There were many supernatural ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... why so few of the ideas that flit through our minds do, in point of fact, produce their motor consequences. Life would be a curse and a care for us if every fleeting fancy were to do so. Abstractly, the law of ideo-motor action is true; but in the concrete our fields of consciousness are always so complex that the inhibiting margin ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... rising tide swept it toward the shore. May I not understand the poet's figure: "The green of spring overflows the earth like a tide"? I have felt the flame of a candle blow and flutter in the breeze. May I not, then, say: "Myriads of fireflies flit hither and thither in the dew-wet ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... was not so dark; yet I could make out none of the objects I now and then ran against. I passed a mirror (I hardly know how I knew it to be such), and in that mirror I seemed to see the ghost of a ghost flit by and vanish. It was too much. I muttered a suppressed oath and plunged forward, when I struck against a closing door. It flew open again and I rushed in, turning on my light in my extreme desperation, when, instead of hearing the sharp ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... "El Refugio," a cafe and restaurant that caters to the volatile exiles from the South. Up from Chili, Bolivia, Colombia, the rolling republics of Central America and the ireful islands of the Western Indies flit the cloaked and sombreroed senores, who are scattered like burning lava by the political eruptions of their several countries. Hither they come to lay counterplots, to bide their time, to solicit funds, to enlist filibusterers, to smuggle ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... flit-pouch, I was the same. If you'd had your priming-horn, and I my flints, mind ye, we should have been there now? Then, forty-whory, that we are not is the fault o' Government for not supplying new ones ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... love that consecrates you so. No; furtive, awkward, restless, cold, I basely seemed to set at naught That sudden bliss, undreamt, unsought. What must she think, my girl of gold? I dare not ask; and baffled wit Droops—till sweet hopes begin to flit— Like butterflies that brave the cold— Perhaps ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... was only thinking that darkness is beautiful as well as light. If you but knew what eyes accustomed to its depth can see! Shades flit by, which one longs to follow; circles mingle and intertwine, and one could gaze on them forever; black hollows, full of indefinite gleams of radiance, lie deep at the bottom of the mine. And then the voice-like sounds! Ah, Harry! one must have lived down there to understand what I feel, ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... Age and withered World! Oh! the dying leaves, Like a drizzling rain, Falling round the roof— Pattering on the pane! Frosty Age and cold, cold World! Ghosts of other days, Trooping past the faded fire, Flit before the gaze. Now the wind goes soughing wild O'er the whistling Earth; And we front a feeble flame, Sitting round the hearth! Sitting by the fire, Watching in its glow, Ghosts of other days Trooping to ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... in agony, when she might pass unnoticed by keeping still. The most marked exception which I have noticed is the Red Thrush, which, in this respect, as in others, has the most high-bred manners among all our birds: both male and female sometimes flit in perfect silence through the bushes, and show solicitude only in a sob which is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... as a coot, swims right away when it is tumbled into water for the first time. So chicks peck without any learning or teaching, very young ducklings catch small moths that flit by, and young plovers lie low when the danger-signal sounds. But birds seem strangely limited as regards many of these instinctive capacities—limited when compared with the "little-brained" ants and bees, which have from the first such a rich repertory ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... flushing, Laden with roses. Happy ones, swarming, Ply their swift pinions, Glide through the charming Airy dominions, Sunward still fleering, Onward, where peering Far o'er the ocean, Islets are dancing With an entrancing, Magical motion; Hear them, in chorus, Singing high o'er us; Over the meadows Flit the bright shadows; Glad eyes are glancing, Tiny feet dancing. Up the high ridges Some of them clamber, Others are skimming Sky-lakes of amber, Others are swimming Over the ocean;— All are in motion, Life-ward all yearning, Longingly turning To the ...
— Faust • Goethe
... only see fine examples of the work of the camera in the hands of artists, but be led thereby to appreciate more fully the value of photography as an aid to interesting composition and a quickening of the eye in realizing the beauty of sunlight and shadows which flit around us much unrecognized at times. Succeeding in gaining the sympathetic co-operation of seventeen museums, in the winter of 1917-18 the Association collected, from many of the most important workers in this country, more than two hundred prints, which ...
— Pictorial Photography in America 1920 • Pictorial Photographers of America
... convict Sophocles, Schiller and Shelley of basest crimes, put Shakespeare in the dock for murder, Milton for blasphemy, Scott for forgery, and Goethe for questionable financial deals with the devil. Byron's sins were as scarlet and the number not a few, but the moths that came just to flit about the flame were all of mature age. Byron set no snares for the innocent, and in all of the man's misdoings, he himself it was who ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... to dance, and flit about the studio, like an incarnate sprite of jollity, pausing at last on the extremity of one toe, as if that were the only portion of himself whereby his frisky nature could come in contact with the earth. The effect in that shadowy chamber, whence the artist ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... said the youth. "He's just about ready to flit. He's bought lots of stuff to-day, and is flush ...
— The Crime of the French Cafe and Other Stories • Nicholas Carter
... from business, an indolence almost cloistral, which is delightful! With what reverence have I paced thy great bare rooms and courts at eventide! They spake of the past; the shade of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... had been before, even though we walked from Aix-les-Bains all the way down to the Riviera shoulder to shoulder. I had the will to be the same, but he was different now; and though we left Gaeta in the flesh at her villa, entertaining guests, Gaeta in the spirit would still flit between us as we went. The Boy would be thinking of her; I should know that he was thinking of her, and—there would be an ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... was her canny realization of the value of tantalism. She was not long left in ignorance of his record for flitting fancy and she felt that he would flit from her as soon as he conquered her. Her duty ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... that held the houses of the dead. They are tapu; about them flit the veinahae, the matiahae, and the etuahae, dread vampires and ghosts that have charge of the corpse and wait to seize the living. Well have these ghoulish phantoms feasted; whole islands are theirs, and soon they will sit upon the paepae ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... friend passed the gate, the former perceived several forms flit across the darkness, and a suspicion of treachery instantly flashed ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... taken for a few weeks by a party of boating-people. Then the quaint, old-fashioned gardens blossom with a sudden luxuriance of striped tents and flaming umbrellas, while bright women in many-hued boating-costumes flit among cabbages and onions like curious tropical birds and butterflies. As a rule, however, the Dean is abandoned to its usual rustic population and to artists, numbers of the latter remaining all winter in the haunts whence the majority ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... see when gentle Geordie was seeking to get other folk out of the Tolbooth forby Jocky Porteous? but ye are of my mind, hinny—better sit and rue, than flit and rue—ye needna look in my face sae amazed. I ken mair things than that, ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... within. And he will see stretch round him Hela's realm, The plains of Niflheim, where dwell the dead, And hear the roaring of the streams of Hell. And he will see the feeble, shadowy tribes, And Balder sitting crown'd, and Hela's throne. Then must he not regard the wailful ghosts Who all will flit, like eddying leaves, around; But he must straight accost their solemn queen, And pay her homage, and entreat with prayers, Telling her all that grief they have in Heaven For Balder, whom she holds by right below; If haply he may melt her heart with words, And make her yield, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... effective, and the practical musician, as well as the student of aesthetics, will do well to examine by what means these various effects are produced. In the second nocturne, F sharp major, the brightness and warmth of the world without have penetrated into the world within. The fioriture flit about as lightly as gossamer threads. The sweetly-sad longing of the first section becomes more disquieting in the doppio movimento, but the beneficial influence of the sun never quite loses its power, and after a little there is a relapse into the calmer mood, with a close like a hazy distance ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... after one, they fall asleep And the pension agents awake to weep, And orphaned statesmen are loud in their wail As the souls flit by on the evening gale. O Father of Battles, pray give us release From the horrors of ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... into her head to flit in the night-time. Her rent she had deposited with the caretaker, unknown porters had removed everything, and she had left no address ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... set it down, not speaking, but looking into her eyes inquiringly, like a dumb beast trying to feel out his master's will in his face. The evening was clear and the moon shining. As Dick sat at his chamber-window, looking at the mountain-side, he saw a gray-dressed figure flit between the trees and steal along the narrow path that led upward. Elsie's pillow was impressed that night, but she had not been missed by the household,—for Dick knew enough to keep his own counsel. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... is over, and the spasm of dying leaves it motionless, to be sleeping. But even in life, while the body sleeps, the soul is awake. It is often, during the sleep of the body, even more active than during the waking hours. In dreams the soul is busy with its fancies. Thoughts flit this way and that through the mind of the sleeper. Indeed, the body is more often a hindrance rather than a help to the activities of thought. To lose all consciousness of the existence of the body, to be as if the body for the time were not,—this is to set the mind thinking ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... door behind Zachariah was reassuring. At any rate he was alive and far too sprightly to have suffered a broken leg or a cracked skull. A few seconds later she saw Kenny's shadow flit hurriedly past the window as he dashed toward the kitchen. For some time she stood perfectly still, listening to the confused jumble of voices in the house across the way, debating whether she should hurry over to explain,—and ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... evoked in a man's heart, however imperfectly, as I believe it is in some of your hearts now, must issue in one of two things. Either it will send you further into darkness to get away from the light, as the bats in a cave will flit to the deepest recesses of it in order to escape the torch, or it will bring you nearer to Him, and at His feet you will ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... earth that is scarcely seen Through the curtain of vapour that waves between, O'er city and hamlet, o'er hill and plain, O'er forest green, and o'er mountain hoar, They flit like shadows, and pass the shore, And wing their way ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... a faintly doubtful expression flit rapidly across his face, and noticed that Mr. Crayford was already surrounded. Adelaide Shiffney kept him in conversation. Margot Drake stood close to him, and fixed her dark eyes upon him with an expression of still determination. ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... observation, in which industry and skill count for more than expensive instruments, is the search for new comets. This requires a very practised eye, in order that the comet may be caught among the crowd of stars which flit across the field of view as the telescope is moved. It is also necessary to be well acquainted with a number of nebulae which look very much like comets. The search can be made with almost any small telescope, if one is careful to use a very low power. With ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... lost no time in opening wide The door that had been fast; And I could see Those crickets three Like dusky ghosts flit past. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... the bats would quit their homes in hollow trees and old rocky banks, and flit noiselessly abroad, over the surface of the quiet star-lit lake; and now also would begin the shrill, trilling note of the green-frog, and the deep hoarse bass of the bull-frog, which ceases only at intervals, through the long, warm summer night. You ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... ignorant of his pecuniary liabilities until the crash of the Ballantyne firm told her for the first time that they were sharers in the ruin. A psychologist might trace this strange twist of his mind in the numerous elfish Fenella-like characters who flit about and keep their irritating secret through the long chapters of so many of ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... back to the United States, where in Cleveland the mother tried many different kinds of occupations by which to support the child and herself. It was a strange life the young person remembered in those early days. She and her mother had to flit so often—suddenly, noiselessly. Often she remembered being roused from a sound sleep, sometimes being simply wrapped up without being dressed, and carried through the dark to some other place ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... day Ody was to flit she held a sort of carouse at her solitary breakfast over the remnant of a pound of tea which she had saved after the wake. Tea was ten prices fifty years ago, and a very rare luxury at the Three Mile Farm. As she poured it strong and black out of the badly ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... the luxury of the Renaissance, traveling was at that time very disagreeable; everywhere in Europe it was as difficult then as it is now in the Orient. Great lords and ladies, who to-day flit across the country in comfortable railway carriages, traveled in the sixteenth century, even in the most civilized states of Europe, mounted on horses or mules, or slowly in sedan-chairs, exposed to all the inclemencies of wind and weather, and unpaved roads. ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... lawn the snow lay deep, Ridged o'er with many a drifty heap; The wind that through the pine trees sung The naked elm-boughs tossed and swung; While through the window, frosty-starred, Against the sunset purple barr'd, We saw the somber crow flit by, The hawks gray flock along the sky, The crested blue-jay flitting swift, The squirrel poising on the drift, Erect, alert, his broad gray tail, Set to the north wind like ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... slipped into one of those sociable silences of the bushfolk—silences that draw away all active thought from the mind, leaving it a sensitive plate ready to absorb impressions and thoughts as they flit about it, silences where every one is so in harmony with his comrades and surroundings that the breaking of them rarely jars—spoken words so often ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... The fellowship of voluntary grief— He read the tear-stained book of poor men's souls, As we must learn to read it. Lady! lady! Wear but one robe the less—forego one meal— And thou shalt taste the core of many tales, Which now flit past thee, like a minstrel's songs, The sweeter for ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... some distance from the houses was bending over the snow where it was not yet melted by the heat. He saw there the track of snowshoes, and suddenly, looking toward the forest, whither they led, he saw a dark figure flit away ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... eye is lost in splendid vistas: it sees a long perspective of rare palaces where beings of a loftier nature glide. The incense of all prosperities sends up its smoke, the altar of all joy flames, the perfumed air circulates! Beings with divine smiles, robed in white tunics bordered with blue, flit lightly before the eyes and show us visions of supernatural beauty, shapes of an incomparable delicacy. The Loves hover in the air and waft the flames of their torches! We feel ourselves beloved; we are happy as we breathe a joy we understand not, as we bathe in the waves of a harmony that flows ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... not walk, though the lads in both watches insisted they saw and heard things that were not right or natural. The night following in the midwatch—our midwatch—half the watch swore they saw him flit across the main deck and disappear behind ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... two red sulky faces were hidden in the dark, watching candle after candle sputter, brighten, and twinkle, till the trembling shadows began to flit away like imps ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... nameless graces, Through the shadows flit and gleam, See again beloved faces Shine around as in a dream, And the well-remembered places Of the bygone, nearer seem, Till all present melancholy, Fades away, and sweet and tender, Visions of life's spring-time splendour, Gleam ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... Some flit through our hearts like birds darting under the foliage of trees, then out again, lost in the sunshine; others linger awhile and we nestle them in our bosoms until we forget that they are there, ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... two days Dr. Rauparaha had much writing to do, and passed his mornings and afternoons in the quiet library. Sometimes, as he wrote, a shadow would flit across the wide, sunlit veranda, and Helen Torringley would flit by, nodding pleasantly to him through the windows. Only two or three times had he met her alone since he came to Te Ariri, and walked with her through the grounds, listening ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... girded me Was there but One who—but of her anon. I said with men, and with the thoughts of men, 60 I held but slight communion; but instead, My joy was in the wilderness,—to breathe The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,[131] Where the birds dare not build—nor insect's wing Flit o'er the herbless granite; or to plunge Into the torrent, and to roll along On the swift whirl of the new-breaking wave Of river-stream, or Ocean, in their flow.[132] In these my early strength exulted; or To follow through the night the moving moon,[133] 70 The stars and their development; or ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... True: but those walls have girded in great ages, And sent forth mighty spirits. The past earth And present phantom of imperious Rome[dk] 190 Is peopled with those warriors; and methinks They flit along the eternal City's rampart, And stretch their glorious, gory, shadowy ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... clusters knit. On either side in circles flit, Like bees in April swarming, Their tiny weight each other lend, And force the yielding cheek to bend, ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... tenderly as if he were one of themselves. Robin the Red-breast and shy little Veery, Pewee the plaintive and cheerful Chewink, Long-sparrow, Bluebird, and sweet Chickadee, all glide freely in and out of their green and golden halls, flit through their winding streets, and take part in all their delights. Nor have the Leaflanders any trouble to understand bird-language. They have not, like the old Ger-men, eaten the hearts of birds, but by a more excellent ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... sees. The green, green woods of Chesney Wold, the noble house, the pictures of his forefathers, strangers defacing them, officers of police coarsely handling his most precious heirlooms, thousands of fingers pointing at him, thousands of faces sneering at him. But if such shadows flit before him to his bewilderment, there is one other shadow which he can name with something like distinctness even yet and to which alone he addresses his tearing of his white hair ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... however, in their artistic creations, succeeded most perfectly, in combining the ideal with the real, or, to drop school terms, an elevation more than human with all the truth of life, and in investing the manifestation of an idea with energetic corporeity. They did not allow their figures to flit about without consistency in empty space, but they fixed the statue of humanity on the eternal and immovable basis of moral liberty; and that it might stand there unshaken, formed it of stone or brass, or some more massive substance than the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... easy to expel an obnoxious thought from your mind as it is to shake a stone out of your shoe; and till a man can do that it is just nonsense to talk about his ascendancy over Nature, and all the rest of it. He is a mere slave, and prey to the bat-winged phantoms that flit through the corridors ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... garden walls The wind blows from the silver seas; Black shadow of the cypress falls Between the moon-meshed olive-trees; Sleep-walking from their golden bowers, Flit ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... a log upon which men's heads can be cut off. Senor, I congratulate you. You have the wisdom that grasps the substance and lets the shadows flit. It is really ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... differentiated and susceptible. Noticeable emotivity, a rapidity of perception and volition, impulsiveness, and a tendency to explosive crises of expression are the distinctive psychic traits. A restless, inexhaustible energy makes them perpetual doers and workers, who get up early in the morning, flit about all day, retire late, and frequently suffer from insomnia, planning in bed what they are ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... it teams I am so proud, I heard one day With endless schemes If I allowed A gentleman say Both good and new My family pride That criminals who For Titipu; To be my guide, Are cut in two But if I flit, I'd volunteer Can hardly feel The benefit To quit this sphere The fatal steel, That I'd diffuse Instead of you And so are slain The town would lose! In a minute or two, Without much pain. Now every man But family pride If this is ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... the "no-good husband" bursting in on games of cards with wild charges which only the payment of big money could suppress—suppress you understand, purely for the sake of the lady: outraged honor could accept no atonement. Then the lady would flit for the winter to those beauty doctors of Paris and New York, who operate on wrinkles and lay up muniments for fresh campaigns; and the "colonel" would betake himself to resorts where balm is accorded ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... good-night. The moonlight was falling weirdly through the big trees, stretching itself over the grass in shapes that seemed to spell unearthly things. And there were mystical lights on the water down there, flitting about with the movement of the stream as ghosts might flit. Because it looked so other-world-like she wondered if it knew what it had just missed. She had never thought anything about water save as something to look beautiful and have a good time on. It seemed now that perhaps it knew a great deal about things of which ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... of Povi-whah have melted again into Mother Earth. Silent are the groves where the Ancient Others carved their homes from the rock walls of the heights. Wings of vivid blue flit in the sunlight from the portal of the star to bough of the pinyon tree—and a brooding silence rests over those high levels;—only the wind whispers in the pines, and the old Indians point to the bird of azure and tell of a Demon-maid who came once ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... me of the happy hours Enjoyed by thee in fair Italia's bowers, Where, lingering yet, the ghost of ancient wit Midst modern monks profanely dares to flit. And pagan spirits, by the Pope unlaid, Haunt every stream and sing through every shade. There still the bard who (if his numbers be His tongue's light echo) must have talked like thee,— The courtly bard, from whom thy mind has caught Those playful, sunshine holidays of thought, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... paint it for you, if I can. It is a lovely spot. Tall mountains, crowned with verdure, rise in awful sublimity around; a river runs through, and bright flowers grow to the water's edge. But there a group of Indians gather. They flit to and fro, with something like sorrow upon their dark brows. In their midst lies a manly form, but his cheek, how deathly! His eyes are wild with the fitful fire of fever. One friend stands before him—nay, I should say, kneels; for see, he is pillowing that poor ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... range of activity be controlled? Who is going to teach, or look after, all these things? How are they to be kept going? Are they, or any of them, to be compulsory, or is a boy or girl to be allowed to do anything or nothing, or to flit, butterfly-fashion, from one to another, learning nothing except to fritter away ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... they turned for a short distance; and a farmer and his wife, returning home from a church sociable, on seeing these five white figures flit past in a minimum of clothing, thereafter always vowed that ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... said my uncle Jervas, viewing me languidly through his quizzing-glass. "How confoundedly the years flit! Nineteen—and on me soul, our poor youth looks as if he hadn't a single gentlemanly ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... the direction in which the strangers had gone, thus covering the spare man to whom she was talking from their backward glances. Bates, who was looking up at her face with his heart-hunger in his eyes, saw a look of contempt for the passing remark flit across her face, and because of the fond craving of his own heart, his sympathy, strangely enough, went out to the young man who had spoken, rather than to her sentiment of contempt. The angel of human loves alone could tell ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... the store, and drew near. The slim figure, finding it out of the question to flit hurriedly away, without attracting attention, which was just the thing he wished to avoid, commenced stroking the sleek side of the big black Kentucky thoroughbred, as though he might be a cowboy connected with the far famed Circle ranch of ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... Yet you never once heard a voice raised yet against the company as a company. Individual complaints get into the Times, of course, about the crowding of the train de luxe, the breach of faith as to places, and the discomforts of the journey; but never a glimmering conception seems to flit across the popular mind that here is a Colossal Wrong, compared to which Monte Carlo is but as a flea-bite to the Asiatic cholera. This chartered abuse connects the three biggest towns in France—Paris, Lyon, Marseilles—and is absolutely without competitors. It can do as it likes; ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... sooner,' whispered one. 'Unseen we flit into those homes of men where there are children, and for every day that we find a good child who gives pleasure to its parents and deserves their love God shortens our time of probation. The child does not know when we fly through the room, and when we smile with pleasure ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... once, a passing cloud Rests on her girlish brow, Her dark eye gleameth restlessly— She's thinking of her vow. But quick as light and fleecy clouds Flit o'er a summer sky, The shadow passeth from her brow, The ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... across the spirits of the gentle sex, when approaching to hold this tender communion with those whom they love. Nothing that we remember resembles the busy working of the soul on such occasions, so much as those lucid streamers which flit in sweeps of delicate light along the northern sky, filling it at once with beauty and terror, and emitting at the same time a far and almost inaudible undertone ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... might be made more vivid, and their effect brought home more tenderly to her heart. For a long hour she sat on the foot of her bed, now weeping, now smiling, now tossing her lovely head backwards, then burying her sweet face in her hands. At times a shadow would flit over the delicate features, but it would soon be replaced by a glamor of serenity, until finally her whole demeanor settled into an air of prayerful content. Her hands joined upon her knee, her brow was bent, and her lips ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... "Forgive me, Mr. Carrollton. I sent Gritty home on purpose to see if you would be annoyed, for I felt vexed because you would not humor my whim and meet me at the bridge. I am sorry I caused you any uneasiness," she continued, as she saw a shadow flit over his face. ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... and the dark velvety green of endless summer to the yellow-green of the plumage of the palm, riots in a heavy shower every night and the heat of a perennial sun-blaze every day, while monkeys of various kinds and bright-winged birds skip and flit through the jungle shades. There is a perpetual battle between man and the jungle, and the latter, in fact, is only brought to bay within a short ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... of prophet beholding his enemies bruised of his rod Beheld but the likeness of this that is fallen on the faithful, the friends of God. Northward, and northward, and northward they stagger and shudder and swerve and flit, Dismantled of masts and of yards, with sails by the fangs of the storm-wind split. But north of the headland whose name is Wrath, by the wrath or the ruth of the sea, They are swept or sustained to the westward, and drive ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... speak worthily of the fullness of childhood? We cannot behold the little creatures which flit about before us otherwise than with delight, nay, with admiration; for they generally promise more than they perform and it seems that nature, among the other roguish tricks that she plays us, here also especially ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... also declare Luther spiritually unfit for translating the Bible. They say that all the time that Luther spent at the Wartburg he was haunted by the devil. He would hear strange noises and see weird shadows flit before him. He felt that he had come under the sway of the powers of darkness. This, we are assured, was because he had risen in rebellion against the divine power of the papacy. The Holy Father whom he had attacked was being ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... fellow, the man who spoke; and amongst other labels on his baggage was one marked Khartoum. His hands were sinewy and his face was bronzed, while his eyes, brown and deep-set, held in them the glint of the desert places of the earth: the mark of the jungle where birds flit through the shadows like bars of glorious colour; the mark of the swamp where the ague mists lie dank and stagnant in the ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... Grieg, he is never mincing and meretricious. We never find him languishing in a pretty boudoir. He is always out under the sky. It is only that he is not always free and resourceful and deeply self-critical. Even through the bold and rugged and splendid Violin Concerto there flit at moments the shadows of Beethoven and Wagner and Tchaikowsky. The first theme of the quartet "Voces intimae" resembles not a little a certain theme in "Boris." The close of "Nightride and Sunrise" is watered Brahms and watered Strauss. And there ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... through the sunshiny barns, with their lean sides and their festoons of brown, dusty cobwebs; dull, comfortable creatures they appear to imaginative eyes, waiting hungrily for their yearly meal. The eave-swallows are teasing their sleepy shapes, like the birds which flit about great beasts; gay, movable, irreverent, almost derisive, those barn swallows fly to and fro in the still, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... end will prove of service in his life's work, and he has stood the test. Many young fellows of his age would have abused their opportunities. He has not done so. My only disappointment has been that he has developed no definite taste, but has been content to flit from one fancy to the next, always carried away by the latest ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... natures,—those that have wings, and those that have feet,—the winged and the walking spirits. The walking are the logicians: the winged are the instinctive and poetic. Natures that must always walk find many a bog, many a thicket, many a tangled brake, which God's happy little winged birds flit over by one noiseless flight. Nay, when a man has toiled till his feet weigh too heavily with the mud of earth to enable him to walk another step, these little birds will often cleave the air in a right line towards ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... surface of which is covered with the broad leaves of Villarsia, exactly resembling those of Nymphaea alba, and with several species of Potomogeton. Small grey birds, like the warblers of the reeds, flit from stem to stem; hosts of brilliant gyrinus play on the water; notonectes and beetles, resembling the hydrophili, live within it—now rising to respire, now swiftly diving. Limnaea, similar to those ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... a murmur of content in her voice when she spoke, and a ripple of content in her laugh when she laughed. But the light quivered on Dolly's lip, and gleamed and sparkled in her brown eyes, and light and shadow could flit over her face with quick change; ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... are fishing together without interfering with each other, while large flights of wild-duck rise splashing from the stream. Eagles soar aloft, or, with the vultures, alight upon a sand-bank to dispute the possession of some carcass with the jackals and the foxes. Water wag-tails flit along the shore, or in the most friendly manner board your steamer to feed on the crumbs from your tea-table, while large numbers of gay-plumaged king-fishers dart in and out from their nests tunnelled far into the precipitous face ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... cotton; that too was difficult. The waste cotton-shrub, long useless, disobedient, as the thistle by the wayside,—have ye not conquered it; made it into beautiful bandana webs; white woven shirts for men; bright-tinted air-garments wherein flit goddesses? Ye have shivered mountains asunder, made the hard iron pliant to you as soft putty: the Forest-giants, Marsh-joetuns bear sheaves of golden-grain; AEgir the Sea-demon himself stretches his back for a sleek highway to you, and on Firehorses and Windhorses ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... best appear to you! how severe its voice! how forbidding its aspect! With what animation, on the contrary, do you enter into the mere pursuits of time and the world! What bright anticipations of joy and happiness flit before your eyes! How you are struck and dazzled at the view of the prizes of this life, as they are called! How you admire the elegancies of art, the brilliance of wealth, or the force of intellect! According to your opportunities you mix in the world, ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... contrast to the quiet effects in some side street; for example this street seen half in moonlight, beneath my window in the Coburg; the only sound the click clack of the busy horse's feet on the wood pavement, as hansoms and carriages flit round from Berkeley Square—there's a levee to night, and their yellow lamps string up Mount Street and divide beneath me into ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... they denounce failure to do so as cause of civil war between States; and as if the Constitution were silent and dead and the power of the Union utterly inadequate to keep the peace between them, unconstitutional commissioners flit from State to State, or assemble at the national capital to counsel peace or instigate war. Sir, these are the causes which lie at the bottom of the present dangers. These causes which have rendered them possible and made them serious, must be removed before they can ever ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... out, for I remember no excitement or interest about the journey, which ought to have had so much for me. In a passive state of mind I followed Miss Pinshon from steamer to station; from one train of cars to another; and saw the familiar landscape flit before me as the cars whirled us on. At Baytown we had been joined by a gentleman who went with us all the rest of the way; and I began by degrees to comprehend that my governess had changed her vocation, and instead of taking care, ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the charge resounds! On Gaelic spear the Northman bounds! Through helmet plumes the arrows flit, And plated breasts the pikeheads split. The double-axe fells human oaks, And like the thistles in the field See bristling up (where none must yield!) The points ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... plunder, and who, in all other points, appeared to consult his welfare and his wishes, it occurred to our hero, that, during the worst crisis of his illness, a female figure, younger than his old Highland nurse, had appeared to flit around his couch. Of this, indeed, he had but a very indistinct recollection, but his suspicions were confirmed when, attentively listening, he often heard, in the course of the day, the voice of another female conversing ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... Bernald heard a step on the gravel, and saw the red flit of a cigar through the shrubs. Then a loosely-moving figure obscured the patch of sky between the creepers, and the red spark became the centre of a dim bearded face, in which Bernald discerned only a broad ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... nor could the bell-branch any longer bring him forgetfulness of them. So one morning he took the branch and went out alone from Tara over the plain, taking the direction in which they had passed away a year agone; and ere long little wreathes of mist began to curl about his feet, and then to flit by him like long trailing robes, and he knew no more where he was. After a time, however, he came out again into sunshine and clear sky, and found himself in a country of flowery meadows and of woods filled with singing-birds where he had never journeyed before. He walked ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... recollict what it was! So we'll jist let it pass by this time, ef you plase, sur!' Martin remained in his station. When the successor of Mr. Van Buren came in, the door-keeper presented himself soon after to the new President, with the civil inquiry: 'I suppose I'll hev to flit, too, with the other Martin?' He was smilingly told ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... flow from so many different sources. Then, like an impetuous torrent, he seemed to unite these streams into a foaming waterfall; over the tossing waves the rainbow presently stretches its peaceful arch, while on the banks butterflies flit to and fro, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... distillation, by which water may be purified; the Arabs called the apparatus for conducting that experiment an alembic. His treatise on the virtues and composition of waters was conveyed under the form of a dream, in which there flit before us fantastically white-haired priests sacrificing before the altar; cauldrons of boiling water, in which there are walking about men a span long; brazen-clad warriors in silence reading leaden books, and sphinxes ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... leg swings 'cross on an outlaw hawse And my spurs clinch into his hide, He kin r'ar and pitch over hill and ditch, But wherever he goes I'll ride. Let 'im spin and flop like a crazy top, Or flit like a wind-whipped smoke, But he'll know the feel of my rowelled heel Till he's ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... Ravenhurst I want to talk to him, or I'll simply flit back to Eros, and thank him much for a pretty retainer that didn't do him any good but gave me a nice profit ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... 'DDT' after a similar tool on the TX-0 computer, the direct ancestor of the PDP-1 built at MIT's Lincoln Lab in 1957. The debugger on that ground-breaking machine (the first transistorized computer) rejoiced in the name FLIT (FLexowriter ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... Sikes, which often flit about, but must not be trusted. Mr. Patch could not have given a better proof that his rejection ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... Christ in civilization; and the knight warring to recover the tomb of God was the poem among soldiers, and in entire consonance with his nature, Tennyson's poetic genius flits back into the poetic days, as I have seen birds flit back into a forest. In Tennyson's poetry two things are clear. They are mediaeval in location; they are modern in temper. Their geography is yesterday, their spirit is to-day; and so we have the questions ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... off shore above the loudest gale. Ever they wait the winter's hate as the thundering boorga calls, Where northward look they to St. George, and westward to St. Paul's. Ever they greet the hunted fleet—lone keels off headlands drear— When the sealing-schooners flit that way at hazard year by year. Ever in Yokohama Port men tell the tale anew Of a hidden sea and a hidden fight, When the Baltic ran from the Northern Light And the ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... curate or bishop, not even the archbishop of Auch, can pardon them; that right belongs to the pope of Rome alone. The Mass of Saint Scaire may be said only in a ruined or deserted church, where owls mope and hoot, where bats flit in the gloaming, where gypsies lodge of nights, and where toads squat under the desecrated altar. Thither the bad priest comes by night with his light o' love, and at the first stroke of eleven he begins to mumble the mass backwards, and ends just as the clocks are knelling the midnight ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... this portion of the ride is a delight. The senses are kept keenly alert, for not only have we the Lake, the bay and the mountains, but part of the way we have flowers and shrubs by the thousands, bees and butterflies flit to and fro, and singing streams come foaming white from the snowbanks above, eager to reach the Lake. As our car-wheels dash across these streamlets they splash up the water on each side into sparkling diamonds and on every ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... unrivalled for toothache. The horses on the roads are sometimes protected from the sun by a kind of oblong sail, which works on a swivel attached to the harness. Black velvety butterflies as big as wrens flit about. (There are twice as many butterflies and moths in Japan as at home.) Snakes, ordinarily of harmless varieties, are frequently seen, dead ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... had on, Which being sold and sold had bought them bread: And Edyrn's men had caught them in their flight, And placed them in this ruin; and she wished The Prince had found her in her ancient home; Then let her fancy flit across the past, And roam the goodly places that she knew; And last bethought her how she used to watch, Near that old home, a pool of golden carp; And one was patched and blurred and lustreless Among his burnished brethren of the pool; And half asleep she made comparison Of that ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... was its hard fate frequently to suffer imposition, from assumed worth and fictitious distress. Beings of supposed benevolence, capable of perceiving, loving, and promoting merit and virtue, have now and then seemed to flit and glide before it. But the visions were deceitful. Ere they were distinctly seen, the phantoms vanished. Or, if such beings do exist, it has experienced the peculiar hardship of never having met with any, in whom both the purpose and the ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... wells of wonder sprang, Both children of the cosmic dream, Alike with yonder bird that sang, And little lives that flit and gleam; Sparks from the central rose of fire That at the heart of being burns, That draws the lily from the mire And trodden dust to ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... and beautiful grounds. She was the pet and darling of the entire community. In the long summer afternoons when the nuns carried their sewing out to the orchard behind the house, or to the pine grove on the hill, where one could obtain such a lovely view of the river, Nita would flit about amongst them like a veritable woodland fairy. Her snatches of song and merry laughter made sylvan echoes ring and brought smiles to the faces of the simple women who watched her ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... had seen its short-lived race Flit past the scenes and others take their place; Yet the old prompter watched his accents still, His name still flaunted on the evening's bill. Heroes, the monarchs of the scenic floor, Had died in earnest and were ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... alternative struck a sudden terror into her; for the abbot abruptly records in his book that 'here her spirit seemed to flit out of her, and she began to tremble very much, and in vain to contend with tears. I had her all dissolved at my feet within a few moments. She was very young, and ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... first of Woodbridge young ladies. To take her to a dance was to have the ultimate in good times, there was no need to worry about her getting "stuck," and in addition to the thrill of taking a popular girl one could enjoy all the advantages of a stag. One could flit from flower to flower until surfeited with beauty and then retire for a smoke or other innocent diversion without the haunting fear that possibly Dick or Bill was circling around and around in ever-deepening gloom with one's elected for the night. Nancy had permanently impressed herself upon the ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... charm of poesy!" rejoined Sah-luma complacently.. "It makes the hours flit like moments, and long days seemed but short hours! ... Nevertheless 'tis time we were within doors and at supper,—for if we start not soon for the Temple, 'twill be difficult to gain an entrance, and I, at any rate, must be early in my place ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... time, and assure posterity that there never was such a lamb as Catherine II., and that, so far from assassinating her own husband and Czar Ivan,[2] she wept over every chicken that she had for dinner. How crimes, like fashions, flit from clime to clime! Murder reigns under the Pole, while you, who are in the very town where Catherine de' Medici was born, and within a stone's throw of Rome, where Borgia and his holy father sent cardinals to the other world by hecatombs, are surprised to hear that there is such an instrument ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... discovered. I earnestly prayed that help might be sent me. How it was to come I could not tell. Notwithstanding what was before me, I still desired to be set free. Although I was not sleeping, strange fancies filled my brain. I saw people flit about in the darkness, suddenly coming into the light, and then disappearing. Some were people I knew, and others were strangers. Aunt Deb and Mr Butterfield came by, tripping it lightly, holding each other's hands, ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... asked abruptly, 'why, with pretty much all the known world to choose her friends from, this young woman should flit about with Siegmund Stein? It prejudices people against her. He's ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... They flit about, the yellow birds, And rest upon the jujube trees [1]. Who followed duke M in the grave? Dze-k Yen-hs. And this Yen-hs Was a man above a hundred. When he ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... stream in, and pounce eagerly on chairs and telephones; the usual Fussy Family waste precious minutes in trying to get seats together, and get separated in the end. Undecided persons flit from one side to another. Gradually they all settle down, and stop their ears with the telephone-tubes, the prevailing expression being one of anxiety, combined with conscious and apologetic imbecility. Nervous people catch the eye of complete strangers across ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 30, 1892 • Various
... . . . The years would pass—and he would have to live with that unfathomable candour where flit shadows of suspicions and hate . . . The years would pass—and he would never know—never trust . . . The years would pass without faith and ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... save Tyber hastning to his fall Remaines of all. O world's inconstancie! That which is firme doth flit and fall away, And that is flitting doth abide ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... egg, "repeats the same note very often, and concludes with the sixth above, which she holds for a longer time" (26. The Hon. Daines Barrington, 'Philosophical Transactions,' 1773, p. 252.); and thus she expresses her joy. Some social birds apparently call to each other for aid; and as they flit from tree to tree, the flock is kept together by chirp answering chirp. During the nocturnal migrations of geese and other water-fowl, sonorous clangs from the van may be heard in the darkness overhead, answered by clangs in the rear. Certain cries serve as danger signals, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... days when I was young and strong, He used to sing on yonder garden tree, Beside the nursery. Ah, I remember how I loved to wake, And find him singing on the self-same bough (I know it even now) Where, since the flit of bat, In ceaseless voice he sat, Trying the spring night over, like a tune, Beneath the vernal moon; And while I listed long, Day rose, and still he sang, And all his stanchless song, As something falling unaware, Fell out of the tall trees ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... himself was not aware of it. Occasionally, while he played, the Nixy's haunting strain would flit through his brain, or hover about it, where he could feel it, as it were, but yet be unable to catch it. This was his regret—his constant chase for those elusive notes ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... my choice of crimes. The woods flit and fly—in summer there are bluebells; in the opening there, when Spring comes, primroses. A parting, was it, twenty years ago? Vows broken? Not Minnie's!... She was faithful. How she nursed her mother! All her savings on the tombstone—wreaths under glass—daffodils in jars. But I'm off the ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... and he held in his hand his wand that is fair and golden, wherewith he lulls the eyes of men, of whomso he will, while others again he even wakens out of sleep. Herewith he roused and led the souls who followed gibbering. And even as bats flit gibbering in the secret place of a wondrous cave, when one has fallen down from the cluster on the rock, where they cling each to each up aloft, even so the souls gibbered as they fared together, and Hermes, the helper, led them down the dank ways. Past the streams of Oceanus and the White ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... ripples run; all patient sit The stars above the night. In shade and gleam the waters flit: The ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... sons of men We Gods have but our season, and go by; And Cronos pass'd, and Uranus, and then Shall Zeus and all his children utterly Pass, and new Gods be born, and reign, and die,— But thee shall lovers worship evermore What Gods soe'er usurp the changeful sky, Or flit to ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... dawn, haunted her during the day. She would read in her room, or remain at her prayers, in the hopes of distracting herself from the struggle, until sleep seemed the supreme necessity: then, when she lay down, sleep would flap its wings in mockery and flit away, leaving her wide-awake staring at the darkness of the room or of her own eyelids, until the windows began to glimmer and the cocks to ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... their form and alive with heavenly instincts, which complete with wondrous speed their rapid courses. Wherefore, my son, by you and by all just men that soul must be retained within its body's confines, nor can it be allowed to flit without command of him by whom it has been given to you. You may not escape the duty which God has trusted to you. Live, my Scipio, and shine with piety and justice, as your grandfather did and I have done. It is your duty to ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... own, hint the commerce of another world with man's discarded domain. Men and women are asleep, and as in an early walk you may startle the hares at their play, or see the creatures of the darkness—owls and night-hawks and heavy moths—flit with fantastic purpose over the familiar scene, so here it comes upon you suddenly that you have surprised Nature's self at her mysteries; you are let into the secret; you have caught the spirit of the April woodland as she glides over the pasture ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... dinner of importance is the first thing imperative to be set in progress. A flurried Court, that of Gotha, and much swashing of French plumes through it, all this morning, since Seidlitz had to flit. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... you," thought Jeff, as he watched the figure before him flit away toward the house. He followed at a distance, till he saw the door close on Evelyn; then he went back to ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... bereavement which wails through Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' or Cowley's 'Ode on the Death of Mr. Hervey'. Much, especially in the earlier stanzas, is common form. The Muse Urania is summoned to lament, and a host of personified abstractions flit before us, "like pageantry of ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... squandered as fast as I obtained it, and had realised a considerable sum. I could not help comparing myself to a chrysalis previous to its transformation. I had before been a caterpillar, I was now all ready to burst my confinement, and flit about as a gaudy butterfly. Another week I continued my prudent conduct, at the end of which I was admitted to my superior, in whose hands I placed a sum of money which I could very conveniently spare, and received his benediction ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... wished that he had a com-unit. Because of the interference in the Burn he had left it behind—but with one he might be able now to locate some settlement. All that remained was to find the seashore and, with it as a guide, flit south towards the ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... hang from the tree branches, to dip their hands in the water to drink; only to flee, chattering to the tree-tops, as they meet the gaze of apparently slumbering crocodiles. Great painted butterflies flit above the beds of lilies that fringe the muddy lagoons, the hippopotamus wallows lazily in the warm sunlit waters. Here, it is true, is the Equatorial Africa of our schoolboy dreams; and the birds have little but their ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... affirmed the other, heartily, as he eyed the boy; and perhaps a dim suspicion that he might find the fugitive valuable as a guide began to flit through his mind then ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... visible as you look closer, are countless forms of brightness and of beauty. You will find them among the shining coals that glimmer in scarlet and gold before you when the embers lie clear and warm upon the hearth. You will behold them among the shadows that flit across the embers with delicate grace ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... of striking rather than beautiful appearance. They have some very handsome relatives which are known as minivets. Every person must have seen a company of small birds with somewhat long tails, clothed in bright scarlet and black—birds which flit about among the trees like sparks driven before the wind. These are cock minivets. The hens, which are often found in company with them, are in their way equally beautiful and conspicuous, for they are bright yellow in those parts of the plumage where the cocks are scarlet. It ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... lodging-house keeper at Whitby Saw a couple of Zeppelins flit by; Though she felt a sharp sting, It's a curious thing That she never knew ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... live in a foreign country, without family intercourse, far from the circle with which one is united by early memories and the first affections of the heart; we do not definitely seek, Fate does not help us find. We adjust our lives to habits which really leave no room for a wife, and so the years flit by till some day we discover that we are bachelors and that it is too ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... murder, Milton for blasphemy, Scott for forgery, and Goethe for questionable financial deals with the devil. Byron's sins were as scarlet and the number not a few, but the moths that came just to flit about the flame were all of mature age. Byron set no snares for the innocent, and in all of the man's misdoings, he himself ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... 'Rich maidens, again, flit abroad in gowns scolloped out behind and before, so that back and breast are almost bare. Wives of quality, on the other hand, have train-gowns four or five ells in length; which trains there are boys to carry. Brave Cleopatras, sailing in their silk-cloth Galley, with ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... little idea of the phantoms of trouble which flit, in such circumstances, before the uneducated mind of the slave. Upon either side, we saw grim death assuming a variety of horrid shapes. Now, it was starvation, causing us, in a strange and friendless land, to eat our own flesh. Now, we were contending ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... But the minutes crept by, and it seemed as if the cold gust had slowly passed away. Sometimes, at the twilight hour, a night-bird will come in by the window like some messenger of misfortune, flit round the darkened room, and then fly off again, carrying its sadness with it. And it was much like that; the gust passed, the basilica remained standing, the earth did not open to swallow it. Little by little the atrocious anguish which ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... mark and the woodland, the home of wild beasts and of hostile ghosts, of deadly spirits and of fierce enemies, gleams luridly through every line. The fen and the forest are dim and dark; will-o'-the-wisps flit above them, and gloom closes them in; wolves and wild boars lurk there, the quagmire opens its jaws and swallows the horse and his rider; the foeman comes through it to bring fire and slaughter to the clan-village at the dead of night. To these real terrors and dangers ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... practice. For the rest, I am sure that Mr. Brummell was no lackey, as they have suggested. He wished merely to be seen by those who were best qualified to appreciate the splendour of his achievements. Shall not the painter show his work in galleries, the poet flit down Paternoster Row? Of rank, for its own sake, Mr. Brummell had no love. He patronised all his patrons. Even to the Regent his attitude was always that of a master in an art to one who is sincerely willing and anxious to ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... much more than comfortably settled myself, and let thoughts of a cigar and a nap flit through my mind, when a row up the street showed that the jail-breaking had been discovered. Then followed shouts and confusion for a few moments, while a search was being organized. I heard some horsemen ride over the tracks, and also down ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... godly Calvinist city, was a poor hunting-ground on the whole for them. But they turned their steps to the old cit, rightly believing that among those ancient and narrow streets vice might, if anywhere, flit by night. ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... and said: "Nay, nay, let me grow a few days older yet. Nevertheless there is this new thing, that this morning I have brought thee a gift which I deem I may to flit to thee, and I shall give it to thee with a good will if thou wilt promise that thou wilt not ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... bagsmen, but stumble upon fawns just dropped, and do not scare their doting mothers; I quench not my noonday thirst with fiery drams from a brazen tap, but, lying over the cold brook, drink to its musical Naiades; I walk no dusty roads of a working-day world, but flit upon the pleasant places of one ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... flows it forms a little oasis upon the barren slope. Along the course of the streams are little patches of green grass, flowers, and bushes. Birds flit about, and there are tracks of small animals in the mud. Evidently the water is as great an attraction to them as it is to us. If a well were dug in the plateau above, we can understand now how deep it would have to be in order to reach water. ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... drooping tail for a few rods, then sank down again in the clover. From somewhere in the distance a Bob White's clear notes welled up through the silence. A flutter of wings near by, and I turned my head to see a bluebird flit gently to the top of a stake in the fence-corner not far away. They were abroad, these harbingers of spring, and I knew that balmy breezes and bursting buds came quickly in their wake. How sweet it ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... far below, slowly advancing along the road; but when they had nearly reached the foot of the mountain, they suddenly struck off in a different direction. The last ray of sunshine departed—the bats began to flit by in the twilight—the road grew dimmer and dimmer to the view; and nothing appeared stirring in it but now and then a peasant lagging ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... wrote the story of his broken life in the song of "the bird with the broken pinion, that never flew as high again." Sooner or later each life passes under bondage. For all strength will vanish as the morning dew our joys take wings and flit away; the eye dim, the ear dull, the thought decay, our dearest die. Oft life's waves and billows chill us to the very marrow, while we gasp and shiver midst the surging tide. Then it is a blessed thing to look out through blinding tears ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... With gorgeous wings of golden sheen, Flit lightly 'neath a sapphire sky Amid the springtime's ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... horses and rode recklessly through the trees towards the great gray beast, who seemed to flit like ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... over its face, the traveller becomes thrilled with awe and astonishment. He fancies that he has never seen any spot so fitted to be the residence of spirits of a malignant influence, and expects to see evil eyes cast upon him from every copse. The bird and bat, as they flit through the shades of night, magnified by the misty exhalations, seem the envious demons of the spot; and, foolish man! he more regards the dangers which are unreal than those which are real—is more afraid of the spirits which cannot harm, than of the ravenous beasts and poisonous serpents ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... it to be Sabbath-day always. I was conscious of a pleasure in the thought of games and frolics and coming week-day delights that would flit across my mind even when I was studying my hymns, or trying to listen to the minister. And I did want the congregation to break up some time. Indeed, in those bright spring days, the last hymn in ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... to his fall Remaines of all. O world's inconstancie! That which is firme doth flit and fall away, And that is flitting ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... held the houses of the dead. They are tapu; about them flit the veinahae, the matiahae, and the etuahae, dread vampires and ghosts that have charge of the corpse and wait to seize the living. Well have these ghoulish phantoms feasted; whole islands are theirs, and soon they will sit upon the paepae ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... relief, now lit by the rays of a vertical sun, now darkened under the flying shadows thrown by the fleecy clouds which sail across the sky. Under such a heaven, what painter could limn the lights and shades which flit over the woods, the pride of Japan, whether in late autumn, when the russets and yellows of our own trees are mixed with the deep crimson glow of the maples, or in spring-time, when plum and cherry trees and wild ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... a sound of timbrels, and suddenly appear A troop of ruddy damsels and herdsmen drawing near: They reach the castle greensward, and gayly dance across; The white sleeves flit and glimmer, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... t'one to t'other, till at last she says, 'There's poor Tommy Johnson, as used to live in the stone row; he's flitted with his wench Betty, and nobody knows where they've gone.' 'That's strange,' says I, 'what made 'em flit that fashion?' 'Oh,' she says, 'they'd a deal of trouble. Thomas wasn't right in his head arter his lad Sammul went off, so he took up with them Brierleys, and turned teetotaller; and then his missus,'—but I canna tell ye what she said about ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... of his friend. The Baron de Willading was troubled, but he was still so far from suspecting the real fact, that he could not have easily told the reason why. He gazed wistfully at the working features of the fine old man who stood before him, and though memory seemed to flit around the truth, it was in gleams so transient as completely to ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... set in. There was nothing to be seen of any bird although some do flit to and fro through the forest in winter-time and the children on their way to Millsdorf had even heard some twitter. The whole ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... the servants, that he has no shadow; and we should think he shouldn't, because our ghosts hereaway have none that ever I heard of. But that's a lie of their foolish religion; for I could swear I one night saw his shadow flit like that of a sun-dial, when the sun's in a hurry to get the curtains round his head, away past the east end of the house, and disappear in a moment. But I'll tell you what, Aminadab, he may, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... a dozen were already there, but, when the scout returned with such dire tidings, they decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and all made haste to get back to their rooms ere the enemy appeared. But, alack-a-day! that enemy could flit about in a surprisingly lively manner, and, ere some of them had reached safety behind their own doors, she came in view. To get to their rooms now was out of the question, so, making a virtue of necessity, they all slipped into a large closet used by ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... because I must, staring up the hall at the empty throne. At first I saw nothing. Then figures seemed to flit around it. From among these figures emerged the shape of the Count Amenmeses. He sat upon the throne, looking about him proudly, and I noted that he was no longer clad as a prince but as Pharaoh himself. Presently hook-nosed men appeared who ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... Hunt has chiefly confined himself, and from this point of view he must be studied. We do not forget, in saying this, his angel with the flaming torch, strong and beautiful and of unearthly presence, nor the shadowy, half-portrayed figures which dart and flit across his easel; but as we may understand the power of Titian from his portraits, yet never revel in it fully until we look upon "The Presentation" or "The Assumption"—never comprehend the painter's joy or his divine rest in endeavor until the achievement lies before us—we ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... than comfortably settled myself, and let thoughts of a cigar and a nap flit through my mind, when a row up the street showed that the jail-breaking had been discovered. Then followed shouts and confusion for a few moments, while a search was being organized. I heard some horsemen ride over the tracks, and also down the street, followed by the hurried footsteps of ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... took a step forward; there was a sharp report, and he staggered back. "Flit?" cried Mr Preddle, excitedly. "Yes, but not hurt," replied Mr Frewen. "The bullet struck my collar, and it was like something giving me ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... fabrication of love-stories. The hunting, I thought, must soon go, and I would not therefore allow that to keep me in the country. And then, why should I live at Waltham Cross now, seeing that I had fixed on that place in reference to the Post Office? It was therefore determined that we would flit, and as we were to be away for eighteen months, we determined also to sell our furniture. So there was a packing up, with many tears, and consultations as to what should be saved out of the ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... knew that there were plenty of living men only biding their time and waiting their opportunity. It was only night that these people desired; a good black night so that no one could see them flit about. You felt in the small of your back as you rode along that ugly faces were looking at you from the silent houses, and that at any moment shots might ring out suddenly and bear you to the ground. But that was merely a preliminary feeling. Soon it added zest to the entertainment. What, ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... when I feed on rice and wild oats I am perfectly delicious. Some birds were, you see, born to sing, and flit about in the trees, and look beautiful, while some were born to have their feathers taken off, and be roasted, and to look fine in a big dish on the table. The Teal Duck is one of those birds. You see we are useful as ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... her porch Of shadow cool and grey Their sidelong beaks in silence lean, And silent flit away. ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... 'which thou beholdest to the left, is the gallery of the Unborn. The shadows that flit onward and upward into the world, are the souls that pass from the long eternity of being to their destined pilgrimage on earth. That which thou beholdest to thy right, wherein the shadows descending from ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... I want you to do it," he said, "because with you there will be no particular danger even if you are caught. You will know how to get yourself out of it better than one of these poor farm laborers. Flies get caught in a cobweb, but wasps flit straight through them. But what kind of a crime is it anyway to protect your own property against monsters that eat it up and ruin it?" he cried, the laugh on his face suddenly changing into an expression of the most fervent anger. The ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... compared with the immediate presence of this object below him. Could it be one of the Apaches? Could it be the sentinel from the other side? Its stealthy movements and the noiseless way in which it seemed to flit from rock to rock gave color to his supposition, and yet it appeared unnatural to Pike that any one of the Indians should separate himself from his comrades and go on a still hunt in the dead of the night for ...
— Sunset Pass - or Running the Gauntlet Through Apache Land • Charles King
... gentle way through strangling rushes Where the glossy kingfisher Flutters when noon-heats are near, 105 Glad the shelving banks to shun, Red and steaming in the sun, Where the shrew-mouse with pale throat Burrows, and the speckled stoat; Where the quick sandpipers flit 110 In and out the marl and grit That seems to breed them, brown as they. Naught disturbs its quiet way, Save some lazy stork that springs, Trailing it with legs and wings, 115 Whom the shy fox from the hill Rouses, creep ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... wood Stirs not but breathes enraptured quietude. Here in these shades the Ancient knows itself, the Soul, And out of slumber waking starts unto the goal. What bright companions nod and go along with it! Out of the teeming dark what dusky creatures flit, That through the long leagues of the island night above Come wandering by me, whispering and beseeching love,— As in the twilight children gather close and press Nigh and more nigh with shadowy tenderness, Feeling they know not what, with noiseless footsteps ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... pass that star we were headed for—too fast to stop. I'm giving it a wide berth and picking out another one. There's a big planet a few million miles off in line with the main door, and another one almost dead ahead—that is, straight down. We sure are traveling. Look at that sun flit by!" ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... going to start directly," cried Lady Louisa, who was a fluttering creature of three-and-thirty, always eager to flit from one scene to another. "If we don't, I really think we shall be late—and there is some dreadful law, isn't there, to prevent people being married ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... poppies spread, You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow-falls in the river, A moment white—then melt forever; Or like the borealis race, That flit ere you can point their place; Or like the rainbow's lovely form Evanishing amid the storm.— Nae man can tether time or tide; The hour approaches Tam maun ride; That hour, o' night's black arch ...
— Tam O'Shanter • Robert Burns
... arbutus, hurry to come at my call, trioto, trioto, totobrix; you also, who snap up the sharp-stinging gnats in the marshy vales, and you who dwell in the fine plain of Marathon, all damp with dew, and you, the francolin with speckled wings; you too, the halcyons, who flit over the swelling waves of the sea, come hither to hear the tidings; let all the tribes of long-necked birds assemble here; know that a clever old man has come to us, bringing an entirely new idea and proposing great reforms. Let all come to the debate ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... captain of the ship was giving a ball. The gay music floated across to me in snatches at long intervals. I recall in particular the trill of a little flute in the midst of the deep blare of the trumpets; it seemed to flit, like a butterfly, about my boat. I bade the man row to the ship; twice he took me round it. ... I caught glimpses at the windows of women's figures, borne gaily round in the whirl-wind of the waltz.... I told the boatman to row away, far away, ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... those green slopes of shadowy grass. The nightingale sings now, and now is hushed again. Streams murmur through the darkness, where the growth of trees, heavy with honeysuckle and wild rose, is thickest. Fireflies begin to flit above the growing corn. At last the plain is reached, and all the skies are tremulous with starlight. Alas, that we should vibrate so obscurely to these harmonies of earth and heaven! The inner finer sense of them seems somehow unattainable—that spiritual touch of soul evoking soul ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... Mrs. Tootle. Her husband's constitutional headache, and yet more constitutional laziness, left to her almost exclusively the congenial task of guiding the household, and even of disciplining the school. In lesson-time she would even flit about the classrooms, and not scruple to administer sharp rebukes to a teacher whose pupils were disorderly, the effect of this naturally being to make confusion worse confounded. The boys of course hated her with the hatred ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... Up, up, betimes, and proudly speak of it; A lordly thing to see on tower and crag, O'er which,—as eagles flit, With eyes a-fire, and wings of phantasy,— Our memories hang superb! The foes we frown upon shall feel the curb Of our full sway; and they shall shamed be Who wrong, with sword or pen, The Code that keeps us free. For there's no sight, in summer or in spring, ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... persons attached to the Palace speak French or English. There are Turkish baths inside ready at a moment's notice. Equerries, aides-de-camp, officers of the Body-Guard, radiant in gold lace and scarlet, in blue and in silver lace, flit about the saloons and corridors. Human nature can scarce sustain the load of obligations imposed on it by such attention. If the Prince is seen on the water guards are turned out along all the batteries and the strains of music ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... several miles along the valley of the Dee. Even in the sunniest weather it is black as midnight, but in a few inequalities on its smooth surface, the snow lies perpetually. Seldom is the cleft between the two great summits free of clouds, which flit hither and thither, adding somewhat to the mysterious awfulness of the gulf, and seeming in their motions to cause certain deep but faint murmurs, which are in reality the mingled sounds of the many torrents which course through ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... in Vienna or St. Petersburg than in Paris. Equals do not need to employ delicacy or shrewdness in speech; they blurt out things as they are. Consequently the dandies of Paris did not discover the great seigneur in the rather heedless young fellow who, in their talks, would flit from one subject to another, all the more intent upon amusement because he had just escaped from a great peril, and, finding himself in a city where his family was unknown, felt at liberty to lead a loose life without the risk ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... very great misguider—but he hadna the saving gift, and he got twa terms' rent in arrear. He got the first brash at Whitsunday put ower wi' fair word and piping; but when Martinmas came, there was a summons from the grund-officer to come wi' the rent on a day preceese, or else Steenie behoved to flit. Sair wark he had to get the siller; but he was weel-freended, and at last he got the haill scraped thegether—a thousand merks—the maist of it was from a neighbour they caa'd Laurie Lapraik—a sly tod. Laurie had walth o' gear—could hunt wi' the hound and rin wi' the hare—and be Whig ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... contented population, happy in the enjoyment of comfort, beyond that of the labouring classes of most other countries. He visits her marts, her harbours, and her ports—men of all nations are met together there—fleets of rich argosies are ever arriving and departing—and myriads of steamers flit to and fro, happily now engaged in promoting the arts of peace, but ready at a moment's notice to become the defenders of his country's shores, and, as recent events have shown the world, able also ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... dream, and through the little opening of your eyelids I shall slip into the depths of your sleep; and when you wake up and look round startled, like a twinkling firefly I shall flit out into ...
— The Crescent Moon • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... acclamation, and returned home to push with the utmost haste the preparations for their stupendous task. The idea of a migration en masse did not frighten them. They were nomads and the descendants of nomads, who for ages had been used to fold their tents and flit away. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... heart, and full of goodwill. These the gods called Fairies or Elves, and gave to them a charming place called Elfland in which to dwell. Elfland lies between Asgard and Midgard, and since all fairies have wings they can easily flit down to the earth to play with the butterflies, teach the young birds to sing, water the flowers, or dance in the ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... followed. In the midst of his rage and mortification Mr. Clinch fancied he saw a shade of pain and annoyance flit across the face of the maiden. He was puzzled, but pressed her hand, in spite of his late experiences, reassuringly. She made a gesture of silence to him, and then slipped ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... it be, when thou shalt flit Fro thy wealth into the pit? Therefore of it be not too bold, Lest thou forethink[7] it, when thou art old: Ye may be likened to a tree, In youth flourishing with royalty, And in age it is cut down, And to the fire ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... manor-house glowed as in a bengal light; the sleigh-bells were still tinkling in the yard, where the coachmen were quarrelling over accommodation for their horses. Crowds of village people were leaning against the railings to watch the dancers flit past the windows, and to catch the strains of the music. Around all this noise, brightness, and merriment lay the darkness of the winter night, and from the winter night emerged slowly the sledge, ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... Prescott was saying good-night. The moonlight was falling weirdly through the big trees, stretching itself over the grass in shapes that seemed to spell unearthly things. And there were mystical lights on the water down there, flitting about with the movement of the stream as ghosts might flit. Because it looked so other-world-like she wondered if it knew what it had just missed. She had never thought anything about water save as something to look beautiful and have a good time on. It seemed now that perhaps it knew a great ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... stept vp some of his men in armour, and commanded vs to strike saile: whereupon we sent them some of our stuffe, crossebarres, and chaineshot, and arrowes, so thicke, that it made the vpper worke of their shippe flit about their eares, and then we spoiled him with all his men, and toare his shippe miserably with our great ordinance, and then he began to fall a sterne of vs, and to packe on his sailes, and get away: and we seeing that, gaue him ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... properly quaint and amusing! Though your wife ran away with a soldier that day, And took with her your trifle of money; Bless your heart, they don't mind—they're exceedingly kind— They don't blame you—as long as you're funny! It's a comfort to feel If your partner should flit, Though you suffer a deal, They don't mind it a bit— They don't blame you—so long ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... sprinkled with white barley flour, and they dwell beneath a glade of Parnassus, apart they dwell, teachers of soothsaying. This art I learned while yet a boy I tended the kine, and my Father heeded not. Thence they flit continually hither and thither, feeding on honeycombs and bringing all things to fulfilment. They, when they are full of the spirit of soothsaying, having eaten of the wan honey, delight to speak forth the ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... Gaylor, who had brought her guest as far as the beginning of the bamboo grove; stood watching the white figure flit farther and farther away, among the intricate green pillars of the temple. Then, when the elusive form became ghostlike in the distance, Carmen went back to the house. She walked slowly and with dignified composure while it was possible ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... fine warm day in June. Out of the town the air is soft and pure. Bird and bee flit from tree to tree, from blue-bell to rose, till at sun-set they hie away to nest ...
— The First Little Pet Book with Ten Short Stories in Words of Three and Four Letters • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... other aid—Spirits, they say, Flit round invisible, as thick as motes Dance in the sunbeam. If that spell Or necromancer's sigil can compel them, They shall hold council with ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... mice asleep, battling with chipmunks at their own doors, and getting down in great numbers toward the lone juniper. Now owls do not love water greatly on its own account. Not to my knowledge have I caught one drinking or bathing, though on night wanderings across the mesa they flit up from under the horse's feet along stream borders. Their presence near the spring in great numbers would indicate the presence of the things they feed upon. All night the rustle and soft hooting keeps on in the neighborhood ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... moving at unheard commands, The abysses and vast fires between, Flit figures that with clanking hands Obey a hideous routine; They are not flesh, they are not bone, They see not with the human eye, And from their iron lips is blown A dreadful and monotonous cry; And whoso of our mortal race Should find that city unaware, Lean Death would smite him face to face, ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... abandon what he called his lyre, to write a commercial prospectus or an electoral address. That was all very well for the poet Rodolphe, a good-for-nothing who was ready to turn his hand to anything, and who never let a five franc piece flit past him without trying to capture it, no matter how. The painter Lazare, a proud wearer of rags, would never have soiled his brushes by painting the portrait of a tailor holding a parrot on his forefinger, as our friend the ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... Seraphine," remarked the Bishop, gravely, "life is but a mirror which reflects themselves. Other forms and faces may flit by, in the background; dimly seen, scarcely noticed. There is but one face and form occupying the entire foreground. Life is, to such, the mirror which ministers to vanity. Should a husband appear in the picture, he is soon relegated to the background, receiving only occasional glances over the ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... looking at everything, listening at the doors, looking up the chimney. Then they go to the clothes basket and raise the lid. Up come four arms, and then two house-fairies stand up in the basket, and get out with the help of the chair. They, also, flit about the room, looking at things. Meanwhile the brownies have taken the broom and dust pan, and begun to sweep, especially over by the outside door and by the wood box. The fairies take a chair, and climb up by the ...
— The Christmas Dinner • Shepherd Knapp
... Lucia saw nothing of the sunset. Dusk came on, and the fireflies began to flit round them, before the two, who were so occupied with each other, came to the Cottage gate. When they did so, they had yet a few last ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... Salmon Bay when he returned above decks to lean on the rail, watching the shores flit by, marking with a little wonder the rapid change in temperature, the growing mildness in the air as the steamer drew farther away from the gorge-like head of Toba with its aerial ice fields and snowy ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... listening to the finest echoes I ever heard. We had a French horn with us, and there was an enchanting wildness in the dying away of the reverberation that quickly transported me to Shakespeare's magic island. Spirits unseen seemed to walk abroad, and flit from cliff to cliff to soothe ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... little children pit-pat from their burrows on the hill; Hangs within the gloom its weary head the shining daffodil. In the valley underneath us through the fragrance flit along Over fields and over hedgerows little quivering drops of song. All adown the pale blue mantle of the mountains far away Stream the tresses of the twilight flying in the wake of day. Night comes; soon alone shall ...
— By Still Waters - Lyrical Poems Old and New • George William Russell
... circumscribes itself like Giotto's O is almost as tangible a thing as a statue; it has almost contour. But this melody afloat in the air, flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swaying poise, as the notes flit from strings to voice, and from voice to wood and wind, is more than a mere heightening of speech: it partakes of the nature of thought, but it is more than thought; it is the whole expression of the subconscious life, saying more of himself than any person of the drama has ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... retired to her bed, leaving the lamp burning on the table; but its gloomy light, instead of dispelling her fear, assisted it; for, by its uncertain rays, she almost fancied she saw shapes flit past her curtains and glide into the remote obscurity of her chamber.—The castle clock struck one before she closed ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... how the natural gets exaggerated, and, if we do not take care, changes its character altogether, mastering us instead of being kept in its fit place, and in check, as it ought to be by sense and reason. From time to time, as Sir Tom made these reflections, there would flit across his mind, as across a mirror, something which was not thought, which was like a picture momentarily presented before him. One of the most persistent of these, which flashed out and in upon his senses like ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... on the sea, when the rising tide swept it toward the shore. May I not understand the poet's figure: "The green of spring overflows the earth like a tide"? I have felt the flame of a candle blow and flutter in the breeze. May I not, then, say: "Myriads of fireflies flit hither and thither in the dew-wet grass ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... Peter Samson, compiler of the original {TMRC} lexicon, reports that he named 'DDT' after a similar tool on the TX-0 computer, the direct ancestor of the PDP-1 built at MIT's Lincoln Lab in 1957. The debugger on that ground-breaking machine (the first transistorized computer) rejoiced in the name FLIT (FLexowriter ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... had produced from his pocketbook the scrap of lace and muslin which he had found in the murdered man's hand. He had the two on the table side by side comparing them, and Mademoiselle Chiron noticed a smile of satisfaction flit across his face as he did so. While she looked he restored the scrap to his pocket-book, and the pocket-book to his pocket. Hastily she turned to the telephone again and continued, in a voice which a quick ear would have detected ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... Commencement. Some day, perhaps, mamma will have finished bringing me out, and then I can crawl in again where it is quiet, and live. Ah, you went to the house and saw her, and she said we were going away next week? I did not know it, but we flit about so one can never tell. I've half a mind to be rebellious and ask to be left here with Lavinia Dorman for guardian, I'm so tired of change. Yes, I enjoyed my flying trip to the West, in a way, though father only came as far ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... citizens! here old Ennius's image presented, Who to your forefathers' deeds gave their own glory again. Honour me not with your tears; by none let my death be lamented: Why? still in every mouth living I flit among men. ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... spectators. I have heard of such people as those who actually hate cricket and football, and make it a constant aim to prevent those over whom they have some influence from engaging in the manly sport. They occasionally flit across one's path like an evil spirit, and disappear as rapidly, but leave behind a chilling effect on the imagination, far more intense than the terrible nightmare after a disastrous defeat. They cannot see the fun of spending valuable time in such a way. If you follow ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... tell me,' Dan asked abruptly, 'why, with pretty much all the known world to choose her friends from, this young woman should flit about with Siegmund Stein? It prejudices people against her. He's ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... women were walking, and walking with no appearance of effort, swiftly, lightly, joyously. Julia, at the head, moved with the frank, free, swinging gait of an Amazon. Peachy seemed to flit along the ground; there was in her progress something of the dipping, curving grace of her flight. Clara glided; her effect of motionless movement was almost obsidian. Chiquita kept the slow, languid gait, both swaying and pulsating, of a Spanish woman. Lulu trotted with the ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... longer they listened the more inclined were they to believe that their senses had deceived them, and Larry O'Hale's heart was beginning to make a troublesome attack on his ribs, as he thought of ghosts—especially foreign ghosts—when all eyes were attracted to a human form which appeared to flit to and fro among the tree stems in the distance, as if to avoid the ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... herself at the Mistress's feet, and kissed and embraced them; and as she rose up, the Lady laid her hand lightly on her head, and then, turning to Walter, cried out: "Now, Squire, let us leave all these troubles and wiles and desires behind us, and flit through the merry greenwood like ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... thing, the saving thing, after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place. And so, when M. Bourget said that bright thing about our grandfathers, I broke all up. I remember exploding its American countermine once, under that grand hero, Napoleon. He was only First ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... silver line drawn through the vast rich valley far below, doubtful of its being the broad Hudson, upon whose bosom we had so lately floated in a huge vessel crowded with passengers: for this vessel we searched in vain; but, by the aid of a telescope, made out one of the same kind, which appeared to flit along like some fairy skiff over a pantomimic lake made all radiant ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... surety was her canny realization of the value of tantalism. She was not long left in ignorance of his record for flitting fancy and she felt that he would flit from her as soon as he conquered her. Her duty ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... sounds the cymbal's voice, where the tambour resounds, where the Phrygian flautist pipes deep notes on the curved reed, where the ivy-clad Maenades furiously toss their heads, where they enact their sacred orgies with shrill-sounding ululations, where that wandering band of the Goddess is wont to flit about: thither 'tis meet to hasten with hurried ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... your wife ran away with a soldier that day, And took with her your trifle of money; Bless your heart, they don't mind - they're exceedingly kind - They don't blame you - as long as you're funny! It's a comfort to feel If your partner should flit, Though YOU suffer a deal, THEY don't mind it a bit - They don't blame you - so long ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... shall be glad to help the cause, even so little as that," she answered. Pepperell thanked her for her words, and ignored the look of disappointment that he had seen flit across her ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... will prove of service in his life's work, and he has stood the test. Many young fellows of his age would have abused their opportunities. He has not done so. My only disappointment has been that he has developed no definite taste, but has been content to flit from one fancy to the next, always carried away by the ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... the door of a spider, who peeps out carefully, and quickly pulls it down again. On a karoo-bush a green fly is laying her silver eggs. We carry them home, and see the shells pierced, the spotted grub come out, turn to a green fly, and flit away. We are not satisfied with what Nature shows us, and we see something for ourselves. Under the white hen we put a dozen eggs, and break one daily, to see the white spot wax into the chicken. We are not excited or enthusiastic ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... hope she'll be done honestly by, even if she is of humble station. 'Tis best, and cheapest too, in the long run.' The coachman was apparently imagining the dove about to flit away to be one of the pretty maid-servants that abounded in Enckworth Court; such escapades as these were not unfrequent among them, a fair face having been deemed a sufficient recommendation to service in that house, without too close ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... must be a whole world-full of victims of injustice, whose souls flit restlessly around, because they died under a weight of undeserved shame—because they lost a battle in which the right was theirs—because they suffered and strove for truth, but went down because falsehood ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... regulation-arrangements of our system, or to appear punctually at the systematic roll-call therein instituted. They are the true free-wanderers of the Infinite, passing from shore to shore of immensity, and presenting themselves, for short and uncertain intervals, to star after star. When they flit through our skies, they shew themselves in all possible positions, and move along all possible directions. They sometimes, however, yield too much to temptation, and have to suffer the penalty of a short imprisonment in consequence. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... it was his chief aim to make it as little like the original before him, as possible. Shall we reveal the fact that another image, wearing a gentler aspect than the stern, rigid features of the minister's portrait, seemed to flit before the young painter's fancy, coming unbidden, and mingling more especially with recollections of the past? As a ray of moonlight stole into the low dormer-window, the young man turned on his humble bed, a sigh burst from his lips, followed by ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... Feck, quantity, portion. Feckless, feeble, powerless. Fell, strong and fiery. Fey, unlike yourself, strange, as if urged on by fate, or as persons are observed to be in the hour of approaching death or disaster. Fit, foot. Flit, to depart. Flyped, turned up, turned in-side out. Forbye, in addition to. Forgather, to fall in with. Fower, four. Fushionless, pithless, weak. Fyle, to soil, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... charming, if English. Thoughts of Cosette, which used to flit through his brain with a surprising effect that can only be likened to an effect of flamingoes sweeping across an English meadow, had now almost entirely ceased to disturb him. He had but to imagine what Geraldine's attitude towards Cosette would have ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... leans slowly over, and then comes down with a crash, while the curious bullocks, which have poked as near as they dare to the strange scene, fling round and lumber off in a heavy gallop, heads down and tails up. From stump to stump flit the little black figures of the workers, standing out clearly sometimes, by the light of a blaze so fierce that to face it is scarcely possible; or half seen in the dull glow of a smouldering tree poking vigorously—seeming as ants attacking living ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... money, which before I had squandered as fast as I obtained it, and had realised a considerable sum. I could not help comparing myself to a chrysalis previous to its transformation. I had before been a caterpillar, I was now all ready to burst my confinement, and flit about as a gaudy butterfly. Another week I continued my prudent conduct, at the end of which I was admitted to my superior, in whose hands I placed a sum of money which I could very conveniently spare, and received his benediction and commendations ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... one of them, who acted as spokesman, "on one of the bittherest days that God ever sent on the earth; out of shame, I believe, because your brother and ould Mary Casey died, he let us back for a few days, but after that we had to flit. Some of the houses he had pulled down, and then he had to build them again for his voters. Oh, if it was ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... the word for this world into which we have entered. The house without its guests would be uninhabitable for such poets as these. The atmosphere is everywhere that of a haunted earth where strange terrors and beauties flit to and fro—phantoms of spectral lives which seem to be looking on while we play out our bustling parts upon the stage. They are separate from the body, these shadows, and belong to some former life. They are an ancestral procession walking ever behind us, and often they are changing ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... lifting up daily pure hands and a thankful heart, if by any means he may condescend to purge thine eyes, that thou mayest see clearly, and without those motes, and specks, and distortions of thine own organs of vision, which flit before the eyeballs of those who have been drunk over-night, and which are called by sophists subjective truth; watching everywhere anxiously and reverently for those glimpses of his beauty, which he will vouchsafe to thee more and more as thou provest ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... motion, with wreaths uplifted until they reach the stage, where sit the guests of honor. There they bow low, then lay the garlands at their feet, and retire, forming ingeniously pretty groups and figures, while bees and butterflies flit in and out. See the bees pursuing the little pink rosebuds until at last they join hands and dance gaily away, only to ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... the lights glimmer in the tents, and as I sit at my desk in the open doorway, there come mingled sounds of stir and glee. Boys laugh and shout,—a feeble flute stirs somewhere in some tent, not an officer's,—a drum throbs far away in another,—wild kildeer-plover flit and wail above us, like the haunting souls of dead slavemasters,—and from a neighboring cook-fire comes the monotonous sound of that strange festival, half powwow, half prayer-meeting, which they know only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... all its traits and habits. September—the morrow of August and eve of October, most affecting of months—is already sprinkling the fine days with subtle warnings. Already one knows the meaning of the dead leaves that flit about the flat stones like ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... the initiative to make his way down the long aisle and find a table for himself, he might have stood there indefinitely, but for the restless activity of Adams, the head steward. It was Adams' mission in life to flit to and fro, hauling would-be lunchers to their destinations, as a St. Bernard dog hauls travelers out of Alpine snowdrifts. He sighted Lord Emsworth and secured him with ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... spruces. Upon her complete recovery of strength she always rose with the dawn. At the moment she was feeding the quail she had tamed. And she had begun to tame the mocking-birds. They fluttered among the branches overhead and some left off their songs to flit down and shyly hop near the twittering quail. Little gray and white rabbits crouched in the grass, now nibbling, now laying long ears flat and ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... rather are they to be found in some morbid morass at the equivocal twilight hour, not the hour exquisite, but that indeterminate moment when the imagination recoils upon itself and creates shadows that flit, or, more depressing, that sit; the mood of exasperated melancholy when all action seems futile, and life a via crucis. Nor is this mood the exclusive possession of perverse poets; it is an authentic one, and your greengrocer around the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... her whether he loved her or not, so long as he was at hand to take her about. And she didn't intend to encourage him, either. Love meant ties and responsibility—Alice proved that clearly enough. There was plenty of time for love. Let her flit first. Let her remain young as long as she could, careless and care-free. The fact that she was married was just an accident, an item in her adventure. It didn't make her less young to be married, and she didn't see why it should. Martin understood, ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... And all my comfort flies; Like Noah's dove, I flit between Rough seas and stormy skies. Anon the clouds depart, The wind and waters cease, While sweetly o'er my gladdened heart Expands the bow of peace; Bow of peace, bow of peace, Expands ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... it be right, This window open to the night? The wanton airs from the tree-top Laughingly through the lattice drop; The bodiless airs, a wizard rout, Flit through thy chamber in and out, And wave the curtain canopy So fitfully, so fearfully, Above the closed and fringed lid 'Neath which thy slumb'ring soul lies hid, That, o'er the floor and down the wall, Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall. O lady dear, hast thou no ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... in guessing what thy sickness can be, nor will he scold thee at all, but he will rather beg every one to take all the care they can of thee. After that he will set off west to the Firths, and Sigmund with him, for he will have to flit all his goods home from the Firths west, and he will be away till the summer is far spent. But when men ride to the Thing, and after all have ridden from the Dales that mean to ride thither, then thou ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... with them next year than this, when I would have all my payments made for what I am now buying. Three or four such years as the last would enable me with prudence and propriety to ask Nicol[89] himself to flit and remove. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... the table, Balzac said, he made music, so exquisitely sensitive was his touch. Ah me! what a tympanist was lost to the world. What shading, what delicacy, what sunlight and shadow he would have made flit across my little darlings on their tripods! No wonder I hate the piano; and yet, hideous mockery of fate! I play upon an old grand to earn my bread and wine. I can't play with an orchestra—it is torture ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... in bed he lay, His valet brings him letters three. What, invitations? The same day As many entertainments be! A ball here, there a children's treat, Whither shall my rapscallion flit? Whither shall he go first? He'll see, Perchance he will to all the three. Meantime in matutinal dress And hat surnamed a "Bolivar"(6) He hies unto the "Boulevard," To loiter there in idleness Until the sleepless Breguet chime(7) ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... had come tales of outraged honor in the person of the "no-good husband" bursting in on games of cards with wild charges which only the payment of big money could suppress—suppress you understand, purely for the sake of the lady: outraged honor could accept no atonement. Then the lady would flit for the winter to those beauty doctors of Paris and New York, who operate on wrinkles and lay up muniments for fresh campaigns; and the "colonel" would betake himself to resorts where balm is accorded wounded honour; while loose-mouthed, simple-eyed ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... lightly, for you see neither anxious faces nor bent shoulders there. Our people walk upright, as becomes free men. Then, through the long winter, when the snow lies firm and white, and the wheat crop has been hauled in, you can hear the jingling sleigh teams flit across the prairie from homestead to homestead under the cloudless blue. The settlers enjoy themselves when their work is done—and we ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... fellow want to stand up for and lie down again? for I can swear he was not there half a minute ago. There is another farther on." He pinched himself to make sure that he was awake. Figure after figure seemed to flit along the deck and disappear. One of the guard rose and stretched his arms; put a fresh bit of some herb that he was chewing into his mouth; moved close to the prisoners to see if they were asleep; ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... right soldierly stuff; but he felt a distinct shiver flit along his back. His past life had not lacked thrilling adventures and strangely varied experiences with desperate men. Usually he met sudden emergencies rather calmly, sometimes with phlegmatic indifference. This passionate ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... this time Fred Forrester rode on at the rear of his little detachment, longing to get to Newton Abbot and be rid of his painful charge. The evening grew more pleasant and cool, the moths came out, and with them the bats, to dart and flit, and capture the myriad gnats which danced here and there beneath the trees. Then, as they passed beneath some umbrageous oak, which stretched its ponderous and gnarled arms across the road, a night-hawk ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... of minor figures, graceful and poetic, brilliant and spirituelles, flit across the canvas, leaving the fragrance of an exquisite individuality, and tempting one to extend the list of the versatile women who toned and colored the society of the period. But we have to do, at present, especially with those who ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... recalled those green-covered tables of the Council Chambers of the Grenoble Prefecture, finding that this Ministerial Council recalled the mean impression invoked by his provincial recollections, at other times, a vein of poesy would flit across his mind, or an eloquent word would reach his ear, suggesting to him the thought that, after all, these men seated there before their open portfolios, turning over or scattering about the papers, ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... aright? Was it possible that he was thus unceremoniously thrown out of work to make a place for his former brakeman? His expression was quite as bewildered as that of Brakeman Joe, and the Superintendent, noticing it, allowed an amused smile to flit ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... and a companion to remain and dine off a leg of mutton. As the two visitors declined, Balzac said: "Ah! you think, perhaps, I am an ordinary host who invites his guests gratis. On the contrary, I intend to make you pay for your meal. Aha! You shall aid me afterwards to flit. To-morrow, the bailiffs are coming to seize my furniture; and I don't mean them to find anything to carry away. So, to-night, I am going to put everything in my gardener's cottage. The gardener will transport all the bigger articles ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... very drowsy tone. His eyes were fixed on the fire, which seemed to him sometimes to flare up with unusual brightness, then to flit about, then totally to disappear, for the best of reasons, his eyes were closed. Percy was also just going off, when his ears were assailed by a hideous uproar of shrieks and howls ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... shutters in its headlong passage. Once or twice, when a passer-by, muffled warmly from the bitter air, hurried past, the phantom shrank closer to the wall, till he was gone. Its vague, mournful face seemed to watch for some one. The twilight darkened, gradually; but it did not flit away. Patiently it kept its piteous look fixed in one direction—watching—watching; and, while the howling wind swept frantically through the chill air, it still seemed to shudder in ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... from this vain world shall flit It bears all with it whatsoever was dear Unto it self, passing in easie fit, As kindly ripen'd corn comes out of th' eare. Thus mindlesse of what idle men will say He takes his own and ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... spoke he saw a strange expression flit across her face. The next instant she rose and going across to her husband's chair stood looking down upon him with ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... the year. Continuing our walk, we pass under the rose-crowned aqueduct, and strike into the green avenue that darkens beyond; listening to the distant water bubbling up from the deepest recesses, and to the fitful whistle of blackbird and thrush, as they flit athwart the moss-grown gravel, and perch momentarily on the heads of mutilated termini and statues; whilst the clipt trees vibrate under the wings of others extricating themselves on a piratical cruise against a whole flotilla of butterflies, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... to-day, and I can be ready for my plunge into Gotham vanities by—let me see—we will say Saturday night. I am at the Lady Louise. You may call for me there about eight. Good-by. Don't be late, Gentlemen." And with that she does the abrupt flit, leavin' us gawpin' at each ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... the divisional lines of the cognac carafon. Part of these he would take neat, another portion he would burn over sugar, gloating glaringly over the bluish flame, while gleams of demoniac delight would flit across his ever-changing features. Jack Hobson and Topp, I am sorry to say, joined him with a will in this double-distilled debauch; and when I attempted to remonstrate with them, they brazenly asserted that I, who am now speaking to you, who have always, publicly and privately, ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Rivoli and in the great square of the Revolution, the garden was left to the silence of its statues and its thousand memories. I often used to wonder, as I looked through the iron railing at nightfall, what might go on there and whether historic shades might not flit about ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... quietly away, and was seen no more. Old Mrs. Gardiner and Miss Margaret are as happy as the day is long in the love of Jay's sweet, grave young wife, while her husband fairly adores her, though two others share his love as the sunny days flit by—a sturdy youngster whom they call Jay, and a dainty little maiden named Sally—named after Miss Rogers, and whom that lady declares is to be her heiress—a jolly little maiden, hoidenish and mischievous, strangely ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... in the smoke of the enemy's big guns; sometimes diving to avoid a shell; sometimes staggering as though wounded, but always righting himself. There would be the Mad Major each day, over the rearguard troops, seeming to shelter them. He would harry the German line; he would drop a bomb, flit back, and with a brave "We've got them, boys," cheer the sinking spirits of the wearied ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... sun As if that morn were a jocund one. Lightly and brightly breaks away The Morning from her mantle grey, And the noon will look on a sultry day. Hark to the trump, and the drum, And the mournful sound of the barbarous horn, And the flap of the banners that flit as they're borne, And the neigh of the steed, and the multitude's hum, And the clash, and the shout, 'They come! they come!' The horsetails are plucked from the ground, and the sword From its sheath; and they ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... heavy on the hillsides. Bracken was yellowing, heather passing from bloom, and the clumps of wild-wood taking the soft russet and purple of decline. Faint odours of wood smoke seemed to flit over the moor, and the sharp lines of the hill fastnesses were drawn as with a graving-tool against the sky. She resolved to go to the Midburn and climb up the cleft, for the place was still a centre of memory. So she kept for a mile to the Etterick road, till ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... will shrink before the long dull vista of a solitary, aimless existence. Sometimes, wildly as she struggled against such thoughts, there would come to Olive's fancy dreams of what her life might have been. The holiness of lovers' love, of wedded love, of mother-love, would at times flit before her imagination; and her heart, still warm, still young, trembled to picture the lonely old age, the hearth blank and silent, the utter isolation from all those natural ties whose place not even the dearest bonds of adopted ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... passed on, and that night, as Dr. Sevier sat at his fireside, an uncompanioned widower, he saw again the young wife look quickly up into her husband's face, and across that face flit and disappear its look of weary dismay, followed by the air of fresh courage with which the ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... and soul and breeches-pocket, to completely beating Bourbon's oppressive ideas out of Bourbon's head. A little fact, but how important, then and there! Under the Successor, all this may be different:—ghastly beings, Old Tutors, Favorites, Mother's-Favorites, flit, as yet invisible, on the new backstairs:—should Bute and Company get into the foreground, people will then know how important ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom, And flit from ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Vulcan and his Cyclops with the idea of a forge. These gentry would be the very last people in the world to flit across my mind whilst gazing at the forge from the bottom of the dark lane. The truth is, they are highly unpoetical fellows, as well they may be, connected as they are with Grecian mythology. At the very mention of their ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... High green bank on one side, with cataracts of bracken delicate as maidenhair; dark rocks, wrapped in velvet moss. Trees holding up screens of green lace between your eyes and the blue water of the loch. Pebbles white and round as pearls, or silver coins dropped by fairies in a big "flit." That's one of your similes! Grass running down to the edge of the water, and full of bluebells. Water the colour of drowned wallflowers. I don't believe your Highland lochs can be prettier or more idyllic, though this is ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... their last courtesies, Flit from the scene, and couch them for their rest; The Meadow Lily folds her scarlet vest And hides it 'neath the Grasses' lengthening green; Fair ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... forth these efforts, the ass bad been flying along at an undiminished rate of speed, and the country swept past him on either side. He passed long lines of trees by the roadside, he saw field after field flit by, and the distant hills went slowly along out of the line of his vision. Hitherto he had met with no one at all along the road, nor had he seen any cattle of any kind. His efforts to arrest the ass had been fruitless, and he gave them up, and looked forward for some opportunity ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... sanicle makes a fine show. Above its fringy bloom how often one sees the exquisite little lavender-blue butterflies (Lycaena pseudargiolus) pausing an instant to drain the tiny cups of nectar, and usually transferring pollen from the protruding styles (q.v.) as they flit to ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... ultimately divided her business between them, Louise going to the general fish-market, while Claire installed herself among the fresh-water fish. "From that time the old mother, although she pretended to have retired from business altogether, would flit from one stall to the other, still interfering in the selling of the fish, and causing her daughters continual annoyance by the foul insolence with which she at times spoke to ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... adding a quaint, rural touch, almost startling in this city of silent palaces. They splash about the wooded island, screaming lustily when boys come in skiffs to steal their eggs. Swallows and frowsy little sparrows flit from their nests, built in the very hands of ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... morning he took the branch and went out alone from Tara over the plain, taking the direction in which they had passed away a year agone; and ere long little wreathes of mist began to curl about his feet, and then to flit by him like long trailing robes, and he knew no more where he was. After a time, however, he came out again into sunshine and clear sky, and found himself in a country of flowery meadows and of woods filled with singing-birds where he had never journeyed before. He walked on, till ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... it was most as light as day, and I saw as plain as could be something flit in at the stable door. 'Twasn't so big as a man, nor so small as a boy, and its head was white. So then I thought, 'Surely 'tis the brownie, for night's his working time,' and I'd half a mind to take a peep and see him at it. But they say if you look him in the face he'll quit, so ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... first you glide along, Naught ruffles up the temper of your mind; All goes as smoothly as a summer song, All objects flit beside ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... sight-gladdening motion like these fair Careerers with the foam beneath their bows, Whose streaming ensigns charm the waves by day, Whose carols and whose watch-bells cheer the night, Moor'd as they cast the shadows of their masts In long array, or hither flit and yond Mysteriously with slow and crossing lights, Like spirits on the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... bank an' brae are clad in green, An' scatter'd cowslips sweetly spring; By Girvan's fairy-haunted stream, The birdies flit on wanton wing; By Cassillis' banks, when e'ening fa's, There let my Mary meet wi' me, There catch her ilka glance o' love, The bonnie blink o' ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... vagar wander, roam, flit, drift, hover. vago, -a wandering, wavering, vague, indistinct, hazy. vagoroso, -a wandering, errant. vaguedad f. vagueness; con —— vaguely, uncertainly. valenta f. valor, courage. valer be worth, help, avail; ms vale it is better. valeroso, ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... weakness, and I have worked upon it. Thy mere defeat or death will not blot out the stain upon their standard and their faith. The public mind is wild with fantasies since Alroy rose. Men's opinions flit to and fro with that fearful change that bodes no stable settlement of states. None know what to cling to, or where to place their trust. Creeds are doubted, authority disputed. They would gladly account for thy success by other ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... absolutely flat; but it had quite the opposite effect upon the Honourable Arthur. He had no command over himself or his horses for some minutes; and at intervals during the afternoon the full felicity of the idea would steal upon him, and the smile of reminiscence would flit across his ruddy face. ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... him so much as Sintram,' said Laura. 'I never saw anything like it. He took it up by chance, and stood reading it while all those strange expressions began to flit over his face, and at last he fairly cried over it so much, that he was obliged to fly out of the room. How often he has read it I cannot tell; I believe he has bought one for himself, and it is as if the engraving had a fascination ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
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