"Fitfully" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it had soothed her and that in spite of her efforts to keep awake she had fallen fitfully asleep again. He let the book drop, and sat still, studying his mother's strong, lined face in its setting of gray hair. There was something in her temporary quiescence and helplessness that touched ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... side of the river. A short trolley line ran down a stone pier from beside the road to the edge of the water, where a barge with a bright brown sail waited; the smoke from a clinker fire built in a pierced bucket swept fitfully about the pier; grimy men loaded a car on the trolley line. Over the grey-blue water hundreds of house-martins dipped and darted and chattered; my umbrella blew inside out, a few scared birds near me tossed up into ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... hunters slipped from his buffalo robe and dived into the laurel thicket to replenish the fire from the stock of dry fuel. His figure revealed itself fitfully in the firelight, a tall slim man with a curious lightness of movement like a cat's. When he had done his work he snuggled down in his skins in the glow, and his two companions shifted their positions to be near ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... was a strange light that was spread over the piazza. There were the pale stars breaking out above, and the dim waving lanterns below, leaving all objects indistinct except when they were seen close under the fitfully moving lights; but in this recess there was a stronger light, against which the heads of the encircling spectators stood in dark relief as Tito was gradually pushed towards them, while above them rose the ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... stared at Natalie. She was dressed in red. What was it they had called that birthday dress of long ago? Accordion silk. The breeze caught Natalie's skirt and played with it, opening out the soft pleats and closing them again. The breeze seized upon the ends of the cloud and lifted them fitfully as though they were wings too tired for ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... Bull, who was only half asleep, kicked out in such an alarming manner, that for some seconds, his boots gyrated fitfully all over the family hearth, filling the whole circle with consternation. For, when Mr Bull did kick, his kick was tremendous. And he always kicked, when the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... attack; But those behind cried, "Forward!" And those before cried, "Back!" And backward now and forward Wavers the deep array; And on the tossing sea of steel To and frow the standards reel; And the victorious trumpet-peal Dies fitfully away. ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of crystal purity and wonderfully blue in places where shafts of sunlight penetrated to great depths—for now the sun was high above the horizon ahead, and shining in an almost clear sky. Presently we began to notice the wind again. It came fitfully, first from one quarter and then another, rapidly increasing until, at times, it rose into a tempest. It lifted the water in huge combing waves, but the car rode them ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... amount of high critical ability available. Buried and obscured to an ineffectual degree among much that is formal, foolish, and venial, there is to be found to-day a really quite remarkable number of isolated reviews, criticisms and articles in which style is apparent, in which discrimination shines fitfully, in which there is the unmistakable note of honest enthusiasm for good work. For the most part, such criticism bears also the marks of haste— as, indeed, it must do when a review as long as the column of a daily paper, a day's work, that is, of steady writing, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... every hour of the time the child was not only gay but patient, not fitfully, but steadily, resigned, sparing of requests, reluctant to be served, inventive of tender and pious little words that she had never used before. "You are exquisite to me, mother," she said, at receiving some ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... moonlight. There was no mistaking the tall, broad-shouldered, handsome Englishman, and the trim, dainty little figure in fleecy white, with the ermine wrap thrown over the pretty plump shoulders and round neck, on which rare diamonds, that would have paid a king's ransom, gleamed fitfully whenever the sportive breeze tossed back the ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... leaving him the only heir to the large property laid up by eight generations of Thayers. His grandfather had refused to become reconciled to his son; then why should he assume post-mortem friendship with his son's son? However, by the time he was launched into German student-life, dividing his time fitfully between his university and his music, young Cotton Mather was forced to admit that an ancestral fortune was no despicable addition to the stock in trade of a man starting in life. He only needed to watch the grinding ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... evidence that after the first few months, during which the habits of his hard school life had not yet broken, the new liberty of university life led him into extravagance, if not dissipation. Work he doubtless did (he won the Browne medal for a Greek ode on the slave-trade in 1792), but fitfully, giving less and less attention to his regular studies and more to conviviality and, above all, to dreams of literary fame. He wrote verses after various models, sentimental, fanciful, or gallant; he was enthusiastic in praise of a contemporary sonneteer, the Rev. William ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... little band of elephant-catchers burned fitfully at the edge of the jungle. They were silent men—for they had lived long on the elephant trails—and curiously scarred and sombre. They smoked their cheroots, and waited for Ahmad Din ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... was strange and terrible to Lady Channice to see how little she had really known this man. Their meetings, their talks together, were like the torchlight that flashed and wavered and only fitfully revealed. From the first she had listened, had assented, to everything he said, hanging upon his words and his looks and living afterward in the memory of them. And in memory their significance seemed so to grow that when they next met they found themselves ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... hall was still burning, and the flames wavered fitfully over the great picture above the mantel, and on the jar of red roses in front of it. The rest of the hall was in the shadow, and darker than the shadows, Anne had made out the figure of a man standing on ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle Of the tramways and the 'buses making hurry down the street, And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting, Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... sultriness pervades the air And binds the brain—a dense oppression, such As tawny tigers feel in matted shades, Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage. Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by. Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf Of muffled sound, the Atheist roar of riot. Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought, Balefully glares red Arson—there-and there. The Town is taken by its rats—ship-rats. And rats of ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... melancholy pines were standing, and everywhere, as far as she could see southward, were blackened fallen trees and stumps. It was a dreary scene. The few cattle grazing on the bleached grass appeared as melancholy as the pines. The sun shone fitfully at sunset, and then sank, leaving the land to twilight ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... brought a torch and lit the brushwood on the altar. Instantly a flame rose to heaven, through which the figure of the magician showed fitfully like a mountain in mist. That act broke the wizardry for me. To sacrifice a cat was monstrous and horrible, but it was also uncouthly silly. I saw the magic for what it was, a maniac's trickery. In the revulsion I grew angry, and my anger heartened ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... period in the proceedings, if the Learned Judge slumbered only fitfully during Mr. Dreadful's final peroration, it might have been owing to the spasmodic explosions of that Counsel's voice; but there could be no doubt that the Learned Judge slept peacefully during the earlier ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... Abel's face, and he walked up and down the room, no longer carelessly, but fitfully; stopping sometimes—again starting more rapidly—then leaning against the mantle, on which the clock pointed to midnight—then throwing himself into a chair or upon a sofa; and ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... hour beyond midnight, when, in spite of his situation, Leland began to yield to the fatigue of the day. His head drooped upon his breast, and he started fitfully. It is at such times as these that the nervous system seems to be most fully alive to what is passing. The prisoner was just in this state of mind when his attention was arrested by a sound no louder than the murmuring wind above him—so low, indeed, that it would ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... death-bed (a picture frightful to the present day); there was Lady Hamilton (Romney) waving a torch, and dancing before a black background,—a melancholy museum indeed. Smirke's delightful "Seven Ages" only fitfully relieved its general gloom. We did not like to inspect it unless the elders were present, and plenty of lights and company were in ...
— John Leech's Pictures of Life and Character • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal—this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully illuminated life. But what could he say now except that he should see ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... from their poles, a band clashing fitfully through the sleepy August air, and carriages still sweeping into the long drive, when Langholm also made his humble advent. He was a little uneasy and self-conscious, and annoyed at his own anxiety to impart his tidings to Mrs. Steel, but for whom he would probably have stayed at home. His ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... Their roots, like molten metal cooled in flowing, Stiffened in coils and runnels down the bank. The friend of all the winds, wide-armed he towers And glints his steely aglets in the sun, Or whitens fitfully with sudden bloom Of leaves breeze-lifted, much as when a shoal 120 Of devious minnows wheel from where a pike Lurks balanced 'neath the lily-pads, and whirl A rood of silver bellies to the day. Alas! no acorn from the British oak 'Neath ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... nature's deepest repose, and the bright midnight moon, stealing through the gently-swaying boughs of the dark pines that rose heavenward, like pinnacles, along the silent shores around, was throwing her broken beams fitfully down upon the faces of the unconscious sleepers, faintly revealing the impress which the thoughts and purposes of the last waking hours had left on the countenance of each. And these impresses were as variant as the characters of those on whose features they rested: that lingering on the sternly-compressed ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... novels. Yet the gesture of the grand style of Valera is palsied, except, perhaps, for the conservative Quixote, Ricardo Leon, a functionary in the Bank of Spain, while the idyllic method lingers fitfully in such gentle writers as Jose Maria Salaverria, after surviving the attacks of the northern realists under the lead of Pereda, in his novels of country life, and of the less vigorous Antonio de Trueba, and of Madrid vulgarians, headed by Mesonero Romanos ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... It was a glaring and irregular flame;—for the branches that he fed it with, were not branches from the Tree of Life,—but from another tree that grew in Paradise,—and they were wet with the unhealthy dews of night, and more unhealthy wine; and thus, amid smoke and ashes the fire burned fitfully, and went out with a glare, which ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Beechams could only huddle together in the small refuge Daddy contrived against the dripping, pricking blackness. When day came, the rain still fell and the wind still blew; but fitfully, as if they, too, were tired out. The family scurried around putting up the tent and building a fire and drying things out before the men must go to the grove. Rose-Ellen and Dick and even Jimmie felt less dismal when ...
— Across the Fruited Plain • Florence Crannell Means
... point, he looked into the glare. Wavering light and wavering shade flickered fast over the Roman profile, flowed fitfully—fitfully as his thoughts. Now his thoughts pursued architectural dreams, and now he thought of himself, of his unhappy youth, of how he had been misunderstood, of his solitary life; a bitter, unsatisfactory ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... this account, imagine that it has no thought; in fact, the Fairy Tale is just the way in which primitive peoples think. It has thought, often the profoundest thought, which darts through it, not steadily, but fitfully in flashes at the important links, like electric sparks. This thought we are to catch and hold, and not rest satisfied with the mere outer form of ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... the poor little flame, as if unable to abide the cold much longer, flared fitfully, and uneasily shifted itself from brand to brand, threatening with many a flicker to go out; but the woman, with her elbows on her knees, and her face settled firmly between her hands, still sat with eyes that saw not the feeble flame at which they ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray
... savage. It chooses its friends from whim or fancy, makes enemies through ignorance or caprice, avenges its wrongs in a torrent of rage, or through a cold-blooded thirst for plunder, and respects rules and usages only fitfully, and with small attention to the possible effect of its disregard of them on the general welfare. The man or the woman and, let us say, "the mother"—since that is supposed to be, in this discussion, a term of peculiar potency—who ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... been fitfully turbulent, the wind veering several points south and west, with suspicions lulls, unlike the steady onset of the regular southwest trades. High overhead the long manes of racing cirro stratus streamed with flying gulls and hurrying water-fowl; plover piped incessantly, ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... little time, and then it sped swiftly away down the steep air and out of sight in the blue distance. Even when it was gone the song seemed to ring in her ears. It seemed to linger with her as a faint, sweet echo, coming fitfully, with little pauses as though a wind disturbed it, and careless, distant eddies. After a few moments she knew it was not a bird. No bird's song had that consecutive melody, for their themes are as careless as their wings. ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... revived again. If Robin really cared for Germany like that, then they had something in common. With that spark a fire might be kindled. A red-gold haze as of fire burnt in the night sky, over the town. Stars danced overhead, a little wind, beating fitfully at the window, seemed to carry the light of the moon in its tempestuous track, blowing it lightly in silver mists and clouds over the moor. The Wise Men were there, strong and dark and sombre, watching over the lighted town and listening patiently to the ripple and murmur and life ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... another time of sleep. I slept, fitfully, worrying, trying to plan. Within a few hours we would be nearing ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... of Arbaces, 'are these galleries, that strangely and fitfully illumined, stretch on either hand into ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... helped Italy greatly. Whilst France and England have played a fitfully obstructionist and generally uninspired policy towards the restoration of European trade, Italy has been steadily working in a positive direction. She has received substantial help from Germany, help in return for help. The wasteful process ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... Grymes, married Henry Lee, and became the mother of "Legion Harry," a favorite officer and friend of Washington in the Revolution, and the grandmother of Robert E. Lee, the great soldier of the Southern Confederacy. The affair with Miss Cary went on apparently for some years, fitfully pursued in the intervals of war and Indian fighting, and interrupted also by matters of a more tender nature. The first diversion occurred about 1752, when we find Washington writing to William Fauntleroy, at Richmond, that he proposed to come to his house to see his sister, Miss ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... the subject of books fitted for public libraries. At the outset, it is most important that each selection should be made on a well considered plan. No hap-hazard, or fitfully, or hastily made collection can answer the two ends constantly to be aimed at—namely, first, to select the best and most useful books, and, secondly, to economize the funds of the library. No money should be wasted upon whims and experiments, but every dollar ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... ripe, red sunshine fitfully, Like withering doubts through Love's warm, flushing breast, With wailing voice of saddest augury, Sweeps from the frozen North a phantom guest. With icy finger on each yellow leaf Writes he the history of ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... in mind. It was not so silent a night as usual. The horses were restless, as if some animal were prowling about. He could hear the sudden trampling of hoofs as a number of horses swiftly changed their location. The coyotes were in full chorus out in the valley. A cold wind fitfully stirred the branches, whipped across his face. One of his comrades, Blinky he thought, was ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... looked up to her and depended on her words of wisdom. To be afraid on her own part was certainly not her custom, and yet that evening, as she sat alone in the deserted old drawing-room, and listened to the wind as it rose fitfully and moaned through the belt of fir-trees that sheltered the lawn; as she sat there, pretending to knit, but listening all the time for footsteps which did not come, she did own to a feeling which she would not describe as fear, but which certainly kept her from going to bed, and made ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... the lovely chateau built for Diane de Poictiers by her royal lover. Leaving the carriage at the lodge, our sight-seers crossed the moat, and, led by a wooden-faced girl with a lisp, entered the famous pleasure-house, which its present owner (a pensive man in black velvet, who played fitfully on a French-horn in a pepper-pot tower) is carefully restoring to ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... not, since English literature is still only fitfully studied in public schools, have named the author. But he quoted the lines with fluent confidence. It was by turning them into Greek Iambics that he ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... home to his garret, fresh interests awaited him. Sometimes, he tells us in the "Peau de Chagrin," he would "study the mosses, with their colours revived by showers, or transformed by the sun into a brown velvet that fitfully caught the light. Such things as these formed my recreations: the passing poetic moods of daylight, the melancholy mists, sudden gleams of sunlight, the silence and the magic of night, the mysteries of dawn, the smoke-wreaths from each chimney; every chance event, in fact, in my ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... assumed. They knew the effect of protracted silence and impending danger to sap even an assertive courage and for five other minutes they stood wordless and motionless. Only their shadows moved under the torch-light, wavering fitfully from small to large, from light to dark like draperies in ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... Marriott,—whose ample voice and exact elocution, together with her formidable stature and her faculty of identification with the character that she assumes and with the spirit of the story, made her of great value to this play—hovered around Ravenswood, and aided to keep this presage of evil doom fitfully present in the consciousness of its victim. Henry Irving gave to the part its perfectly distinct individuality, and in that respect made as fine a showing as he has ever made of his authority as an actor. There was never the least doubt as ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... that it fades into the background of the concert-hall, is like gray upon gray. The gems and gold thread and filigree with which this work is sewn tarnish in the gloom. Something is there, we perceive, something that moves and sways and rises and ebbs fitfully in the dim light. But it is a wraithlike thing, and undulates and falls before our eyes like flames that have neither redness nor heat. Even the terrible bagpipe of the second rhapsody for oboe; even the caldron of the "Pagan Poem," that transcription of the most sensual ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... generally a home-keeper. No adventure, no setting forth, and small liberty, for him. But Tom-a-Bedlam, the wild man in patches or in ribbons, with his wallet and his horn for alms of food or drink, came and went as fitfully as the storm, free to suffer all the cold—an unsheltered creature; and the chill fancy of the villager followed him out to the heath on a journey that had no law. Was it he in person, or a poet for him, that made the swinging song: "From the hag and the hungry goblin"? If a poet, it was one ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... intimacy had never been quite re-established between them since the day of his tactless juvenile proposal—for so he saw it now. They had only met that once, when he was home for Christmas. On the second occasion, they had missed. Throughout the War they had corresponded fitfully; but her letters, though affectionate and sisterly, lacked an unseizable something that affected the tone of his response. He had been rash enough, once, to presume on their special relation. But he was no longer a boy; and he had ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... the mountains when the little train steamed down the valley. All were subdued, and Greta, with a nodding head, slept fitfully. Christian, in her corner, was looking out of the window, and Harz kept studying ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... thine will last Save in my love's eternity. Thy smiles, that light thee fitfully, Are lost for ever—their moment past— Except the few thou givest ...
— Poems • Alice Meynell
... late at night. The yellow lamplight left hard faces almost repulsive under the fantastic shadows it so fitfully impressed upon them. The low-ceiled room, too, gained in its sordid aspect. An atmosphere of moral degradation looked out from every shadowy corner, claiming the features of everybody who came within the dull radiance of the two cheap oil lamps ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... fainter as he reached the forest sward, Spreading round for many an acre over the lands which owned him lord. As he dashed along the woodland, fitfully, upon the breeze, Swept the tu-who-o of the owlet through the naked ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... ridges, mainly (I believe) of lime, rise to the surface; beyond these, and near the west line of the new State, stretches a thin-soiled, rolling sandstone district, perhaps forty miles wide; then comes the Buffalo range, formerly covering the entire valley of the Mississippi, and even stretching fitfully beyond the Rocky Mountains, but now shrunk to a strip hardly more than one hundred and fifty miles in width, but extending north and south from Texas into the British territory which embosoms the Red River of the North. Better soil than that of the Buffalo region west of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fitfully and had been wide awake at various times. Strong had again been awakened and was insisting that ...
— Ted Marsh on an Important Mission • Elmer Sherwood
... little of it could be seen in this wasted and emaciated figure that now lay before her, seemingly at the last verge of life. His features had grown thin and attenuated, his lips were drawn tight over his teeth, his face had the stamp of something like death upon it. He was sleeping fitfully, but his eyes were only half closed. His thin, bony hands moved restlessly about, and his lips muttered inarticulate words from time to time. Hilda placed her hand on his forehead. It was cold and damp. The cold sent a chill ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... obscured the stars and a drizzle of rain was falling. The car went forward at a good pace and Desmond, after one or two ineffectual attempts to make out where they were going, was lulled by the steady motion into a deep sleep. He was dreaming fitfully of the tossing Channel as he had seen it but a few hours before when he came to his senses with a start. He felt a cold draught of air on his face and his feet were ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room—of the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... held tight in his arms, to get his first big kiss, to come into the house still clinging to him, was bliss to Rachael now. But as the summer wore away she noticed that in a few hours the joy of homecoming would fade for him, he would become fitfully talkative, moodily silent, he would wonder why the Valentines were always late, and ask his wife patiently if she would please not hum, ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... banners, crosses, crucifixes, flowers, and tall thin tapers—all the altars were crowded with such adornments. Human vanity and the love of surpassing one's neighbors, these also figured conspicuously among the things the fitfully shining sun looks down upon. But what a charm there is in such a contest! Surely the desire to beautify the spot on which the Blessed Sacrament rests this is only another way of professing ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... Cawood Castle. It had been a touching meeting. Hal could hardly restrain his tears when he saw how Wolsey's sturdy form had wasted, and his round ruddy cheeks had fallen away, while the attitude in which he sat in his chair was listless and weary, though he fitfully exerted himself with his ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... look down and see a steep irregular wall, expanding deeper into the ocean than the eye can follow, and broken into lovely grottoes and holes and canals, through which small resplendent fish of the brightest blue or gold flit fitfully between the lumps of coral. The sides of these natural grottoes are entirely covered with endless forms of tender-coloured coral, but all beautiful, and all more or less of the fingery or branching species, known as madrepores. It is really impossible to draw or describe the sight, which must ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... fate and life. Here, where the dark pool reflects the chancel pillars, and the cattle lie in unhindered rest, the soft sunshine on their dappled bodies, instead of priests' vestments; their white furry hair ruffled a little, fitfully, by the evening wind deep-scented from the ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... Dick's face and he awoke to find hundreds of sheeted and silent white forms lying motionless upon the deck. Snow was falling swiftly out of a dark sky, and the fleet was moving slowly. In the darkness and stillness the engines throbbed powerfully, and the night was lighted fitfully by the showers of sparks that gushed now and then ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... wounded man had just expired, and I encountered his body at the threshold. Within, the sickening smell of mortality was almost insupportable, but by degrees I became accustomed to it. The lanterns hanging around the room streamed fitfully upon the red eyes, and half-naked figures. All were looking up, and saying, in pleading monotone: "Is that you, doctor?" Men with their arms in slings went restlessly up and down, smarting with fever. Those who were ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... few faggots, and a cleaver. He caught up the last. "Aha," he muttered; "and there's the sledge-hammer somewhere for Walters." Leaning himself against the door, he then applied his eye to a chink which admitted a dim view of the room within, lighted fitfully ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was not a sound in the forests of Drowned Valley except in the dead timber where unseen woodpeckers hammered fitfully at the ghosts of ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... every means to excite sensation in different parts of my body, and so to weaken the enemy by creating a division. It continued from one in the morning till half-past five, and left me pale and fainty. It came on fitfully, but not so violently, several times on Thursday, and began severer threats towards night; but I took between 60 and 70 drops of laudanum, and sopped the Cerberus just as his mouth began to open. On Friday it only niggled, as if the Chief ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... his obscure, terrible glimpses of scenery were in essence something quite new.... Ossian's images were far from "nature methodized." His imagination illumined fitfully a scene of mountains and blasted heaths, as artificially wild as his heroines were artificially sensitive; to modern readers they resemble too much the stage-settings of melodrama. But in 1760, his ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... time staring into the flames of the tiny fire before creeping between her damp blankets. Despite the utter body-weariness of her long canoe-trip, the girl slept but fitfully in ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... shining fitfully, as it broke through swift flying clouds. In the uncertain light, Dot could see a little creature near them, and knew at once that it ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... 1812, during the Indian War of Tecumseh, the garrison and settlers, who had abandoned the fort and were retreating toward safety, were attacked and overpowered by the savages at a point now well within the city. The fort was re-established and fitfully occupied until its final abandonment in 1837. When Cook county was organized in 1831, Chicago, then a tiny village, became the seat of justice. It became a town in 1833 and a city in 1837. By that time Chicago ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... to the external air; echoing to the roof with the beating of hammers and roar of furnaces, mingled with the hissing of red-hot metal plunged in water, and a hundred strange unearthly noises never heard elsewhere; in this gloomy place, moving like demons among the flame and smoke, dimly and fitfully seen, flushed and tormented by the burning fires, and wielding great weapons, a faulty blow from any one of which must have crushed some workman's skull, a number of men laboured like giants. Others, reposing upon heaps of coals or ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep, Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes, What is that which the breeze o'er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam, In full glory reflected now shines in the stream; 'Tis the star-spangled banner; oh, long may it wave O'er the land of the free and the home of ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... like millions of mothers in those days, was cruelly divided in mind. When the neighbors felicitated her on the valor and patriotism of Mr. Jack she was elated and fitfully reconciled. When, in the long watches of the night, she reflected on the hardships, temptations, the dreadful companions her darling must be thrown with, country, lineage, everything faded into the dreadful reality that her darling was in peril, body and soul. He was so like his ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... not my house, I instinctively realized. She sat bolt upright, firm and strong as a Hindoo idol on its altar; a nebulous glare invested her head with a halo, through which bristling hair-pins stuck out in all directions, like lightning-rods with fitfully luminous points. The crystal wall of spectacles that bridged her nose seemed graven with the cabalistic words, "I've got you." A feeling of conscious guilt, of what an enfeebled mind failed to grasp, succumbed ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... not turn to take his letters, however, nor seem to heed the wind which was rising fitfully each moment without, but leaned ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... wonderful how her hatred towards me could grow so intense and active as it did. But she had begun to suspect, by some involuntary betrayal of mine, that there was an abnormal power of penetration in me—that fitfully, at least, I was strangely cognizant of her thoughts and intentions, and she began to be haunted by a terror of me, which alternated every now and then with defiance. She meditated continually how the incubus could be shaken off her life—how she could be freed from this hateful ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... to rise again. He rallied, however, more than once, and regained his good spirits and gave hope to those who had any real wish for his recovery that the reign had not yet quite come to an end. In some of his better moods he showed glimpses of that higher nature which was wont to assert itself fitfully now and then at many periods of his career. More than once he prayed fervently in these later days that his life might be spared until the Princess Victoria should come of age. Almost to the end the usual festivities were kept up at Windsor Castle, and the ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... seemed less interesting than ever when Rose had tripped away. A gusty breeze was blowing fitfully, whisking bits of straw and odds and ends of paper about. The watering cart went by, leaving a cool wake of shining mud. Here and there a surrey, loaded with stout women in figured percales, and ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... keen suffering, hair damp with the cold dew on his forehead, a scarlet spot on either cheek, gray lines about the mouth, and pale lips parted by the painful breaths that came in heavy gasps or fluttered fitfully. This was what Christie saw, and after that long look she knew the truth, and sunk down beside the bed, crying with an exceeding ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... formed so favourable an impression that he spoke sternly to Susy on the importance of respecting her husband's working hours; and he even carried his general benevolence to the length of showing a fatherly interest in Clarissa Vanderlyn. He was always charming to children, but fitfully and warily, with an eye on his independence, and on the possibility of being suddenly bored by them; Susy had never seen him abandon these precautions so completely as ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... continuing difficulties in moving away from the former command system, the Romanian economy seems to have bottomed out in 1993-94. Market oriented reforms have been introduced fitfully since the downfall of CEAUSESCU in December 1989, with the result a growing private sector, especially in services. The slow pace of structural reform, however, has exacerbated Romania's high inflation rate and eroded real ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... won't be able to sleep, or at best only fitfully, if I don't. Here's what happened, in ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... open park in front of Cranbury, there occurs that fitfully blooming plant, lady's-tresses—Neottia Spiralis autumnalis- -and a profusion of brown-winged orchis and cowslips. All the slopes are covered with copsewood, much of it oak, the tints of which are lovely shades of green in spring and golden-brown in early autumn. The whole is ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... the blanket, and, with his hand upon his knapsack, gazed at the small red ember burning amid the ashes. When the last spark faded into blackness it was as if his thoughts went groping for a light. Sleep came fitfully in flights and pauses, in broken dreams and brief awakenings. Losing himself at last it was only to return to the woods at Chericoke and to see Betty coming to him among the dim blue bodies of the trees. He saw the faint sunshine falling upon her ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... behind cried "Forward!" and those before cried "Back!" And backward now and forward wavers the deep array; And on the tossing sea of steel, to and fro the standards reel; And the victorious trumpet-peal dies fitfully away. ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... come boisterous winds which blow damply, except Notus and Boreas and clear Zephyr. These are a god-sent kind, and a great blessing to men; but the others blow fitfully upon the seas. Some rush upon the misty sea and work great havoc among men with their evil, raging blasts; for varying with the season they blow, scattering ships and destroying sailors. And men who meet these upon the sea have ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... merchant within rather than a beggar without the law, and proceeded to enliven the still quiet neighborhood with the dreadfully strained measure of Verdi's "Miserere." He turned the handles of the little organ fitfully, so that now the strains of sorrow arose at such long intervals as hardly to be connected with one another, and now all huddled and jumbled like notes in a barbaric quickstep, and as he played he addressed his instrument ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... high houses with projecting upper stories, much carved and gilded, their deeply projecting roofs or eaves tiled with shells cut into panes, which let the light softly through, while a sky of deep bright blue fills up the narrow slit between. Then in the shadow below, which is fitfully lighted by the sunbeams, hanging from all the second stories at every possible interval of height, each house having at least two, are the richly painted boards of which I wrote before, from six to ten feet long, some ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... There seem to have been two conceptions of the operations of the Spirit in St. Paul's time: (a) He comes fitfully, with visible signs, and puts men beside themselves; (b) He is an abiding presence, enlightening, guiding, and strengthening. St. Paul lays weight on the latter view, without repudiating the former. See H. Gunkel, Die Wirkungen des H. Geistes nach der popul. Anschauung d. apostol. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... some very unpleasant dreams. The waning moon rose late. Its light struck a ghostly white beam across my cabin, and made an ominous shape on the planking by my bunk. Then the staghounds woke, and began howling and baying; so that I dreamt fitfully, and scarcely slept ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... to have had so much love, he must have given some. Treasures of wit and wisdom, and tenderness, too, must that man have had locked up in the caverns of his gloomy heart, and shown fitfully to one or two whom he took in there. But it was not good to visit that place. People did not remain there long, and suffered for having been there. He shrank away from all affections sooner or later. Stella and Vanessa both died near him, and away from him. He ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... word of Father Neptune's mouth. So to the Sirens' rocks they draw, a dangerous pass forsooth In yore agone, now white with bones of many a perished man. Thence ever roared the salt sea now as on the rocks it ran; And there the Father felt the ship fare wild and fitfully, Her helmsman lost; so he himself steered o'er the night-tide sea, Sore weeping; for his fellow's end his inmost heart did touch: "O Palinure, that trowed the sky and soft seas overmuch, 870 Now naked on an unknown ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil |
