"Fitful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when Myles was awakened from a fitful sleep by Gascoyne bringing in his dinner, but, as might be supposed, he had but little hunger, and ate sparingly. He had hardly ended his frugal meal before his two squires of honor came in, followed by a servant carrying the garments for the coming ceremony. He saluted them gravely, and then arising, ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... way through the little fore yard. No one was about. The veranda was deserted. There was Edith's work-basket; there were the baby's playthings. The door stood open, and as he approached it he heard singing—not singing, either, but a fitful sort of recitation, with the occasional notes of an accompaniment struck as if in absence of mind. The tune he knew, and as he passed through the first room towards the sitting-room that looked on the sea he ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... grew dark, the men lighted a couple of flaring resinous torches, which Mr. Carter had sent for towards dusk, and worked, by the patches of fitful light which these torches threw upon the water. I still walked up and down under the dripping trees, in the darkness, as I had walked in the light; and once when I was farthest from the red glare of the torches, a strange fancy took possession of me. In amongst the dim ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... voices of the night are mute Beneath the moon's eclipse; The silence of the fitful flute Is in the dying lips! The silence of my lonely heart Is kept for ever more In the lull Of the waves Of a ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... in gloomy silence. Gordon, Smith and Hart began a fitful conversation, but a message was immediately passed up to them from Mr. Whitehead, who sat at the bottom of one of the tables, to stop talking. At the end of tea the guests filed ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... sons may die in tens of thousands for her; but never, I believe, as long as the men of the two countries remain what they are, will Ireland recover her independence, for, in the long run, English perseverance and determination will overcome the fitful courage of the Irish. I grieve that I should say it. I mourn that I feel it my duty to repress rather than to encourage the eager desire of my people to draw the sword and strike for freedom; but ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... thoughts Mr. Eglantine fell asleep; but it was evident that the idea of seeing Morgiana once more agitated him considerably, else why should he have been at the pains of preparing so much heroism? His sleep was exceedingly fitful and troubled; he saw Morgiana in a hundred shapes; he dreamed that he was dressing her hair; that he was riding with her to Richmond; that the horse turned into a dragon, and Morgiana into Woolsey, ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... tinctured with superstitious fears. Here then, in the lonely wilderness, far from their beloved parents and social hearth, with no visible arm to protect them from danger, none to encourage or to cheer them, can it be matter of surprise if they started with terror-blanched cheeks at every fitful breeze that rustled the leaves or waved the branches above them? The gay and lively Louis, blithe as any wild bird in the bright sunlight, was the most easily oppressed by this strange superstitious ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... fitful as the wind, they are as fleeting as the clouds," said Thugut, shrugging his shoulders. "But I believe you, Victoria, for you are no woman like other women. If I were ever to discover that you had deceived me, I should take ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... watch 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 ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... those, who regard love as of necessity a mere Impulse; a thing not subject in any wise to human control, but fitful, an outbreaker, a tyrant. They can govern other emotions and sentiments. Anger, envy, jealousy, resentment, pride, they believe capable of being moderated, if not wholly suppressed. But love is lawless. Its mandates must be obeyed, and that instantly; they may not ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... gates, and journeyed toward the monastery with bowed head and dejected mien. The gates remained open, and as darkness fell, a lighted torch was thrust in a wrought iron receptacle near the entrance at the outside, throwing a fitful, flickering glare under the archway and into the deserted court. Within, all was silent as the ruined castle is to-day, save only the tinkling sound of the clear waters of the effervescing spring as it flowed over the stones and trickled down to disappear under ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... nothing of this. The hour of her tryst with me was approaching. In the darkness of her room as she lay bound and gagged on her couch, she could see the fitful moonlight rising ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... you had been born for naught. Save like the brutes to perish. What do they But crop the grass and die? Ye have been taught A nobler lesson—that within the clay, Upon the minds high altar, burns a ray Flashed from Divinity—and shall it shine Fitful and feebly? Shall it die away, Because, forsooth, no priest is at the shrine? Go ye with learning's lamp and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... see the tears of joy and gratitude that filled the eyes of the poor fellows, who had given themselves up for lost as they watched the movements of their comrades while they prepared food for them; and the broken, fitful conversation was mingled strangely with alternate touches of fun and deep feeling, indicating the conflicting emotions ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... "primitive man," says: "Doubtless he was lower than the lowest of the savages of today—a powerful, cunning biped, with keen sense organs always sharper, in virtue of constant exercise, in the savage than in the civilized man (who supplements them by science), strong instincts, uncontrolled and fitful emotions, small faculty of wonder, and nascent reasoning power; unable to forecast tomorrow, or to comprehend yesterday, living from hand to mouth on the wild products of Nature, clothed in skin and bark, or daubed with clay, and finding shelter in trees and caves; ignorant of ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... 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 door-way forming a frame for a picture ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... French consular authorities in Tientsin filed a request to have their Concession extended on the ground that they were becoming cramped. The Chinese authorities, although not wishing to grant the request and indeed ignoring it for a long time, were finally induced to begin fitful negotiations; and in October, 1916, after having passed through various processes of alteration, reduction, and re-statement during the interval of fourteen years, the issue had been so fined down that a ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... expression, he wrote about to Addie. She also wrote to her absent friend, but in briefer snatches, a meagreness to her reasons for which he had long since assented. She had other play for her pen as well as, fortunately, other remuneration; a regular correspondence for a "prominent Boston paper," fitful connexions with public sheets perhaps also in cases fitful, and a mind above all engrossed at times, to the exclusion of everything else, with the study of the short story. This last was what she had mainly come out to go into, two or three years after he had found himself engulfed ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... remembered with extraordinary tenacity everything she had acquired. But she was neither tender nor deferential, and to induce her to study you could not depend on the affections, but only on her intelligence. So she was often fitful, capricious, or provoking, and her mother, who, though accomplished and eager, had neither the method nor the self-restraint of Mr. Ferrars, was often annoyed and irritable. Then there were scenes, or rather ebullitions on one side, for Myra was always unmoved and enraging from her total ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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 ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... Pathology has advance been so fitful and interrupted as in that dealing with blood changes in various forms of disease, though none now offers a field that promises such an abundant return for an equal ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... than she would confess, Sylvia fell asleep at once, despite the novelty of her situation and the noises that fill a summer night with fitful rustlings and tones. How long she slept she did not know, but woke suddenly and sat erect with that curious thrill which sometimes startles one out of deepest slumber, and is often the forerunner of some dread or danger. She felt this hot tingle ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... next Monday morning. It was the Doctor's day to be early at the hospital, and he had had a summons to see some one on the way, so that he was gone before breakfast, when Carey's attempts to discuss her happy day in the country met with such odd, fitful answers; for, in fact, Mrs. Brownlow could not trust herself to talk, and had no sooner done breakfast than she went off to her housekeeping affairs and others, which she managed ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... now evening. The sun shot a languid and fitful ray athwart the vapours gathering to receive him, and its light shone on the full couch of the invalid. The astrologer was sitting apart, in profound meditation. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... where Mr. Rayne spent his long, thoughtful night under the gaslight with Robert Edgeworth's letter lying between his numbed fingers. The fire burns there cheerfully now—there is no other light than that cast by the fitful flames which leap and dwindle in shadows through the twilight that lingers still, huge fanciful phantoms skipping over the walls and the ceiling and floor, a little flickering subdued light that trembles on the great arm chairs. "Flo" is curled up, with both ends saluting one ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... psychical, or mental, or artificial, introducing various more or less capricious changes that are supposed to be emendations; and its operation is, to some extent, uncertain and fitful."[1] ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... his throat, very softly and rhythmically, broken only by interruptions in which a last instinctive effort appeared to revive the flickering life of the intelligence, and to rouse fitful gleams of consciousness in the ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... gathering suspicions had something of the unreal quality of a nightmare. Aunt Isabel was reading aloud to Uncle Charlie out of the Sunday paper. Beautiful! The sunset was carrying away its gold like some bold knight with his captured, streaming-tressed lady. The fitful breeze whispered in the rhythm of olden ballads. Unseen church bells sent long-drawn cadences across the evening hush. And the little stars quivered into being, to peer at the young poignancy of feeling which cannot know what it contributes to ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... 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 ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... celebrated organ. The organist performed a piece descriptive of a storm. We resigned ourselves to the illusion. Low, mysterious wailings, swelling, dying away in the distance, seeming at first exceedingly remote, drew gradually near. Fitful sighings and sobbings rose, as of gusts of wind; then low, smothered roarings. Anon came flashes of lightning, rattling hail, and driving rain, succeeded by bursts of storm, and howlings of a hurricane—fierce, furious, frightful. I felt myself lost in a snow storm in winter, on ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the maple-leaves made a little island of sombre green, around which more vivid grasses rippled and dimpled under the fitful spring breezes. And everywhere leaves lisped to one another, and birds shrilled insistently. It was ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... Pearl was asleep the face of the heavens was darkened with storm-clouds. Great rolling masses came up from the west, shot through with flashes of lightening, and the heavy silence was more ominous than the loudest thunder would have been. The wind began in the hills, gusty and fitful at first, then bursting with violence over the plain below. There was a cutting whine in it, like the whang of stretched steel, fateful, deadly as the singing of bullets, chilling the farmer's heart, for he knows it ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... political movement Lollardry had ceased to exist, and little remained of the directly religious impulse given by Wycliffe beyond a vague restlessness and discontent with the system of the Church. But weak and fitful as was the life of Lollardry the prosecutions whose records lie scattered over the bishops' registers failed wholly to kill it. We see groups meeting here and there to read "in a great book of heresy all one night certain chapters of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... game on a neighboring rancho, some bent on courting. Pedro and Joe lay, faces down, under the shade of the trees about the tenaya, the stone cistern into which water was pumped by the windmills that worked in the fitful breezes. ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... I walked along in no very happy frame of mind, the more so, as the rising wind and flying wrack of clouds above (through which a watery moon had peeped at fitful intervals) seemed to presage a wild night. It needed but this to make my misery the more complete, for, as far as I could tell, if I slept at all (and I was already very weary), it must, of necessity, be ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... is it with us and Anatole France. We may have little in common with his thought—the community we often imagine comes of self-deception—but it is sweet for us to inhabit his mind for a while. His touch is potent to soothe our fitful fevers. ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... we were slowly starving on our feet, we were wet through continuously, and such sleep as we got was broken and fitful. Before we had been four days out we were reduced to gaunt, tattered, dirty scarecrows. We staggered as we walked and sometimes one of us would drop on the road through sheer weakness. Through it all we kept up our frenzy for speed and it was surprising how much ground ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... their light flashing across Madame's face showed her to be alert, attentive and sleepless. On crossing the Pont Napoleon I saw that the sky behind the towers of Notre Dame was already of a pearly grey. The dawn was indeed at hand, and the great city, wrapped in a brief and fitful slumber, would soon be rousing itself to another day of gaiety and tears, of work and ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... 'tis the bluebird's venturous strain High on the old fringed elm at the gate— Sweet-voiced, valiant on the swaying bough, Alert, elate, Dodging the fitful spits of snow, New England's poet-laureate Telling us Spring has come ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... lamented that antiquarian zeal is so often diverted from subjects of real to those of merely fanciful interest. The mercurial young gentlemen who addict themselves to that exciting department of letters are open to censure as being too fitful, too prone to flit, bee-like, from flower to flower, now lighting momentarily upon an indecipherable tombstone, now perching upon a rusty morion, here dipping into crumbling palimpsests, there turning ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... as corollary to it a CONFEDERATION OF BAR, which quite dimmed the fame of Radom, and indeed of all Confederations prior or posterior! As the Confederation of Bar and its Doings, or rather sufferings and tragical misdoings and undoings, still hang like fitful spectralities, or historical shadows, of a vague ghastly complexion, in the human memory, one asks at least: Since they were on this Planet, tell us where? Bar is in the Waiwodship Podol (what we call Podolia), some 400 miles southeast of Warsaw; not ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... fell, and the battle ceased, save for the fitful boom of cannon along the lines, Dick sank against an earthwork, exhausted. He panted for breath and was without the power to move. He regarded vaguely the moving lights that had begun to show in the darkness, and he heard without comprehension ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... waiting-room, a monument of patient resignation to his fate. His hands were bunched on the head of his walking-stick, his chin propped on his hands; his eyes were bent on a certain spot on the carpet with a fixed stare. And when Allerdyke entered he sprang up as if roused from a fitful slumber. ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... sat they, where the silvery birches grow, And th' eternal sun of midnight bathed them in its fitful glow— She a maid of eighteen summers, fresh and fair as Norway's spring; Tall and dark-browed he, like pine-woods in whose gloom the Hulders[1] sing, When in silence, Deep-toned silence, Night ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... land, seeking to know his destiny. All day he had journeyed thitherward, and the dusk had already fallen ere he reached the sacred spot. Jette sat on the glimmering altar-steps, clad in a flowing white robe, while on the altar itself burned a faint and fitful flame. The tall, slender trees, showing fantastic and ghostly in the fading light, made a fitting background for the gleaming shrine; and the elusive, unearthly beauty of the priestess was quite in keeping with the magic scene. Her mantle of austerity had fallen from her; she had forgotten ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... cheese reminded him at the same instant that he had to support a widow with two children. The Signora Piaveni lived in Milan, and the count her father visited her twice during the summer months, and wrote to her from his fitful Winter residences in various capital cities, to report progress in the settled scheme for the recovery of Giacomo's property, as well for his widow as for the heirs of his body. 'It is a duty,' Count Serabiglione said emphatically. 'My daughter can entertain no proposal until her children are duly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... quietly dismissed the matter from their minds and rode slowly back to the roadway with scarce a thought for the business in hand. Abel Cumshaw would have whistled had he dared; as it was he hummed softly to himself. The moon was now well up in the heavens, and its fitful light creeping through the leafy roof above, made gibbering ghosts of the swaying gums. Mr. Abel Cumshaw and his companion, Jack Bradby, had been brought up in the Australian bush, their nerves were as steady as a rock, and where others saw ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... will," replied Sandy thoughtfully, "mebbe I will." He paused reflectively a few moments while he filled and lighted his pipe. The rain still beat steadily against the roof and windows of the bunkhouse, but the wind now came only in fitful gusts. ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... had a language in common. For they were men from Africa and Italy, from France, Germany, Poland, Spain, and Holland. The majority of them were recruits, raw and of poor physique. All were fugitives, flying before those dread Cossacks whose "hurrah! hurrah!"—the Arabic "kill! kill!"—haunted their fitful sleep at night. They came to Dantzig not to fight, but to lie down and rest. They were the last of the great army—the reinforcements dragged to the frontier which many of them had never crossed. For those who had ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... Lady of the silver'd lakes, Chaste Goddess of the sweet, still shrines. The jocund river fitful makes, By sudden, deep gloom'd brakes, Close shelter'd by close weft and woof of vine, Spilling a shadow gloomy-rich as wine, Into the silver throne where thou dost sit, Thy silken leaves all dusky round ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... which the empress had granted to the Countess Margaret had passed away, and the eve of her bridal had dawned. During those eight eventful days the countess had been more fitful than ever, and her ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... cabin window, and he lay broad awake counting the hours that must wear themselves out before he could set foot on English ground. As the time of his arrival drew nearer, his mind grew restless and fitful, now full of hope and happy visions of his meeting with Marian, now weighed down by the ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... the ground, nor faint, nor give vent to noisy passion. But the rich colour, which before had been varying and fitful, deserted her cheek, and left it of an ashen whiteness; the lips, too, grew tightly compressed, and her small fingers, interlaced, were clasped with strained and convulsive energy, so that the quivering of the very arms was perceptible. ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be observed that I have not said—and I certainly do not mean—that the Scriptures themselves have been permanently corrupted either by friend or foe. Error was fitful and uncertain, and was contradicted by other error: besides that it sank eventually before a manifold witness to the truth. Nevertheless, certain manuscripts belonging to a few small groups—particular copies of a Version—individual Fathers or Doctors of the Church,—these do, to the present hour, ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... 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 ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... the captain returned on deck a marked change had taken place in the weather. Dark clouds were gathering in the northern horizon, and fitful gusts of wind came sweeping over the ocean, stirring up its hitherto calm surface, and sending the spoon-drift flying rapidly over it. Still the chase kept her canvas set, having altered her course ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... always had his breakfast under this tree. Occasionally one other person breakfasted with him, even Savary dit Detricand, whom however he met less frequently than many people of the town, though they lived in the same house. Detricand was but a fitful lodger, absent at times for a month or so, and running up bills for food and wine, of which payment was never summarily demanded by Mattingley, for some day or other he always paid. When he did, he never questioned the bill, and, what was most important, whether he was sober or "warm ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... vegetation, this fitful nervous groping, is nevertheless a sign of life, out of which art emerges by discipline and by a gradual application to real issues. An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world; he is a highly suggestible mind hypnotised by reality. Even barbaric genius ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... never awoke. The maidservants who held her hands felt them grow gradually cold. The Duchess was dead. After life's fitful fever, she had found rest. Thus died, in the sixty-ninth year of her life Elizabeth, Duchess of Kingston, who had drunk deep of life's cup of pleasure; who had alternately shocked and dazzled the world; and who had found that the greatest triumphs of her beauty and the most prodigal ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... a fitful and uncertain admiration for Disraeli. Gladstone he never liked or trusted, and did not take the trouble to understand. He had been brought up to despise oratory, he had caught from Carlyle a horror of democracy, he disliked the Anglo-Catholic party in the Church of England, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... winning the girl's confidence, learned almost everything—learned that there was an impediment to his marrying, and that Rosamond believed that impediment to be hereditary insanity—learned that he was often fitful and gloomy, treating his ward sometimes with coldness, and again with the utmost tenderness. Of the interview in the library Rosamond did not tell, but she told of everything else—of his refusing to let her come to the Springs and then compelling her, against her will, to go; ...
— Rosamond - or, The Youthful Error • Mary J. Holmes
... it was a chilly night in early spring. The moon was hidden by clouds, so that one could see but a short distance on the open prairie. A fitful wind was blowing, adding to the discomfort of outdoors, and causing the interior of the cabin to be the more comfortable ...
— The Great Cattle Trail • Edward S. Ellis
... awhile, as languidly The head of Argo fell off toward the sea, And through the water she began to go; For from the land a fitful wind did blow, That, dallying with the many-colored sail, Would sometimes swell it out and sometimes fail, As nigh the east side of the bay they drew; Then o'er the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... sleeping comrade, for from apparently quite near at hand came the boom of artillery, a sound which for the moment drowned all others, even the hoarse, harshly uttered words of command, as large bodies of men swung past the doorway of the hut, and the fitful bugle-calls which a minute before had ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... on, the heavy firing of the Turks ceased, and a dead stillness followed the terrible boom of cannon. The streets were ploughed with balls, the ashes of many a consumed building were scattered about by the wind, while here and there a fitful blaze was seen issuing from a shapeless mass that once had been the stately home of some proud Austrian noble. Pale, ghastly figures wandered among the ruins, searching for food, which, alas! they rarely found. ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... hard by fits and starts, for whatever possessed his mind he always pursued with ardour, and to Cecil was fond of inveighing against his useless, unsatisfying life. In spite of her infatuation, though, she judged him more truly than most people, and perceived that his fitful remorse was chiefly occasioned by pressure of money matters, and seldom ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... war, overwhelmed Felix Aquila with ridicule when they found him poring over these relics, and being of a proud and susceptible spirit, they so far succeeded that he abandoned the open pursuit of such studies, and stole his knowledge by fitful glances when there was no one near. As among the ancients learning was esteemed above all things, so now, by a species of contrast, it was of all things ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... Ralph Waldo Emerson," he writes, "is not entirely new in England: distinguished travellers bring us tidings of such a man; fractions of his writings have found their way into the hands of the curious here; fitful hints that there is, in New England, some spiritual notability called Emerson, glide through Reviews and Magazines. Whether these hints were true or not true, readers are now to judge ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... lack of news from him, in another sense, would have to be explained to Una sooner or later for a fitful correspondence was maintained between brother and sister—and O'Moy dreaded the moment when this explanation must be made. Lacking invention, he applied to Tremayne for assistance, and Tremayne glumly supplied him with the necessary lie that should meet ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... 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 ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... you feel it in your feet that you've got to go, Marcella," said Aunt Janet calmly. The wind roared down the chimney and sent fitful puffs of smoke out into the room. "If I tried to stop you, you'd go ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... obviously the more important thing. The sky is free, the fields limitless; and the sun merges them into one blazing whole. In the midst of this, man seems so trivial. He comes and goes, like the ferry-boat, from this shore to the other; the babbling hum of his talk, the fitful echo of his song, is heard; the slight movement of his pursuit of his own petty desires is seen in the world's market-places: but how feeble, how temporary, how tragically meaningless it all seems amidst the immense aloofness of ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... night the fire engines have been busy. Water has been constantly playing on the burning ruins. At times the fire seems almost extinguished, but fitful flames suddenly break out afresh in some new quarter, and again the water and flames ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... that the morning was not far away. A few stars shone down through the sky-light. The house was still as the grave, and the only sound to break the silence was the rushing of the wind round the walls and over the roof. But this was a fitful sound, suddenly rising and as suddenly falling away again, and it only ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... love-antics on the wing, as we have seen with the black African weaver, instead of on the ground. During the spring our little white-throat (Sylvia cinerea) often rises a few feet or yards in the air above some bush, and "flutters with a fitful and fantastic motion, singing all the while, and then drops to its perch." The great English bustard throws himself into indescribably odd attitudes whilst courting the female, as has been figured by Wolf. An allied ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... "this is incredible!" and the miserable creature stood for a moment with an appalling vacancy shadowing in his countenance, which was illumed for one fitful moment with a ray of hope as he inserted his hand in his waistcoat pocket to assure himself that the diamond which he had placed in that receptacle the night before at least ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... the banquet hall. He discovered the door and descended the steps, and 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 ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... the silver strip of mountain reddening the heat lakes and the Desert air. Across the mesas, the silt dust and sand drift still whirled in fitful gusts; but the air no longer carried the scorch of burning oil. The sky that had blazed all day in fiery brass darkened and closed near to earth, a throbbing thing of the Desert night brooding over life: a oneness of space rimmed round by ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... time, as we glided in front of the Union Station, I passed out on to the platform of the car, and peered intently through the darkness. Suddenly my heart gave a great bound. There, sure enough, standing in front of the door of the waiting-room, was my uncle, plainly discernible by the fitful glare of the overhanging lamps. Before the train came to a stand-still, I sprang from the car and advanced towards him. He was looking out for me, but his eyes not being as young as mine, he did not recognize ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... And ever the fitful gusts between A sound came from the land; It was the sound of the trampling surf On the rocks and ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... way I covered a wide literary and scientific territory. Humped over my fitful register I discussed the Nebular Hypothesis. My poets and scientists not merely told me of things I had never known, they confirmed me in certain conceptions which had come to me without effort in the past. I became an evolutionist in the fullest sense, ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Hudson River by night, and at every town and village on the way vast waiting crowds were revealed by the fitful glare of torches, and dirges and hymns were sung. As the train passed into Ohio, the crowds increased in density, and the public grief seemed intensified at every step westward. The people of the great central ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... lamps are lighted, And, like phantoms grim and tall, Shadows from the fitful firelight ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... which are those of the Celtic family as a whole, appear in their history and in the scanty late remains of their literature. Two main traits include or suggest all the others: first, a vigorous but fitful emotionalism which rendered them vivacious, lovers of novelty, and brave, but ineffective in practical affairs; second, a somewhat fantastic but sincere and delicate sensitiveness to beauty. Into impetuous action they were easily hurried; but their momentary ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... spectres and goblins now stood motionless, and tall as lofty palm trees; then, as if in fits, leaped, danced, and tumbled before their evocator. The air was filled with shrill and strident cries, with the fitful moaning of the storm-wind, with the hooting of the owl, with the jackal's long wild cry, and with the hoarse gurgling of the swollen river, from whose banks the earth-slip thundered ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... through the woods came the piercing shrieks of wailing women and the mournful cries of native men, sorrowing over him who had that day fallen by my hand. These cries rang on my ears all night, startling me at every moment from my feverish and fitful slumbers. ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... valleys beyond. And so here, at Niagara, that converging rush of waters may fall down, down at once into a hell of rivers, for what the eye can see. It is glorious to watch them in their first curve over the rocks. They come green as a bank of emeralds, but with a fitful, flying color, as though conscious that in one moment more they would be dashed into spray and rise into air, pale as driven snow. The vapor rises high into the air, and is gathered there, visible always as a permanent white cloud over the cataract; ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... in some nurseries. In many it is probably a fitful game, and since the days of the Brontes there has not been a large family without its magazine. The weak point of all this literature is its commonplace. The child's effort is to write something as much like as possible to the tedious books ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... spirits that at such times only could be evoked by him from the Aidenn, close by whose portals his disturbed soul sought to forget the ills to which his constitution subjected him—close by the Aidenn which were those he loved—the Aidenn which he might never see, but in fitful glimpses, as its gates opened to receive the less fiery and more happy natures whose destiny to sin did not involve the doom of death. He seemed, except when some fitful pursuit subjugated his will and engrossed his faculties, always to bear the memory of some controlling ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... Heavy but fitful. He had scarcely lain an hour when he found himself suddenly wide awake. Love still lay breathing heavily beside him. The other lodger turned restlessly from side to side, muttering to himself, and sometimes ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... as well as his conversation than he really was, and less as a rollicking "King of Society." The gravity of Johnson's own writings tends to confirm this, as I suspect, erroneous impression. His religion was fitful and intermittent; and when once the ice was broken he enjoyed Jack Wilkes, though he refused to shake hands with Hume. I was much struck with a remark of Sir John Hawkins (excuse me if I have mentioned this to you before): "He was the most ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... kindly beams on all below— The same that shone there yestere'en, as though All things today were as they were before. And yet 'twixt now and yesterday there yawns A gulf, as wide as that which sunders joy Made perfect and grim death! How change-less e'er Is Nature—and man's life and happiness How fitful, fleeting! When I tell the tale Of my unhappy life, it is as though I listened, while another told it me, And now would stop him: "Nay, that cannot be, My friend! This woman here, that harbors dark And murderous thoughts—how can she be the same That once, long years agone, on Colchis' ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... was very occupied still and his vision clouded as he passed into the cool shade of the temple, and he did not see a small, dainty person with an impish face perched high on a broken wall, with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, and a queer, fitful, half-serious, half-bored expression in her dark eyes. Instead, seeing no one and thinking himself alone, he sat down on a low wall quite near to her and stared gloomily at the ground. Diana, not a little amused, surveyed him at her leisure. ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... after a day of terrific heat, we were lying under a thorn tree on the hot sand, and hoping for the rain that had been threatening but would not fall. There was a moon; but its light was fitful, and the dark thunder-clouds occasionally obscured it. Away over the Tatas Berg Mountains the lightning was flickering, and John and I lay watching it, and wishing the storm would break for us too. Suddenly we heard the bark of a baboon from ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... Blackwood's Magazine was 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
... by her tomb In torpor one dark night; When fitful tremours shook the doom Of cold lethargic settled gloom, That weighed ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... indefatigable in his efforts to preserve life. A vast number of passengers died in their berths; many who had managed to reach the deck were swept away by the immense waves that flooded it. One sharp cry was wafted on the chill night air, and a deadly silence prevailed, except for the fitful roaring ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... exchanged for a quick trot. And there is not even a point of comparison between his sweet sing-song, and the wavy, snow-like, spirit-like motion of Milton's loftier passages; or the gliding, pausing, fitful, river-like progress of Shakspeare's verse; or the fretted fury, and "torrent-rapture" of brave old Chapman in his translation of Homer; or the rich, long-drawn-out, slow-swimming, now soft-languishing, ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... whence they brought back the mails and a cargo of supplies, so that any arrival was an event to the Cydonians, and that of a yacht flying the English and American flags at once was enough to turn out the entire population. The fitful northerly breeze had kept us the whole afternoon in sight of the port; and it was only as sunset closed the doors of the health-office that we dropped anchor in the middle of the little harbor,—the wondering centre of attraction to a wondering town, whose folk came to assist at the sunsetting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... holds untried. For me, I've dared enough that fitful sea; Its "breach of promise" grim hath curst Both purse ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various
... fell—a brilliant green meteor—as I learned afterwards, in Bushey Park. Before the guns on the Richmond and Kingston line of hills began, there was a fitful cannonade far away in the southwest, due, I believe, to guns being fired haphazard before the black vapour ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... Great Britain had for many years covered the ocean with subsidized steamers, paying heavily for mail service until the lines were self-supporting, and withdrawing her aid only when competition could be safely defied. Congress steadily refused to enter upon any system of the same kind. Fitful aid was granted to special lines here and there, but no general system was devised, and the aid extended being temporary and accompanied sometimes by scandals in legislation was in the end ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... was wild and melancholy. The moon was nearly full, but its place in the heavens was only seen, as the masses of vapor which drove through the air occasionally opened, suffering short gleams of fitful light to fall on the scene below. A south-western wind rather moaned than sighed through the forest, and there were moments when its freshness increased, till every leaf seemed a tongue, and each low plant appeared to be endowed with the gift of speech. With the exception ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... cleared. Murky cloud split to show shining, blue-white stars and a fitful moon, that silvered the crests of the spruces and sometimes hid like a gleaming, black-threaded ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... in some places the only, supporters of religion. Even in Paris, where Freethinkers abound, the women go to church and favor the priest. Naturally, they impress their own views on the children, for while the father's influence is fitful through his absence from home, the mother's is constant and therefore permanent. Again and again the clergy have restored their broken power by the hold upon that sex which men pretend to think the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... supper and the stately old bottle which had given its bouquet to the room. Old Herbert, moving out of the shadow noiselessly and pleasantly, bowed them out, and as the vision faded one of the guests, at least, pictured the four friends on the sun porch readjusting themselves, after their fitful fever, to the gentle life of ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... bless the soldier, And God nerve him for the fight; May He lend his arm new prowess To do battle for the right. Let him feel that while he's dreaming In his fitful slumber bound, That we're praying—God watch o'er him In his ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... my dearest hasten, hasten! It is lonely here. Already Have I heard the jackals' first assembling cry, And among the purple shadows of the mangroves and the marshes Fitful echoes of ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... by my Edith's bed-side through long, weary midnight hours, and she wakes from her fitful slumbers and asks for you. 'Why does she never come to see me now? There's no arm raises me so lightly, no hand bathes my brow so gently, as hers. Will you ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... who love to linger over "The Cotter's Saturday Night," there is a touch of tender pathos in the picture. The stone floor, the bare, whitewashed walls, the peat smoldering on the hearth, sending out long, fitful streaks that dance among the rafters overhead, and the mother and son sitting there watching the coal—silent. The woman takes a small twig from a bundle of sticks, reaches over, lights it, applies it to her pipe, takes a few whiffs and passes the light ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... awe inspiring spectacle in the fitful light of the nearby camp fire. The ferocity of their fierce faces was accentuated by the upturned, bristling tiger cat's teeth which protruded from every ear; while the long feathers of the Argus pheasant waving from their war-caps, the brilliant colors of their war-coats trimmed ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... comes back with the same intensity, but little mellowed or softened with the years. The gaunt old room that had entertained so many guests, emptied of its last one, with nothing but the faint chill that had come through the opened window to remind one of their presence—the fitful light of the two candles that had begun spluttering in the tall brass sticks—Brutus with quiet adroitness clearing away the bottles and the dishes—and a sudden burst of flame from the back log in the fireplace that made his shadow jump unevenly over the opposite wall—and my ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... able to ascend the flight of stairs that led to her sixth floor, dragging herself along by the railing. One day she fell on the stairs: the other servants picked her up and carried her to her chamber. But that did not stop her; the next day she went downstairs again, with the fitful gleam of strength that invalids commonly have in the morning. She prepared mademoiselle's breakfast, made a pretence of working, and kept moving about the apartment, clinging to the chairs and dragging herself along. Mademoiselle took pity on her; ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... Frank on his cot, with blanched countenance, eyes closed, and pale lips smiling, as if in dreams. Of his two friends, Atwater and the old drummer, only one, as Seth Tucket said, remains. One was carried out last night—in a coffin his cold form is laid—life's fitful fever is ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... disappointed, owing perhaps to the dampness of the climate; for it was not until the sun was pretty high that the mists cleared away, and by noon we were generally clouded up again, so that there was seldom more than an hour or two of fitful sunshine. We searched in every direction for birds and other game, but they were very scarce. On our way I had shot the find white-headed pigeon, Ptilonopus cinctus, and the pretty little lorikeet, Trichoglossus euteles. I got a few more of these at the blossoms of the ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... is the physical meaning. It is now easy to find the mental one. You must all have felt the expression of ignoble anger in those fitful gusts of storm. There is a sense of provocation in their thin and senseless fury, wholly different from the nobler anger of the greater tempests. Also, they seem useless and unnatural, and the Greek thinks of them always as vile in malice, and opposed, therefore, to the Sons of Boreas, who ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... for the sole purpose of finding that humble grave, of assuring himself that after life's fitful fever, Genevra Lambert slept quietly, forgetful of the wrong once done to her by him. It is true he had not doubted her death before, but as seeing was believing, so now he felt sure of it, and plucking from the turf above her a little flower growing ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... 'penny readings' (in imagination), 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
... A classmate, sent to summon the lad, roused him from the fitful sleep into which he had sunk on the cold floor. His mind was no longer active. Dumbly following his preceptors at the appointed hour, he proceeded with the class to the chapel. Dimly conscious of his surroundings, his thought befogged as if in a dream, his eyes half-blinded by the gray ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... 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
... no habits of application and concentration. The system which had addressed him in exactly the same manner as it had addressed hundreds of other boys, all varying in character and capacity, had enabled him to dash through his tasks, always with fair credit and often with distinction, but in a fitful, dazzling way that had confirmed his reliance on those very qualities in himself which it had been most desirable to direct and train. They were good qualities, without which no high place can be meritoriously ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... too quickly for the young people, who were dreading the approaching separation, and Sunday afternoon found them all assembled at Mrs. Hapgood's for a farewell dinner together. But it was rather a silent, subdued party that gathered about the table; the conversation was fitful and broken by long pauses, and the jokes were rather forced and feeble; while Molly's red eyes and Florence's white cheeks showed that something was wrong. If it was bad at the table, it was worse when they all sat in the front porch after dinner, with nothing ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... calm day, with a few light showers, and fitful but unfavourable breezes. Some thirty or forty little birds, which the sailors called Mother Carey's chickens, but which were smaller and more graceful than any I have seen of that name, followed closely in ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... by, and all the while the patient sank lower and lower. The night drew on that was to end all suspense. It was a wintry one. The darkness gathered, the snow was falling, the wind wailed plaintively about the house or shook it with fitful gusts. The doctor had paid his last visit and gone away with that dismal remark to the nearest friend of the family that he "believed there was nothing more that he could do" —a remark which is always overheard by some one it is not meant ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... bade his host good-night, but his sleep was fitful and restless. The sudden passionate speech of the grave scholar had been a revelation to the boy, and whereas he had felt a desire for the Fisheries Bureau before, he knew now that it had been largely with the sense of novelty and adventure. But the professor's words had given him a new light, ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... lanterns going, and I began to look around curiously. We were in a long, vaulted passage, partly carriageway, partly footpath, perfectly bare but for the street refuse which had drifted in with eddying winds. Beyond lay the courtyard, a curious place rendered more curious still by the fitful moonlight and the flashing of four dark lanterns. The place had evidently been once a most noble palace. Opposite rose the oldest portion, a three-story wall of the time of Francis I., with a great wisteria ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... stood half open; a bogwood fire burned on a hearth somewhat less rude than the one which I had first seen, but still very little better appointed with a chimney, for thick wreaths of smoke were eddying, with every fitful gust, about the room. Close by the fire was strewed a bed of heath, intended, I supposed, for the ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... own couch, a large, four-posted affair, sleep soon overpowered the stranger; but sleep, broken and fitful! Nor did he dream only of France and of kings running away, of American land barons and of "bolters." More intrusive than these, the faces of the strollers crept in and disturbed his slumbers, not least among which were the features of the dark-eyed girl whose gown had caught as she passed through ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... experienced enough to know whether this motionless sleep, so different from the fitful, broken slumbers of the last few weeks, was a hopeful sign or not; if her strength could be kept up, the doctor had said, and so had Miss Betsey—and perhaps she ought to wake her and give her something. As she stood looking at her, her ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... winter season, Fitful, gloomy, piercing cold; Passion weaken'd, yields to reason, Man feels then himself grown old; His senses one by one have fled, His very soul ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... palls the sense; And love unchanged will cloy, And she became a bore intense Unto her love-sick boy? With fitful glimmer burnt my flame, And I grew cold and coy, At last, one morning, I became ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... woman meddling with it and spoiling it was insupportable. It was as if some reckless colourist had taken the Witch of Atlas and daubed her all over with frightful scarlet and magenta. But the trouble at her heart of hearts was the certainty that Audrey, that creature of dubious intellect and fitful emotions, would never be able to love Ted as ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... Harvey Maxwell's busy day. The ticker began to reel out jerkily its fitful coils of tape, the desk telephone had a chronic attack of buzzing. Men began to throng into the office and call at him over the railing, jovially, sharply, viciously, excitedly. Messenger boys ran in and out with messages and telegrams. The clerks in the ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... either slept not through the live-long night, Or slept in fitful trances, with a bright, Fair dream upon their eyelids: but they rose In sorrow from the pallet of repose; For the dark thought of their sad destiny Came o'er them, like a chasm of the deep sea, That was to rend their fortunes; and at eve They met again, but, silent, took their leave, As ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... 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 ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... cold and unconcerned, retired from it as soon as possible, and resumed the guidance of his little bark, which had safely borne him on many a solitary voyage. The chant of his matin hymn rose, at intervals, on the fitful breeze; and Stanhope watched him till he disappeared behind the point of land round which he had followed him ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... sweep dim against the background of stars; and the white cloud that ever floated about its summit like the ghost of dead fires was crawling down the slopes to the little town at its base. From this small but teeming capital came fitful sounds of music and of less decorous revelry, and its lights seemed to flit through the groves of palm and cocoanut trees, gently moving in the ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... and cast a crimson glow far over the sea. This appearance was accompanied by a low growling sound, as of distant thunder, and at the same time the sky above us became black, while a hot, stifling wind blew around us in fitful gusts. ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... you might fancy yourself now in the great hall of a ruined castle, now in the vast nave of a gothic cathedral with its chapels opening off it into the darkness on either hand. The illusion is strengthened by the multitude of stalactites which hang from the roof of the cavern and, glittering in the fitful glow of the torches, might be taken for burning cressets kindled to light up the revels in a baronial hall, or for holy lamps twinkling in the gloom of a dim cathedral aisle before holy images, where solitary worshippers kneel in silent devotion. ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... spaces with trays upon their heads; a tradesman's boy comes out of the corner entrance from the hostel; a cat or two stretches himself on the grass; but, for the rest, the court lies in broad sunshine; the shadows slope eastwards, and the fitful splash and trickle of the fountain asserts itself clearly above the gentle rumble of ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... 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 venture ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... always had the good fortune, which he wishes to every other traveller, of having it to himself. I think most visitors find the place rather alarming and wicked-looking. They walk about a while among the fitful figures that gleam here and there out of the great tapestry (as it were) with which the painter has hung all the walls, and then, depressed and bewildered by the portentous solemnity of these objects, by strange glimpses of unnatural scenes, by the echo of their ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... 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 sake, seemed to have become more ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... Sizers did, and were frantic with rage over what they deemed was a deliberate insult to Molly. Several young men who had come from distances to attend the birthday party had stayed over Sunday at the farmhouse, where the revelry still continued in a fitful way, due to vain attempts to relieve racking headaches by further libations. Monday morning found the dissipated crew still the guests of the Sizers, and when big Bill slowly spelled out the assertion made by ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... and discordant scream of the electric trams, the sun warm upon his face, aroused Emile from a restless, fitful sleep of a few hours. The street cries had begun to swell into a volume of sound, and at the earliest dawn the whole place teemed with stir and life. There was no hour in all the night in which Barcelona really slept. Some of the shops did not close before midnight, and ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... one." There was a struggle going on worthy the soul of this noble-minded youth. He was trying to solve a problem which vacillated between right and wrong. It was no common task, for when duty pointed the way, the form of self overshadowed the path, and showed only fitful ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... their wrists and above their knees to keep the water out. Taking in sail is no easy matter now. Every one tails on, puts his back into it, and joins the chorus of the hard-breathed chanty. The human voices sound like fitful screams of seabirds, heard in wild snatches between the volleying gusts; while overhead the sails are booming like artillery, as the spilling lines strain to get the grip. 'Now then, starboard watch, up with your sail and give the larboard watch a dressing down!' Yo—ho! Yo—hay! Yo—ho—oh! ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... trial came, The world no longer was the same. I still had pleasures:—who could live Without the healing aid they give? But, as a plant surcharg'd with rain, When radiant sunshine comes again, Just wakes from a benumbing trance, I caught a feverish, fitful glance. The dove, that for a weary time Had mourn'd the rigour of the clime, And, with its head beneath its wing, Awaited a more genial spring, Went forth again to search around, And some few leaves of olive found, ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham |
