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More "Flit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quite a common thing to see 10,000 or 15,000 spectators. I have heard of such people as those who actually hate cricket and football, and make it a constant aim to prevent those over whom they have some influence from engaging in the manly sport. They occasionally flit across one's path like an evil spirit, and disappear as rapidly, but leave behind a chilling effect on the imagination, far more intense than the terrible nightmare after a disastrous defeat. They cannot see the fun of spending valuable time in such ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... the house of the Lord.' He knew what he was saying when he preferred his humble office to all honours among the godless. He was shut out by some unknown circumstances from external participation in the Temple rites, and longs to be even as one of the swallows or sparrows that twitter and flit round the sacred courts. No doubt to him faith was much more inseparably attached to form than it should be for us. No doubt place and ritual were more to him than they can permissibly be to those who have heard and understood the great charter of spiritual ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... groaned. Then I got up and went out. I had forgotten "Little Frank" and hoped that she had. If she was to flit about Europe seeing "Little Frank" on every corner I foresaw trouble. "Little Frank" was likely to be the ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Young looked back at the hut. It was dark. He saw three boats flit silently by him toward the city, as if phantoms guided them. They crossed the moonbeams, and Young lost them in the dark shadows near ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... triumphant way,—where privately they are not very welcome, though one puts the best face on it, and a dinner of importance is the first thing imperative to be set in progress. A flurried Court, that of Gotha, and much swashing of French plumes through it, all this morning, since Seidlitz had to flit. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... way of a treat, I would offer him, whenever I could get it, a locust, or large grasshopper. His way of accepting this was unique and pretty. He would look surprised, stare, curtsey once or twice, stare again and then, suddenly, noiselessly and as lightly as a fairy, flit across the cage and, without alighting, pluck the insect from my fingers with both his feet and return ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... might be the case, with a score of red men prowling near at hand. They would flit hither and thither like so many phantoms, and all the acuteness the Pawnee possessed was needed to elude the traps they were likely to set for his feet. He seemed to believe he was alone, and, resuming his noiseless advance, he did not stop until the listening ear detected the soft ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... costume was sufficiently discreet in sleeves—they came almost to the elbow, but the bodice allowed so liberal a view of neck and shoulders as to cover the wearer with confusion. She felt exactly as you feel in a dream when you flit down the aisle of a crowded car in your night clothes, or inadvertently remove most of your garments in a pew in church, and with Deena self-consciousness always took the form ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... of reasoning, and was simply obliged to accept the fact and give up trying to solve the riddle. He found himself dragged into society and courted, wondered at and envied very much as if he were one of those foreign barbers who flit over here now and then with a self-conferred title of nobility and marry some rich fool's absurd daughter. Sometimes at a dinner party or a reception he would find himself the centre of interest, and feel unutterably ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... every fawn and satyr flies For willing service; whether to surprise The squatted hare while in half sleeping fit; Or upward ragged precipices flit To save poor lambkins from the eagle's maw; Or by mysterious enticement draw Bewildered shepherds to their path again; Or to tread breathless round the frothy main, 270 And gather up all fancifullest shells ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... feelings might have identified him with all. In a word, we apprehend he was a tolerably fair example of what vague generalities, when acting on a temperament not indisposed to moral impressions, render the great majority of men; who flit around the mysteries of a future state, without alighting either on the consolations of faith, or discovering any of those logical conclusions which, half the time unconsciously to themselves, they seem to expect. When Bluewater made his last remark, therefore, the vice-admiral looked anxiously ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... "You may assume as much." In despair for a hint the decorator steals a look at a photograph of the miss, full-lipped, melting dark eyes, and blue-black hair. Sensing an houri he hangs the walls with a deep shade of Persian orange, over which flit tropical birds of emerald and azure; strange pomegranates bleed their seeds at regular intervals. The couch is an adaptation, in colour, of the celebrated Sumurun bed. The dressing table and the chaise-longue are of Chinese lacquer. A heavy bronze incense burner ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... the stars, perfect in their form and alive with heavenly instincts, which complete with wondrous speed their rapid courses. Wherefore, my son, by you and by all just men that soul must be retained within its body's confines, nor can it be allowed to flit without command of him by whom it has been given to you. You may not escape the duty which God has trusted to you. Live, my Scipio, and shine with piety and justice, as your grandfather did and I have done. It is your duty to your parents and to your relatives, but ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... commonly the poets, creating for themselves an ideal of motion, fasten upon the charm of a boat. They do not usually express any desire for wings, or, if they do, it is only in some vague and half-unintended phrase, such as "flit or soar," involving wingedness. Seriously, they are evidently content to let the wings belong to Horse, or Muse, or Angel, rather than to themselves; but they all, somehow or other, express an honest wish for a Spiritual Boat. ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... like poppies spread, You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow-falls in the river, A moment white—then melt forever; Or like the borealis race, That flit ere you can point their place; Or like the rainbow's lovely form Evanishing amid the storm.— Nae man can tether time or tide; The hour approaches Tam maun ride; That hour, o' night's black arch the key-stane, That dreary hour he mounts his ...
— Tam O'Shanter • Robert Burns
... the distorted fancies that flit through the mind of one who is at college and lives as I do in an atmosphere of ideas, conceptions and half-thoughts, half-feelings which tumble and jostle each other until one is almost crazy. I rarely have dreams that are not in keeping with what I really think ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... dressing very carefully. She is a tall, imposing, handsome, languid woman, with flashing dark eyes and long lashes. They make for the chesterfield, not noticing the two palpitating figures blotted against the walls in the gloom on either side. The figures flit away noiselessly through the window ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... was at length relieved; a rude folding-door opened opposite, and showed a low dim sitting-room beyond, from which there rose a few steps to the entrance of my chamber. On these appeared, not, alas! the fancied visitant who was to flit about my bedside, and mix her bright presence with my dreams, but stately and severe, with a pale cheek and compressed ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... earth. On other evenings, sitting inside with lighted candles and wide opened doors, great bats flap inside, make a round of the apartment, and pass out again, whilst iris-winged moths, attracted by the light, flit about the ceiling, or long-horned beetles flop down on the table. In this way I made my first acquaintance with many entomological rarities.* (* In moths, numerous fine Sphingidae and Bombycidae; and in beetles, amongst many others, the rare Xestia nitida (Bates) and Hexoplon albipenne ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... Schuyler, standing still, saw her slim figure flit across a strip of frost-bleached sod as the moon ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... nightingale doth shake His feathers, and the air is full of song; In those old days when I was young and strong, He used to sing on yonder garden tree, Beside the nursery. Ah, I remember how I loved to wake, And find him singing on the self-same bough (I know it even now) Where, since the flit of bat, In ceaseless voice he sat, Trying the spring night over, like a tune, Beneath the vernal moon; And while I listed long, Day rose, and still he sang, And all his stanchless song, As something falling unaware, Fell out of the tall trees he sang among, Fell ringing down the ringing ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... spoke he saw a strange expression flit across her face. The next instant she rose and going across to her husband's chair stood looking down upon him ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... guessing what thy sickness can be, nor will he scold thee at all, but he will rather beg every one to take all the care they can of thee. After that he will set off west to the Firths, and Sigmund with him, for he will have to flit all his goods home from the Firths west, and he will be away till the summer is far spent. But when men ride to the Thing, and after all have ridden from the Dales that mean to ride thither, then thou must rise from ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... flit over one's mind in looking at any phase of work, or any piece of work. In the right choice of work lies the fullest use of one's capacities; in the right conditions of work lies the freest play of one's energies; in the right spirit ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... world at midsummer only makes my loneliness more keen. The butterflies flit through the meadows like wandering souls of last year's flowers that died and were buried by the snow. The harvest moon, red-gold and wonderful, will rise slowly up out of the sea. The path of light will lie on the still waters and widen into a vast arc at the line of the shore. Cobwebs will ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... with the appalling and incessant waste of these benefits that goes on; with the number of men of Newtonian capacity who are undoubtedly born into the world only to chronicle small beer; with the hosts of high and worthy souls who labour and flit away like shadows, perishing in the accomplishment of minor and subordinate ends. We may suspect that the notion of all this immeasurable profusion of priceless treasures, its position as one of the laws of the condition of man on the globe, would be unspeakably ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... heart; in want of a wife mayhap; a man that can earn his own bread and another's;—half a dozen others' when the half dozen come? Would not that be a good sort of lodger? Such a question as that too did flit, just flit, across the widow's sleepless mind. But then she thought so much more of the wolf! Wolves, she had taught herself to think, were more common than stalwart, honest-minded, ...
— The Courtship of Susan Bell • Anthony Trollope
... screen, and with a hurried movement of alarm she darts away. In a moment the male, with a tuft of wool in his beak (for there is a sheep pasture near), joins her, and the two reconnoitre the premises from the surrounding bushes. With their beaks still loaded, they flit round with a frightened look, and refuse to approach the nest till I have moved off and lain down behind a log. Then one of them ventures to alight upon the nest, but, still suspecting all is not right, quickly darts away again. Then they both ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... hillside.[873] Certainly witches are constantly thought to ride through the air on broomsticks or other equally convenient vehicles; and if they do so, how can you get at them so effectually as by hurling lighted missiles, whether discs, torches, or besoms, after them as they flit past overhead in the gloom? The South Slavonian peasant believes that witches ride in the dark hail-clouds; so he shoots at the clouds to bring down the hags, while he curses them, saying, "Curse, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... window. One pane of the stained glass was open, to throw light upon the half-finished sketch and the box of colours, while the rest of the perfumed apartment was steeped in a soft subdued glow. Absorbed in his work he seemed not to have heard the carriage stop, the bell ring twice, and a lady's dress flit along the passage. He had: but it was not his mother's shabby black dress that he expected, it was not for her that he posed at his desk, nor for her that he had provided the delicate bouquets of fine irises and tulips, or the sweetmeats and elegant ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... as the lovers of whom M. Anatole France has written (La Messe des Morts). Above the witches' lake come shadows of the women who suffered under Knox and the Bastard of Scotland, poor creatures burned to ashes with none to help or pity. The shades of Dominicans flit by the Black Friars wall—verily the place is haunted, and among Murray's pleasures was this of pacing alone, by night, in that airy press and throng of those who lived and loved and ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... he!" said my uncle Jervas, viewing me languidly through his quizzing-glass. "How confoundedly the years flit! Nineteen—and on me soul, our poor youth looks as if he hadn't a single gentlemanly ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... course, the indigenous birds of a country that emphasise its foreignness far more than its people. People can travel. Turbaned heads are, for example, not unknown in England; but to have green parrots with long tails flitting among the trees, as they used to flit in my host's garden in Bombay, is to be in India beyond question. At Raisina we had mynahs and the babblers, or "Seven Sisters," in great profusion, and also the King Crow with his imposing tail; while the little striped squirrels were everywhere. These ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... was most as light as day, and I saw as plain as could be something flit in at the stable door. 'Twasn't so big as a man, nor so small as a boy, and its head was white. So then I thought, 'Surely 'tis the brownie, for night's his working time,' and I'd half a mind to take ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... shalt thou have thy will, for thou hast wrought thyself into something better than thou wert." So Illugi rode hastily from home, and bought for Gunnlaug half a ship which lay in Gufaros, from Audun Festargram—this Audun was he who would not flit abroad the sons of Oswif the Wise, after the slaying of Kiartan Olafson, as is told in the story of the Laxdalemen, which thing though betid later than this.—And when Illugi came home, ...
— The Story Of Gunnlaug The Worm-Tongue And Raven The Skald - 1875 • Anonymous
... beauty, of Anderssen, McDonnell's jokes and after dinner speeches, Boden's recollections, Pickwickian and other quotations, and in fact little incidents relative to most of the celebrated chess players, constantly flit through the memory in social chat, which invariably seem to entertain chess listeners whom a minute's conversation about the history, science, or theory of the game would utterly fail ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... lost. It brings in an amiable person, who is fairer than the children of men, who is all love, and hath no spot in him. Is it not a sweet word, a Redeemer to captives, a Saviour to sinners? And will not the soul rise up, and go forth out of itself? And will it not choose to flit(480) unto him who is the desire of all nations? Will it not go unto him for food and clothing? Love then is the soul's journey and motion towards Jesus, whom faith hath brought in such a ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... As that abundant gush of wine from Heaven Loosens the dreary grasp of Cares which coil Round the lone heart like serpents,—the sweet toil Of draining the dear dream-cup thou hast given Is unto me,—and thoughts which long have striven With joyousness, flit far away the while My lips are prest to it. By the fire-light, Or in full gaze of sun-set, when the choirs Of winged minstrels, waking out of light, Ring requiem meet to those departing fires— Let me be with thee then—forgetting ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various
... cross the glade To take his nurse his broken toy; Sometimes a thrush flit overhead Deep in her unknown ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... screen; Nor me thy gifts shall wile to let thee pass Scatheless from war, as once did Tydeus' son. Though thou didst 'scape his fury, will not I Suffer thee to return alive from war. Ha, in thy many helpers dost thou trust Who with thee, like so many worthless flies, Flit round the noble Achilles' corpse? To these Death and black doom shall my ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... Conscious of horror huge as heaven, and knew Where Goneril's soul made chill and foul the mist, And all the leprous life in Regan hissed. Fierce homeless ghosts, rejected of the pit, From hell to hell of storm fear watched them flit. About them and before, the dull grey gloom Shuddered, and heaven seemed hateful as the tomb That shrinks from resurrection; and from out That sullen hell which girt their shades about The nether soul that lurks and lowers within Man, made ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... those green slopes of shadowy grass. The nightingale sings now, and now is hushed again. Streams murmur through the darkness, where the growth of trees, heavy with honeysuckle and wild rose, is thickest. Fireflies begin to flit above the growing corn. At last the plain is reached, and all the skies are tremulous with starlight. Alas, that we should vibrate so obscurely to these harmonies of earth and heaven! The inner finer sense of them seems somehow ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... little Cinderellas don't get half a chance with life, the stolid ones do better. But she could hold an audience with that story, if she was not afraid of the audience," smiling a little, "and the lovely expressions that flit over her face! She is not the ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... plainly. One, riding furiously a few lengths ahead of the foremost, he guessed was Clavering, and he fancied he recognized the Sheriff in another; but he could not discern Torrance anywhere. He turned his eyes ahead and watched the bluff rise higher, though the white levels seemed to flit back to him with an exasperating slowness. Beyond it a faint grey smear rose towards the blue; but the jaded horse demanded most of his attention, for the sod was slippery here and there where the snow had lain in a hollow, and the beast stumbled ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... effective, and the practical musician, as well as the student of aesthetics, will do well to examine by what means these various effects are produced. In the second nocturne, F sharp major, the brightness and warmth of the world without have penetrated into the world within. The fioriture flit about as lightly as gossamer threads. The sweetly-sad longing of the first section becomes more disquieting in the doppio movimento, but the beneficial influence of the sun never quite loses its power, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Lordship the bow, and we pushed off. The boatman, a big, husky fellow, had been rowing a long hour when we put into a cove under the high shore of an island. I could see a moving glow back in the bushes. It swung slowly, like a pendulum of light, with a mighty flit and tumble of shadows. We tied our boat, climbed the shore, and made slowly for the light. Nearing it, his Lordship whistled twice, and got answer. The lantern was now still; it lighted the side of a soldier in high boots; and suddenly I saw it was D'ri. I caught his hand, raising ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... "sauced" her landlady, found it wise to change her quarters. She had taken a room in an apartment house two blocks removed from her former home, and Win, not being able to afford a "flit," remained at the old address. At first, when her pay was increased by two dollars a week, she had intended to save and follow Sadie. One had, however, to live mostly on ice-cream soda in the hot weather, which cost money. Besides, even had ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... dashed down upon him and the wind hustled him, Huldbrand grew bewildered. The storm seemed to have changed the peaceful meadows into a weary wilderness, and even the maiden herself seemed to flit before him as a phantom spirit ...
— Undine • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... a fine warm day in June. Out of the town the air is soft and pure. Bird and bee flit from tree to tree, from blue-bell to rose, till at sun-set they hie away to nest ...
— The First Little Pet Book with Ten Short Stories in Words of Three and Four Letters • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... is not a road To bring you near the skies Where you can sit and gather clouds That flit before your eyes, Or jump upon a golden fleece And sail to paradise— But it is a super-mountain road Where you can feast your eyes Upon the beauties of the world The Lord God gave to man For his enjoyment and his use; Improve it if you can. The builders of ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... go by perpetual motion is perpetual nonsense. Multitudes of boys and men have wasted much valuable time in trying to find it, but they never can, as it is contrary to natural laws, and therefore impossible; but one certainty of the future is, that a million useful flying machines will flit hither and thither; and one certainty of the present is, that while Cole's Book Arcade contains 80,000 sorts of books, not a single person has yet been able to come to it for a supply in a flying machine.—Laggard inventors, think of this! N.B.—Cole ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... her face as she spoke, but he had seen a little tremulous smile flit over her features, and she could not hide her dimple. What could she mean? Was he fooling himself—dreaming? The next moment he had dropped on one knee beside her, and was begging her, with tears in his ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... her, and then, on their side, strove to be heroic. But the minutes crept by, and it seemed as if the cold gust had slowly passed away. Sometimes, at the twilight hour, a night-bird will come in by the window like some messenger of misfortune, flit round the darkened room, and then fly off again, carrying its sadness with it. And it was much like that; the gust passed, the basilica remained standing, the earth did not open to swallow it. Little by ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... a butterfly, With gorgeous wings of golden sheen, Flit lightly 'neath a sapphire sky Amid ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... that flit and sway, And mass, and scatter in the breeze, And meet and part, open and close; Thou sister of the clouds and trees, Thou daintier phantom of the rose, Thou nun of the hot and ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... armoury be secretly unlocked, should the crones have dozed by the palisade and the weapons find their way unseen into the village, revolution would be nearly certain, death the most probable result, and the spirit of the tyrant of Apemama flit to rejoin his predecessors of Mariki and Tapituea. Yet those whom he so trusts are all women, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... him as I could and peered at him through my binocular, while he returned the compliment by peering at me, and then warily ventured to rehearse his little tune. The least movement on my part would startle him, cause him to flit to another perch and crane out his neck to glare at me questioningly with wild, dilated eyes, uncertain whether I was to be trusted or not. Both of us presently grew tired of our strained position, and so I walked ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... closer, and gave the doctor to understand she knew they came from Hanover; she now even endured her mother's caresses, but would leave her with indifference at the slightest signal. After a while, on the mother taking hold of her again, a vague idea seemed to flit across Laura's mind that this could not be a stranger; she therefore felt of her hands very eagerly, while her countenance assumed an expression of intense interest; she became very pale, and then suddenly red; hope seemed struggling with doubt and anxiety, and never were contending emotions ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... they shall still succeed, And still are disappointed: rings the world With the vain stir. I sum up half mankind, And add two-thirds of the remaining half, And find the total of their hopes and fears Dreams, empty dreams. The million flit as gay As if created only, like the fly That spreads his motley wings in the eye of noon, To sport their season and be seen no more. The rest are sober dreamers, grave and wise, And pregnant with discoveries new and rare. Some write a narrative of wars, and feats Of heroes little known, and call ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... of poesy!" rejoined Sah-luma complacently.. "It makes the hours flit like moments, and long days seemed but short hours! ... Nevertheless 'tis time we were within doors and at supper,—for if we start not soon for the Temple, 'twill be difficult to gain an entrance, and I, at any rate, must be early in my place ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... evil spirits did flit about the banished Sintram, but it was without his calling them up. In his dreams he often saw the wicked enchantress Venus, in her golden chariot drawn by winged cats, pass over the battlements of the stone fortress, and heard her say, mocking him, "Foolish Sintram, ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... saw the figure of a man flit, by him. The stranger was dressed in citizen's clothes. There was nothing suspicions in that, since there is no law to prevent citizens from visiting the Military Academy. But there was something stealthy about ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... practice. For the rest, I am sure that Mr. Brummell was no lackey, as they have suggested. He wished merely to be seen by those who were best qualified to appreciate the splendour of his achievements. Shall not the painter show his work in galleries, the poet flit down Paternoster Row? Of rank, for its own sake, Mr. Brummell had no love. He patronised all his patrons. Even to the Regent his attitude was always that of a master in an art to one who is sincerely willing and anxious to ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... generation. Living in all of them, especially the ages just ahead, and seeing as one looks out upon them how goodness wins, may be well enough when one is tired or discouraged and is driven to it, but in the meantime all the while we are living in this one. The faces of the people we know flit past us; the gaunt, grim face of the crowd haunts us—the crowd that will slip softly off the earth very soon and drop into the Darkness—a whole generation of it, without seeing how things are coming out; and there is something about the streets, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... those are special cases, Hermes. I do not go on my own feet on those occasions, and it is not Zeus who sends me, but Pluto, who has his own ways of conferring wealth and making presents; Pluto and Plutus are not unconnected, you see. When I am to flit from one house to another, they lay me on parchment, seal me up carefully, make a parcel of me and take me round. The dead man lies in some dark corner, shrouded from the knees upward in an old sheet, with the cats fighting for possession of him, while those ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... of the honeysuckle lies motionless upon my study floor, as if it were a figure in the carpet; and through the open window comes the fragrance of the wild-brier and the mock-orange. The birds are carolling in the trees, and their shadows flit across the window as they dart to and fro in the sunshine; while the murmur of the bee, the cooing of doves from the eaves, and the whirring of a little humming-bird that has its nest in the honeysuckle, send up a sound of joy to meet ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... hearts. Geneva, that godly Calvinist city, was a poor hunting-ground on the whole for them. But they turned their steps to the old cit, rightly believing that among those ancient and narrow streets vice might, if anywhere, flit by night. ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... "Ye scenes, that flit my memory o'er, Deck'd in the smiles which then ye wore, In the same gay and varied dress, I cannot but admire and bless! What though some anxious throbs would beat, Some fears within my breast retreat, Yet then I found sincere delight, Whenever ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... line mentioned by W. T. M. is "Flits by the sea-blue bird of March," instead of "blue sea-bird." This reading appears to be a better one. I would suggest that the bird meant by Tennyson was the Tom-tit, who, from his restlessness, may be said to flit among ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... in his life's work, and he has stood the test. Many young fellows of his age would have abused their opportunities. He has not done so. My only disappointment has been that he has developed no definite taste, but has been content to flit from one fancy to the next, always carried away by the latest novelty on ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... And where there is love it is reciprocated. That is the way of the world. I am only surprised that he didn't take a vacation and flit over here. When one has such a ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... progress, only when the brakeman with measured tone shouts the name of the station; he looks up from his paper or rouses from his doze, looks out at the cheerless prospect, and then settles himself for another thirty miles. Time passes as unobserved as the meadows or bushy pastures that flit by the jarring window at his ear. But with Greenleaf, the reader will believe, the case was far different. He had never noticed before how slowly the locomotives really moved. At each station where wood and water were to be taken, it seemed to him the delay was interminable. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... the giant-mother, 'which thou beholdest to the left, is the gallery of the Unborn. The shadows that flit onward and upward into the world, are the souls that pass from the long eternity of being to their destined pilgrimage on earth. That which thou beholdest to thy right, wherein the shadows descending from above sweep on, equally ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... I want you to do it," he said, "because with you there will be no particular danger even if you are caught. You will know how to get yourself out of it better than one of these poor farm laborers. Flies get caught in a cobweb, but wasps flit straight through them. But what kind of a crime is it anyway to protect your own property against monsters that eat it up and ruin it?" he cried, the laugh on his face suddenly changing into an expression of the most fervent anger. The veins in his brow swelled up, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... a covert glance from the corner of her sparkling eyes. "Oh, I guess I can take care of myself," she decided calmly. "I always have. When fresh drummers begin to talk private dining-room and cold bottles, I spread my little wings and flit." ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the sunny, dusty village street—who would have thought, a month ago, that we should complain of sun and dust again!—and turn the corner where the two great oaks hang so beautifully over the clear deep pond, mixing their cool green shadows with the bright blue sky, and the white clouds that flit over it; and loiter at the wheeler's shop, always picturesque, with its tools, and its work, and its materials, all so various in form, and so harmonious in colour; and its noise, merry workmen, hammering and singing, ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... we have done. If any faint remembrance, as of a dream, flit in some puzzled moment across your brain, and you shall feel that the potion which is to be given you shall not have done its work, and the memory of this existence which you are leaving endeavours vainly to return; we say in such a moment, when you clutch at the dream but it eludes ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... and the rat-mole (Spalax). The jerboa has very long hind legs, and a habit of jumping, so that it resembles superficially (but not really) a small kangaroo. The Spalax is quite blind, and has the burrowing habit, and somewhat the shape of the common mole. Some rodents are fitted to flit through the air in long jumps, by means of the wide extensibility of the skin of their flanks, which, when stretched out, acts as a parachute. Such forms are the flying squirrels, and a curious rodent called Anomalurus, from the exceptional clothing ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... shines out, the weather grows warm and pleasant; flowers spring up, great trees cast a friendly shade, streams murmur cheerfully over their pebbly beds, jewelled fruits are to be had for the trouble of gathering them; invisible hands set out well-covered dinner-tables, brilliant and graceful forms flit in and out across our path, and we all at once find ourselves in the midst of a company of dear old friends whom we have known and loved ever since we knew anything. There is Fortunatus with his magic purse, and the square of carpet that carries him anywhere; and Aladdin with his ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... of intellect: it is like the calm in the whirlwind's centre, where the waves run higher though the air is deadly still, and the surly mariner wishes the mad wind back again.—To and fro you flit, goaded on and strengthened by untiring anguish. You are but the body of a man; your thought and emotion are abroad, haunting ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... happy moths that now flit and hover From the blossom of white to the blossom of red, Take heed, for I was a lordly lover Till the little day of my life had sped; As straight as a pine-tree, a golden head, And eyes as blue as an austral bay. Ladies, when loosing ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... come to quote Tennyson to her; Dr. Maryland's shy, distant homage was more comical yet; and the tender little mouth began to find out its lines and dimples and power of concealment. But the young heart had a good share of timidity, and that stirred very often; making the colour flit to and fro 'like the rosy light upon the sky'— Mr. Kingsland originally observed; while Dr. Maryland looked at the evening star and was silent. Compliments!—how they rained down upon her; how gayly she shook them ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... it might have to be, at times," Garlock said. "But that's a very minor point. With yours so nearly ready to flit, no change in size is indicated now. But Belle and I have got to have another conference with the legal eagle. So if you and Brownie, Jim, will 'port whatever you need out of the Pleiades, we'll be ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... imagination, narrow perceptions and limited knowledge, that he would see strange sights and hear strange sounds. Images and visions which have been portrayed in tales of romance and given interest to the pages of poetry were made by him to throng the woods, flit through the air and hover over the heads of terrified officials, whose learning should have placed them beyond the bounds of superstition. The ghosts of murdered wives, husbands and children played their part with a vividness of representation and artistic skill of expression hardly ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... through our own open door I saw Felicity's white-clad figure flit down the stairs to Aunt Janet's room. From the room she had left ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... immaculata. Among others are the anagrammatic answer to Pilate's question, "Quid est veritas''—namely, "Est vir qui adest''; and the transposition of "Horatio Nelson'' into "Honor est a Nilo''; and of "Florence Nightingale'' into "Flit on, cheering angel.'' James I.'s courtiers discovered in "James Stuart'' "A just master,'' and converted "Charles James Stuart'' into "Claimes Arthur's seat.'' "Eleanor Audeley,'' wife of Sir John Davies, is said to have been ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... others, however, which repose by day, stand erect, and expand themselves in the stillness of night. But few flowers are open; only those of the sweet-scented Paullinia greet me with a balmy fragrance, and thine, lofty mango, the dark shade of whose leafy crown shields me from the dews of night. Moths flit, ghost-like, round the seductive light of my lantern. The meadows, ever breathing freshness, are now saturated with dew, and I feel the damp of the night air on my heated limbs. A Cicada, a fellow-lodger in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... that it carry off all our regard from its elder sister, the drama. In the novel every thing passes by in dizzy rapidity; we are whirled along over hill and valley, through the grandeur and the filth of cities, and a thousand noble and a thousand grotesque objects flit over our field of vision. In the drama, it is true, we often toil on, slow as a tired pedestrian; but then how often do we sit down, as at the foot of some mountain, and fill our eyes and our hearts with the prospect before us? How gay is the first!—even when terrible, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... thought so,' said Djama, half closing his eyes and allowing just the ghost of a smile to flit across his lips. 'I thought I knew enough about archaeology and the science of mummies in general to expect you to say that. Now, just for the gratification of my own vanity, I should like to try and anticipate what you are going to say; ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... confectionery, and articles rejected by the Society of Decorative Art. I hope it will be a success, and help many worthy women, all over the land, to help themselves.... I find it hard to consent to your having, at your age, to flit about from home to home, but a loving Father has a mansion for you beyond all the changes and chances of this strange complicated life. If He gives you His presence, that will be a home. I wish you ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... beach we flit, One little sandpiper and I, And fast I gather, bit by bit, The scattered driftwood, bleached and dry. The wild waves reach their hands for it, The wild wind raves, the tide runs high, As up and down the beach we flit, One little ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... the green woods were but a few steps away, with flowers blooming and rich mosses growing all around. They constantly longed to be free, if only for a few moments, to wander at will and make playhouses in the dusky shade, 20 to climb upon the great logs and watch the gay-winged birds flit about ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... learning that some of the members of the New York orchestra were in indigent circumstances, she generously made them a substantial gift. Her beneficent actions during her entire stay in America are too numerous to detail. Frequently would she flit away from her house quietly, as if about to pay a visit, and then she might be seen disappearing down back lanes or into the cottages of the poor. She was warned to avoid so much liberality, as many unworthy persons took unfair advantage of her bounty; but she invariably replied, ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... on his. She had seen a curious expression of mingled annoyance and contempt flit across his face as she came in. Why, why had she allowed Julian to over-persuade her? She was looking horrible, a scarecrow, a ghost of a woman. She was certain of it. For a moment she felt almost angry with Julian for placing her in such a bitter position. But he was glowing with a consciousness ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... bereavement which wails through Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' or Cowley's 'Ode on the Death of Mr. Hervey'. Much, especially in the earlier stanzas, is common form. The Muse Urania is summoned to lament, and a host of personified abstractions flit before us, "like pageantry of ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... have them come and feed, And sing and flit about; Yet not where we have dropped the seed, To ...
— Gems Gathered in Haste - A New Year's Gift for Sunday Schools • Anonymous
... her aunt with wonder which savored of horror, but she heard the door close and saw Lily flit back across the yard with a feeling of immeasurable relief. Then she heard her aunt's voice at her door, opened a ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... to the places where I should best obtain all that I sought. Needless to say, he became my slave—never was monarch better served than I—the very waiters hustled each other in a race to attend upon me, and reports of my princely fortune, generosity, and lavish expenditure, began to flit from mouth to month—which was the result I ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... athwart the clear blue sky. The dust and foulness which the night has hidden stand revealed. But in the forests and hills the pulses of nature beat fresh and full; the leopard and the tiger slink away; the gay flowers open; the birds flit to and fro, and with woodland music welcome the rising day. In the city all forms of life quicken into active exercise. The trader sits ready on his stall; the judge is on the bench; the physician allays pain; ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... given case, or with reference to the policy of the department, "where we were at." I do not mean talk for publication. It is a common mistake of people who know nothing about the newspaper profession that reporters flit about public men like so many hawks, seizing upon what they can find to publish as their lawful prey. No doubt there are such guerrillas, and they have occasionally more than justified their existence; ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... Does the woodpecker flit round the young ferash? Does grass clothe a new-built wall? Is she under thirty, the woman who holds a boy in ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... other, heartily, as he eyed the boy; and perhaps a dim suspicion that he might find the fugitive valuable as a guide began to flit through ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... the great lateen swinging lazily under the pressure of those light airs that flit to and fro over the islands at evening and sunrise. All the arts of civilization have as yet failed to approach the easiest of all modes of progression and conveyance—sailing on a light breeze. For here is speed without friction, passage through the air without opposition, for it ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... Derek watched her flit down the aisle, saw her jump up the little ladder onto the stage, watched her vanish into the swirl of the dance. He reached for a cigarette, opened his case, and found it empty. He uttered a mirthless, Byronic laugh. The thing seemed ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... or haunted only by those whose business—whether for good or evil—forced them out of doors, he met no one and saw no lights. The man's mind was evidently filled with pleasant thoughts, for ever and anon a smile would flit across his face, as though he dwelt upon the surprised look of his daughter when she would behold him. These agreeable anticipations, which had taken the place for the moment of the sterner purposes which ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... letter. Here there are lots of funny little lizards that run about in the dusty roads very fast, and then stand still with their heads up. Beautiful red cardinal birds and tanagers flit about in the woods, and the flowers are lovely. But you never saw such dust. Sometimes I lie on the ground outside and sometimes in the tent. I have a mosquito net because there are so ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... or given warning, on account of the governesses, than from any other cause. In the drawing-room they are a check upon conversation; in the school-room, if they do their duty, they are the cause of discontent, pouting and tears; like the bat, they are neither bird nor beast, and they flit about the house like ill-omens; they lose the light-heartedness and spring of youth; become sour from continual vexation and annoyance, and their lives are miserable, tedious, and full of repining. I tell ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... misfortunes like its own; among whom it was its hard fate frequently to suffer imposition, from assumed worth and fictitious distress. Beings of supposed benevolence, capable of perceiving, loving, and promoting merit and virtue, have now and then seemed to flit and glide before it. But the visions were deceitful. Ere they were distinctly seen, the phantoms vanished. Or, if such beings do exist, it has experienced the peculiar hardship of never having met with any, in whom both the purpose and the power were fully united. Therefore, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... done honestly by, even if she is of humble station. 'Tis best, and cheapest too, in the long run.' The coachman was apparently imagining the dove about to flit away to be one of the pretty maid-servants that abounded in Enckworth Court; such escapades as these were not unfrequent among them, a fair face having been deemed a sufficient recommendation to service in that house, without ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... do not encourage the motorist, and are impassable for heavy lorries. So incredible weights and bundles are moved on hand-barrows; and bales of goods and stacks of produce are punted down the dark waterways which give to parts of Tokyo a Venetian picturesqueness. Passengers, too proud to walk, flit past noiselessly in rubber-tyred rickshaws—which are not, as many believe, an ancient and typical Oriental conveyance, but the modern invention of an English missionary called Robinson. The hum of the ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... ranged in the same class, because they are, in many respects, very similar in their appearance; but bats, papa, seem so extremely different. They are a great deal more like birds than man. They have wings, you know, and flit ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... The blessed One, made perfect? Why, by grief— The fellowship of voluntary grief— He read the tear-stained book of poor men's souls, As we must learn to read it. Lady! lady! Wear but one robe the less—forego one meal— And thou shalt taste the core of many tales, Which now flit past thee, like a minstrel's songs, The ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... maliciously, "pardon me if I caution you. Yet in truth if veiled ladies flit thus through your apartments in the light of day, it will reach the ears of the holy but violent Issachar, of whose doings I come to speak. Then, Prince, I tremble ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... she had made up her mind that she would be the Prince's legal wife, and no light-o'-love to be petted and flung aside when he chose, butterfly-like, to flit to some other flower; and this she made abundantly clear to Henry Frederick. Her favours—after a period of coquetry and coy reluctance—were at his disposal; but the price to be paid for them was a wedding-ring—nothing less. ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... horses had slowed down to a walk, the heavy sand retarding progress. It was a gloomy, depressing scene in the spectral gray light, a wide circle of intense loneliness, unbroken by either dwarfed shrub or bunch of grass, a barren expanse stretching to the sky. Vague cloud shadows seemed to flit across the level surface, assuming fantastic shapes, but all of the same dull coloring, imperfect and unfinished. Nothing seemed tangible or real, but rather some grotesque picture of delirium, ever merging into another yet more hideous. The very ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... put Shakespeare in the dock for murder, Milton for blasphemy, Scott for forgery, and Goethe for questionable financial deals with the devil. Byron's sins were as scarlet and the number not a few, but the moths that came just to flit about the flame were all of mature age. Byron set no snares for the innocent, and in all of the man's misdoings, he himself ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... blossoms Such different hues? And the waves of the sea Such a number of blues? So many soft greens Flit over the trees? And little gray shadows Fly ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... to discharge a duty in the face of his own scepticism that he had spoken thus, and he did not expect to see another shade of sadness flit across ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... neighbor, Grieg, he is never mincing and meretricious. We never find him languishing in a pretty boudoir. He is always out under the sky. It is only that he is not always free and resourceful and deeply self-critical. Even through the bold and rugged and splendid Violin Concerto there flit at moments the shadows of Beethoven and Wagner and Tchaikowsky. The first theme of the quartet "Voces intimae" resembles not a little a certain theme in "Boris." The close of "Nightride and Sunrise" is watered ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... as much for the present time, and assure posterity that there never was such a lamb as Catherine II., and that, so far from assassinating her own husband and Czar Ivan,[2] she wept over every chicken that she had for dinner. How crimes, like fashions, flit from clime to clime! Murder reigns under the Pole, while you, who are in the very town where Catherine de' Medici was born, and within a stone's throw of Rome, where Borgia and his holy father sent cardinals to the other ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... don't see each other often," the old fairy woman had said. "You flit in like, and flit away again as if you was a butterfly, I think sometimes when I'm sitting here alone. When you come to stay you're mostly flitting about the wood and I only see you bit by bit. But I couldn't tell you, Miss, my dear, what it's ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... blue, the sun is often fiercely hot; you could not perhaps prove that the pathetic radiance is not an efflux of your own consciousness that summer is but hanging over the land, briefly poising on wings which flit at the first dash of rain, and will soon vanish in long retreat before the snow. But somehow, from without or from within, that light ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Manchester, when Nanette slept so contentedly and Henry Rayne smoked in moody silence by the fire-place in the hotel parlor. When we become interested again, it is a clear, bright day, blue and white threads of filmy loveliness flit along the sky, a soft, gentle breeze is blowing, and over the restless waves of the broad Atlantic the "Parisian" is skipping gracefully. She is nearing the port, and many are the anxious, weary faces that turn landward with a sigh upon ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... will be beautiful!" cried Patty, jumping up and dancing about the room; "but I must flit, girls,—I have an engagement at five. Wait, what about motors? I'm sure we can ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... midst of strangers, you do feel rather melancholy. You try to read, and when you are tired of chasing the words up and down the page, you look out of the window and admire the scenery as you flit past until your eyes ache to such an extent you are obliged to withdraw your gaze and be satisfied with the study of human nature, as far as it can be procured from the inmates of your compartment. Finally you go to sleep, only to wake up after a few minutes, to find the eyes of all ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... feet, nor hearing the rattle of the exploding shells. He flew rather than ran, stumbled over charred roots, fell, picked himself up again and darted onward, looking neither to the right nor to the left, almost with closed eyes. Now and then, as from a train window, he saw a pale, troubled face flit by. Once it seemed to him he heard a man moaning for water. But he wished to hear nothing, to see nothing. He ran on, blind and deaf, without stopping, driven by the terror of that bad, reproachful, ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... cast. All over the camp the lights glimmer in the tents, and as I sit at my desk in the open doorway, there come mingled sounds of stir and glee. Boys laugh and shout,—a feeble flute stirs somewhere in some tent, not an officer's,—a drum throbs far away in another,—wild kildeer-plover flit and wail above us, like the haunting souls of dead slavemasters,—and from a neighboring cook-fire comes the monotonous sound of that strange festival, half powwow, half prayer-meeting, which they know only as a "shout." These ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... proclaiming the festival of the ensuing day. The ravine was overshadowed by fig-trees, vines, and myrtles, and the outer towers and walls of the fortress. It was dark and lonely, and the twilight-loving bats began to flit about. At length the soldier halted at a remote and ruined tower apparently intended to guard a Moorish aqueduct. He struck the foundation with the butt-end of his spear. A rumbling sound was heard, and the solid stones ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... confidently, but Virginia was put into great agitation. She began to flit about the room like a moth, wringing her hands ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... will see more than that. First, with the instinctive selfishness of human nature, you will recognize your own future habitation; perhaps your eye will mark the identical spot where the body you love must lie through all seasons and weathers, through the slow centuries that will flit so fast for you, till the crash of doom. It is good that you should think of that, although it makes you shudder. The English churchyard takes the place of the Egyptian mummy at the feast, or the slave in the Roman conqueror's ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... hears a sound of timbrels, and suddenly appear A troop of ruddy damsels and herdsmen drawing near: They reach the castle greensward, and gayly dance across; The white sleeves flit and glimmer, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... your wife ran away with a soldier that day, And took with her your trifle of money; Bless your heart, they don't mind - they're exceedingly kind - They don't blame you - as long as you're funny! It's a comfort to feel If your partner should flit, Though YOU suffer a deal, THEY don't mind it a bit - They don't blame you - ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... deep; Thou hast not sailed in Indian seas, Where scent comes forth in every breeze. Thou hast not seen the rich grape grow For miles, as far as eyes can go; Thou hast not seen a summer's night When maids could sew by a worm's light; Nor the North Sea in spring send out Bright hues that like birds flit about In solid cages of white ice— Sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Love-one-place. Thou hast not seen black fingers pick White cotton when the bloom is thick, Nor heard black throats in harmony; Nor hast thou sat on stones ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... Touggourt exactly know, so far as I am aware. But, alas! even Aghas are sometimes human, and play pitch and toss with magical things. As Grand Dukes who go to disport themselves in Paris sometimes hie them incognito to the "Cafe de la Sorciere," so do Aghas flit occasionally to Touggourt, and appear upon the high benches of the great dancing-house of the Ouled Nails in the outskirts of the city. And Halima was young and beautiful. Her eyes were large, and she wore a golden crown ...
— Halima And The Scorpions - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... which the lily blooms," he muses as he issues out of the forest and reaches the top of the mountain, "to the cliffs round which the eagles flit,—what a glorious promontory! What a contrast at this height, in this immensity, between the arid rocky haunts of the mountain bear and eagle and the spreading, vivifying verdure surrounding the haunts of man. On one side ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Bay when he returned above decks to lean on the rail, watching the shores flit by, marking with a little wonder the rapid change in temperature, the growing mildness in the air as the steamer drew farther away from the gorge-like head of Toba with its aerial ice fields and snowy slopes. Twenty miles below Salmon Bay the island-dotted area of the Gulf ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the single figures melt into the dusk, until only an obscure stir and coming and going of black clusters is visible upon the loch. A little longer, and the first torch is kindled and begins to flit rapidly across the ice in a ring of yellow reflection, and this is followed by another and another, until the whole field is full ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... forward a few feet, then his mouth flew open, but no sound came out. Had he seen a white streak flit across the snow? He had. ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... 156). This careful and conscientious recognition of the duty of having ordered opinions, and of responsibility for these opinions being both as true and as consistent with one another as taking pains with his mind could make them, distinguished Mr. Mill from the men who flit aimlessly from doctrine to doctrine, as the flies of a summer day dart from point to point in the vacuous air. It distinguished him also from those sensitive spirits who fling themselves down from the heights of rationalism suddenly into the pit ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... 'Tis said, an operator of the first class can always procure work, but there are times when even the best of them are on their uppers. For instance, when winter's chill blasts sweep across the hills and dales of the north, like swarms of swallows, operators flit southwards to warmer climes, and for this reason the supply is often greater than ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... hydrogen, by which, in accordance with the most ordinary natural laws, you would not only rise to the ceiling and float there in quasi-angelic posture, but perhaps, as one of your feminine adepts is said to have done, flit swifter than train or telegram to "still-vexed Bermoothes," and twit Ariel, if he happens to be there, for a sluggard? We have not the presumption to deny the possibility of anything you affirm; only, as our brethren are particular about evidence, do give us as much to go upon as may ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... I am so proud, I heard one day With endless schemes If I allowed A gentleman say Both good and new My family pride That criminals who For Titipu; To be my guide, Are cut in two But if I flit, I'd volunteer Can hardly feel The benefit To quit this sphere The fatal steel, That I'd diffuse Instead of you And so are slain The town would lose! In a minute or two, Without much pain. Now every man But family ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... like Parsons; they think nobly of the Universe, and believe in Souls and Eternal Happiness. And some of them, I am told, believe in Angels—that there are Angels who guide our footsteps, and flit to and fro unseen on errands in the ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... bay affords a daily delight, although Christchurch and Poole are the nearest real harbours. At the close of a summer's day, when sea and sky and shore are enveloped in soft mist, nothing can be more delightful than to flit with a favouring wind past the picturesque Chines, or by the white cliffs of Studland. The water in the little inlets and bays lies still and blue, but out in the dancing swirl of waters set up by the sunken rocks at the base of a headland, all the colours of the rainbow seem ...
— Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch • Sidney Heath
... knew that there were plenty of living men only biding their time and waiting their opportunity. It was only night that these people desired; a good black night so that no one could see them flit about. You felt in the small of your back as you rode along that ugly faces were looking at you from the silent houses, and that at any moment shots might ring out suddenly and bear you to the ground. But that was merely a preliminary ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... the whole day through; Stars rise for them, and moons grow large And lessen in such tranquil wise As joys and sorrows do that rise Within their nature's sheltered marge; Their hours into each other flit, Like the leaf-shadows of the vine And fig-tree under which they sit; And their still lives to heaven incline With an unconscious habitude, Unhistoried as smokes that rise From happy hearths and sight elude In kindred blue ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... side on the balcony above the public square, withdrew quietly to his own apartments. The casement of his closet stood wide, and he leaned against the window-frame, looking out on the silent radiance of the gardens. As he stood there he saw two figures flit across the farther end of one of the long alleys. The moonlight surrendered them for a moment, the shade almost instantly reclaiming them—strayed revellers, doubtless, escaping from the lights and music of the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... a French name, and his son after him, but no Chippewa of pure blood and name looked habitually as he did into those whirlpools called the chutes, where the slip of a paddle meant death. Yet nobody feared the rapids. It was common for boys and girls to flit around near shore in birch canoes, balancing themselves and expertly ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... "If I were a stenographer in your office I would think that I was making a fairly good start; but I happen to be the daughter of Alexander Strong living in my own home with my only sister, who can afford to flit like the flittingest of social butterflies from one party to another as well dressed as, and better dressed than, the Great General Average. You have known us, John, ever since Eileen sat in the sun to dry her handmade curls, while I was leaving a piece of my dress on every busk in Multiflores ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... The sunbeams round thee flit, So merry the minutes go by, go by, While fast thy fingers fly, ...
— Rhymes Old and New • M.E.S. Wright
... Sometimes, wildly as she struggled against such thoughts, there would come to Olive's fancy dreams of what her life might have been. The holiness of lovers' love, of wedded love, of mother-love, would at times flit before her imagination; and her heart, still warm, still young, trembled to picture the lonely old age, the hearth blank and silent, the utter isolation from all those natural ties whose place not even ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... roaring with the terrific thunder of its own vitality, this hall in which no common voice could make itself heard produced nevertheless an effect of magical stillness, silence, and solitude. We were alone in it, save that now and then in the far-distant spaces a figure might flit and disappear between the huge glinting columns of metal. It was a hall enchanted and inexplicable. I understood nothing of it. But I understood that half the electricity of New York was being generated by its engines of a hundred and fifty thousand horse-power, ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... he." So I went on into the wood, still hoping to find, in some one of its mysterious recesses, my lost lady of the marble. The sunny afternoon died into the loveliest twilight. Great bats began to flit about with their own noiseless flight, seemingly purposeless, because its objects are unseen. The monotonous music of the owl issued from all unexpected quarters in the half-darkness around me. The glow-worm ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... to London, and did pretty well for a bit; Then the business dropped to nothing, and the manager took a flit,— Stepped off one Sunday morning, forgetting the treasury call; But our luck was in, and we managed right on our feet ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... toiling at the work they loved. They took no pattern from the houses of men, but each man wrought what his inner eye had seen and carved in marble the visions of his dream. All over the roof of one of the palace chambers winged lions flit like bats, the size of every one is the size of the lions of God, and the wings are larger than any wing created; they are one above the other more than a man can number, they are all carven out of one block of marble, the chamber itself is hollowed from it, and it is borne aloft upon the ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... keeper at Whitby Saw a couple of Zeppelins flit by; Though she felt a sharp sting, It's a curious thing That she never knew which she ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... still intervene, And all my comfort flies; Like Noah's dove, I flit between Rough seas and stormy skies. Anon the clouds depart, The wind and waters cease, While sweetly o'er my gladdened heart Expands the bow of peace; Bow of peace, bow of peace, Expands the ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... the world at midsummer only makes my loneliness more keen. The butterflies flit through the meadows like wandering souls of last year's flowers that died and were buried by the snow. The harvest moon, red-gold and wonderful, will rise slowly up out of the sea. The path of light will lie on the still ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... read by another person, without an inward struggle?—In mere passive silent reading the thoughts remain mere thoughts, and these too not our own,—phantoms with no attribute of place, no sense of appropriation, that flit over the consciousness as shadows over the grass or young corn in an April day. But even the sound of our own or another's voice takes them out of that lifeless, twilight, realm of thought, which is the confine, the 'intermundium', as it were, of existence and ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... a step forward; there was a sharp report, and he staggered back. "Flit?" cried Mr Preddle, excitedly. "Yes, but not hurt," replied Mr Frewen. "The bullet struck my collar, and it was like something giving me a ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... Fitz, who from your suburb grange Where once I tarried for a while, Glance at the wheeling Orb of change And greet it with a kindly smile; Whom yet I see, as there you sit Beneath your sheltering garden tree, And watch your doves about you flit And plant on shoulder, hand and knee, Or on your head their rosy feet, As if they knew your diet spares Whatever moved in that full sheet Let down to ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the despair and joy of Ethan Frome. The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches. The fact that he had no right to show his feelings, and thus provoke the expression of hers, made him attach a fantastic importance to every change in her look and tone. Now ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... of absolute indifference to her whether he loved her or not, so long as he was at hand to take her about. And she didn't intend to encourage him, either. Love meant ties and responsibility—Alice proved that clearly enough. There was plenty of time for love. Let her flit first. Let her remain young as long as she could, careless and care-free. The fact that she was married was just an accident, an item in her adventure. It didn't make her less young to be married, and she didn't see why it should. Martin understood, and that was why ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... two. Kitty—nervous without being sensitive, temperamental without temperament, a woman who seemed to flit and never light—and Roxanne, who was as young as spring night, and summed up in her own ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... her agents and her spies, Gliding through temples, baths, and theatres; Possess all angles, corners, noonday halts, And darknesses; they flit with casual poison Softly; the city secretly is filled With murmurs, lifted eyebrows, and with sighs. The mischief's in the very blood of Rome Unless the sore that feeds it is ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... that house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom, And flit from room ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... every now and then as a form that I loved glided amongst them, but even that form dragged after it a chain of painful, fettering considerations, and the gleams of light that it threw round it were only like those weak, pallid flashes of sun that flit through the clouds of thunder ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... in that enchanting time when men are still asleep in their nests, and even "My Lord Sun" has not arisen from his; when the air is sweet and fresh, and as free from the dust of man's coming and going as if his tumults did not exist. It was so still that the flit of a wing was almost startling. The water lapped softly against the shore; ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... dust and heat of the Piazza one comes into a cool cloister that surrounds a quadrangle open to the sky, in which a cypress still lives. The sun fills the garden with a golden beauty, in which the butterflies flit from flower to flower over the dead. I do not know a place more silent or more beautiful. One lingers in the cool shadow of the cloisters before many an old marble,—a vase carved with Bacchanalian women, the head of Achilles, or the bust ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... INTELLECTUAL, one lays himself liable to the accusation of having forsaken democracy. For all that, "fundamental brainwork" is behind every respect-worthy piece of writing, whether it be a lightsome lyric that seems as careless as a redbird's flit or a formal epic, an impressionistic essay or a great novel that measures the depth of human destiny. Nonintellectual literature is as nonexistent as education without mental discipline, or as "character building" in a school that is slovenly in scholarship. Billboards along the highways ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... torment until the dawn, haunted her during the day. She would read in her room, or remain at her prayers, in the hopes of distracting herself from the struggle, until sleep seemed the supreme necessity: then, when she lay down, sleep would flap its wings in mockery and flit away, leaving her wide-awake staring at the darkness of the room or of her own eyelids, until the windows began to glimmer and the cocks to ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... displaying their rich white and chestnut plumage to perfection. Now they chase each other for very joyfulness, uttering their sharp twittering notes; then they hover with expanded wings like miniature Kestrels, or dart downwards with the velocity of the sparrowhawk; anon they flit rapidly over the neighboring pool, occasionally dipping themselves in its calm and placid waters, and leaving a long train of rings marking their varied course. How easily they turn, or glide over the surrounding ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [March 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... Mohoro river, monkeys slide down the ropes formed by parasitic plants that hang from the tree branches, to dip their hands in the water to drink; only to flee, chattering to the tree-tops, as they meet the gaze of apparently slumbering crocodiles. Great painted butterflies flit above the beds of lilies that fringe the muddy lagoons, the hippopotamus wallows lazily in the warm sunlit waters. Here, it is true, is the Equatorial Africa of our schoolboy dreams; and the birds have little but their glittering plumage to ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... inhabitants. Some "seem to take us into the dense forest among mocking echoes from, the life outside; others show us the trolls tobogganing down the highest peaks of Norway; in some we feel human souls hovering over reefs; in others, memories of the old sun-lit land flit before us; but in none do we meet with sentimentalism, despondency, or disconsolateness." But with their weird and minor strains, and their odd jumps from low tones to high, on first acquaintance they strike the ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... in the convulsions of death, and will be registered by the destroying angel! May a form like this draw thy curtain when thou sleepest, and grasp thee with its clay-cold hand! May a form like this flit before thy soul when thou diest, and drive away thy expiring prayer for mercy! May a form like this stand by thy grave at the resurrection, and before the throne of God when he pronounces thy doom! (He faints, the servants receive him ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... that is, whenever he could catch her, a smiling rosy, dimple-cheeked little girl, whom he called "Fanny," and the rest of the party "Lady Frances." It was a pretty sight to see her break away from them all, and flit about the ruins and through the dark tangled alleys of the groves, like a bird on the wing. She laughingly skipped up and down the Witches' Staircase with the rest, but she lingered longest in the haunted cave, looking about her wistfully, as though she expected to see the enchanted ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... a scrap of cambric, dried her eyes like magic, and began to flit about the garden, humming a light air under her breath. Her dress was of an old-fashioned sort of book-muslin—it was made full and billowy; her figure was round and yet lithe, her hair was a mass of frizzy soft rings, and when the dimples played in her ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... the faces of our friends Unfamiliar traits she lends— Quaint, white witch, who looketh down With a glamour all her own. Hushed are laughter, jest, and speech, Mute and heedless each of each, In the glory wan we sit, Visions vague before us flit; Side by side, yet worlds apart, Heart becometh ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... troop—stranded on the Island of Calypso. After some mention of the fate of the other Greeks, Jupiter decrees that Ulysses shall return to Ithaca, where many suitors are besieging his wife Penelope. In obedience with this decree, Pallas (Minerva) dons golden sandals—which permit her to flit with equal ease over land and sea—and visits Ithaca, where Ulysses' son, Telemachus, mournfully views the squandering of his father's wealth. Here she is hospitably received, and, after some conversation, urges Telemachus to visit the courts of Nestor and Menelaus to inquire ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... bright rays athwart the clear blue sky. The dust and foulness which the night has hidden stand revealed. But in the forests and hills the pulses of nature beat fresh and full; the leopard and the tiger slink away; the gay flowers open; the birds flit to and fro, and with woodland music welcome the rising day. In the city all forms of life quicken into active exercise. The trader sits ready on his stall; the judge is on the bench; the physician allays pain; the mother tends ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... witness to such sacrilege. "That OLD man!" he raved. And when I said I was not a young girl myself he got all the madder. Well, I allowed him to think I was going to marry Dr. Denbigh (I wonder what the doctor would say), and as a consequence Harry will flit to-morrow, and he is with poor little Peggy out in the grape-arbor, and she is crying her eyes out. If he dares tell her what a fool he is I could kill him. I am horribly afraid that he will let it out, for I never saw such an alarmingly impetuous youth. Young Lochinvar ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... recently my pilot and I nearly had to do this, but were just able to glide across a small salient. I am thus qualified to describe a typical series of incidents preceding the announcement, "one of our machines is missing," and I do so in the hope that this may interest you, madam, as you flit from town to country, country to town, ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... was not silent. His box was on the stage; and ever and anon the syren shot a glance which seemed to tell him that he was marked out amid this brilliant multitude. Each round of applause, each roar of ravished senses, only added a more fearful action to the wild purposes which began to flit about his Grace's mind. His imagination was touched. His old passion to be distinguished returned in full force. This creature was strange, mysterious, celebrated. Her beauty, her accomplishments, were as singular and as rare as ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... he spoke he saw a strange expression flit across her face. The next instant she rose and going across to her husband's chair stood looking down upon him with ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Bunratty, that moths and butterflies come to life by shaking themselves out, one fine day, from a dull-looking, shapeless, ugly thing they call a grub, in which they have been buried for a long time. They unfold their wings and fly out in the sunshine, and flit from flower to flower, and they look beautiful and happy—the world, the wicked world, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... from which they kept one detachment in check. Meanwhile, in our own quarter the fight raged furiously. A large body of Spaniards, slipping past O'Brien, came on again and again. We beat them back, but they gave us no rest. Our men began to fall, and once I saw a shade of anxiety flit across the colonel's face. It was gone in less than a second, but it confirmed my opinion that we could not hold ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... compromise with the tops of the boots, managed to protect also the lower half. His features were delicate, and would have been called handsome had they belonged to a proportionately delicate body; in his eyes hovered a dreamy vagueness which seemed to come and vanish, and to flit from one feature to another, suggesting the idea of remoteness, and a feeling of hopeless strangeness to the world and all ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the mad world seethes. Hansoms, like cantering beetles, with diamond eyes Run through the moons of it; busses in yellow and red Hoot; and St. Paul's is a bubble afloat in the skies, Watching the pale moths flit and ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... frugality the lights burn dim and low. But anon sounds the signal from the front of the house. Strike up the band; here comes a sucker! Somebody resembling ready money has arrived. The lights flash on, the can-canners take the floor, the garcons flit hither and yon, and all ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... moment of clever, double meanings; veils raised by words, as petticoats are lifted by the wind; tricks of language, cleverly disguised audacities; sentences which reveal nude images in covered phrases, which cause the vision of all that may not be said to flit rapidly before the eyes of the mind, and allow well-bred people the enjoyment of a kind of subtle and mysterious love, a species of impure mental contact, due to the simultaneous evocations of secret, shameful and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... kept saying to himself; "an' sic sma' white han's! an' sic a bonny flit! Eh hoo she wad glitter throu' the water in a bag net! Faith! gien she war to sing 'come doon' to me, I wad gang. Wad that be to lowse baith sowl an' body, I wonner? I'll see what Maister Graham says to that. It's a fine question to put till 'im: 'Gien a body was to gang wi' a mermaid, ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... was borne to be healed of his hurts. With straining eyes the fisherman watches the mist-wrapped islet, and, peering through the evening haze, cheats himself into the belief that giant forms are moving upon its shores and that spectral shapes flit across its sands—that the dark hours bring back the activities of the attendant knights and enchantresses of the mighty hero of Celtdom, who, refreshed by his long repose, will one day return to the world of men and right the ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... "We've certainly got a couple of hours before they find where we came out. Then, very likely, they'll start a fresh search for us among the ruined houses. That would give us a bit more pull in making a flit of it." ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... chirps in agony, when she might pass unnoticed by keeping still. The most marked exception which I have noticed is the Red Thrush, which, in this respect, as in others, has the most high-bred manners among all our birds: both male and female sometimes flit in perfect silence through the bushes, and show solicitude only in a sob which is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... mark for the rifles of the sportsmen and the sling-shots of small boys. As if sufficient attention were not attracted to it by its plumage, it must needs keep up a noisy, guttural rattle, ker-r-ruck, ker-r-ruck, very like a tree-toad's call, and flit about among the trees with the restlessness of a fly-catcher. Yet, in spite of these invitations for a shot to the passing gunner, it still multiplies in districts where nuts abound, being "more common than the robin" about Washington, ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... pit-pat from their burrows on the hill; Hangs within the gloom its weary head the shining daffodil. In the valley underneath us through the fragrance flit along Over fields and over hedgerows little quivering drops of song. All adown the pale blue mantle of the mountains far away Stream the tresses of the twilight flying in the wake of day. Night comes; ...
— By Still Waters - Lyrical Poems Old and New • George William Russell
... fury doubly keen, Fierce on the Deacon rush'd the raging Dean; Nor less the dauntless Deacon dare withstand The brandish'd weight of Toe's uplifted hand. [38]The ghost of themes departed, that, of yore, Disgraced alike, the Doctor praised or tore, On paper wings flit dimly through the night, And, hovering low in air, beheld the fight. Each ill-starr'd verse its filthy den forsakes, Black from the spit, or reeking from the jakes; The blot-stain'd troop their shadowy pages spread, And call for vengeance on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... than back flitted the bevy of girls again into the study, until the small room was full to overflowing. It was like seeing a company of fat bumble-bees, their portly bodies resplendent in black and gold, buzz heavily out of a room, and a gay flight of pale-blue and lemon butterflies flit back in their places. All the daughters fell upon their father, Margaret, Bridget, Isabel, Sarah, Mary, and Susanna; there they all were! tugging off his heavy riding-boots and gaiters, putting away the whip on the whip-rack, while little Mary perched herself proudly ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... thoughts from the most searching human eye, but this cannot be done on Mute. As a consequence each one can read the character of his comrades, and the normal citizen well knows what necessary allowance to make for the impure thoughts that flit through the ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... Indian seas, Where scent comes forth in every breeze. Thou hast not seen the rich grape grow For miles, as far as eyes can go; Thou hast not seen a summer's night When maids could sew by a worm's light; Nor the North Sea in spring send out Bright hues that like birds flit about In solid cages of white ice— Sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Love-one-place. Thou hast not seen black fingers pick White cotton when the bloom is thick, Nor heard black throats in harmony; Nor hast thou sat on stones that lie Flat on the earth, that once did rise To hide proud kings ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... spirits. The walking are the logicians: the winged are the instinctive and poetic. Natures that must always walk find many a bog, many a thicket, many a tangled brake, which God's happy little winged birds flit over by one noiseless flight. Nay, when a man has toiled till his feet weigh too heavily with the mud of earth to enable him to walk another step, these little birds will often cleave the air in a right line towards the bosom of God, and show the way where he could ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... the deep woods of Mexico, Where screams the "painted paraquet," And mocking-birds flit to and fro, With borrowed notes they half forget; Where brilliant flowers and poisonous vines Are mingled in a firm embrace, And the same gaudy plant entwines Some reptile of a poisonous race; Where spreads ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... chaplets on their head Of fresh woodbind, be such as never were To love untrue in word, in thought, nor deed, But ay steadfast; nor for pleasance, nor fear, Though that they should their heartes all to-tear,* *rend in pieces* Would never flit,* but ever were steadfast, *change *Till that their lives there asunder ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... have seen another spring In floral beauty rise, And happy birds on gladsome wing Flit through the azure skies. Though sickness bowed my feeble frame Through winter's cheerless hours, Life's sinking torch resumes its flame ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... properly quaint and amusing! Though your wife ran away with a soldier that day, And took with her your trifle of money; Bless your heart, they don't mind - they're exceedingly kind - They don't blame you - as long as you're funny! It's a comfort to feel If your partner should flit, Though YOU suffer a deal, THEY don't mind it a bit - They don't blame you - ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... earth; and to them is given a soul from among the stars, perfect in their form and alive with heavenly instincts, which complete with wondrous speed their rapid courses. Wherefore, my son, by you and by all just men that soul must be retained within its body's confines, nor can it be allowed to flit without command of him by whom it has been given to you. You may not escape the duty which God has trusted to you. Live, my Scipio, and shine with piety and justice, as your grandfather did and I have done. It is your duty to your parents and to your relatives, but especially ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... "I flit about, I skip, I roam Through houses past the telling, Through many a stately ducal home, And many a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... and make out the whole; and, had she plainly told this to Helen, it would have been better for all parties: but she continued to talk of the people they had seen, to hide her thoughts from Helen, who all the time felt as in a feverish dream, watching the lights of the carriage flit by like fiery eyes, while she thought only of the strange words she had heard and why they should have made Beauclerc ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... and teach it rather A tune to drown the ballads of thy father. For thou hast nought to cure his fame, But tune and noise, and eccho of his shame. A rogue by statute, censured to be whipt, Cropt, branded, flit, neck-flockt: go, you ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... bank an' brae are clad in green, An' scatter'd cowslips sweetly spring; By Girvan's fairy-haunted stream, The birdies flit on wanton wing; By Cassillis' banks, when e'ening fa's, There let my Mary meet wi' me, There catch her ilka glance o' love, The bonnie blink ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... impressed by the scene, but when he saw a shadowy figure flit between two of the wigwams, and was certain he heard a movement in the lodge behind him, he hastily concluded it was the time for action and not meditation. With a start that might have betrayed him, he quickly left his position and ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... swoln with blooms Like chrysalids impatient for the air, The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run Along the furrows, ants make their ado; Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark Soars up and up, shivering for very joy; Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek Their loves in wood and plain—and God ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... out a cigarette and was lighting it when he heard a swift, stealthy step close behind him. He dropped the match as he swung round, pushing back his canvas chair, and found his eyes dazzled by the sudden darkness. Still he thought he saw a shadow flit across the veranda and vanish into the mist. Next moment there were heavier footsteps, and a crash as a man fell over the projecting legs of the chair. The fellow rolled down the shallow stairs, dropping a pistol and then ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... be allowed so far to indulge the imagination, as to suppose a being entirely confined to the nether world—some 'dusky melancholy sprite,' like Umbriel, who could 'flit on sooty pinions to the central earth,' but who was never permitted to 'sully the fair face of light,' and emerge into the regions of water and of air; and if this being should busy himself in investigating the structure of the globe, he might frame theories the exact converse of those usually ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... will. Just as Parsifal, overcoming all resistance, drives away the guards of the castle and springs up on the ramparts, the magician waves his wand. He and his tower sink from view, and a beautiful garden appears, in which lovely damsels flit excitedly about in very scanty attire. After a few moments spent in motionless admiration of the scene before him, Parsifal springs down into the garden, where he is immediately surrounded by the fair nymphs. They pull him this way and that, tease and cajole him, ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... flies, From flower to flower, and loads her labouring thighs 490 With treasured sweets, robbing those flowers, which, left, Find not themselves made poorer by the theft, Their scents as lively, and their looks as fair, As if the pillager had not been there. Ne'er doth she flit on Pleasure's silken wing; Ne'er doth she, loitering, let the bloom of Spring Unrifled pass, and on the downy breast Of some fair flower indulge untimely rest; Ne'er doth she, drinking deep of those rich dews Which chemist Night prepared, that ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... awake a while, watching the sparks fly, and the shadows flit, feeling the cold wind on my face, listening to the crackle of the fire and the ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... two days Dr. Rauparaha had much writing to do, and passed his mornings and afternoons in the quiet library. Sometimes, as he wrote, a shadow would flit across the wide, sunlit veranda, and Helen Torringley would flit by, nodding pleasantly to him through the windows. Only two or three times had he met her alone since he came to Te Ariri, and walked with her through the grounds, listening ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... to dwell upon the years of youth. They are the sweetest in life; and these memories constitute most of the happiness of declining life. Incidents in our pilgrimage awaken the almost forgotten, and then how many, many memories flit through the mind, and what a melancholy pleasure fills the soul! We think, and think on, calling this and that memory up from the grave of forgetfulness, until all the past seems present, and we live over the bliss ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... clank of machinery makes the hills rumble, the hiss of steam and the sighs of the soldering-furnaces are like the complaint of some giant overgorging himself. The river swarms with the fleets of fish-boats, which skim outward with the dawn to flit homeward again at twilight and settle like a vast brood of white-winged gulls. Men let the hours go by unheeded, and forget ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... chrysalids impatient for the air, The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run Along the furrows, ants make their ado; Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark Soars up and up, shivering for very joy; Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing gulls Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek Their loves in wood and plain—and God renews ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... the panes, the wind blew tempestuously: "One lies there," I thought, "who will soon be beyond the war of earthly elements. Whither will that spirit—now struggling to quit its material tenement—flit ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... began to dance, and flit about the studio, like an incarnate sprite of jollity, pausing at last on the extremity of one toe, as if that were the only portion of himself whereby his frisky nature could come in contact with the earth. The effect in that shadowy chamber, whence the artist had so ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... say, what nymph will prize the flame Which seems, as marshy vapours move, To flit along from dame to dame, ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... the street! Well I know it, as is meet! Did he not, before her face, Seek to brand me with disgrace? From the chiselled lips of wit Let the fire-flakes lightly flit, Scorching as the snow that fell On the damned in Dante's hell? With keen-worded opposition, playful, merciless precision, Mocking the romance of Youth, Standing on the sphere of Truth, He on worldly wisdom's plane Rolled ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... Limpid pool, Golden notes from sunset's lute For shadows Draped in green With purple feet To dance and swim Through irridescent undulatings. Dusk descends; Mauve cloudlets— Dying butterflies— Flit and fly and die In the opalescent ocean of mist That grows dark and still, Kisses away the last gold From the brow of the hills; Till the coral crescent With its wand of breeze Makes silver ripple-music On the ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... huddled together in groups to withstand the buffeting of winter winds; and here Sylvia sat within a rocky nest she knew, during many a happy solitary hour, watching the sword-fishers go out or return, and the smaller mackerel boats flit lightly ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... said: "Forgive me, Mr. Carrollton. I sent Gritty home on purpose to see if you would be annoyed, for I felt vexed because you would not humor my whim and meet me at the bridge. I am sorry I caused you any uneasiness," she continued, as she saw a shadow flit over his ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... the Northmen may here be closed. Borne along by the living current of events, we leave them behind, high up on the remoter channels of the stream. Their terrible ravens shall flit across our prospect no more. They have taken wing to their native north, where they may croak yet a little while over the cold and crumbling altars of Odin and Asa Thor. The bright light of the Gospel has penetrated even to those last haunts of Paganism, and the fierce ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... numerous birds that flit through the trees as visitors, or else stay with us and nest in secluded places, how comparatively few do we really depend upon for the aerial colour and the song that opens a glimpse of Eden to our eager eyes and ears each year, ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... tales of treasure and wonder; and if France does not make haste she will find herself one of the least among European Powers. Besides, let us build up a nation in the New World, and we may have some more fighting. The rumours of war that flit up and down in France are mere woman's talk. My blade is rusting in the scabbard, and now that the Emperor and King Francis are complimenting each other like two schoolgirls, it is long likely to remain so. But in the New World there will be a glorious opportunity for a struggle with Spain. ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... musician, as well as the student of aesthetics, will do well to examine by what means these various effects are produced. In the second nocturne, F sharp major, the brightness and warmth of the world without have penetrated into the world within. The fioriture flit about as lightly as gossamer threads. The sweetly-sad longing of the first section becomes more disquieting in the doppio movimento, but the beneficial influence of the sun never quite loses its power, and after a little there is a relapse into the calmer mood, with a close like a hazy ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... see neither anxious faces nor bent shoulders there. Our people walk upright, as becomes free men. Then, through the long winter, when the snow lies firm and white, and the wheat crop has been hauled in, you can hear the jingling sleigh teams flit across the prairie from homestead to homestead under the cloudless blue. The settlers enjoy themselves when their work is done—and ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... the wonder flit, Or heart's desire of her, all earth in it. We saw the heavens fling down their rose; On rapturous waves we saw her glide; The pearly sea-shell half enclose; The shoal of sea-nymphs flush the tide; And ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of outraged honor in the person of the "no-good husband" bursting in on games of cards with wild charges which only the payment of big money could suppress—suppress you understand, purely for the sake of the lady: outraged honor could accept no atonement. Then the lady would flit for the winter to those beauty doctors of Paris and New York, who operate on wrinkles and lay up muniments for fresh campaigns; and the "colonel" would betake himself to resorts where balm is accorded wounded honour; while loose-mouthed, simple-eyed young fellows went East for the winter ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... with men, and with the thoughts of men, 60 I held but slight communion; but instead, My joy was in the wilderness,—to breathe The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,[131] Where the birds dare not build—nor insect's wing Flit o'er the herbless granite; or to plunge Into the torrent, and to roll along On the swift whirl of the new-breaking wave Of river-stream, or Ocean, in their flow.[132] In these my early strength exulted; or To follow through ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... throbs with youthful pain at the glance of your eyes, the ascetic lays the fruit of his austerities at your feet, the songs of poets hum and swarm round the perfume of your presence. Your feet, as in careless joy they flit on, wound even the heart of the hollow wind with the tinkle ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... Some flit through our hearts like birds darting under the foliage of trees, then out again, lost in the sunshine; others linger awhile and we nestle them in our bosoms until we forget that they are there, and ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... made of right soldierly stuff; but he felt a distinct shiver flit along his back. His past life had not lacked thrilling adventures and strangely varied experiences with desperate men. Usually he met sudden emergencies rather calmly, sometimes with phlegmatic indifference. This passionate ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... There's no use of you tryin' to discourage me, because I'm gonna buy a car. Here I am makin' all kinds of money and I might as well be a bum!—no automobile or nothin'. I should have had a car long ago; all the big leaguers own their own tourin' cars. There's no class to you any more, if you don't flit from place to place in your ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... process of reasoning, and was simply obliged to accept the fact and give up trying to solve the riddle. He found himself dragged into society and courted, wondered at and envied very much as if he were one of those foreign barbers who flit over here now and then with a self-conferred title of nobility and marry some rich fool's absurd daughter. Sometimes at a dinner party or a reception he would find himself the centre of interest, and feel unutterably uncomfortable ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... I want to talk to him, or I'll simply flit back to Eros, and thank him much for a pretty retainer that didn't do him any good but gave me a nice profit ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Persistently, and do it with a will: The greater part keep wavering to and fro, And now all right, and now all wrong they go. Prisons, we all remember, oft would wear Three rings at once, then show his finger bare; First he'd be senator, then knight, and then In an hour's time a senator again; Flit from a palace to a crib so mean, A decent freedman scarce would there be seen; Now with Athenian wits he'd make his home, Now live with scamps and profligates at Rome; Born in a luckless hour, when every face Vertumnus wears was pulling a grimace. Shark Volanerius tried ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... length relieved; a rude folding-door opened opposite, and showed a low dim sitting-room beyond, from which there rose a few steps to the entrance of my chamber. On these appeared, not, alas! the fancied visitant who was to flit about my bedside, and mix her bright presence with my dreams, but stately and severe, with a pale cheek and compressed lip, her ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... grave the robin sings, And swarms of bright and happy things Flit all about with sunlit wings, But I am cheerless, Rosaline! The violets in the hillock toss, The gravestone is o'ergrown with moss; For nature feels not any loss, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... the after-math of fat wheat-fields, where float like myriad little nets of silver gauze the webs of the crafty weavers, and where a whole world of winged small folk flit from tree-top to tree-top of the low weeds. They are all mine—these Kentucky wheat-fields. After the owner has taken from them his last sheaf I come in and gather my harvest also—one that he did not see, ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... spoke; and amongst other labels on his baggage was one marked Khartoum. His hands were sinewy and his face was bronzed, while his eyes, brown and deep-set, held in them the glint of the desert places of the earth: the mark of the jungle where birds flit through the shadows like bars of glorious colour; the mark of the swamp where the ague mists lie dank and stagnant in the rays of ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... easier or a pleasanter height to climb than the Motterone, if, in Italian heat, you can endure the disappointment of seeing the summit, as you ascend, constantly flit away to a farther station. It seems to throw its head back, like a laughing senior when children struggle up for kissings. The party of five had come through the vines from Stresa and from Baveno. The mountain was strange ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "should any one be interested in my stories any more than in the thousand and one stories published this year? Mine are among the number of trivial things that compose the tedium which we call life." His thoughts will flit back over the past, and his own life will seem hardly more real than the day's work on the easel if he be a painter, on the secretaire if he be a writer. He will seem to himself like a horse going round and round a well. ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... on knowledge, and could convict him most triumphantly of a barbarian ignorance. Up and down they wandered, and she gave him eyes, whether for Artemis, or Aphrodite, or Apollo, or still more for the significant and troubling art of the Renaissance, French and Italian. She would flit before him, perching here and there like a bird, and quivering through and through ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... glass. But it is usually impossible for one on the ground to see the finest blooms, which turn their faces to the sunlight above the canopy of green. Gray apes chatter in the tree-tops; strange tropic birds of gorgeous plumage flit from bough to bough, monstrous reptiles slip silently through the undergrowth; insects buzz in swarms above the putrid swamps; occasionally the jungle crashes beneath the tread of some heavy animal—a rhinoceros, perhaps, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... eye, cunning hand, ready brain, broad back, and warm heart; in want of a wife mayhap; a man that can earn his own bread and another's;—half a dozen others' when the half dozen come? Would not that be a good sort of lodger? Such a question as that too did flit, just flit, across the widow's sleepless mind. But then she thought so much more of the wolf! Wolves, she had taught herself to think, were more common ...
— The Courtship of Susan Bell • Anthony Trollope
... to her bed, leaving the lamp burning on the table; but its gloomy light, instead of dispelling her fear, assisted it; for, by its uncertain rays, she almost fancied she saw shapes flit past her curtains and glide into the remote obscurity of her chamber.—The castle clock struck one before she closed her ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... in time to see several gray forms flit rapidly between the bushes. He stepped to the edge of the road, and saw some wolves spring out through the bushes, and go straight ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... in an amiable person, who is fairer than the children of men, who is all love, and hath no spot in him. Is it not a sweet word, a Redeemer to captives, a Saviour to sinners? And will not the soul rise up, and go forth out of itself? And will it not choose to flit(480) unto him who is the desire of all nations? Will it not go unto him for food and clothing? Love then is the soul's journey and motion towards Jesus, whom faith hath brought in such ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... appearance and manifested a feeling of nostalgia. Mother Carey's chickens, little birds resembling swallows, began to flit around us, skimming closely along the waves. There is a fiction among the sailors that nobody ever saw one of these birds alight or found its nest. Whoever harms one is certain to bring misfortune upon himself and possibly his companions. A prudent traveler would be careful not to offend ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... we are going to start directly," cried Lady Louisa, who was a fluttering creature of three-and-thirty, always eager to flit from one scene to another. "If we don't, I really think we shall be late—and there is some dreadful law, isn't there, to prevent people being ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... in my pocket I remember thinking, "Some poor devil made miserable!" for there had been hint in it of the husband. But I had no thought—I swear it before God—of who that husband was till I beheld her flit back through the open doorway, with terror in her mien and searching eyes fixed on the floor. Then hell opened before me, and I saw my happiness go down into gulfs I had never ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... not that there is much to see in it; one of the crags of the aiguille-edge, on the southern slope of it, is struck sharply through, as by an awl, into a little eyelet hole; which you may see, seven thousand feet above the valley (as the clouds flit past behind it, or leave the sky), first white, and then dark blue. Well, there's just such an eyelet hole in one of the upper crags of the Diamond Valley; and, from a distance, you think that it is no bigger than the eye of a needle. But if you get up to it, they say you ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... in the house of the Lord.' He knew what he was saying when he preferred his humble office to all honours among the godless. He was shut out by some unknown circumstances from external participation in the Temple rites, and longs to be even as one of the swallows or sparrows that twitter and flit round the sacred courts. No doubt to him faith was much more inseparably attached to form than it should be for us. No doubt place and ritual were more to him than they can permissibly be to those who have heard and understood the great charter of spiritual worship ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the black hulls cast A firefly radiance down the deep; The inlet gleams, the long clouds sweep, The sails flit up, the ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... The waste cotton-shrub, long useless, disobedient, as the thistle by the wayside,—have ye not conquered it; made it into beautiful bandana webs; white woven shirts for men; bright-tinted air-garments wherein flit goddesses? Ye have shivered mountains asunder, made the hard iron pliant to you as soft putty: the Forest-giants, Marsh-joetuns bear sheaves of golden-grain; AEgir the Sea-demon himself stretches his back for a sleek highway to you, and on Firehorses and Windhorses ye career. Ye are most strong. ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... more after that, and Hester was content till a new worry came to trouble her. On her way to her room late one night, she saw a tall shadow flit down one of the side corridors that branched from the main one. For a moment she was startled, but, being a woman of courage, she followed noiselessly, till the shadow seemed to vanish in the gloom of the ...
— The Mysterious Key And What It Opened • Louisa May Alcott
... all those ill-regulated aspirations that had first made me ashamed of home and Joe,—from all those visions that had raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the wooden window of the forge, and flit away. In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... They flit about, the yellow birds, And rest upon the jujube trees [1]. Who followed duke Mu in the grave? Dze-kue Yen-hsi. And this Yen-hsi Was a man above a hundred. When ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... and we have done. If any faint remembrance, as of a dream, flit in some puzzled moment across your brain, and you shall feel that the potion which is to be given you shall not have done its work, and the memory of this existence which you are leaving endeavours vainly to return; we say in such a moment, when you clutch at the dream but it eludes your ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... to flit up the terraces before him, her voice rippling with amusement dropping down on him through the dusk. "Well, you'll have to come nearer than that, if you ever want to make a go of it!" she called over her shoulder. Upon which note this very modern ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... rocks, wrapped in velvet moss. Trees holding up screens of green lace between your eyes and the blue water of the loch. Pebbles white and round as pearls, or silver coins dropped by fairies in a big "flit." That's one of your similes! Grass running down to the edge of the water, and full of bluebells. Water the colour of drowned wallflowers. I don't believe your Highland lochs can be prettier or more idyllic, though this ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of the steamer is the great event of the day; and on Sunday, after morning service, the butterflies of fashion flit to the pier to see the landing of passengers. It is rather embarrassing for weary travelers to be obliged to "run the gauntlet" as they pass through the gay throng, for every one stares with all his might. This does not seem to be ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... the way the blood dribbled from the corpse in a slow, incessant, sanguine exudation. The old negro was niggardly dismissed with two paper dollars. The dead man untied and cast upon the vessel's dock, steam gotten up in a little while, and the broad Potomac shores saw this skeleton ship flit by, as the bloody sun threw gashes and blots of unhealthy light ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... season, and go by; And Cronos pass'd, and Uranus, and then Shall Zeus and all his children utterly Pass, and new Gods be born, and reign, and die,— But thee shall lovers worship evermore What Gods soe'er usurp the changeful sky, Or flit to ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... constantly thought to ride through the air on broomsticks or other equally convenient vehicles; and if they do so, how can you get at them so effectually as by hurling lighted missiles, whether discs, torches, or besoms, after them as they flit past overhead in the gloom? The South Slavonian peasant believes that witches ride in the dark hail-clouds; so he shoots at the clouds to bring down the hags, while he curses them, saying, "Curse, curse Herodias, thy mother is a heathen, damned of God and fettered through the Redeemer's blood." ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... thrown into prison for her deed of madness and now the executioner's axe awaits her. She sits on the damp straw, rocking a bundle, which she takes for her baby, and across her poor wrecked brain there flit once more pictures of all the scenes of her short-lived happiness. Then Faust enters with Mephisto, and tries to persuade her to escape with them. But she instinctively shrinks from her lover, loudly imploring God's and the Saint's ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... Dust devils rise up from the plains and veil the crags. In the winter there are snows. In the summer great clouds gather over Shiwina and grow dark with rain. White corn tassels are waving, blue butterfly maidens flit among the blossoming beans. ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... lean sides and their festoons of brown, dusty cobwebs; dull, comfortable creatures they appear to imaginative eyes, waiting hungrily for their yearly meal. The eave-swallows are teasing their sleepy shapes, like the birds which flit about great beasts; gay, movable, irreverent, almost derisive, those barn swallows fly to and fro ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... wrote the story of his broken life in the song of "the bird with the broken pinion, that never flew as high again." Sooner or later each life passes under bondage. For all strength will vanish as the morning dew our joys take wings and flit away; the eye dim, the ear dull, the thought decay, our dearest die. Oft life's waves and billows chill us to the very marrow, while we gasp and shiver midst the surging tide. Then it is a blessed thing to look out through blinding tears upon a friendly face, ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... weary horses had slowed down to a walk, the heavy sand retarding progress. It was a gloomy, depressing scene in the spectral gray light, a wide circle of intense loneliness, unbroken by either dwarfed shrub or bunch of grass, a barren expanse stretching to the sky. Vague cloud shadows seemed to flit across the level surface, assuming fantastic shapes, but all of the same dull coloring, imperfect and unfinished. Nothing seemed tangible or real, but rather some grotesque picture of delirium, ever merging into another yet more hideous. The very silence of those surrounding ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... whenever the weather is anything like favourable, presents an animated scene. Eight-oars pass along, the measured pull of the oars in the rowlocks marking the time in musical cadence with their plashing dip in the water; perilous skiffs flit like fire-flies over the glassy surface of the river; men lounge about in the house-boats and barges, or gather together at King's, or Hall's, and industriously promulgate small talk and tobacco-smoke. All is gay and bustling. ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... became a bay of the great Lake itself. Every moment of this portion of the ride is a delight. The senses are kept keenly alert, for not only have we the Lake, the bay and the mountains, but part of the way we have flowers and shrubs by the thousands, bees and butterflies flit to and fro, and singing streams come foaming white from the snowbanks above, eager to reach the Lake. As our car-wheels dash across these streamlets they splash up the water on each side into sparkling diamonds and on every hand come ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... My sword! Do you see how it flashes? Soon will it redden in their tepid blood!— What change is this in me? My brow burns hot; A multitude of visions flit before me.— Vengeance it is,—triumph for all those dreams Of greatness, regal power, and lasting fame. My watch-word shall be: livid flames and death! The capitol! Now ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... night, when he lay sleepless, sick for his mother's presence, her voice, her kisses, her soothing touch, the boy would rise to sit at the window—there to watch shadowy figures flit through the street-lamp's circle of light. Once he fancied that his mother came thus out of the night, that for a moment she paused with upturned glance, then disappeared in woe and haste: returning, halted again; but ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... drive back the same day. One's circle had its limitations and degrees of intimacy. Now it is possible motor fifty miles to lunch and home to dine with guests from the remotest corners of the earth. Oceans are crossed in six days, and the eager flit from continent to continent. Engagements can be made by cable and the truly enterprising can accept an invitation to dine in America on a fortnight's notice. Telephones communicate in a few seconds and no one is secure from social intercourse for fifteen minutes. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... remember how keen and sweet the air was, with the scent of the wild thyme? and how the sand-martins circled round us?) As we passed through the long, bare, imposing rooms, something like a shadow of you seemed to flit before us. Or if I glanced out of one of the tall windows, it seemed as if you had just passed under them, along the Riva or across the Piazza. As for Isola Nobile, if I regret that it is n't mine, that is chiefly because I should be glad to ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... house-dog is barking, The night-owl is hooting, The glow-worm is sparkling, The meteor is shooting; And forms, which lie So stiff and still, In their shrouds so chill, Through the live-long day, Now burst their clay, And flit through the sky, On their dusky pinions: Hell's dominions Keep holiday. Sisters, sisters, wherever your watches Are kept, fleet hither to me, Fleet hither, fleet hither, and leave earth's ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... hears an indelicate word or expression, which allows of no possible harmless interpretation. Then not the shadow of a smile should flit across the lips. Either complete silence should be preserved in return, or the words, "I do not understand you," be spoken. A lady will always fail to hear that which she should not hear, or, having unmistakably heard, she ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... common voice could make itself heard produced nevertheless an effect of magical stillness, silence, and solitude. We were alone in it, save that now and then in the far-distant spaces a figure might flit and disappear between the huge glinting columns of metal. It was a hall enchanted and inexplicable. I understood nothing of it. But I understood that half the electricity of New York was being generated by its engines of a hundred and fifty thousand horse-power, and that if the spell ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... shall be glad to help the cause, even so little as that," she answered. Pepperell thanked her for her words, and ignored the look of disappointment that he had seen flit across ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... scar-ridden eunuch!" Pilate shouted as he entered the place. "Wrap thy broad back in this wolf hide and take thou a helmet and spear—so! Now, musicians, pipe thee a tune that will be wild like the wrath of the gods. No music now to make a butterfly flit, but thunder for the beast that maketh the earth tremble. ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... Tybalt, awake me not yet, Around my soft pillow while softer dreams flit, For what are the joys that in waking we prove, Compared with these visions, O, Tybalt, my love? Let the birds to the rise of the mist carol shrill, Let the hunter blow out his loud horn on the hill, Softer sounds, softer pleasures, in slumber I prove,— But think not I dreamt ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... predicament: I knew that within myself was a Golconda of memories of other lives, yet I was unable to do more than flit like a madman through those memories. I had my Golconda but ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... of her kiss. How had he kept himself from catching her to his heart in that moment, and holding her there while he drank his fill of the cup she had so shyly proffered? How had he ever suffered her to flit from him down the rough kopje and turn at the bottom with the old intangible shield uplifted ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... regularity; and at the same time greater brilliancy is exhibited. The fantastic headdresses of the women nod and vibrate like waving plants of Indian corn; the lustrous hair and the gaudy costumes glisten and sparkle in the sunlight, fox pelts wag back and forth, plumes and feathers flit and dance, the monotonous chanting, the dull thumping and drumming rise into the deep blue sky, re-echoing from the towering cliffs, whose pinnacles look down upon the weird scene from heights far above the uppermost ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... and we struggled. That struggle brought down the clock with a shattering crash. Robert Turold and I were locked in one another's arms, wrestling desperately for the revolver, when I saw the great moon face of the clock flit past my vision like the face of a man taking a header off a pier. The crash startled Robert Turold. His hand loosened, and I got the revolver from him. As I tore it from his fingers it went off, ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... others are the anagrammatic answer to Pilate's question, "Quid est veritas''—namely, "Est vir qui adest''; and the transposition of "Horatio Nelson'' into "Honor est a Nilo''; and of "Florence Nightingale'' into "Flit on, cheering angel.'' James I.'s courtiers discovered in "James Stuart'' "A just master,'' and converted "Charles James Stuart'' into "Claimes Arthur's seat.'' "Eleanor Audeley,'' wife of Sir John Davies, is said to have been brought before the High ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... out to the end of the Fifth Act. I cannot, unfortunately, boast of being merely a spectator, seated in the royal box, applauding now and again. There is a wrench at my heart, a pang in every nerve. When I have put out the light and am in my bed, little touches, little glances, little words flit about and fill the darkness. When I get up in the morning, I thrill with lively anticipations, my blood seems to course through me to the strains ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... the lily blooms," he muses as he issues out of the forest and reaches the top of the mountain, "to the cliffs round which the eagles flit,—what a glorious promontory! What a contrast at this height, in this immensity, between the arid rocky haunts of the mountain bear and eagle and the spreading, vivifying verdure surrounding the haunts of man. On one side are the sylvan valleys, the thick grown ravines, the meandering ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... of birds, the gulls and rooks and little brown wavering things which flit out and along the edge of the chalk-pits, is once more refreshment to me, utterly untempered. A merle is singing in a bramble thicket; the dew has not yet dried off the bramble leaves. A feather of a moon floats across the sky; the distance ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... comment or change of expression, but a tear seemed to flit and zigzag its way down the dried courses of her thousand wrinkles. She stood in the doorway, facing the moon as it rose above the roof of the granary. If she was a little translucent for so solid-shaped an old presence, Old Dalton did not notice ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... much for the present time, and assure posterity that there never was such a lamb as Catherine II., and that, so far from assassinating her own husband and Czar Ivan,[2] she wept over every chicken that she had for dinner. How crimes, like fashions, flit from clime to clime! Murder reigns under the Pole, while you, who are in the very town where Catherine de' Medici was born, and within a stone's throw of Rome, where Borgia and his holy father sent cardinals to the other world by hecatombs, are surprised to hear that there ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... was cast,—the authority of Beau Lovelace was nearly supreme in fashionable and artistic circles, and from the moment he was seen devoting his attention to the "new beauty," excited whispers began to flit from mouth to mouth,—"She will be the rage this season!"—"We must ask her to come to us!"—"Do ask Lady Winsleigh to introduce us!"—"She must come to our house!" and so on. And Lady Winsleigh was ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... remarked the Bishop, gravely, "life is but a mirror which reflects themselves. Other forms and faces may flit by, in the background; dimly seen, scarcely noticed. There is but one face and form occupying the entire foreground. Life is, to such, the mirror which ministers to vanity. Should a husband appear in the ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... heart for a single day in ordinary circumstances. The lights and shadows that flit ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... flashing waves, he heard their ceaseless roar; Or carolled in his light canoe content, As, bound from creek to creek, it grazed the shore; Gods of the storm the dreary space might sweep, And shapes of death, and gliding spectres gaunt, Might flit, he thought, o'er the remoter deep; And whilst strange voices cried, Avaunt, avaunt! Uncertain lights, seen through the midnight gloom, Might lure him sadly on ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... too—It was curious about those dreams. She would now have found it an intolerable bore to sit with hands idle in her lap and eyes upon vacancy, watching the dim, luminous shadows flit aimlessly by. Yet that was the way she used to pass hours—entire days. She used to fight off sleep at night the longer to enjoy her one source of pure happiness. There was no doubt about it, the fire of romance was burning low, and she was becoming commonplace, practical, resigned. ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... her have her own way. So she goes from t'one to t'other, till at last she says, 'There's poor Tommy Johnson, as used to live in the stone row; he's flitted with his wench Betty, and nobody knows where they've gone.' 'That's strange,' says I, 'what made 'em flit that fashion?' 'Oh,' she says, 'they'd a deal of trouble. Thomas wasn't right in his head arter his lad Sammul went off, so he took up with them Brierleys, and turned teetotaller; and then his missus,'—but I canna tell ye what she said about ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... feast in the merry noontide, and glad is the April green That a Volsung looks on the sunlight and the night and the darkness have been. Earls think of marvellous stories, and along the golden strings Flit words of banded brethren and names of war-fain Kings: All the days of the deeds of Sigmund who was born so long ago; All deeds of the glorious Signy, and her tarrying-tide of woe; Men tell of the years of Volsung, and how long agone ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... existence then too fanciful For our life's common light, who are so dull? Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold With our congenial souls? secrets too bold? Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit, Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire Warms feet and hands—nor does to more aspire; By whose compact utilitarian heap The present may sit down and go to sleep, Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked, And ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... charming, if English. Thoughts of Cosette, which used to flit through his brain with a surprising effect that can only be likened to an effect of flamingoes sweeping across an English meadow, had now almost entirely ceased to disturb him. He had but to imagine what Geraldine's attitude towards Cosette would ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... an older friend; The humbler prose has fallen to thy share: Nor could I miss the occasion to declare, What spoken in thy presence must offend— That, set aside some few caprices wild, Those humorous clouds that flit o'er brightest days, In all my threadings of this worldly maze, (And I have watched thee almost from a child), Free from self-seeking, envy, low design, I have not found ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... stones that held the houses of the dead. They are tapu; about them flit the veinahae, the matiahae, and the etuahae, dread vampires and ghosts that have charge of the corpse and wait to seize the living. Well have these ghoulish phantoms feasted; whole islands are theirs, and soon they will sit upon the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... jackets on their respective beds reading or talking, would listen for her departure. There was always a moment when they knew that the excitement was over and the landing stricken into certainty. Then Mademoiselle would flit to the top of the stairs and demand, leaning over the balustrade, "Eh bien! Eh bien!" ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... who is matchless among you for wit; A Leyden jar always full charged, from which flit The electrical tingles of hit after hit. His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyric Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satiric; In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes That are trodden upon are ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... ultimate notice from London to Mrs Machin, and it was on blue paper. It stated, baldly, that as Mrs Machin had failed to comply with all the previous notices, had, indeed, ignored them, she and her goods would now be ejected into the street, according to the law. It gave her twenty-four hours to flit. Never had a respectable dame been so insulted as Mrs Machin was insulted by that notice. The prospect of camping out in Brougham Street confronted her. When Denry reached home that evening, Mrs Machin, as the phrase is, ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... alternative struck a sudden terror into her; for the abbot abruptly records in his book that 'here her spirit seemed to flit out of her, and she began to tremble very much, and in vain to contend with tears. I had her all dissolved at my feet within a few moments. She was ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... the flag! Up, up, betimes, and proudly speak of it; A lordly thing to see on tower and crag, O'er which,—as eagles flit, With eyes a-fire, and wings of phantasy,— Our memories hang superb! The foes we frown upon shall feel the curb Of our full sway; and they shall shamed be Who wrong, with sword or pen, The Code that keeps us ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... moon-irradiated plain of Umbria. Over all rise shadowy Apennines, with dim suggestions of Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Montefalco, and Spoleto on their basements. Little thin whiffs of breezes, very slight and searching, flit across, and shiver as they pass from Apennine to plain. The slowly moving population—women in veils, men winter-mantled—pass to and fro between the buildings and the grey immensity of sky. Bells ring. The bugles of the soldiers blow retreat in convents turned to barracks. Young men ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... flown? Am I once more sunk to a level with my former self? Once I thought that religion was a substance with me,—not a shadow, to flit, to mock, and to vanish when its succour was most needed; yet now does my ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... was a goodly heap for to behold, And spake the praises of the workman's wit, But full great pity, that so fair a mould Did on so weak foundation ever sit; For on a sandy hill, that still did flit, And fall away, it mounted was full high, And every breath of heaven shaked it; And all the hinder parts, that few could spy, Were ruinous ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... the heathen barbarian. The terror inspired in the rude English mind by the mark and the woodland, the home of wild beasts and of hostile ghosts, of deadly spirits and of fierce enemies, gleams luridly through every line. The fen and the forest are dim and dark; will-o'-the-wisps flit above them, and gloom closes them in; wolves and wild boars lurk there, the quagmire opens its jaws and swallows the horse and his rider; the foeman comes through it to bring fire and slaughter to the clan-village at the dead of night. To these real ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... quaint and amusing! Though your wife ran away with a soldier that day, And took with her your trifle of money; Bless your heart, they don't mind - they're exceedingly kind - They don't blame you - as long as you're funny! It's a comfort to feel If your partner should flit, Though YOU suffer a deal, THEY don't mind it a bit - They don't blame you - so ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... of the Renaissance, traveling was at that time very disagreeable; everywhere in Europe it was as difficult then as it is now in the Orient. Great lords and ladies, who to-day flit across the country in comfortable railway carriages, traveled in the sixteenth century, even in the most civilized states of Europe, mounted on horses or mules, or slowly in sedan-chairs, exposed to ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... "We must flit, and again seek some other home. Though he should keep our secret,—and I believe he will if he be asked,—it will be known that there is a secret, and a secret of such a nature that its circumstances have driven ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... least funny, that it was absolutely flat; but it had quite the opposite effect upon the Honourable Arthur. He had no command over himself or his horses for some minutes; and at intervals during the afternoon the full felicity of the idea would steal upon him, and the smile of reminiscence would flit across his ruddy face. ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... feeding, have made it all too tempting a mark for the rifles of the sportsmen and the sling-shots of small boys. As if sufficient attention were not attracted to it by its plumage, it must needs keep up a noisy, guttural rattle, ker-r-ruck, ker-r-ruck, very like a tree-toad's call, and flit about among the trees with the restlessness of a fly-catcher. Yet, in spite of these invitations for a shot to the passing gunner, it still multiplies in districts where nuts abound, being "more common than the robin" about Washington, ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... water flows it forms a little oasis upon the barren slope. Along the course of the streams are little patches of green grass, flowers, and bushes. Birds flit about, and there are tracks of small animals in the mud. Evidently the water is as great an attraction to them as it is to us. If a well were dug in the plateau above, we can understand now how ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... branches like incandescent globes of colored glass. But it is usually impossible for one on the ground to see the finest blooms, which turn their faces to the sunlight above the canopy of green. Gray apes chatter in the tree-tops; strange tropic birds of gorgeous plumage flit from bough to bough, monstrous reptiles slip silently through the undergrowth; insects buzz in swarms above the putrid swamps; occasionally the jungle crashes beneath the tread of some heavy animal—a rhinoceros, perhaps, or a wild ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... fills those woods with the very breath of melancholy, no birds will sing in the multitudinous cloisters except the birds of the night whose melody is one doleful and mocking note. The bracken burns and withers, lush grass rots and whitens above the fir-roots, the birds flit from shade to shade with no carolling. And over all will stand the trees sleeping with ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... Hare, who had been so absorbed as to forget himself, suddenly felt a cold tightening of the skin of his face, and a hard swell of his breast. The dance of Snap's eyes, the downward flit of his hand seemed instantaneous with a red flash and loud report. Instinctively Hare dodged, but the light impact of something like a puff of air gave place to a tearing hot agony. Then he slipped down, back to the stone, with a ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... self-controlled, seemed to show a person of equable temperament, without any strong emotions. In her light cheerfulness, her perpetual interest in the things about her, she might have reminded a spectator of some of the smaller sea-birds that flit endlessly from wave to wave, for whom the business of life appears to be summed up in ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... red sulky faces were hidden in the dark, watching candle after candle sputter, brighten, and twinkle, till the trembling shadows began to flit away like ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... sailors aboard he learned that he was not the only member of the crew who had been shanghaied. Aside from a half-dozen reckless men from the criminal classes who had signed voluntarily, either because they could not get a berth upon a decent ship, or desired to flit as quietly from the law zone of the United States as possible, not a man was there who had been ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... best appear to you! how severe its voice! how forbidding its aspect! With what animation, on the contrary, do you enter into the mere pursuits of time and the world! What bright anticipations of joy and happiness flit before your eyes! How you are struck and dazzled at the view of the prizes of this life, as they are called! How you admire the elegancies of art, the brilliance of wealth, or the force of intellect! ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... names menacingly from the saddle, once, twice. The drowsy answers—grumpy, conciliating, savage, jocular, or deprecating—came out into the silent darkness in which the horseman sat still, and presently a dark figure would flit out coughing in the still air. Sometimes a low-toned woman cried through the window-hole softly, "He's coming directly, senor," and the horseman waited silent on a motionless horse. But if perchance he had to dismount, then, after a while, from the door of that hovel or of that pulperia, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... and pleasant; flowers spring up, great trees cast a friendly shade, streams murmur cheerfully over their pebbly beds, jewelled fruits are to be had for the trouble of gathering them; invisible hands set out well-covered dinner-tables, brilliant and graceful forms flit in and out across our path, and we all at once find ourselves in the midst of a company of dear old friends whom we have known and loved ever since we knew anything. There is Fortunatus with his magic purse, and the ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... to complete annihilation, is yet identical with that of "an hidden untimely birth." Translated into the language of philosophy this somewhat vague notion might be expressed as follows: All things, past, present and to come, which flit as unreal shadows on the wall of time and space, are manifestations of the one sole force which is everlasting and omnipresent. They are not parts of a whole which is one and divisible: all that we see and know of them in life is nothing; and ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Monsieur le Duc. One would as soon think of taking the adoration of a butterfly seriously. One is a flower, butterflies come round, and when they find no honey, flit away elsewhere. You amuse yourself, so do I. Talk about hearts, I do not believe in ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... No record of thee Shall there ever be, Since thou dost not share Roses in Pieria grown. In the deathful cave, With the feeble troop Of the folk that droop, Lurk and flit and crave, Woman severed ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... narrow straight pathway doth wind. The sighing winds whisper of sacrifice, toil, And foot-prints where pilgrims have trod Are crimson and tear-washed, where fissures are rent Wierd spirits of pain flit abroad. ...
— Poems - A Message of Hope • Mary Alice Walton
... It takes an astronomer to calculate great distances. I quite compassionate those little fellows, our colleagues." His eyes twinkled behind his rimless spectacles. "Just amuse yourself with these photographs awhile. Not in your line, perhaps, but interesting to us glow-worms that flit about in ruinous places. I 'll be with you in ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... quitting Jerome's arm. She did so with a gentle murmur of explanation, for she could do nothing abruptly, then went on before him swiftly. Her white shawl hung from her head to her waist in sharp slants. She moved through the dusk with the evanescent flit of ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... eyes, in which tears were shining, she said: "Forgive me, Mr. Carrollton. I sent Gritty home on purpose to see if you would be annoyed, for I felt vexed because you would not humor my whim and meet me at the bridge. I am sorry I caused you any uneasiness," she continued, as she saw a shadow flit over his face. ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... peered at him through my binocular, while he returned the compliment by peering at me, and then warily ventured to rehearse his little tune. The least movement on my part would startle him, cause him to flit to another perch and crane out his neck to glare at me questioningly with wild, dilated eyes, uncertain whether I was to be trusted or not. Both of us presently grew tired of our strained position, and so I walked off and he flew away. No doubt there was mutual ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... Sikes, which often flit about, but must not be trusted. Mr. Patch could not have given a better proof that his rejection ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... understood the reticent tones of the man behind, and how admirably the loosely painted convention of landscape background is made to carry on the purely artificial arrangement of light and shade. In the Reynolds the shadowed figure on the left, and the shadows that flit across the skirts of the other two figures, and the fine relief of the dark trees, give a wonderful richness of design to a picture that is not in other respects ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... disk my course I trace, There restlessly forever flit; Small is the circuit I embrace, Two hands suffice to cover it. Yet ere that field I traverse, I Full many a thousand mile must go, E'en though with tempest-speed I fly, Swifter than arrow from ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... upon the shore, Young looked back at the hut. It was dark. He saw three boats flit silently by him toward the city, as if phantoms guided them. They crossed the moonbeams, and Young lost them in the dark ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... eyes must ever be open for beautiful little living things. Now a green and gold lizard flashes across a bit of grey rock, now a dragon-fly disports its sapphire wings amid the yellowing ferns or purple ling, butterflies, white, blue, and black and orange, flit hither and thither, whilst little beetles, blue as enamel ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... affirmed the other, heartily, as he eyed the boy; and perhaps a dim suspicion that he might find the fugitive valuable as a guide began to flit through ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... face to face with the mighty hosts of the vanished dead, all clothed in life, and girded round with a panoply of power, and light, and strength; with vivid memory of the secret wrongs deemed buried in their graves. Our cities are thronged with an unseen people who flit about us, their piercing eyes invisible to us, are scanning all our ways. The universe is teeming with them,—"THERE ARE NO DEAD,"—the air, the earth, and the sky above, are filled with a ...
— Hydesville - The Story of the Rochester Knockings, Which Proclaimed the Advent of Modern Spiritualism • Thomas Olman Todd
... cocksparrow, and bee, There's a ring gaudy-green in the dell, Sing, sing, ye sweet cherubs, that flit in the tree; La! who can draw tears from a well-well-well, Who ever drew tears ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... defeat itself, and the bird flies and chirps in agony, when she might pass unnoticed by keeping still. The most marked exception which I have noticed is the Red Thrush, which, in this respect, as in others, has the most high-bred manners among all our birds: both male and female sometimes flit in perfect silence through the bushes, and show solicitude only in a sob which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... the elated son of Vulcan, as he descended the companion ladder, "we're goin' to flit, lad. We're about to rise in the world, so get up your bellows. It's the last time we shall have to be bothered with them ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... ghosts that flit around, While spade and mattock death-fields glean, Open with words from the unseen The mysteries now ...
— The Mound Builders • George Bryce
... the business which had been so auspiciously commenced under his judicious arrangements. Such, indeed, was the then critical state of affairs at Naples, that it required both the ablest heads, and the best hearts, to seize the favourable moment, already beginning to flit away, for effectually restoring loyalty and order in that devoted country. During the absence of Lord Nelson and Captain Troubridge, from Sicily and Naples, Cardinal Ruffo, with his army of twenty thousand ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... vagar wander, roam, flit, drift, hover. vago, -a wandering, wavering, vague, indistinct, hazy. vagoroso, -a wandering, errant. vaguedad f. vagueness; con —— vaguely, uncertainly. valenta f. valor, courage. valer be worth, help, avail; ms vale it is better. valeroso, ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... sake of the river, a rustic cot is taken for a few weeks by a party of boating-people. Then the quaint, old-fashioned gardens blossom with a sudden luxuriance of striped tents and flaming umbrellas, while bright women in many-hued boating-costumes flit among cabbages and onions like curious tropical birds and butterflies. As a rule, however, the Dean is abandoned to its usual rustic population and to artists, numbers of the latter remaining all winter in the haunts ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... her MS., and paused to reread some passage just penned, which she had laboriously composed, and thought particularly good as an illustration of the idea she was striving to embody perspicuously, a smile would flit across her countenance while ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... his throat, pretended that he drank it. At the moment when he felt the moisture on his lips it seemed to him that his breast and stomach were aflame and that if he did not quench that flame he would drop dead. Before his eyes red spots began to flit, and in his jaws he felt a terrible pain, as if some one stuck a thousand pins in them. His hands shook so that he almost spilt these last drops. Nevertheless, he caught only two or three in his mouth with his tongue; the rest ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... that she was fond of musing, of solitude; that in her fancies she believed in the reality of visions which might flit before her eyes as they flit before the eyes of all ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... soldierly stuff; but he felt a distinct shiver flit along his back. His past life had not lacked thrilling adventures and strangely varied experiences with desperate men. Usually he met sudden emergencies rather calmly, sometimes with phlegmatic indifference. This passionate outburst on the priest's part, however, ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... enough, about a mile down the mountain, a rider on a white horse was seen to flit rapidly across a heathy open and vanish among the trees on ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... towards which adventurous youth turned its steps when real life was to be begun. He dreaded and yet longed to be there, and his heart was in a turmoil of conflicting emotion as he watched the landscape flit by. ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... where dwell the dead, And hear the roaring of the streams of Hell. And he will see the feeble, shadowy tribes, And Balder sitting crown'd, and Hela's throne. Then must he not regard the wailful ghosts Who all will flit, like eddying leaves, around; But he must straight accost their solemn queen, And pay her homage, and entreat with prayers, Telling her all that grief they have in Heaven For Balder, whom she holds by right below; If haply he may melt her heart with words, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... plainly visible as you look closer, are countless forms of brightness and of beauty. You will find them among the shining coals that glimmer in scarlet and gold before you when the embers lie clear and warm upon the hearth. You will behold them among the shadows that flit across the embers with delicate grace ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... breeches-pocket, to completely beating Bourbon's oppressive ideas out of Bourbon's head. A little fact, but how important, then and there! Under the Successor, all this may be different:—ghastly beings, Old Tutors, Favorites, Mother's-Favorites, flit, as yet invisible, on the new backstairs:—should Bute and Company get into the foreground, people will then know how ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... in the sunbeam that pierces the yew; Its colours were crimson, black, orange and blue. It looked like a flag that the fairies might fly If leading an army from here to the sky. And out of the shadow it came from the lane To flit through the light into shadow again. O brother! dear brother! what could it have been? Such colours, such beauty, I seldom have seen. Look! there in the distance it flutters once more, Now right and now left by the summer-house door.' And like one bewitched he set off at a bound, Though ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... letters a-flicker from crimson to blue High overhead. All round him the mad world seethes. Hansoms, like cantering beetles, with diamond eyes Run through the moons of it; busses in yellow and red Hoot; and St. Paul's is a bubble afloat in the skies, Watching the pale moths flit and the dark ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... forms were flitting past. She seemed to recognize a few more of these. They floated through the Hall of Death towards the dark curtain, and there they vanished. Would her husband and her daughter thus flit past? No, their sighs and lamentations still sounded from above:—and she had been nearly forgetting them for the sake of ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... had set in. There was nothing to be seen of any bird although some do flit to and fro through the forest in winter-time and the children on their way to Millsdorf had even heard some twitter. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... other, while large flights of wild-duck rise splashing from the stream. Eagles soar aloft, or, with the vultures, alight upon a sand-bank to dispute the possession of some carcass with the jackals and the foxes. Water wag-tails flit along the shore, or in the most friendly manner board your steamer to feed on the crumbs from your tea-table, while large numbers of gay-plumaged king-fishers dart in and out from their nests tunnelled far into the ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... Stability above? To match and mate Feeling with knowledge,—make as manifest Soul's work as Mind's work, turbulence as rest, Hates, loves, joys, woes, hopes, fears, that rise and sink Ceaselessly, passion's transient flit and wink, A ripple's tinting or a spume-sheet's spread Whitening the wave,—to strike all this life dead, Run mercury into a mould like lead, And henceforth have the plain result to show— How we Feel, hard and fast as what we Know— This were the ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... the children all are lapped in sleep The pretty Nymphlets of the sea shall rise, And we shall know them as they flit and creep And peep and glance and murmur lullabies; While the pale moon comes up beyond the hill, And Proteus rests ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... they were winded by half the pack, while the other half were running the first fox up the fence. The crash and music of the hounds re-echoed from the trees and the enfolding hills above, the shrieking of the jays as they flit protesting from tree to tree, the hearty ring of the huntsman's voice cheering his hounds—surely all this should send each fox flying out over the fields beyond! But a fox has no nerves. He keeps his head with the coolness of a Red Indian, and a "slimness" ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... really, to discharge a duty in the face of his own scepticism that he had spoken thus, and he did not expect to see another shade of sadness flit across ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... vapours to the Baron's brain New stratagems the radiant Lock to gain. Ah cease, rash youth! desist ere 'tis too late, Fear the just Gods, and think of Scylla's fate! Changed to a bird, and sent to flit in air, She dearly pays for ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... of air from an open oven. The intense heat only serves to make the insects more active. The locusts shrill through the long sultry noon, the bees hum with greater industry among the flowers, multitudes of butterflies flit joyfully from place to place, and the turkey-vulture soars high above the forest, for the intense heat only serves to make his dinner more plentiful and for him more palatable. The small animals now seek the shade of the forest and the birds, with bills open and wings drooping, ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... night, when his wheel pulled him, he rose and went out into the garden. The night was at odds with morning which was which. An occasional bat would flit like a doubtful shadow across his eyes, but a cool breath of air was roaming about as well, which was not of the night at all, but plainly belonged to the morning. He wandered to the bottom of the garden—to the clump of trees, lay down where Agnes had been lying the night before, and thought ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... cried Bob, who so far had only heard the occasional note of a bird which was invisible. Now he saw one or two flit across the sunny ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... arrear. He got the first brash at Whitsunday put ower wi' fair word and piping; but when Martinmas came, there was a summons from the grund-officer to come wi' the rent on a day preceese, or else Steenie behoved to flit. Sair wark he had to get the siller; but he was weel-freended, and at last he got the haill scraped thegether—a thousand merks—the maist of it was from a neighbour they caa'd Laurie Lapraik—a sly tod. Laurie had walth o' ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... presence—of the Irish members at Westminster destroys every hope that Ireland will be governed by her best citizens. The reasons why this is so are various; some of them may be shortly stated. The system, in the first place, of double representation, under which members of the Irish Parliament must flit to and fro between Ireland and England, and debate one day about Irish matters in Dublin, and the next about Imperial, or in truth British, matters in England, makes it impossible for quiet hard-working Irishmen, who carry ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... anguish and self-murd'ring thought, He was so wasted and forpined quite, That all his substance was consumed to nought, And nothing left but like an airy sprite; That on the rocks he fell so flit and light, That he thereby received no hurt at all; But chanced on a craggy cliff to light; Whence he with crooked claws so long did crawl, That at the last he found a cave ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... humiliation, I could boom forth with a sound equal to that of dozens of singers, if I could only hit upon the formula. During morning and evening prayers, which were extremely lengthy and fatiguing, I fancied that one of my two selves could flit up, and sit clinging to the cornice, and look down on my other self and the rest of us, if I could only find the key. I laboured for hours in search of these formulas, thinking to compass my ends by means absolutely irrational. For example, I was convinced that if I could only count ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... strange nomenclature of the savages who take their cognomens from some characteristic of their nature, she was known as the Antelope, because she more resembled that graceful animal than any other of the young maidens in her tribe. She would flit from rock to rock, when out gathering berries, or float down the stream in her birch-bark canoe, catching fish for her aged father's meals. Crouching Panther had for a long time had his eyes riveted upon the Antelope, and would often lie for hours on some ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom. And flit from ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... when he preferred his humble office to all honours among the godless. He was shut out by some unknown circumstances from external participation in the Temple rites, and longs to be even as one of the swallows or sparrows that twitter and flit round the sacred courts. No doubt to him faith was much more inseparably attached to form than it should be for us. No doubt place and ritual were more to him than they can permissibly be to those who have heard and understood the great ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... reading lamps and disciplined shelves of brown bound books. Now and then a dignitary in gaiters would pass him, "Portly capon," or a drift of white-robed choir boys cross a distant arcade and vanish in a doorway, or the pink and cream of some girlish dress flit like a butterfly across the cool still spaces of the place. Particularly he responded to the ruined arches of the Benedictine's Infirmary and the view of Bell Harry tower from the school buildings. He was ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... it all before," Rat said, with a note of boredom in his reedy voice. "Why, with hyperspace drive you'd be able to flit all over the galaxy without suffering the time-lag you experience with regular drive. And then you'd accomplish your pet dream of going everywhere and seeing everything. Ah! Look at the eyes light up! Look at the radiant expression! You get ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... beggars all description; and yet, listen! I will paint it for you, if I can. It is a lovely spot. Tall mountains, crowned with verdure, rise in awful sublimity around; a river runs through, and bright flowers grow to the water's edge. But there a group of Indians gather. They flit to and fro, with something like sorrow upon their dark brows. In their midst lies a manly form, but his cheek, how deathly! His eyes are wild with the fitful fire of fever. One friend stands before him—nay, I should say, kneels; for see, he is pillowing that poor head ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... the thorn-tree was silhouetted against the sky, for it stood on the edge of a slight descent. Every twig and leaf was distinctly visible, while the openings in the foliage were so numerous that not a wing could flit by without my seeing it. The nest itself was partially veiled by a bunch of leaves. What the view might be from the other side I did not investigate that morning; I preferred to leave the birds the slight screen afforded by the foliage, for since ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... ouk, as I gaed out To flit a tether'd ewe and lamb, I met, as skiffin' ower the green, A jolly, rantin' Highlandman. His shape was neat, wi' feature sweet, And ilka smile my favour wan; I ne'er had seen sae braw a lad As this young ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Nicolette Passing, lifted skirts and let— 'Neath the pretty ermine frock, 'Neath the snowy linen smock— Just a dainty ankle show. Lo, the sick was healed, and lo, Found him whole as ne'er before. From his bed he rose once more, And to his own land did flit, Safe ...
— Aucassin and Nicolette - translated from the Old French • Anonymous
... uttering a deep sigh, he fell back, and, stretching out his arms, expired. On the next the water had a more happy effect: the eye, which at first was glazed and fixed, slowly acquired a look of consciousness, the muscles of the face relaxed, and a smile, expressive of gratitude, seemed to flit across the countenance of the sufferer. The next, who was sitting by himself, almost naked, with his feet close to the sea, received the cup with a vacant stare, and dashed the precious liquid on the ground, ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... Gnats and moths flit in the soft sunlight and spiders run over tree trunks while their single shining lines of silk are stretched ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... them, to take place in the Pleasance, and resolved to add a third to the party, in hope that, either in coming or returning, he might find an opportunity of delivering the letter to Leicester; for strange stories began to flit among the domestics, which alarmed him for the lady's safety. Accident, however, detained Dickon a little behind the Earl, and as he reached the arcade he saw them engaged in combat; in consequence of which he hastened to alarm the guard, having little doubt that what bloodshed took ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help questioning at such moments whether Pearl was a human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage floor, would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and intangibility: it was as if she were hovering in the air, and might vanish, like a glimmering light that comes we know ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... And when I said I was not a young girl myself he got all the madder. Well, I allowed him to think I was going to marry Dr. Denbigh (I wonder what the doctor would say), and as a consequence Harry will flit to-morrow, and he is with poor little Peggy out in the grape-arbor, and she is crying her eyes out. If he dares tell her what a fool he is I could kill him. I am horribly afraid that he will let it out, for I never saw such an alarmingly impetuous youth. Young Lochinvar out of the west ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... many other thoughts flit over one's mind in looking at any phase of work, or any piece of work. In the right choice of work lies the fullest use of one's capacities; in the right conditions of work lies the freest play of one's energies; in the right spirit of work lies the way of ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... (meat) viando. Flesh karno. Flexibility fleksebleco. Flexible fleksebla. Flexion flekso. Flicker lumsxanceli. Flight forkuro. Flight (birds) flugado. Fling jxeti. Flint (mineral) siliko. Flippant babila. Flirt amindumeti, koketi. Flirt koketulino. Flirtation koketeco. Flit flirti. Float (intrans.) nagxi. Float (trans.) flosi. Flock (congregation) zorgitaro. Flock aro. Flog skurgxi. Flood superakvego. Floor planko. Floor (storey) etagxo. Florid rugxega. Florin floreno. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... pleasant all, and sunny, Bees are busy making honey, You can flit from bough to bough, You can sing and twitter now: Wait till winter comes, you rover, Then your frolic will be over. Cats are on the roof already: Birdie, ...
— The Nursery, July 1877, XXII. No. 1 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... Growing Things! As through the gladden sight ye flow And flit and glow, Ye win me so In soul to go, I too am waves, I too am wings, And kindred motion ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... the fire the lovers sit, On rosy wings the moments flit; One little word confirms their bliss, And seals it with a ...
— Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... burst forth from his eyes. "I am free!" he exclaimed, loudly and in a tone of exultation. "Yes, I am free! My life and the world belong to me again. All women are mine again, Cupid and all the gods of love will boldly flit toward me, for they need not conceal themselves any longer from the face of a husband strolling on forbidden grounds, nor from the spying eyes of a jealous wife. Life is mine again, and I will enjoy it; yes I enjoy it. I will enjoy it like fragrant wine pressed to our lips in a golden goblet, ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... cotton; that, too, was difficult. The waste-cotton shrub, long useless, disobedient as the thistle by the wayside; have ye not conquered it, made it into beautiful bandana webs, white woven shirts for men, bright tinted air garments wherein flit goddesses? Ye have shivered mountains asunder, made the hard iron pliant to you as soft putty; the forest-giants— marsh-jotuns—bear sheaves of golden grain; AEgir—the Sea-Demon himself stretches his back for a sleek highway to you, and on Firehorses and Windhorses ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... used to flit through Green Valley streets like a chattering blue-jay. But now nobody saw her, only now and then at night, slinking along through the dark. And many a kindly heart ached for her, remembering how Fanny loved the ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... her canny realization of the value of tantalism. She was not long left in ignorance of his record for flitting fancy and she felt that he would flit from her as soon as he conquered her. Her ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... its loop, put the point to his lips, and paused. He was standing with his back to the failing light, so I could not see the expression of his mobile face. When he paused, I knew that no ordinary doubt beset him. He stood thus for nearly a minute. While he waited, I watched a pair of swans flit ghost-like over the silken surface of the lake. Between us and a dark bank of wood the lights of the house flamed red. The melancholy even-song of a blackbird wailed out from a shrubbery beside us. Then Herbert Brande wrote in ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... of wedded life flew over Mr and Mrs Arbuthnot without a cloud, save a few dark but transitory ones which I saw now and then flit over the husband's countenance as the time when he should become a father drew near, and came to be more and more spoken of. 'I should not survive her,' said Mr Arbuthnot, one day in reply to a chance observation of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... joyous than the Parisians have been during the last two days of sunshine. The Jardins des Tuileries are crowded with well-dressed groups; the budding leaves have burst forth with that delicate green peculiar to early spring; and the chirping of innumerable birds, as they flit from tree to tree, announces the approach ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... in thy quiet:—a cessation—a coolness from business—an indolence almost cloistral—which is delightful! With what reverence have I paced thy great bare rooms and courts at eventide! They spoke of the past:—the shade of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff as in life. Living accounts and accountants puzzle me. I have no skill in figuring. But thy great dead tomes, which scarce three degenerate clerks of the present day could lift from their enshrining ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... those were such as had feelings and misfortunes like its own; among whom it was its hard fate frequently to suffer imposition, from assumed worth and fictitious distress. Beings of supposed benevolence, capable of perceiving, loving, and promoting merit and virtue, have now and then seemed to flit and glide before it. But the visions were deceitful. Ere they were distinctly seen, the phantoms vanished. Or, if such beings do exist, it has experienced the peculiar hardship of never having met with ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... the direction in which the strangers had gone, thus covering the spare man to whom she was talking from their backward glances. Bates, who was looking up at her face with his heart-hunger in his eyes, saw a look of contempt for the passing remark flit across her face, and because of the fond craving of his own heart, his sympathy, strangely enough, went out to the young man who had spoken, rather than to her sentiment of contempt. The angel of human loves alone could tell why John Bates loved this girl after all that ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... had no argument ready, and etiquette was waived. "Time!" she repeated, and then the two battering-rams, revolving their fists country-fashion, engaged. Half-forgotten Homeric phrases began to flit from a faraway schoolroom back into the little teacher's mind and she began to be consoled for the absence of gloves—those tough old ancients had used gauges of iron and steel. The two boys were evenly matched. After a few thundering body blows they grew wary, and when the round closed their ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... the City of Marvel, but artists toiling at the work they loved. They took no pattern from the houses of men, but each man wrought what his inner eye had seen and carved in marble the visions of his dream. All over the roof of one of the palace chambers winged lions flit like bats, the size of every one is the size of the lions of God, and the wings are larger than any wing created; they are one above the other more than a man can number, they are all carven out of one block of marble, the chamber itself is hollowed from it, and it is ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... hour of dusk and mist and midges, Now the tired planes drone homeward through the haze, And distant wood-fires wink behind the ridges, And the first flare some timorous Hun betrays; Now no shell circulates, but all men brood Over their evening food; The bats flit warily and owl and rat With muffled cries their shadowy loves pursue, And pleasant, Corporal, it is to chat In this hushed moment with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... charitable institutions of New York, and, on learning that some of the members of the New York orchestra were in indigent circumstances, she generously made them a substantial gift. Her beneficent actions during her entire stay in America are too numerous to detail. Frequently would she flit away from her house quietly, as if about to pay a visit, and then she might be seen disappearing down back lanes or into the cottages of the poor. She was warned to avoid so much liberality, as many unworthy ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... for murder, Milton for blasphemy, Scott for forgery, and Goethe for questionable financial deals with the devil. Byron's sins were as scarlet and the number not a few, but the moths that came just to flit about the flame were all of mature age. Byron set no snares for the innocent, and in all of the man's misdoings, he himself it ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... time, current of time, tide of time, march of time, step of time, flight of time; duration &c 106. [Indefinite time] aorist^. V. elapse, lapse, flow, run, proceed, advance, pass; roll on, wear on, press on; flit, fly, slip, slide, glide; run its course. run out, expire; go by, pass by; be past &c 122. Adj. elapsing &c v.; aoristic^; progressive. Adv. in due time, in due season; in in due course, in due process, in the fullness of time; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... is a long way to flit to; beyond London a good bit I reckon; and quite in foreign parts; but I've never had no opinion of England, ever since they could be such fools as to take up a quiet chap like thee, and clap thee in prison. Where you go, I'll go. Perhaps ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... threw their arms about each other, and were so full of their own feelings that they never saw Uncle Fact's tall shadow flit across them, as he stole away over the soft sand. Poor old gentleman! he was in a sad state of mind, and didn't know what to do; for in all his long life he had ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... arrived, they found only the old charwoman in the house, and she left shortly after their arrival. Finding that something was needed, the nurse went out to purchase it. On her return she asked the mother were the children all right, as she had seen two ghostly forms flit past her on the door-step! The mother answered that she believed they were, but on going up to the nursery they found both the children with their throats cut. The murderer was never brought to justice, and no ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... the initiative to make his way down the long aisle and find a table for himself, he might have stood there indefinitely, but for the restless activity of Adams, the head steward. It was Adams' mission in life to flit to and fro, hauling would-be lunchers to their destinations, as a St. Bernard dog hauls travelers out of Alpine snowdrifts. He sighted Lord Emsworth and secured ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the stranger to the left who complied with his request, but for one instant both the clergyman and the old sexton caught sight of a face white as death, yet beautiful as an angel's, framed in a mass of dead-gold hair; but the flickering of the lamps caused strange shadows to flit over it. There was a moment of utter silence, broken only by the howling of the ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... been taught by their unfailing instinct that summer has departed, and winter is near. They no more warble their rich melodies, or flit in and out of the bowery recesses of the honeysuckles or peep with knowing look under the eaves, or into the arbour. Other purposes prompt to other acts, and they are taking their farewell of the pleasant summer haunts, where ...
— The Nest in the Honeysuckles, and other Stories • Various
... the Brooklyn Bridge: The bees and fireflies flit and twinkle in their vast hives; curved clouds like the breath of gods hover between the towers and the moon. One hears the hiss of lightnings, the deep thunder of human things, and a fevered breathing as ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... admittedly the first of Woodbridge young ladies. To take her to a dance was to have the ultimate in good times, there was no need to worry about her getting "stuck," and in addition to the thrill of taking a popular girl one could enjoy all the advantages of a stag. One could flit from flower to flower until surfeited with beauty and then retire for a smoke or other innocent diversion without the haunting fear that possibly Dick or Bill was circling around and around in ever-deepening gloom with one's elected for the night. Nancy had permanently impressed herself ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... with wonder which savored of horror, but she heard the door close and saw Lily flit back across the yard with a feeling of immeasurable relief. Then she heard her aunt's voice at her ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... not. I was thinking—well of other, things," and here he allowed the ghost of a smile to flit suggestively across his firm-set lips. "And Mr. Van Burnam seemed preoccupied also, for, as far as I know, he did not even look ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... and rare," (the queen rejoin'd,) Impending destinies in dreams to find; Immured within the silent bower of sleep, Two portals firm the various phantoms keep; Of ivory one; whence flit, to mock the brain, Of winged lies a light fantastic train; The gate opposed pellucid valves adorn, And columns fair incased with polish'd horn; Where images of truth for passage wait, With visions manifest of future fate. Not to this troop, I fear, that ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... enemy's big guns; sometimes diving to avoid a shell; sometimes staggering as though wounded, but always righting himself. There would be the Mad Major each day, over the rearguard troops, seeming to shelter them. He would harry the German line; he would drop a bomb, flit back, and with a brave "We've got them, boys," cheer the sinking spirits of ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... sad intonations Seemingly, as flit they past, Bring to memory hopes long shattered, Blissful ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... dark tricks, The Roman kentna hoo 'twas farin' Across the ferry rowed by Charon, An' readin' doonwards through the ages The tale's the same in a' their pages, Eternal grum'lin' at the load We hae to bear alang Life's road, Yet, when we're fairly at the bit, Awfu', maist awfu sweer to flit, Praisin' the name o' ony drug The doctor whispers in oor lug As guaranteed to cure the evil, To haud us here an' cheat the Deevil. For gangrels, croochin' in the strae, To leave this warld are oft as wae As the prood laird o' ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie
... bright-feathered bosom friends Flit around one and the same tree; One of them tastes the sweet berries, The other without ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... red, the reflection of the lighted windows, stretched over the dark sea. The captain of the ship was giving a ball. The gay music floated across to me in snatches at long intervals. I recall in particular the trill of a little flute in the midst of the deep blare of the trumpets; it seemed to flit, like a butterfly, about my boat. I bade the man row to the ship; twice he took me round it. ... I caught glimpses at the windows of women's figures, borne gaily round in the whirl-wind of the waltz.... I told the boatman to row away, far away, straight into the darkness.... I remember ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... accepted his plan by acclamation, and returned home to push with the utmost haste the preparations for their stupendous task. The idea of a migration en masse did not frighten them. They were nomads and the descendants of nomads, who for ages had been used to fold their tents and flit away. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the soul of Christina, a still breadth of light without shadow; there was a murmur of content in her voice when she spoke, and a ripple of content in her laugh when she laughed. But the light quivered on Dolly's lip, and gleamed and sparkled in her brown eyes, and light and shadow could flit over her face with quick change; they did ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... of something a thousand times rarer than hydrogen, by which, in accordance with the most ordinary natural laws, you would not only rise to the ceiling and float there in quasi-angelic posture, but perhaps, as one of your feminine adepts is said to have done, flit swifter than train or telegram to "still-vexed Bermoothes," and twit Ariel, if he happens to be there, for a sluggard? We have not the presumption to deny the possibility of anything you affirm; only, as our brethren are particular about evidence, do give us as much to go upon as may save us ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... the earth that is scarcely seen Through the curtain of vapour that waves between, O'er city and hamlet, o'er hill and plain, O'er forest green, and o'er mountain hoar, They flit like shadows, and pass the shore, And wing their ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... ignorance. Up and down they wandered, and she gave him eyes, whether for Artemis, or Aphrodite, or Apollo, or still more for the significant and troubling art of the Renaissance, French and Italian. She would flit before him, perching here and there like a bird, and quivering through and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a dream, and through the little opening of your eyelids I shall slip into the depths of your sleep; and when you wake up and look round startled, like a twinkling firefly I shall flit out into ...
— The Crescent Moon • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... contented population, happy in the enjoyment of comfort, beyond that of the labouring classes of most other countries. He visits her marts, her harbours, and her ports—men of all nations are met together there—fleets of rich argosies are ever arriving and departing—and myriads of steamers flit to and fro, happily now engaged in promoting the arts of peace, but ready at a moment's notice to become the defenders of his country's shores, and, as recent events have shown the world, able also to carry war and devastation along the coasts of her enemies, even to the uttermost parts of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... spoke thus and feelingly at times, yet with perfect dignity he displayed that executive ability which in after years made him such a prominent man. Of course the people, especially the boys, had heard fine words spoken before, and at once a little smile seemed to flit across the faces of the leading spirits in ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... bed-room in a shabby little out-of-the-way street. When in town he took his meals at his club, and to that address all letters and papers for him were sent. But of late even the purlieus of his club had become dangerous ground. Round the palatial portal duns seemed to hover and flit mysteriously, so that the task of reaching the secure haven of the smoking-room was one of danger and difficulty; while the return voyage to the shabby little bed-room in the shabby little street could be ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... ill Adonais that note of personal bereavement which wails through Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' or Cowley's 'Ode on the Death of Mr. Hervey'. Much, especially in the earlier stanzas, is common form. The Muse Urania is summoned to lament, and a host of personified abstractions flit before us, "like pageantry of ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... yet murky storm of the cloud and the lightning-flash, though but few boys pause to record the crisis from which slowly emerges Man. And these first desultory grapplings with the fugitive airy images that flit through the dim chambers of the brain had become with each effort more sustained and vigorous, till the phantoms were spelled, the flying ones arrested, the Immaterial seized, and clothed with Form. Gazing on his last effort, Leonard felt ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ominous night-bird of Error, Scared by a sudden irruption of day, Flap his maleficent wings, and in terror Flit to the wilderness, dropping his prey. Then should we, growing in strength and in sweetness, Fusing to one indivisible soul, Dazzle the world with a splendid completeness, Mightily single, ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... anagrammatic answer to Pilate's question, "Quid est veritas''—namely, "Est vir qui adest''; and the transposition of "Horatio Nelson'' into "Honor est a Nilo''; and of "Florence Nightingale'' into "Flit on, cheering angel.'' James I.'s courtiers discovered in "James Stuart'' "A just master,'' and converted "Charles James Stuart'' into "Claimes Arthur's seat.'' "Eleanor Audeley,'' wife of Sir John Davies, is said to have been brought ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... names began to flit past, like palaces on a river-brink, their bases washed by the pouring liturgy—Peter and Paul, Simon and Thaddeus, Cosmas and Damian—vast pleasure houses alight with God, while near at hand now gleamed the line ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... said my uncle Jervas, viewing me languidly through his quizzing-glass. "How confoundedly the years flit! Nineteen—and on me soul, our poor youth looks as if he hadn't a single gentlemanly vice to bless ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... slung to his side, and, as he held the mouth to his comrade's lips and forgot the pain he suffered in his strained and stiffening joints, he watched with a feeling of pleasure the avidity with which the boy drank; and as he saw the strange bird flit by once more he recalled having heard of such a bird living in the ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... see in it; one of the crags of the aiguille-edge, on the southern slope of it, is struck sharply through, as by an awl, into a little eyelet hole; which you may see, seven thousand feet above the valley (as the clouds flit past behind it, or leave the sky), first white, and then dark blue. Well, there's just such an eyelet hole in one of the upper crags of the Diamond Valley; and, from a distance, you think that it is no bigger than the eye of a needle. But if you get up to it, they say you may drive a ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... flower the wild bee roams, Then buried within the cowslip's cup, He murmurs his low and music tones, Till she folds the wanton intruder up; The spring bird, wakening, soars on high, Gushing aloft its melting lay; Whilst painted clouds flit o'er the sky, All ushering in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the earnest request of his friend. He did not like the looks of himself bedraggled and wet, and dead, on the deck of the "Hatty," with that curious crowd looking at him, Mandy Ann with the rest. Strange that thoughts of Mandy Ann should flit through his mind as he decided against the cold bath in the St. John's and to face it, whatever it was. Occasionally some one spoke to him, and he always answered politely, and once offered his chair to a lady who seemed ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... rare palaces where beings of a loftier nature glide. The incense of all prosperities sends up its smoke, the altar of all joy flames, the perfumed air circulates! Beings with divine smiles, robed in white tunics bordered with blue, flit lightly before the eyes and show us visions of supernatural beauty, shapes of an incomparable delicacy. The Loves hover in the air and waft the flames of their torches! We feel ourselves beloved; we are happy as we breathe a joy we understand not, as we bathe in the waves of ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... cunning hand, ready brain, broad back, and warm heart; in want of a wife mayhap; a man that can earn his own bread and another's;—half a dozen others' when the half dozen come? Would not that be a good sort of lodger? Such a question as that too did flit, just flit, across the widow's sleepless mind. But then she thought so much more of the wolf! Wolves, she had taught herself to think, were more common than stalwart, ...
— The Courtship of Susan Bell • Anthony Trollope
... my choice of crimes. The woods flit and fly—in summer there are bluebells; in the opening there, when Spring comes, primroses. A parting, was it, twenty years ago? Vows broken? Not Minnie's!... She was faithful. How she nursed her mother! ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... of the emotions through which he had been passing of late, that Roland felt but a faint interest at the prospect of meeting face to face a genuine—if exiled—monarch. The thought did flit through his mind that they would sit up a bit in old Fineberg's office if they could hear of it, but ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... be. And, as long as they lived or until the Procyon made port, all responsibility rested: First, upon First Officer Deston; and second, upon Second Officer Jones. Therefore Theodore and Bernice Jones came aboard Lifecraft Two, and Deston asked Newman to flit across ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... this unnatural sanity of intellect: it is like the calm in the whirlwind's centre, where the waves run higher though the air is deadly still, and the surly mariner wishes the mad wind back again.—To and fro you flit, goaded on and strengthened by untiring anguish. You are but the body of a man; your thought and emotion are abroad, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
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