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More "Flit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... exposed for sale; embroidery, pickles, preserves, confectionery, and articles rejected by the Society of Decorative Art. I hope it will be a success, and help many worthy women, all over the land, to help themselves.... I find it hard to consent to your having, at your age, to flit about from home to home, but a loving Father has a mansion for you beyond all the changes and chances of this strange complicated life. If He gives you His presence, that will be a home. I wish you could ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... fellowship of voluntary grief— He read the tear-stained book of poor men's souls, As we must learn to read it. Lady! lady! Wear but one robe the less—forego one meal— And thou shalt taste the core of many tales, Which now flit past thee, like a minstrel's songs, The sweeter for ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... degrees difficulties were smoothed down. A squatter on one of the forfeited farms, about eight miles off, who with his family lived solely on flesh and milk, was engaged to lend a hand with his waggon and oxen to "flit" the families to their various locations. He also sold the settlers a few sheep. In time, more sheep and oxen were purchased from the Dutch farmers on the Tarka, a river on the other side of the mountains. ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... day. Stories are told in Sutherlandshire about a 'witch' who milked deer; a 'ghost' once became acquainted with a forester, and at his suggestion packed all her plenishing on a herd of deer, when forced to flit by another and a bigger 'ghost;' the green mounds in which 'fairies' are supposed to dwell closely resemble the outside of Lapp huts. The fairies themselves are not represented as airy creatures in gauze wings and spangles, but they appear in tradition as small ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... politician wise, And see through all things with his half-shut eyes) Sent up in vapours to the baron's brain New stratagems the radiant lock to gain. Ah, cease, rash youth! desist ere 'tis too late, Fear the just gods, and think of Scylla's fate! Changed to a bird, and sent to flit in air, She dearly pays for Nisus' ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... the earth that is scarcely seen Through the curtain of vapour that waves between, O'er city and hamlet, o'er hill and plain, O'er forest green, and o'er mountain hoar, They flit like shadows, and pass the shore, And wing their ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... and in this pale light all details of ornaments and lines of windows and balconies seemed lost; they stood out more clearly in the buildings that were wrapped in a light veil of unbroken shadow. The gondolas, with their little red lamps, seemed to flit past more noiselessly and swiftly than ever; their steel beaks flashed mysteriously, mysteriously their oars rose and fell over the ripples stirred by little silvery fish; here and there was heard the brief, subdued call of a gondolier (they never sing now); scarcely another sound ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... the body of De-deed disappears for the last time. We search for an hour or more with grappling irons, but he is never seen again. A strange silence settles down above and below deck, and all night long two faces flit before us—the grave face of the mother calling down blessings on her boy, the rallying smile of De-deed bidding her good-by and telling her all is well. It is a brave and happy spirit which, in the "Little Lake" of the Mackenzie, goes ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... the dust and heat of the Piazza one comes into a cool cloister that surrounds a quadrangle open to the sky, in which a cypress still lives. The sun fills the garden with a golden beauty, in which the butterflies flit from flower to flower over the dead. I do not know a place more silent or more beautiful. One lingers in the cool shadow of the cloisters before many an old marble,—a vase carved with Bacchanalian women, the head of Achilles, or the bust of Isotta of Rimini. But it is before the fresco of ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... the chamber, moody and alone. The taper was nigh extinguished; the wasted billet grew pale, a few sparks starting up the chimney, as the wind roared in short and hasty gusts round the dwelling. The old family portraits seemed to flit from their dark panels, wavering with the tremulous motion of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... years thegither; We'll toyte about wi' ane anither; Wi' tentie care I'll flit thy tether, To some hain'd rig, Whare ye may nobly rax ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... of time, tract of time, current of time, tide of time, march of time, step of time, flight of time; duration &c 106. [Indefinite time] aorist^. V. elapse, lapse, flow, run, proceed, advance, pass; roll on, wear on, press on; flit, fly, slip, slide, glide; run its course. run out, expire; go by, pass by; be past &c 122. Adj. elapsing &c v.; aoristic^; progressive. Adv. in due time, in due season; in in due course, in due process, in ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the Poet at his will Lets the great world flit from him, seeing all, Higher through secret splendours mounting still ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... short the word he was saying, and Martin saw his body stiffen and his eyes dilate. Even Ichi betrayed agitation, and Martin saw a violent but quickly mastered emotion flit across ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... term, yet how irksome, cold, uninteresting, uninviting, does it at best appear to you! how severe its voice! how forbidding its aspect! With what animation, on the contrary, do you enter into the mere pursuits of time and the world! What bright anticipations of joy and happiness flit before your eyes! How you are struck and dazzled at the view of the prizes of this life, as they are called! How you admire the elegancies of art, the brilliance of wealth, or the force of intellect! According to your opportunities you mix in the world, you meet and ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... out, for I remember no excitement or interest about the journey, which ought to have had so much for me. In a passive state of mind I followed Miss Pinshon from steamer to station; from one train of cars to another; and saw the familiar landscape flit before me as the cars whirled us on. At Baytown we had been joined by a gentleman who went with us all the rest of the way; and I began by degrees to comprehend that my governess had changed her vocation, and instead of taking care, as heretofore, was ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... we'll jist let it pass by this time, ef you plase, sur!' Martin remained in his station. When the successor of Mr. Van Buren came in, the door-keeper presented himself soon after to the new President, with the civil inquiry: 'I suppose I'll hev to flit, too, with the other Martin?' He was ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the law, even to drumming her out of the town; but forbearance was my best policy, so I only persuaded my colleagues to order the players to decamp, and to give the Tappit-hen notice, that it would be expedient for the future sale of her pies and porter, at untimeous hours, and that she should flit her howff from our town. Indeed, what pleasure would it have been to me to have dealt unmercifully, either towards the one or the other? for surely the gentle way of keeping up a proper respect for magistrates, ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... flown? Am I once more sunk to a level with my former self? Once I thought that religion was a substance with me,—not a shadow, to flit, to mock, and to vanish when its succour was most needed; yet now does ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... their foliage with that of the trees to form one huge canopy of leaves, in which birds of bright plumage and beautiful song live out their happy lives. Monkeys also make their home there, and strange insects and butterflies of rare beauty flit among the flowers, or hover in the few stray sunbeams which ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... true, as the lovers of whom M. Anatole France has written (La Messe des Morts). Above the witches' lake come shadows of the women who suffered under Knox and the Bastard of Scotland, poor creatures burned to ashes with none to help or pity. The shades of Dominicans flit by the Black Friars wall—verily the place is haunted, and among Murray's pleasures was this of pacing alone, by night, in that airy press and throng of those who lived and loved and suffered so ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... the other, heartily, as he eyed the boy; and perhaps a dim suspicion that he might find the fugitive valuable as a guide began to flit through his ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... bestow Rest on the fever'd bed, All slumb'rous sounds and low Are mingled here and wed, And bring no drowsihed. Shy dreams flit to and fro With shadowy hair dispread; With wistful eyes that glow And silent robes that sweep. Thou wilt not hear me; no? Wilt thou ...
— Sleep-Book - Some of the Poetry of Slumber • Various
... and fixed a lunch, I go over into the Park. There are only birds and squirrels and a few tramps about then, and it is glorious. Sometimes I am so happy that I do not want to read; later come the squalling children and the hot sun; but I flit about from place to place. I wonder what ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... and are impassable for heavy lorries. So incredible weights and bundles are moved on hand-barrows; and bales of goods and stacks of produce are punted down the dark waterways which give to parts of Tokyo a Venetian picturesqueness. Passengers, too proud to walk, flit past noiselessly in rubber-tyred rickshaws—which are not, as many believe, an ancient and typical Oriental conveyance, but the modern invention of an English missionary called Robinson. The hum of the city is ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... terror and confusion whispers the night, While blue and green flames flit over the deep; But calm reigns again with the morning's light, And soon the bold fisherman comes into sight, As his bark rushes on and the waves ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... And took with her your trifle of money; Bless your heart, they don't mind - they're exceedingly kind - They don't blame you - as long as you're funny! It's a comfort to feel If your partner should flit, Though YOU suffer a deal, THEY don't mind it a bit - They don't blame you - ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... house! do you, too, miss the light step of your mistress? No longer shall her little silken figure flit up and down your quiet staircases, no more deck out your silent rooms with flowers, humming the ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... The western end of the island ran out into a long low point covered with briars, rushes and saw-grass. As Alfred directed his gaze along the water line of this point he distinctly saw a dark form flit from one bush to another. He was positive he had not been mistaken. He got up slowly and unconcernedly, ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... don't know as I want any o' Mester Maldon's friends here," said the landlady loudly. "Mester Maldon's done a flit from here, Mester Maldon has; and," coming out on to the pavement and pointing upward to a broken pane in the first-floor window, "that's a bit o' his fancy ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... to his fall Remaines of all. O world's inconstancie! That which is firme doth flit and fall away, And that is flitting doth abide ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... Keats's Eve of St. Agnes lately made me regret that I was not young again. The beautiful and tender images there conjured up, "come like shadows—so depart." The "tiger-moth's wings," which he has spread over his rich poetic blazonry, just flit across my fancy; the gorgeous twilight window which he has painted over again in his verse, to me "blushes" almost in vain "with blood of queens and kings." I know how I should have felt at one time in ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... no time or opportunity in getting beyond the domain of General Yozarro and would never again willingly enter it. She had had more than enough of Zalapata as well as Atlamalco, and yearned for the return of Jack's yacht, when they could flit from a country which she had come to detest unutterably. She dearly loved Manuela and could not reconcile herself to the thought of losing her companionship forever; but from this time forward, the American must voyage to the country which had been her home for years, and where ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... I lay awake a while, watching the sparks fly, and the shadows flit, feeling the cold wind on my face, listening to the crackle of the fire and the roar ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... of aesthetics, will do well to examine by what means these various effects are produced. In the second nocturne, F sharp major, the brightness and warmth of the world without have penetrated into the world within. The fioriture flit about as lightly as gossamer threads. The sweetly-sad longing of the first section becomes more disquieting in the doppio movimento, but the beneficial influence of the sun never quite loses its power, and after a little ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the men separated, repairing to their tents. Their songs had charmed me, and made the long hours flit by like birds. Where are you, brave singers, in this year '68? I know not—you are all scattered. Your guns have ceased their thunder, your voices sound no more. But I think you sometimes remember, as you muse, in these ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... the Hel-ya Water, Sobbing by its eyot drear, Screaming with the tempest-furies, Over hillock, over mere; On the wings of silent snow-flakes, On the bulwands[10] from the rill, By the haunted Hel-ya Water Flit those heralds of ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... that there is much to see in it; one of the crags of the aiguille-edge, on the southern slope of it, is struck sharply through, as by an awl, into a little eyelet hole; which you may see, seven thousand feet above the valley (as the clouds flit past behind it, or leave the sky), first white, and then dark blue. Well, there's just such an eyelet hole in one of the upper crags of the Diamond Valley; and, from a distance, you think that it is no bigger than the eye of a needle. But if you get up to it, they say you ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... borne by him, the step of the ex-Ranger is no longer that of a man either despairing or fatigued. On the contrary, it is light and elastic; while his countenance shows bright and joyous as the beams of the ascending sun. His very shadow seems to flit over the frosted foliage of the artemisias as lightly as the figure of a gossamer-robed belle gliding across the waxed floor of ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... are not very welcome, though one puts the best face on it, and a dinner of importance is the first thing imperative to be set in progress. A flurried Court, that of Gotha, and much swashing of French plumes through it, all this morning, since Seidlitz had to flit. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... here or inside, whichever they please; but look after them sharp, mind you. A captive free is a regular wild bird: once given a chance to flit, that is enough—you can never get ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... at home, and Theobald was a little snappish at reflecting how many miles he had to post before he could be at his own fireside again. However there was nothing for it, so the pair sat quietly and watched the roadside objects flit by them, and get greyer and grimmer as the ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... echo and re-echo in my ears the sad song which hovers throughout the length and the breadth of your borders? What is the burden of that song? Why does it wail and sob and catch at my heart? What say the notes which thus painfully caress and embrace my soul, and flit, uttering their lamentations, around me? What is it you seek of me, O Russia? What is the hidden bond which subsists between us? Why do you regard me as you do? Why does everything within you turn upon me eyes full of yearning? Even at this moment, as I stand dumbly, fixedly, perplexedly ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... from a quarry that supplies no other place. But we are not one family. In the old days, those of us who were of the Tenements seldom wandered to the Croft head, and if we did go there we saw men to whom we could not always give a name. To flit from the Tanage brae to Haggart's road was to change one's friends. A kirk- wynd weaver might kill his swine and Tillyloss not know of it until boys ran westward hitting each other with the bladders. Only the voice of the dulsemen could be heard all ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... the giant-mother, 'which thou beholdest to the left, is the gallery of the Unborn. The shadows that flit onward and upward into the world, are the souls that pass from the long eternity of being to their destined pilgrimage on earth. That which thou beholdest to thy right, wherein the shadows descending from above sweep on, equally unknown and dim, is ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... less difficult with respect to transverse sections. Under ordinary circumstances, external impressions persist so that they can be transfixed by a deliberate act of attention, and objects rarely flit over the external scene so rapidly as to allow us no time for a careful recognition of the impression. Not so in the case of the internal region of mind. The composite states of consciousness just described never remain perfectly uniform for the shortest conceivable duration. They change ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... or the Flitting figure, or the Remoue.] Now as arte and good pollicy in perswasion bids vs to abide & not to stirre from the point of our most aduantage, but the same to enforce and tarry vpon with all possible argument, so doth discretion will vs sometimes to flit from one matter to another, as a thing meete to be forsaken, and another entred vpon, I call him therefore the flitting figure, or figure of remoue, like as the other before was called the figure ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... our friends Unfamiliar traits she lends— Quaint, white witch, who looketh down With a glamour all her own. Hushed are laughter, jest, and speech, Mute and heedless each of each, In the glory wan we sit, Visions vague before us flit; Side by side, yet worlds apart, Heart becometh ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... understand! You do not belong to the fields as I do." He pointed ironically to her handsome riding skirt. "You are of the cities, of people. You will flit from this Indiana landscape one day, from provincial Torso, and spread your gay wings among the houses of men. While I—" He made a gesture of despair,—half comic, half serious,—and his dark ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... relieved; a rude folding-door opened opposite, and showed a low dim sitting-room beyond, from which there rose a few steps to the entrance of my chamber. On these appeared, not, alas! the fancied visitant who was to flit about my bedside, and mix her bright presence with my dreams, but stately and severe, with a pale cheek and ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... manner of cool distinction and her polished, impersonal phrases, another feminine figure dared to flit between him and this lady of manifold merit. No sooner would he indignantly banish her image than she would come dancing back, a gay little figure, with too much color in her checks and too much ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... and it was really a matter of absolute indifference to her whether he loved her or not, so long as he was at hand to take her about. And she didn't intend to encourage him, either. Love meant ties and responsibility—Alice proved that clearly enough. There was plenty of time for love. Let her flit first. Let her remain young as long as she could, careless and care-free. The fact that she was married was just an accident, an item in her adventure. It didn't make her less young to be married, and she didn't see why it should. ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... had been derived, like that of most Americans, from books and chance observation of the handful of Kwangtung men who are earning their living among us by washing our clothes. Silent, inscrutable, they flit through the American scene, alien to the last. What lies behind the riddle of their impassive faces? Perhaps I could find an answer. Then, too, it was clear, even to the most unintelligent, that a change was coming over the East, though few realized how speedily. I longed to see the old China before ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... own! Why is it that at moments there creeps over us an awe, a terror, overpowering, but undefined? Why is it that we shudder without a cause, and feel the warm life-blood stand still in its courses? Are the dead too near? Do unearthly wings touch us as they flit around? Has our soul any intercourse which the body shares not, though it feels, with the supernatural world—mysterious revealings—unimaginable communion—a language of dread and power, shaking to its centre the fleshly barrier that divides ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mentioned by W. T. M. is "Flits by the sea-blue bird of March," instead of "blue sea-bird." This reading appears to be a better one. I would suggest that the bird meant by Tennyson was the Tom-tit, who, from his restlessness, may be said to flit among ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... nay, let me grow a few days older yet. Nevertheless there is this new thing, that this morning I have brought thee a gift which I deem I may to flit to thee, and I shall give it to thee with a good will if thou wilt promise that thou wilt ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... perverse, sometimes so malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help questioning, at such moments, whether Pearl were a human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage floor, would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and intangibility; it was as if she were hovering in the air and ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... only when the brakeman with measured tone shouts the name of the station; he looks up from his paper or rouses from his doze, looks out at the cheerless prospect, and then settles himself for another thirty miles. Time passes as unobserved as the meadows or bushy pastures that flit by the jarring window at his ear. But with Greenleaf, the reader will believe, the case was far different. He had never noticed before how slowly the locomotives really moved. At each station where wood and water were to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... system, or to appear punctually at the systematic roll-call therein instituted. They are the true free-wanderers of the Infinite, passing from shore to shore of immensity, and presenting themselves, for short and uncertain intervals, to star after star. When they flit through our skies, they shew themselves in all possible positions, and move along all possible directions. They sometimes, however, yield too much to temptation, and have to suffer the penalty of a short imprisonment in consequence. Lexell's Comet, for instance, rushed in its ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... its own vitality, this hall in which no common voice could make itself heard produced nevertheless an effect of magical stillness, silence, and solitude. We were alone in it, save that now and then in the far-distant spaces a figure might flit and disappear between the huge glinting columns of metal. It was a hall enchanted and inexplicable. I understood nothing of it. But I understood that half the electricity of New York was being generated by its engines of a hundred and fifty ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... shines out Where the swinked shepherd drives his bleating flock Back to their wattled sheep-cotes, a faint shout Comes from some Oxford boat at Sandford lock, And starts the moor-hen from the sedgy rill, And the dim lengthening shadows flit like ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... sake of the river, a rustic cot is taken for a few weeks by a party of boating-people. Then the quaint, old-fashioned gardens blossom with a sudden luxuriance of striped tents and flaming umbrellas, while bright women in many-hued boating-costumes flit among cabbages and onions like curious tropical birds and butterflies. As a rule, however, the Dean is abandoned to its usual rustic population and to artists, numbers of the latter remaining all winter in the haunts whence the majority of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... second a spasm shot over her face; then a ray of light seemed to flit across it, and then it ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... it just so much worse when she and Aunty does the summer flit. Course, I saw it comin' 'way back early in June, and then the first thing I know they're gone. I gets a bulletin now and then,—Lenox, the Pier, Newport, and so on,—sometimes from Vee, sometimes by readin' the society notes. Must be great to have the papers ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... her. She looked around her at the dark night. Dim forms flitted by. She seemed to recognize some of them, as they floated through the regions of death towards the dark curtain, where they vanished. Would her husband and her daughters flit past? No; their sighs and lamentations still sounded from above; and she had nearly forgotten them, for the sake of ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... the Advocate had so highly complimented him, was not strong enough to carry him much beyond a vigorous phraseology. He had not awoke from the delusive dream of the Spanish marriage which had dexterously been made to flit before him, and he was not inclined, for the sake of the Republic which he hated the more because obliged to be one of its sponsors, to risk the animosity of a great power which entertained the most profound contempt for him. He was destined to find himself involved more closely ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... flashing waves, he heard their ceaseless roar; Or carolled in his light canoe content, As, bound from creek to creek, it grazed the shore; Gods of the storm the dreary space might sweep, And shapes of death, and gliding spectres gaunt, Might flit, he thought, o'er the remoter deep; And whilst strange voices cried, Avaunt, avaunt! Uncertain lights, seen through the midnight gloom, Might lure him sadly on ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... precept, "Upward, not Northward", haunts me like a soul-devouring Sphinx. It is part of the martyrdom which I endure for the cause of the Truth that there are seasons of mental weakness, when Cubes and Spheres flit away into the background of scarce-possible existences; when the Land of Three Dimensions seems almost as visionary as the Land of One or None; nay, when even this hard wall that bars me from my freedom, these very ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... trumpet and drum, but in silence, they came— Their paths were illumed by their torches' mild flame, Whose soft lambent streams by love's glory were lit; And where fairy knights and bright elves used to flit Across the wan world when the lights quivered dim, These watched at the grave, and ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... bright! can it be right, This window open to the night? The wanton airs, from the tree-top, 20 Laughingly through the lattice drop; The bodiless airs, a wizard rout, Flit through thy chamber in and out, And wave the curtain canopy So fitfully, so fearfully, 25 Above the closed and fringed lid 'Neath which thy slumb'ring soul lies hid, That, o'er the floor and down the wall, Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall. Oh lady dear, hast thou ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... enemy's big guns; sometimes diving to avoid a shell; sometimes staggering as though wounded, but always righting himself. There would be the Mad Major each day, over the rearguard troops, seeming to shelter them. He would harry the German line; he would drop a bomb, flit back, and with a brave "We've got them, boys," cheer the sinking spirits of ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... at a distance, who thus obtain the first intimation of his decease. Having conveyed the sad intelligence to them, the long soul departs by way of Maligep, on the west coast of New Britain, to a village on the north coast, the inhabitants of which recognise the Tami ghosts as they flit past.[470] ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... were taking holiday. But old Oliver saw and heard nothing of the crowd. He walked on by Tony's side; with feeble and tottering steps, deaf and blind, but whispering all the while, with trembling lips, to One whom no one else could see or hear. Once or twice Tony saw a solemn smile flit across his face, and he nodded his head and raised his hand, as one who gives his assent to what is said to him. So they passed on through the noisy streets till they reached quieter ones, were there were neither shops nor many passers-by, and there they found the home where they were ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... are clad in green, An' scatter'd cowslips sweetly spring; By Girvan's fairy-haunted stream, The birdies flit on wanton wing; By Cassillis' banks, when e'ening fa's, There let my Mary meet wi' me, There catch her ilka glance o' love, The bonnie ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... and brightened every now and then as a form that I loved glided amongst them, but even that form dragged after it a chain of painful, fettering considerations, and the gleams of light that it threw round it were only like those weak, pallid flashes of sun that flit through the clouds of thunder and ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... fish with a net. When the sun sets he takes a towel and soap and saunters to the bathing-shed, where he undresses at his leisure, slowly rubs his bare chest with his hands, and goes into the water. And in the water, near the opaque soapy circles, little fish flit to and fro and green water-weeds nod their heads. After bathing there is tea with cream and milk rolls.... In the evening a walk or vint with ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... woods, the enemy meantime advancing with a yell to the timber we had abandoned. Then it was learned that Kilpatrick had given no such order, but the "staff officer" had disappeared and, when we came to think about it, nobody could describe him very closely. He had seemed to flit along the line, giving the order but stopping nowhere, and leaving no very clear idea as to how he looked. There is but little doubt that he was an audacious confederate, probably one of Stuart's scouts clothed in federal uniform, who made ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... of the senses. The eye, for example, like the mind, must not only see the object, but it must look upon it—examine it—before the child can either become acquainted with it at the time, or remember it afterwards. But if unknown objects are made rapidly to flit past the eye of the child, so that this cannot be done before there is time to fix the attention upon any of them, the labour of the exhibitor is not only lost, but the sight of the child is impaired;—the eye itself is injured, and is less able, for some time afterwards, to look steadily ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... typical of the country and its inhabitants. Some "seem to take us into the dense forest among mocking echoes from, the life outside; others show us the trolls tobogganing down the highest peaks of Norway; in some we feel human souls hovering over reefs; in others, memories of the old sun-lit land flit before us; but in none do we meet with sentimentalism, despondency, or disconsolateness." But with their weird and minor strains, and their odd jumps from low tones to high, on first acquaintance they strike the hearer as strange ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... phantoms there that were as men 15 And men that were as phantoms flit and roam; Marked shapes that were not living to my ken, Caught breathings acrid as with Dead Sea foam: The City rests for man so weird and awful, That his intrusion there might seem unlawful, 20 And phantoms there may have their ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... not walk, though the lads in both watches insisted they saw and heard things that were not right or natural. The night following in the midwatch—our midwatch—half the watch swore they saw him flit across the main deck and ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... spiritually unfit for translating the Bible. They say that all the time that Luther spent at the Wartburg he was haunted by the devil. He would hear strange noises and see weird shadows flit before him. He felt that he had come under the sway of the powers of darkness. This, we are assured, was because he had risen in rebellion against the divine power of the papacy. The Holy Father whom he had attacked was being avenged upon Luther by an accusing conscience. Luther was ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... through the after-math of fat wheat-fields, where float like myriad little nets of silver gauze the webs of the crafty weavers, and where a whole world of winged small folk flit from tree-top to tree-top of the low weeds. They are all mine—these Kentucky wheat-fields. After the owner has taken from them his last sheaf I come in and gather my harvest also—one that he did not see, and ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... the robin sings, And swarms of bright and happy things Flit all about with sunlit wings, But I am cheerless, Rosaline! The violets in the hillock toss, The gravestone is o'ergrown with moss; For nature feels not any loss, But I am ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... failure to do so as cause of civil war between States; and as if the Constitution were silent and dead and the power of the Union utterly inadequate to keep the peace between them, unconstitutional commissioners flit from State to State, or assemble at the national capital to counsel peace or instigate war. Sir, these are the causes which lie at the bottom of the present dangers. These causes which have rendered them possible and made them serious, must be removed ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... would burst in on silence, each his heart beating, and play there. And perhaps it was Hopeful who would steal away from us, and the others play on; or perhaps you into the sunlight that maddened the sheltered bird to flit and sing in the orchard where the little child we loved played—not yet sad, but how much beloved; not yet weary of passing shadows, and simple creatures, and boy's rough gifts and cold hands. But I—with me it was ever evening, when the blackbird bursts ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... many different sources. Then, like an impetuous torrent, he seemed to unite these streams into a foaming waterfall; over the tossing waves the rainbow presently stretches its peaceful arch, while on the banks butterflies flit to and fro, and the nightingale warbles ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... greenwood tree Who loves to lie with me, And tune his merry note Unto the sweek bird's throat, Come hither.' You see, Jakey, mine, we were eddicated when we was young." Benjamin had jumped into his clothes as he talked. "A sup and a snack, and we flit by ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... the horizon? Are they the shadows of evening, or are they, as I hopefully believe, but the mists which are exhaled by the sun as it rises, but which are to be dispersed by its meridian glory? Are they but the little evanishing clouds that flit between the people and the great objects for which the Constitution was established? I hopefully look toward the reaction which will establish the fact that our sun is still in the ascendant—that that cloud which ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... of poesy!" rejoined Sah-luma complacently.. "It makes the hours flit like moments, and long days seemed but short hours! ... Nevertheless 'tis time we were within doors and at supper,—for if we start not soon for the Temple, 'twill be difficult to gain an entrance, and I, at any rate, must be early in ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... and Mr. Rogers are but passing shadows in the play, and even nice Laura is only to flit across its few pages for a moment on her way to happier things. We scarcely notice them in the presence of Mrs. Don, the gracious, the beautiful, the sympathetic, whose magnetic force and charm ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... professional relations, but who seem now as absolutely to belong to a bygone order of things, as if they had wrangled before the Dikasts of Athens, or pleaded before the Praetor at Rome. Mr. Phillips seems to feel this, and, as the gay days of his sanguine youth flit by his memory, the retrospect brings, as it will ever bring, melancholy, and even sadness, with it. Yielding himself up to the dominion of feeling, in place of keeping his reason predominant, he mourns over the past, as if, in comparison with the present, it were greatly more worthy. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... intercourse makes us sensible of all its traits and habits. September—the morrow of August and eve of October, most affecting of months—is already sprinkling the fine days with subtle warnings. Already one knows the meaning of the dead leaves that flit about the flat stones ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... that has been left him of the common relations of life,—to the hour of business and the hour of repose, to the hall of audience and the garden-walk, and giving equally its deceptive coloring to the thoughts that stir him when borne on the shoulders of men through a prostrate crowd, and those that flit dimly through his brain as he lays a weary head upon a solitary pillow. And hence, too, he becomes for himself, as well as for others, an object of constant contemplation,—valuing things as they contribute to his ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... star we were headed for—too fast to stop. I'm giving it a wide berth and picking out another one. There's a big planet a few million miles off in line with the main door, and another one almost dead ahead—that is, straight down. We sure are traveling. Look at that sun flit by!" ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... Island of Calypso. After some mention of the fate of the other Greeks, Jupiter decrees that Ulysses shall return to Ithaca, where many suitors are besieging his wife Penelope. In obedience with this decree, Pallas (Minerva) dons golden sandals—which permit her to flit with equal ease over land and sea—and visits Ithaca, where Ulysses' son, Telemachus, mournfully views the squandering of his father's wealth. Here she is hospitably received, and, after some conversation, urges Telemachus to visit the courts of ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... this closer intercourse makes us sensible of all its traits and habits. September—the morrow of August and eve of October, most affecting of months—is already sprinkling the fine days with subtle warnings. Already one knows the meaning of the dead leaves that flit about the flat stones ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... all patient sit The stars above the night. In shade and gleam the waters flit: The heavens are ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... the pet and darling of the entire community. In the long summer afternoons when the nuns carried their sewing out to the orchard behind the house, or to the pine grove on the hill, where one could obtain such a lovely view of the river, Nita would flit about amongst them like a veritable woodland fairy. Her snatches of song and merry laughter made sylvan echoes ring and brought smiles to the faces of the simple women who watched her with loving ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... said Mrs. Mallowe. 'He clears you completely and ahem I should think by this, that he has cleared completely too. My experience of men is that when they begin to quote poetry they are going to flit. Like swans singing ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... rooks goes by; and from time to time the cooing of wild doves falls upon the ear, not sweet and rich and near at hand as in England, but a sort of voice of the woods, thin and far away, as fits these solemn places. Or you hear suddenly the hollow, eager, violent barking of dogs; scared deer flit past you through the fringes of the wood; then a man or two running, in green blouse, with gun and game-bag on a bandoleer; and then, out of the thick of the trees, comes the jar of rifle-shots. Or perhaps the hounds are out, and ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Flit from the scene, and couch them for their rest; The Meadow Lily folds her scarlet vest And hides it 'neath the Grasses' lengthening ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... the lily blooms," he muses as he issues out of the forest and reaches the top of the mountain, "to the cliffs round which the eagles flit,—what a glorious promontory! What a contrast at this height, in this immensity, between the arid rocky haunts of the mountain bear and eagle and the spreading, vivifying verdure surrounding the haunts of man. On ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... propelling themselves a fraction of an inch. They do not move—they have to be carried. More than this, like all other disease-germs, while incredibly tiny and infinitesimal, they have a definite weight of their own, and are subject to the law of gravity. They do not flit about hither and thither in the atmosphere, thistledown fashion, but rapidly fall to the floor of whatever room or receptacle they may be thrown in. And the problem of their transference is not that of direct carrying from one victim to the next, but the intermediate ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... Sophocles, Schiller and Shelley of basest crimes, put Shakespeare in the dock for murder, Milton for blasphemy, Scott for forgery, and Goethe for questionable financial deals with the devil. Byron's sins were as scarlet and the number not a few, but the moths that came just to flit about the flame were all of mature age. Byron set no snares for the innocent, and in all of the man's misdoings, he himself ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... and done with! Swift from shine to shade The roaring generations flit and fade. To this one, fading, flitting, like the rest, We come to proffer—be it worst or best— A sketch, a shadow, of one brave old time; A hint of what it might have held sublime; A dream, an idyll, call it what you will, Of man still Man, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a covert glance from the corner of her sparkling eyes. "Oh, I guess I can take care of myself," she decided calmly. "I always have. When fresh drummers begin to talk private dining-room and cold bottles, I spread my little wings and flit." ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... appearance and manifested a feeling of nostalgia. Mother Carey's chickens, little birds resembling swallows, began to flit around us, skimming closely along the waves. There is a fiction among the sailors that nobody ever saw one of these birds alight or found its nest. Whoever harms one is certain to bring misfortune upon himself and possibly ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... the second and the third time? why had Chance brought him to her across ten thousand miles of sea? why had it brought him here? Why at the beginning could he not have forgotten her as one forgets those who flit into one's life and out again? He did not believe ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... is the great thing, the saving thing, after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place. And so, when M. Bourget said that bright thing about our grandfathers, I broke all up. I remember exploding its American countermine once, under that grand hero, Napoleon. He was only First Consul ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... did not let Us swallow when it gaped; As from a snare a bird doth flit So is our soul escaped. The snare's in two, and we are through: The name of God it standeth true, The God of ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... emerged from the gloom. Another followed it, but they made no sound that could be heard through the rustle of the leaves, and George felt his heart beat and his nerves tingle as he watched them flit, half seen, through the grass. Then one of the shadowy objects stooped, lifting something, and they went back as noiselessly as they had come. In a few more moments they had vanished, and the branches about them clashed in a rush of wind. It died away, and there was no sound or sign of ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... the luxury of the Renaissance, traveling was at that time very disagreeable; everywhere in Europe it was as difficult then as it is now in the Orient. Great lords and ladies, who to-day flit across the country in comfortable railway carriages, traveled in the sixteenth century, even in the most civilized states of Europe, mounted on horses or mules, or slowly in sedan-chairs, exposed to all the inclemencies of wind and weather, and unpaved roads. The cavalcade was thirteen days on ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... unfortunately, boast of being merely a spectator, seated in the royal box, applauding now and again. There is a wrench at my heart, a pang in every nerve. When I have put out the light and am in my bed, little touches, little glances, little words flit about and fill the darkness. When I get up in the morning, I thrill with lively anticipations, my blood seems to course through me to ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... the night, when he lay sleepless, sick for his mother's presence, her voice, her kisses, her soothing touch, the boy would rise to sit at the window—there to watch shadowy figures flit through the street-lamp's circle of light. Once he fancied that his mother came thus out of the night, that for a moment she paused with upturned glance, then disappeared in woe and haste: returning, halted again; ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... unnatural sanity of intellect: it is like the calm in the whirlwind's centre, where the waves run higher though the air is deadly still, and the surly mariner wishes the mad wind back again.—To and fro you flit, goaded on and strengthened by untiring anguish. You are but the body of a man; your thought and emotion are abroad, haunting the unconscious, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... "invite" the Stable. The Stable having been duly invited, its eight occupants come in, and each finds a place on a palliasse. It is a warm, still night. The great doors of the Coach-house stand wide open. The stars are out thick by this time. Little black bats flit and swoop about in the darkness. If you keep very still you can just hear the gentle "hshshsh, hshshsh" of the sea. The candle flickers as the night gives a little sigh. A few Cubs are rolling about on their straw beds. "Shut up, all!" commands an imperious ...
— Stories of the Saints by Candle-Light • Vera C. Barclay
... than comfortably settled myself, and let thoughts of a cigar and a nap flit through my mind, when a row up the street showed that the jail-breaking had been discovered. Then followed shouts and confusion for a few moments, while a search was being organized. I heard some horsemen ride over the tracks, and also down the street, followed by ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... an impression, rather than the traces, of an empty cage. About two minutes of cautious questioning of neighbors satisfied her where the missionaries were; nothing short of death seemed able to deprive her of ability to flit like a black bat through the shadows, and the distance to Howrah's palace was accomplished, by her usual bat's entry route, in less time than a pony would have taken by the devious street. Before Alwa had thundered on Jaimihr's gate Joanna had mingled in the crowd outside the palace ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... of this silent mansion, Pierre continued seeking somebody, a porter, a servant; and, fancying that he saw a shadow flit by, he decided to pass through another arch which led to a little garden fringing the Tiber. On this side the facade of the building was quite plain, displaying nothing beyond its three rows of symmetrically disposed windows. However, the abandonment ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... rather pitied me. He agreed to lend me his horse, and I borrowed a van from Mr Joseph Wright, cabinet maker, determined to give my would-be captors the "leg bail." Early next morning I was, so to speak, doing a moonlight "flit"—the van, containing my furniture, in charge of two men, was on the road to Bradford. Mrs Wright I left with friends at Keighley, and myself, accomplished the journey by rail. I spent some time at the top of Manchester road, Bradford, looking for a suitable house, and ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... thick-speckled—mere barnacles, perhaps, on the keel of some greater ship of space. He remembered how at home there had been a certain burning twinkle that peeped through the screen of the dogwood tree. As he moved on his porch, it seemed to flit to and fro, appearing and vanishing. He was often uncertain whether it was a firefly a few yards away, or a star the other side of Time. Possibly Truth was ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... to the direction in which the strangers had gone, thus covering the spare man to whom she was talking from their backward glances. Bates, who was looking up at her face with his heart-hunger in his eyes, saw a look of contempt for the passing remark flit across her face, and because of the fond craving of his own heart, his sympathy, strangely enough, went out to the young man who had spoken, rather than to her sentiment of contempt. The angel of human loves alone ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... there's dwarfish Hildebrand; 100 He had a fever late, and in the fit He cursed thee and thine, both house and land: Then there's that old Lord Maurice, not a whit More tame for his gray hairs—Alas me! flit! Flit like a ghost away."—"Ah, Gossip dear, We're safe enough; here in this arm-chair sit, And tell me how"—"Good Saints! not here, not here; Follow me, child, or else these ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... and pounce eagerly on chairs and telephones; the usual Fussy Family waste precious minutes in trying to get seats together, and get separated in the end. Undecided persons flit from one side to another. Gradually they all settle down, and stop their ears with the telephone-tubes, the prevailing expression being one of anxiety, combined with conscious and apologetic imbecility. Nervous people catch the eye of complete ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 30, 1892 • Various
... herself in the objects of her choosing; they revealed her life before he could grasp her personality and ideas. About an hour later the Duchess came noiselessly out of her chamber. Montriveau turned, saw her flit like a shadow across the room, and trembled. She came up to him, not with a bourgeoise's enquiry, "How do I look?" She was sure of herself; her steady eyes said plainly, "I am ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... an impression of the country and the people. My idea of the Chinese had been derived, like that of most Americans, from books and chance observation of the handful of Kwangtung men who are earning their living among us by washing our clothes. Silent, inscrutable, they flit through the American scene, alien to the last. What lies behind the riddle of their impassive faces? Perhaps I could find an answer. Then, too, it was clear, even to the most unintelligent, that a change was coming over the East, though few ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... necessaries, many were no longer to be had. Mothers had to ransack old rag-bags to find material with which to clothe their children. Ladies accustomed to a life of abundance and fashion had not only to work their old gowns over and to wear their bonnets of long ago, but also to flit with their children from one plantation to another in order to find something palatable to eat in the houses of more fortunate friends who had in time provided for themselves. And when at last the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... my window, All in the Midsummer weather, Three little girls with fluttering curls Flit to and fro together:— There's Bell with her bonnet of satin sheen, And Maud with her mantle of silver-green, And Kate with ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... of most other countries. He visits her marts, her harbours, and her ports—men of all nations are met together there—fleets of rich argosies are ever arriving and departing—and myriads of steamers flit to and fro, happily now engaged in promoting the arts of peace, but ready at a moment's notice to become the defenders of his country's shores, and, as recent events have shown the world, able also to carry war and devastation along the coasts of her ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... mingled a sprinkling of elder men, and these latter were always the saddest and most silent of this little whispering army of the down-at-heel. Roughly speaking, we were divided into two groups: the newcomers, cheery, confident. These would flit from newspaper to newspaper with buzz of pleasant anticipation, select their advertisement as one choosing some dainty out of a rich and varied menu card, and replying to ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... and sodden street, To and fro, Flit the fever-stricken feet Of the freshers as they meet, Come and go, Ever buying, buying, buying Where the shopmen stand supplying, Vying, vying All they know, While the Autumn lies a-dying Sad and low As the price of summer suitings ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... because we had thought that nothing could be as beautiful as our ways of yesterday. The ways of to-day were the most beautiful of all. We were going to Bretton Woods, and on the way we learned a great secret—this: that when the Fairies made their flit—the well-known Dymchurch Flit—they decided to emigrate to the White Mountains. Somebody had told them—probably it was the Moon—that the scenery there was marvellously suited to their tastes, and would give them a chance to ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... and confusion whispers the night, While blue and green flames flit over the deep; But calm reigns again with the morning's light, And soon the bold fisherman comes into sight, As his bark rushes on and the ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... the numerous birds that flit through the trees as visitors, or else stay with us and nest in secluded places, how comparatively few do we really depend upon for the aerial colour and the song that opens a glimpse of Eden to our eager eyes and ears each year, for our eternal solace and encouragement? ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... 'doorkeepers in the house of the Lord.' He knew what he was saying when he preferred his humble office to all honours among the godless. He was shut out by some unknown circumstances from external participation in the Temple rites, and longs to be even as one of the swallows or sparrows that twitter and flit round the sacred courts. No doubt to him faith was much more inseparably attached to form than it should be for us. No doubt place and ritual were more to him than they can permissibly be to those who have ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... indolence almost cloistral—which is delightful! With what reverence have I paced thy great bare rooms and courts at eventide! They spoke of the past:—the shade of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff as in life. Living accounts and accountants puzzle me. I have no skill in figuring. But thy great dead tomes, which scarce three degenerate clerks of the present day could lift from their enshrining ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... yellowhammer, but I believe not belonging to the same genus, hop about the grass, enlivening the place with a few musical notes. The Carashue (Mimus) also then resumes its mellow, blackbird-like song; and two or three species of hummingbird, none of which, however, are peculiar to the district, flit about from tree to tree. On the other hand, the little blue and yellow-striped lizards, which abound amongst the herbage during the scorching heats of midday, retreat towards this hour to their hiding-places, together with the day-flying insects and the numerous ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... com-unit. Because of the interference in the Burn he had left it behind—but with one he might be able now to locate some settlement. All that remained was to find the seashore and, with it as a guide, flit south towards the ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... ither mode o' payin' the debt!" said John. "Stick spaud in yird here, ye sall not! You or I maun flit first!" ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... confess the sweeping river. And, need I say, that hope referred alone To her who in his heart had fixed her throne, And reigned within it still, the sovereign queen. Yet darkest visions oft would flit between His fondest fancies, as the thought returned That she for whom his soul still restless burned, Would be another's now, while haply he, Lost to her heart, would to her memory be As the remembrance of a pleasing dream, Vague and forgotten half, but which we deem Worthy ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... Yosemite Falls is sixteen hundred feet—sixteen hundred feet of a compact mass of snowy rockets shooting downward and bursting into spray around which rainbows flit and hover. The next leap is four hundred feet, and the last six hundred. We tried to get near the foot and inspect the hidden recess in which this airy spirit again took on a more tangible form of still, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... rearranging, and so comes to understand how it is that women spend forenoons of delight in box rooms or store closets, and are happiest when everything is turned upside down. It is a slow business, rearrangement, for one cannot flit a book bound after the taste of Grolier, with graceful interlacement and wealth of small ornaments, without going to the window and lingering for a moment over the glorious art, and one cannot handle a Compleat Angler ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... inscribed in the convulsions of death, and will be registered by the destroying angel! May a form like this draw thy curtain when thou sleepest, and grasp thee with its clay-cold hand! May a form like this flit before thy soul when thou diest, and drive away thy expiring prayer for mercy! May a form like this stand by thy grave at the resurrection, and before the throne of God when he pronounces thy doom! (He faints, the servants receive him in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of those forms which flit by us, when we Are young, and fix our eyes on every face: And, oh! the Loveliness at times we see In momentary gliding, the soft grace, The Youth, the Bloom, the Beauty which agree, In many a nameless being we retrace Whose course and home we knew not nor shall ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... fable of his fairy princeliness in the curiosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts or his fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon. Pretty presences in the tie- backs of the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuous poverty, hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or incomings might give. The chances were better with the outgoings than with the incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... groaned. Then I got up and went out. I had forgotten "Little Frank" and hoped that she had. If she was to flit about Europe seeing "Little Frank" on every corner I foresaw trouble. "Little Frank" was likely to be the bane ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... dome of the night Had dropped all its stars in the valley, it glittered so over with light: There were voices and clashings of weapons, and drum beat and bugle and tramp, Quick flittings athwart the broad watchfires that spotted the grays of the camp: Dark columns would glimmer and vanish, a rider flit by like a ghost; There was movement all over the valley, the movement and din ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Now and then a dignitary in gaiters would pass him, "Portly capon," or a drift of white-robed choir boys cross a distant arcade and vanish in a doorway, or the pink and cream of some girlish dress flit like a butterfly across the cool still spaces of the place. Particularly he responded to the ruined arches of the Benedictine's Infirmary and the view of Bell Harry tower from the school buildings. He was stirred to read the Canterbury Tales, but he could not get on with Chaucer's old-fashioned ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... children creep timidly through the streets; the carriages go cautious and hearse-like along; daylight is dim and obscure; the town is not filled, nor the brisk mirth of Christmas commenced; the unsocial shadows flit amidst the mist, like men on the eve of a fatal conspiracy. Each other month in London has its charms for the experienced. Even from August to October, when The Season lies dormant, and Fashion forbids her sons to be seen within hearing of Bow, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it fly; Presager of death! I hailed its wing, She scorned the omen but felt the sting Of bitter grief, when another day Bore her angel Mother from earth away. I warned her, when on the coming blast I saw the phantom-like shades flit past; She smiled on my words as idle play, But wept when her sire, in the midnight fray, Felled to the dust by the Tory's blade, Died in the home where his bones are laid; When the cold drops stood on the forehead fair, And the curdling blood on the thin, gray hair. But the dead in ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... conversation in Vienna or St. Petersburg than in Paris. Equals do not need to employ delicacy or shrewdness in speech; they blurt out things as they are. Consequently the dandies of Paris did not discover the great seigneur in the rather heedless young fellow who, in their talks, would flit from one subject to another, all the more intent upon amusement because he had just escaped from a great peril, and, finding himself in a city where his family was unknown, felt at liberty to lead a loose life without the risk ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... and all such as can pay, For the Summer-green country are up and away; But what of the poor pale-faced waifs of the slums? Oh, the butterfly flits, and the honey-bee hums O'er the holt and the heather, the hill and the plain, But they flit and they hum for Town's children in vain; Unless—ah! unless—there is hope in that word!— Mrs. JEUNE'S kindly plea by the Public is heard. Heard? Everyone feels 'tis a duty to listen. The eyes of the children will ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... radiations, with every combination of shade which these colours could produce. Another night we saw a bright crescent, and from it feathery-edged rays, of a pale orange colour, branched off in every direction, while across it a succession of the prismatic colours appeared rapidly to flit. Indeed, it is difficult to describe the various forms which ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... Shaped and polished by ice and rain and sun; Some flattened, grooved, and chiseled By the inscrutable sculpture of the weather; Some with clefts and rough edges harsh to the touch. Gracious Time has glorified the wall And covered the historian stones with a mantle of green. Sunbeams flit and waver in the rifts, Vanish and reappear, linger and sleep, Conquer with radiance the obdurate angles, Filter between the naked rents ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller
... of time, flow of time, flux of time, stream of time, tract of time, current of time, tide of time, march of time, step of time, flight of time; duration &c 106. [Indefinite time] aorist^. V. elapse, lapse, flow, run, proceed, advance, pass; roll on, wear on, press on; flit, fly, slip, slide, glide; run its course. run out, expire; go by, pass by; be past &c 122. Adj. elapsing &c v.; aoristic^; progressive. Adv. in due time, in due season; in in due course, in due process, in the fullness of time; in time. Phr. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... would. The quiet and cool ones would glance over the top of my head, past my side, over my shoulder, but never meet my eye. The gentle-modest would turn their faces south if I were coming east, flit down a passage if I were about to halve the pavement with them. There was the spruce young bookseller would play the same tricks; the butcher's daughters; the upholsterer's young men. Hand in glove when doing business out of sight with you; but caring nothing for a' old woman when playing ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... the wild bee roams, Then buried within the cowslip's cup, He murmurs his low and music tones, Till she folds the wanton intruder up; The spring bird, wakening, soars on high, Gushing aloft its melting lay; Whilst painted clouds flit o'er the sky, All ushering in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... our boat, we glide beneath the Abbey Manor, with its wooded slopes, and presently we reach Chadbury Lock and Mill. On a fair and warm day we may rest here in perfect content, listening to the rush of the weir, watching the swallows flit and skim over the calm water and break the glassy surface into circling ripples; or gazing with silent pleasure down the stream as it continues its peaceful ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... doan' like him?' says Liza. 'He come a sto'min' round hyah like he gwine to pull de whole place up by de roots an' transport hit ovah Lexington way. Fust he's boun' fo' to take dat hoss what's done win all dem good dollahs. Den his min' flit f'om dat to Miss Sally, an' he's aimin' to cyar her off like she was a 'lasses bar'l or a yahd ob calico. Who is dem Dillons, anyway? De Goodloes owned big lan' right hyar in Franklin County when de Dillons ain' nothin' but Yankee trash back in Maine or some other ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... pass rapidly thus. The nights bring merriment, not sleep. The general goes with his staff to the hospitable mansion, and soon the great drawing-room is full of music and laughter. The song, the dance, the rattling banjo follow. The long hours flit by like a flock of summer birds, and Sweeney, our old friend Sweeney, is the king of ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... blooms Like chrysalids impatient for the air, The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run Along the furrows, ants make their ado; Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark Soars up and up, shivering for very joy; Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek Their loves in wood and plain—and ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Or lastly, the natural subordination of pleasure to work may be set aside, defeated, and rendered impossible by the whole tenour of an individual's life, if he be one of those giddy butterflies who flit from pleasure to pleasure and do no work at all. Till late in the morning he sleeps, then breakfasts, then he shoots, lunches, rides, bathes, dines, listens to music, smokes, and reads fiction till late at night, then sleeps again; and this, or the like of this is his day, some three ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... meanings; veils raised by words, as petticoats are lifted by the wind; tricks of language, cleverly disguised audacities; sentences which reveal nude images in covered phrases, which cause the vision of all that may not be said to flit rapidly before the eyes of the mind, and allow well-bred people the enjoyment of a kind of subtle and mysterious love, a species of impure mental contact, due to the simultaneous evocations of secret, shameful ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Amleth that to his trick he owed his salvation, observed that latterly he had been singly devoted to Amleth. The young man's reply was apt. Not to seem forgetful of his informant's service, he said that he had seen a certain thing bearing a straw flit by suddenly, wearing a stalk of chaff fixed in its hinder parts. The cleverness of this speech, which made the rest split with laughter, rejoiced the heart ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... all but equal moment, the Natural World becomes slowly Spiritual. Nature is not a mere image or emblem of the Spiritual. It is a working model of the Spiritual. In the Spiritual World the same wheels revolve—but without the iron. The same figures flit across the stage, the same processes of growth go on, the same functions are discharged, the same biological laws prevail—only with a different quality of {bios}. Plato's prisoner, if not out of the Cave, has at least his face to ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... this Cormac went to Thorveig and said he would have her no longer live there at the firth. "Thou shalt flit and go thy way at such a time," said he, "and I will give ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown
... day in June. Out of the town the air is soft and pure. Bird and bee flit from tree to tree, from blue-bell to rose, till at sun-set they hie away to nest ...
— The First Little Pet Book with Ten Short Stories in Words of Three and Four Letters • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... question of wages—" began the young man, who was watching the various expressions flit over Darry's face with an ...
— Darry the Life Saver - The Heroes of the Coast • Frank V. Webster
... deeper purpose in this than might have been supposed. There were few things he did not think over as he sat looking into the fire. What if this young man should unwittingly steal away his darling's heart and then flit away to some other flower, and leave this, his own treasure, with all the soul gone out of her life. He believed Mr. Monteith to be an honourable man, but then he would hedge this blossom of his about and guard it carefully. There should ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... wildly as she struggled against such thoughts, there would come to Olive's fancy dreams of what her life might have been. The holiness of lovers' love, of wedded love, of mother-love, would at times flit before her imagination; and her heart, still warm, still young, trembled to picture the lonely old age, the hearth blank and silent, the utter isolation from all those natural ties whose place not even the dearest bonds of adopted affection can. ever entirely fill. ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... town he took his meals at his club, and to that address all letters and papers for him were sent. But of late even the purlieus of his club had become dangerous ground. Round the palatial portal duns seemed to hover and flit mysteriously, so that the task of reaching the secure haven of the smoking-room was one of danger and difficulty; while the return voyage to the shabby little bed-room in the shabby little street could be accomplished in safety only by frequent tacking and much skilful pilotage, to avoid running ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... cruelly than ever. With a look of anxiety and suffering Iona's eyes stray restlessly among the crowds moving to and fro on both sides of the street: can he not find among those thousands someone who will listen to him? But the crowds flit by heedless of him and his misery.... His misery is immense, beyond all bounds. If Iona's heart were to burst and his misery to flow out, it would flood the whole world, it seems, but yet it is not seen. It has found a hiding-place in such an insignificant ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... head. "Look at these clouds which flit across the heavens; at these swallows which cut the air. D'Artagnan moves more quickly than the clouds or the birds; D'Artagnan is ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Now they chase each other for very joyfulness, uttering their sharp twittering notes; then they hover with expanded wings like miniature Kestrels, or dart downwards with the velocity of the sparrowhawk; anon they flit rapidly over the neighboring pool, occasionally dipping themselves in its calm and placid waters, and leaving a long train of rings marking their varied course. How easily they turn, or glide over the surrounding hedges, ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [March 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... quaint and amusing! Though your wife ran away with a soldier that day, And took with her your trifle of money; Bless your heart, they don't mind - they're exceedingly kind - They don't blame you - as long as you're funny! It's a comfort to feel If your partner should flit, Though YOU suffer a deal, THEY don't mind it a bit - They don't blame you - ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... motion, with wreaths uplifted until they reach the stage, where sit the guests of honor. There they bow low, then lay the garlands at their feet, and retire, forming ingeniously pretty groups and figures, while bees and butterflies flit in and out. See the bees pursuing the little pink rosebuds until at last they join hands and dance gaily away, ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... off short the word he was saying, and Martin saw his body stiffen and his eyes dilate. Even Ichi betrayed agitation, and Martin saw a violent but quickly mastered emotion flit across his yellow features. ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... people on top of the hill were beginning to make their preparations to flit to the seashore or mountains. Lydia Sessions left for two weeks, promising to return in June, and the Uplift work drooped, neglected. There seems to be an understanding that people do not need uplifting so much during hot weather. Gray Stoddard was faithful ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... market to Louise, while Claire, whom the smell of the skate and the herrings affected in the lungs, installed herself among the fresh water fish. And from that time the old mother, although she pretended to have retired from business altogether, would flit from one stall to the other, still interfering in the selling of the fish, and causing her daughters continual annoyance by the foul insolence with which she would ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... suddenly, his lassitude left him, his senses became preternaturally acute, and a sense of well-being and complete satisfaction pervaded his whole being. The mist into which he was gazing became faintly luminous, and strange shapes began to flit across it; shapes the like of which he had never seen in his life before. Then something approached him and rested its head upon his knee. He looked down and saw that the "something" was a huge jaguar or South American tiger; and it ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... easy chair Softly humming some old-time air; And as she sings, her needles keep pace With the smiles that flit o'er her wrinkled face; While the fire-light flickers, and fades away, And comes again like the ...
— Fun And Frolic • Various
... made for Piccadilly. He sprang into the first cab that came along, and he reached Waterloo just in time to catch a Shepperton train. He longed to be at his destination, and alternate hopes and fears beset him, as he watched the landscape flit by. He drew a deep breath when he found himself on the platform of the rustic little station. It was a beautiful spring-like day, warm and sunny, with birds making merry song and the air sweet and fragrant. ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... like poppies spread, You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow-falls in the river, A moment white—then melt forever; Or like the borealis race, That flit ere you can point their place; Or like the rainbow's lovely form Evanishing amid the storm.— Nae man can tether time or tide; The hour approaches Tam maun ride; That hour, o' night's black arch the key-stane, That dreary hour he mounts his beast in, And sic a night he ...
— Tam O'Shanter • Robert Burns
... the even-song at St. Joseph's, Stepton saw flit across the face of the curate, whom he was meeting, a flicker of something like fear. The two men passed each other, and immediately, like one irresistibly compelled, the professor looked back. As he did so, Chichester also turned round to ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... vanished dead, all clothed in life, and girded round with a panoply of power, and light, and strength; with vivid memory of the secret wrongs deemed buried in their graves. Our cities are thronged with an unseen people who flit about us, their piercing eyes invisible to us, are scanning all our ways. The universe is teeming with them,—"THERE ARE NO DEAD,"—the air, the earth, and the sky above, are filled with a viewless host of spirit—witnesses whose ...
— Hydesville - The Story of the Rochester Knockings, Which Proclaimed the Advent of Modern Spiritualism • Thomas Olman Todd
... all? Was thy existence then too fanciful For our life's common light, who are so dull? Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold With our congenial souls? secrets too bold? Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit, Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire Warms feet and hands—nor does to more aspire; By whose compact utilitarian heap The present may sit down and go to sleep, Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... Troop, straight across the parade in search of him. The major so allowed his sentry on No. 5 to be relieved at night. Mullins thanked the saints with pious fervor that no more ladies would be like to flit across his vision, that night at least, when, dimly through the dusk, against the spangled northern sky, he sighted another figure crouching across the upper end of his post and making straight for the lighted ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... ceaseless roar; Or carolled in his light canoe content, As, bound from creek to creek, it grazed the shore; Gods of the storm the dreary space might sweep, And shapes of death, and gliding spectres gaunt, Might flit, he thought, o'er the remoter deep; And whilst strange voices cried, Avaunt, avaunt! Uncertain lights, seen through the midnight gloom, Might lure him sadly on ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... enough, about a mile down the mountain, a rider on a white horse was seen to flit rapidly across a heathy open and vanish among the trees on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... really, to discharge a duty in the face of his own scepticism that he had spoken thus, and he did not expect to see another shade of sadness flit across Alba's ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... dreaming, unconscious of time, forgetful of the companions of her days, intoxicated by the moonlight until her blood raced madly through her veins and she was filled with an intense desire to go out and dance in the garden and flit in and out among the trees like a ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... fall asleep And the pension agents awake to weep, And orphaned statesmen are loud in their wail As the souls flit by on the evening gale. O Father of Battles, pray give us release From the horrors of peace, the ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... lawyer (a Stewart, nae doubt—they all hing together like bats in a steeple) and had the proceedings stayed. And then Colin Campbell cam' in again, and had the upper-hand before the Barons of Exchequer. And now they tell me the first of the tenants are to flit to-morrow. It's to begin at Duror under James's very windows, which doesnae seem wise by ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... but did not speak with them, being tired, and wishing to rest till I was wanted. So cast myself down on the turf, but had not lain there long when I saw someone coming to me through the brambles, and Master Ratsey said, 'Well, Jack, so thou and Elzevir are leaving Moonfleet, and I fain would flit myself, but then who would be left to lead the old folk to their last homes, for dead do not bury their dead in ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... flight of birds, the gulls and rooks and little brown wavering things which flit out and along the edge of the chalk-pits, is once more refreshment to me, utterly untempered. A merle is singing in a bramble thicket; the dew has not yet dried off the bramble leaves. A feather of a moon floats across the sky; the distance ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... not pedlers and bagsmen, but stumble upon fawns just dropped, and do not scare their doting mothers; I quench not my noonday thirst with fiery drams from a brazen tap, but, lying over the cold brook, drink to its musical Naiades; I walk no dusty roads of a working-day world, but flit upon the pleasant places of one made ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... quite a common thing to see 10,000 or 15,000 spectators. I have heard of such people as those who actually hate cricket and football, and make it a constant aim to prevent those over whom they have some influence from engaging in the manly sport. They occasionally flit across one's path like an evil spirit, and disappear as rapidly, but leave behind a chilling effect on the imagination, far more intense than the terrible nightmare after a disastrous defeat. They cannot see the fun of spending valuable ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... of a river was it? Was it like an Irish stream, winding through the brown bogs, where the wild ducks squatter up from among the white water-lilies, and the curlews flit to and fro, crying "Tullie-wheep, mind your sheep"; and Dennis tells you strange stories of the Peishtamore, the great bogy-snake which lies in the black peat pools, among the old pine-stems, and puts ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... makes the black hulls cast A firefly radiance down the deep; The inlet gleams, the long clouds sweep, The sails flit up, the sails ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... at the work they loved. They took no pattern from the houses of men, but each man wrought what his inner eye had seen and carved in marble the visions of his dream. All over the roof of one of the palace chambers winged lions flit like bats, the size of every one is the size of the lions of God, and the wings are larger than any wing created; they are one above the other more than a man can number, they are all carven out of one block ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... Within the Scottish castle we meet a heroine with an "expression of pensive melancholy" and a "smile softly clouded with sorrow," a noble lord deprived of his rights by a villain "whose life is marked with vice and whose death with the bitterness of remorse." But these grey and ghostly shadows, who flit faintly through our imagination, are less prophetic of coming events than the properties with which the castle is endowed, a secret but accidently discovered panel, a trap-door, subterranean vaults, an unburied corpse, a suddenly extinguished lamp and a soft-toned lute—a goodly ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Monadnock, the cities of Worcester and Fitchburg—all these and many other beautiful objects are spread out before the spectator. But it cannot be described—it must be seen to be appreciated; and the throngs of visitors that flit through the town every summer afford abundant evidence that the love of the beautiful and grand in nature still lives in the hearts ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... contradictory spirit in persons whose conduct intimated no purpose of plunder, and who, in all other points, appeared to consult his welfare and his wishes, it occurred to our hero, that, during the worst crisis of his illness, a female figure, younger than his old Highland nurse, had appeared to flit around his couch. Of this, indeed, he had but a very indistinct recollection, but his suspicions were confirmed when, attentively listening, he often heard, in the course of the day, the voice of another female conversing ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... canny realization of the value of tantalism. She was not long left in ignorance of his record for flitting fancy and she felt that he would flit from her as soon as he conquered her. Her ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... flowers he deemed immortal are more mortal than the rose. "Why," he asks, "should any one be interested in my stories any more than in the thousand and one stories published this year? Mine are among the number of trivial things that compose the tedium which we call life." His thoughts will flit back over the past, and his own life will seem hardly more real than the day's work on the easel if he be a painter, on the secretaire if he be a writer. He will seem to himself like a horse going round and round a well. But the horse is pumping water—water is necessary; ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... their nightly perches, with small happy twitterings, and the lizards and numberless other chirping things began to send forth their evening hymn to the great Being who made them and us, and a solitary white-sailing owl would every now and then flit spectrelike from one green tuft, across the bald face of the cliff, to another, and the small divers around us were breaking up the black surface of the waters into little sparkling circles as they fished for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 579 - Volume 20, No. 579, December 8, 1832 • Various
... of the Renaissance, traveling was at that time very disagreeable; everywhere in Europe it was as difficult then as it is now in the Orient. Great lords and ladies, who to-day flit across the country in comfortable railway carriages, traveled in the sixteenth century, even in the most civilized states of Europe, mounted on horses or mules, or slowly in sedan-chairs, exposed to all the inclemencies of wind and ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... arms about each other, and were so full of their own feelings that they never saw Uncle Fact's tall shadow flit across them, as he stole away over the soft sand. Poor old gentleman! he was in a sad state of mind, and didn't know what to do; for in all his long life he had never been ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... for this world into which we have entered. The house without its guests would be uninhabitable for such poets as these. The atmosphere is everywhere that of a haunted earth where strange terrors and beauties flit to and fro—phantoms of spectral lives which seem to be looking on while we play out our bustling parts upon the stage. They are separate from the body, these shadows, and belong to some former life. They are an ancestral procession walking ever behind us, and ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... sound of timbrels, and suddenly appear A troop of ruddy damsels and herdsmen drawing near: They reach the castle greensward, and gayly dance across; The white sleeves flit and glimmer, the wreaths and ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... one, they fall asleep And the pension agents awake to weep, And orphaned statesmen are loud in their wail As the souls flit by on the evening gale. O Father of Battles, pray give us release From the horrors of peace, the ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... summer voice, Musketaquit,[1] Repeats the music of the rain, But sweeter rivers pulsing flit Through thee as thou ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of the fate of the other Greeks, Jupiter decrees that Ulysses shall return to Ithaca, where many suitors are besieging his wife Penelope. In obedience with this decree, Pallas (Minerva) dons golden sandals—which permit her to flit with equal ease over land and sea—and visits Ithaca, where Ulysses' son, Telemachus, mournfully views the squandering of his father's wealth. Here she is hospitably received, and, after some conversation, urges Telemachus to visit the courts of Nestor and Menelaus to inquire ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... (Spalax). The jerboa has very long hind legs, and a habit of jumping, so that it resembles superficially (but not really) a small kangaroo. The Spalax is quite blind, and has the burrowing habit, and somewhat the shape of the common mole. Some rodents are fitted to flit through the air in long jumps, by means of the wide extensibility of the skin of their flanks, which, when stretched out, acts as a parachute. Such forms are the flying squirrels, and a curious rodent called Anomalurus, from the exceptional clothing ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... trace it to all its consequences, they will not hesitate to part with trivial objections to a Constitution, the rejection of which would in all probability put a final period to the Union. The airy phantoms that flit before the distempered imaginations of some of its adversaries would quickly give place to the more substantial forms of dangers, real, certain, ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... Flora Schuyler, standing still, saw her slim figure flit across a strip of frost-bleached sod as the ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... before we go home. I'd be a miserable defaulter, indeed, if I did not give you your share of this experience. Oh! I know you've snatched bits that in no wise were included in the program, but we're all grafters. I want to play fair. Will you flit over the continent with ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... year had seen its short-lived race Flit past the scenes and others take their place; Yet the old prompter watched his accents still, His name still flaunted on the evening's bill. Heroes, the monarchs of the scenic floor, Had died in earnest and were heard ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... until we quit The farm-gate, leading to the lane And orchard, all in bloom again, Mid which the bluebirds sit And sing; and through whose blossoms flit The catbirds crying while they fly: Then tenderly I'll speak, and try To ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... will shrink before the long dull vista of a solitary, aimless existence. Sometimes, wildly as she struggled against such thoughts, there would come to Olive's fancy dreams of what her life might have been. The holiness of lovers' love, of wedded love, of mother-love, would at times flit before her imagination; and her heart, still warm, still young, trembled to picture the lonely old age, the hearth blank and silent, the utter isolation from all those natural ties whose place not even the dearest bonds of ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... other, heartily, as he eyed the boy; and perhaps a dim suspicion that he might find the fugitive valuable as a guide began to flit through ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... down to the Riviera shoulder to shoulder. I had the will to be the same, but he was different now; and though we left Gaeta in the flesh at her villa, entertaining guests, Gaeta in the spirit would still flit between us as we went. The Boy would be thinking of her; I should know that he was thinking of her, and—there would be an ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... investigations of the moat-house murder, that the stages of his promotion through the grades of detective, sub-superintendent, and superintendent, flashed through his mind as rapidly as telegraph poles flit past a traveller in a railway carriage. The crime which had struck down one human being in the dawn of youth and beauty, turned another into a murderer, and plunged an old English family into horror and misery, afforded Detective Caldew's optimistic temperament such ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... are birds with very bright colors. There are birds called sunbirds. Often green, yellow, scarlet, and purple feathers are found on these birds. What a pretty sight it must be to see them flit ...
— Big People and Little People of Other Lands • Edward R. Shaw
... flagged path than back flitted the bevy of girls again into the study, until the small room was full to overflowing. It was like seeing a company of fat bumble-bees, their portly bodies resplendent in black and gold, buzz heavily out of a room, and a gay flight of pale-blue and lemon butterflies flit back in their places. All the daughters fell upon their father, Margaret, Bridget, Isabel, Sarah, Mary, and Susanna; there they all were! tugging off his heavy riding-boots and gaiters, putting away the whip on the whip-rack, while little Mary perched ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... heard. We had a French horn with us, and there was an enchanting wildness in the dying away of the reverberation that quickly transported me to Shakespeare's magic island. Spirits unseen seemed to walk abroad, and flit from cliff to cliff to soothe my ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... time he saw his sweetheart Rebecca, whom another man had to go and get for him, he lifted up his voice and cried like a boob. He had become soft on the mutton and grape juice of his father. Tender little doves flit around the home cote, but the eagle sweeps from sun to sun. Anyhow, in these modern days children are very largely bringing up ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... when the scourging was performed; of the grid-iron of Saint Lawrence, and the stone below it, marked with the frying of his fat and blood; these set a shadowy mark on some cathedrals, as an old story, or a fable might, and stop them for an instant, as they flit before me. The rest is a vast wilderness of consecrated buildings of all shapes and fancies, blending one with another; of battered pillars of old Pagan temples, dug up from the ground, and forced, like giant captives, to support the roofs of Christian churches; ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... and became a bay of the great Lake itself. Every moment of this portion of the ride is a delight. The senses are kept keenly alert, for not only have we the Lake, the bay and the mountains, but part of the way we have flowers and shrubs by the thousands, bees and butterflies flit to and fro, and singing streams come foaming white from the snowbanks above, eager to reach the Lake. As our car-wheels dash across these streamlets they splash up the water on each side into sparkling diamonds and on every hand come up ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... from which he had come at the earnest request of his friend. He did not like the looks of himself bedraggled and wet, and dead, on the deck of the "Hatty," with that curious crowd looking at him, Mandy Ann with the rest. Strange that thoughts of Mandy Ann should flit through his mind as he decided against the cold bath in the St. John's and to face it, whatever it was. Occasionally some one spoke to him, and he always answered politely, and once offered his chair to a lady who seemed to be looking ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... into prison for her deed of madness and now the executioner's axe awaits her. She sits on the damp straw, rocking a bundle, which she takes for her baby, and across her poor wrecked brain there flit once more pictures of all the scenes of her short-lived happiness. Then Faust enters with Mephisto, and tries to persuade her to escape with them. But she instinctively shrinks from her lover, loudly imploring God's and the Saint's pardon. ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... children all are lapped in sleep The pretty Nymphlets of the sea shall rise, And we shall know them as they flit and creep And peep and glance and murmur lullabies; While the pale moon comes up beyond the hill, And Proteus rests and ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... which the top of the mountain seems to be suspended like the floating island of Laputa. Conte Pepoli can sit in his castle and watch the half-tame ravens, with little silver bells on their necks, as they flit around the window and perch on the crazy wooden balcony where an old priest is asleep in a chair, over the edge of a precipice of many hundred feet, backed by leagues ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... cherish his home as tenderly as if he were one of themselves. Robin the Red-breast and shy little Veery, Pewee the plaintive and cheerful Chewink, Long-sparrow, Bluebird, and sweet Chickadee, all glide freely in and out of their green and golden halls, flit through their winding streets, and take part in all their delights. Nor have the Leaflanders any trouble to understand bird-language. They have not, like the old Ger-men, eaten the hearts of birds, but by a more excellent ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... enchanting time when men are still asleep in their nests, and even "My Lord Sun" has not arisen from his; when the air is sweet and fresh, and as free from the dust of man's coming and going as if his tumults did not exist. It was so still that the flit of a wing was almost startling. The water lapped softly against the shore; but ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... so,' said Djama, half closing his eyes and allowing just the ghost of a smile to flit across his lips. 'I thought I knew enough about archaeology and the science of mummies in general to expect you to say that. Now, just for the gratification of my own vanity, I should like to try and anticipate what you are going to say; and if I'm wrong, well, of course, I shall ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... the straw in the bottom of the wagon, with his arm about his daughter, who nestled close to him for the sake of warmth. A bitter frost had set in during the last hour or so, and the snow was frozen in white patches upon her wrappings, while it was with numbed senses she vacantly watched the pines flit past her. It seemed that they would crawl up out of the darkness and slide by, white beneath ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... days Dr. Rauparaha had much writing to do, and passed his mornings and afternoons in the quiet library. Sometimes, as he wrote, a shadow would flit across the wide, sunlit veranda, and Helen Torringley would flit by, nodding pleasantly to him through the windows. Only two or three times had he met her alone since he came to Te Ariri, and walked with her through the grounds, listening with a strange pleasure to her low, tender ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... whiteness. A hand's breadth of clear sky lay beneath the sun, and down after them, with the speed of a racer, came that great black wave. Before it the blue ripples shivered brightly; behind it the angry water tossed and seethed. In its bosom, lurid, phosphorescent lights seemed to flit to and fro. Its crest was ragged and white with dashes of foam. She took in the whole in a second's glance, and made a movement to bring the boat's head up to the wind. As the white face turned toward him, a quick instinct of self-preservation seized him, and he sprang up to lower ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and down they wandered, and she gave him eyes, whether for Artemis, or Aphrodite, or Apollo, or still more for the significant and troubling art of the Renaissance, French and Italian. She would flit before him, perching here and there like a bird, and quivering through and through with ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sky The rain-clouds flit away, So from the maiden's eye Vanished the falling spray, Which lingered but awhile Her dimpled cheek upon— Then melted in her smile, Like vapor ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... well as his own. Dickens seems to expect all his characters, like amusing strangers arriving at lunch: as if they gave him not only pleasure, but surprise. But Thackeray is everybody's past—is everybody's youth. Forgotten friends flit about the passages of dreamy colleges and unremembered clubs; we hear fragments of unfinished conversations, we see faces without names for an instant, fixed for ever in some trivial grimace: we smell the strong smell of social cliques now quite incongruous to us; and there stir ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... Stirs not but breathes enraptured quietude. Here in these shades the Ancient knows itself, the Soul, And out of slumber waking starts unto the goal. What bright companions nod and go along with it! Out of the teeming dark what dusky creatures flit, That through the long leagues of the island night above Come wandering by me, whispering and beseeching love,— As in the twilight children gather close and press Nigh and more nigh with shadowy tenderness, Feeling they ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... religious awe the solemn scene Commands your steps! as if the reverend form Of Minos or of Numa should forsake 290 The Elysian seats, and down the embowering glade Move to your pausing eye! Behold the expanse Of yon gay landscape, where the silver clouds Flit o'er the heavens before the sprightly breeze: Now their gray cincture skirts the doubtful sun; Now streams of splendour, through their opening veil Effulgent, sweep from off the gilded lawn The aerial ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... weather, Float, my notes, Through the sunny motes, Falling light as a feather! Flit, flit, o'er the fertile land 'Mid hovering insects' hums; Fall into the sower's hand: Then, when his harvest comes, The seed and the song shall ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... flushing, Laden with roses. Happy ones, swarming, Ply their swift pinions, Glide through the charming Airy dominions, Sunward still fleering, Onward, where peering Far o'er the ocean, Islets are dancing With an entrancing, Magical motion; Hear them, in chorus, Singing high o'er us; Over the meadows Flit the bright shadows; Glad eyes are glancing, Tiny feet dancing. Up the high ridges Some of them clamber, Others are skimming Sky-lakes of amber, Others are swimming Over the ocean;— All are in motion, Life-ward all yearning, Longingly turning To ...
— Faust • Goethe
... away, and was seen no more. Old Mrs. Gardiner and Miss Margaret are as happy as the day is long in the love of Jay's sweet, grave young wife, while her husband fairly adores her, though two others share his love as the sunny days flit by—a sturdy youngster whom they call Jay, and a dainty little maiden named Sally—named after Miss Rogers, and whom that lady declares is to be her heiress—a jolly little maiden, hoidenish and mischievous, strangely like that other one ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... the longed-for face. She was not there, he knew, but for a while he stood on the other side of the street, unmindful of the stares and jostling of the passers-by, gazing at the house-front, and letting himself imagine from moment to moment that her figure might flit across some window, or issue from the door, basket in hand, for the evening marketing, on which journey he had so often accompanied her. At length, crossing the street, he inquired for the Werner family. The present tenants had ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... in a slow, incessant, sanguine exudation. The old negro was niggardly dismissed with two paper dollars. The dead man untied and cast upon the vessel's dock, steam gotten up in a little while, and the broad Potomac shores saw this skeleton ship flit by, as the bloody sun threw gashes and blots of unhealthy ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... wheels and the braying of the heavily laden asses. Now over all reigns a decorous silence, such as we moderns deem fitting for a cemetery; only the hum of insects breaks the deep quiet of the atmosphere, nor are there any living creatures visible at this late hour save the bats which flit restlessly in and out of the weed-grown piles of brick or stone that once were stately monuments of wealth or piety. Above our heads the tall sombre cypresses shoot upward like gigantic spear-heads into the crystal-clear air, pointing heavenward ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... the Irish members at Westminster destroys every hope that Ireland will be governed by her best citizens. The reasons why this is so are various; some of them may be shortly stated. The system, in the first place, of double representation, under which members of the Irish Parliament must flit to and fro between Ireland and England, and debate one day about Irish matters in Dublin, and the next about Imperial, or in truth British, matters in England, makes it impossible for quiet hard-working Irishmen, who carry on the real business of Ireland, to take ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... nor there. The point is: what do you have to offer? Why shouldn't I just pinch the gems myself and do a quick flit across the Galaxy? That would give me ...
— Heist Job on Thizar • Gordon Randall Garrett
... man, the fool That vows to the vulgar sun; oh, rare, To wheel from the wood to the window where A day-worn sleeper is dreaming of care, And perch on the sill and straightly stare Through his visions; rare, to sail Aslant with the hill and a-curve with the vale, — To flit down the shadow-shot-with-gleam, Betwixt hanging leaves and starlit stream, Hither, thither, to and fro, Silent, aimless, dayless, slow ('Aimless? Field-mice?' True, they're slain, But the night-philosophy ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... cried the elated son of Vulcan, as he descended the companion ladder, "we're goin' to flit, lad. We're about to rise in the world, so get up your bellows. It's the last time we shall have to be bothered with them in the ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... she helped to add fuel to it until the flames leaped high up into the shadows of the spruce, and drove them far back with its heat. David was content to sit and smoke his pipe while he watched her flit here and there after still more fuel, now a shadow in the darkness, and then again in the full fireglow. After a time she grew tired and nestled down beside him, spreading her hair over his breast and about his face in the ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... of all childlike dreams In the simple Indian lore Still to me the legend seems Of the Elves who flit before. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... will be exposed for sale; embroidery, pickles, preserves, confectionery, and articles rejected by the Society of Decorative Art. I hope it will be a success, and help many worthy women, all over the land, to help themselves.... I find it hard to consent to your having, at your age, to flit about from home to home, but a loving Father has a mansion for you beyond all the changes and chances of this strange complicated life. If He gives you His presence, that will be a home. I wish you could visit us ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... ford. vagar wander, roam, flit, drift, hover. vago, -a wandering, wavering, vague, indistinct, hazy. vagoroso, -a wandering, errant. vaguedad f. vagueness; con —— vaguely, uncertainly. valenta f. valor, courage. valer be worth, help, avail; ms vale it is better. valeroso, -a valiant, brave. valiente ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... air-cutting wings he measured wide, Nor did he leave the mountains bare unseen, Nor the rank grassy fens' delights untried; But none of these, however sweet they been, Mote please his fancy, or him cause to abide; His choiceful sense with every change doth flit; No common things ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... how irksome, cold, uninteresting, uninviting, does it at best appear to you! how severe its voice! how forbidding its aspect! With what animation, on the contrary, do you enter into the mere pursuits of time and the world! What bright anticipations of joy and happiness flit before your eyes! How you are struck and dazzled at the view of the prizes of this life, as they are called! How you admire the elegancies of art, the brilliance of wealth, or the force of intellect! According to your opportunities you mix ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... sit at my desk in the open doorway, there come mingled sounds of stir and glee. Boys laugh and shout,—a feeble flute stirs somewhere in some tent, not an officer's,—a drum throbs far away in another,—wild kildeer-plover flit and wail above us, like the haunting souls of dead slave-masters,—and from a neighboring cook-fire comes the monotonous sound of that strange festival, half pow-wow, half prayer-meeting, which they know only as a "shout." These fires ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... seen no sign of the running man, yet he knew that he was close upon him when he was forced to give up the chase, and, as if to confirm this opinion, when Stobart finally stood still and looked at the great boulders above him, hoping to see a black human form flit from one to another, a stone came out of the silence, hurled with deadly force and aim. Years of danger with wild cattle had made the drover's actions as quick as lightning. The stone was totally unexpected, but he jerked his head aside just in time. Instead ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... shore. May I not understand the poet's figure: "The green of spring overflows the earth like a tide"? I have felt the flame of a candle blow and flutter in the breeze. May I not, then, say: "Myriads of fireflies flit hither and thither in the dew-wet grass like ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... "Now shalt thou have thy will, for thou hast wrought thyself into something better than thou wert." So Illugi rode hastily from home, and bought for Gunnlaug half a ship which lay in Gufaros, from Audun Festargram—this Audun was he who would not flit abroad the sons of Oswif the Wise, after the slaying of Kiartan Olafson, as is told in the story of the Laxdalemen, which thing though betid later than this.—And when Illugi came home, Gunnlaug ...
— The Story Of Gunnlaug The Worm-Tongue And Raven The Skald - 1875 • Anonymous
... go, and I would not therefore allow that to keep me in the country. And then, why should I live at Waltham Cross now, seeing that I had fixed on that place in reference to the Post Office? It was therefore determined that we would flit, and as we were to be away for eighteen months, we determined also to sell our furniture. So there was a packing up, with many tears, and consultations as to what should be saved out of the things ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... Young looked back at the hut. It was dark. He saw three boats flit silently by him toward the city, as if phantoms guided them. They crossed the moonbeams, and Young lost them in the dark shadows ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... "Upward, not Northward", haunts me like a soul-devouring Sphinx. It is part of the martyrdom which I endure for the cause of the Truth that there are seasons of mental weakness, when Cubes and Spheres flit away into the background of scarce-possible existences; when the Land of Three Dimensions seems almost as visionary as the Land of One or None; nay, when even this hard wall that bars me from my freedom, these very tablets on which I am writing, and all the substantial realities of Flatland ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... delusive dream of effecting his own emancipation by the murder of those who hold him in bondage. Take away from him this cause of dissatisfaction, and this incentive to insurrection, and then these "impracticable hopes," which now sometimes flit before his imagination, will no longer embitter his hours of labor, and urge him to the commission of those horrid deeds of massacre, which, though they may glut a momentary revenge, must result disastrously, not only to the slaves ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... as she saw a rather peculiar look flit over her companion's face, she added quickly: "D'you think that you have seen anything since ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... now grates Upon the beach; and swift her shapely prow Will skim the deep, as swallows' fleet wing. Thou Seest! comely and strong it is. For thee Its golden sails, its purple canopy. With skin of spotted pard, I cushioned it. Ere the fresh breeze doth die, light let us flit Across the sea. No craft so proud, so staunch, Goes glancing through the foam. I safely launch Her now, and speed to fairy isles. Come thou With me." And glad she crossed the burnished prow; And 'mong the thick furred rugs sat down. "Oh craft, Fair fashioned, lightly built, speed far," she ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... eyes) Sent up in vapours to the baron's brain New stratagems the radiant lock to gain. Ah, cease, rash youth! desist ere 'tis too late, Fear the just gods, and think of Scylla's fate! Changed to a bird, and sent to flit in air, She dearly pays for Nisus' ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... the store, and drew near. The slim figure, finding it out of the question to flit hurriedly away, without attracting attention, which was just the thing he wished to avoid, commenced stroking the sleek side of the big black Kentucky thoroughbred, as though he might be a cowboy connected with the far famed ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... moment, then went on: "An' once I saw an Annir Choille, a girl of the green people, flit like a shade of green fire through Carntogher woods, an' once at Dunchraig I slept where the ashes of the Dun of Cormac MacConcobar are mixed with those of Cormac an' Eilidh the Fair, all burned in the nine flames ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... who is fairer than the children of men, who is all love, and hath no spot in him. Is it not a sweet word, a Redeemer to captives, a Saviour to sinners? And will not the soul rise up, and go forth out of itself? And will it not choose to flit(480) unto him who is the desire of all nations? Will it not go unto him for food and clothing? Love then is the soul's journey and motion towards Jesus, whom faith hath brought in such ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... time, and assure posterity that there never was such a lamb as Catherine II., and that, so far from assassinating her own husband and Czar Ivan,[2] she wept over every chicken that she had for dinner. How crimes, like fashions, flit from clime to clime! Murder reigns under the Pole, while you, who are in the very town where Catherine de' Medici was born, and within a stone's throw of Rome, where Borgia and his holy father sent cardinals to the other world ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... despair for a hint the decorator steals a look at a photograph of the miss, full-lipped, melting dark eyes, and blue-black hair. Sensing an houri he hangs the walls with a deep shade of Persian orange, over which flit tropical birds of emerald and azure; strange pomegranates bleed their seeds at regular intervals. The couch is an adaptation, in colour, of the celebrated Sumurun bed. The dressing table and the chaise-longue ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... street. When in town he took his meals at his club, and to that address all letters and papers for him were sent. But of late even the purlieus of his club had become dangerous ground. Round the palatial portal duns seemed to hover and flit mysteriously, so that the task of reaching the secure haven of the smoking-room was one of danger and difficulty; while the return voyage to the shabby little bed-room in the shabby little street could be accomplished in safety only by frequent tacking and much skilful pilotage, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... sat watching the little dark things flit by, like the gibbering ghosts of the suitors in the Odyssey, into the darkness of the cave; and then turned to long talk of things concerning which it is best nowadays not to write; till it was time to feel our way indoors, by ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... ambulance flit off as he waited for the Spaceport Patrol. There was no further need for the protection suit, so he peeled it off and hung it in the control-room locker. Copper was right, ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... home more tenderly to her heart. For a long hour she sat on the foot of her bed, now weeping, now smiling, now tossing her lovely head backwards, then burying her sweet face in her hands. At times a shadow would flit over the delicate features, but it would soon be replaced by a glamor of serenity, until finally her whole demeanor settled into an air of prayerful content. Her hands joined upon her knee, her brow was bent, ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... fastened their horses, and were ascending the precipitous slope which led up to the object which had excited their curiosity. They advanced rapidly and noiselessly, with the confidence and dexterity of practised scouts. The watchers from the plain below could see them flit from rock to rock until their figures stood out against the skyline. The young man who had first given the alarm was leading them. Suddenly his followers saw him throw up his hands, as though overcome with astonishment, and on joining him they were affected in the ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a heroine with an "expression of pensive melancholy" and a "smile softly clouded with sorrow," a noble lord deprived of his rights by a villain "whose life is marked with vice and whose death with the bitterness of remorse." But these grey and ghostly shadows, who flit faintly through our imagination, are less prophetic of coming events than the properties with which the castle is endowed, a secret but accidently discovered panel, a trap-door, subterranean vaults, an unburied corpse, a suddenly extinguished lamp and a soft-toned lute—a goodly ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... a phantom landscape flit past the window of the sleeping-car. Sometimes a cloud of smoke, shot through with sparks, brushed the glass like a billowing curtain, and sometimes the thunderous darkness of a tunnel swept between her and spectral trees or looming hilltops. She lay there ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... so little fancy that HE MAY COME IN.—No? No movement. No gray shade, growing more palpable, out of which at last look the well-known eyes. No, the printer came and took him away with the last page of the proofs. And with the printer's boy did the whole cortege of ghosts flit away, invisible? Ha! stay! what is this? Angels and ministers of grace! The door opens, and a dark form—enters, bearing a black—a black suit of clothes. It is John. He says it is time to dress ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... door, which opened immediately into the living-room, stood ajar, so that a ribbon of light fell through the opening into the dark atmosphere without. Every now and then a moth, decrepit from the late season, would flit for a moment across the out-coming rays and disappear again ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... 'cross on an outlaw hawse And my spurs clinch into his hide, He kin r'ar and pitch over hill and ditch, But wherever he goes I'll ride. Let 'im spin and flop like a crazy top, Or flit like a wind-whipped smoke, But he'll know the feel of my rowelled heel Till he's ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... amusing! Though your wife ran away with a soldier that day, And took with her your trifle of money; Bless your heart, they don't mind - they're exceedingly kind - They don't blame you - as long as you're funny! It's a comfort to feel If your partner should flit, Though YOU suffer a deal, THEY don't mind it a bit - They don't blame you - so long ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... to be Sabbath-day always. I was conscious of a pleasure in the thought of games and frolics and coming week-day delights that would flit across my mind even when I was studying my hymns, or trying to listen to the minister. And I did want the congregation to break up some time. Indeed, in those bright spring days, the last hymn in the afternoon always sounded best, because with it came the ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... too, as if, like our red houses, we came from a quarry that supplies no other place. But we are not one family. In the old days, those of us who were of the Tenements seldom wandered to the Croft head, and if we did go there we saw men to whom we could not always give a name. To flit from the Tanage brae to Haggart's road was to change one's friends. A kirk- wynd weaver might kill his swine and Tillyloss not know of it until boys ran westward hitting each other with the bladders. Only the voice of the dulsemen could be heard ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... line and hook By a babbling brook, The fisherman's sport we ply; And list the song Of the feathered throng That flit in the branches nigh. At last we strip For a quiet dip; Ah, that is the best of joy. For this I say On a summer's day, What's so fine as being a boy? ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... and through the little opening of your eyelids I shall slip into the depths of your sleep; and when you wake up and look round startled, like a twinkling firefly I shall flit out into the darkness. ...
— The Crescent Moon • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever—transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They sing "Home, Sweet Home" in ragtime; they carry their lares et penates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... in the sunniest weather it is black as midnight, but in a few inequalities on its smooth surface, the snow lies perpetually. Seldom is the cleft between the two great summits free of clouds, which flit hither and thither, adding somewhat to the mysterious awfulness of the gulf, and seeming in their motions to cause certain deep but faint murmurs, which are in reality the mingled sounds of the many torrents which course through the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... upon the years of youth. They are the sweetest in life; and these memories constitute most of the happiness of declining life. Incidents in our pilgrimage awaken the almost forgotten, and then how many, many memories flit through the mind, and what a melancholy pleasure fills the soul! We think, and think on, calling this and that memory up from the grave of forgetfulness, until all the past seems present, and we live over the bliss of boyhood with ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... forgetting the proper business of the pail and mop. Even so we are moved by the sight of some of Mr. Cruikshank's works—the "Busen fuhlt sich jugendlich erschuttert," the "schwankende Gestalten" of youth flit before one again,—Cruikshank's thrush begins to pipe and carol, as in the days of boyhood; hence misty moralities, reflections, and sad and pleasant remembrances arise. He is the friend of the young especially. Have we not read, ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... begins in some measure a new spring. The plover is heard whistling high in the air over the dry pastures, the finches flit from tree to tree, the bobolinks and flickers fly in flocks, and the goldfinch rides on the earliest blast, like a winged hyla peeping amid the rustle of the leaves. The crows, too, begin now to congregate; you may stand and count them as they fly low and straggling over the landscape, singly or ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... I can be ready for my plunge into Gotham vanities by—let me see—we will say Saturday night. I am at the Lady Louise. You may call for me there about eight. Good-by. Don't be late, Gentlemen." And with that she does the abrupt flit, leavin' us gawpin' at each ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... just so much worse when she and Aunty does the summer flit. Course, I saw it comin' 'way back early in June, and then the first thing I know they're gone. I gets a bulletin now and then,—Lenox, the Pier, Newport, and so on,—sometimes from Vee, sometimes by readin' the society notes. Must be great to have the papers keep track of you, the way ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... in the midst of strangers, you do feel rather melancholy. You try to read, and when you are tired of chasing the words up and down the page, you look out of the window and admire the scenery as you flit past until your eyes ache to such an extent you are obliged to withdraw your gaze and be satisfied with the study of human nature, as far as it can be procured from the inmates of your compartment. Finally you go to sleep, only ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... it is quite a common thing to see 10,000 or 15,000 spectators. I have heard of such people as those who actually hate cricket and football, and make it a constant aim to prevent those over whom they have some influence from engaging in the manly sport. They occasionally flit across one's path like an evil spirit, and disappear as rapidly, but leave behind a chilling effect on the imagination, far more intense than the terrible nightmare after a disastrous defeat. They cannot see the fun of spending valuable time in such ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... Again it was the stranger to the left who complied with his request, but for one instant both the clergyman and the old sexton caught sight of a face white as death, yet beautiful as an angel's, framed in a mass of dead-gold hair; but the flickering of the lamps caused strange shadows to flit over it. There was a moment of utter silence, broken only by the ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... difficult. The waste-cotton shrub, long useless, disobedient as the thistle by the wayside; have ye not conquered it, made it into beautiful bandana webs, white woven shirts for men, bright tinted air garments wherein flit goddesses? Ye have shivered mountains asunder, made the hard iron pliant to you as soft putty; the forest-giants— marsh-jotuns—bear sheaves of golden grain; AEgir—the Sea-Demon himself stretches his back for a sleek highway to you, and on Firehorses ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... hushed, and the light is dull, In the hollow tube and the whitened skull, They crouch in fear or in whispers wail, For the lingering night, and the coming gale. But at even-tide, when the shore is dim, And bubbling wreaths with the billows swim, They rise on the wing of the freshened breeze, And flit with the wind o'er the ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... you never once heard a voice raised yet against the company as a company. Individual complaints get into the Times, of course, about the crowding of the train de luxe, the breach of faith as to places, and the discomforts of the journey; but never a glimmering conception seems to flit across the popular mind that here is a Colossal Wrong, compared to which Monte Carlo is but as a flea-bite to the Asiatic cholera. This chartered abuse connects the three biggest towns in France—Paris, Lyon, Marseilles—and ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... Bob, who so far had only heard the occasional note of a bird which was invisible. Now he saw one or two flit across the ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... know wherefore the figure of Faustus was thus associated with her own, he changed the scene, and represented the parties in situations not to be misconstrued. Lightning does not so quickly glance through the darkness as did these scenes flit before the eyes of the innocent maiden; a moment is an age in comparison, and the poison was glowing in her breast before she was able to retreat. She started back, and, with her hands before her eyes, rushed into her chamber, and sunk ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... she is filling NIBLO'S GARDEN with her voice and its admirers. We go to hear her. PALMER and ZIMMERMANN, clad in velvet and fine linen, flit gorgeously about the lobby, and are mistaken, by rural visitors, for JIM FISK and HORACE GREELEY—concerning whom the tradition prevails in rural districts that they are clothed in a style materially ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... too fanciful For our life's common light, who are so dull? Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold With our congenial souls? secrets too bold? Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit, Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire Warms feet and hands—nor does to more aspire; By whose compact utilitarian heap The present may sit down and go to sleep, Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked, And ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... up. Within a few feet of buoy and boat, the body of De-deed disappears for the last time. We search for an hour or more with grappling irons, but he is never seen again. A strange silence settles down above and below deck, and all night long two faces flit before us—the grave face of the mother calling down blessings on her boy, the rallying smile of De-deed bidding her good-by and telling her all is well. It is a brave and happy spirit which, in the "Little Lake" of the Mackenzie, goes out ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... we may be allowed so far to indulge the imagination, as to suppose a being entirely confined to the nether world—some 'dusky melancholy sprite,' like Umbriel, who could 'flit on sooty pinions to the central earth,' but who was never permitted to 'sully the fair face of light,' and emerge into the regions of water and of air; and if this being should busy himself in investigating the structure of the globe, he might frame theories the exact converse of those ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... a fish going from the water below to the mill pond above. The child could hardly believe his eyes, and for a little while it seemed that the whole world was turned topsy-turvy, especially as the shadows continued to flit from the water below to ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the sun nearly below the horizon, its rays illuminate the tops of the trees, while all below is dark and gloomy. Bats are on the wing, the night-hawk careers above the trees, fire-flies flit about, and the ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... Vulcan and his Cyclops with the idea of a forge. These gentry would be the very last people in the world to flit across my mind whilst gazing at the forge from the bottom of the dark lane. The truth is, they are highly unpoetical fellows, as well they may be, connected as they are with Grecian mythology. At the very mention of their names the forge burns dull and dim, ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... Does the woodpecker flit round the young ferash? Does grass clothe a new-built wall? Is she under thirty, the woman who holds ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... screamed aloud. We lost little time in quieting her. Her cries would attract the nuns; so we sprang into the room and scampered to the door, while she stood trembling and staring, seeing all the strange procession flit by without understanding it nor recognizing any one of us, so terrified was she. In a moment we had all dispersed: one went to the upper room whence we had started, and played the piano with might and main; another ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... dessert was placed upon the table, and the servants had gone, Jack, feeling bound to open his heart to somebody, told Tom about the fool's paradise to which he meant to flit from Castle Despair, in which ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... every new system of treatment projected, and toy with every medicinal device that is placed upon the market. They are the class from whom the patent medicine vendor draws his enormous annual profits. Like a bee in a garden of roses, they flit from one remedy to another, but, unlike that energetic and acquisitive insect, they do not gather the golden reward they are in search of—health. It is the purveyor of the nostrum that secures whatever there ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... of right soldierly stuff; but he felt a distinct shiver flit along his back. His past life had not lacked thrilling adventures and strangely varied experiences with desperate men. Usually he met sudden emergencies rather calmly, sometimes with phlegmatic indifference. This passionate outburst on the priest's part, however, ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... I want to talk to him, or I'll simply flit back to Eros, and thank him much for a pretty retainer that didn't do him any good but gave me a nice profit for ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... has covered it, Deep in the sand it lies; While over me the long weeds flit And veil my ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... outlined, By rocky steeps barren 'mid dangers unseen, A narrow straight pathway doth wind. The sighing winds whisper of sacrifice, toil, And foot-prints where pilgrims have trod Are crimson and tear-washed, where fissures are rent Wierd spirits of pain flit abroad. ...
— Poems - A Message of Hope • Mary Alice Walton
... fishing together without interfering with each other, while large flights of wild-duck rise splashing from the stream. Eagles soar aloft, or, with the vultures, alight upon a sand-bank to dispute the possession of some carcass with the jackals and the foxes. Water wag-tails flit along the shore, or in the most friendly manner board your steamer to feed on the crumbs from your tea-table, while large numbers of gay-plumaged king-fishers dart in and out from their nests tunnelled far into the precipitous face ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... haunted spring and grassy ring, Troop goblin, elf, and fairy; And the kelpie must flit from the black bog-pit, And the brownie must not tarry; To Limbo-lake, Their way they take, With scarce the pith to flee. Sing hay trix, trim-go-trix, Under ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... and got some lawyer (a Stewart, nae doubt—they all hing together like bats in a steeple) and had the proceedings stayed. And then Colin Campbell cam' in again, and had the upper-hand before the Barons of Exchequer. And now they tell me the first of the tenants are to flit to-morrow. It's to begin at Duror under James's very windows, which doesnae seem wise by my ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at length; 'tis only on rare seasons that the old wound rankles. We none of us speak of Effie, lest it involve the mention of Helmar; we none of us speak of Helmar, lest, with the word, a shining, desolate, woful phantom flit like the wraith of Effie before us. But I think that Mary Strathsay lives now in the dream of hereafter, in the dream that some day, perchance when all her white beauty is gone and her hair folded in silver, a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... where the grass is lit With lamp-like flowers, I seem to see thee flit On azure wings, as if to bless the glade; For, everywhere, thy form in shine and shade Doth come and go, conversant, as I deem, With Nature's whims; for thou'rt of great esteem In fairy haunts; and elves and fays confess How sweet thou art, ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... first made me ashamed of home and Joe,—from all those visions that had raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the wooden window of the forge, and flit away. In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... tremendous effect, almost all that can be found in the literature of that day, and the period preceding it, relating to such subjects. Images and visions which had been portrayed in tales of romance, and given interest to the pages of poetry, will be made by them, as we shall see, to throng the woods, flit through the air, and hover over the heads of a terrified court. The ghosts of murdered wives and children will play their parts with a vividness of representation and artistic skill of expression that have hardly been surpassed in scenic representations on the stage. In the Salem-witchcraft ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... of murdered hours, As they flit past in countless throngs, They taunt me with their meager powers, And ridicule my ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... in her easy chair Softly humming some old-time air; And as she sings, her needles keep pace With the smiles that flit o'er her wrinkled face; While the fire-light flickers, and fades away, And comes again like ...
— Fun And Frolic • Various
... jays arrived, whose discordant screams were heard long before, as they were warily making their approach an eighth of a mile off; and in a stealthy and sneaking manner they flit from tree to tree, nearer and nearer, and pick up the kernels which the squirrels have dropped. Then, sitting on a pitch-pine bough, they attempt to swallow in their haste a kernel which is too big for their throats and chokes them; and after great labor they disgorge ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... found it wise to change her quarters. She had taken a room in an apartment house two blocks removed from her former home, and Win, not being able to afford a "flit," remained at the old address. At first, when her pay was increased by two dollars a week, she had intended to save and follow Sadie. One had, however, to live mostly on ice-cream soda in the hot weather, which cost money. Besides, even had she possessed the dollars, ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... when I was young and strong, He used to sing on yonder garden tree, Beside the nursery. Ah, I remember how I loved to wake, And find him singing on the self-same bough (I know it even now) Where, since the flit of bat, In ceaseless voice he sat, Trying the spring night over, like a tune, Beneath the vernal moon; And while I listed long, Day rose, and still he sang, And all his stanchless song, As something falling unaware, Fell out of the tall ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... staggering as though wounded, but always righting himself. There would be the Mad Major each day, over the rearguard troops, seeming to shelter them. He would harry the German line; he would drop a bomb, flit back, and with a brave "We've got them, boys," cheer the sinking spirits of ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... darkness but that one window from which that faint light streamed, and he knew that she had not yet gone to rest. For a moment he lingered and looked at it in the absurd way lovers will look, and was presently rewarded by seeing what he watched for—a shadow flit between him and the light. The sight was a strong temptation to him to dismount and enter, and, under pretence of warning her against the Earl of Rochester and his "pretty page," see her once again. But reflection, stepping rebukingly up to him, whispered indignantly, that his ladylove was probably ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... show him those hospitalities which he could value, and continued the fable of his fairy princeliness in the curiosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts or his fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon. Pretty presences in the tie- backs of the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuous poverty, hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or incomings might give. The chances were better with the outgoings than with the incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the final result of his constitutional ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... two days Dr. Rauparaha had much writing to do, and passed his mornings and afternoons in the quiet library. Sometimes, as he wrote, a shadow would flit across the wide, sunlit veranda, and Helen Torringley would flit by, nodding pleasantly to him through the windows. Only two or three times had he met her alone since he came to Te Ariri, and walked with her through the grounds, listening with a strange pleasure to her low, tender voice, ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... many other thoughts flit over one's mind in looking at any phase of work, or any piece of work. In the right choice of work lies the fullest use of one's capacities; in the right conditions of work lies the freest play of one's energies; in the right spirit of work ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... Madame Cerise relaxed to allow a quaint smile to flit across it. She returned Fogerty's bow ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... were plenty of living men only biding their time and waiting their opportunity. It was only night that these people desired; a good black night so that no one could see them flit about. You felt in the small of your back as you rode along that ugly faces were looking at you from the silent houses, and that at any moment shots might ring out suddenly and bear you to the ground. But that was merely a preliminary feeling. Soon it added zest to the entertainment. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... this unnatural sanity of intellect: it is like the calm in the whirlwind's centre, where the waves run higher though the air is deadly still, and the surly mariner wishes the mad wind back again.—To and fro you flit, goaded on and strengthened by untiring anguish. You are but the body of a man; your thought and emotion are abroad, haunting ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... happy been! Ay! did he remember her? Did a thought of her, his first and best love, flit across him, as the words fell on his ear? Did a past vision of the time when she had sat there and sung it to him arouse his heart to even ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... Derek watched her flit down the aisle, saw her jump up the little ladder onto the stage, watched her vanish into the swirl of the dance. He reached for a cigarette, opened his case, and found it empty. He uttered a mirthless, Byronic laugh. The thing ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... hills, Rosy mist, Limpid pool, Golden notes from sunset's lute For shadows Draped in green With purple feet To dance and swim Through irridescent undulatings. Dusk descends; Mauve cloudlets— Dying butterflies— Flit and fly and die In the opalescent ocean of mist That grows dark and still, Kisses away the last gold From the brow of the hills; Till the coral crescent With its wand of breeze Makes silver ripple-music On the ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... the flying steel. As night draws on, the single figures melt into the dusk, until only an obscure stir and coming and going of black clusters is visible upon the loch. A little longer, and the first torch is kindled and begins to flit rapidly across the ice in a ring of yellow reflection, and this is followed by another and another, until the whole field ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... drearily and slowly, loud hymns of experience and humiliation, I could boom forth with a sound equal to that of dozens of singers, if I could only hit upon the formula. During morning and evening prayers, which were extremely lengthy and fatiguing, I fancied that one of my two selves could flit up, and sit clinging to the cornice, and look down on my other self and the rest of us, if I could only find the key. I laboured for hours in search of these formulas, thinking to compass my ends by means absolutely ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... his chief aim to make it as little like the original before him, as possible. Shall we reveal the fact that another image, wearing a gentler aspect than the stern, rigid features of the minister's portrait, seemed to flit before the young painter's fancy, coming unbidden, and mingling more especially with recollections of the past? As a ray of moonlight stole into the low dormer-window, the young man turned on his humble bed, a sigh burst from his lips, followed ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... silence and seclusion,—a splendor of abandoned glory. All the stir of life (if, indeed, one may dream of life in Pisa) is far away on the other side of the city; to this corner is left the wraith-like haunted atmosphere, where only shadows flit over the grass, and the sunset reflections linger on the Tower. A statue of Cosimo di Medici was near; the Lanfranchi palace, where Byron had lived, was not far away, on the banks of the Arno. They quite preferred the Duomo and the Campo Santo to social festivities, ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... and he has stood the test. Many young fellows of his age would have abused their opportunities. He has not done so. My only disappointment has been that he has developed no definite taste, but has been content to flit from one fancy to the next, always carried away by the latest novelty ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... day Ody was to flit she held a sort of carouse at her solitary breakfast over the remnant of a pound of tea which she had saved after the wake. Tea was ten prices fifty years ago, and a very rare luxury at the Three Mile Farm. As ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... be all his life rearranging, and so comes to understand how it is that women spend forenoons of delight in box rooms or store closets, and are happiest when everything is turned upside down. It is a slow business, rearrangement, for one cannot flit a book bound after the taste of Grolier, with graceful interlacement and wealth of small ornaments, without going to the window and lingering for a moment over the glorious art, and one cannot handle a Compleat Angler without tasting again some favourite passage. It is days before five shelves ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... Rogers are but passing shadows in the play, and even nice Laura is only to flit across its few pages for a moment on her way to happier things. We scarcely notice them in the presence of Mrs. Don, the gracious, the beautiful, the sympathetic, whose magnetic force and charm are such that we wish to sit at her feet at once. She is intellectual, but with a disarming smile, ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... parasitic plants that hang from the tree branches, to dip their hands in the water to drink; only to flee, chattering to the tree-tops, as they meet the gaze of apparently slumbering crocodiles. Great painted butterflies flit above the beds of lilies that fringe the muddy lagoons, the hippopotamus wallows lazily in the warm sunlit waters. Here, it is true, is the Equatorial Africa of our schoolboy dreams; and the birds have little but their glittering plumage ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... of a mist that has settled over the scene, a few years flit by, and escape our notice. As the atmosphere becomes transparent, we perceive a decrepit grandsire, hobbling along the street. Do you recognize him? We saw him, first, as the baby in Goodwife Massey's arms, when the primeval trees were flinging their shadow over Roger Conant's ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the sake of the river, a rustic cot is taken for a few weeks by a party of boating-people. Then the quaint, old-fashioned gardens blossom with a sudden luxuriance of striped tents and flaming umbrellas, while bright women in many-hued boating-costumes flit among cabbages and onions like curious tropical birds and butterflies. As a rule, however, the Dean is abandoned to its usual rustic population and to artists, numbers of the latter remaining all winter in the haunts whence the majority ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... serena, pia, munda et immaculata. Among others are the anagrammatic answer to Pilate's question, "Quid est veritas''—namely, "Est vir qui adest''; and the transposition of "Horatio Nelson'' into "Honor est a Nilo''; and of "Florence Nightingale'' into "Flit on, cheering angel.'' James I.'s courtiers discovered in "James Stuart'' "A just master,'' and converted "Charles James Stuart'' into "Claimes Arthur's seat.'' "Eleanor Audeley,'' wife of Sir John Davies, is said to have ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Shakespeare in the dock for murder, Milton for blasphemy, Scott for forgery, and Goethe for questionable financial deals with the devil. Byron's sins were as scarlet and the number not a few, but the moths that came just to flit about the flame were all of mature age. Byron set no snares for the innocent, and in all of the man's misdoings, he himself it was who ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the entire community. In the long summer afternoons when the nuns carried their sewing out to the orchard behind the house, or to the pine grove on the hill, where one could obtain such a lovely view of the river, Nita would flit about amongst them like a veritable woodland fairy. Her snatches of song and merry laughter made sylvan echoes ring and brought smiles to the faces of the simple women who watched her with ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... clearing; flowers are crowding everywhere—orange milkweed, purple phlox, creamy pawpaw, azure bluebells, spotted foxgloves, rose-tinted daisies, brown-eyed coreopsias and unknown flowers of palest blue. Butterflies flit noiselessly among them, and mocking-birds sing loud in the leafy screens above. A red-headed woodpecker taps upon a resounding tree and screams in exultation as he seizes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... lost no time in opening wide The door that had been fast; And I could see Those crickets three Like dusky ghosts flit past. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... stretches between two fringes of emerald green, delightful to look upon after the bare and ghastly basalt of Southern Arabia. The Jujube grows to a height already betraying signs of African luxuriance: through its foliage flit birds, gaudy-coloured as kingfishers, of vivid red, yellow, and changing-green. I remarked a long-tailed jay called Gobiyan or Fat [2], russet-hued ringdoves, the modest honey-bird, corn quails, canary-coloured finches, sparrows gay as those of Surinam, ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... a-flicker from crimson to blue High overhead. All round him the mad world seethes. Hansoms, like cantering beetles, with diamond eyes Run through the moons of it; busses in yellow and red Hoot; and St. Paul's is a bubble afloat in the skies, Watching the pale moths flit and the ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... Shades that flit, besides the shades of the night; Rustling sobs besides the sobs of the wind; Steps of feet that pace with his on the right, Steps that pace on the left, and steps behind. "Nay, no fear that I shall be lone, ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... shadow was really a fish going from the water below to the mill pond above. The child could hardly believe his eyes, and for a little while it seemed that the whole world was turned topsy-turvy, especially as the shadows continued to flit from the water below to the mill ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... just before my fingers close, she's gone again like wings. A sudden laugh, a scrap of song, a footfall on the lawn, And yet, no matter how I run, forever up and gone! A fairy or a firefly could hardly flit so fast. When we come home in summer, I have given up at last. I lay my cheek on mother's. If there's only one for me, I'd rather have her, anyway, than the girl she used ...
— Zodiac Town - The Rhymes of Amos and Ann • Nancy Byrd Turner
... Musketaquit,[1] Repeats the music of the rain, But sweeter rivers pulsing flit Through thee as thou ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Happy ones, swarming, Ply their swift pinions, Glide through the charming Airy dominions, Sunward still fleering, Onward, where peering Far o'er the ocean, Islets are dancing With an entrancing, Magical motion; Hear them, in chorus, Singing high o'er us; Over the meadows Flit the bright shadows; Glad eyes are glancing, Tiny feet dancing. Up the high ridges Some of them clamber, Others are skimming Sky-lakes of amber, Others are swimming Over the ocean;— All are in motion, Life-ward all yearning, Longingly turning To ...
— Faust • Goethe
... helps me and does me good. She bewitches and sways me by her spells, but I might as well seek to imprison a spirit of the air as to gain any hold upon her. I wonder whom or what she was thinking of, that such dreamy, tender smiles should flit ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... war-horns are played, The anchors are weighed, Like moths in the distance The sails flit ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... this neglect by the perfect regularity of her attendance at Church parade. In the afternoon she will go to Tattersall's to inspect horses. Ascot could not continue without her, and Goodwood would crumble into ruins if she were absent. This at least is her opinion, and thus the months flit by and leave her just as wise as they found her. For she never reads a book, and illustrates by constant practice her belief that the fashionable intelligence of the Morning Post is a sufficient mental pabulum for ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... when one they love returns to them after an absence of some little time. Their eyes sparkle and grow bright, while very evident and easily recognized smiles flit ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... were bound, when the scourging was performed; of the grid-iron of Saint Lawrence, and the stone below it, marked with the frying of his fat and blood; these set a shadowy mark on some cathedrals, as an old story, or a fable might, and stop them for an instant, as they flit before me. The rest is a vast wilderness of consecrated buildings of all shapes and fancies, blending one with another; of battered pillars of old Pagan temples, dug up from the ground, and forced, like giant captives, to support the roofs of Christian churches; of pictures, bad, and wonderful, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... of fashionable sets are of little importance. The latter long ago gave up going to the play in New York, except during two short seasons, one in the autumn, “before things get going,” and again in the spring, after the season is over, before they flit abroad or to the country. During these periods “smart” people generally attend in bands called “theatre parties,” an infliction unknown outside of this country, an arrangement above all others calculated to bring the stage into contempt, as such parties ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... of his perches, but, by way of a treat, I would offer him, whenever I could get it, a locust, or large grasshopper. His way of accepting this was unique and pretty. He would look surprised, stare, curtsey once or twice, stare again and then, suddenly, noiselessly and as lightly as a fairy, flit across the cage and, without alighting, pluck the insect from my fingers with both his feet and return ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... the street outside, the bell rang, and she watched the figure of a trim mulatto maid flit through the hall to the door. An instant later Arthur's name was announced, and Gabriella, with her hands in his clasp, stood looking into his face. It had been eighteen years since they parted, and in those eighteen years she had carried his image ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... are looked upon with terror in the Landes: their approach to any dwelling bodes evil in all forms: the dead quit their tombs at night and flit about in the fens, and covered with their white shrouds come wandering into the villages, nor will they quit them till the prayers and alms of their friends have calmed their ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... the faithful servant, who still lingered, she passed into the car and sank down into a seat. She watched the valley, beautiful in amethyst lights, flit past the window; then Sefton Falls, flanked by misty hills, came into sight and disappeared. At last all the familiar country of the moving panorama was blotted out by the darkness, and she ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... log upon which men's heads can be cut off. Senor, I congratulate you. You have the wisdom that grasps the substance and lets the shadows flit. It is ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... contrast, with our worldly dresses and coloured ribbons; and the great hall lighted by one immense lamp that hung from the ceiling—I felt transported three centuries back, and half afraid that the whole would flit away, and prove a mere ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... and entreats to see your lordship before she dies, for she has something to communicate that hangs upon her very soul, and she says she canna flit in peace until ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... it with a will: The greater part keep wavering to and fro, And now all right, and now all wrong they go. Prisons, we all remember, oft would wear Three rings at once, then show his finger bare; First he'd be senator, then knight, and then In an hour's time a senator again; Flit from a palace to a crib so mean, A decent freedman scarce would there be seen; Now with Athenian wits he'd make his home, Now live with scamps and profligates at Rome; Born in a luckless hour, when every face Vertumnus wears was pulling a grimace. Shark Volanerius ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... to tak' some ither mode o' payin' the debt!" said John. "Stick spaud in yird here, ye sall not! You or I maun flit first!" ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... "We must flit, and again seek some other home. Though he should keep our secret,—and I believe he will if he be asked,—it will be known that there is a secret, and a secret of such a nature that its circumstances have driven us hence. ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... lodging-house keeper at Whitby Saw a couple of Zeppelins flit by; Though she felt a sharp sting, It's a curious thing That she never knew which she ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... lost in splendid vistas: it sees a long perspective of rare palaces where beings of a loftier nature glide. The incense of all prosperities sends up its smoke, the altar of all joy flames, the perfumed air circulates! Beings with divine smiles, robed in white tunics bordered with blue, flit lightly before the eyes and show us visions of supernatural beauty, shapes of an incomparable delicacy. The Loves hover in the air and waft the flames of their torches! We feel ourselves beloved; we are happy as we breathe a joy ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... the broad parlor windows, bearing in the fragrance of the vines on the portico outside. It was all so silent and different from the brilliant social life he had left behind in New York. Warren's whole life seemed to flit past him, as he stood there now, with the impersonality of ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... shelves of brown bound books. Now and then a dignitary in gaiters would pass him, "Portly capon," or a drift of white-robed choir boys cross a distant arcade and vanish in a doorway, or the pink and cream of some girlish dress flit like a butterfly across the cool still spaces of the place. Particularly he responded to the ruined arches of the Benedictine's Infirmary and the view of Bell Harry tower from the school buildings. He was stirred to read ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... consciousness is thus difficult with respect to longitudinal sections of the mental column, it is no less difficult with respect to transverse sections. Under ordinary circumstances, external impressions persist so that they can be transfixed by a deliberate act of attention, and objects rarely flit over the external scene so rapidly as to allow us no time for a careful recognition of the impression. Not so in the case of the internal region of mind. The composite states of consciousness just described ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... regularity; and at the same time greater brilliancy is exhibited. The fantastic headdresses of the women nod and vibrate like waving plants of Indian corn; the lustrous hair and the gaudy costumes glisten and sparkle in the sunlight, fox pelts wag back and forth, plumes and feathers flit and dance, the monotonous chanting, the dull thumping and drumming rise into the deep blue sky, re-echoing from the towering cliffs, whose pinnacles look down upon the weird scene from heights far above the uppermost ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... one lays himself liable to the accusation of having forsaken democracy. For all that, "fundamental brainwork" is behind every respect-worthy piece of writing, whether it be a lightsome lyric that seems as careless as a redbird's flit or a formal epic, an impressionistic essay or a great novel that measures the depth of human destiny. Nonintellectual literature is as nonexistent as education without mental discipline, or as "character building" in ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... we will learn, and you shall teach— Our people shall have double speech: One to be homely, one polite, As you have robes for different wear; But this is all:—'tis just and right, And more our children will not bear, Lest flocks of buzzards flit along, Where ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... chivalry, and I threw into their expression all the passion of the lovers of romance. Surely Fionguala, the white-shouldered, would hear, and awaken from her sleep of centuries, and come to the latticed casement and look down! Hist! see yonder! What light—what shadow is that that seems to flit from room to room within the abandoned house, and now approaches the mullioned window? Are my eyes dazzled by the play of the moonlight, or does the casement move—does it open? Nay, this is no delusion; there is no error of the senses here. There is simply ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... I thought, must soon go, and I would not therefore allow that to keep me in the country. And then, why should I live at Waltham Cross now, seeing that I had fixed on that place in reference to the Post Office? It was therefore determined that we would flit, and as we were to be away for eighteen months, we determined also to sell our furniture. So there was a packing up, with many tears, and consultations as to what should be saved out of the ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... I, I care no whit For pelf or place, It is enough for me to sit And watch Dulcinea's face; To mark the lights and shadows flit Across the silver ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... Glen could do was to follow where Chick-chick led and try to go just as noiselessly, and to flit carefully from one screen of cover to the next in just as unobtrusive a way. It was an old sport with Chick-chick, but though Glen was an amateur at it he made ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... was full to overflowing. It was like seeing a company of fat bumble-bees, their portly bodies resplendent in black and gold, buzz heavily out of a room, and a gay flight of pale-blue and lemon butterflies flit back in their places. All the daughters fell upon their father, Margaret, Bridget, Isabel, Sarah, Mary, and Susanna; there they all were! tugging off his heavy riding-boots and gaiters, putting away the whip on the whip-rack, while little ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... triumphantly of a barbarian ignorance. Up and down they wandered, and she gave him eyes, whether for Artemis, or Aphrodite, or Apollo, or still more for the significant and troubling art of the Renaissance, French and Italian. She would flit before him, perching here and there like a bird, and quivering through and through with a ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... or mar its beautiful reflection. But every enjoyment has its dark shadow: as life has its 'insect cares,' so Eastern night has its mosquitoes; and a sore contest one has with them on issuing from the bath at such an hour. How they flit about, imps of evil as they are, and sound their horn of defiance in our ear!—a very marvellous sound to proceed from such tiny creatures, and, to persons of irritable nerves, worse even than their sting, or at least an additional horror. They proved strong ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... a wild cry close at hand, and a curlew rose, and then a flock of lapwings, to flit round and round, uttering their peevish calls; but Max saw nothing but the scene at the castle, heard nothing but The Mackhai's bitter words, and he tramped onward and onward into the wilderness of mountain and moss, onward into ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... tasks for school, you take riding lessons or work with the fret-saw, and even in the long vacation on the seashore your time is taken up with rowing, sailing, and swimming; while I lie lost in idle thought on the sand, staring at the mysteriously changing expressions that flit over the countenance of the sea. And that is why your eyes are so clear. To be ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... inquiringly, like a dumb beast trying to feel out his master's will in his face. The evening was clear and the moon shining. As Dick sat at his chamber-window, looking at the mountain-side, he saw a gray-dressed figure flit between the trees and steal along the narrow path that led upward. Elsie's pillow was impressed that night, but she had not been missed by the household,—for Dick knew enough to keep his own counsel. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... an' brae are clad in green, An' scatter'd cowslips sweetly spring; By Girvan's fairy-haunted stream, The birdies flit on wanton wing; By Cassillis' banks, when e'ening fa's, There let my Mary meet wi' me, There catch her ilka glance o' love, The bonnie ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... by lonely meres To sit, with heart and soul awake, Where water-lilies lie afloat, Each anchored like a fairy boat Amid some fabled elfin lake: To see the birds flit to and fro Along the ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... had scarcely any opportunities of observing. Our Consul kindly undertook to take us to one of their encampments; but they flit so often from place to place, it is very difficult to light upon them. Here and there, as we cruised about among the fiords, blue wreaths of smoke rising from some little green nook among the rocks would betray their temporary place of abode; but I never got a ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... that weare chaplets on their hede Of fresh Woodbine, be such as never were To love untrue in word, thought, ne dede, But aye stedfast; ne for pleasaunce ne fere, Though that they should their hertes al to-tere, Would never flit, but ever were stedfast Till that there ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... Mothers had to ransack old rag-bags to find material with which to clothe their children. Ladies accustomed to a life of abundance and fashion had not only to work their old gowns over and to wear their bonnets of long ago, but also to flit with their children from one plantation to another in order to find something palatable to eat in the houses of more fortunate friends who had in time provided for themselves. And when at last the war was over, the blockade was raised, and the necessaries and comforts ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... said: "Nay, nay, let me grow a few days older yet. Nevertheless there is this new thing, that this morning I have brought thee a gift which I deem I may to flit to thee, and I shall give it to thee with a good will if thou wilt promise that thou wilt not part ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... delicate as maidenhair; dark rocks, wrapped in velvet moss. Trees holding up screens of green lace between your eyes and the blue water of the loch. Pebbles white and round as pearls, or silver coins dropped by fairies in a big "flit." That's one of your similes! Grass running down to the edge of the water, and full of bluebells. Water the colour of drowned wallflowers. I don't believe your Highland lochs can be prettier or more idyllic, though this is so ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Dorothy, knit, The sunbeams round thee flit, So merry the minutes go by, go by, While fast thy fingers fly, they fly. Knit, ...
— Rhymes Old and New • M.E.S. Wright
... head-sign, The battle-steep war-helm, the byrny all hoary, The sword stately-good, and spell after he said: This raiment of war Hrothgar gave to my hand, The wise of the kings, and therewithal bade me, That I first of all of his favour should flit thee; He quoth that first had it King Heorogar of old, The king of the Scyldings, a long while of time; But no sooner would he give it unto his son, 2160 Heoroward the well-whet, though kind to him were he, This weed of the breast. Do thou brook it full ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous
... must be a whole world-full of victims of injustice, whose souls flit restlessly around, because they died under a weight of undeserved shame—because they lost a battle in which the right was theirs—because they suffered and strove for truth, but went down because falsehood ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... over and over again the words of her hymn, and vainly trying to stop her ears from hearing and her eyes from seeing all the pleasant sights and sounds around her. But the birds were so busy singing, and the fish kept springing up from the stream, and every now and then a bright butterfly would flit across, or a little bird perch on a spray close to her, and everything around seemed trying so mischievously to take her attention from her book, so that they had reached the gate at the end of the wood before Kitty had learned two verses ...
— Amy Harrison - or Heavenly Seed and Heavenly Dew • Amy Harrison
... the poet at his will Lets the great world flit from him, seeing all, Higher thro' secret splendours mounting still, Self-poised, ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... of time, forgetful of the companions of her days, intoxicated by the moonlight until her blood raced madly through her veins and she was filled with an intense desire to go out and dance in the garden and flit in and out among the ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... What dire prospects this proposition must conjure up before many minds! If one chance to grow prodigiously obese before death, he must lug that enormous corporeity wearily about forever; but if he happen to die when wasted, he must then flit through eternity ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... out from the store, and drew near. The slim figure, finding it out of the question to flit hurriedly away, without attracting attention, which was just the thing he wished to avoid, commenced stroking the sleek side of the big black Kentucky thoroughbred, as though he might be a cowboy connected with the far famed Circle ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... light is dull, In the hollow tube and the whitened skull, They crouch in fear or in whispers wail, For the lingering night, and the coming gale. But at even-tide, when the shore is dim, And bubbling wreaths with the billows swim, They rise on the wing of the freshened breeze, And flit with the wind o'er ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... Every moment of this portion of the ride is a delight. The senses are kept keenly alert, for not only have we the Lake, the bay and the mountains, but part of the way we have flowers and shrubs by the thousands, bees and butterflies flit to and fro, and singing streams come foaming white from the snowbanks above, eager to reach the Lake. As our car-wheels dash across these streamlets they splash up the water on each side into sparkling diamonds and on every hand come up the sweet scents of growing, living things. ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... perfect in their form and alive with heavenly instincts, which complete with wondrous speed their rapid courses. Wherefore, my son, by you and by all just men that soul must be retained within its body's confines, nor can it be allowed to flit without command of him by whom it has been given to you. You may not escape the duty which God has trusted to you. Live, my Scipio, and shine with piety and justice, as your grandfather did and I have done. It is your duty to your parents and to your relatives, but especially your duty to your ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... or increase your Irish anxiety about my being 'in a wisp[77],' I answer your letter forth-with; premising that, as I am a 'Will of the wisp,' I may chance to flit out of it. But, first, a word on the Memoir;—I have no objection, nay, I would rather that one correct copy was taken and deposited in honourable hands, in case of accidents happening to the original; for ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... noticed his yellow vest, sprinkled with dark spots, as he flew with drooping tail for a few rods, then sank down again in the clover. From somewhere in the distance a Bob White's clear notes welled up through the silence. A flutter of wings near by, and I turned my head to see a bluebird flit gently to the top of a stake in the fence-corner not far away. They were abroad, these harbingers of spring, and I knew that balmy breezes and bursting buds came quickly in their wake. How sweet it was to know that earth's winding-sheet had been rent from her breast once more; ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... filling NIBLO'S GARDEN with her voice and its admirers. We go to hear her. PALMER and ZIMMERMANN, clad in velvet and fine linen, flit gorgeously about the lobby, and are mistaken, by rural visitors, for JIM FISK and HORACE GREELEY—concerning whom the tradition prevails in rural districts that they are clothed in a style materially different ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... old Ennius's image presented, Who to your forefathers' deeds gave their own glory again. Honour me not with your tears; by none let my death be lamented: Why? still in every mouth living I flit among men. ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... especially near swamps, when the air is illuminated with their brilliant dancing light. Sometimes they may be seen in groups, glancing like falling stars in mid-air, or descending so low as to enter your dwelling and flit about among the draperies of your bed or window curtains; the light they emit is more brilliant than that of the glowworm; but it is produced in the same manner from the under part of the body. The glowworm is also frequently seen, even ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... Massachusetts. The yard, or college-precinct, is traversed by a number of straight little paths, over which, at certain hours of the day, a thousand undergraduates, with books under their arm and youth in their step, flit from one school to another. Verena Tarrant knew her way round, as she said to her companion; it was not the first time she had taken an admiring visitor to see the local monuments. Basil Ransom, walking with her from point ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... English. Thoughts of Cosette, which used to flit through his brain with a surprising effect that can only be likened to an effect of flamingoes sweeping across an English meadow, had now almost entirely ceased to disturb him. He had but to imagine what Geraldine's attitude towards Cosette would have been had the two met, in order to ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... eyes fixed on Lucy, as did Van Helsing, and we saw a spasm as of rage flit like a shadow over her face. The sharp teeth clamped together. Then her eyes closed, and she ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
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