"Loiterer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tresses flew, And high their snowy arms they threw, As echoing back with shrill acclaim, And chorus wild, the Chieftain's name; While, prompt to please, with mother's art The darling passion of his heart, The Dame called Ellen to the strand, To greet her kinsman ere he land: 'Come, loiterer, come! a Douglas thou, And shun to wreathe a victor's brow?' Reluctantly and slow, the maid The unwelcome summoning obeyed, And when a distant bugle rung, In the mid-path aside she sprung:— 'List, Allan-bane! From mainland cast I hear my father's signal blast. Be ours,' ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... are Ye, With all your wasting passions' war, To the great Strife that, like a sea, O'erswept His soul tumultuously, Whose face gleams on me like a star— A star that gleams through murky clouds— As here begirt by struggling crowds A spell-bound Loiterer I stand, Before a print-shop in the Strand? What are your eager hopes and fears Whose minutes wither men like years— Your schemes defeated or fulfill'd, To the emotions dread that thrill'd His frame on that October night, When, watching by the lonely mast, He saw on shore the moving light, And ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... that my companion's tone was changed, that his whole appearance was different. I was suddenly conscious of an irresistible conviction. I did not believe any longer that he was, like me, an idle loiterer here. I felt that his presence had a purpose, and that it was connected in some measure with the two people to whom my attention was so suddenly drawn. They were, in that somewhat heterogeneous crowd, sufficiently noticeable. The man, although he assumed the jauntiness of youth, was past middle-age, ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... As if thou wert of the same blood as the damsel!' exclaimed Hob in considerable anger, bringing down his stick. 'Away with thee, ill-bred lubber! Back to thy sheep, thou lazy loiterer! Get thee gone and ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... after carefully tending the wounded sheriff, and leaving such instructions with the Abingdon leech as he judged sufficient for his patient's well-doing, Roger Bacon again mounted his palfrey, and turned its head in the direction of Oxford. He was unwilling to be a loiterer after dark, and his beast was equally desirous to be once more comfortably housed, so that his homeward journey was accomplished even more rapidly than his morning excursion; and barely an hour had elapsed when the Friar drew the rein at the foot of the last gentle eminence, close ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... triumph in Capua. Lentulus, returning with victorious eagles, had amused the populace with the sports of the amphitheatre to an extent hitherto unknown even in that luxurious city. The shouts of revelry had died away; the roar of the lion had ceased; the last loiterer had retired from the banquet, and the lights in the palace of the victor were extinguished. The moon, piercing the tissue of fleecy clouds, silvered the dewdrop on the corselet of the Roman sentinel, ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... a whisper out of the west: "O loiterer, hasten where there waits for thee A life to build, a love therein to nest, And a man's work, serving the age ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... in front, imprest With evening twilights summer hues, While, facing thus the crimson west, The boat her silent path pursues! And see how dark the backward stream! A little moment past, so smiling! And still, perhaps, with faithless gleam, Some other loiterer beguiling. ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... discovered "what thick and sticky fluids were air and water," how crass and dull in comparison with other more subtle fluids; he added that speech had no less deceived him, seeming, as it did, to be such a perfect messenger of thought, and being after all nothing but a shuffler and a loiterer. ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... lane. The gray day had turned to a light drizzling rain, which freshened the hedgerows and the grassy borders of the by-roads, and hastened the laborers who were loading the last shocks of corn. Raffles, walking with the uneasy gait of a town loiterer obliged to do a bit of country journeying on foot, looked as incongruous amid this moist rural quiet and industry as if he had been a baboon escaped from a menagerie. But there were none to stare at him except the long-weaned calves, and none ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the way. The scene is an epitome of the world. Here crouches a Chinese mendicant, there glides an Italian image-vender; a Swedish sailor is hard pressed by a smoking Cuban, and a Hungarian officer is flanked by a French loiterer; here leers a wanton, there moans a waif; now passes an Irish funeral procession, and again long files of Teutonic "Turners"; the wistful eyes of a beggar stare at the piles of gold in the money-changer's show-window; a sister of charity walks beside a Jewish Rabbi; then comes a brawny negro, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... can tell me whether he is generally a loiterer on duty. I do not inquire whether he is a laggard in his duty to you, but whether, mounted on a good hunter, he could get over twenty miles, in eight or ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... girl's countenance; but the reflective and observant traveller is not to be encountered very often in this age of excursionists; and Maria and her goat may roam the highways and byways for a long time before she will find any dreamy loiterer with a mind attuned ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... open-mouthed. It was some relief to the doctor's feelings, in the excitement of the moment, to rush to the window and throw it open, admitting a gust of chill December air, penetrating enough to search to the bones of the fireside loiterer. Fred was father enough to turn with anxiety to the child. But his trembling nervous fingers and bemused eyes could make nothing of the "case" thus so suddenly brought before him. He turned fiercely and vacantly upon his wife and demanded why everything was suffered ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... Subject with them to darkness and decay, But something absolute, something beyond, Oft met like tender orbs that seem to peer From pale horizons, luminous behind Some fringe of tinted cloud at close of day; And in this flood of the reviving year, When to the loiterer by sylvan streams, Deep in those cares that make Youth loveliest, Nature in every common aspect seems To comment on the burden in his breast — The joys he covets and the dreams he dreams — One then with all beneath the radiant skies That laughs with him or sighs, ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... to this effect,—that he was an indolent, dreamy, frolicsome creature, with a mortal enmity to books, supplemented by a passionate regard for fishing-rods and shot-guns; disorderly in dress, slouching, vagrant, unambitious; a roamer in woods, a loiterer on river-banks; having more tastes and aspirations in common with trappers and frontiersmen than with the toilers of civilized life; giving no hint nor token, by word or act, of the possession of any intellectual gift that ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... tha'rt about!" responded a stout loiterer in our path. "Or I'll take thy ears home for my ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... yesterday, Who bore me gifts of attar and of myrrh, And leaves of roses delicate that were Sprung from a garden-close in far Cathay; While I, unheeding, let them pass their way Nor cared for all the gifts they might confer, Watching in vain for one dear loiterer, Who never dreamed adown my ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... from the bazaars, on higher ground, and though it is not horm we found it less easy to see than the more famous mosques, since the Christian loiterer in its doorways is more quickly noticed. The Fazi are not yet used to seeing unbelievers near their sacred places. It is only in the tumult and confusion of the souks that one can linger on the edge of the inner mysteries ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... gate into the black canyon of the lane. Silence and darkness. Not a loiterer, only one of the furtive starved dogs, slinking ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... he was no loiterer. In three years after his settlement in London he had produced the first volume of the Decline and Fall: an amount of diligence which will not be underrated by those who appreciate the vast difference between ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... then fell plashing back, sprinkling the flowers and the grass with sparkling moisture. Gay butterflies fluttered hither and thither, sipping sweets from the honey-laden flowers. Under the trees stood marble statues gleaming white through the shadows; and seats in sheltered nooks invited the loiterer to rest and listen to the concert of the myriad birds that made their happy homes in this ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... waken; loiterer, hasten; what thy task is understand: Thou art here to purchase substance, and the price is ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... seized with the fit of ecstasy that results in this lyric burst in the air, as I described in my first book, "Wake Robin," over thirty years ago, is the oven-bird, or wood-accentor—the golden-crowned thrush of the old ornithologists. Every loiterer about the woods knows this pretty, speckled-breasted, olive-backed little bird, which walks along over the dry leaves a few yards from him, moving its head as it walks, like a miniature domestic fowl. Most birds are very stiff-necked, like ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... to the yellow school. There was no sentry, and a queer air of forlornness seemed to pervade. We asked a loiterer for the colonel's office. He pointed. We climbed yet another stair and found a pair of large rooms; they were empty. Town papers were scattered on the floor, ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... loiterer's scowling eyes caught sight of the sergeant's gold teeth. His cupidity was aroused. Raising his brass-bound old whipstock he struck at the prisoner's mouth to knock out the shining prize. But the ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... lift them almost out of water. Visions of ocean, the guns, falling birds, and the hard winter distract the poor mother. She flutters wildly about the brood, now leading, now bravely facing the monster; now pushing along some weak little loiterer, now floundering near the canoe as if wounded, to attract attention from the young. But they double the point at last, and hide away under the alders. The canoe glides by and makes no effort to find them. Silence is again over ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... a man named Thord, who lived at Hoefdi on Hoefdi-strands. He married Fridgerd, daughter of Thori the Loiterer and Fridgerd, daughter of Kiarval the King of the Irish. Thord was a son of Biorn Chestbutter, son of Thorvald Spine, Asleik's son, the son of Biorn Iron-side, the son of Ragnar Shaggy-breeks. They had a son named Snorri. ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... conceit, and I lose the respect for you which at first your garb engendered in my mind. Do your work manfully, and flatter not yourself that your most strenuous efforts are able to cross the design of the Almighty. My own poor belief is that He has patience with any but a coward and a loiterer." ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... Returning from the post office, he kept a sharp eye for the unknown loiterer, but saw him not. He even walked quickly to the bend of the road, but ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... twinkles with colored lights. Here is that famous artificial tree which has so often been described. It is so constructed with root, trunk and branch, leaf and bud as to deceive the most practiced eye. Its shade, with an inviting seat placed beneath it, lures the loiterer, through these Eden groves, to approach and rest. The moment he takes his seat he presses a spring which converts the tree into a shower bath, and from every twig jets of water in a cloud of ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... own father, had, when a very young man, at St. John's College, Oxford, been the originator and chief supporter of a periodical paper called 'The Loiterer,' written somewhat on the plan of the 'Spectator' and its successors, but nearly confined to subjects connected with the University. In after life he used to speak very slightingly of this early work, which he had the better right to do, as, ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... class, was made of glass instead of oiled paper, which supplied its place in the humbler tenements, till they were out of sight. The drum had some time before ceased its sonorous rattle, indicating thereby that the services had commenced, and the streets were bare of the last loiterer. Spikeman then resumed his seat, listening and glancing occasionally at the door, as if he was expecting some one to enter. At last, as if tired of waiting, he rose, and going to the door, called softly, "Prudence." No answer was returned, and in tones a little raised he called again. ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... play the loiterer: 'tis enough to note That here in dwarf proportions were expressed The limbs of the great world; its eager strifes Collaterally pourtrayed, as in mock fight, 585 A tournament of blows, some hardly dealt Though short of mortal combat; ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... passed the Naito[u] Shinjuku quarter. Almost as great, if of different kind, was the woman's curiosity at sight of the caged beauties, waiting the summons of those far better supplied with cash than her own spouse. Finally in indignation she dragged away the loiterer; and muttering rebuke followed after the jingle of the rings on his pilgrim's staff. They were passing through the Go Bancho[u], along the long stretch of yashiki wall. From a postern gate came forth a woman. The light of her lantern fell on the man and his equipment—"Oya! ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... the linen hung on poles between the elms, and once Frank saw the provoking boy hide behind the cricketers' tent and remain watching the match. For half an hour the question—letters or no letters—hung in suspense, and when the loiterer came, stopping every minute to see where the ball was hit to, the joy, heightened by anticipation, was great in receiving a packet of newspapers and various correspondence. Frank often went to meet him. True, he might have nothing for him, he might ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... reports of the wizard who inhabited or haunted the place, his fantastic treasures, his immense age. His windows might be seen glittering afar on stormy nights, with a blaze of golden ornaments, said the more adventurous loiterer. It was not because he was suspicious still, but in a kind of wantonness [150] of affection, and as if by way of giving yet greater zest to the luxury of their mutual trust that Duke Carl added to his announcement of the purposed place and time of the event a pretended ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... golden dreams of poetry before it settles into authorship or action! She missed the brilliant errors, the daring aspirations,—even the animated gestures and eager eloquence,—that had interested and enamoured her in the loiterer by the shores of Baiae, or amidst the tomb-like chambers of Pompeii. For the Maltravers now before her—wiser, better, nobler, even handsomer than of yore (for he was one whom manhood became better than youth)—the Frenchwoman could at any period have felt friendship without danger. It seemed ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of depressing sobriety of color; rectangularity of buildings; and excessive breadth and straightness of the gashed streets, so that there is no escape from gales and from sight of the grim sweep of land, nor any windings to coax the loiterer along, while the breadth which would be majestic in an avenue of palaces makes the low shabby shops creeping down the typical Main Street the more ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... recalls a fiery hero of the Iliad, at other times he is the grave and studious benedictine, but whether in quietude or movement, always a man with a purpose and never the loiterer or lounger, never apathetic, never a sufferer from that worst malady of the human soul—from cheerlessness ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... it gazes at, Startling the loiterer in the naked groves With unexpected beauty; for the time Of blossoms and green leaves is ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... "Loiterer or not, he is the first to return from this long and weary chase," said Ruth, breathing heavily, like one who regretted that the truth were so. "Go thou to the postern, and admit him, girl. I ordered bolts to be drawn, for I like not to leave a fortress ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... a loiterer, Lady," answered young Glendinning, "thou shalt now find me willing to press forward with double speed. Other thoughts have filled my mind, other thoughts have engaged my heart, within a brief period—and by Heaven, other ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... there is little else to praise him for. This is, of course, a survival of the old notion that style is a sort of achievement in decorative art; that fine feathers may do much for the literary bird, at least. The style of a writer like Irving—a mere loiterer in the field of letters—is at best a creditable product of artifice. To him even so much credit has not been always allowed; the clever imitator of Addison—or, as some sager say, of Goldsmith—has not even invented a manner; he ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... also, with one of the twain, the same signs of a hidden purpose that marked the farmer. The young lady's mind was straying as clearly into the shadows as that of the loiterer was fixed upon the room—nay, it could be said that she was quite conscious of his presence outside. Impatience caused her foot to beat silently on the carpet, and she more than once rose to leave the table. This proceeding was checked by ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... was not so easy hung by the heels," that aged loiterer affirmed, "shipping as he did along with the lady herself, as bo's'n ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various |
