"Fitful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in a small room close to her three wards. But she sat very little, as a matter of fact. Her responsibility was heavy on her; she made frequent rounds. The late summer nights were fitful, feverish; the darkened wards stretched away like caverns from the dim light near the door. And from out of these caverns came petulant voices, uneasy movements, the banging of a cup on a bedside, which was the ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... his hand, with panting lips A-gape, but wide and empty lay the sea Beyond the barrier crags of Cromarty, To the far sky-line lying blue and bare— For no red pirate sought as yet to dare The gloomy hazards of the fitful seas, The gusty terrors, and the treacheries Of fickle April and its changing skies— And while he scanned the waves with curious eyes, The sea-wind in his nostrils, who had spent A long, bleak winter in Knockfarrel pent Over ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... but in fitful snatches, as a man does when constantly disturbed by the whirr and whizzing of the train, the rattle and jangle of wheels passing over ill-jointed points. After one of the longest periods of unconsciousness I ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... various other atmospheric commotions, lasted for half an hour, and ceased to attract their attention. The wind, however, continued to increase, and the ears of the four matrons anon caught the sound of a dull, steady roar, which rose above the fitful howling of the blast. They ran to the door and saw a dark cloud shaped like a monstrous funnel moving swiftly towards them from the west. The point of this funnel was scarcely more than one hundred feet from the earth, and swayed ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... but I am ready to hunt in the opposite direction, and I hunt." Off to the chase he went and took the family auto, i.e., the sled and dogs, with him. The once-wife, travelling five days and six nights by the fitful light of the Aurora, found her way to her father, for the instinct of direction is unerring in these people; but the ex-bride's feet became badly frozen. Public opinion in this case was strongly roused against the husband and probably if there had been a tree ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... greatness. My boyhood's visions were peopled with warlike tumults. There were no spring mornings to my brain even in early youth; my heart was clouded with shadow, and sadness reigned when mirth and careless glee should have been pre-eminent. My manhood has been a fitful, feverish, and painful existence. I have outlived all whom I ever cared for; I have seen those whom I idolized lie before me cold and senseless; and now, with every event vividly impressed upon my memory, each tone of the voice of her I loved dropping like liquid fire ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... events were fitful and wayward, so that effects started up without causes, and like causes under like conditions produced unlike effects, and anything might come of anything, there would be no such thing as that which we call nature. When we speak ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... The organist performed a piece descriptive of a storm. We resigned ourselves to the illusion. Low, mysterious wailings, swelling, dying away in the distance, seeming at first exceedingly remote, drew gradually near. Fitful sighings and sobbings rose, as of gusts of wind; then low, smothered roarings. Anon came flashes of lightning, rattling hail, and driving rain, succeeded by bursts of storm, and howlings of a hurricane—fierce, furious, frightful. I felt myself lost in a snow storm ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... for the Midnight Office; and afterwards came fitful sleep, half dreamy, half broken by the wanderings of slight feverishness and great weakness; but she thought her attendance would not be very brief, and agreed mentally with what Mr. Audley had told her, that the doctor ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... King of the Dwarf-kind stood Like an image of deeds departed and days that once were good; And he seemed but faint and weary, and his eyes were dim and dazed As they met the glory of Sigurd where the fitful candles blazed. Then he spake: "Hail, Son of the Volsungs, the corner-stone is laid, I have toiled and thou hast desired, and, lo, ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... permanent value—but at this distant day I find that they still possess an interest for me and also a value, because it turns out that they were registrations of character. The qualities then revealed by fitful glimpses, in childish acts and speeches, remained as a permanency in the children's characters in the drift of the years, and were always ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... The fitful rush of the wind was now disturbed by a portentous sound; it was a quick and heavy knocking at the outer door. Pearson's wan countenance grew paler, for many a visit of persecution had taught him what to dread; the old man, on the other hand, stood up erect, and his glance was firm as that ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... lost, but who at length struck into his road and saw its end.' He would find some way of taking Darnay's place in the gloomy prison; he would, by his substitution, restore her husband to Lucy's side; he would make his life sublime at its close. His career should resemble a day that, fitful and overcast, ends at length in a glorious sunset. He would save his ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... hospitality. The church was one of those strongholds of religion and loyalty which I rejoice to see in the colonies. There, Sabbath after Sabbath, the inhabitants of this peaceful locality worship in the pure faith of their forefathers: here, when "life's fitful fever" is over, they sleep in the hallowed ground around these sacred walls. Nor could a more peaceful resting-place be desired: from the graveyard one could catch distant glimpses of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and tall ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... mountains of material it places upon the market, if there are no purchasers? One man at a machine will do as much work in a factory to-day as required the work of fifty men fifty years ago; but the enhanced volume of production can have only one purchaser now where there was once fifty, hence the fitful existence of the one and the desperate struggle for existence of the forty-nine.[15] As iron and steel cannot compete with muscle and brain in the volume of production, so iron and steel cannot compete with muscle and brain in consumption. And, without consumption, what ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... reaching Luckenough retired to bed, and addressed herself to sleep. It was in vain—her nerves were fearfully excited. In vain she tried to combat her terrors—they completely overmastered her. She was violently shocked out of a fitful doze. ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... evening. Eleven floors below her, in the foyer of the Hotel Manhattan, the after-theater crowd of visitors thronged and buzzed happily. But the girl, after an unusual day of anxiety in a strange land, was ill at ease, with fitful dreams. ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... long been the mainstay of Rome's influence in the Orient. Her contact with the other protected princedoms was distant and fitful; but as long as her mandates could be issued through this faithful vassal, and he could rely on her whole-hearted support in making or meeting aggressions, the balance of power in the East was tolerably secure. It had been necessary to make Eumenes the Second see that he was wholly in the power ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... young O'Reilly, and myself were walking arm- in-arm and briskly up and down the deck. Six bells had rung; a head-wind blew chill and fitful, the fog was closing in with a sprinkle of rain, and the fog-whistle had been turned on, and now divided time with its unwelcome outcries, loud like a bull, thrilling and intense like a mosquito. Even the watch lay somewhere ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dynamo was lower and more subdued. The street cars were practically empty. Instead of a constant stream of vehicles, an occasional cab clattered past. The city was preparing for its brief hours of fitful rest. ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... that attack of fever and dysentery, and these two were lying beside me; the one mumbling and the other panting in a fitful sleep. ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... Illuminating the peaceful smile, and seeming to linger lovingly as it lit up strange glories in the golden hair, smoothed in soft bands over her brow. There she lay with her hands folded, as though in prayer, upon her quiet breast; and the fitful fever of life had passed away. Dead—with the smile of heaven upon her lips, which ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... always been fitful and wayward, but had never before behaved so unpleasantly. Certainly his world had not improved him for his home. Yet amongst his companions he bore the character of the best-natured fellow in the world. To them he never showed any of the peevishness arising from mental discomfort, but kept it ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... task a pastime. The poor is hungry and a-thirst; but for him also there is food and drink: he is heavy-laden and weary; but for him also the Heavens send Sleep, and of the deepest; in his smoky cribs, a clear dewy heaven of Rest envelops him, and fitful glitterings of cloud-skirted Dreams. But what I do mourn over is, that the lamp of his soul should go out; that no ray of heavenly, or even of earthly knowledge, should visit him; but only, in the haggard darkness, like two spectres, Fear ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... A wondrous form, and fair; With jewels bright she plaiteth Her shining golden hair: With comb of gold prepares it, The task with song beguiled; A fitful burden bears it— ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... another! reach from Lethe's stream The last reviving draught of cool refreshment! Soon shall its waters in my bosom still Life's fitful fever; and my spirit then Adown oblivion's stream shall glide to you, Ye spirits, shrouded in eternal mist. With tranquil pleasure in your deep repose A weary son of earth may lave his soul!— What whisp'ring sounds pervade the ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... from its slavery. If only he had the Vagabond, he'd take off again for the uncharted reaches of spaces, find some little habitable asteroid, live out the rest of his meaningless life there. With these gloomy thoughts he fell at last into fitful slumber. ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... that the first Albany train would arrive at the station across the river at about seven o'clock. He arranged to be on hand, and then tried to go to sleep again. But the most he could do was to take a few fitful naps. ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... volcano: "it was," said my guide, "like a little hell upon earth." Not far off, two or three broad spots of rank, unwholesome green still marked the places where these rival warriors, after their fierce and fitful struggle, slept quietly together in the lap of their common mother earth. Over all the rest of the field peace had resumed its sway. The thoughtless whistle of the peasant floated on the air, instead of the trumpet's clangor; the team ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... he found himself in a gloomy and lonesome valley. Jagged mountains, black as night, rose on either side, and huge rocks seemed ready to topple down upon him at every step. Through broken clouds a watery moon shed a faint, fitful light, that came and went as the clouds, driven by a moaning wind, passed over ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... of the squandered chances, the sleep Of the will that cannot itself awaken, From the promise the future can never keep, From the fitful purposes ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... torments of conscience; for it is but by degrees that the greatest villain can drive away its stings, and then it is but for a short time, and when it does force itself back upon him, it is with redoubled power. His occasional slumbers were broken by fitful starts, in which he again and again heard the yell of the poor lad, and saw the corpse rolling at his feet. It was about an hour before daylight that Mr Vanslyperken again woke, and found that the light had ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... drawing-room a ghastly silence prevailed, broken by fitful efforts of conversation. Mr Farrell had asked that a cab should be ordered by nine o'clock to take him back to his hotel; but, though the time drew nearer and nearer, he still vouchsafed no explanation of the unexpected visit. Surely—surely, ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... breaking pitcher and Mary's wild plunge back into bed, Joyce sat up in alarm, but in response to her whisper Mary explained in muffled tones from under the bedclothes that she had simply gotten up for a drink of water and dropped the pitcher. All the rest of the night her sleep was fitful and uneasy, for toward morning her face began to burn as if it were on fire. She tore off the mask and used it to wipe away what remained of the ointment. Most of it had been absorbed, however, and the skin was broken ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... and the camp grew quiet. The boys and their unexpected guests, sandwiched closely together on the floor and in the bunks, drifted off into fitful slumber. But John P. ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... a cancer the soul of society with its black fluid? Is freedom, the divine idea, nothing but the toy of an orator to the majority, a distant star in the night to a helpless minority? Yet the instinct to freedom, the appetite for freedom, flickers through the centuries as a fitful flame, though snuffed out by every gust of class passion, every wind of mob resentment, and every storm of national jealousy. Though the inferior subnormals multiply into great sheep majorities, and the careerists, like Napoleon, morbid variants, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... sleep was fitful. It was broad daylight. I swear to you that the succubus came, irritant and palpable and most tenacious. Happily, I remembered the formula of deliverance, which ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... then I've strayed through many a fitful clime, (Tossed on the wind of fortune like a feather,) And chanced with rare good fellows in my time; But ne'er the time that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the speaker earnestly, and yet with a half- contemptuous smile upon his face. She was seated in shadow, and he could only see the glitter of her dark eyes as the fitful light of the fire ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... of the mourning trees, The maiden waited at the accustom'd bower. And waited long beyond the appointed hour, Yet Bateman came not;—o'er the woodland drear, Howling portentous did the winds career; And bleak and dismal on the leafless woods The fitful rains rush'd down in sullen floods; The night was dark; as, now and then, the gale Paused for a moment—Margaret listen'd pale; But through the covert to her anxious ear No rustling footstep spoke her lover near. Strange fears now ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... and counted the days that were yet left before the end of September. But the tension began to tell upon her, and her face took a delicate look that Mr. Falkirk did not like to see, in spite of the ready colour that flickered there in such fitful fashion. And then, Dr. Arthur Maryland, watching her one night at the Ocean House, with his critical eyes, gave his opinion, unasked. All that appeared was ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... in her fitful sleep and Miss Smith soothed her. Poor child! here too was work—a strange strong soul cruelly stricken in her youth. Could she be brought back to a useful life? How she needed such a strong, clear-eyed helper ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... big clock in the corner of the kitchen. The early dark was already creeping into the room, hiding itself under table and chair, showing the light of the isinglass doors of the cooking-stove with a fitful radiance, making Marion lonely and homesick, for you could hear the clock tick, the room was so still. Then Aunt Betty lighted two yellow tallow candles that stood in iron candlesticks on the mantel-shelf, put up a leaf of the kitchen ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... had grown fitful. Heavy clouds whirled over, trailing snow-flurries. Rarely the sun found a cleft in the black canopy to shoot a ray through and remind the world that he was still in his place and ready to shine when ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... again into the garden, but somehow things seemed to drag. Conversation was fitful, except on the part of Ukridge, who continued to talk easily on all subjects, unconscious of the fact that the party was depressed and at least one of his guests rapidly becoming irritable. I watched the professor furtively as Ukridge talked on, ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... permanent foreign population. How our friend from quiet Nancy—which long ago had been deserted by royalty and its train, and where literary luminaries, such as Voltaire, Madame du Chatelet, Saint Lambert, &c., had ceased to make their fitful appearances—must have opened his eyes when this varied spectacle ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the finely constant impenetration of love through all her spiritual life, the man's uncontrollable blaze and his alternate coldness, seem fitful—weak—brutish, almost unworthy of ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... country. In the beginnings of Australian poetry the names of two other men stand with his—Adam Lindsay Gordon, of English parentage and education, and Charles Harpur, born in Australia a generation earlier than Kendall. Harpur's work, though lacking vitality, shows fitful gleams of poetic fire suggestive of greater achievement had the circumstances of his life been more favourable. Kendall, whose lot was scarcely more fortunate, is a true singer; his songs remain, and are likely long to remain, ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... for her, though fitful and fanciful, was yet so warm and real that it had become a necessity of her life. As he always told her—especially after he had had one of his little quarrels with ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... tendency to come unbidden whenever the snoring of any of my fellow-lodgers gets aggravatingly harsh. In all this company I think I am the only person who doesn't snore, and when I awake from my rather fitful slumbers at four o'clock and find the rain no longer pattering against the window, I arise, and take up my journey toward Philippopolis, the city I had intended reaching yesterday. It is after crossing the Kodja Balkans and descending into the Maritza Valley that one finds among ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... tree-top outside, according to the countryside superstition, or whether by a singular coincidence, he discovered that he had business elsewhere, he was soon gone, and the night was left to the chorusing katydids and tree-toads and to the weird, fitful illuminations of the noiseless ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... those who have untroubled heart and good digestion. There was just one black patch in all that silvery stretch of sand, upon which the moon shone, a patch that came neither from rock or tree or cloud, and which moved occasionally in fitful jerks, until it raised itself and collapsed again, and spread itself in a still stranger shape as from underneath garments which had the form of arms and legs and disjointed feet which fell apart, ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... in the village of Clifton. With about a thousand men in all, he contrived to defeat five hundred dragoons, backed by a great body of cavalry, all well disciplined troops. The moon, which was in its second quarter, appeared at intervals during the close of the action, and gave but a fitful light, being often over-clouded, so that the combatants fought almost in gloom, except for a few minutes at a time. The English, being all on horseback, were just visible to their foes, but the "little Highlanders" were in darkness. "We had the advantage," observes ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... gold-brown hair, And quivered and glowed in the sun-lit air; The jewels gleamed on her hands of snow And dazzled my eyes with their fitful glow. A river of gold ran low at our feet, And echoed the words I cannot repeat. Oh! life was fair that I loved the sun! And love was so sweet when the day ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... among the trees, torches of lightwood threw a wild and fitful light over the little cluster of graves, and revealed the long, straight boxes of rough pine that held the remains of the two negroes, and lit up the score of russet mounds beneath which slept the dusky kinsmen who ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... extraordinary value toward the formation of a right understanding of that remarkable personage. Much of all this sensitiveness is clearly due to the hasty fashion of publishing private correspondence within a few years of the writer's decease, but more to the fitful and somewhat feminine temper of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... philosophers. Thorpe wondered if in his time he could have looked such a vacant and sour young fool. No—no. That could not be. Boys were different in his day—and especially boys in book-shops. They read something and knew something of what they handled. They had some sort of aspirations, fitful and vague as these might be, to become in their time bookmen also. And in those days there still were bookmen—widely-informed, observant, devoted old bookmen—who loved their trade, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... of the foreign community in Yokohama and its neighbourhood with a vigour and freedom, not to say licence, which would now hardly be tolerated. Its proprietor is long since dead, and so I believe is the journal which he owned and whose fitful appearances used to create such a mild excitement among the foreign community ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... She laughed—her fitful, somewhat unreal laugh, which was always displeasing to him. To-night, taken in conjunction with her story, and her unconcerned way of telling it, it jarred on him ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... The landlady came up to ask when she should bring up the leg of mutton, but she went away frightened. There was no dinner that day. Amid screams and violent words the evening died slowly, and the room darkened until nothing was seen but the fitful firelight playing on Dick's hands; but still the vague form of the woman passed through the shadows like a figure of avenging fate. Would she never grow tired and sit down? Dick asked himself a thousand times. It seemed as if it ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... front of the house. The Hopper heard the sash moving slowly in the frame. He reached the steps, deposited the jar in a pile of snow, and was soon peering into a room where Wilton's presence was advertised by the fitful flashing of his ...
— A Reversible Santa Claus • Meredith Nicholson
... fellow were, dexterous his dives into porches and the patches of shadow which the eaves cast, the priest's trained eye followed his every turn, numbered, as it were, the very steps he took. And the smile upon Fra Giovanni's face was fitful no more. He walked as a man who has a ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... laced it before the fireplace, and then made up a good blazing fire on the open hearth. By the time the dry wood was crackling and sparkling out its cheery welcome, my patient arrived, and was laid down, blankets and all, on the rude little bedstead, before the blaze. By its fitful and uncertain light I proceeded to examine the enormous frame stretched so helplessly before me, feeling half afraid to touch him at all. F—— was very trying as an assistant, for he looked on without ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... first interview with his grandfather. All his experience of the ties of relationship, however limited, was full of tenderness and rapture. His memory often dwelt on his mother's sweet embrace; and ever and anon a fitful phantom of some past passage of domestic love haunted his gushing heart. The image of his father was less fresh in his mind; but still it was associated with a vague sentiment of kindness and joy; and the allusions to her husband in his mother's letters had cherished these ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... turns away, and she still stands at the foot of the staircase, watching him uneasily. He has aged greatly in the past few months. She is shocked to see how gray, how fitful, nervous, irritable, he has become. As he moves towards the door-way, she notes how thin his cheek has grown, and wonders at the irresolution in his movements when he reaches the broad piazza. He stands there an instant, the massive ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... in fruitless action, and devoting the moments of reflection to the playful current of the muse's fancy, forsooth, to the delectation of the more prosaic humanity in this his locality. A life of pleasure was ever his treasure, and he agrees, after experience of life's fitful dream, that ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... Smiling." In a bivouac an opposition mouth-organ saws at "The Rosary." On the left hand is a dark mass of horses, picketed in parallel lines. They lounge, hips drooping, heads low, in a pleasant after-dinner doze. The Guard lolls against a post, lantern at his feet, droning a fitful accompaniment to the distant mouth-organ. "The hours I spent wiv thee, dear 'eart, are-Stan' still, Ginger—like a string of pearls ter me-ee ... Grrr, Nellie, stop kickin'!" The range of desolate hills in the background is flickering ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug. 22, 1917 • Various
... number of passengers died in their berths; many who had managed to reach the deck were swept away by the immense waves that flooded it. One sharp cry was wafted on the chill night air, and a deadly silence prevailed, except for the fitful roaring ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... a voiceless wail, save a cry of woe, That burst forth in fitful throbbing— A bullet had pierced its metal through, For the Dead the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... old cedars stretched across the yard. Their shapes, so familiar to him, were already disordered. The sleet must have been falling for hours to have weighed them down this way and that. A peculiarity of the night was the wind, which increased constantly, but with fitful violence, giving no warning of its high swoop, seizure, ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... white of pear and cherry blossom, with here and there a blush from apple-trees and a faint glimmer of delicate green against cool grey of stone walls showing among the purples of trunks and branches warming into new life under the fitful rays of April sunshine. The sunshine draws out colour from soaring spires or copper domes of churches and from the quaint towers and pinnacles of old Prague's former defences against enemies that came like storm clouds from out of the west or over the giant mountains to northward. A passing ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... is retrospectively thrown upon it by Coleridge's correspondence of a later date is of the most fitful description,— scarcely more than serves, in fact, for the rendering of darkness visible. Even the sudden and final departure from the Lakes it leaves involved in as much obscurity as ever. Writing to Mr. Thomas Allsop [1] from Ramsgate twelve years afterwards ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... hand forcibly on his bursting heart, and fled from the room. The noise of the harps, the laughing of the dancers, prevented his emotions from being observed; and rushing far from the joyous tumult, till its sounds died in the breeze, or were only brought to his ear by fitful gusts, he speeded along the margin of the lake, as if he would have flown even from himself. But memory, racking memory, followed him. Throwing himself on a bank, over which the ice hung in pointed masses, he felt not the roughness of ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... life for a guerdon small In fitful flashes; There has been reward — but the end of all ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... as he skims along, Uttering his sweet and mournful cry; He starts not at my fitful song, Nor flash of fluttering drapery. He has no thought of any wrong, He scans me with a fearless eye; Stanch friends are we, well tried and strong, The ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... silent. But, in the pauses of the struggle, the voice of conscience resumes its power,—and the heart of man again relents. As Bertram went rocking over the waves numbed in body and exhausted in spirits, all about him hideous gloom, and the fitful flashes of lightning serving but to light up the great world of terrors—this inner voice was not so silenced but that he felt a pang of sorrow at the thought of having destroyed the partner of his misfortunes. ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... shouting rose and died away, like wild gusts of wind on the plain round the barricaded house; the fitful popping of shots grew louder above the yelling. Sometimes there were intervals of unaccountable stillness outside, and nothing could have been more gaily peaceful than the narrow bright lines of sunlight from the cracks in the shutters, ruled straight across the cafe over the disarranged ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... sunshine. She lived in an elevated region full of love and wonder, taking kindly alike to reverence and to hope; but she was seldom excited, her feelings were not shallow enough to be easily troubled with excitement, or made fitful ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... the deep love I bore her, "Miss Dodan, I may for some time yet be engaged in this now imperative work. I cannot, you know, now leave it. It is the most marvellous thing the world has ever known. It means so much to me, indeed to us all. These messages are erratic—fitful. I have now waited for weeks for a renewal of these strange communications and there is nothing. But in the midst of this, a distracting love for you seems to unnerve and torment me. I beg you to wait until those days may come when I can show you all the ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... out I threw myself down early near the camp fire and slept soundly for several hours. But at length some unusual sound awoke me, and when I opened my eyes I saw that the fire had died down to one single flickering ember, which still blazing cast a fitful light upon the boles of the forest ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... tell much of its history, are, in fact, results of its doings, but they are not the stream. They were brought down when it was turbid; it may now be clear: they are as much the result of other circumstances as of the action of the stream: their history is fitful: they give us no sure intelligence of the future course of the stream, or of the nature of its waters; and may scarcely shew more than that it has not been always as it is. The actions of men are often but little better ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... long in brewing. The discontent of the colonies at their treatment by the mother country was gradual in its growth. At first it seemed rather to inspire fitful protests and expostulations, than a desire to foster a deliberate quarrel. Even New England, settled by Pilgrims who had no strong reason for evincing loyalty and affection for the land whence they had been driven for opinion's ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... opening itself, under promising omens: now, and more and more henceforth, he began to look on Literature as his real employment, after all; and was prosecuting it with his accustomed loyalty and ardor. And he continued ever afterwards, in spite of such fitful circumstances and uncertain outward fluctuations as his were sure of being, to prosecute it steadily with ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... and tossed and turned, or fell into fitful slumbers, in which she had hideous dreams of the mills being burnt down, and her father with them. After a very vivid one, in which she saw the mill-owner standing, a tall, burly figure, on the top of one of the chimneys, with flames all round him which in ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... Polly, shortly. Then she turned to and packed in a vigorous manner, and very soon after the little party started on their return walk home. It was decidedly a dull walk. Polly's gay spirits were fitful and forced; the rest of the party did not attempt to enjoy themselves. David lagged quite behind the others; and poor Maggie confided to George that somehow or other, she could not tell why, they were all turning their eyes reproachful-like on her. The sun had gone in now in the ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... the morning of the 19th, it was reported to him that artillery firing could be heard in the direction of Cedar Creek, but as the sound was stated to be irregular and fitful, he thought it only a skirmish. He, nevertheless, arose at once, and had just finished dressing when another officer came in, and reported that the firing was still going on in the same direction, but that it did not sound like a general battle. Still Sheridan ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... a fitful wind swept across the waste, a noxious wind, cold and dank, that chilled me with a sudden dread even while the sweat ran from me. I walked amid shell craters, sometimes knee-deep in mud; I stumbled over rifles half buried in the slime, on muddy knapsacks, over muddy bags half full of rusty bombs, ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... believe that persecution is an unfailing help to a religious cause. It is so only when the persecution is sporadic and fitful: storms succeeded by sunshine. When persecution partakes of a stern, unrelenting nature, such as has recently been meted out to Chinese converts, it certainly destroys, or ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... exerting a subtile, unrecognized power over her? Certainly within the last few weeks she had been subject to strange moods and reveries. But the first dawning of a woman's love is like the aurora, with its strange, fitful flashes. The phenomena have never been ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... Flanders fields, the cannon boom And fitful flashes light the gloom, While up above, like eagles, fly The fierce destroyers of the sky; With stains the earth wherein you lie Is redder than the poppy bloom, In ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... told me, as we sat by the fire and hearkened to the rising gusts, of how this change had fallen upon my uncle. All last winter he had been dark and fitful in his mind. Whenever the Roost ran high, or, as Mary said, whenever the Merry Men were dancing, he would lie out for hours together on the Head, if it were at night, or on the top of Aros by day, watching the tumult of the sea, and sweeping the horizon for a sail. After February the tenth, when ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... She had absolutely nothing to turn to, nothing to rely upon. Her religious observances were mere conventional occupations. And yet mixed up in the woman there was a mental quality very rare and sympathetic, a strange fitful brilliance, extremely pleasing. Once or twice on their journey she had expressed the peculiar quality of the scenery in words which were not far off prose poems. It had puzzled him to know how her intellectual refinement could dwell in the ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... that the soft west-wind to-day From the cherry-trees beareth their blooms away, And wherever its fitful currents flow, Rising or falling, swift or slow, The tender petals like white wings go, Floating, eddying, wavering low, Wheeling and sinking in showers of snow; And under their light and flickering fall, The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... substance blooms, shall stay with you Eternally, as now: and, if it doth, How, when ye shall regain your visible forms, The sight may without harm endure the change, That also tell." As those, who in a ring Tread the light measure, in their fitful mirth Raise loud the voice, and spring with gladder bound; Thus, at the hearing of that pious suit, The saintly circles in their tourneying And wond'rous note attested new delight. Whoso laments, that ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... West, Whose spired domes hold priceless stones, And censers' fumes lull sighs and moans As barriers dank, flee their fold, Betrayed by crystals on a crest That ride this kingdom's batter'd gnomes, A fitful syrinx stills all groans As chasms roar with devils' glee. Then fancies greet each goblin's eye, Each donga's depth and mount unsunned: A quire's rune, in onyx dress, And black-linkt harps with eyes that see Each blood-set jazel in a sky, Where heights eternal reign unstunned, Pierce sylvan ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... Over all boomed the muffled thunders of Niagara. The big guns, almost mouth to mouth, roared crimson destruction. Though bayonets were crossed, and the fighting was hand to hand and desperate, and sand and grass grew ghastly and slippery with the sheen of blood in the fitful moonlight, the British, notwithstanding the advantage in weight and numbers of the enemy, held their ground. When day was breaking, and the American general found his casualties exceeded one thousand, he withdrew his shattered ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... days, when communication with the mainland was uncertain and fitful, the luxuries of civilised life were quite unknown. In one outlying district a box of oranges was washed ashore from a wreck: these the natives boiled, under the impression that the orange was a novel kind of potato. A cask ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... between King Gama and ourselves! (aside to Cyril) Oh, Cyril, how I dread this interview! It's twenty years since he and I have met. He was a twisted monster — all awry—— As though Dame Nature, angry with her work, Had crumpled it in fitful petulance! ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... the ship's run. This wooden cavern was very narrow, but not less than fifteen feet long. The candle was at the further end, and between it and Hazel a man was working, with his flank turned toward the spectator. This partly intercepted the light; but still it revealed in a fitful way the huge ribs of the ship, and her inner skin, that formed the right-hand partition, so to speak, of this black cavern; and close outside those gaunt timbers was heard the wash ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... him as he skims along, Uttering his sweet and mournful cry; He starts not at my fitful song, Or flash of fluttering drapery; He has no thought of any wrong, He scans me with a fearless eye. Stanch friends are we, well-tried and strong, The little sandpiper ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... it exerted over me, nor could I account in any way for the really superstitious dread which from this moment seized me, making my head move slowly round with shrinking backward looks as that swaying shutter creaked or some of the fitful noises, which grow out of silence in answer to our inner expectancy, drew my ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... o'clock, and for a short space the pressure on the Confederate lines relaxed. The continuous roar of the artillery dwindled to a fitful cannonade; and along the edge of the wood, drooping under the heat, where the foliage was white with the dust of battle, the skirmishers let their rifles cool. But the Valley soldiers knew that their respite would be short. The Federal masses were still marching ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... Sense, was not easy to seize and adapt with any fitness of application to the feelings of modern minds. It was to penetrate into the inmost shrines of Imagination, where human passion and action are reflected in dim and fitful, but deeply significant resemblances, and to copy these with the guileless, humble graces which alone can become them. . . . The ordinary lovers of witch and fairy matter will remark a deficiency of spectres and enchantments, and complain that the whole is rather ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... dream, Times past and long forgotten, present seem. To his charmed ear the east wind, rising shrill, Seems through the hero's shroud to whistle still. The clock's deep pendulum swinging through the blast Sounds like the rocking of his lofty mast; While fitful gusts rave like his clam'rous band, Mixed with the accents of his high command. Slowly the stripling quits the pensive scene, And burns and sighs and weeps to be ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... the table. As he stood there talking in a sneering voice, in full flesh, shaved and clean, he certainly did not look like a man stricken with paresis. Yet the doctor knew that this fitful mood of sanity was deceitful. The feeble brain ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the ship's side, shading his eyes against the dazzle that made a brassy light over sea and sky. The Ryukyu Islands, off the port beam, were not visible in the metallic haze that grew as the sun arched higher. The fitful wind gave promise of stopping altogether and ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... the clouds that occasionally passed over the face of the moon gave the earth a dreary aspect. The high wall under which they stood seemed to frown gloomily upon them, and the long flight of white marble steps, leading from the Propylaea, looked cold and cheerless beneath the fitful gleamings of ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... watches the spasmodic shoots and darts that break out of her face and limbs, like fitful lightning out of a dark sky, some contagion in them seizes upon him: insomuch that he has to withdraw himself to a lean arm-chair by the hearth—placed there, perhaps, for such emergencies—and to sit in it, holding ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... thirty years previous to the time of which we write, a young man named John Newsome left the great city of London for the New World. Fate had played a hard game with young Newsome—had first robbed him of both parents, and then in a single fitful turn of her wheel deprived him of what little property he had inherited. A little later he came to Montreal, and being a youth of good education and considerable ambition, he easily secured a position ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... strangeness of aspect. Where is there a band like this—the Baron of Bradwardine, Dominie Sampson, Meg Merrilies, Monkbarns, Edie Ochiltree, Old Mortality, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Andrew Fairservice, Caleb Balderston, Flibbertigibbet, Mona of the Fitful head, and that fine fellow the farmer of Liddesdale, with all his Peppers and Mustards raffling at his heels? But not even out of Melrose need you move a step to find the name of a faithful servant of Sir Walter. Tom Purdie lies in Melrose Abbey-Yard; and Scott ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... into fitful breaths. The sea still beat furiously on the outer ledges of the island, but in the reach between the island and the distant main there was a living chance for a small boat. It was not a chance that unskilful rowers would want to ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... Her later behaviour had repelled him, impressing him with the notion that she was proud, and that she had made up her mind, notwithstanding her apparent frankness at first, to keep him at a distance. That she was fitful, too, and incapable of showing much tenderness even to poor Harry, he had already concluded in his private judgment-hall. Nor could he doubt that, whether from wrong theories, incapacity, or culpable indifference, she must have taken very bad measures ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... fitful light, Glide,—gliding round the golden rim! Restored to life, now glancing bright, Now just expiring, faint and dim! Like a spirit loath to die, Contending with its destiny. All dark! a momentary veil Is o'er the sleeper! now a pale Uncertain beauty ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... their fitful light on still other objects. They illumined now a vivid yellow shrub; they danced upon a roof-top; they flooded, with a sudden circlet of brilliance, the awful depths below of the swirling waters and of rocks that were black as a ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... made out that my work was to walk Miss Havisham round and round the room. Accordingly I started at once and she leaned on my shoulder. She was not strong, and soon she said, "Slower!" Still she went at a fitful, impatient speed, and the hand on my shoulder twitched. After a while she bade me call Estella, and on we started again round the room. If she had been alone I should have been sufficiently embarrassed, but as she brought with her the ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... without wounding the feelings of any other person. But her kind heart never would forget itself, and so Number Seven had a champion who was always ready to see that his flashes of intelligence, fitful as they were, and liable to be streaked with half-crazy fancies, always found one willing recipient of what light ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... more and he stood alone on the granite steps. The night was still and gloomy, the moon gave only a fitful glimmering now and then as it peeped from between heavy clouds, the air was sharp and piercing, but the young man on the steps felt in a white heat as he waited in breathless anxiety for the ...
— Three People • Pansy
... uneasily. There was that in the words that vaguely stirred him. Dick had never spoken in that strain before. Slowly, with a certain caution, he lifted his tear-stained face and peered up at his brother in the fitful candle-light. ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... points made in their report, I mention these. They said: "The supply of gold is diminishing, being now but little more than one half what it was in 1852, and is always so fitful and irregular from the method of its production that it is ill-suited to be ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... like evening lights; or were swallowed up in the headlong torrent of puritanic zeal which succeeded, and swept away everything in its unsparing course, throwing up the wrecks of taste and genius at random, and at long fitful intervals, amidst the painted gew-gaws and foreign frippery of the reign of Charles II. and from which we are only now recovering the scattered fragments and broken images to erect a temple to true Fame! How long, before it ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... our backs and rations in our pockets for two days, set out along an ancient and in places an obliterated bark road that followed and crossed and recrossed the stream. The morning was bright and warm, but the wind was fitful and petulant, and I predicted rain. What a forest solitude our obstructed and dilapidated wood-road led us through! five miles of primitive woods before we came to the forks, three miles before we came to the "burnt shanty," a name merely,—no shanty there now ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... had been very cold, the spring had been fitful and stormy, but May had suddenly burst upon the country with one broad, bright smile of sunshine and flowers. If Timothy had loitered on the way to school when the frost nipped his nose, and the ground was muddy, and the March winds crept up his jacket sleeves, ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... there had been a strong sun shining down into the pot, and the trees about its rim had stood unstirred by any wind. Now, however, a sudden darkness settled over everything, and sharp, fitful gusts drew in through the cleft, helping to push the logs back. Henderson was by this time so near fainting from exhaustion that his wits were losing their clearness. Only his horror of the fatal exit, the raving sluice, the swaying white spray-curtain, retained its keenness. As to all ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the North waxed fitful. Sometimes two or three lessons would pass in severe study. Nino, who always took care to know the passages they were reading, so that he might look at her instead of at his book, had instituted an arrangement by which they sat opposite each other at a small ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... doorway, one entered at once into the hall. This was a lofty room some twelve feet wide. At one end of it was a broad fire-place, where huge resinous pine logs sent up an odor most grateful to the senses and emitted a pleasant, fitful blaze, lighting up, ever and anon, the faces of The McAllister and his ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... a Talleyrand in love matters; and, so completely versed in the pathology of the "fitful fever," as to be able to diagnose it at a glance; besides nursing the patient through all the several stages of the disease—watching every symptom, anticipating each change, bringing the "case," ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... itself flat, and then went tunnelling its way with fitful explosions among the channels of ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... smudge-pungent tent where her two companions slept heavily, Chloe sat late into the night staring through the mosquito-barred entrance toward the narrow strip of beach where the dying fires of the scowmen glowed sullenly in the darkness, pierced now and again by the fitful flare of a wind-whipped brand. Two still forms wrapped in ragged blankets, lay like logs where sleep had ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... decaying. That the Delphic Oracle itself—of all oracles the most illustrious—had not expired, but simply slumbered for centuries, the fathers might have been convinced themselves by innumerable passages in authors contemporary with themselves; and that it was continually throwing out fitful gleams of its ancient power, when any very great man (suppose a Caesar) thought fit to stimulate its latent vitality, is notorious from such cases as that of Hadrian. He, in his earlier days, whilst yet only dreaming of the purple, had not found the Oracle superannuated ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... needed to give it the touch of the habitable and the homelike. It was, therefore, unfortunate for the spirits of the Lebanon people that the meeting summoned by local agitators to discuss with asperity affairs on both sides of the Sagalac should, while starting with fitful sunlight in the early morning, have developed to a bleak greyness by three o'clock in the afternoon, the time set ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the silence and overshadowing of that night whose fitful meteoric fires only herald the descent of a superficial fame into lasting oblivion, the imbecile and unavailing resistance which is made against the doom must often excite our pity for the pampered child of market-gilded popularity;" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... romantic effect, which a true musical genius would not have failed to recognize. The four parts, tenor, treble, bass, and counter, as they were then called, rose and swelled and wildly mingled, with the fitful strangeness of Aeolian harp, or of winds in mountain-hollows, or the vague moanings of the sea on lone, forsaken shores. And Mary, while her voice rose over the waves of the treble, and trembled with a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... chilly little wind played about the street corners and wailed softly through the thinning tree-tops. The big lamp above Joe's workbench was unlighted so the little shop was in darkness except for the fitful wavering of the ruddy wood fire in ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... Seeks some isolated bower Where the body's sordid cravings Yield beneath the spirit's power, So the searcher, bowed in reverence, Left untouched his evening fare As he listened to the voices Of the shadows gathering there. Here no lighted torch or camp fire With its weak and fitful ray, Could illume the mystic journey Of prayer's consecrated way. Here the silence brought its message Of forebodings, vague and deep, In its visions to the dreamer, Through the mystery ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... his power of external description is not his greatest merit. Born and bred among the people—full of their animal vehemence—skilled in their sports—as credulous and headlong in boyhood, and as fitful and varied in manhood, as the wildest—he had felt with them, and must ever sympathise with them. Endowed with the highest dramatic genius, he has represented their love and generosity, their wrath and negligence, their crimes and virtues, as a hearty peasant—not ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... night was fitful, and when Victoria was reached at last, he was conscious of some bodily fatigue. However, his mind was never slow to receive impressions, and at the sight of the scaffolding, he whipped out his note-book ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... with the dead, Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace, Than on the torture of the mind to lie In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave; After life's fitful fever he sleeps well: Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison, Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing, Can touch ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... next room came the fitful, awkward sounds of a five-finger exercise from Ray. Clara listened with silent contempt to this torrent of abuse. She knew that it was false that the more Jonah gave her, the more she spent on ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... robe and the crown hid all but the face and tress of the lustrous brown hair,—but that face! Had not King Hephaestos wrought every line of clear Phoenician glass, then touched them with snow and rose, and shot through all the ichor of life? Perhaps there was a fitful fire in the dark eyes that awaited the husband's coming, or a slight twitching of the impatient lips. But nothing disturbed the high-born repose of face and figure. Hermione was indeed the worthy daughter of a noble house, and happy the man who ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... with respect to the more fitful and fantastic expression of the "Italian Gothic," our author is again to be blamed for his loose assumption, from the least reflecting of preceding writers, of this general term, as if the pointed buildings of Italy could in any wise be arranged in one class, or criticised in general terms. ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... at the Arts course in Edinburgh University came to an end, and he began formal, though fitful, preparation for the ministry of the Church of Scotland by enrolling himself, on November 16th of the same year, as a student at its Divinity Hall. In the summer of 1814 he competed successfully at Dumfries for the mathematical mastership of Annan Academy. The post was worth only between ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... after a discursive, fitful, but very spicy preface of ten minutes' duration, "why they couldn't find somethin' I hed done, instead of tuckin' some other feller's job on me? I hev had difficulties, but this here one's just one more than I knows on. Like 'nuff some galoot'll be mean 'nuff to try ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... servants, that he had once dragged the instrument forth from its case when he had thought the house to be nearly deserted; and a wail of sounds had been heard, very low, very short-lived, recurring now and again at fitful intervals. He had at those times attempted to play, as though with a muffled bow,—so that none should know of his vanity and folly. Then there had been further consultations at the deanery, and it had been again agreed that it would be best to say nothing ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... tiles and finials rattled in the wind, that was dying away in fitful gusts; but Auld Jock heard nothing. In fancy he was away on the braes, in the shy sun and wild wet of April weather. Shepherds were shouting, sheepdogs barking, ewes bleating, and a wee puppy, still unnamed, scampering at his heels in the swift, dramatic days of lambing time. And so, presently, ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... room when Caw brought tea to his master. Fitful gleams from the fire touched the latter's face, which had grown haggard. The ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... dressing; and the wreath upon her head encircled the same cold and steady brow. But it would have been better to have seen its leaves and flowers reft into fragments by her passionate hand, or rendered shapeless by the fitful searches of a throbbing and bewildered brain for any resting-place, than adorning such tranquillity. So obdurate, so unapproachable, so unrelenting, one would have thought that nothing could soften such a woman's nature, and that everything in life ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... stone fly into a dozen pieces. Steady turning is what the grinders like, and any boy who turns steadily, so as to give an even motion to the stone, will be much praised, and will be in demand. I advise any boy who desires to do this sort of work to turn steadily. If he does it by jerks and in a fitful manner, the "hired men" will be very apt to dispense with his services and turn ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... my studies and remained with my father, who, naturally, was greatly changed. Always of a sedate, taciturn disposition, he now fell into so deep a dejection that nothing could hold his attention, yet anything—a footfall, the sudden closing of a door—aroused in him a fitful interest; one might have called it an apprehension. At any small surprise of the senses he would start visibly and sometimes turn pale, then relapse into a melancholy apathy deeper than before. I suppose he was what ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... As to his dinner, perhaps he could go to the hotel at Rough-and-Ready. He worked on until the night had well advanced. Then, overcome with a certain restlessness that disturbed him, he was forced to put his books and papers away. It had begun to blow in fitful gusts, and occasionally the rain was driven softly across the panes like the passing of childish fingers. This disturbed him more than the monotony of silence, for he was not a nervous man. He seldom read a book, and the county paper furnished him only the financial and mercantile ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... the blue, Till, as a fountain that has reached its height Falls back in sprays of light Slowly dissolved, so that enrapturing lay, Divinely melts away Through tremulous spaces to a music-mist, Soon by the fitful breeze How gently kissed Into ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... the Scholar, the Gypsy, and the Priest has after his fitful hour come into his own, and there abides securely. Borrow's books,—carelessly written, impatient, petulant, in parts repellant,—have been found so full of the elixir of life, of the charm of existence, of the glory of motion, so instinct with character, and mood, and wayward fancy, that their ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... the war was scarcely broken by the fitful, armistice. The death of John of Cleve, an event almost simultaneous with the conclusion of the Truce, seemed to those gifted with political vision the necessary precursor of a new and more ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Tapp awoke after not more than one hour of fitful sleep. The door to the garage apartment shook under the tattoo of a heavy fist. Miss Tapp's heart thudded somewhere inside her thirty-eight-inch bosom. She lay rigid in darkness penetrated only by the glimmer of a distant ...
— Stopover Planet • Robert E. Gilbert
... bowed, Like the Banshee in her shroud, Doth the moon her spectral shadow o'er some silent gravestone throw; Then moans the fitful wail, And the wanderer grows pale, Till at morning fades the phantom of the Spirit ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... above his head in which the cocoanut oil sputtered and burned and cast a fitful half-light about the ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... subject to great uncertainties, because, the land being very high, the wind could not be depended on. It might blow in from the sea, but if so it would be by daylight, which would deprive the attack of the benefits of a surprise; while at night the land wind was too fitful and unreliable to assure the ships reaching their anchorage before the enemy could discover them, and have time for adequate ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... multitudes, and the hoarse bellowing of the guns; and then the hiding of it all under a rolling firmament of smoke—a firmament through which veiled vacancies appeared for a moment now and then, giving fitful dim glimpses of the wild tragedy enacting beyond; and always at these times one caught sight of that slight figure in white mail which was the center and soul of our hope and trust, and whenever we saw that, with its back to us and its face to the fight, we knew that all was well. At last a great ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... youth were dreams, but the waking was more glorious than they. They were only dreams,—fitful, flitting, fragmentary visions of the coming day. The shallow joys, the capricious pleasures, the wavering sunshine of infancy have deepened into virtues, graces, heroisms. We have the bold outlook of calm, self-confident courage, the strong fortitude of endurance, the imperial magnificence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... her own salvation that she rode. All was well as yet. The lights of the camp were twinkling like a band of ribbon across the hillside, and there was silence as deep as death everywhere, except when the wind came booming down the valley in fitful gusts, and bowed the tops of the lonely and stunted trees. Upwards she mounted, and the road grew rougher. Her horse's eyes were streaked with blood, his nostrils quivered. Still she urged him on. A little ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... on this emotional basis of dreams, but pass to the consideration of the second and objective kind of unity which characterizes many of our more elaborate dream-performances. In spite of all that is fitful and grotesque in dream-combination, it still preserves a distant resemblance to our actual experience. Though no dream reproduces a particular incident or chain of incidents in this experience, though the dream-fancy invariably transforms the particular objects, relations, ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... sailing beneath the scorching sun that beat down from the pale blue of the cloudless sky upon a sea hardly less blue in its greater depths. Only the hope that they would soon reach Timor seemed to rouse them from a state of babbling delirium or fitful slumber. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... had sunk into a fitful breeze and the white sail moved very slowly. The tide was in, and the water lapped with a cooling sound against the dark green piles. In the distance the blue of the bay melted into the blue of the sky, while the nearer waters mirrored every passing gull, the masts of the fishing ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... elan of John of Bologna's Mercury,—a lift to them, as if they had on winged sandals, like the herald of the Gods. I hear her singing sometimes; and though she evidently is not trained, yet is there a wild sweetness in her fitful and sometimes fantastic melodies,—such as can come only from the inspiration of the moment,—strangely enough, reminding me of those long passages I have heard from my little neighbor's room, yet of different tone, and by no means to be mistaken ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... comely cheeks, Wind-play tossed their hair, Creeping things among the grass Stroked them here and there; Meggan piped a merry note, A fitful, wayward lay, While shrill as bird on topmost twig Piped merry ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... arguments upon one side without attending to those upon the other, and 'the weaker the evidence the greater the merit in believing.'[623] The temper is depraved not only by the antipathies generated, but by the 'fitful and intermittent character' ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen |
