"Fleeting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his son was disappointed in this manner, as he thought it would make him more attentive than he had been of late to Colonel Hauton; and the living of Chipping-Friars was better worth looking after than the fleeting fame of a popular preacher. Buckhurst, however, still held fame in higher estimation than it had ever been held by his father, who never valued it but as subordinate to interest. But the love of fame, however superior to mercenary habits, affords no security ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... stifled here for twenty years, lad. But then,' he added, with his own dry, wistful twinkle of a fleeting smile, 'I was born to stifle. What'll you do in the world, Paul, when ye get into it, if ye're ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... Whatever may be the present state, it is altogether transient. All systems of civil life are therefore necessarily ephemeral. Time brings new external conditions; the manner of thought is modified; with thought, action. Institutions of all kinds must hence participate in this fleeting nature, and, though they may have allied themselves to political power, and gathered therefrom the means of coercion, their permanency is but little improved thereby; for, sooner or later, the population ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... to the end Endur'd not suffering, for their portion chose Life without glory." Soon as they had fled Past reach of sight, new thought within me rose By others follow'd fast, and each unlike Its fellow: till led on from thought to thought, And pleasur'd with the fleeting train, mine eye Was clos'd, and ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... depart? Again I ask, Is Fortune's presence dear to thee if she cannot be trusted to stay, and though she will bring sorrow when she is gone? Why, if she cannot be kept at pleasure, and if her flight overwhelms with calamity, what is this fleeting visitant but a token of coming trouble? Truly it is not enough to look only at what lies before the eyes; wisdom gauges the issues of things, and this same mutability, with its two aspects, makes the threats ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... AEnone perhaps one instant of almost unconscious regret at learning that she had been forgotten for another. But it passed away like a fleeting cloud—banished from her mind by the full blaze of happiness which poured in upon her at the thought that here at last was what would counteract the cruel schemes which were warring against her peace, and would thereby bring sure relief to ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... and down in nature voices that speak, but which few hear; just as there are millions of flowers that bloom unseen by man. It is sad for those who catch a hint of it. Perforce they come back and seek the hidden springs. They waste their youth and vigor upon empty dreams, and in return for the fleeting glimpses they have enjoyed, for the perfect phrase half caught and lost again, will have given up the intercourse of their kind, and even friendship itself. Yes, it is sad for the schoolboys who open their ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the rural housewife, taking charge of all intrusted things, Prolonging the existence of whatever needed repair, Requiring children to respect the property of their parents, Not to waste or destroy, but be grateful for food and clothing; Teaching them industry, and the serious value of fleeting time, Strict account of which must be rendered to the Master and Giver of Life. Prudence was then held in esteem and a laudable economy Not jeered at by miserly names, but held becoming in all, For the poor, that they ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... guess." Marthy's voice had a harsh huskiness. "He was—gone—when I woke up. Well—he's better off than I be. I dunno what woulda become of him if I'd went first." There, at last, was a note of tenderness, stifled though it was and fleeting. "Git down, Billy Louise, and come in. I been kinda lookin' for yuh to come, ever sence the weather opened ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... corallina, for the beauty of its coral-like seeds; P. Cretica, for its earliness in flowering; P. tenuifolia, single and double, for its elegant foliage; P. Whitmaniana, for its pale yellow but very fleeting flowers, which, before they are fully expanded, have all the appearance of immense Globe-flowers (trollius); P. lobata, for the wonderful richness of its bright crimson flowers; and P. Whitleji, a ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... all mysterious things; Its little life to peck and pipe, As long as cherries ripe and ripe, And minister unto the need Of baby-birds that feed and feed. This, Fragoletta, is a flower, Open and fragrant for an hour, A flower, a transitory thing, Each petal fleeting as a wing, All a May morning blows and blows, And then for ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... tide, With watery drops the chief they sprinkle round, Placed on the margin of the flowery ground. Raised on his knees, he now ejects the gore; Now faints anew, low-sinking on the shore; By fits he breathes, half views the fleeting skies, And seals again, by fits, his ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... direction of mental achievement. It is true that now and then, on Friday at school, he read a composition, one of which—a personal burlesque on certain older boys—came near resulting in bodily damage. But any literary ambition he may have had in those days was a fleeting thing. His permanent dream was to be a pirate, or a pilot, or a bandit, or a trapper-scout; something gorgeous and active, where his word—his nod, even—constituted sufficient law. The river kept the pilot ambition always fresh, and the cave supplied a background ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... even, for a fleeting thought of death. His mind framed the question, "What will I be in a ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... of vivid blue and gold glare; but now the twilight sheds softly upon the darting jays, and only the little oval frames catch the fleeting beams. I go to the miniatures. Amid the parliamentary faces, all strictly garrotted with many-folded handkerchiefs, there is a metal frame enchased with rubies and a few emeralds. And this chef d'œuvre of antique workmanship surrounds a sharp, shrewdish, modern face, withal ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... witness of everything. But, merely as an ingredient, they make use only of such aids as the poet does of that heritage of an already-formed language to which he owes so much; historiographers bind together the fleeting elements of story, and treasure them up for immortality in the temple of Mnemosyne. Legends, ballad-stories, and traditions must be excluded from such original history; they are but dim and hazy forms of historical apprehension, and therefore belong to nations ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... No, He is immeasurably more than that, He is a holy Person who comes to dwell in our hearts, One who sees clearly every act we perform, every word we speak, every thought we entertain, even the most fleeting fancy that is allowed to pass through our minds; and if there is anything in act, or word or deed that is impure, unholy, unkind, selfish, mean, petty or untrue, this infinitely holy One is deeply grieved by it. I know of no thought that will help one more than this ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... laughed. "Mother thought we ought to conduct you about the place and explain all the different phases of your new home, but I am inclined to believe you will like it better if you can make the tour all by yourselves. Young folks usually glory in unexplored fields. Now to it, for time is fleeting! I shall call for a report of your discoveries at luncheon. A prize for the one ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... Statement in each entry referred to the weather and the second to the deportment of the writer, and Rebecca Mary had remarked a sympathetic resemblance between the two statements. She had caught a fleeting glimpse of the weather part of "Thirsdy"—she could guess the rest. Better let the curtain fall on "Thirsdy." On her way home Rebecca Mary decided to keep a diary herself. Her first day's record had been a ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... overgrowth of mosses and house-leeks, and the thatch was brown as a chestnut shell, but just now it seemed to be powdered with a golden dust. The cottage itself was scarcely visible through the haze of light; the ruinous wall, the doorway and everything about it was radiant with a fleeting glory and a beauty due to chance, such as is sometimes seen for an instant in a human face, beneath the influence of a strong emotion that brings warmth and color into it. In a life under the open sky and among the fields, the transient ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... to Someone who is thought of as willing to listen and able to answer. As Sabatier has well said, "Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion." Wherever men believe in a personal God, as distinct from an "all-inclusive consciousness of being" of which they are fleeting expressions—mere surface ripples on an infinite ocean—that belief will attest itself by the prayerful life. On the other hand, a prayerless religion is a contradiction in terms; it either has no needs to express or {196} it will die from lack of self-expression. The believer will pray ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... ran along the barrel. The little bead on the front sight first covered the British officer, and then the broad breast of Girty. It moved reluctantly and searched out the heart of Wingenund, where it lingered for a fleeting instant. At last it rested upon ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... seated himself under a stunted oak tree. The light was growing stronger. The east was overshot with ripples of crimson and orange, here blending into lines each more gorgeous than a moment before. The wind was chasing in from the bosom of Adria, and driving the fleeting mists up the little valley. The hills were springing out of the gloom, the thrushes were swinging in the boughs overhead, and pouring out their morning song. Out from the camp the bugles were calling the soldiers for the ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... Ashe waiting for a considerable time. It was not until the hands of the fat clock over the door pointed to twenty minutes past eleven that the office boy's "Next!" found him the only survivor. He gave his clothes a hasty smack with the palm of his hand and his hair a fleeting dab to accentuate his good appearance, and turned the handle of ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... so sensitive (she did not like to say willful). But the rector's was a firm mind, grasping its first judgments tenaciously and acting on them promptly, whence counter-judgments were no more for him than shadows fleeting across the solid ground ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the breakfast is stowed away, and I must remind you that the moments are fleeting rapidly," announced the director of the expedition presently. "Cub, are you ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... deeper things also; as a little child, wrapped up in her bearskin, she watched with awe her father engaged in mystic rites; when around him the airy legions gathered from the populous elements, the spirits he ruled and the spirits he bowed down before: fleeting nebulous things white as foam coming forth from the great deep who fled away at the waving of his hand; and rarer the great sons of fire, bright and transparent as glass, who though near seemed yet far away and were still and swift ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... so sublime a horror, that it is impossible to describe them. Yet, in the midst of these catastrophes, swift as thought, one catches sometimes a momentary glimpse of a picture, rapid and fleeting, as if illumined by ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Among the fleeting curiosities of the day are a crowd of sampans flying black flags, evidently some military expedition; they are bound down stream, and it occurs to me that they are perhaps a reinforcement of these famous free-lances going to join the hordes of that denomination making things ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... utterly left the place where Thad remembered they had erected it. He had just a fleeting glimpse of something dingy white careering along over the ground among the trees, and ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... of gum-arabic or gamboge adds to its stability. As a landscape pigment, the colour is out of the general scale of nature; but in flower-painting its charms are almost irresistible. Nothing certainly can approach it as a colour for scarlet geraniums, but its beauty is almost as fleeting ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... But, if this fleeting spirit share With clay the grave's eternal bed, While life yet throbs I raise my prayer, Though doom'd no more to quit ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... conceive how soothing it is to know that whenever you enter your gate and glance upward, you will always see the curtains parted, and between them, like an idol in a shrine, the ugly wooden back of a little oval or oblong looking-glass. It gives one a sense of permanence in a world where all is fleeting." ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... underwent a subtle change: the spans of defeat grew longer, the moments of hope more fleeting. The sheep too at last were infected by uneasiness, bleating piteously skyward and making no attempt to nibble any longer. The goat, like Slafe, was unmoved; she disdained ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... him by every means in my power. I think now it would have been perfectly easy for me to have disappeared without raising more than a fleeting suspicion in any one's mind. But we cannot foresee everything. And I believed that my safety lay in keeping Grell at liberty. What he thought of my motives for helping him, I do not know—he may have believed them to be gratitude, or something else. Anyway, ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... a million. Seeing that most of these obvious kinds have their accidental varieties, and that they often shade into others by imperceptible degrees, it may well be imagined that the task of distinguishing between what is permanent and what fleeting, what is a species and what a ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... a hard question to ask, but it must be asked. He felt a shiver run through her body and he saw in her eyes a fleeting expression ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... murmuring waterfall, along the rocky face of the towering precipice, with fleeting glimpses of the myriad monkeys eternally flitting through the tropical forest, with the discords of nocturnal animals, and the squawking and cries of disturbed birds of a hundred different species, ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... a matter of seconds, he knew. But they were seconds that stretched into the farthermost reaches of eternity. Seconds that lived a million years and passed in another fleeting instant. ...
— The Monster • S. M. Tenneshaw
... standing at the little luncheon-bar, like a pelican in the wilderness of the galleries, bent over a sandwich with a glass of sherry before him. The spacious emptiness of the great central hall, over which father and son brooded as they stood together, was marred now and then for a fleeting moment by barristers in wig and gown hurriedly bolting across, by an occasional old lady or rusty-coated man, looking up in a frightened way, and by two persons, bolder than their generation, seated in an embrasure arguing. The sound of their ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... long and vainly seek to determine.' So he comes to care supremely for Baudelaire, 'who, more than any other, possessed the marvellous power of rendering, with a strange sanity of expression, the most fleeting, the most wavering morbid states of exhausted minds, of desolate souls.' In Flaubert he prefers La Tentation de Saint-Antoine; in Goncourt, La Faustin; in Zola, La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret—the exceptional, the most remote and recherche outcome of each temperament. And of the three it is ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... said the man, "to be constantly straining every resource of my memory in futile endeavor to catch and hold one fleeting clue to my past. Why, dear, do you realize that I may have been a fugitive from justice, as was von Horn, a vile criminal perhaps. It is awful, Virginia, to contemplate the horrible ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Penrod, though he was convinced that he could do anything that Margaret could do, and also that neither she nor her comely friend could sustain such a speed for long. On the contrary, they actually increased it with each fleeting block they covered. ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... "Gallop and go!" and "Slow, now, slow!" With every man in this life below— But the things of this world are a fleeting show. ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... a sublime contempt for any one with whom he was not drunk. He lumped together 'nasty old Lyttons, Carlyles, and Dickenses.' And the intoxication itself was swift and fleeting. There was something wrong with Goethe by July; it is his ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... this last adieu I send. At length the conqueror death asserts his right, And will forever veil me from thy sight. He wooes me to him, with a chearful grace; And not one terror clouds his meagre face. He promises a lasting rest from pain; And shews that all life's fleeting joys are vain. Th' eternal scenes of Heaven he sets in view, And tells me, that no other joys are true. But love, fond love, would yet resist his power; Would fain a-while defer the parting hour: He brings the mourning image ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... deny ourselves the pleasure of that social intercourse which, to me, at least, has thus far made this wilderness an Eden of delight? But can it be thus preserved, if we keep up that intercourse, as in the sunshine of our love,—those pleasant, fleeting, rosy months, when I was so happy, O so very happy, in the feelings of the present and the prospects of the future? No, no, it is not possible, it is not possible for you to come here, and encounter my father in such a mood, and then return and receive the upbraidings of your own, that ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... up its brilliant illusions before him; it would be wrong to say that they had never been associated with the charming vivacity of Adele, as well as, at other times, with the sweet graces of Rose Elderkin. But these illusions had been of a character so transitory, so fleeting, that he had come to love their brilliant changes, and to look forward with some dread to the possible permanence of them, or such fixedness as should take away the charming drift of his vagaries. If, in some wanton and quite ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... the reactions that gave it birth and through a knowledge of the laws of optics that it has come into current use in laboratories. In fact, it alone is capable of giving with an undoubted character of truthfulness a durable vestige of certain fleeting phenomena.— ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... saying very much—she was not by nature of a talkative disposition—she plainly asked, by her calm steady look, and rare ironical smile, "How can you imagine, my dear friends, that I can take these fleeting shadowy images for true living and breathing forms?" For this reason many found fault with her as being cold, prosaic, and devoid of feeling; others, however, who had reached a clearer and deeper conception ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... sheath enfolding a silvery-green leaf-cloak, the solitary erect bud slowly rises from its embrace, sheds its sepals, expands into an immaculate golden-centred blossom that, poppy-like, offers but a glimpse of its fleeting loveliness ere it drops its snow-white petals and is gone. But were the flowers less ephemeral, were we always certain of hitting upon the very time its colonies are starring the woodland, would it have so great a charm? Here to-day, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... world, with all its supposed infinitudes of space and time, its systems of suns and planets, its seemingly endless forms of inorganic matter and organic life, shrivels up, on a close inspection, into a fleeting, a momentary figment of thought. It is like one of those glass baubles, iridescent with a thousand varied and delicate hues, which a single touch suffices to shatter into dust. The philosopher, like the sorcerer, has but to ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... flourishing but fleeting days. My father, when he went to the fair to purchase his team, happened to see a fine hunter on sale. It was a beautiful beast. Who could forbear to prefer him and his noble form, high blood, and spirited action, to the slouching dull and clumsy cart-horse? Hugh ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... Did it never cross your mind to wonder how we came to pair on that night of the river picnic? I accused you of cheating, do you remember? And you were quite indignant." A glimmer of the old gay mischief shone for a fleeting second through her tragedy. "That was the first move in the game," she said. "At least you never suspected ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... two, nor three, were sufficient to allay her longing, and the housekeeping money went without a thought; it was only the remembrance of the fleeting time which stayed her. She did not wish her lady to ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... of them. If you will turn your faces to God, amidst all the flaunting splendours and vain shows and fleeting possessions of this present, His face will dawn on you yonder. We can say but little of what is meant by such a hope as that. But only this we can say, that there will be, as yet unimaginable, new wealths of revelation of the Father, and to match them, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... with the girls. Funny thing, but I've had these girls on my mind all day. It seemed to me that they needed me, and I couldn't go to bed without finding out that everything was well with them. What's wrong?" Captain Jules had caught a fleeting glimpse of Tom's harassed face. "Is it—is it Madge?" he asked anxiously. "Is anything the matter with ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... an impulse of shame—obscure, instinctive, and fleeting; shame of his eagerness to be informed, and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... d'Aoste, exhibit one branch of the river of Sensibility (if one may be permitted to draw up a new Carte de Tendre), losing itself in agreeable trifling with the surface of life, and in generous, but fleeting, and slightly, though not consciously, insincere indulgence of the emotions. In Adolphe the river rushes violently down a steep place, and in nigras lethargi mergitur undas. It is to be hoped that most people who will read these pages know Xavier de Maistre's charming little ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... in such circumstances, in the midst of intense darkness, can "take no note of time." An hour of horror will sometimes seem an age, while a week of unalloyed pleasure will often glide by seemingly with the same rapidity as a few fleeting moments. It may have been one hour—it may have been ten—that the Corporal sat on the floor of his dungeon; when suddenly he was startled by the noise of the trap-door above his head being opened, and looking up, ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... the great masters of style in the language. In his greatest passages, as in the Vision of Sudden Death and the Dream Fugue, the cadence of his elaborately piled-up sentences falls like cathedral music, or gives an abiding expression to the fleeting pictures of his most gorgeous dreams. His character unfortunately bore no correspondence to his intellectual endowments. His moral system had in fact been shattered by indulgence in opium. His appearance and manners have been thus described: "A short and fragile, but well-proportioned frame; a shapely ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... of their clashing, as the son had outgrown the presumptions of early youth, and a change had passed over his nature which Ethel had felt, rather than seen, during his fleeting visits at home, more marked by negatives than positives, and untraced by confidences. The bitterness and self-assertion had ceased to tinge his words, the uncomfortable doubt that they were underlaid by satire had passed away, and methodical and self-possessed as he always was, the atmosphere of ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lights me to my tomb.—Yes, 'tis the hand Of Death I feel press heavy on my vitals, Slow sapping the warm current of existence My moments now are few—the sand of life Ebbs fastly to its finish. Yet a little, And the last fleeting particle will fall, Silent, unseen, unnoticed, unlamented. Come then, sad Thought, and let us meditate While meditate we may. * * * * * I hoped I should not leave The earth without a vestige; Fate decrees It shall be otherwise, ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... More fleeting in their nature still, And less substantial are Than sunbeam, breeze, and drop of dew, Smile, sigh, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the traffic was held up, thus enabling Iglesias from his perch on the 'bustop to receive a more than fleeting impression. Two ladies were seated opposite the young man in the carriage. In them Iglesias recognised persons of very secure social standing. The elder he supposed to be Lady Sokeington—Alaric Barking's half-sister—to whom, on the occasion ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... beneath them, As when across the sky the driving rack[57] of the rain cloud Grows for a moment thin, and betrays the sun by its brightness. Once it had lifted its hand, and moved its lips, but was silent, As if an iron will had mastered the fleeting intention. 955 But when were ended the troth and the prayer and the last benediction, Into the room it strode, and the people beheld, with amazement Bodily there in his armor, Miles Standish, the Captain of Plymouth! Grasping the bridegroom's hand, he said with emotion, "Forgive me! ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... six hours to wait at Turin before the train left for Milan. My fleeting impression of Turin was of a very well-planned city, its Corsi spacious and well shaded with trees, its trams multitudinous, its many distant vistas of wooded hills and of the Superga Palace beyond ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul. Art is long and time is fleeting. And our hearts though stout and brave, Still like muffled drums are beating Funeral marches to the grave. Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us footsteps on the sands of Time. Let us then ..." said Miss ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... mountain would not be comforted; he lifted his sturdy head aloft, and his sorrowing face was turned ever toward the fleeting object of his love. Hills, valleys, forests, plains, and other mountains separated them now, but over and beyond them all he could see was her fair face lifted pleadingly toward him, while her white arms tossed wildly to and ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... Mrs. Brewster met the gaze of Anne. But the two understood and exchanged a fleeting glance of ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... he could be obstinately silent when he did go so far as to take Fruen for a walk down to the bridge. I could see well enough how they stood looking each their separate ways. Lord God in heaven, but love is a fleeting thing! ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... to immeasurable, never-beginning, and never-ending eternity; a drop of water in the great deep, which evaporates and is borne off by the winds; a grain of sand, which is soon gathered to the dust from which it sprung. Shall a being so small, so petty, so fleeting, so evanescent, oppose itself to the onward march of a great nation, which is to subsist for ages and ages to come; oppose itself to that long line of posterity which, issuing from our loins, will endure during the existence of the world? Forbid it, God. Let us look to our country and our cause, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... that was low and lifelong we may turn to the devotion that was loud and fleeting. The love-songs are many and well picked: one is the madrigal from Thomas Lodge's Eitphues' Golden Legacy, which "he wrote," he says, "on the ocean, when every line was wet with a surge, and every humorous passion counterchecked with a storm;" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... regular journal, I have only a few scattered notes written in an old log-book to guide me in my account of the events of that period of my career. A few are still vivid in my memory as when they first occurred, but many have escaped me altogether, or appear like the fleeting phantoms of a dream of which it is impossible to describe the details. I must therefore be allowed to pass rapidly over that early portion of my naval life and go on to the time when I had passed my examination for a lieutenant's ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... listening ear. But, ah! the heart grows very sad, when the ear listens in vain, and the yearning, unsatisfied spirit realizes that the words, so loved, so fondly dwelt upon, were but words, empty, vain words. But, to have believed them, was a fleeting blindness. They served for food to the yearning heart, when they were given, and shall the traveller through the desolate wilderness look back with scorn upon the bread and water that once satisfied his hunger and thirst, even though ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... There is a time for the second birth of every soul; that time had come for me. From that hour, this book has been my constant companion and comfort. I have learned from its pages how little it matters how or where this fleeting, mortal life is passed, so that it answers its purpose of preparing the soul for another. I have learned patience with sinners, forgiveness of enemies, and confidence in God. In a word, I trust I have learned the way of salvation, and in that have ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... moment Minnie and Sidney were treading the complicated measure; and simultaneously Henry ceased to be a youngish twenty-one and was even conscious of a fleeting doubt as to whether he was ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the gale Has tossed your bark, and many weary miles Stretch yet before you, furl the battered sail, Fling out the anchor, and with rapture hail The pleasant prospect—storms will come too soon. They are but suicides, at best, who fail To seize when'er they can Joy's fleeting boon— Fools, who exclaim "'tis night," yet always shun ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... seemed precious and fair indeed. Balancing between genuine homesickness for the green pools of the Cam, and a humorous whim in his rhymed comment on the outlying villages, Brooke wrote the Grantchester poem; and probably when the fleeting pang of nostalgia was over enjoyed the evening in Berlin hugely. But the verses are more than of merely passing interest. To one who knows that neighbourhood the picture is cannily vivid. To me it brings back with painful intensity ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... may call attention to the fact that the average man is a victim of Arrested Development, and that the fleeting years bring an increase of knowledge only in very exceptional cases. Health and prosperity are not pure blessings—a certain element of discontent is necessary to spur men on to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... pianissimo chords, two notes in each; then silence, broken only by soft drum-beats to make the silence felt. Elsa has fainted, and as she revives we hear a bit of the duet—Lohengrin's tenderness as he tends her, and a fleeting dream of Elsa's, perhaps, seem to blend ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... just freed its neck. These difficulties will be met with, even where the great body of the citizens has not become wholly corrupted; but where the corruption is complete, freedom, as shall presently be shown, is not merely fleeting but impossible. Wherefore my remarks are to be taken as applying to those States only wherein corruption has as yet made no great progress, and in which there is more that is ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... unquestioned right. Here is a peculiar race, of most unfathomable origin, possessed of the qualities which have always prompted poetry, and living lives which are to us as shadowy as those of the Ossianic heroes; our own, and passing away—while we take no pains to arrest their fleeting traits or to record their picturesque traditions. Yet we love poetry; are ambitious of a literature of our own, and sink back dejected when we are convicted of imitation. Why is it that we lack interest in things at home? Sismondi has a passage to ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... drives me; do it I must. And after all, what is life to a man who is young, and has no children? Better over, better done with, before the troubles and the disappointment come, the weariness, and the loss of power, and the sense of growing old, and seeing the little ones hungry. Life is such a fleeting vapor—I smell some man sucking peppermint! The smell of it goes on the wind for a mile. Oh! Cadman again, as usual. Peppermint in the Royal Coast-Guard! Away ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... forty-eight hours and to them it had no more terrors. Men overworked to the breaking point and women unnerved by hysteria dropped down on the cooling ashes and slept where they lay, for had they not seen the tall steel skyscrapers burn like a torch? Had they not beheld the cataracts of flame fleeting unhindered up the broad avenues, and over the solid blocks ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... of the sea-bottom there had been no spoor to follow, for the soft pads of the thoat but pressed down in his swift passage the resilient vegetation which sprang up again behind his fleeting feet, ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... lived because he had a fixed desire, a grand aim in view—he thirsted for freedom, and believed it attainable. Trenck could not die, for without was liberty, the sun, life, and honor. He would not die; for to be willing to die, he must first have lived. His life had been so short—a few fleeting years of youth, of careless enjoyment—a joyous dream of love and ambition! This had been his fate. Then came long, weary years of imprisonment—a something which he knew not, but it was not life—had crept to him in his prison, and with a cruel hand marked years upon his brow—years through which ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... atoned by energy and brilliant courage for his famous treason of the preceding year, while his striking and now rapidly approaching doom upon the very scene of his present labours, made him appear to have been building a magnificent though fleeting monument to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... process of time therefore as the fashions continued to spread, and the youth of the society began to come under their dominion, the Quakers incorporated dress among other subjects of their discipline. Hence no member, after this period, could dress himself preposterously, or follow the fleeting fashions of the world, without coming under the authority of friendly and wholesome admonition. Hence an annual inquiry began to be made, if parents brought up their children to dress consistently with their christian profession. The society, however, ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... placed it on her sister's finger, begging her to keep it there until she married. Thus there had been between these two young girls a strange commingling of bitter remorse and the artless visions of a fleeting spring-time too early blighted by the keen north wind of desertion; yet all their tears, regrets and memories were always subordinate to ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... sleeping lad, and his look was a compound of great friendship and admiration. He knew that Paul was not, like himself, born to the wilderness, and he respected the courage and skill that could triumph nevertheless. But it was only a fleeting look. His eyes turned back to the forest, where he watched lazily; lazily, because he knew with the certainty of divination that they would not attempt anything until dark, and he knew with equal certainty that they ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... his muscles, grown stiff by his cramped position, and as he did so he caught a glimpse of a figure on the south face of the wall. But it was so fleeting he was not sure. If he had only brought his glasses with him he might have decided, but he was without them, and he concluded finally that it was merely an optical illusion. He and the Indian had the mountain walls to themselves, and the warrior could not have moved around ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... almost taken him for a young man; and sometimes he said something in a settled kind of way that was almost adult. This fondest aunt went on to add, however, that of course, the next minute after one of these fleeting spells, he was sure to be overtaken by his more accustomed moods, when his eye would again fix itself with fundamental aimlessness upon nothing. In brief, he was at the age when he spent most of his time changing his mind about things, or, rather, when his mind spent most ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... I call, in vain, in vain I call, While she like fleeting, fleeting Air; When press'd by some tempestuous Wind, Flys swifter from the voice of my Despair: Nor cast a pitying, pitying, pitying, pitying look behind, No not one, no not one, not one pitying, pitying look, Not ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... mile before they started to dip toward the far end. Small patches of wait-a-bit and other thorn bushes sparsely dotted the floor of the ravine, or gorge, and about halfway through there was a little grove of mimosa, in the midst of which we caught fleeting, indistinct glimpses of certain moving things which ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... marvellous what an amount of knowledge candidates will produce before their examiners; but those who have been both examined and examiners know best how fleeting that knowledge often is, and how different from that other knowledge which has been acquired slowly and quietly, for its own sake, for our own sake, without a thought as to whether it would ever pay at examinations or not. A candidate, after giving most glibly the dates and the titles of the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... alone that gives the flower Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume, And we are weeds without it. All constraint, Except what wisdom lays on evil men, Is evil; hurts the faculties, impedes Their progress in the road of science; blinds The eyesight of discovery, and begets In those that suffer it, a sordid mind Bestial, ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... are full of surprises, on which we can bestow but a fleeting glance within these limits. They present a ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... three that wintry walk was rapture only too fleeting. For the third it was passive endurance. The agonies that had but lately rent Diana's breast when she had seen those two together no longer tortured her. The scorpion sting was beginning to lose its venomous power. She suffered still, but her suffering was softened by resignation. There is a limit ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... youth,' Blake continued, 'this memory of mine was, if I may so phrase it, piecemeal and occasional. Feeling that I was no ordinary man, conscious of strange forces struggling in me, I would obtain, as it were, glimpses, fleeting and unsatisfactory, into a former state. Then they would go, not for long intervals to return. As time elapsed, however, these glimpses, to call them so, became more frequent and lasting, the intervals of oblivion shorter; and at last, one ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... it was ill. Then spake Cathba: "The little boy that takes arms [8]this day[8] shall be splendid and renowned [9]for deeds of arms[9] [10]above the youths of Erin [11]and the tales of his high deeds shall be told[11] forever,[10] but he shall be short-lived and fleeting." Cuchulain overheard what he said, though far off at his play-feats south-west of Emain; and he threw away all his play-things and hastened to Conchobar's sleep-room [12]to ask for arms.[12] "All [W.1077.] good ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... away. For a moment, perhaps, I am Hiawatha alone in his forest home, or a more primitive savage, feeling the great, silent pulse of nature, happy in unconsciousness, like a beast of the wild. But only for an instant do I ever catch this fleeting state. Next I am Glenn Kilbourne of West Fork, doomed and haunted by memories of the past. The great looming walls then become no longer blank. They are vast pages of the history of my life, with its past and present, and, alas! its future. ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... Fell fast asleep And dreamt she heard them bleating, But when she awoke, She found it a joke, For still they all were fleeting. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... down with him to meat, and rises with him from his bed; he lives and breathes under a shadow of mortality awful to support; and he is so inured to the apprehension that he greets the reality with relief. He does not even seek to support a disappointment; at an affront, at a breach of one of his fleeting and communistic love-affairs, he seeks an instant refuge in the grave. Hanging is now the fashion. I heard of three who had hanged themselves in the west end of Hiva-oa during the first half of 1888; but though this be a common form of suicide in other ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Mrs. Roden. What is the use of asking 'why' when the thing is done? Could I make it so now, as though I had never seen her? Could I if I would? Would I if I could? What is the good of thinking of antecedents which are impossible? She has become my treasure. Whether past and fleeting, or likely to last me for my life, she is my treasure. Can I make a change because you ask why,—and why,—and why? Why did I ever come here? Why did I know your son? Why have I got a something here within me which kills me ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... one fleeting moment I had a vision of a round white arm bare to the shoulder, a slender hand grasping a tawny mane, and black eyes flashing with scorn. Perhaps it was due to that vision that my voice had a ring in it that brought ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... in her own mind she went over and over her list of acquaintances, trying to find the person of whom she was thinking. Nor could she tell wherein the resemblance lay, whether in the voice, the manner, or in some feature; and yet it was there all the time, a fleeting, haunting likeness to some former friend. Then she thought she had a clue, for, in answer to a sudden jest on her part, the stranger laughed until his glasses fell off and dropped to the floor, and as he stooped ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... each flutter of her garments, the grotesque shadow on the white wall danced and gibbered behind her. And, as she gazed down on the girl, it was as if the end of life, with its pathos, its cruelties, its bitterness and its disillusionment, had stopped for a fleeting instant to look back at life in the pride and ignorance ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Lanyard gave a fleeting smile, a bare curving of lips together with an almost imperceptible narrowing of amused eyes—goading the other to the last stage of exasperation—then calmly ignored the fellow, returning indifferent attention to the progress of ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... a temple, and said it should be A shrine, and a home where the past meets me, And the most evanescent and fleeting of things, Should be lured to my temple, and shorn of their wings, To adorn my palace ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... everywhere else in this northern land of exquisite, fleeting summers, the sunset colors came on gradually, increasing in richness of tone and fading through several hours. The mist of the afternoon had scattered before a faint sea-wind, and settled wraithlike in the hollows of the hills across the bay. Violet now in ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... "diving buck" in Dutch. There are a dozen or more different species of duikers, and they may be found scattered all over South and East Africa. They are difficult to shoot, for their diving habits make them a fleeting target; also their size, about twenty or thirty pounds in weight, makes ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... of comparative security brought back my fleeting senses, and I made a convulsive clutch with the other hand at the gunwale; while the next thing I remember is feeling myself helped over the side by the boy, who had climbed in, and lying in the bottom with the sun beating down upon me—sick ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... my days will not return to me, You who see them fleeting, you, all time above, You who move the whole world's heart, ah move one heart to turn to me, —Bring me a lover, and teach me ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... depths of the earth, passing more than one layer of ancient lava, for Resina and Portici themselves are but modern editions of former towns that have been engulfed in the course of ages. If the stranger can derive any solid satisfaction from the descent by a gloomy underground passage and from fleeting glimpses of ancient walls and dwellings seen through a forest of wooden baulks, which serve to support the spaces excavated, he must indeed be an enthusiast. But most people, perhaps all sensible people, will be content to take the undoubted interest ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... will do very nicely," Miss Merivale said, after giving the typewritten programmes a cursory glance and pushing them from her. Her eyes went back to Rhoda's face. She saw now that the fleeting glimpse she had got of her on the staircase had somewhat deceived her. Rhoda was not as pretty as she had thought. Her mouth was a little too wide, and her nose had too blunt a tip for beauty. But it was a charming face, nevertheless, full of heart-sunshine; and the dark brown, darkly-fringed ...
— Miss Merivale's Mistake • Mrs. Henry Clarke
... articulation of words you might well 'miss' her; for her qualities are not histrionic, they have no notion of making the best of themselves. They remain, so to speak, in nuggets; they are minted into no current coin of fleeting fashion and shallow accomplishment. But if a face can mean more to you than the whole of Johnson's Dictionary, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica to boot, if a strain of music can convey to you the thrill of human life, with its heights and ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... woman of the world as she was, watched her daughter's face in the fleeting lights as they sped homeward, and saw what a crushing blow the announcement ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... these speculations and felt that her original faith in him was justified. He did not offer even yet to pay all the monthly expenses of the house, explaining casually that the greater part of his profits went back into the business; but he handed over his share promptly, and such fleeting doubts and anxieties as may once have visited his still inexperienced wife ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... decreased, Joy, after years, youth is departed, 1265 The ancient pride. The bison[U] was once The gladness of youth. Now are the old days In course of time gone forever, Life-joy departed, as ocean[L] flows by, Waves hurried along. To each one is wealth[3][F] 1270 Fleeting 'neath heaven, treasures of earth Pass 'neath the clouds likest to wind, When before men it mounts up aloud, Roams 'round the clouds, raging rushes, And then all at once silent becomes, 1275 In narrow prison closely confined, Strongly repressed. So passes this world, And likewise ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... had journeyed down to Wyndfell Hall to-night were all so hungry, that there was rather less talk going on round the table than might have been expected. But now and again the hostess caught a fleeting interchange of words. She heard, for instance, old Miss Burnaby informing young Donnington that she had been a good deal on the Continent as a young woman, and had actually spent a year in Austria a matter of forty ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... seemed to me that for one fleeting moment "luminous eyes" indeed "'broidered the darkness!'" From out of the shade below the big tree they regarded me greenly—and I ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... old dread of annihilation which I had first experienced as a small child was not dead as I had fondly imagined, but still lived and worked in me. This visible world—this paradise of which I had had so far but a fleeting glimpse-the sun and moon and other worlds peopling all space with their brilliant constellations, and still other suns and systems, so utterly remote, in such inconceivable numbers as to appear to our vision as a faint luminous mist ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... single word it is this: it lasts. "Love," urges Paul, "never faileth." Then he begins one of his marvelous lists of the great things of the day, and exposes them one by one. He runs over the things that men thought were going to last, and shows that they are all fleeting, temporary, passing away. ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... to detain and comprehend the lovely but fleeting forms. I was conscious, also, of being in a dream, and was anxious that nothing should rouse me from it; and when I did awake, I kept my eyes closed, in order if possible to continue the illusion. ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... of kindliness and good will, hurrying both along to say they knew not what. I could only thank her; and the very beauty and sweetness of her struck all at once a sadness on my merriment; and I saw for a moment that this was all a fleeting wreath of fog, as I said; yet all the more for that strove to grasp it and hold ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... of them all our worldly hankerings after the seen and temporal. Then we shall bear fruit that He will gather into His garner. The cares and the pleasures and the wealth that terminate in, and are occupied with, this poor fleeting present are small and insignificant. Let us try to yield ourselves up wholly to the higher influences of that Divine Spirit, and in true consecration receive the engrafted word. And then He will give to us to drink of that river of His pleasures, drinking of which we shall ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... fleeting thought to the Palace, to the Crown Prince and his impending fate, she dismissed it quickly. She had no affection for Annunciata, and as to the boy, let them look out for him. Let Mettlich guard his treasure, or lose it to ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... asked him what he was laughing at, and he said it was at Lang Tammas. He got grave again when I asked him what there was in Lang Tammas to smile at, and admitted that he could not tell me. However, I have always been of opinion that the thought of the precentor in his box gave Cree a fleeting sense of humour. ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... brother's couch, and the sight of him cast a dark shadow over the brightness of this happy morn. As he recognized her, a fleeting smile crossed the pale, spiritualized face, which seemed to her to have grown ten years older in this short time; but it vanished as quickly as it had come. Then the great eyes gazed blankly again from the shadows ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... man is able to construct monuments far more permanent than the narrow span of his own existence; yet these monuments, like himself, are perishable and frail; and in the boundless annals of time his life and his labors must equally be measured as a fleeting moment. Of a simple and solid edifice it is not easy, however, to circumscribe the duration. As the wonder of ancient days, the Pyramids attracted the curiosity of the ancients: a hundred generations, the leaves ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... Lyonnais in the Rue de Port-Mahon, where never again can I invite my friends, for the Cabaret has gone into the land of shadows with so many of the group who sat round my table. At the time, there was no looking back, no sad straying into a dead past to spoil a good dinner—at the worst, a fleeting moment of discomfort when we selected the tench swimming in the tank close to our table and saw them carried off to the kitchen to be cooked for us. It was the custom of the house, intended to be ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... the one Loss as he feels the other. Nay, but it is as well that one of them, tho' the Lesser, should be repaired. 'Twill shew Signe of Grace, my thinking of him, and may open the Way, if God wills, to some Interchange of Kindnesse, however fleeting. ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... changes mortal Life with fleeting years; A mournful change, should Reason fail to bring The timely insight that can temper fears, And from vicissitude remove its sting; While Faith aspires to seats in that domain Where joys are perfect—neither wax nor ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... dead, my child; She cannot see you now: The damps of death are gath'ring there Upon her marble brow. She cannot speak to you again, Her lips are sealed in death; That little hand will never move, Nor come that fleeting breath. ...
— Proud and Lazy - A Story for Little Folks • Oliver Optic
... is but a fleeting dream, of happiness to some, misery to others, but there is a home beyond, and for the faithful, a "crown of glory which fadeth not away." For we know that there is an inheritance for those ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... are willing to learn; hardy plants will soon take the place of tender plants if left alone. The short dark people are still the main part, not only of the Welsh, but of the British people. It is true that their language has disappeared, except a few place-names. But languages are far more fleeting than races. The loss of its language does not show that a race is dead; it only shows that it is very anxious to change and learn. Some languages easily give place to others, and we say that the people who speak these languages are good linguists, like Danes ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... thou mortal bane! Spite of thy charms, thou causest often pain And sore regret, of which we daily find A thousand instances attend mankind: For thou—O may it not displease the fair— A fleeting pleasure art, but lasting care. And always proves, alas! too dear the prize, Which, in ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... of the bread-fruit are of great size, and their edges are cut and scolloped as fantastically as those of a lady's lace collar. As they annually tend towards decay, they almost rival in brilliant variety of their gradually changing hues the fleeting shades of the expiring dolphin. The autumnal tints of our American forests, glorious as they are, sink into nothing ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... conductor suddenly turned his head and looked directly at Mary Louise, with a curious expression, as if connecting his two passengers. Then he went on through the train, but the girl's heart was beating high and the little man, while seeming to eye the fleeting landscape through the window, wriggled somewhat ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... the large, broad style of the historical painter. There is scant opportunity afforded in any of the scenes allotted to Coriolanus for fine touches and delicate shading. During much of the action the spectator is aware only of an imperial figure that moves with a mountainous grace through the fleeting rabble of Roman plebeians and Volscians, dreadful in war, loftily calm in peace, irradiating the conscious superiority of power, dignity, worth, and honourable renown. McCullough filled that aspect of the part ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... Any fleeting suspicion she might have had of his complicity in the Chinaman's pursuit vanished. He showed plain bewilderment. For a moment he was more at sea than herself. The next she saw the shadow of a thought so disturbing that it sharpened his ruddy face to harshness. He stepped ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... in the darkness, with the wind tearing at her hair and flickering her cloak about her like a silken sail. When she closed the door behind her and went forward it was like plunging into an unknown purple pool, full of dark objects swaying and swimming beside her in the fleeting darkness. Tendrils of flowering plants caught at her with twining fingers. A heavily scented waxen flower, pallid as the face of a lost soul, stooped and kissed her from a balcony as she passed. The young trees were like slim girls ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... Spring in her arms. What was the war to her just then? Robin abolished war. While she had him there was always the rainbow, the perfect rainbow, rising from the world to the heavens and falling from the heavens to the world. The showers were fleeting Spring showers, and the clouds were ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Dickson's tackets. Arm in arm the two hobbled down the back path behind the village which led to the South Lodge. The gate was unlocked, for the warder was busy elsewhere, and they hastened up the avenue. Far off Dickson thought he saw shapes fleeting across the park, which he took to be the shock-troops of his own side, and he seemed to hear snatches of song. Jaikie was giving tongue, and this was ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... white, whiter than her dress; she struggled faintly, and then with the feeling of submission strong within her, crossed her arms upon her breast as a little child about to say her prayers. The bright light of the lamp fell full upon her, and Clarke watched changes fleeting over her face as the changes of the hills when the summer clouds float across the sun. And then she lay all white and still, and the doctor turned up one of her eyelids. She was quite unconscious. Raymond ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... within the rail—of determination. His nod toward herself was distinctly brusque; a new quality which gave her a moment's thought. And then when he had hung up his hat and was walking past her to his own private office, he indulged in a faint, fleeting grin. ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... days immediately preceding and following the Great Match, there had been a return of that frank and open bearing that had characterised the employees of the Maitland Mills in the old days, but that fleeting gleam of sunshine had faded out and the old grey shadow of suspicion, of discontent, had fallen again. To Maitland this attitude brought a disappointment and a resentment which sensibly added to his burden, already heavy enough in these ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... painting of manners which at first had been so attractive, there was something that left deeper mark. Genial and irrepressible enjoyment, affectionate heartiness of tone, unrestrained exuberance of mirth, these are not more delightful than they are fleeting and perishable qualities; but the attention eagerly excited by the charm of them in Pickwick found itself retained by something more permanent. We had all become suddenly conscious, in the very thick of the extravaganza of adventure and fun set before us, that here were real people. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... precisely at this part of my history that I love to pause for a moment; a sort of breathing interval between the cloud that has been long gathering, and the storm that is about to burst. And this interval is not without its fleeting gleam of quiet and ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
