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More "Fitful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fire on the open hearth. By the time the dry wood was crackling and sparkling out its cheery welcome, my patient arrived, and was laid down, blankets and all, on the rude little bedstead, before the blaze. By its fitful and uncertain light I proceeded to examine the enormous frame stretched so helplessly before me, feeling half afraid to touch him at all. F—— was very trying as an assistant, for he looked on without making any suggestions, and only said ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... valley the brown hills of Catalonia, faintly tinged with pink. A nursing sister in her dark blue dress and white winged cap was seated at the open window, gazing reflectively across the valley. There was an odour of violets in the room. A fitful breeze stirred the lace curtains. Whittaker perceived his own travel-worn portmanteau lying half unpacked on a side table. It seemed that some one had opened it to seek the few necessaries of the moment. He noted with a feeling of helplessness that his simple ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... Such knowledge have we of it, vaguely caught Through whispers fallen from tradition's lip. This shattered tower, with crenellated top And loops for archers, alone marks the spot, Looming forlornly—a gigantic harp Whereon the invisible fingers of the wind Its fitful and ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... visitors, and when walking with them on the terraces, his thoughts ran on Mount Rorke Castle, his own success, and Frank's failure; and when he awoke in the sweet, luxurious rooms, in the houses where he was staying, his brain filled with febrile sensations of triumph, and fitful belief that he was above ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... all inconceivable and strange. The glamour of love mingled with the soft, fitful firelight reflected in Miriam's eyes, till they twain seemed the only realities. So that when she began to speak of her husband, it seemed at first no more to John Arniston than if she had told him that ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... noble gallop of Dryden's verse is exchanged for a quick trot. And there is not even a point of comparison between his sweet sing-song, and the wavy, snow-like, spirit-like motion of Milton's loftier passages; or the gliding, pausing, fitful, river-like progress of Shakspeare's verse; or the fretted fury, and "torrent-rapture" of brave old Chapman in his translation of Homer; or the rich, long-drawn-out, slow-swimming, now soft-languishing, and now full-gushing melody of Spenser's "Faery Queen."—Yet, within his own sphere, Pope ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... time, in the same place; and is rarely at home when you call upon him. It would be instructive to obtain a return of the number of professional writers who retain pews in church, and are to be found there with their families on Sundays. There is something altogether fitful, irregular, spasmodic in their way of life. And so it is with their expenditure. They do not live like other men, and they do not spend like other men. At one time, you would think, from their lavish style of living, that they were worth three thousand a year; and at another, from ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Westerners have remained allied or subject to the Spaniards longer than the immediate needs of the moment demanded. At the bottom the Spaniards knew this, and their encouragement of American immigration was fitful and faint-hearted. ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... creature belonging to this fountain. Whether woman or sprite was a mystery, as was all else about her, except that her life and soul were somehow interfused throughout the gushing water. She was a fresh, cool, dewy thing, sunny and shadowy, full of pleasant little mischiefs, fitful and changeable with the whim of the moment, but yet as constant as her native stream, which kept the same gush and flow forever, while marble crumbled over and around it. The fountain woman loved the youth,—a knight, as Donatello called him,—for, according to the legend, his ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... heavy-hearted for the man Whom they had honoured even as Achilles. Then black night, bearing unto all men sleep, Upfloated: so they brake bread, and lay down Waiting the Child of the Mist. Short was sleep, Broken by fitful staring through the dark, Haunted by dread lest in the night the foe Should fall on them, ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... to derive no little advantage from the quickness of wit; which had attracted M. de Rosny's attention; although I did not fail to take into account at the same time that the lad was wayward and fitful, prone at one time to depression, and at another to giddiness, and equally uncertain ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... a.m. the British troops stood to arms as usual. It was a wet and misty morning. As the men, few of whom knew of the occurrences of the night, waited in quarter-column, to a few keen ears came the fitful sound of musketry from the east. It was the fire of Grimshaw's piquet just then at bay below Talana. The parade having been dismissed, at 5.20 a message from Headquarters assured commanding officers that all was clear. A few companies moved directly ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... of the scrubbing-brushes, as they were set to work at four bells (six o'clock) next morning, awoke me; and, hastily donning such garments as were indispensable, I went on deck to take a look round. The easterly breeze, though it had proved somewhat fitful, had held with sufficient strength through the night to place us off Selsey Bill, with the high land of Saint Catherine's Point looming faintly ahead of us about two points on the starboard bow; and there, too, hauling up for the inside ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... is fitful and spiritless, few but civilian partners being left for the ladies. Many of the latter prefer to sit in reverie while waiting for ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... melancholy hoot from the forest, or a screech owl would raise a momentary and damnable din. At intervals, the tinkle of a cow-bell sounded faintly in the distance. I tossed restlessly, thinking of various things, till I must have dropped off into an uneasy fitful sleep. I know not how long I had been dozing, but of a sudden I felt myself wide awake, though with my ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... more and he stood alone on the granite steps. The night was still and gloomy, the moon gave only a fitful glimmering now and then as it peeped from between heavy clouds, the air was sharp and piercing, but the young man on the steps felt in a white heat as he waited in breathless anxiety for the ...
— Three People • Pansy
... who resorts to stimulants to keep up his strength or to increase it, is never normal, never on the level, never at his best. He is either overstimulated or abnormally depressed. His efforts are bound to be fitful and his work uneven in quality. Furthermore, it will be only a matter of time until he exhausts his reserve supply of nerve fats and vital energy and then suffers nervous bankruptcy in the forms of nervous prostration, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... interruption, we waited till the whole house was abed before we left it for the grotto. We went by boat and oh! the dip of those oars! I hear them yet. And the witchery of her face in the moonlight; and the mockery of her low fitful laugh! As I caught the sinister note in its silvery rise and fall, I knew what was before me if I failed to retain my composure. And I strove to hold it and to meet her calmness with stoicism and the taunt of her expression with a mask ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... though strong, was steady and all went well until the ship reached the western extremity of the mountainous island, when, with a roar and a screech truly terrific, a squall struck us in wild, fitful gusts. We were carrying reefed topsails and trysails at the time, and it was fortunate that we had no more sail on, or surely our spars must have gone over the side. As it was, the fore trysail split with ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... As fitful shadows round me gather fast, And solemn watch my thoughts are holding, Comes Memory, Panoramist of the Past. The rising morn of life unfolding, Now fade from view all living toil and strife; Time past is now my ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... mean we have heard read by Mr. Carr, who reads admirably, half the first volume of the Pirate, stopped at the chapter ending with the description of Norma of the Fitful Head. We were much pleased and interested, especially with the beautiful description of Mordaunt's education and employments: the sea-monsters, etc., most poetical, in Scott's master style: the manner in which, by scarcely perceptible touches, he wakens the reader's interest for his ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... room was stifling now as the slant sun of afternoon burned through the closed blinds and drawn hangings. Languidly she curled up upon the sofa and pillowed her heavy head on the scented silk, and so, drowsing with fitful dreams, she lost the ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... the heavy firing of the Turks ceased, and a dead stillness followed the terrible boom of cannon. The streets were ploughed with balls, the ashes of many a consumed building were scattered about by the wind, while here and there a fitful blaze was seen issuing from a shapeless mass that once had been the stately home of some proud Austrian noble. Pale, ghastly figures wandered among the ruins, searching for food, which, alas! they rarely found. But, amid this "abomination of desolation," they still lifted their ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... stirred uneasily in the early slumber of the evening. Eleven floors below her, in the foyer of the Hotel Manhattan, the after-theater crowd of visitors thronged and buzzed happily. But the girl, after an unusual day of anxiety in a strange land, was ill at ease, with fitful dreams. ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... retrospectively thrown upon it by Coleridge's correspondence of a later date is of the most fitful description,— scarcely more than serves, in fact, for the rendering of darkness visible. Even the sudden and final departure from the Lakes it leaves involved in as much obscurity as ever. Writing to Mr. Thomas Allsop [1] from Ramsgate twelve years ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... scarcely realized I was creeping along barely beneath the dead line of those bullets which constantly swept the apartment. Their crashing into the wall was almost meaningless, and I barely noted either the dense smoke or the fitful flashes of flame as the little garrison returned shot for shot. It was Brennan's voice—how hateful it sounded then—which ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... brown hair,—but that face! Had not King Hephaestos wrought every line of clear Phoenician glass, then touched them with snow and rose, and shot through all the ichor of life? Perhaps there was a fitful fire in the dark eyes that awaited the husband's coming, or a slight twitching of the impatient lips. But nothing disturbed the high-born repose of face and figure. Hermione was indeed the worthy daughter of a noble house, and happy the man who was ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... the background of stars; and the white cloud that ever floated about its summit like the ghost of dead fires was crawling down the slopes to the little town at its base. From this small but teeming capital came fitful sounds of music and of less decorous revelry, and its lights seemed to flit through the groves of palm and cocoanut trees, gently moving in the ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... Lydgate and Hoccleve to Stephen Hawes! The Italian influence would have come in for the first time with Surrey and Wyatt, and the whole sequence would have been just what a plain man would expect. Not only by his inconvenient possession of genius, but also by his great, if fitful industry, and by what we can hardly call by any name but good luck, Chaucer shoots up suddenly between Gower and his natural successors, and thus revolutionises the standard of poetry by which the next century is inevitably judged. The effect ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... light in the lodge, as the fire was low, and its fitful flashes, by disclosing their white faces and then dropping them in sudden darkness, served rather to increase than to dispel ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... fitful, and fragmentary; intimate lover's talk, interspersed with luminous pauses, that were but hidden channels of speech; till Quita felt the walls within walls giving way under her 'magic,' and knew that she had reached ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... And ever the fitful gusts between A sound came from the land; It was the sound of the trampling surf, On the rocks and ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... were equally pleasurable or painful; in such a case all acts would be equally good or equally sad; there would be no ground for choice. One might in any of these hypothetical worlds be driven by mechanical impulse or fitful whim to do this or that, but there would be no rational basis for preference. Such, however, is not the case. Comparative valuation is possible; all secondary goods and evils arise, all morality, all art and religion and science ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... some way of taking Darnay's place in the gloomy prison; he would, by his substitution, restore her husband to Lucy's side; he would make his life sublime at its close. His career should resemble a day that, fitful and overcast, ends at length in a glorious sunset. He would save his life by ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... over the railing and looked below. As far as the eye could reach, within the arc of their vision, they could see fitful lights flashing up, here and there, and going out again. And then they heard faint sounds of crashing masonry and the condensed roar of human voices, which seemed to come from above rather than from below. The Alphian turned. "I cannot ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... rough and stormy as it is in England, would perhaps be deemed mild and beautiful as May by those accustomed to meet and brave its fury in the eastern Highlands, nor would the evening on which our tale commences bely its wild and fitful character. ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... and night settled in. Fitful snorings and groans and incoherent mutterings broke the stillness. At intervals a man near the door would jump to his feet, proclaiming the end of the world. Sometimes his paroxysm was brief, but again ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... uncertain. No interest can thrive under it. The prudent capitalist will never adventure his capital in manufacturing establishments, or in any other leading pursuit of life, if there exists a state of uncertainty as to whether the Government will repeal to-morrow what it has enacted to-day. Fitful profits, however high, if threatened with a ruinous reduction by a vacillating policy on the part of Government, will scarcely tempt him to trust the money which he has acquired by a life of labor upon the uncertain adventure. I therefore, in the spirit of conciliation, and influenced ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... waiting-room, a monument of patient resignation to his fate. His hands were bunched on the head of his walking-stick, his chin propped on his hands; his eyes were bent on a certain spot on the carpet with a fixed stare. And when Allerdyke entered he sprang up as if roused from a fitful slumber. ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... suspension of intelligence only, a frost-bite in the brain that presently some April breath of memory might thaw out. This was not merely conjectural, of course. I had the story of his mental collapse from his mother in the early days of my sojourn in Bel-Oiseau; for it came to pass that a fitful caprice induced me to prolong my stay in the swart little village far into the ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... murky morning in November, wind north-east, a poor old woman with a wooden leg was seen struggling against the fitful gusts of the bitter breeze, along a stony zigzag road, full of deep and irregular cart-ruts. Her ragged petticoat was blue, and so was her wretched nose. A stick was in her left hand, which assisted her to dig and ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... of the night are mute Beneath the moon's eclipse; The silence of the fitful flute Is in the dying lips! The silence of my lonely heart Is kept for ever more In the lull Of the waves Of a low ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... ever the fitful gusts between, A sound came from the land; It was the sound of the trampling surf, On the ...
— The Wreck of the Hesperus • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... night. We four officers lay down side by side with just our valises to soften the ruggedness of the ground. Fitful flashes in front showed our own guns firing; high-velocity shells, bursting immediately behind us, made us ponder on the possibility of casualties before the night was out. But we were dog-tired, and slept well; and by ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... agitation of his thoughts, he envies those whom he has sent to peace. 'Duncan is in his grave; after life's fitful fever he sleeps well.' It is true, he becomes more callous as he plunges deeper in guilt, 'direness is thus rendered familiar to his slaughterous thoughts', and he in the end anticipates his wife in the boldness and bloodiness of his enterprises, while she, for want of the same stimulus of ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... day of high wind, with clouds and fitful bursts of sunshine in which the waves shone white and sparkling. Jimmie was standing by the fail with his "wobbly" friend, watching the white-caps, when his companion called his attention to a sparkle that seemed to persist, hitting one in ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... chamois this youth bounded up, leaping from rock to rock, and steering in a straight line for the summit. Next the Senator, who mounted slowly and perseveringly, as though he had a solemn duty to perform, and was determined to do it thoroughly. Then came Dick. More fitful. A few steps upward: then a rest; then a fresh start; followed by another rest. At length he sat down about one-third of the way up and took a smoke. Behind him Mr. Figgs toiled up, pulled by the panting guides. Three stout men in front—two others ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... the wind, which, first blowing in fitful gusts, soon becomes a steady gale, with now and then a violent burst catching still another sail, and rending it ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... introduction to an end; it is merely to point out how calmly and peacefully the Saga ends, with the perfect reconciliation of Kari and Flosi, those generous foes, who throughout the bitter struggle in which they were engaged always treated each other with respect. It is a comfort to find, after the whole fitful story has been worked out, after passing from page to page, every one of which reeks with gore, to find that after all there were even in that bloodthirsty Iceland of the tenth century such things as peaceful old age and happy firesides, and that men like Flosi ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... given to this prayer, and his words were followed by a deep and solemn silence, that was only broken occasionally by the heavy pattering of the descending rain, and the fitful gusts of the blast, as they rushed against the house, and sung wildly among the few trees by which it and ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... I simply felt. I was overwhelmed by the sense of unloosened power. The very confusion of it all constituted the unity of impression. The emotion roused in me by the roar and riotous movement and the vast gloom torn by fitful yellow gleams from opened furnaces and shapes of glowing metal was the emotion appropriate to the experience of chaos. That I can find a single word by which to characterize it, is evidence that the moment had its harmony for me and consequent meaning. All the ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... that antiquarian zeal is so often diverted from subjects of real to those of merely fanciful interest. The mercurial young gentlemen who addict themselves to that exciting department of letters are open to censure as being too fitful, too prone to flit, bee-like, from flower to flower, now lighting momentarily upon an indecipherable tombstone, now perching upon a rusty morion, here dipping into crumbling palimpsests, there turning up a tattered reputation from heaps ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... about a thousand men in all, he contrived to defeat five hundred dragoons, backed by a great body of cavalry, all well disciplined troops. The moon, which was in its second quarter, appeared at intervals during the close of the action, and gave but a fitful light, being often over-clouded, so that the combatants fought almost in gloom, except for a few minutes at a time. The English, being all on horseback, were just visible to their foes, but the "little Highlanders" were in darkness. ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... was far slower and more fitful. It would seem indeed that the conquest of the Norman bore harder on the rural population than on any other class of Englishmen. Under the later kings of the house of AElfred the number of absolute slaves and the number of freemen had alike diminished. ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... day in the ante-chapel of his old college, through a morning service, listening, as in a dream, to the sweet singing within; it seemed but a day since he had sate in his stall, a fitful-hearted boy. The service ended, and the procession streamed out, the rich tints of the windows lighting up the faces and the white surplices of the men, old and young, that issued from the dark door of the screen. Hugh felt within himself that he would ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... gave a tenseness to the atmosphere, as if it were charged with the electricity of a coming storm, a tingling waiting which made the men prone to become silent and then talk again in fitful outbursts. Or it might be said that it was like a glass full of precipitate which only waits for the injection of a single unusual substance before it settles to the bottom and leaves the remaining liquid clear. It was for the unusual, then, that the entire assembly waited, feeling ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... being's winter season, Fitful, gloomy, piercing cold; Passion weaken'd, yields to reason, Man feels then himself grown old; His senses one by one have fled, His very soul ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... night as Barry and his crew spent up the river, waiting for the moon; and the mysterious night noises from the shore were lulling and drowsy. Gradually the schooner blurred into a vague mass of shadow, out of which the two lights twinkled uncertainly. And mingling with the chirp of insects and the fitful cries of dreaming monkeys came a gnawing and rasping of wood that seemed to echo throughout ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... reduced the Criminal Question to such a pass among us. Many other things have come, and are coming, for the same sad reason, to a pass! Not the supreme scoundrel have our laws aimed at; but, in an uncertain fitful manner, at the inferior or lowest scoundrel, who robs shop-tills and puts the skin of mankind in danger. How can Parliament get through the Criminal Question? Parliament, oblivious of Heavenly Law, will find itself in hopeless reductio ad absurdum in regard to innumerable other questions,—in regard ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... from a fitful dream of his Cousin Maria. She with a supernatural strength seemed to be holding the door against some unseen, unknown power that moaned and strove without, and threw itself in despairing force against the cabin. He could see the ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... lit with smoky old lamps and flaring torches, and the fitful light shows weird pictures to our unaccustomed eyes. Each booth is in charge of one or more women, and here and there is a man resplendent in overshadowing sombrero, with heavy silver braid wound about the crown. The women have the scantiest ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... Jane awoke from her fitful slumber. She looked with but half-conscious fearfulness at the figures darkening her view. Sidney moved so that his face was in the light, and, bending near to her, asked if she recognised him. A smile—slow-forming, but unmistakable at last—amply justified ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... situated (where motions in the line of sight are vertical) disclose the progress of violent uprushes and downrushes of ignited gases, for the most part in the penumbral or outlying districts. They appear to be occasioned by fitful and irregular disturbances, and have none of the systematic quality which would be required for the elucidation of sun-spot theories. Indeed, they almost certainly take place at a great height above the actual openings ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... predicted a continuance of the fair wind, and plenty of it. So it proved; the wind increased rapidly, and the men found it difficult to reduce the canvas in sufficient time. Before dark, the wind blew with considerable force, not steadily, but in fitful gusts: and the sun, as he descended in the wave, warned them, by his red and fiery aspect, to prepare for an increase of the gale. The schooner flew before it, under her diminished sail, rolling gunwale-to in the deep trough, or ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... smoke kept curling out of the Governor's door, and the orderly could catch the fitful murmur of talk that followed it. Presently rifle shots rang out somewhere. Instantly a tall, broad- shouldered figure, in white undress uniform, appeared in the doorway and spoke quickly to the orderly. In a moment ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was still carried on by stealth by merchants and ship-owners of more than one country—not, if the suspicions of our statesmen were well founded, without some connivance on the part of their governments. Nor were our efforts in the cause the fitful display of impulsive excitement. We have continued them and widened their sphere as occasions have presented themselves, exerting a successful influence even over unchristian and semi-civilized governments, of which an instance has very recently been furnished, in the assurances ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... sees,—whether it be the stripes made by the rain on the gray background of the atmosphere (a species of chasing not unlike the capricious threads of spun glass), or the whirl of white water which the wind is driving like a luminous dust along the roofs, or the fitful disgorgements of the gutter-pipes, sparkling and foaming; in short, the thousand nothings to be admired and studied with delight by loungers, in spite of the porter's broom which pretends to be sweeping out ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... of my house Held close in the arms of the blossomed boughs: I leaned my face to the window bright To feel if the heart of my house beat right. The firelight hung it with fitful gold; It was warm as the house of the dead is cold. I saw the settles, the candles tall, The black-faced presses against the wall, Polished beechwood and shining brass, The gleam of china, the glitter of glass, All the little things that were home to me - Everything ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... drawing on the huge stones became too much for my old back." Like his life-long friend and contemporary, Hine, he was not of Punch Punchy—at least, in respect to conviviality; and after a record of Staff service extending to 1844, with fitful contributions up to 1848, he deserted the precincts of Whitefriars, and soon after renounced wood-drawing in favour of his more lucrative employment. He had, however, already contributed ten cartoons—striking for their handling, if not at first for ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... she told me, as we sat by the fire and hearkened to the rising gusts, of how this change had fallen upon my uncle. All last winter he had been dark and fitful in his mind. Whenever the Roost ran high, or, as Mary said, whenever the Merry Men were dancing, he would lie out for hours together on the Head, if it were at night, or on the top of Aros by day, watching the tumult of the sea, and sweeping the horizon for ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... time, he numbered many divines among his most cherished friends, and he frequently, and with admitted edification, was to be found in chapel and church. Meanwhile he continued busily to educate himself for whatever profession he might choose or drift into, supplemented by such fitful periods of schooling as his delicate health permitted, as well as by many jaunts with his parents to the English lakes and other parts of the kingdom, and by frequent tours on the Continent, especially ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... a breath about the rocky stair Moved, but the growing tide from verge to verge, Heaving salt fragrance on the midnight air, Climbed with a murmurous and fitful surge. A hoary mist rose up and slowly sheathed The dripping walls and portal granite-stepped, And sank into the inner court, and crept From column unto ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... will be allowed to reach it. Thus the primary defence of the outlying base is the active, sea-going fleet. Moderate local defence, chiefly of the human kind, in the shape of a garrison, will certainly be needed. Though the enemy has not been able to obtain control of the communications of the place, fitful raids on it will be possible; and the place should be fortified enough and garrisoned enough to hold out against the inconsiderable assaults comprised in these till our own ships ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... fault, but the Queen's-in-Council, that Sidonia had unwittingly stolen this march on them. It was their glory that they won the lost advantage back again. All afternoon and evening, all through that summer night, the sea-dog crews were warping out of harbor. Torches, flares, and cressets threw their fitful light on toiling lines of men hauling on ropes that moved the ships apparently like snails. But once in Plymouth Sound the whinnying sheaves and long yo-hoes! told that all the sail the ships could carry was being made for a life-or-death ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... slept; and into his fitful slumbers drifted a ridiculously disturbing dream. That of actually witnessing the terrible scene of the long-dead Indian Mutiny hero, Major Hodson, executing with his own hand the three princes ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... still they did not speak, and once more Susan lay motionless—not asleep, but strangely, pleasantly conscious of all the small chamber and household sounds; the fall of a cinder on the hearth, the fitful singing of the half- empty kettle, the cattle tramping out to field again after they had been milked, the aged step on the creaking stair—old Peggy's, as she knew. It came to her door; it stopped; ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... of the Jesuit mission the last days of Champlain are inseparably allied. A severe experience had proved that the colonizing zeal of the crown was fitful and uncertain. Private initiative was needed to supplement the official programme, and of such initiative the supply seemed scanty. The fur traders notoriously shirked their obligations to enlarge the colony, {133} and after 1632 the Huguenots, who had a distinct motive for emigrating, ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... been fitful, had all been aroused by the colloquy, and they crowded to the front of the barricade. The moon had now risen, and their faces could be clearly discerned. Ruth lovelier every time he saw her, Allen ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... benches in front of a fire, which they from time to time nourished with sticks from a heap of wood on the hearth. The fire however would not burn, but kept smouldering and smoking, now and then springing up into a fitful blaze, which threw a spectral air over the room, peopling its dim recesses with all sorts of fantastic forms, and then expired, leaving it more gloomy than ever. The appearance of the men, their subdued, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... The fitful, shivery wind that rasped the hill-top, fluttered the rags of his long mantle of Tyrian blue, torn by thorns and stained by travel. The rich tunic of striped silk beneath it was worn thin, and the girdle about his loins had lost all its ornaments of silver and jewels. His ...
— The Sad Shepherd • Henry Van Dyke
... Mistress Nutter moved on; but a new feeling of uneasiness came over Alizon as she followed her down the long dusky corridor, in the direction of the mysterious chamber, where they were to pass the night. The fitful flame of the lamp fell upon many a grim painting depicting the sufferings of the early martyrs; and these ghastly representations did not serve to re-assure her. The grotesque carvings on the panels and ribs of the vaulted roof, likewise impressed her with vague terror, and there ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... canal-boats, at intervals of a quarter of a mile, standing up to Hooksett with a light breeze, and one by one disappeared round a point above. With their broad sails set, they moved slowly up the stream in the sluggish and fitful breeze, like one-winged antediluvian birds, and as if impelled by some mysterious counter-current. It was a grand motion, so slow and stately, this "standing out," as the phrase is, expressing the gradual and steady ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... were picketed out and after the midnight supper the wayfarers rolled themselves in their blankets and prepared to pass what remained of the night in the glow of the campfire, and beneath the fitful light of ...
— The Boy Ranchers at Spur Creek - or Fighting the Sheep Herders • Willard F. Baker
... toward the Earl, and felt desirous to gratify his wishes. But whatever changes of feeling she had experienced toward her new guardian, she showed no change of manner toward Gualtier. To her, application to any thing was a thing as irksome as ever. Perhaps her fitful efforts to advance were more frequent; but after each effort she used invariably to relapse into ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... yet still steeped in the colours of that true love which raises even the lowest, were the midnight meditations of Clifford; they terminated, towards the morning, in an uneasy and fitful slumber. From this he was awakened by a loud yawn from the throat of Long Ned, who was always the earliest riser of ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... national destinies, heroic sentiments, and grand ambition. We see a nation of citizen soldiers, an iron race of conquerors, bent on conquest, on glory, on self-exaltation, attaching but little value to the individual man, but exalting the integrity and unity of the state. We see no fitful policy, no abandonment to the enjoyment of the fruits of victory, no rest, no repose, no love of art or literature, but an unbounded passion for domination. The Romans toiled, and suffered, and died,—never wearied, never discouraged, never satisfied, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... so dear to them, who had been left behind, for what fate God only knew. Besides, there was little wherewithal to court the drowsy god, in the manner of their repose—each limb being strained and corded in a position the most painful—and if they slept at all, it was that feverish and fitful slumber, which, though it serve in part the design of nature, brings with it nothing refreshing to the individual himself. To both, therefore, the night proved one of torture to body and mind; and bad as was their condition after the encampment, it was destined to be ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... farm generally began on the Monday after the Fourth of July and lasted from four to six weeks, according to the weather, which is often fitful in Maine. We usually harvested from seventy to seventy-five tons, and in the days of scythes and hand rakes that meant that we had to do a good deal of hard, ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... of birds circled and called with shrill, uncanny voices. Yet the moonlight was so bright that they saw each other as plainly as if it were day, and its placid radiance seemed strangely at variance with the disturbed wild-fowl, and certain weird and fitful sounds that seemed to be sighed forth from the bosom of ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... Islands, and those chiefs who were inclined to favor Christianity. This war continued to rage more or less violently for several years, frequently slumbering, sometimes breaking out with sudden violence, like the fitful eruptions of the still unextinct volcanoes in those ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... throat, my head swam round, and I clung to the wall for support. The next thing of which I have any recollection, was the dawn of reason breaking through my troubled dreams. It was midnight—all was still. The fitful lamp shone dimly through my chamber. I turned on my side—and, oh! by its light, I saw the face I most loved—that face, whose gentle lineaments, were each deeply and separately engraven on my heart. I saw her bending over me ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... was this that met the eyes of the Bugologist, as Carmody roused him from a fitful sleep, with the murmured words, "Almost light, sir. They'll be on us soon as they can see." Deep in under the overhang and close to the pool lay one poor fellow whose swift, gasping breath told all too surely ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... not quite so rough as they had been, and Aitkin proceeded cautiously some distance in front of the ship, making soundings and finding no depth less than four fathoms. In obedience to his signals, the ship came bowling on, and the fitful breeze suddenly freshening, she ran through the breakers, passing Aitkin's boat to starboard in pistol-shot distance. Signals were made for the boat to return, but the tide had turned, and the strong ebb, with the current of the river, bore the boat into the breakers in spite of all ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... loved to be much alone, and strongly moved. The banks of the Elbe were the favourite resort of his mornings: here wandering in solitude amid groves and lawns, and green and beautiful places, he abandoned his mind to delicious musings; watched the fitful current of his thoughts, as they came sweeping through his soul in their vague, fantastic, gorgeous forms; pleased himself with the transient images of memory and hope; or meditated on the cares and studies which had lately been employing, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... we were slowly starving on our feet, we were wet through continuously, and such sleep as we got was broken and fitful. Before we had been four days out we were reduced to gaunt, tattered, dirty scarecrows. We staggered as we walked and sometimes one of us would drop on the road through sheer weakness. Through it all we kept up our frenzy ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... follow Alisande's further explanation of who our captured knights were, now—I mean in case she should ever get to explaining who they were. My interest was gone, my thoughts were far away, and sad. By fitful glimpses of the drifting tale, caught here and there and now and then, I merely noted in a vague way that each of these three knights took one of these three damsels up behind him on his horse, and one rode north, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... much quicker than the last. The twilight was falling fast, and the little river, and the two horses as they forded its swift current, looked shadowy enough; set off by the white foam on both. The evening wind began its fitful stir, and swept the dry leaves past Faith's feet, and shook the cedar boughs above her head; and so she sat there, and ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... a snug corner of the veranda in company with Mr. Pennington Brown, Mr. Port was smoking a comforting cigar. Mr. Brown, who also was smoking, did not seem to find his cigar comforting. He smoked it in so fitful a fashion that it repeatedly went out; and his nervousness seemed to be increased each time that he lighted it. Further, his comment upon Mr. Port's discourse—which was a more than ordinarily thoughtful and accurate weighing of the relative merits of thin and thick soups—obviously were ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... light from a window in the tower. It was fitful and changeable; commonly feeble and yellowish, as if from a lamp; with an occasional glare of some vivid metallic colour, followed by a dusky glow. A column of dense smoke would now and then rise in the air, ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... thoughtful students of contemporary history, is the absence of able leaders in the popular struggles of the age. Whether we look at the orderly resistance of the Finns, the efforts of the Russian revolutionaries, or the fitful efforts now and again put forth by the Poles, the same discouraging symptom is everywhere apparent. More than once the hour seemed to have struck for the overthrow of the old order, but no man appeared. Other instances might of course ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... this point to the barrier of sand, it was apparent by the stooping sails and the struggles of the gondoliers who pulled towards the quay, that the air was swift. Without the Lido itself, the element was shadowed and fitful, while further in the distance the troubled waters, with their crests of foam, sufficiently ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... accomplish anything. "No man ever did anything well," says Johnson, "to which he did not apply the whole bent of his mind." And unless a man keep his head cool, and his faculties undissipated, he need not expect that his efforts can ever be other than half efforts, or other than of a desultory, fitful, non-productive kind. We do not stand here in the character of a modern Rechabite. But this we must say: Let no young man ever beguile himself with the hope that he is to make a figure in society, or rise in the world, unless, as the apostle expresses it, he be "temperate in all things." ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... made up his mind, weeks before, that the marriage years of his life would be the best, the most distinguished, and most useful. With the utmost pains he had chosen a wife. He had acted with the greatest caution in no weak or superficial, or haphazard, or fitful way. Nevertheless, the outlook was dismal. This first step in decline from his ideal caused him much pain and restlessness, and led him to think cynically of many doctrines to which, in serene moments, he had unconditionally subscribed. He compared his own case with Robert's. Robert, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... awoke after not more than one hour of fitful sleep. The door to the garage apartment shook under the tattoo of a heavy fist. Miss Tapp's heart thudded somewhere inside her thirty-eight-inch bosom. She lay rigid in darkness penetrated only by the glimmer of a distant ...
— Stopover Planet • Robert E. Gilbert
... velvety blackness of the heavens was powdered with star dust; in the wash of the ship there gleamed a profound phosphorescence, as from a decaying ocean. The coast hung like a mass of inky vapor above the fitful shimmer of the surf from which was wafted a faint, interminable booming that suggested the roaring of lions and the thunder ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... government at all. In Bohemia a state of semi-independence existed, while Hungary preferred [Sidenote: The family compact, 1606.] the Turk to the emperor. In both kingdoms Rudolph had failed to assert his sovereign power except in fitful attempts to extirpate heresy. With anarchy prevalent within the Austrian dominions some action became necessary. Accordingly in 1606 the archdukes made a compact agreeing to acknowledge the archduke Matthias as head of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... unlettered Trieste, an excellent copyist able and willing to decypher a crabbed hand and deft at reproducing facetious and drolatic words without thoroughly comprehending their significance. At first my exertions were but fitful and the scene was mostly a sick bed to which I was bound between October '83 and June '84. Marienbad, however, and Styrian Sauerbrunn (bed Rohitsch) set me right and on return to Trieste (Sept. 4, '84), we applied ourselves to the task of advertising, the first two volumes ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the bandy-legged monster with the festooned whiskers was not to disport himself with this wanton butchery. The sky had closed darkly around the becalmed ships, in sodden clouds which were suddenly obscured by mist and rain while the wind sighed in fitful gusts. It steadied into the southward and swiftly increased in force until the sea was whipped ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... infinite space"; a purely scientific intelligence would have applied himself to the patient mastery of facts; in the hero of Pauline the despotic senses and intellect of science and the imperious imagination of the poet appear to coexist and to contend, and he tosses to and fro in a fever of fitful efforts, continually frustrated, to find complete spiritual response and expressiveness in the intractable maze of being. There had indeed been an earlier time when the visions of old poets had wholly sufficed him; and the verses in which ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... real continuity of the war was scarcely broken by the fitful, armistice. The death of John of Cleve, an event almost simultaneous with the conclusion of the Truce, seemed to those gifted with political vision the necessary precursor of a new ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... satisfaction across the world. The twilight was short, night fell with its myriad stars. Pere Lastique took the oars, and they saw that the sea was phosphorescent. Jeanne and the vicomte, side by side, watched the fitful gleams in the wake of the boat. They were hardly thinking, but simply gazing vaguely, breathing in the beauty of the evening in a state of delicious contentment; Jeanne had one hand on the seat and her neighbor's finger touched it as if by accident; she did not move; she was surprised, happy, ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... his task a pastime. The poor is hungry and athirst; but for him also there is food and drink: he is heavy-laden and weary; but for him also the Heavens send Sleep, and of the deepest; in his smoky cribs, a clear dewy heaven of Rest envelops him; and fitful glitterings of cloud-skirted Dreams. But what I do mourn over is, that the lamp of his soul should go out; that no ray of heavenly, or even of earthly knowledge, should visit him; but only, in the haggard darkness, like two spectres, Fear and Indignation bear him company. Alas, while ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... happened by a queer sort of accident, which came pretty near relieving you of the duty of replying to this letter. I was out in my little boat, which carries a sail too big for her, as I know and ought to have remembered. One of those fitful flaws of wind to which the lake is so liable struck the sail suddenly, and over went my boat. My feet got tangled in the sheet somehow, and I could not get free. I had hard work to keep my head above water, and I struggled desperately to escape from my toils; for ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of steel, and collision and confusion of struggling multitudes, and the hoarse bellowing of the guns; and then the hiding of it all under a rolling firmament of smoke—a firmament through which veiled vacancies appeared for a moment now and then, giving fitful dim glimpses of the wild tragedy enacting beyond; and always at these times one caught sight of that slight figure in white mail which was the center and soul of our hope and trust, and whenever we saw that, ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... their fitful unconvincing talk, their expressions of being slowly and painfully smothered, seemed to be suffering from the toil of social life and the horror of good food as much as himself. All of them accepted with ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... achievement! That wonderful, wonderful ride—that amazing, glorious tour de force which caused her name to be revered and hallowed in every sleepy hamlet and hovel of Old England—her ride to Norwich on Piebald Polly, her thoroughbred mare! On, on through the night—a fitful moon scrambling aslant the cloud-blown heavens, the wind whistling past her ears, and the tune of "God Save the King" ringing in her brain, the rhythm set by the convulsive movements of Piebald Polly. On, on, through towns and villages, and then once more the open ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... wild plunge back into bed, Joyce sat up in alarm, but in response to her whisper Mary explained in muffled tones from under the bedclothes that she had simply gotten up for a drink of water and dropped the pitcher. All the rest of the night her sleep was fitful and uneasy, for toward morning her face began to burn as if it were on fire. She tore off the mask and used it to wipe away what remained of the ointment. Most of it had been absorbed, however, and the skin was broken ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... that she were an Indian to thus hold his interest flashed through her mind, but he was speaking yet of his work, and his rapt look filled her with awe. She was overwhelmed with the greatness and the fineness of the man before her. Sitting there in the fitful firelight, with its ruddy glow upon his face, his hat off and the moon laying a silver crown upon his head, he seemed half angel, half god. She had never before been so filled with the joy of beholding another soul. She had no room for thoughts ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... beginnings of Australian poetry the names of two other men stand with his—Adam Lindsay Gordon, of English parentage and education, and Charles Harpur, born in Australia a generation earlier than Kendall. Harpur's work, though lacking vitality, shows fitful gleams of poetic fire suggestive of greater achievement had the circumstances of his life been more favourable. Kendall, whose lot was scarcely more fortunate, is a true singer; his songs remain, and are likely long to remain, attractive ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... Harvey Maxwell's busy day. The ticker began to reel out jerkily its fitful coils of tape, the desk telephone had a chronic attack of buzzing. Men began to throng into the office and call at him over the railing, jovially, sharply, viciously, excitedly. Messenger boys ran in and out with messages and telegrams. The clerks in the office jumped about like sailors ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... hand freely and kindly, and looked at me, I thought, with a pitying expression in her eyes; nor was there any settled light of joy in them on her own behalf, but a troubled and passionate flame, flickering and fitful. ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... could have looked such a vacant and sour young fool. No—no. That could not be. Boys were different in his day—and especially boys in book-shops. They read something and knew something of what they handled. They had some sort of aspirations, fitful and vague as these might be, to become in their time bookmen also. And in those days there still were bookmen—widely-informed, observant, devoted old bookmen—who loved their ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... six months seemed to him much longer than the first. The charm of respectful adoration had lost its novelty, and once again his breast was racked by fitful fevers which could scarcely calm themselves even by conversion into sonnets. The one point of repose was that shining fixed star of marriage. Still smarting under Winifred's reproach of his unpoetic literality, he did not intend to force her to marry him exactly at the end of the twelve-month. ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... conscience; for it is but by degrees that the greatest villain can drive away its stings, and then it is but for a short time, and when it does force itself back upon him, it is with redoubled power. His occasional slumbers were broken by fitful starts, in which he again and again heard the yell of the poor lad, and saw the corpse rolling at his feet. It was about an hour before daylight that Mr Vanslyperken again woke, and found that the light had burnt out. He could not remain in the dark, it was too dreadful; he raised himself, and pulled ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the Basin, between Orleans and Quebec, and frequently engaged with Montcalm's floating batteries; while in the mean time the roar of artillery from a dozen different quarters filled the simmering July days, and lit the short summer nights with fiery shapes, and drew in fitful floods the roving thunder-clouds that at this season of the year in North America are apt to lurk behind the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... opened door, came Mrs Keswick, and stealthily stepping towards him in the fitful light of the blazing logs, she put her hand on his arm and said: "Dear Robert, how glad I am to ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... with time my vision less, Yea, less and less Makes of that Past my housemistress, It dwindles in my eye; It looms a far-off skeleton And not a comrade nigh, A fitful far-off skeleton Dimming ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... as fitful as the wind, they are as fleeting as the clouds," said Thugut, shrugging his shoulders. "But I believe you, Victoria, for you are no woman like other women. If I were ever to discover that you had deceived me, I should take ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... of men and women sitting silently, making no appeal to passers-by, but, as night fell, crouching lower in their thin garments or wrapping old placards or any sack or semblance of covering about them, losing memory in fitful sleep and waking with dawn to a hopeless day. This was the sight that Trafalgar Square had for those who passed through it, and who at last began to question, "Why is it? Who are they? They don't seem to beg. ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... watch at eight bells, came tumbling up on deck hurriedly, and the skipper at once ordered the topsail and foresail to be reefed, spanker to be brailed up, and the main course furled; while the vessel was kept with her head to the southward, that is, as well as the cross sea and the fitful gusts of wind would allow, under her jib, fore and ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... those far-off valleys beyond. And so here, at Niagara, that converging rush of waters may fall down, down at once into a hell of rivers, for what the eye can see. It is glorious to watch them in their first curve over the rocks. They come green as a bank of emeralds, but with a fitful, flying color, as though conscious that in one moment more they would be dashed into spray and rise into air, pale as driven snow. The vapor rises high into the air, and is gathered there, visible always as a permanent ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... impacts, and a passage of intermittent puffs of white steam across the further view. And to the left, between the railway and the dark mass of the low hill beyond, dominating the whole view, colossal, inky-black, and crowned with smoke and fitful flames, stood the great cylinders of the Jeddah Company Blast Furnaces, the central edifices of the big ironworks of which Horrocks was the manager. They stood heavy and threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten iron, and about the feet of them rattled the rolling-mills, ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... stepped outside. The sky was thick and heavy, with only a white blur where the moon was smothered. Fifty yards away the gray gloom became opaque. Over the thousand miles of drift to the north there came a faint whistling wind, rising at times in fitful sweeps of flinty snow, and at intervals dying away until it became only a lulling sound. In one of these intervals ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... Besides, the sky has become overcast, a storm is imminent. In the month of May, so variable, so fickle, in my part of the world, we can hardly ever count on a whole day of fine weather. A splendid morning is swiftly followed by a fitful afternoon; and my experiments with Mason-bees have often suffered by these variations. All things considered, I am inclined to think that the homeward journey across the forest and the mountain is effected just ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... reclined. The evening was calm as it was clear. The cathedral bells below had thrice told the approaching third hour before midnight, when I heard the voice of some one singing, in the monotonous, drawling, but melodious tone of prayer; and, at last, as the fitful evening zephyr stirred uneasily, I could distinctly catch the soft intonation of a female voice; and, whatever woman she was, she sang a sweet ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... those, who regard love as of necessity a mere Impulse; a thing not subject in any wise to human control, but fitful, an outbreaker, a tyrant. They can govern other emotions and sentiments. Anger, envy, jealousy, resentment, pride, they believe capable of being moderated, if not wholly suppressed. But love is lawless. Its mandates must be obeyed, and that ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... had been a strong sun shining down into the pot, and the trees about its rim had stood unstirred by any wind. Now, however, a sudden darkness settled over everything, and sharp, fitful gusts drew in through the cleft, helping to push the logs back. Henderson was by this time so near fainting from exhaustion that his wits were losing their clearness. Only his horror of the fatal exit, the raving sluice, the swaying white spray-curtain, retained its keenness. As to all ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... sun was high, While veered the wind and flapped the sail; We saw a snow-white butterfly Dancing before the fitful gale Far out ...
— An Elementary Study of Insects • Leonard Haseman
... darker, and more menacing appeared the waves as the time drew near for the pageant to begin. A kind of weird twilight reigned o'er land and sea. No light was visible save that from the beacon-tower, which sent a fitful gleam o'er the angry waves; all else was dark, primal, spectral, as was that eventful night which these present-day pilgrims were now gathered to commemorate. The gale dashed salt spray and raindrops spitefully into our faces, ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... Continental Divide, and when the shadows of night come walking along the mountains, seek one of these sequestered camps, take our place in the magic circle, and listen to wondrous tales as they are passed around. There is nothing to disturb the magnificent silence save an occasional soughing of the fitful breeze in the tops of the towering pines, or the gentle babbling of some tiny rivulet as its water soothingly flows over the rounded pebbles in its bed. There is a charm in the environment of such a spot that will photograph its picture on the memory ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... "Pope," says Hazlitt, "has turned Pegasus into a rocking-horse." The noble gallop of Dryden's verse is exchanged for a quick trot. And there is not even a point of comparison between his sweet sing-song, and the wavy, snow-like, spirit-like motion of Milton's loftier passages; or the gliding, pausing, fitful, river-like progress of Shakspeare's verse; or the fretted fury, and "torrent-rapture" of brave old Chapman in his translation of Homer; or the rich, long-drawn-out, slow-swimming, now soft-languishing, and now full-gushing melody ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... no longer was the same. I still had pleasures:—who could live Without the healing aid they give? But, as a plant surcharg'd with rain, When radiant sunshine comes again, Just wakes from a benumbing trance, I caught a feverish, fitful glance. The dove, that for a weary time Had mourn'd the rigour of the clime, And, with its head beneath its wing, Awaited a more genial spring, Went forth again to search around, And some few leaves of olive found, But not a bower which could impart ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... is a mental and moral sickness, pointing the way to mental and moral death. It has its source in a violation of that law which makes the health of the mind depend on its activity being directed to an object. When directed on itself, it becomes fitful and moody; and moodiness generates morbidness, and morbidness misanthropy, and misanthropy self-contempt, and self-contempt begins the work of self-dissolution. Why, every sensible man will despise himself, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... than one hundred and fifty miles from the spot in which Captain Hazzard believes the ship is ice-bound," announced Frank that night as they turned in inside the snugly curtained chassis. Sleep that night was fitful. The thought of the discovery of which they might be even then on the brink precluded all thought of sound sleep. Even the usually calm professor was excited. He hoped to find some strange creatures amid the mouldering timbers ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... a strange crowd that stood there in the driving storm, lit up by the fitful flashes of ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... the territory north of the Danube. This abandoned province was chiefly occupied by the Visigoths, the Western members of the confederacy, who for the century from 275 to 375 were the neighbours, generally the allies, by fitful impulses the enemies, of Rome. With Constantine the Great especially the Visigoths came powerfully in contact, first as invaders and then as allies (foederati) bound to furnish a certain number of auxiliaries to serve under the eagles of ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... chief. Every loiterer was there, and others came back. Not one spoke. All were fascinated by the singular and weird scene. The moon, low down on the mountain's crest, still shed a pallid, grayish light that mingled with the fitful red glare from the glowing coals, the two together casting an unearthly tinge. But Harley's eyes never left the chief, as he saw his figure continue to expand and grow with ancient memories of prowess, and the eyes of Sylvia beside him, as she too listened, ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... closed in, the heavy south-westerly gale that had raged throughout the long-drawn summer's day gradually dropped, and blew now only in fitful gusts. Instead of the sullen, unending roar of artillery, which till past mid-day had stunned the ear, there was now to be heard only the muttering of distant thunder; the flash of guns was replaced by the glare of lightning flickering against the ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... through the open door, had there been any to see, was almost as motionless as a tableau, and it was a starkly grim one, with murky shadows against a fitful light. A ray of the setting sun forced its inquisitive way inward upon the semi-darkness of the interior. A red wavering from the open hearth, where supper preparations had been going forward, threw unsteady ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... the lonely wilderness, far from their beloved parents and social hearth, with no visible arm to protect them from danger, none to encourage or to cheer them, they started with terror-blanched cheeks at every fitful breeze that rustled the leaves or waved the ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... trapper was looking into the fire,—the light of which, that came and went in flashes, brought distinctly out the settled gravity of the features, and the rugged but grand proportions of the head. There is no better light in which to see an old man's face than the fitful firelight; and no better background than ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... stretch their moss-grown arms, like giant hairy spiders, above a desolate pool which crisps and shivers in the biting breeze, while from beside its brink rises a mournful cry, and sweeps down, faint and fitful, amid ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... moreover, of his intelligent parents, who, when they discovered his talents,—avoiding the mistake often made by some, who, alas! but too frequently rest content merely with observing the signs of genius in their children, allowing the at first bright spark to go untended, to burn "with fitful glare," and to finally become, from this neglect, extinguished,—devoted themselves at once to their fullest and most artistic development,—this example, I say, is one to be highly commended, ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... tied with mourning and wreathed with cypress. There were many women—here and there a peasant with a child slumbering in her arms, or clinging sleepily to the tawny silk scarf woven under her own mulberry trees. Here and there, with the fitful motion of the wind, the light touched the fair hair of a chance peasant from the province of La Kythrea into gleams of gold that a Venetian patrician might envy, or brought into sudden relief the smothered passion of some beautiful, dark Greek face. But the women were chiefly ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... The church was one of those strongholds of religion and loyalty which I rejoice to see in the colonies. There, Sabbath after Sabbath, the inhabitants of this peaceful locality worship in the pure faith of their forefathers: here, when "life's fitful fever" is over, they sleep in the hallowed ground around these sacred walls. Nor could a more peaceful resting-place be desired: from the graveyard one could catch distant glimpses of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... men who have entered, like Francis of Assisi, into the secret of that deep amity with God and with His creatures which makes man to be in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field to be at peace with him. In this pure, universal charity there is nothing fitful or intermittent, nothing that comes and goes in showers and gleams and sunbursts. Its springs are deep and constant, its rising is like that of a mighty river, its very overflow calm and steady, leaving ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... long shall my fortunes be, Yet my faith is firm—I will go with thee. I yield not weakly to fancy's trance, Or the fitful flame of young romance; I dwell with a calm, unshrinking mind On the scenes that I seek and leave behind; My future fate spread forth I see, And my choice is fix'd—I will ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... unfortunately had had too much their own way under the slack though fitful reign of William the Testy; and though upon the accession of Peter Stuyvesant they had felt, with the instinctive perception which mobs as well as cattle possess, that the reins of government had passed into stronger hands, yet could they not help fretting and chafing and champing upon, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... the festivities are kept up late. Songs are sung which perhaps would not be heard in a quiet drawing-room; a little acting is done with them. Music is played, and von Francius, in a vagrant mood, sits down and improvises a fitful, stormy kind of fantasia, which in itself and in his playing puts me much in mind of the weird performances ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... heard beyond the barriers of Blarwyn Fells throughout the afternoon, was near them now, and had burst in deep-mouthed battle among the ravines at the other side, and over the broad lake, that glared like a sheet of burnished steel under its flashes of dazzling blue. Wild and fitful blasts sweeping down the hollows and cloughs of the fells of Golden Friars agitated the lake, and bent the trees low, and whirled away their sere leaves in melancholy drift in their tremendous gusts. And from the window, looking on a scene enveloped ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... with various disease; the water either stagnant, or disgorged in wild torrents charged with earth; the air, in the morning, stagnant also, hot, close, and infected; in the afternoon, rushing up from the outlet at Martigny in fitful and fierce whirlwind; one side of the valley in almost continual shade, the other (it running east and west) scorched by the southern sun, and sending streams of heat into the air all night long from its torrid limestones; while less traceable plagues ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... 1902 the French consular authorities in Tientsin filed a request to have their Concession extended on the ground that they were becoming cramped. The Chinese authorities, although not wishing to grant the request and indeed ignoring it for a long time, were finally induced to begin fitful negotiations; and in October, 1916, after having passed through various processes of alteration, reduction, and re-statement during the interval of fourteen years, the issue had been so fined down that a virtual agreement regarding the ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... scale of its creatures but the lord of all." He is not a parasite but the paragon of the globe. He has faith in the unchangeableness of the laws he is mastering while suffering from them. He confidently declares there is nothing fitful, nothing capricious, nothing irregular in their action. The greater the calamity the more earnest his effort to ascertain its causes and learn ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... 3.—We have had such a long spell of fine clear weather without especially low temperatures that one can scarcely grumble at the change which we found on waking this morning, when the canopy of stratus cloud spread over us and the wind came in those fitful gusts which promise a gale. All day the wind force has been slowly increasing, whilst the temperature has risen to -15 deg., but there is no snow falling or drifting as yet. The steam cloud of Erebus was streaming away to the N.W. this morning; ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... the lake, there was a wide, flat stretch of sand wash from the river, and below this from the lake shore on either side, great barren, grim hills rose in solemn majesty, across whose rocky face the wind swept the snow in fitful gusts and squalls. Off on a mountain side a wolf disturbed the white silence with his dismal cry, and farther on a big black fellow came to the water's edge, and with the snow blowing wildly about him ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... While he was thus made comparatively helpless in body by the infirmities of his advancing age, he was nevertheless as active and restless in spirit as ever. It was, however, no longer the activity of youth, and hope, and progress which animated him, but rather the fitful uneasiness with which age agitates itself under the vexations which it sometimes has to endure, or struggles convulsively at the approach of real or imaginary dangers, threatening the possessions which it has been the work of life to gain. The dangers in William's ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... capitalist will never adventure his capital in manufacturing establishments, or in any other leading pursuit of life, if there exists a state of uncertainty as to whether the Government will repeal to-morrow what it has enacted to-day. Fitful profits, however high, if threatened with a ruinous reduction by a vacillating policy on the part of Government, will scarcely tempt him to trust the money which he has acquired by a life of labor ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... explanation, Mistress Nutter moved on; but a new feeling of uneasiness came over Alizon as she followed her down the long dusky corridor, in the direction of the mysterious chamber, where they were to pass the night. The fitful flame of the lamp fell upon many a grim painting depicting the sufferings of the early martyrs; and these ghastly representations did not serve to re-assure her. The grotesque carvings on the panels and ribs of the vaulted roof, likewise impressed ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... scene of such confiding love on one part, and base hypocrisy on the other, to look upon the honest countenance of Magnus Troil, who, with his daughters on each arm—the stately, dark-eyed Minna, and the no less lovely Brenda—were now approaching me. Behind followed Norna of the Fitful-head, in earnest conversation with the Pirate Cleveland. As I looked upon her tall, majestic person, her countenance, so stern and wild, rendered more so, perhaps, by the singular head-dress she had assumed, and her long hair streaming over ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... in and sat down in the arm-chair beyond the fire. What memories a fire gathered into it, with its flaky ashes, its little leaf-like flames, and that quiet glow and flicker! What tale of passions! How like to a fire was a man's heart! The first young fitful leapings, the sudden, fierce, mastering heat, the long, steady sober burning, and then—that last flaming-up, that clutch back at its own vanished youth, the final eager flight of flame, before the ashes wintered it to nothing! Visions and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of that long career. The first forty—two years of the Queen's life are illuminated by a great and varied quantity of authentic information. With Albert's death a veil descends. Only occasionally, at fitful and disconnected intervals, does it lift for a moment or two; a few main outlines, a few remarkable details may be discerned; the rest is all conjecture and ambiguity. Thus, though the Queen survived ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... those blissful assurances also exerting a subtile, unrecognized power over her? Certainly within the last few weeks she had been subject to strange moods and reveries. But the first dawning of a woman's love is like the aurora, with its strange, fitful flashes. The phenomena have never been ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... left them alone. What with the excitement of the fire and the startling accusation against them, the boys' brains were too excited to let them sleep much. They had a few fitful naps throughout the remainder ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... by,—two days of strain in sunlight, and of watching and fitful sleep in darkness. But the Wilderness Trail was deserted. Here and there a lean-to—silent remnant of the year gone by—spoke of the little bands of emigrants which had once made their way so cheerfully to the new country. Again it was a child's doll, the rags of it beaten by the weather ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... never flagged. Rogers, the Nestor of British literature, whose refined purity of taste and exquisite mental organization rendered him eminently calculated to appreciate a work of the kind, declared that of all the books which, through the fitful changes of three generations, he had seen rise and fall, the charm of the Vicar of Wakefield had alone continued as at first; and could he revisit the world after an interval of many more generations, he should as surely look to ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... of music or laughter, softened a little by the distance. My childhood had trained me to be fond of living out-of-doors; and, when the spring came, I spent most of my days under these elm-trees, in the fitful sunshine and showers of an English April and May, such as I had never ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... part it was to lie at Jud's feet, his nose between his paws, his eyes twinkling sagaciously behind his shaggy eyebrows, while occasionally, as a token of approval, he wagged his tail. Once or twice, during a fitful slumber, he had been known to give vent to his feelings in a sharp bark, but he never failed to awaken immediately, with every appearance of the deepest abasement and confusion at the ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... persuaded to leave the army as the surest way of weaning him from certain unprofitable associates and habits; a post of attache was procured for him, and he and his young wife went abroad. I thought she would forget me now, but she did not. For many years, she kept up a capricious, fitful sort of correspondence. During the first year or two, it was only of herself and Alfred she wrote; then, Alfred faded in the background; herself and a certain, new comer prevailed; one Alfred Fanshawe de Bassompierre de Hamal began to reign in his father's ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... fully attired, save that in place of his dress coat he wore a loose smoking jacket, stood at the windows of his sitting room at Devenham Castle, looking across the park. In the somewhat fitful moonlight the trees had taken to themselves grotesque shapes. Away in the distance the glimmer of the sea shone like a thin belt of quicksilver. The stable clock had struck two. The whole place seemed at rest. Only one light was gleaming from a long low building ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... much of its history, are, in fact, results of its doings, but they are not the stream. They were brought down when it was turbid; it may now be clear: they are as much the result of other circumstances as of the action of the stream: their history is fitful: they give us no sure intelligence of the future course of the stream, or of the nature of its waters; and may scarcely shew more than that it has not been always as it is. The actions of men are often but little better indications of the ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... forward, setting his elbows on the two chair arms, closing his eyes as he listened, and leaning his forehead upon his raised hands. For in the plaintive voice of the moist, fitful southwesterly wind how, to his bearing, the buried, half-forgotten drama re-lived ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Burgos. The surface of Alava is very mountainous, especially on the north, where a part of the Pyrenees forms its natural boundary. It is separated from Logrono by the river Ebro, and its other rivers are the Zadorra and the Ayuda. The climate is mild in summer, fitful in autumn and spring, and very cold in winter, as even the plains are high and shut in on three sides by mountains snow-clad during several months. The soil in the valleys is fertile, yielding wheat, barley, maize, flax, hemp and fruits. Oil and a poor kind of wine called chacoli are also ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... taken hold of the case again, all the fascination his work had for him returned. He became so engrossed in the contemplation of the problem that unnoticed the sun went down to leave the young crescent moon shedding a fitful light over the silent bush. Unnoticed, also, were the sound of footfalls as Mrs. Burke came out on ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... about yourself, he says. Poor, dear, young Herbert! He is very young and cannot as yet conceive how much there is about oneself that demands care. I thought it out in the hills to-day. It was gray and there was a fitful wind. What is this selfishness but a prompting to make much of life? You and I and people of our kind are old before our time, that is the reason we are not reckless. Our dreams mature us. I was a mere girl when Herbert said he wished to marry me, but I was old enough ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... that I perceived well. When—how—whither, I could not yet discern; but he himself, I doubted not, would hurry me from Thornfield. Real affection, it seemed, he could not have for me; it had been only fitful passion; that was balked; he would want me no more. I should fear even to cross his path now: my view must be hateful to him. Oh, how blind had been my eyes! how weak ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... him vociferously, and point after point of brilliant and effective invective pleased the House—always anxious with its jaded appetite for a sensation. But when you had time to compare, it with that little speech delivered by Mr. Gladstone earlier in the evening—when you contrasted its fitful and gaudy brilliancy with the sober and broad wisdom of Mr. Gladstone's utterance—then, indeed, you were able to see what a gulf there is between the smart debater and ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... are lighted, And, like phantoms grim and tall, Shadows from the fitful firelight Dance upon ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... beneath the scorching sun that beat down from the pale blue of the cloudless sky upon a sea hardly less blue in its greater depths. Only the hope that they would soon reach Timor seemed to rouse them from a state of babbling delirium or fitful slumber. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... other room, and selected a book for perusal; it chanced to be a work on metaphysics, and after poring over its abstruse pages for some time, she became drowsy, and finally fell into a dreamy sleep. In her fitful slumbers, she was visited by a dream or vision of extraordinary vividness, which made an indelible impression upon her mind, because she felt personally interested in the characters that appeared before her, and by alluding to the ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... the howling shore the great waves were hurling themselves in vast cataracts of snow-white surf that shone, dimly radiant, in the fitful moonlight. The sky was covered with broken clouds, and a rising storm-wind blew in gusts along the cliffs. The peace of the night was utterly shattered, the shining glory had departed. A wild and desolate grandeur ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... heralding banner of an approaching hurricane, from whose bosom the lurid lightning leaped forth, and the deep-toned thunder resounded. Presently the large drops of rain fell peltering on the leaves; then the first heavy dash of the fitful storm came down, and presently extinguished the fire, which, by this time, was pretty well scattered over the ground. Walter and Ellen, still locked in a close embrace, were rescued from the jaws of the devouring ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... while the British had an army on the borders of the Lake, or in Upper Canada,—how he could best aid General Harrison's army; and then resolved on the work of the morrow; when, soothed by reflection, his tired nature gave out, and he, too, sank into a fitful slumber. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... forms of art. Their initiative vanished; they ceased to create and began to comment. Patriotism, with rare exceptions, became an empty name, for few had the high spirit and energy to translate into action man's duty to the State. Vacillation, indecision, fitful outbursts of unhealthy activity followed by cowardly depression, selfish cruelty, and criminal weakness are characteristic of the public life of Greece from the struggle with Macedonia to the final conquest by the arms of Rome. No one can fail to be struck by the marked difference ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... dredge and seine was extremely successful, and the rambles inland were geological excursions of great interest. Here he had the first sight of the guanaco of the Patagonian plains. The weather was fine, and at night-fall, to the golden light of sunset succeeded the fitful glow, over land and water, of the bonfires built by the sailors on the beach. Returning to the ship after dark, the various parties assembled in the wardroom, to talk over the events of the day and lay out plans for the morrow. These are the brightest hours in such a voyage, when ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... sheer edge, they glowered into one another's eyes through the fading twilight, the great steam cranes behind flinging out giant arms over the stone heaps, the black water below glancing with fitful gleams of steel and copper from the sunset's last saffron afterglow. The yellow headlight of a low-lying grain boat stole nearer, unheeded till the ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... the sentiment, and requited it with the bitterest hatred that can be supposed to rankle in a childish bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a kind of value, and even comfort for the mother; because there was at least an intelligible earnestness in the mood, instead of the fitful caprice that so often thwarted her in the child's manifestations. It appalled her, nevertheless, to discern here, again, a shadowy reflection of the evil that had existed in herself. All this enmity and passion ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... all classes are confined here; but beauty alone beams on the prison-yard from the windows of its cell. At this moment of writing, I hear voices from a room immediately below me; fair, the speakers possibly may be, but—judging from the fitful scraps of conversation that rise hither—they are assuredly ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... nights in his lonely life, Jan drew Kazan close to him, and he shivered as the other dogs slunk back from him suspiciously and the fire and the spruce tops broke the stillness of the forest. He looked at the crackling flames, at the fitful shadows which they set dancing and grimacing about him, and it seemed to him now that they were no longer friends, but were taunting him—gloating in Kazan's death, and telling him that he was alone, alone, alone. He let the fire die down, stirring it into ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... bold stroke in the hope of which they had paid this visit. They had dared, however, show no signs of their consuming anxiety. With smiling thanks they bade good-bye to the Governor and went on, in the fitful silence of suspense, ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... power, Who, wakened by the rushing midnight shower, Watch for the fitful breeze To howl and chafe amid the bending trees, Watch for the still white gleam To bathe the landscape in a fiery stream, Touching the tremulous eye with sense of light Too rapid and too pure ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... thoughts as have a tendency to come unbidden whenever the snoring of any of my fellow-lodgers gets aggravatingly harsh. In all this company I think I am the only person who doesn't snore, and when I awake from my rather fitful slumbers at four o'clock and find the rain no longer pattering against the window, I arise, and take up my journey toward Philippopolis, the city I had intended reaching yesterday. It is after crossing the Kodja Balkans ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... o'clock the monster balloon was almost fully charged, and was swaying to and fro in a wild, fitful manner, that could not have been beheld without trepidation by any of the thirty gentlemen who had so judiciously booked seats in advance. The wickerwork car now secured to the balloon was half filled with ballast and crowded with men, whilst others ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... found himself in a gloomy and lonesome valley. Jagged mountains, black as night, rose on either side, and huge rocks seemed ready to topple down upon him at every step. Through broken clouds a watery moon shed a faint, fitful light, that came and went as the clouds, driven by a moaning wind, passed over ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... similar when brought to bear upon loose particles of solid matter. It would, indeed, seem that the slow and comparatively regular movements of the heavy, unelastic water ought to affect such particles very differently from the sudden and fitful impulses of the light and elastic air. But the velocity of the wind currents gives them a mechanical force approximating to that of the slower waves, and, however difficult it may be to explain all the phenomena that characterize the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... contrary to all the canons of musical Pharisaism, had still a singular and romantic effect, which a true musical genius would not have failed to recognize. The four parts, tenor, treble, bass, and counter, as they were then called, rose and swelled and wildly mingled, with the fitful strangeness of Aeolian harp, or of winds in mountain-hollows, or the vague moanings of the sea on lone, forsaken shores. And Mary, while her voice rose over the waves of the treble, and trembled ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... longing for her; idealizing her; thinking of her in her innocent beauty, her charming ways; wondering how she would meet him the next time, what he should say to her; living upon her brief, alluring notes that came to him from time to time like fitful rose petals blown from a garden where he longed to be; but yet in a way it was a relief to have her gone until he could settle the great perplexity that was in ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... night before the brink of death In fitful sleep the army lay, For through the dream that stilled their breath Too ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... decency. It is, however, but child's play after all, and abounds with toys and games, from a half-penny whistle to an electric machine. Leipsic is now in its waking hours; but a short time hence her fitful three weeks' fever will have passed away, and, weary with excitement, or as some say, plethoric with her gorge of profits, she will sink into a soulless lethargy. Her streets will become deserted, and echo to solitary footsteps; and whole rows of houses, with their lately ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... with weeping cheer, Whose cold hand guides the youngling year Down misty roads of mire and rime, Before thy pale and fitful face The shrill wind shifts the clouds apace Through skies the morning scarce may climb. Thine eyes are thick with heavy tears, But lit with hopes that ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of a five years' vagabondage. I started out as a Pilgrim to the Inner Shrine of Truth which I have sought from St. Petersburg to Lisbon, from Taormina to Christiania. I have lived in a spiritual shadowland, dreaming elusive dreams, my better part stayed by the fitful vision of things unseen. Such an exquisite wild-goose-chase has never man undertaken before or since the dear Knight of La Mancha. And now I come to think of it, I don't know what the deuce I have been after, save that instead of pursuing I have ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... The wind was fitful. They traveled unsteadily, too, tacking back and across the estuary, because the breeze was so light, and no longer astern. Ten miles down the mouth of the stream they beheld an island where huge sheets of ice were piled one upon another, in an overhanging jumble of ice-hummock, ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... of a day far advanced in autumn, he set off to visit this being. The howling of the wind as it came in fitful gusts through the openings of the forest, formed no bad accompaniment to his thoughts; while the indistinct twilight received little aid from the moon, which waded through heavy masses of clouds. The Baron, however, was a man of daring ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... against any possible interruption, we waited till the whole house was abed before we left it for the grotto. We went by boat and oh! the dip of those oars! I hear them yet. And the witchery of her face in the moonlight; and the mockery of her low fitful laugh! As I caught the sinister note in its silvery rise and fall, I knew what was before me if I failed to retain my composure. And I strove to hold it and to meet her calmness with stoicism and the taunt of her expression with a ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... sense; And love unchanged will cloy, And she became a bore intense Unto her love-sick boy? With fitful glimmer burnt my flame, And I grew cold and coy, At last, one morning, I ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... was indefatigable in his efforts to preserve life. A vast number of passengers died in their berths; many who had managed to reach the deck were swept away by the immense waves that flooded it. One sharp cry was wafted on the chill night air, and a deadly silence prevailed, except for the fitful ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... gathering resolution from the terrors that had beset him when he fancied his opportunity threatened, he ran like a frightened deer fleetly down the road, and plunged into the dense forest. The wind kept him company, rollicking, quickening, coming and going in fitful gusts. He heard it die away, but now and again it was rustling among a double file of beech-trees all up the mountainside. He saw the commotion in their midst, the effect of swift movement as the scant ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... was the same place; the old familiar outlines of home and garden and landscape. But seen now, in the choking breathlessness of haste, in the fitful changing flashes of life and motion around it, in intervals of sharp suspense or dazed bewilderment, it seemed to be recognized no longer. Men who had known it all their lives, hurrying to the front in compact masses, scurrying to the rear in straggling line, or opening their ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... loomed beyond. A pale star twinkled above. Shefford suddenly became aware of the intense nature of the stillness about him. Yet, as he listened to this silence, he heard an intermittent and immeasurably low moan, a fitful, mournful murmur. Assuredly it was only the wind. Nevertheless, it made his blood run cold. It was a different wind from that which had made music under the eaves of his Illinois home. This was a lonely, haunting wind, with desert hunger in it, and more which he could not name. Shefford ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... and overhead flocks of birds circled and called with shrill, uncanny voices. Yet the moonlight was so bright that they saw each other as plainly as if it were day, and its placid radiance seemed strangely at variance with the disturbed wild-fowl, and certain weird and fitful sounds that seemed to be sighed forth from ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... the farther side of a deep ravine running north and south, being the continuation of the valley or ravine of Brier Creek, he formed his line, facing west with wings refused, the centre being the apex, and still connecting on the right with the remnant of Sherman's division. Several fitful onslaughts at intervals forced McClernand to refuse his left ...
— From Fort Henry to Corinth • Manning Ferguson Force
... will," replied Sandy thoughtfully, "mebbe I will." He paused reflectively a few moments while he filled and lighted his pipe. The rain still beat steadily against the roof and windows of the bunkhouse, but the wind now came only in fitful gusts. ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... clachan on the hillside and up above it the old manor-house. But ever and again his heart would pause to catch anew some flitting glance of the brown eyes, some turn of the golden head, some cadence of the soft Highland voice, some fitful illusive sweetness of the smile upon the curving lips, pause and return upon its tracks to feel anew that subtle rapture of the first poignant thrill, lingering over each separate memory as a drunkard lingers regretful over his last ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... garden there came the strains of "The Blue Danube," fitful, alluring, plaintive—that waltz to which countless lovers have danced and wooed and whispered through the years. Muriel longed intensely to shut it out, to stop her ears, to make some noise to drown it. Her nerves were all on edge, and she felt ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... and Mary's wild plunge back into bed, Joyce sat up in alarm, but in response to her whisper Mary explained in muffled tones from under the bedclothes that she had simply gotten up for a drink of water and dropped the pitcher. All the rest of the night her sleep was fitful and uneasy, for toward morning her face began to burn as if it were on fire. She tore off the mask and used it to wipe away what remained of the ointment. Most of it had been absorbed, however, and the skin was broken out in ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... strapped to our backs and rations in our pockets for two days, set out along an ancient and in places an obliterated bark road that followed and crossed and recrossed the stream. The morning was bright and warm, but the wind was fitful and petulant, and I predicted rain. What a forest solitude our obstructed and dilapidated wood-road led us through! five miles of primitive woods before we came to the forks, three miles before we came to the "burnt shanty," a name merely,—no ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... pleasure in his visitor's expression. This man, who had visited him that afternoon with a note of introduction from an old friend, interested him from the very contrast of their dispositions. The lank black hair and deep grey eyes, the haggard expression and nervous manner, the fitful yet keen interest of his visitor were a novel change from the phlegmatic deliberations of the ordinary scientific worker with whom the Bacteriologist chiefly associated. It was perhaps natural, with a hearer evidently so ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... herself came out to the gate, and, leaning one arm lightly across it, watched them approaching. She wore a pale lilac print gown, high to the neck and tidily finished off by a plain little muslin collar fastened with a coquettish knot of black velvet,—her head was uncovered, and the fitful gleams of the sinking sun shed a russet glow on her shining hair and reddened the pale clear transparency of her skin. In that restful waiting attitude, with a smile on her face, she made a perfect picture, and Helmsley stole a side-glance at his companion, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... he had contemplated and planned his father's separation from one whom he had imposed by false pretexts on the old man's love, and whom he only regarded as an alien encumbrance upon the scanty means of her deluded protector—the fitful and desultory mode in which, when (contrary to the reasonings which Gabrielle had based upon a very large experience of the credulities of human nature in general, but in utter ignorance of the nature peculiar to ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cathedral to hear the celebrated organ. The organist performed a piece descriptive of a storm. We resigned ourselves to the illusion. Low, mysterious wailings, swelling, dying away in the distance, seeming at first exceedingly remote, drew gradually near. Fitful sighings and sobbings rose, as of gusts of wind; then low, smothered roarings. Anon came flashes of lightning, rattling hail, and driving rain, succeeded by bursts of storm, and howlings of a hurricane—fierce, furious, frightful. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... instantly followed as corollary to it a CONFEDERATION OF BAR, which quite dimmed the fame of Radom, and indeed of all Confederations prior or posterior! As the Confederation of Bar and its Doings, or rather sufferings and tragical misdoings and undoings, still hang like fitful spectralities, or historical shadows, of a vague ghastly complexion, in the human memory, one asks at least: Since they were on this Planet, tell us where? Bar is in the Waiwodship Podol (what we call Podolia), some 400 miles southeast of Warsaw; not ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... border the Rhine, Segfried departed on horseback through the castle gates, and journeyed toward the monastery with bowed head and dejected mien. The gates remained open, and as darkness fell, a lighted torch was thrust in a wrought iron receptacle near the entrance at the outside, throwing a fitful, flickering glare under the archway and into the deserted court. Within, all was silent as the ruined castle is to-day, save only the tinkling sound of the clear waters of the effervescing spring as it flowed over the stones ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... the railing and looked below. As far as the eye could reach, within the arc of their vision, they could see fitful lights flashing up, here and there, and going out again. And then they heard faint sounds of crashing masonry and the condensed roar of human voices, which seemed to come from above rather than from below. The Alphian turned. "I cannot stand ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... dominion is a memory of the past; and when we evoke its departed shades, they rise upon us from their graves in strange, romantic guise. Again their ghostly camp-fires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... teeth he fights the implacable winter, calling to aid his every reserve of strength and high courage. He thinks of the road he must follow, the miles to be overcome, measures his chances of life; and fitful memories arise of a house, so warm and snug, where all will greet him gladly; of Maria who, knowing what he has dared for her sake, will at length raise to him her truthful eyes shining ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... of events were fitful and wayward, so that effects started up without causes, and like causes under like conditions produced unlike effects, and anything might come of anything, there would be no such thing as that which we call nature. When we speak of nature, we imply a regular and definite ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... like a sob, Mr Smith left me and went down the stairs. All that long night, as I sat beside Billy and watched his fitful sleep, I could hear the sound of voices in the ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... he involuntarily paused before it a moment. The cabin lamp—taking long swings this way and that—was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man's bolted door,—a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there, though ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... Normandy the peasants used to repair, often from a distance of miles, to the churches to hear the midnight mass on Christmas Eve. They marched in procession by torchlight, chanting Christmas carols, and the fitful illumination of the woods, the hedges, and the fields as they moved through the darkness, presented a succession of picturesque scenes. Mention is also made of bonfires kindled on the heights; the custom is said to have been observed at Athis near ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... waited and watched for us at the window, peering through the gathering dusk until the anxious heart was stilled by the sight of tired little legs dragging down the street past the postoffice. We'll stay here in the twilight, and watch the fire-flies light their fitful lamps, and the first stars blinking through the afterglow; and when the night drops down see the black bats careening weirdly across the moon.... And we'll stretch out again on the wild grass—soothed by the fragrance of the Mayapple and the violets, and the touch of ...
— The Long Ago • Jacob William Wright
... time wore on, and Bosnia enjoyed a kind of fitful repose. There and in Herzegovina the feudal system had lost much of its primeval vigour, although a barbarous independence still prevailed, more especially in the latter province, where Ali Aga of Stolatz showed symptoms of forsaking the treacherous fidelity ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... (where motions in the line of sight are vertical) disclose the progress of violent uprushes and downrushes of ignited gases, for the most part in the penumbral or outlying districts. They appear to be occasioned by fitful and irregular disturbances, and have none of the systematic quality which would be required for the elucidation of sun-spot theories. Indeed, they almost certainly take place at a great height above the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... satin and marked at the head with a chiseled star, bearing above it the inscription in Latin, "Here was Jesus Christ born of the Virgin Mary." At the foot are several altars, on which incense is ever kept burning and from which mass is conducted, while a score of hanging lamps shed a fitful light over the apartment. ...
— Myths and Legends of Christmastide • Bertha F. Herrick
... you had been born for naught. Save like the brutes to perish. What do they But crop the grass and die? Ye have been taught A nobler lesson—that within the clay, Upon the minds high altar, burns a ray Flashed from Divinity—and shall it shine Fitful and feebly? Shall it die away, Because, forsooth, no priest is at the shrine? Go ye with learning's lamp and tend ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... sun, And amidst the fire-hall's pavement the King of the Dwarf-kind stood Like an image of deeds departed and days that once were good; And he seemed but faint and weary, and his eyes were dim and dazed As they met the glory of Sigurd where the fitful candles blazed. Then he spake: "Hail, Son of the Volsungs, the corner-stone is laid, I have toiled and thou hast desired, ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... his errand. And as a matter of fact, just as he got to the bottom of the stairs, it was opened for him by some people of the house coming home late—two men and a woman. He slipped out through them into the street, swept then by a fitful gust of wind. They were, of course, very much startled. A flash of lightning enabled them to observe him walking away quickly. One of the men shouted, and was starting in pursuit, but the woman had recognized him. "It's all right. It's only that young Russian from the third floor." ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... and stormy night. Thunder was rolling in the sky. Lightning flashed among the mountain-peaks. Rain, the first that had descended for many days, fell in fitful showers. It must have seemed to the women either that the elements sympathised with them, or that the extreme darkness was favourable to the execution of their plan, for about midnight one of them rose from her bed, and crept noiselessly to the corner of her ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... Outside, the fitful early April wind howled dismally, swaying the leafless branches of the old elm, and causing them to rub complainingly against the gable end of the farmhouse. Two or three inches of fine snow had fallen the day before and the wind tossed it about gleefully, festooning the window-sashes ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... images are made to the gods; around it divine worship is conducted, of which music is a subservient ornament; by means of it pictures are given to lovers of their beloved; by it the beauties are preserved which time, and nature the mother, render fitful; by it we retain the images of famous men. And if thou wert to say that by committing music to writing you render it eternal, we do ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... and others, I never would have polluted my body and shamed my soul." The nurse should know how to instruct the mother as to the signs of self-abuse in her little boys, so that she may know what causes the nervous movements, the pallor, the fitful appetite, the dark circles under the eyes, the listlessness, the fondness for being alone—any one of which should call for extreme watchfulness. All these things a nurse should be sure to know, so that, as far as in ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... bedding. Engaged in this, he realized that his two blankets promised to be woefully inadequate to the weather and he cocked an apprehensive eye heavenward. What he saw did not reassure him, for the evening sky was overcast and a cold, fitful wind blew from off the lake. There was no doubt about it, it looked like rain—or snow—perhaps a combination of both. Mr. Quirk felt a shiver of dread run through him, and his heart sank at the prospect of many nights like ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... openly her master should no less openly have shown itself even in the first moments of their inauspicious union is what any bystander of common insight must inevitably have foreseen. Tears, dejection, and passionate expressions of a despair "wishing only for death," bore fitful and variable witness to her first sense of a heavier yoke than yet had galled her spirit and her pride. At other times her affectionate gayety would give evidence as trustworthy of a fearless and improvident satisfaction. They rode out in state together, and if he kept cap in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... wan fitful light, Glide,—gliding round the golden rim! Restored to life, now glancing bright, Now just expiring, faint and dim! Like a spirit loath to die, Contending with its destiny. All dark! a momentary ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... From such fitful lights as could be cast upon his dark history by the broken narrative of his poor patron, torn by remorse and struggling in the last pangs of dissolution, Mr. Esmond had been made to understand ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lived a thronged and busy life, a secret life, full of terror, triumph, wonder, frantic enterprise, a noble and gallant figure among my peers, while to my parents, brothers and sisters I was an incalculable, fitful creature, often lethargic and often in the sulks. They saw me mooning in idleness and were revolted; or I walked dully the way I was bid and they despaired of my parts. I could not explain myself to them, still less justify, having that miserable veil ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... night had settled down upon the camp, relieved only by the fitful flarings of the fire that was kept up to warn off the man-eaters. Tarzan lay quietly in his bonds. He suffered from thirst and from the cutting of the tight strands about his wrists and ankles; but he made ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... door, which stood half open; a bogwood fire burned on a hearth somewhat less rude than the one which I had first seen, but still very little better appointed with a chimney, for thick wreaths of smoke were eddying, with every fitful gust, about the room. Close by the fire was strewed a bed of heath, intended, I supposed, for the stalwart limbs ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... Tasmanian convict village scheme. In '47, he announced total abolition. In '48, another complete revolution took place, and all convicts were to be sent to Van Diemen's Land. This extravagance of upstart theory and fitful experiment without end, all tended to check colonial enterprise and destroy the ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... it is true, that the old spirit of terrorism was not yet quite extinct: Captain Zolotykhin, for example, an officer of the Moscow secret police, was assassinated by a female revolutionist in 1890. But such incidents were merely the last fitful sputterings of a lamp that was going out for want of oil. In 1892 Stepniak declared it evident to all that the professional revolutionists could not alone overthrow autocracy, however great their energy and heroism; and ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... arranged them into classes and distinguished principal from subsidiary meanings. Then to illustrate what he wants, Smith himself writes two model articles, one on Wit and the other on Humour, both acute and interesting. He counts humour to be always something accidental and fitful, the disease of a disposition, and he considers it much inferior to wit, though it may often be more amusing. "Wit expresses something that is more designed, concerted, regular, and artificial; humour ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... beneath the awning, I dozing lay and yawning; It was the gray of dawning, Ere yet the sun arose; And above the funnel's roaring, And the fitful wind's deploring, I heard the cabin snoring With universal nose. I could hear the passengers snorting— I envied their disporting— Vainly I was courting ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... an hour had gone that the flakes began to swirl in fitful flurries. By then the travellers were making better time, and Jim was convinced the blotted sun would soon again assert its mastery over clouds so abruptly accumulated in the sky. The wind, however, had veered about. It came directly in ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... had long since declared that there was no hope. In one of those fitful bursts of anger, in which Charles from time to time indulged, even in his state of exhaustion and in his dying moments, he had desired to be left by his doctors and attendants, and he slumbered his last slumber in this world, before closing his eyes for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... gayety and heartiness that charmed them and caused them to exclaim frequently that he could not be an Englishman, and that his accent was but assumed. Arnold Dampierre had been admitted two months later. He had, the master said, distinct talent, but his work was fitful and uncertain. Some days he would work earnestly and steadily, but more often he was listless and indolent, exciting M. ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... 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 ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... and no anguish has made it wise. But that evening there was, I thought, something missing; a curious feverishness seemed to have replaced the cool and hardy purity of manner which was natural to him; his eyes had a strange glow, fitful and eager; I saw by the starlight how restless his fingers were, they intertwined, twisted, and writhed in ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... his own reflections, which were none of the liveliest, and lulled by the motion of the train, our traveller soon fell into a fitful sleep, wherein he was haunted by dreams that wrought upon his brain until he was almost as nervous as he had been in his own room some ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... she heard the swish of the rain on the window, the uneven sob of the fitful wind; she heard the old people talk, the husband persist, the wife protest. She did not look up; her eyes were fixed on her needle, but she hardly saw it; more plainly she saw the dark barns, the crowded shelves, the place where the blue ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... what depth of blackness thrown Against the clouds, far up the skies The walls of the cathedral rise, Like a mysterious grove of stone, With fitful lights and shadows blending, As from behind, the moon ascending, Lights its dim aisles and paths unknown! The wind is rising; but the boughs Rise not and fall not with the wind, That through their foliage sobs and soughs; Only the cloudy rack behind, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... contritely, as the big wave passed harmlessly under the sailboat. Then the craft swung behind a projecting point of land and they were in calmer waters. Allen had let the sail come down on the run, and all danger of capsizing was over. The wind still blew in fitful gusts, however, and the rain, which had been holding off, came down in a ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... it slowly over his brows, the increasing and corpse-like whiteness of his face became more glaringly visible, by the contrast which this dread head-gear presented. Twice as he essayed to speak his voice failed him, and an indistinct murmur came forth from his hueless lips, and died away like a fitful and feeble wind. But with the third effort the resolution and long self-tyranny of the man conquered, and his voice went clear and unfaltering through the crowd, although the severe sweetness of its wonted tones was gone, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... advertised or even of confessed relation to it as would do honour to a vacuum produced by an air-pump!" The formulation, the approximate expression of what the system at large might or mightn't do for those in contact with it, became thus one's own fitful care, with one's attention for a considerable period doubtless dormant enough, but with the questions always liable to revive before ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... passed completely through a narrow storm belt. She was now in a quiet atmosphere, though behind her could be seen the fitful play of lightning, and there could be heard the distant ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
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