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More "Fickle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... life's expense Hath won for him coeval youth With the immaculate prime of Truth; While we, who make pretence At living on, and wake and eat and sleep, And life's stale trick by repetition keep, Our fickle permanence (A poor leaf-shadow on a brook, whose play Of busy idlesse ceases with our day) Is the mere cheat ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... he had time now to ponder upon his ups and downs, hardly able to believe that at last he was really on his homeward journey. He felt far more confident in the care of bluff Captain Hillgrove than in that of the fickle Peruvians. ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... first, "This city bold Belonged to us In days of old." Said Nellie, "Here Prince Arthur wept— By cruel John A prisoner kept. Here Joan of Arc Was tried and burned, When fickle fate Against her turned." Said Rose, "Oh dear! It makes me sad To think what trouble People had Who lived once in This very town, Where we walk gaily Up ...
— Abroad • Various
... before the astonishment of my hosts had even begun to subside, I was pursuing my onward journey. Suez, I found, was still three hours distant, and the sun going down in the west warned me that I must find some other guide to keep me in the right direction. This guide I found in the most fickle and uncertain of the elements. For some hours the wind had been freshening, and it now blew a violent gale; it blew not fitfully and in squalls, but with such remarkable steadiness, that I felt convinced it would blow from the same quarter for several hours. When the sun set, ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... 'tis given, What knows he of its worth? 'Tis either fire of heaven Or earthiness of earth. And if the lips are fickle That kiss, they'll never know If tears begin to trickle Where ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... know which I dislike most, foreign usurpation or the oleander. I have carried that plant up and down stairs every time the weather has changed, and the fickle elements of New England have kept me rising and falling with the thermometer, and whenever I raised or fell I most always had that scrawny oleander in ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... can chance mee, well or ill is equall In my acceptance, since I joy in neyther, 160 But goe with sway of all the world together. In all successes Fortune and the day To mee alike are; I am fixt, be shee Never so fickle; and will there repose, Farre past the reach of any dye she throwes. ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... immediate business, as they are eminently capable of looking after themselves. I merely drop one word in passing, lest you waste your powerful intellect on such projects. The English may some day forgive you; the French never will. You Teutons are too light and fickle to understand the Latin seriousness. My only concern is to point out that about England, at least, you are invariably and ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... great mischief. The gallant gentleman bore it all, in order not to give any grounds for any possible complaints from the natives. On the other hand, he set about finding a better port, in order to have it against the occasion already feared by the tokens observed in those fickle people. To this end he sent Captain Juan de la Isla to look for a good port. He and his men went to a bay, where the Indians met them peaceably, and showed signs of a desire to draw blood with them. But ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... love me, my dear wife, because I have been so pulled down by illness? You are not so fickle—I am come on purpose for you—my mother and father ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... not to be so fickle as to wish without any substantial reason to change our Confessor, but, on the other hand, we should not be immovable and persistent when legitimate causes make such a change desirable, and Bishops should not so tie their own hands as ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... paraphernalia then used in the ceremonial of Buddhist worship, but the heart of the ancient faith was atrophied by the indifference of the people, and the zealous attempt to galvanise a moribund creed into fresh life failed even to arrest the progress of decay. National thought, fickle as the wind, had turned from an impersonal philosophy to the materialistic cult of Hindu deities, as the Israelites of old hankered after the visible symbol of Isis and Osiris in the Golden Calf. No definite creed succeeded in gaining a permanent hold upon the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... their birthplace—where their home? Lighter than foam upon the crested wave, Fleeter than shadows of the passing cloud, They are of such fantastic substance made That quick as thought they change their fickle forms— Now grander than the waking vision views, Now stranger than the wildest fancy feigns, And now so grim and terrible they start The hardened conscience from its guilty sleep. In troops they come, trooping they fly away, Waved into being by the magic wand Of some deep purpose of the inmost ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... daft," said Margray, looking after her with a perplexed gaze, and dropping her scissors. "Surely, Mary, you shouldn't tease her as you do. She's worn more in these four weeks than in as many years. You're a fickle changeling!" ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to cheat the fickle fair. O fickle! fickle! fickle! But the brave should be true, And the fair ones too— True, true, As the ocean's blue! And Ariadne had not been, Deserted there, like ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... one, viewing the celebration from afar, nursed its bruises and its wrath, and recruited its hosts for the morrow. And on the next night, behold! the bonfire burned in Seventh Street and not in Eleventh. The fortunes of war are proverbially fickle. The band stand in the Garden has been taken many a time since the police took it by storm in battle with the mob in the seventies, but no mob has succeeded that one to clamor for "bread or blood." It may ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... once more with every sail set, logging over two hundred miles a day and going by the Cape de Verde Islands in fine style. We did not bring up again until we reached "the Doldrums," in about latitude 5 degrees north and 22 degrees west, where the fickle wind deserted us again and left us rolling and sweltering in the great region of equatorial calm. The north-east and south-east trades here fight each other for the possession of their eventful battle-ground, the Line, and old Neptune finds the contest so wearisome that he ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... what consequence is the constancy or inconstancy of an individual to the truth which is always the same? It is better to enlighten men's minds than to teach them to be obstinate in their prejudices. Do we not know that man is frail and fickle, that his heart is full of delusions, and that his lips are a distillery of falsehood? Omnis homo meudax. Whether we will or no, we all serve for a time as instruments of this truth, whose kingdom comes ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... we've play'd our parts Like wary cunning foxes, And gain'd the common people's hearts By broaching het'rodoxes, - But they're as fickle as the winds, With nothing long agree, And when they change their wav'ring minds, Then ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... Miss Price; 'but men are always fickle, and always were, and always will be; that I can ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... readily to the disorganizing doctrines of Protestantism than the southern. The general fickleness of the human mind, which is so well brought out by the great Spanish writer, does not strike us as a sufficient cause; for the mind of southern peoples is certainly not less fickle, on many points at least, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... if on life's uncertain main Mishap shall mar thy sail; If faithful, wise, and brave in vain, Woe, want, and exile thou sustain 40 Beneath the fickle gale; Waste not a sigh on fortune changed, On thankless courts, or friends estranged, But come where kindred worth shall smile, To greet thee in the lonely ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... is true what your cousin told me!" said Otto. "If one will be fortunate with the ladies, one must at least be somewhat frivolous, fond of pleasure, and fickle,—that makes one interesting. Yes, he has made himself acquainted with the world, ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... receive letters very well, much better than I love to write them. I make but a poor figure at composition, my head is much too fickle, my thoughts are running after birds' eggs, play and trifles till I get vexed with myself. I have but just entered the 3d volume of Smollett, tho' I had designed to have got it half through by this time. I have determined this week to be more ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... incense he even accused himself for having left them unread so long, and then to think that nearly six months had gone by since the second letter had brought its half-playful reproach for forgetfulness.... "Ah! Jenny, I'm afraid you're a fickle little person, after all." ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... your hair round your mamma's neck, and give me one good long kiss, and I won't talk any more in that way about your lover. After all, some young men are not so fickle as others; but even if he's the ficklest, there is consolation. The love of an inconstant man is ten times more ardent than that of a faithful man—that is, ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... coffee-room, who took me for an Englishman, as most people do nowadays, and I heard from him—as you may from all his countrymen—an expression of weariness and dissatisfaction with the whole business. These fickle islanders! How differently they talked a year ago! John Bull sees now that he never was in a worse predicament in his life; and yet it would not take much to make him roar as bellicosely as ever. I went to bed at eleven, and slept ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... said Richard, "I want my cousin Ada to understand that I am not captious, fickle, and wilful about John Jarndyce, but that I have this purpose and reason at my back. I wish to represent myself to her through you, because she has a great esteem and respect for her cousin John; and I know you will soften the course I take, even though you disapprove of it; and— and in short," ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... love, And make thee loathe all of the feminine sex. They that have known me, knew me once of name To be a perfect wencher: I have tried All sorts, all sects, all states, and find them still Inconstant, fickle, always variable. Attend me, man! I will prescribe a method, How thou shalt win her ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... was a woman of a very fickle temper, in six months time she began to be tired of Mrs. Manley. She was quarrelsome, loquacious, fierce, excessively fond, or downright rude; when she was disgusted with any person, she never failed to reproach them, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... with Love? all o'er is the enchanter's reign. Who'll buy the plumeless, dying dove—a breath of bliss, a storm of pain? And Friendship, rarest gem of earth; who e'er has found the jewel his? Frail, fickle, false, and little worth! who bids for Friendship—as it is? 'Tis going! going! hear the call; once, twice and thrice, 'tis very low! 'Twas once my hope, my stay, my all, but now the broken staff must ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... droop not: Fortune at your time of life, Although a female moderately fickle, Will hardly leave you (as she's not your wife) For any length of days in such a pickle. To strive, too, with our fate were such a strife As if the corn-sheaf should oppose the sickle: Men are the sport of circumstances, when The circumstances ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... rosebud lips, whose honied wealth the zephyr sips, But bait the lair Where fickle fair, Like ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... her a frightful and unnecessary pain. But how could he have foreseen such a thing? How could he tell? he had asked himself, in mute stupefaction, when the news reached him. What a cheat life was! What a fickle jade was Fortune! ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... suppress a gibe. Whilst THOU art with the whining tribe; Thou who hast sail'd in a balloon, And touch'd, intrepid, at the moon, 80 (Hence, as the Ladies say you wander, By much too fickle a Philander:) Shalt THOU, a Roman free and rough, Descend to weak blue stocking stuff, And cherish feelings soft and kind, 85 Till ...
— No Abolition of Slavery - Or the Universal Empire of Love, A poem • James Boswell
... the difficulties were increased. After months, nay, years, of teaching, the missionaries found that the fickle savage was easily led astray; never could they form pupils to our life and manners. The nineteenth century failed, as the seventeenth failed, in raising up priests from among the Iroquois or the Algonquins; and at this day a pupil of the Propaganda, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... were fictions of the author's lively imagination, and his words savour less of science than of satire; but Fontenelle was neither the first nor the last of those to whom "the inconstant moon that monthly changes" has been an impersonation of the fickle and the feminine. The following illustration is from Plutarch: "Cleobulus said, As touching fooles, I will tell you a tale which I heard my mother once relate unto a brother of mine. The time was (quoth she) that the moone praied her mother to make her a peticoate ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... men he had left behind him,—men alive with the excitement of parliamentary life in London. When in London he had often told himself that he was sick of it, and that he would better love some country quiet life. Now Dublin was his Tibur, and the fickle one found that he could not be happy unless he were back again at Rome. When, therefore, he received the following letter from his friend, Barrington Erle, he neighed like the old warhorse, and already found himself shouting "Ha, ha," ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... is not our function in the scheme of things, then what is our function? Is it to stand with bated breath to catch the first whisper that will usher in the next change? Is it to surrender all initiative and simply allow ourselves to be tossed hither and yon by the waves and cross-waves of a fickle public opinion? Is it to cower in dread of a criticism that is not only unjust but often ill-advised of the real conditions under which we are doing ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... The boat must keep up an average of nine miles an hour, and the wind was becoming calmer every moment! It was a capricious breeze, coming from the coast, and after it passed the sea became smooth. Still, the Tankadere was so light, and her fine sails caught the fickle zephyrs so well, that, with the aid of the currents John Bunsby found himself at six o'clock not more than ten miles from the mouth of Shanghai River. Shanghai itself is situated at least twelve miles up the stream. At seven they were still three miles from Shanghai. ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... or gave him unpalatable advice and which prevented him from exacting vengeance on some occasions, he had scarcely a trait whereon the mind can rest with any satisfaction. Weak and easily led, puerile in his gusts of passion and his complete abandonment of himself to them—selfish, fickle, boastful, cruel, superstitious, licentious—he exhibits to us the Oriental despot in the most contemptible of all his aspects—that wherein the moral and the intellectual qualities are equally in defect, and the career is one ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... must compleat A Verse, sublimely Good, and justly Great. It call'd for an Omnipotence to raise The World's Imperial Poem in Six Days. But Man, that offspring of corrupting Clay, Subject to Err, and Subject to Decay: In Hopes, Desires, Will, Power, a numerous Train, Uncertain, Fickle, Impotent and Vain: Must tire the Heav'nly Muse with endless Prayer, And call the smiling Angels to his care. Must sleep less Nights, Vulcanian Labours prove, Like Cyclops, forging Thunder for a Jove. With Flame begin thy Glorious ...
— Discourse on Criticism and of Poetry (1707) - From Poems On Several Occasions (1707) • Samuel Cobb
... great thaw came, and the fickle climate proceeded to show what it could do. When the thaw had been going on for a day and a night a terrific winter hurricane broke over the forest. Trees were shattered as if their trunks had been shot through by huge cannon balls. Here and there long windrows were piled up, and ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... expel the musquitoes, was entirely burnt. Hepburn, who was sleeping within it, close to some powder, most providentially awoke in time to throw it clear of the flame, and rescue the baggage, before any material injury had been received. We dreaded the consequences of this disaster upon the fickle minds of the Indians, and wished it not to be communicated to them. The chief, however, was soon informed of it by one of his people, and expressed his desire that no future misfortune should be concealed from him. We found he was most concerned ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... cause one to wonder why others were undertaken, and yet year after year new magazines were launched on the market with full anticipation of success. This certainly indicates a widespread demand for this class of literature and if the kind offered did not happen to suit the taste, the fickle public was constantly deserting the old ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... substitute order, peace, equity, and virtue, for the disorder, war, cruelty, injustice, and corruption which you, acting alone, have established. You doubt our fitness to take part in government because we are fickle, extravagant, etc., etc., as you say. I answer, there is an inconsiderable minority which deserve such epithets; but even if all women deserved them, who is in fault? You not only prefer the weak-minded, extravagant ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... had deserted her for Miriam. It was almost unbelievable. She set her lips and winked hard to keep back the tears which rose to her eyes. Then, followed by her one faithful friend, she walked out of the locker room, leaving her fickle classmates with their ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... your two songs with a music publishing house, and you will get a royalty on them in time. He says they don't pay any royalty on the first three hundred copies, and perhaps they won't sell; the public taste on sheet music is very fickle. Then, that composer, I can never remember his name, is at work on your poem, 'The Lord of the Sea.' He told Leopold he was going to make it his opus vitae, the work of his life, you know, and he is talking it up to the director of ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... after all as fickle as it is curious (one of its little vices chasing away the other), turned suddenly to another subject; forgot the rupture of Marsa and Andras, and saw in Zilah only a superior being, whose lofty soul forced respect from the frivolous set accustomed ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... Even his audacity and lack of scruple did not go to the extent of doing without the king altogether, or even of dispensing with having him for a tool; and he had seen too much of the Parisian populace not to know how precarious and fickle was its favor. He determined to negotiate with the king's party, and for that purpose he sent his brother-in-law the Count of Hainault, to Tours, with a brilliant train of unarmed attendants, bidden to make themselves agreeable, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Thomas," said Wolsey; "but I have heard enough to place your life in my power. So you refuse to obey the king's injunctions. You refuse to proceed to Paris. You refuse to assist in bringing about the divorce, and prefer remaining here to brave your sovereign, and avenge yourself upon a fickle mistress. Ha?" ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... shall be fickle, false, and full of fraud, 1141 Bud and be blasted in a breathing-while; The bottom poison, and the top o'erstraw'd With sweets that shall the truest sight beguile: 1144 The strongest body shall it make most weak, Strike the wise dumb and teach the ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... back into their faces in clouds; the slide and crunch of snow-shoes, and the creaking of the sledge sounded under foot. The sun had dropped below the horizon, and the early darkness had come swiftly marching down from the north, bringing in its train the fickle, inconstant beauty of the aurora. Great streamers of color shot silently from horizon to zenith, and flickered with eerie dimness across the white ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... adherents: these dissensions ripened into a complete schism; and this handful of shipwrecked men, thus thrown together, on an uninhabited island, separated into two parties, and lived asunder in bitter feud, as men rendered fickle by prosperity instead of being brought into ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... Given it, perhaps, to a man she didn't love, throwing cynical defiance thereby at love, which had hurt her; escaping from the intolerable to the shoddy. Even if not, even supposing the best, Nan was hurt and in trouble; Neville was somehow sure of that. Men were blind fools; men were fickle children. Neville almost wished now that Barry would give up Gerda and go out to Rome and fetch Nan back. But, to do that, Barry would have to fall out of love with Gerda and into love again with Nan; and even Barry, Neville imagined, was not such a weathercock as that. And ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... safe to say that Patty would never have given Mark Wilson a second thought had he not taken her to drive on that afternoon in early May. The drive, too, would have quickly fled from her somewhat fickle memory had it not been for the kiss. The kiss was, indeed, a decisive factor in the situation, and had shed a rosy, if somewhat fictitious light of romance over the past three weeks. Perhaps even the kiss, had it never been repeated, might have lapsed into its true perspective, ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... still grew gentler till its pulse was less For life than pity,—I should yet be slow To bring my own heart nakedly below The palm of such a friend, that he should press My false, ideal joy and fickle woe Out ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the honor of shoveling him under. The Duke of Wellington refused to have his iron fence mended, because it had been broken by an infuriated populace in some hour of political excitement, and he left it in ruins that men might learn what a fickle thing is human favor. "But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting to them that fear Him, and His righteousness unto the children's children of such as keep His covenant, and to those who remember ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... Alas for fickle fortune and the changes which time brings! The present writer was accidentally present on the occasion of the Emperor and Empress's last visit to the Crystal Palace. They came from Chislehurst ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... I've even tried to drop hints about clothes and things, and she's been furious—given me the funniest looks. She's sensitive enough to know she's not getting away with much, but I'll bet she consoles herself by thinking that she's very virtuous and that I'm too gay and fickle and will come to a bad end. All unpopular girls think that way. Sour grapes! Sarah Hopkins refers to Genevieve and Roberta and me as gardenia girls! I'll bet she'd give ten years of her life and her European education to ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... said to be fickle, but are they more so than men? A man's ideal is as variable as the wind. What he thinks is his ideal of woman is usually a glorified image of the last girl he happened to admire. The man who has had a decided preference for blondes all his life, finally installs a brown-eyed deity at his hearthstone. ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... the forces of Nature, and they were wholly dependent upon her fickle favor. It might be a day, a week, a month before she would let them through, and, even when the barrier began to yield, another ship, a league distant, might profit by an opening which to them was barred. For a long, dull period the voyagers ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... and tell me, woman, How the God in heaven above Starts the fires of hell a-burning From a spark of human love; Why He ever made a woman Who could play a fickle part; Why He ever made a fellow With his soul tied to his heart; Why He made life just a gamble— I can't talk the way I feel— In the game that I've been playing, You know this ain't no square deal! I will go away and leave you, But 'twould kind o' ease the ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... were no longer concealing their distress under courtly phrases, nor groaning in secret. The ideas of the new philosophers were penetrating and colouring public opinion. They were beginning to talk of the great antique days of Greece, of heroes, and of virtue, and of living and dying like Romans. Fickle fashion was turning her back upon the art of old Boucher, and upon Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses and pleasant landscapes and bosky groves, and was taking up her abode with heroes and amongst picturesque ruins. The Parliament men were demanding rights, were indeed going to prison and into banishment ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... life I didn't mean it!' said the repentant captain, hastening after. 'I do love her best—indeed I do—and I don't love you at all! I am not so fickle as that! I merely just for the moment admired you as a sweet little craft, and that's how I came to do it. You know, Miss Garland,' he continued earnestly, and still running after, ''tis like this: when you come ashore after having been shut up in a ship for eighteen ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... every chance blast of air may blow it into nothing, and drift another into form that we have no power to move? Life hinges upon hazard, and at every turn wisdom is mocked by it, and energy swept aside by it, as the battled dykes are worn away, and the granite walls beaten down by the fickle ocean waves, which, never two hours together alike, never two instants without restless motion, are yet as changeless as they are capricious, as omnipotent as they are fickle, as cruel as they are countless! Men and mariners may build their bulwarks, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... was not the object of her love. Ladies are little apt to become enamoured of such a fit emblem of their own fickle and capricious humours; and yet, somebody she loved, but he was invisible! Probably her wild and fervid imagination had created a form—pictured it to the mind, and endowed it with her own notions of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... honour upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... at the destiny which had been written upon my head; for I then thought thee faithful and constant: but if our hands had been then united, I should have been more wretched than I am; for I now know that thou art fickle and false. To know thee, though it has pierced my soul with sorrow, has yet healed the wound which was inflicted when I lost thee: and though I am now compelled to wear the form of ALMORAN, whose vices are this moment disgracing ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... asseveration, my father knew not whose veracity to impeach; but, charitably concluding there was some mistake, or that I was, as heretofore, a fickle, thoughtless being, considered himself bound in honour to communicate the substance of our conversation to Mr Somerville; and the latter no sooner received it, than he placed the letter in Emily's hands—a very comfortable kind of avant-courier ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... was troubled. Here was a moral complication of which he could not possibly get the ends. Hurstwood would laugh at him for being a fickle boy. He would laugh with Hurstwood. Carrie would never hear, his present companion at table would never know, and yet he could not help feeling that he was getting the worst of it—there was some faint stigma attached, and he was ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... and finds it not so flattering as he would have liked. Seems, in fact, determined to have his grievance. Well, then, he will buy a dog. And he will take the road with his pal the comic sailor and shake the dust of fickle Troy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various
... thou that knowest each, That bright and fierce and fickle is the South, And dark and true and ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... worthy Earl was among her best friends; and even after the dismal doings that led to her captivity in Lochleven Castle, and thence to the battle of Langside, he still acted the part of a true nobleman to a sovereign so fickle and so faithless. Whether he rued on the field that he had done so, or was smitten with an infirmity that prevented him from fighting against his old friend and covenanted brother, the good Regent Murray, belongs not to this history to inquire; but certain it is, that in him ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... months, Thompson," I answered quickly, "or a few days, or hours, when the will is fickle, principles unfixed, and the heart treacherous and false. That Smithson and I, Thompson, were fellow students. We left home together—we took up our abode in the University together—we were attached to the same college—taught by the same master—read from the same books. My feelings were as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... he said, musingly—"public favor, it is light as zephyr, as fickle as the seasons, it passes away like the latter, and when the north wind moves it, it will disappear." [Footnote: Le ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... love to receive letters very well; much better than I love to write them. I make but a poor figure at composition, my head is too fickle, my thoughts are running after birds eggs play and trifles, till I get vexed with myself. Mamma has a troublesome task to keep me steady, and I own I am ashamed of myself. I have but just entered the third volume of Smollett, tho' I had designed to have got it half through by this ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... at her thrust, however). "No, not with you. And you know in your heart, in the bottom of your trifling and fickle and worthless heart, Helena Emory, that if it came to the test, and if life and all the world and all happiness were to be either all yours or all mine, I'd go anywhere, do anything, and leave it all to you rather than keep ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... is fickle and the reservation was far. So, when the rain was over next morning, she ran to the barn, bridled her horse, climbed from the manger to his back, and, lying flat to escape the top casing of the door, went out of the stable toward the Swede shanty at a run. Down deep in the long, narrow, jack-knife ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... an abrupt change in the fickle minds of the Barbarians. Their extreme bravery disappeared; they wished to conquer, but with the smallest possible risk. According to Spendius they ought to maintain carefully the position that they held, and starve out the Punic army. But the Carthaginians ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... spend his life as a needy hanger on of the court rather than as a British sailor, bearing a good name in the city, and earning a fair living by honest trade. Ned knows that I am speaking only for his own good. Court favour is but an empty thing, and our good queen is fickle in her likings, and has never any hesitation in disavowing the proceedings of her envoys. When a man has broad lands to fall back upon he can risk the loss of court favour, and can go into retirement assured that sooner or later he will again have his turn. But ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... in, and you are expected to stay in, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. No matter what combination of laws got you there, there you are, and there you must stay, for better, for worse, till merciful death you do part,—or you are—"fickle." You find a man entertaining for an hour, a week, a concert, a journey, and presto! you are saddled with him forever. What preposterous absurdity! Do but look at it calmly. You are thrown into contact with a person, and, as in duty bound, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... kindly doctor, "it may be for the witnesses; but crowds are fickle things; and I should strongly urge you not to court a demonstration of one sort or the other. You are best where you are for the time being, or at all events somewhere within the precincts. And meanwhile your solicitor is waiting to add ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... thou ask me, who and what I am? Listen then, and I will tell thee. I am a bee, which not like other bees, roams roving to flower after flower, but confines itself exclusively to one. I am a breeze, which not like other breezes blows fickle and inconstant now hither and now thither, but is fixed and ever steady, coming straight from Malaya laden with the sandal of affection to lay it at thy feet. I am only the echo of a voice which is thyself, the shadow of a substance ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... experience; how subjects ought to be guided so as best to preserve their fidelity and virtue is not so obvious. (18) All, both rulers and ruled, are men, and prone to follow after their lusts. (19) The fickle disposition of the multitude almost reduces those who have experience of it to despair, for it is governed solely by emotions, not by reason: it rushes headlong into every enterprise, and is easily corrupted either by avarice or luxury: everyone thinks himself omniscient ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part IV] • Benedict de Spinoza
... sit on the dam, With left wing gathered low; So on each other do they lean, And their attachment show. And love should thus the man and wife In closest concord bind; But that man turns away from me, And shows a fickle mind. ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... against the sun Where the rolled scarp retires, And the Long Man of Wilmington Looks naked toward the shires; And east till doubling Rother crawls To find the fickle tide, By dry and sea-forgotten walls, ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... century B. C. and in the third century B. C. invaded Asia Minor and northern Greece. A part of them remained in Galatia. predominating in the mixed population formed out of the Greek, Roman and Jewish people. They were quick-tempered, impulsive, hospitable and fickle people. They were quick to receive impressions and equally quick to give them up. They received Paul with enthusiastic joy, and were then suddenly ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... enormous, so much so that almost any cause to which they devote themselves will in the long run succeed; unless, indeed, their attention is diverted to some other need, for it may be suggested that they are somewhat fickle of purpose. For example, their success in the antislavery movement makes the American history of the nineteenth century; in the prohibition movement they were, in the middle decades of that century, almost entirely successful, and while apparently there was a set-back ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... fitting opportunity for an ambitious and courageous woman who, though she might not find full measure of happiness and love which only comes with respect, yet would meet with adventure, would dare fate and hazard chance with fickle fortune. The prospect to her mind was more pleasing than to be the wife of a gentleman farmer and grow fat and matronly—the other ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... the Persian defeat, Miltiades, who at first received all the honors that a grateful people could bestow, met a fate that casts a melancholy gloom over his history, and that has often been cited in proof of the assertion that "republics are fickle and ungrateful." History shows, however, that the Athenians were not greatly in the wrong in their treatment of Miltiades. He obtained of them the command of an expedition whose destination was known to himself alone; assuring them of the honorableness and the success of the ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... speaks of night While yet the day is full of golden light, We felt steal o'er us. Vivian broke the spell Of dream-fraught silence, throwing down his book: "Young ladies, please allow me to arrange These wraps about your shoulders. I know well The fickle nature of our atmosphere,— Her smile swift followed by a frown or tear,— And go prepared for changes. Now you look, Like—like—oh, where's a pretty simile? Had you a pocket mirror here you'd see How well my native talent is displayed In shawling you. Red on the brunette maid; Blue on the ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... find oneself the subject of a scathing onslaught in the columns of the leading newspaper. It was positively the worst blast from the black trumpet of the wind-god AEolus then possible for any inhabitant of England; and not even that poor company of suitors to whom, in Chaucer's poem, fickle Queen Fame awarded this black blast from the wind-god, instead of the blast of praise from his golden trumpet which they were expecting, can have been more discomfited than most persons would have been had they been in Milton's place a day or two after ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... a fickle mistress, and fond of showing her character in war," said the colonel. "Sometimes she favors one party with a run of luck, then shifts suddenly over to the other side. So with individuals, only there she is most apt to work at cross purposes. One pretty fellow ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... for the swallow, sir?" touching an imaginary cap. "Shall I say that 'Dark and true and tender is the North,' and 'Fierce and false and fickle is the South,' or ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... that way—my nature is of the tropical order, for my mother was born in Corsica, you know. Some of these fair English girls may be fickle, but Pauline Potter is the same as when she knew you in Chicago. But, John Craig, this same love can change to hate; it is but a step between the two, and no magician's wand is needed to ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... blest with a frank cheerful disposition; and were I to draw any comparisons, should say, that they are equally free from the fickle levity which distinguishes the natives of Otaheite, and the sedate east observable amongst many of those of Tongataboo. They seem to live very sociably in their intercourse with one another; and, except the propensity to thieving, which seems innate in most of the people we have visited in this ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... from the skating pond to the theatres, had been admitted as a lawyer, had opened an office on Broadway, acquiring some reputation in his profession, had looked at more than twenty girls with the view of making them his wife, and found them as he believed, alike fickle, selfish, artificial and hollow-hearted. In short, while thinking far more of family, and accomplishments, and style, than he ought, he was yet heartily tired of the butterflies who flitted so constantly around him, offering to be caught if he would but stretch out his hand to catch them. ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... mechanical devices introduced, and the labor situations are factors to be considered. The management must be ready at a moment's notice to change, increase, or drop work according to the demands of a fickle market. It would seem, therefore, that at present the problems of the school trade shops are of too serious and unsettled a character for adequate solution by public instruction as at present organized, ...
— The Making of a Trade School • Mary Schenck Woolman
... night-wear. This, however, had proved totally inadequate when the thermometer fell to -42 deg., and on the night of the 16th uncontrollable paroxysms of shivering had prevented them from getting any sleep. The value of proper clothing and the wisdom of being prepared for the unexpected rigors of such a fickle climate, were two of the lessons learnt from the experiences ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... had been successful in business. He bought two farms, joining the one he bought of father, and one about a mile off and paid for them, they were farms which father and mother knew very well. We learned, from others, that he was a wealthy, prominent and influential man, in that old country. Fickle fortune had smiled on him and he had taken what she offered to give. In the fall we were going to see them. The war of the rebellion had commenced, 1861, when we got ready to go and ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... should in future be considered by all as the queen." Soon Waizero Tamagno had numerous rivals; but she was a woman of tact; and far from complaining, she rather encouraged Theodore in his debauchery, and always received him with a smile. One day she said to her fickle lord, who felt rather astonished at her forbearance, "Why should I be jealous? I know you love but me; what is it if you stoop now and then to pick up some flowers, to beautify ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... did not, after Jutland, dare to thrust even its vanguard far into the open sea. Behind its forts, mines and submarines it waited, growing weaker with the dry-rot of inaction, for the chance that fickle Fortune might place a single unit of the Allied fleet within easy ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... drowsy parson has read the ceremony from a dog's-eared prayer-book? It may be so in your English law—but Scotland makes Love himself the priest. A vow betwixt a fond couple, the blue heaven alone witnessing, will protect a confiding girl against the perjury of a fickle swain, as much as if a Dean had performed the rites in the loftiest cathedral in England. Nay, more; if the child of love be acknowledged by the father at the time when he is baptized—if he present the mother to strangers of respectability ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... snares. How is it possible for any one to remain faithful here, to be completely steadfast? This doubt often depressed him, and he expresses it, as an artist expressed his doubt, in artistic forms. Elizabeth, for instance, can only suffer, pray, and die; she saves the fickle and intemperate man by her loyalty, though not for this life. In the path of every true artist, whose lot is cast in these modern days, despair and danger are strewn. He has many means whereby he can attain to honour and might; peace and plenty persistently offer themselves ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... to the heart. The ingratitude of the people was heartrending to her, for she herself was at last beginning to believe in the mission of the Rougons. She called for her husband. She wanted him to learn how fickle ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... same allurement which drew the "forty-niners" to California, and in 1897 the gold-seekers to the Canadian Klondyke. If the suffering endured was often great, the prize to be gained was worth it. Fortune, if fickle one day, might the next bring incredible bounty, and the buccaneers who sweltered in a tropical sea, with starvation staring them in the face, dreamed of rolling in the oriental wealth of a Spanish argosy. Especially to the cattle-hunter must this temptation have been great, for his mode ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... Mankind did dispence, The sacred Wedlock, which did then commence: Not founded as some Criticks say, by chance; But Heaven it self, did this blest State advance. Not subject to the various Revolutions, Of fickle fading human Institutions. A Married Life was first contriv'd above, To be an Emblem of Eternal Love; And after by Divine indulgence sent, To be the Crown of Man, and Wife's content; Yet black Mouthed Envy Strives with all ...
— The Pleasures of a Single Life, or, The Miseries Of Matrimony • Anonymous
... tell Of ancient deeds, so long forgot; Of feuds, whose memory was not; Of forests, now laid waste and bare; Of towers, which harbour now the hare; Of manners, long since chang'd and gone; Of chiefs, who under their grey stone So long had slept, that fickle Fame Had blotted from her rolls their name, And twin'd round some new minion's head The fading wreath ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... is sure to teach wisdom and indifference to human glories. In our France of the nineteenth century, fickle as it has been, inconstant, fertile in revolutions, recantations, and changes of every sort, this lesson is more impressive than it has been at any period of our history. Never has Providence shown more clearly the nothingness of this world's grandeur and magnificence. Never has the ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... but heeded not, being prepared with a concealed revolver for whatever might occur. Immediately another victim stepped forward, staked five hundred dollars—and won. He staked again a thousand dollars—and won; then he rose, apparently resolved to tempt fickle fortune no more, and left the saloon. As he retired his place was filled by a young man who laid down the small sum of two dollars. Fortune favoured this man for a long time, and his pile of dollars gradually increased until he became over-confident and staked ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... very wantonly before we could prevent him. On being asked why he did so, he answered that the inhabitants inland were bad; though no longer since than last night, when Bereewan had departed, they were loud in their praise. But now they had reverted to their first opinion; so fickle and transient are their motives ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... fifty-dollar bank-note was presented to him, as the identical one he had given to the clerk of Tremont Hotel (the great hotel at Galveston), in payment of his weekly bill. Now, the lawyer had often dreamed of fifties, hundreds, and even of thousands; but fortune had been so fickle with him, that he had never been in possession of bank-notes higher than five or ten dollars, except one of the glorious Cairo Bank twenty-dollar notes, which his father presented to him in Baltimore, when he advised him most paternally to try his ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... circumstances condone the insult offered to a species of literary religion by the wretched stuff pitchforked together and called a libretto. But the genius of Pasta made them forget even this, and London bowed at her feet with as devout a recognition as that offered by the more fickle Parisians. Her chaste and noble style, untortured by meretricious ornament, excited the deepest admiration. Count Stendhal, the biographer of Rossini, seems to have heard her for the first time at London, and writes of ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... wouldst inspire hearts with ardor needing inspiration more than mine; and to me thou givest hope, and confidence, and strength. Too long have I slept and dreamed," his countenance darkened, and his voice was sadder; "fickle in purpose, uncertain in accomplishment; permitting my youth to moulder 'neath the blasting atmosphere of tyranny. Yet will I now atone for the neglected past. Atone! aye, banish it from the minds of men. ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... The fickle goddess was late; she kept us waiting till after ten o'clock. Just before her arrival, when the horizon began to grow perceptibly brighter, and the opposite shore to assume a milky, silvery tint, a sudden wind ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... made so fair a sight that the King, jealous and suspicious of Prince Henry's popularity though he was, looked now upon them both with loving eyes. But how those loving eyes would have grown dim with tears could this fickle, selfish, yet indulgent father have foreseen the sad and bitter fates of ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... But I would point out to ye that Fortune is a fickle, tricksy jade, and the luck o' the game might fall to your patriarch ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... should wait for thee To woo! Nor even dare to love, till thou lov'st me. How shameful, too, Is this: That, when thou lov'st, I am at first afraid Of thy fierce kiss, Like a young maid; And only trust thy charms And get my courage in thy throbbing arms. And, when thou partest, what a fickle mind Thou leav'st behind, That, being a little absent from mine eye, It straight forgets thee what thou art, And ofttimes my adulterate heart Dallies with Pleasure, thy pale enemy. O, for the learned spirit without attaint That does not faint, ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... in his pose and manner, however, much of that old grace which had first endeared him to Elizabeth, and even now served to fix her fickle favor. ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... thoughts, and raise my soul to his heroic pitch? Is not this true knight-errantry, to redeem to peace and use, and to the glory of that glorious queen whom God has given to me, a generous soil and a more generous race? Trustful and tenderhearted they are—none more; and if they be fickle and passionate, will not that very softness of temper, which makes them so easily led to evil, make them as easy to be led towards good? Yes—here, away from courts, among a people who should bless me as ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... soon the VAPOUR OF THE WOODS will wander afar, And the fickle moon will fade, and the stars disappear, Then, cheerless will they be, tho' they fairies are, If I, with my pale light, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... the garment of rebellion With some fine colour, that may please the eye Of fickle changelings, and poor discontents, Which gape and rub the elbow at the news Of hurlyburly innovation.—HENRY ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... blow at feudal privileges by agreeing that peers might be attached upon process for contempt out of Chancery. In 1723 (George I.) the inn was highly aristocratic, its inmates being the Lord Chief Justice, the Lord Chief Baron, justices, and Serjeants. In 1730, however, the fickle serjeants removed to Chancery Lane, and Adam, the architect of the Adelphi, designed the present nineteen houses and the present street frontage. On the site of the hall arose the Amicable Assurance Society, which in 1865 transferred its business to the Economic, and ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... fickle, and easily swerved by success or failure. In this instance we had no reason to complain of want of applause, for cheer after cheer was raised in honor of our perseverance, and Colonel Hensen was despatched by the governor to thank us on the ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... protests were inevitably vain. Even her least prudent counsellors would assuredly have dissuaded her from the attempt which she made to force an entrance into Westminster Abbey on the coronation day, July 19, 1821. It was a painful scene when she, who had so lately been the idol of the fickle populace, was turned away from the doors amidst conflicting exclamations of derision and pity. A fortnight later, on August 2, she was officially reported to be seriously ill; on the 7th she was no more. In accordance with her own direction her body was ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... flopped down on her knees in the big scene at the close of the last act she had a rather dreadful time of it getting up again. And the audience, resentful, bewildered, cheated of a precious memory, laughed. That laugh sealed the career of Sarah Haddon. It is a fickle thing, this public that wants to be amused; fickle and cruel and—paradoxically enough—true to its superstitions. The Sarah Haddon of eighteen years ago was one of these. They would have none of this fat, puffy, ample-bosomed woman who was trying to blot her picture from their memory. ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... sought in every way to break; who that has ever read of this fanatical, heartless, cruel, and despotic Philip II of Spain, or of that wonderful, pure, magnanimous, noblest Dutchman of all, William of Orange, or of that fickle and false Margaret of Parma, the wicked sister in Holland, who lived to execute the will of a wicked brother in Spain, or of those monsters at the head of Spanish armies, Alva, Requesens, and Don Juan; who that has been fired by the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... him—to trust him absolutely, and he knew well enough how little he was to be trusted. And because of that faith and because of that trust he felt that she was more reliable than he could have believed that changing fickle human being would ever be. How secure he might ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... visit to the Hall. He used at that time to be joked about a widow, a fine dashing woman, as he privately informed me. I had supposed the pleasure he betrayed on these occasions resulted from the usual fondness of old bachelors for being teased about getting married, and about flirting, and being fickle and false-hearted. I am assured, however, that Master Simon had really persuaded himself the widow had a kindness for him; in consequence of which he had been at some extraordinary expense in new clothes, and had actually got Frank Bracebridge to order him a coat from Stultz. ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... farm be operated like a factory? Can fickle nature be offset and crops be brought to maturity ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... Time-Spirit is active, or fickle perhaps, and Mr. Yeats has already almost ceased to be a quite modern poet. He, like Mr. Gosse, formed his technique in the nineteenth century, and the twentieth century is casting about with feverish energy for a ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... dyspepsia are: Feeling of weight in the stomach; Bloated condition after eating; Belching of wind; Nausea; Vomiting of food; Water brash; Pain in the stomach; Heartburn; Bad taste in the mouth in the morning; Palpitation of the heart; Cankered mouth; loss of flesh; Fickle appetite; depression of spirits; Lack ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... enjoyment should breed annoy! Tryntje grew fickle or cold or coy; Rambout, possessed of a jealous sprite, Scowled like the sky on a stormy night, Snarled a good-bye from his sullen throat, Blustered away to his tugging boat. After him hastened Jacobus Horn: "Stay ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... 1800, so complete, bidding so fair to be permanent, drew all the more fickle Federalists speedily to that side. Since it was evident that the new party was quite as national in spirit as the ruling element of the old, the Adams Federalists, those most patriotic, least swayed in their politics by commercial ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... a little warmer than it is in our country in summer; and cold, though not so severely cold as it is with us in winter. The rains are very heavy, but to compensate for this there is, during the greater part of the year, a steadiness of climate which forms a striking contrast to the fickle climate of England. Down in the valleys the heat is very great. Even in winter the sun is unpleasantly strong, and in summer in the deep ravines the temperature is almost as trying as in the plains. When the season has been somewhat advanced, I have been very thankful ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... message of succour, but rather warned the lonely men to hasten back, while yet some strength remained to them; and above all they were surrounded by hostile blacks. Sturt had now a terrible task before him. His men were weakened and on half rations; there was every probability that the fickle natives might be troublesome on their homeward route, and worst of all they would have to fight the steady current of the river the whole way; nor would their spirits be cheered by any hope of novelty or discovery. Under these gloomy auspices Sturt re-entered the Murray on his return ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... the Liberator, began to see that the materialization of his lifelong ideal was now no longer a matter of the dim distant future. The struggle had been severe, and the fortunes of war had proved fickle at the beginning. At one period it had seemed that even Nature had fought against the South American cause. At Barquisimeto an earthquake had shattered the barracks of the soldiers of the Independence, and many hundreds of troops were crushed ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... true that the chief bridesmaid's mother shook her head at him, and called him fickle, but then his fickleness was of so open and boyish an order that it could hardly be regarded as a fault, especially since no one—with the exception of the chief bridesmaid—ever took him seriously. And ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... youth, I was reckoned a good actor. Besides Harrow speeches (in which I shone), I enacted Penruddock in the Wheel of Fortune, and Tristram Fickle in Allingham's farce of the Weathercock, for three nights (the duration of our compact), in some private theatricals at Southwell, in 1806, with great applause. The occasional prologue for our volunteer play was also of my composition. The other performers ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... he said, "who it would seem are not fickle and light-hearted, or worse, like the multitude of your sex—perchance because your dark skin shields you from their temptations—you have set me in a cleft stick, and there I am held fast. Know that the rule of my order is that we should have naught ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... not last, for, as the settlers became more firmly fixed in the land, the Indians, fickle and changeable, grew jealous and resented their intrusion, and refused to sell corn, hoping by this means to ...
— The Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith • E. Boyd Smith
... 1890 was destroyed in the following year by the great blizzard, which is distinctly "the storm" in the West of England; the present quays were built in 1897. At one time more pilchards were taken here than at any other spot, but the pilchard is a fickle fish, and has no consideration beyond the choice of feeding-grounds; if better satisfied elsewhere, no sentiment interferes with its migrations. But there are still a good many pilchards taken off Mevagissey, and these are largely cured here—many under their own name, but a large number find ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... And. like Orlando and Duke Aymon's son, Had faithful Brandimart thrown up the game, Charles had from Paris into exile gone, If he had scaped alive so fierce a flame. Brandimart does his best, and when 'tis done, Yields to the storm: Thus Fortune, fickle dame, Now smiles upon the paynim monarch, who Besieges royal ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... Nor yet is there a clamour, but the murmur of a low voice, such as is wont to arise from the waves of the sea, if one listens at a distance, or like the sound which the end of the thundering {makes} when Jupiter has clashed the black clouds together. A crowd occupies the hall; the fickle vulgar come and go; and a thousand rumours, false mixed with true, wander up and down, and circulate confused words. Of these, some fill the empty ears with conversation; some are carrying elsewhere what is told ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... water in the river and the river that flows forever. We can single out and watch certain drops of the water as they flow from a spring, and we can trace them through their brief careers, and say truly that the river is composed of fickle and transient stuff; but we cannot say that the river is transient. That is perpetuated by the renewing of the supply of water as the original drops disappear. We can mentally watch a particular man, as he enters the social force of workmen, labors for a time, ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... by faith. Nor can it truly hope for eternal life, unless it be pacified before. For a doubting conscience flees from God, despairs and cannot hope. However, hope of eternal life must be certain. Now, in order that it may not be fickle, but certain, we must believe that we have eternal life, not by our works or merits, but from pure grace, by ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... in whose vast hold lay stored The priceless riches of all climes and lands, Say, wouldst thou let it float upon the seas Unpiloted, of fickle winds the sport, And of wild waves and hidden rocks ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of Phyllis." Read without the prepossession which the constant mention of it as a dialogue between Horace and Lydia makes it difficult to avoid, the Ode commends itself merely as a piece of graceful fancy. Real feeling is the last thing one looks for in two such excessively well-bred and fickle personages as the speakers. Their pouting and reconciliation make very pretty fooling, such as might be appropriate in the wonderful beings who people the garden landscapes of Watteau. But where are the fever and the strong pulse of passion which, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... "regulation" of Spanish affairs—the appropriation, if it should seem best, of the whole Iberian peninsula. Any tyro in geography could see by a glance at the map that as navigation was in those days—that is, by the propulsion of fickle winds amid the partly known currents of ocean and sea—the command of Gibraltar and Malta meant the control of the Levant, and the British held both places. With Spain in French hands, Gibraltar eventually ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... he also, thanks to the kind offices of M. Polperro, and by the payment of twenty francs, found himself a member of the Club; free of that inner sanctuary where the devotees of the fickle goddess play with gold instead of silver; and where, as even Chester could see, the people who stood round the table, risking with quiet, calculating eyes their twenty-franc pieces and bank-notes, were of a very different social ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... would ten times rather have heard what they said than to listen to the cheers of the multitude; for he knew that love and friendship endure, while the admiration of the crowd is as fickle as the weather, praising one day and on the ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... from history as it has been; neither do we think that any desirable effect has been gained by this change. In history, Rienzi is a master-spirit of reckless and atrocious daring, but in the drama, he is softened down to a fickle liberty brawler, and the sternest of his vices are glossed over with an almost inconsistent show of affection and tenderness. As he there stands, he is rather like an injured man, than one who so liberally dealt oppression and injustice ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... enormous wickedness. In the sixteenth century, Queen Catherine was an obstacle to the establishment of the kingdom, an incentive to treasonable hopes. In the nineteenth, she is an outraged and injured wife, the victim of a false husband's fickle appetite. The story is a long and painful one, and on its personal side need not concern us here further than as it illustrates the private character of Henry. Into the public bearing of it I must enter at some length, in order to explain the interest with which the nation threw itself into the ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... was gone, the child was told that the name of Bugbee was thereafter to be appended to those she already bore; and being quite pleased with the notion, she forthwith adopted her new appellative, retaining it for several years, until (such is the fickle nature of women) she took a fancy to change it for another which she liked better still. She was also taught to call her grandparents papa and mamma; and though, while a child, she continued to address Miss Cornelia by the title of "Aunty," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... throwing himself on his knees and mastering his wife's hand. "Grisell, Grisell, dost think I could turn to the feather-pated, dull-souled, fickle-hearted thing I know now Eleanor of Audley to be, ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Fortune at your time of life, Although a female moderately fickle, Will hardly leave you (as she's not your wife) For any length of days in such a pickle. To strive, too, with our fate were such a strife As if the corn-sheaf should oppose the sickle: Men are the sport of circumstances, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... little we have left to get him the title and estate of Lord Strutt; and then forsooth, we shall have the honour to be his woollen-drapers.** Besides, Esquire South will be Esquire South still; fickle, proud, and ungrateful. If he behaves himself so when he depends on us for his daily bread, can any man say what he will do when he is got above ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... his work was done, and he had time now to ponder upon his ups and downs, hardly able to believe that at last he was really on his homeward journey. He felt far more confident in the care of bluff Captain Hillgrove than in that of the fickle Peruvians. ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... I am best left alone now, and I do best to keep apart from you, of all else. Ask me no questions, but believe that what I am when I seem fickle or capricious to you, I am not of my own will, or for myself. Believe, though we are stranger to each other than we have been, that I am unchanged to you within. Forgive me for having ever darkened your dark ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... later period, addressing a meeting of young men, he said: "Turn a cold shoulder to the bookmaker and those who would advise you to throw your money into the lap of fickle Fortune If you want to be happy. You might just as well throw the money into ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... bitterly regret their folly, and the very idea that there exists somewhere a packet of letters which would bring serious trouble, if not ruin, upon them and those they love, is a cause of constant grief and worry. I know that there are letters written by one once dear, but now perhaps turned fickle or false, or separated from us forever, from which we feel loath to part; but we must be men and reduce to ashes what would hurt in the very least degree or cast a reflection upon an innocent if silly woman. Suppose you ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... departed from Munich, he probably thought that he was leaving behind him forever, not only the fickle Aloysia, but the rest of the Weber family as well. How slight our premonition of fate! For, if ever the inscrutable ways of Providence brought two people together, those two were Mozart and Constance Weber. Nor was Aloysia without further ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... surprising thing—her marrying him so suddenly. But, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, I have never quite made up my mind that Ethel was really fickle. She did it out of pique, or pride, or impulse, or whatever it is that sways women in such cases. She was angry, or indignant—how like fire and ice at once she was when she was angry!—and she was resolved ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... high estate of pride, With what untimely speed they glide, How soon depart! Bid not the shadowy phantoms stay, The vassals of a mistress they, Of fickle heart. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... heaped upon Montfort by the weak and fickle King, who would far better have understood him, if, like the selfish kinsmen who encircled the throne, he had struggled for his own advantage, and not for the maintenance of the Great Charter. Richard was too young to remember the early days when his elder brothers had been companions, ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... city bold Belonged to us In days of old." Said Nellie, "Here Prince Arthur wept— By cruel John A prisoner kept. Here Joan of Arc Was tried and burned, When fickle fate Against her turned." Said Rose, "Oh dear! It makes me sad To think what trouble People had Who lived once in This very town, Where we walk ...
— Abroad • Various
... that was all explained and settled? Southern girls are not fickle or false to their word." And she managed to assume an aspect of great dignity. "If I do not shake him off in the next few minutes I'm lost," ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... out into all filthy lusts, and transgressions of all laws, both of nature and civility. Many things which they have left off, after a while they fall to again, husbandry, navigation; and leave again, fickle and inconstant as they are. When they are young, they would be old, and old, young. [243] Princes commend a private life; private men itch after honour: a magistrate commends a quiet life; a quiet man would be in his office, and obeyed as he is: and what is the cause of all this, but that they ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... to death, Peter went one day to see her, prepared to make any amends in his power for his brother's sin. And beside the sofa where the girl lay he met Joan Whitby. And such are the vagaries of human nature, with its beginning on that day, the gay, light heart, the fickle fancies, light loves, wild escapades of the devil-may-care young sportsman, all vanished away into thin air before a love that filled his whole being. Lovelier, gayer, cleverer women, ready enough to meet the heir of Richard Fourtenay-Carew halfway, had left ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... Round Table was one who was a mixture of good and bad, as indeed most people are. His name was Sir Ivaine; brave, kind-hearted, and merry; but at the same time fickle, sometimes forgetful of his promises, and inclined to ...
— King Arthur and His Knights • Maude L. Radford
... flower of her small dynasty, Lucia came. Lucia, with her music and her youth and her indestructible charm. And the little court, fickle by its very nature, went over bodily to Lucia! To Lucia who did not want it, who would much rather have been without it, but must needs encourage it, play to it, sympathize with it, just to satisfy ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... of the ancient faith was atrophied by the indifference of the people, and the zealous attempt to galvanise a moribund creed into fresh life failed even to arrest the progress of decay. National thought, fickle as the wind, had turned from an impersonal philosophy to the materialistic cult of Hindu deities, as the Israelites of old hankered after the visible symbol of Isis and Osiris in the Golden Calf. ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... who fell by the wayside, and her feet were swift on errands of mercy; the heart of her husband had trusted in her; he had left her to long hours of solitude, while he amused himself in scenes in which she had no part. When boon companions deserted him, when fickle affection selfishly departed, when pleasure palled, he went home and found her ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... russet and gold on a background of hazy blue mountains, back to a winter as in the Christmas carol about Good King Wenceslaus. All this is theory; in reality the weather here, as elsewhere, is not to be trusted, though, indeed, it is not as fickle as that of our own dear country. Still, the people cling to their theory about the climate of the country, and if perchance the theory does not fit, there is always an "oldest inhabitant" handy to declare ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... a fitting opportunity for an ambitious and courageous woman who, though she might not find full measure of happiness and love which only comes with respect, yet would meet with adventure, would dare fate and hazard chance with fickle fortune. The prospect to her mind was more pleasing than to be the wife of a gentleman farmer and grow fat and matronly—the other chance ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... their fulfillment would be our keenest disappointment? For instance, the wife of our family physician is forever lamenting that no spouse in all New Jedboro sees as little of her husband as does she, forever longing that he might be released to the enjoyment of his own fireside. Yet should a fickle or convalescent public suddenly so release him, our doctor's wife would be of all women ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... Fickle Eleanor! Where was the promise that she would make no choice for herself without her father's approval? She had chosen, and now demanded his acquiescence. "Oh, Papa, isn't he good? Isn't he noble? Isn't he religious, high-minded, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... every human being there must come, sooner or later, a present so sad and desolate, that the beautiful past is all he has to live upon. Remember this handsome prince in silence, bid him farewell when he departs to his native country, but beware of hoping to see him again. The Persians are fickle and inconstant, lovers of everything new and foreign. The prince has been fascinated by thy sweetness and grace. He loves thee ardently now, but remember, he is young and handsome, courted by every one, and a Persian. Give him up that he may not ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... will keep my word. But to recall her would be poor indeed: Nor will I do it, though I love her still. And former commerce binds me strongly to her. —I can't but weep, to think how sad and lonely My future life will be.—Oh fickle fortune! How transient are thy smiles!—But I've been school'd To patience by my former hapless passion, Which I subdued by reason: and I'll try By reason to subdue this too.—But yonder Comes Parmeno, I see, with th' ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... Planner was very great, and I will not say undeserved; still some account should have been taken of his previous habits, and the positive abiding infirmity of human nature. It was surely dangerous to surround a man so fickle, and so easily led by the delusions of his sanguine spirit, with every temptation to walk astray, and to remove every check that had hitherto kept down the capricious movements of his most unsteady will. The daily, almost hourly presence of Allcraft, his vigorous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... swallow, sir?" touching an imaginary cap. "Shall I say that 'Dark and true and tender is the North,' and 'Fierce and false and fickle is the South,' or any ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... her—seriously. And his thoughts were far from fickle as he watched her now, riding within a few feet of him, her profile toward him, her head having a rigid set, her chin held high, her lips tight-pressed, and her hair drooping in graceful coils over her ears, and bulging in alluring disorder at ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... was at home all the old glee and enjoyment of life returned. There was, moreover, the curate, "bonnie, pleasant, light-hearted, good-tempered, generous, careless, crafty, fickle, and unclerical," to add piquancy to the situation. "He sits opposite to Anne at church, sighing softly, and looking out of the corners of his eyes—and she is so quiet, her look so downcast; they are a picture," ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... the admiral said. "All governments are ungrateful, and republics most of all. Where all are supposed to be equal, there is ever envy and jealousy against one who rises above the rest. The multitude is fickle and easily led; and the first change of fortune, however slight, is seized upon by enemies as a cause of complaint, and the popular hero of today may be an exile tomorrow. Like enough I shall see the inside of a Venetian ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... and fickle winds brought us through the Channel and well on our way to Yarmouth Roads, off which we understood Admiral Duncan was lying. As we passed the Downs, strange and ugly rumours of trouble ahead met ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... maid, who would have been set right, in the time of the Tudors, with a sound ducking; and nowadays, had she consulted a fashionable physician, she would have been probably ordered a sea-voyage, and a diet free from stimulants. The Pastor is a feeble, fickle fool, who seemingly has had but one sensible idea in his life. He has believed his wife to be mad, and, considering that she married him, his faith in the matter rested upon evidence of an entirely convincing nature. The Rector Kroll is a prig and a bore of the first water. When he discovers ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 14, 1891. • Various
... with the bark on the road?" In imagination she could hear Pixie putting the question in the years to come, and Bridgie would remember quite well, because she had not the faculty of forgetting, but other people—other people were reputedly fickle, and tempted to forget old friends in favour of new! Other people would probably be in love with a fair-haired beauty by that time, and have forgotten ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... far beyond the waters The fickle feet may roam, But they find no light so pure and bright As the one fair star of home; The star of tender hearts, lady, That glows in an ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... think that Man is a god are in error. We see man moving by law, growing up, and waxing old, even against his will. Now he rejoiceth, now he grieveth, requiring meat and drink and raiment. Besides he is passionate, envious, lustful, fickle, and full of failings: and he perisheth in many a way, by the elements, by wild beasts, and by the death that ever awaiteth him. So Man cannot be a god, but only the work of God. Great then is the error that the Chaldeans have erred in following their own lusts; for they worship corruptible elements ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... has said, that never turns again, And Fate, though fickle, often gives another chance to men. And Casey smiled—his rugged face no longer wore a frown; The pitcher who had started all the ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... more virulent than either, soon drew the strength out of his body: close study and high living had made the joints less supple than Derrick Trull's: he lay there limp and unable,—his brain alert, but fickle. It put the watery death out of sight, and brought his familiar every-day life about him: the dissecting-room; curious cases that had puzzled him; drawing-rooms, beautiful women; he sang airs from the operas, sad, broken little snatches, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... down, mourned lonesomely at the northwest corner of the cabin, as if it felt the desolateness of the barren, icy hills and the black hollows between, and of the angry red sky with its purple shadows lowering over the unhappy land—and would make fickle friendship with some human thing. Charming Billy, hearing the crooning wail of it, knew well the portent and sighed. Perhaps he, too, felt something of the desolateness without and perhaps he, too, longed ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... with the assurance that if the post fell into Proctor's hands it would be in a manner to do him more honor than any surrender could do. The fight then continued until the British general found his fickle savage friends deserting him, and on the 12th day raised ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... way; Nor asks of God, but of her stars, to give The mighty blessing, 'while we live, to live.' Then for all death, that opiate of the soul! Lucretia's dagger, Rosamonda's bowl. Say, what can cause such impotence of mind? A spark too fickle, or a spouse too kind. Wise wretch! with pleasures too refined to please; With too much spirit to be e'er at ease; With too much quickness ever to be taught; With too much thinking to have common thought: ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... natural consequence of his silence, which had not occurred to him before. But he was learning to keep his feelings under control, to set his face and his teeth against the regular reactions of his coward conscience and his fickle will. And once again did Dr. Baumgartner atone for an unintentional minor by striking a rousing chord on the very heart-strings ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... head. The end must come, and that before long. The slaves will unquestionably be freed, and the only question for us is how to soften the blow. There is no doubt that our slaves, both at the Orangery and at the other plantations, are contented and happy; but you know how fickle and easily led the negroes are, and in the excitement of finding them selves free and able to go where they please, you may be sure that the greater number will wander away. My proposal is, that we should at once mark out ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... widened; his innuendo had been skilfully parried. "When you get to be my age," he said, "you will doubtless take your politics more calmly. I never lose sleep now over the vicissitudes of those whom the fickle crowd has raised to honour. How does the line run? Hunc, si mobilium turba Quiritium—but you probably remember your Horace better than ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... seventeenth century, the dissensions of these two factions again threatened to make government impossible. In administration the evil was felt most; the union of ministers of both parties was proving unworkable. So fickle did legislation become that no one could say one day what the House would do the next. It was at this crisis, and about the year 1693, that William III., who cared more for a strong administration than for political differences, ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... was raising him to his feet. Marahna was beside him, robed in the golden garment of the priest. She placed her hands beside his face to turn him toward the further wall. The light was fickle, but it showed him, as it rose and fell, the blackened, swollen body of the monster, still writhing in its death struggle. And beside it, blasted and charred, the head of the obscene sun god, severed by the cutting, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... ever awake and her tender heart filled with remorse for the sorrow she had caused the Queen. The brief years of enchantment were soon over, to be followed by disillusionment, when it was revealed to Louise that the fickle heart of Louis had succumbed to other charms; the final flight from court and the long years of repentance at ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... Davenport is gone, of fickle fame forgot, And Barrett sleeps forever in a much neglected spot; Fred Warde, the papers tell me, in far woolly western lands Still flaunts the banner of high Tragic Art at one-night stands; And Jack and I, in Charley Hoyt's Bostonian dramas wreak Our vengeance on creation at some eensty dolls per ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... have known him, and his father before him too, to break more promises than five, as great as this is that he should here make with you. Who shall come and cast it in his teeth, and tell him it is a shame for him to be so fickle and so false of his promise? And then what careth he for those words that he knoweth well he shall never hear? Not very much, though they were ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... a strangely unbalanced man. He was magnetic, his geniality was really heart-warming, yet he was perfectly cold- blooded in his selfishness. He was cool and calculating, but interference roused him to an almost insane pitch of passion. Fickle in most things, he was uncompromising in his hatreds. O'Neil's generosity in affording sanctuary to his defiant mistress struck him as a personal affront, it fanned his dislike of his rival into a consuming rage. It was with no thought of profit that he cast about for a means of crippling ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... together and explained that he came as their ally, and not as their foe, and that if they would join with him they should be citizens of the American republic, and treated in all respects on an equality with their comrades. The Creoles, caring little for the British, and rather fickle of nature, accepted the proposition with joy, and with the most enthusiastic loyalty toward Clark. Not only that, but sending messengers to their kinsmen on the Wabash, they persuaded the people of Vincennes ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... Parliament, one half of a session passed in amending the mismanagement of the other. For my own part, I really believe that there is nothing like one mind, one wise and good ruler; and I verily believe that the President of France is that man. My only doubt being whether the people are worthy of him, fickle as they are, like all great masses,—the French people, in particular. By the way, if a most vilely translated book, called the "Prisoner of Ham," be extant in French, I should like to possess it. The account of the escape looks true, and is ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... is a very bleak one, and the climate cold and fickle. In order to provide against a late spring frost, a coil of one inch pipe was inclosed in brick work, with a fire chamber under it. From this coil a single one inch pipe was carried around the house next the side sashes. It is found to answer the purpose, having ...
— Woodward's Graperies and Horticultural Buildings • George E. Woodward
... point of view of the Church, which is of a more human nature. This is fallible and fickle, but, though perpetually changing, it will last as long as there are weak human beings. The light of cloudless divine revelation is far too pure and radiant for poor, weak man. But the Church interposes as ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... thou not me!" the Deep Voice cried, "So long enjoyed, so oft misused Alternate, in thy fickle pride, Desired, neglected, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... year after year subject-pictures continued to be painted on an ambitious scale, which after a few months' exhibition on the walls of Burlington House passed to their tomb in provincial museums, or reappeared as ghosts in the sale-room only to fetch a derisory price and to illustrate the fickle vagaries in the ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... such like injudicious things are said even by some who ought to have more discretion. People talk without thinking, or make such statements to cover their own shortcomings and faults. Why shall they not stand? are they in the keeping of a feeble or fickle Saviour? isn't His grace as strong as sin? is not Jesus always mightier than the devil? and have not millions of the greatest sinners who have found the Lord, stood firm against the snares of the world, and all the devices of the wicked one? "He won't stand," is an ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... common-sense tells her that a plunge into the concert field is still dangerous. Accordingly she remains two, or possibly three, more years and at the end if she has worked hard she is convinced that with proper management she may stand some chance of winning that fickle treasure, ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... did not appear; and the French, favoured by a fair wind, steered for Nitherohy, which they were all eager to reach. Nigel's heart beat with anxiety. Besides knowing that the Portuguese, in considerable force, were in the neighbourhood, and being uncertain as to the fidelity of the fickle Indians, he could not forget his suspicions regarding Villegagnon, and he dreaded to hear that the governor had carried out the treacherous designs which he believed him to entertain. All eyes were directed towards the island-fortress, as the ship sailed up the harbour. Great was the satisfaction ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... were there around her to make farther, wider ranges, Where her loving gentle spirit could try any stronger flight; And she turned aside, half fearing that fresh thoughts were fickle changes— That she must stay as he left her on that ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... to me his strange, half pagan, half Christian fatalism. He was of the South, "well toward the Boot Heel, signore," but Love, the master mariner, had driven him out of his course and brought him within fifty miles of Rome to court a fickle beauty of the hills, whose brother had come down for the wood-cutting and ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... the number of the AEsir, whom some call the calumniator of the gods, the contriver of all fraud and mischief, and the disgrace of gods and men. His name is Loki or Loptur. He is the son of the giant Farbauti.....Loki is handsome and well made, but of a very fickle mood, and most evil disposition. He surpasses all beings in those arts called Cunning and Perfidy. Many a time has he exposed the gods to very great perils, and often extricated them ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... passions: they are drawn this way or that by the objects of the senses, and the "senses move after their appropriate objects"; it is not the "I," the Self, which moves. And so also with the mind. "The mind is fickle and restless, O Krishna, it seems as hard to curb as the wind," and the mind lets the senses run after objects as a horse that has broken its reins flies away with the unskilled driver. All these forces are set up; and there is one more thing to remember. These forces ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... the moon. Adj. changeable, changeful; changing &c. 140; mutable, variable, checkered, ever changing; protean, proteiform|; versatile. unstaid[obs3], inconstant; unsteady, unstable, unfixed, unsettled; fluctuating &c. v.; restless; agitated &c. 315; erratic, fickle; irresolute &c. 605; capricious &c. 608; touch and go; inconsonant, fitful, spasmodic; vibratory; vagrant, wayward; desultory; afloat; alternating; alterable, plastic, mobile; transient &c. 111; wavering. Adv. seesaw &c. (oscillation) 314; off and on. Phr. "a rolling stone ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... guards about the hut were changed, and again the women came, bearing platters of food. There was plenty of it, showing that the king, however fickle his friendship might be, did not intend to starve his captives. Tom and his friends had not seen Delby come out of the royal palace, and they concluded that he was still ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... surprised," the colonel said, "and there are many others in the same state; but whither can I send them? The Elector of Brandenburg is so fickle and treacherous that he may at any moment ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... fallen into her grandfather's keeping! A cold horror falls upon her. After all these weary years of hated servitude to be undone! It is impossible even fickle fortune should play her ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... winter of 1618 the colony was reduced to the verge of extinction through the defection of its fickle allies, the Indians. The station at Three Rivers had become to them a great place of resort; and while many hundreds of savages were assembled there a quarrel occurred at Quebec between some Indians and colonists, the particulars of which have not been very clearly transmitted. But the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... brightness of His Father's glory, and the express image of His person. Such a satisfaction have they found in looking upon the triumphal entry into Jerusalem of Him who knew that it would be followed by the revolt of the fickle mob, and the desertion of His disciples, and the Cross of Calvary, and all the hideous circumstances of ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... respected (as a white gate always is) from its strong declaration of purpose. Outside of it, things may belong to the Crown, the Admiralty, Manor, or Trinity Brethren, or perhaps the sea itself—according to the latest ebb or flow of the fickle tide of Law Courts—but inside that gate everything belongs to the fine old ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... Universal Parent, how he sings! As if he wished the firmament of heaven Should listen, and give back to him the voice Of his triumphant constancy and love; The proclamation that he makes, how far His darkness doth transcend our fickle light."[72] ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... and even that she had preserved intact her sway over the Duke de Lorraine, in spite of the charms of the fair Beatrice. By the help of the Princess de Phalzbourg he watched every step, and disputed with her, foot to foot, possession of the fickle Charles IV., sometimes the victor, but very often the vanquished ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... That "nothing is more fickle and inconstant than the multitude" is affirmed not by Titus Livius only, but by all other historians, in whose chronicles of human actions we often find the multitude condemning some citizen to death, and afterwards lamenting him and grieving greatly for his loss, as the Romans ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... life. He then changes his mind again, and pronounces this fruit a very powerful remedy, which ought to be employed only in extreme cases, and with great caution, but which ought not to be absolutely excluded from the Pharmacopoeia. Would it not be the height of absurdity to call such a man fickle and inconsistent because he had repeatedly altered his judgement?' Of course it would. A man cannot go all through life wearing the same suit of clothes. For two reasons. It will not always fit, and it will wear out. And, in precisely the same way, and for ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... like a lawyer," smiled the governor. "You forget that I am neither judge nor jury. Tyrant I may have been to a fickle people that needed a firm hand to rule them, but tyrant I am ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... another, to the governor himself, who appeared determined to release him if he could do it without risk of personal popularity, and who yet, in order to avoid accusation at Rome, gave sentence according to the people's will. The fickle populace crying "crucify him," the disciples who forsook him, the rock-apostle who denied even so much as knowledge of the man, show how all the currents of life about him were stirred and full of tumult. ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... moved up one sidewalk and down another, staring hypnotically at the flash-in and flash-out electric, signs that kept the breakfast foods and ales, the safety razors, soaps, and soups incessantly in the minds of a fickle public. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... first in France, Where mankind lives in haste, and thrives by chance; A dancing nation, fickle and untrue, Have oft undone themselves, and others too; Prompt the infernal dictates to obey, And in hell's favour none ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... say! shall the land of Achilles Reluctantly cherish a dastardly slave, Who can crouch at the foot of a despot, whose will is As fickle as wind, and as rude as the wave? Shall the ashes of heroes enshrouded in glory, Be spurn'd in contempt by a barbarous horde, While their sons idly tremble like boys at a story, And shudder to gaze on the point of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... about another would-be godfather for whom you, naturally, have no earthly use. And to-day my heart is filled with remorse and my head is filled with fears lest you should think your dear godchild is ungrateful, fickle, and flighty. I want to tell you how every detail of your life—from knob-polishing and bug-swallowing to poetry-writing is dear and precious to me. How I wish I could do the same! How I live in eager expectation of your letters; how I gloat and ponder over them when they come; and how ...
— Deer Godchild • Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell
... Medicine had been his last fancy, and he had set to work with so much ardor that he had just qualified after an unusually short course of study, by a special remission of time from the minister. He was enthusiastic, intelligent, fickle, but obstinate, full ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... be better to rent," said Mr. Fairfield. "Suppose my fickle daughter should change her mind, and after a visit in the city decide that she prefers it ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... proof why a woman of beauty should not concentrate all her devotion on one man. You have seen him to-night and his assiduous attention to another woman. Captain Prescott, all men are fickle—with a few ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... bold, Led his array against Altoum. Fortune, The fickle jade, lured him to his defeat And death. Altoum's general devised At one fell stroke to extirpate our race. My brothers he assassinated. Me, Together with my mother and three sisters, He cast into the river, then in spate. The gentle Emperor, coming on ...
— Turandot, Princess of China - A Chinoiserie in Three Acts • Karl Gustav Vollmoeller
... landed him halfway through the ropes. There he lay while the referee tolled off the count of ten, and as the official took Billy's hand in his and raised it aloft in signal that he had won the fight the fickle crowd cheered and screamed ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Evangelical standpoints, he stood outside of all the movements and missions and cults and crusades of the day, uncaring and uninterested. Yet in a mystical-practical way of his own, which had served him unscathed and unshaken through the fickle years of boyhood, he was intensely and intensively religious. His family were naturally, though unobtrusively, distressed about it. "I am so afraid it may affect his bridge," ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... master. The public—they who live in the present, not the past. They who swear by triumph, achievement; not effort. They who have no memory for the deeds that have been done unless they vouch for future conquests. The public—fickle as woman, weak as infancy, gullible as credulity, mighty as fate. Yes, Garrison knew it, and deep down in his heart, though he showed it not, he gloried in the welcome accorded him. He had not ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... worthily, his affections being easily won; and there is something touching, soothing, and delightful in his inherent respect for gentleman and lady. His aptitude for domestic service; his love for and his power of amusing children and winning their fickle heart, their attachment to him being one of the most delightful traits of Southern life; his impressible, religious and devout nature, mark him as a wonderful element of variety in the domestic texture of our life such as it shall be ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of the ever-fickle mob, hailing him as its deliverer, Louis XII rode triumphantly into Milan on October 6, attended by a little host of princes, including the Prince of Savoy, the Dukes of Montferrat and Ferrara, and the Marquis of Mantua. But ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... fine folds of muslin, or like sheets of dissolving sugar, and then the hot air of the earth would dissipate it, and the showers would be absorbed in the upper regions. The heat was sometimes intense, but at intervals a refreshing wind would blow, the air being as fickle as the rain; and now and then we would see a slender column of dust, a thousand or two feet high, marching across the desert, apparently not more than two feet in diameter, and wavering like the threads of moisture that tried in vain to reach the ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... done, Washington and the Colonel sallied forth, and as they walked along Washington learned what he was to be. He was to be a clerk in a real estate office. Instantly the fickle youth's dreams forsook the magic eye-water and flew back to the Tennessee Land. And the gorgeous possibilities of that great domain straightway began to occupy his imagination to such a degree that he could scarcely manage to keep even enough of his attention upon the Colonel's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Chandos for killing Mr. Compton in a duel was, just at this moment, exciting the fickle attention of the town, which had probably said its say on the subject of Cromwell's coup d'etat, and was only too ready for another subject of conversation. The trial is not reported among the State Trials, but our observant friend ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... had at first accused the barber of murdering his brother cried out that it was sorcery, and that this accursed barber must be in fact a foul magician, since he could not only kill good Moslims, but shave misshapen apes. On this the fickle crowd were moved against the barber, and would have fallen upon him and done him an injury had I ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... erratic that there was never any knowing when the ferry-boat would be able to start. But that was what people had to put up with forty years ago. So the Great Western Railway Company, in 1871, decided to go under the fickle waters, as they found it so troublesome to go over them. A study of the bottom of the river made it clear that the tunnel they intended to make would have to slope downwards considerably from both ends, running level for a short distance only under ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... appeals to the good sense of the public, for a decision, whether, with such objections and difficulties weighing upon his mind, as he has now exposed, his conduct in that respect can reasonably be attributed to the unmanly influence of caprice and fickle-ness, (as has been circulated by some who had an interest in making it believed;) or to the just influence of motives deserving a ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... its many complexions, East and West, had developed in Paul Harley a sort of sixth sense. It was an evasive, fickle thing, but was nevertheless the attribute which had made him an investigator of genius. Often enough it failed him entirely. It had failed him to-night—or else no one had followed him from ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... however started, when they began to build their dwelling-house; and some wicked people endeavoured to raise suspicions in the minds of their countrymen, as to the intentions of the Missionaries. The latter were, for some time after, in danger of their lives, from the fickle disposition of their new friends; but the Lord preserved them. Their upright intentions were at length acknowledged, and ever after all due respect and confidence shown to them by ...
— Letters on the Nicobar islands, their natural productions, and the manners, customs, and superstitions of the natives • John Gottfried Haensel
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