"Desultory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... After a little more desultory conversation, he strolled away from Varhely, and gradually approached Marsa, who, her chin resting on her hand, and her eyes lowered, seemed absorbed in contemplation of the ceaseless ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... he had long since given way altogether to his indolence and shyness in respect of visiting his flock; but his conscience still troubled him about it. He was a great reader, but his reading had become quite desultory, and he now read only for his own entertainment. His sermons were poor; he had no delivery and no gift of expression; he could not even give utterance to the ideas that did, not infrequently, act on his brain, nor hardly to the human tenderness which was his normal attitude towards mankind. But ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... cushions of a teak-wood chair, Anthony let his eyes ramble luxuriously over the prospect. In a chaise longue by his side Valerie was engaged in the desultory composition of a letter to her uncle in Rome. Stretched blinking upon the warm flags, Patch watched the two vigilantly for any ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... funeral equipage; nor is the rank of the poor clay which travels to its last home illustrated by the pomp and ceremony of its departure. Still, in answer to some pertinent questions, we will offer a few desultory remarks, beginning with the end, as it were—the return of the mourner ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... from the brightly lighted corner of the main avenue where rows of automobiles were lined up waiting for the wedding ceremony to be over. She could see the chauffeurs walking back and forth and chatting together. She could hear the desultory wandering of the organ, too, from the partly open window near by. A faint sickening waft of lily sweetness swept out, mingled with a dash of drops from the maple tree on the sidewalk. In a panic she ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... profession, when Johnson neither understood nor desired to understand anything of painting.' Ib. p. 638. Reynolds, there can be little question, is thinking of Johnson in the following passage in his Seventh Discourse:—'What partial and desultory reading cannot afford may be supplied by the conversation of learned and ingenious men, which is the best of all substitutes for those who have not the means or opportunities of deep study. There are many such men in this age: and they will be pleased with communicating ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... day in the open air would diminish the sick line, produce better work, and help to put a soul in any prison. Desultory exercise—say two or three hours of baseball on Saturdays—does not meet the need—it emphasizes it rather. But at present the well-nigh universal aim seems to be to render the gray monotony of prison slavery as monotonous and as gray as possible. Any relief from it is ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... desultory visit, the Hon. Cy rose to go. As the door closed behind him (I am at least thankful the child waited for that), Punch raised his appealing brown eyes to mine and murmured, with a ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... messengers, each guarded by a detachment of palace guards, appeared with fresh news from the convent, the weary senators strolled up and down in the great chambers opening on the sea facade of the Ducal Palace discussing the event in a more desultory way—its meaning, its dangers, the achievements of the great man who might, even now, be receiving the viaticum in the convent of ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... why she thus used inoffensive wood and wire to dramatize her departure from the veranda, the impression remaining with him being that she was critical of his mother upon some point of funeral millinery. Throughout the desultory conversation he had been profoundly concerned with his own disturbing affairs, and now was preoccupied with a dialogue taking place (in his mind) between himself and Miss Lucy Morgan. As he beheld the vision, Lucy had just thrown ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... irregular and desultory education that the two children gathered under this system of things. The masters they had were rather for accomplishments and languages than for anything solid; the rest they worked out for themselves. Fortunately they both loved books, and rational books; ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... one of the upper rooms of the observatory, in proximity with the telescope through whose glass for days we had watched the approach of our sister planet. As the night settled down upon us we had taken our seats for a few instants at a table in a lower room engaged in one of those innumerable desultory talks upon our project and their, even to us, somewhat problematic character. Everything connected with that evening, apart from its having been carefully recorded in my diary and notebooks, is very distinctly remembered by me. I recall my father reading from a letter to Nature, May 15, ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... young second officer over to him. This was not done in displeasure. The glance he fastened on Mr. Powell conveyed a sort of approving wonder. He engaged him in desultory conversation as if for the only purpose of keeping a man who could provoke such a sound, near his person. Mr. Powell felt himself liked. He felt it. Liked by that haggard, restless man who threw at him disconnected phrases to which his answers were, "Yes, sir," "No, ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... his answer was not as polite as it might have been, considering that at that time I was a very pretty woman. We returned to the camp at Mzez Ammar; a few days afterwards we were attacked by the Arabs, who showed great spirit and determination in their desultory mode of warfare, which, however, can make no impression on such troops as the French. The attack was continued for three days, when they decamped as suddenly as they had come. But this cannot be very interesting ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... have rather visited with her. We have walked together or sat down together, and our intimacy grows with the seasons. What I have learned about her ways I have learned easily, almost unconsciously, while fishing or camping or idling about. My desultory habits have their disadvantages, no doubt, but they have their advantages also. A too strenuous pursuit defeats itself. In the fields and woods more than anywhere else all things come to those who wait, because all things are on the move, and are sure ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... third part of the Memorial, Los Rios gives a brief description of the Philippines and the Moluccas, with interesting but somewhat desultory information of their peoples and natural products, of the Dutch factories, and of the produce and value of the clove trade. He describes the custom of head-hunting among the Zambales, and advocates their reduction to slavery as the only means of rendering the friendly natives safe from their attacks. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... of trying to educate oneself lies in desultory, disconnected, aimless studying which does not give anything like the benefit to be derived from the pursuit of a definite program for self-improvement. A person who wishes to educate himself at home should get some ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... (libertine) 962. V. be disorderly &c adj.; ferment, play at cross-purposes. put out of order; derange &c 61; ravel &c 219; ruffle, rumple. Adj. disorderly, orderless; out of order, out of place, out of gear; irregular, desultory; anomalous &c (unconformable) 83; acephalous^, deranged; aimless; disorganized; straggling; unmethodical, immethodical^; unsymmetric^, unsystematic; untidy, slovenly; dislocated; out of sorts; promiscuous, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... there was desultory fighting, and on the 3d, General Shafter telegraphed to the Secretary of War that he was considering the withdrawal of his troops to a strong position, about five miles in the rear. The Secretary immediately replied: "Of course you can judge the situation ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... desultory talking, the son carefully broached the following subject: "There is the "Augusta" ready in port to sail for Baltimore, to bring a cargo of tobacco. Pity, that the heavy Kentucky barrels fill only half the freight room and leave so much space ...
— Bremen Cotton Exchange - 1872/1922 • Andreas Wilhelm Cramer
... till within a few weeks of Chatham's death, his intellect suffered any decay. His eloquence was almost to the last heard with delight. But it was not exactly the eloquence of the House of Lords. That lofty and passionate, but somewhat desultory declamation, in which he excelled all men, and which was set off by looks, tones, and gestures, worthy of Garrick or Talma, was out of place in a small apartment where the audience often consisted of three ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... opera began at the Metropolitan Opera House it endured seven years. It was only at the outset that it had the opposition of what had been the established rgime of Italian opera at the Academy of Music, but it was pursued throughout its career by desultory enterprises and hampered greatly by the fact that the stockholders were never unitedly and enthusiastically in favor of it or the principles of art which it represented. Throughout the period there was a hankering for the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the mile, but it was a long time before I could double-seam a copper bottom onto a tin wash-boiler. I lived to construct quite a decent traveling oilcan for a Eureka sawmill, but such triumphs come through mental anguish and burned fingers. No doubt the experience extended my desultory education. ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... want, infested the neighboring seas. The asylum allowed in the dominions of the emperors to some of those exiled outlaws, and the imprudent provocations given by these latter to their adventurous countrymen, attracted various bands of Norman pirates to the shores of Guelders; and from desultory descents upon the coast, they soon came to inundate the interior of the country. Flanders alone successfully resisted them during the life of Baldwin Bras-de-fer; but after the death of this brave chieftain there was not a province of the whole country that was ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... day. It is true that Aigues-Mortes does a little business; it sees certain bags of salt piled into barges which stand in a canal beside it, and which carry their cargo into actual places. But nothing could well be more drowsy and desultory than this industry as I saw it practised, with the aid of two or three brown peasants and under the eye of a solitary douanier who strolled on the little quay beneath the western wall. "C'est bien plaisant, c'est bien paisible," said this worthy man, with whom I had ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... a kettle-drum than at a larger day reception. The time is spent in desultory conversation with friends, in listening to music, or such entertainment as has ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... colour to be ascribed to fugitiveness of the pigment, which belong to the affinities of other substances with which it has been improperly mixed and applied. It is thus that the best pigments have suffered in reputation under the injudicious processes of the painter; although, owing to a desultory practice, the effects and results have not been uniform. If a colour be not extremely permanent, dilution will render it in some measure more weak and fugitive; and this occurs in several ways—by a too free use of the vehicle; by complex ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... a strong cavalry reconnaissance was pushed down the Colenso road to ascertain the force which the enemy had in that direction. Colonel Brocklehurst took with him the 18th and 19th Hussars, the 5th Lancers and the 5th Dragoon Guards, with the Light Horse and the Natal Volunteers. Some desultory fighting ensued which achieved no end, and was chiefly remarkable for the excellent behaviour of the Colonials, who showed that they were the equals of the Regulars in gallantry and their superiors in the tactics ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... progress has run away altogether with a desultory pen, which started to tell why Duncan didn't want to go to Josie Lockwood's party. I was long in finding out, but not so long as Duncan himself, perhaps; by which I mean to say that he was conscious of the desire not to go, and determined not to, without stopping to analyse the ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... left Stourbridge he spent two years at home in desultory reading, "not voyages and travels, but all literature, sir, all ancient writers, all manly; though but little Greek, only some of Anacreon and Hesiod," the result of which was that when he went up to Oxford, the Master of his College said he was "the best qualified for the University ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... author of Historiae of the Social and Civil Wars (Vell. Pat. ii. 9). Cicero thought him superior to his predecessors, but childish (Brut. 228, De Leg. i. 7), and Sallust remarks his want of frankness in speaking of Sulla's career (Iug. 95). He avoided a piecemeal and desultory treatment of events; cf. his own words quoted by Gell. xii. 15, 2, 'Nos una aestate in Asia et Graecia gesta litteris idcirco continentia mandavimus, ne vellicatim aut saltuatim scribendo lectorum animos impediremus.' His translation of the Milesiaka of Aristides is mentioned by Ovid, ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... nil; and in less than a month he had been unanimously voted a "pukka[12] bounder" by that isolated community of Englishmen, who played as hard as they worked, and invariably "played the game"; a code of morals which had apparently been left out of Kresney's desultory education. The fact revealed itself in a hundred infinitesimal ways, and each revelation added a fresh stone to the wall that sprang up apace ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... said. Yes, she had that great gift—almost the highest and rarest that has been granted to man. Nothing of an extraordinary sort was still to be done, yet the remaining work could not safely be left to the King's idiots; for it would require wise statesmanship and long and patient though desultory hammering of the enemy. Now and then, for a quarter of a century yet, there would be a little fighting to do, and a handy man could carry that on with small disturbance to the rest of the country; and little by ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... at the desultory and futile procedure of his Huron allies. Against his advice, they now withdrew to the distance of a cannon-shot from the fort, and encamped in the forest, out of sight of the enemy. "I was moved," he says, "to speak to them roughly and harshly ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... circle, and is still at home." No advance is made by his writings in any sentiment, or mode of reasoning. Out of the pale of established authority and received dogmas, all is sceptical, loose, and desultory: he seems in imagination to strengthen the dominion of prejudice, as he weakens and dissipates that of reason; and round the rock of faith and power, on the edge of which he slumbers blindfold and uneasy, the waves and billows of uncertain and dangerous opinion roar and ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... '79.—To-day one of the newspapers of St. Louis prints the following informal remarks of mine on American, especially Western literature: "We called on Mr. Whitman yesterday and after a somewhat desultory conversation abruptly asked him: 'Do you think we are to have a distinctively American literature?' 'It seems to me,' said he,'that our work at present is to lay the foundations of a great nation in products, in agriculture, in commerce, in networks ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... past eleven when Tuppence again entered the hall of South Audley Mansions. Albert was on the look-out, attending to his duties in a somewhat desultory fashion. He did not immediately recognize Tuppence. When he did, ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... Captain Sampson must have been have hidden his treasure in the very place certain to be ransacked if the secret ever got out? Unless it was deeply buried, which it could have been only at certain stages of the tide, even old Heintz would have been apt to come across it in the course of his desultory researches for the riches of the buccaneers. And I am certain placid old Heintz did not mislead me. Besides, at Panama, he was making arrangements to go with some other Germans on a small business venture to Samoa, which ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... diary, methodically kept by Milly, of great use to her, and although incapable herself of keeping one regularly, she had continued it in a desultory manner, noting down whatever she thought might be useful for Milly's guidance. For whatever the feelings of the two personalities towards each other, there was a terrible closeness of union between them. Their indivisibility ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... It was during a desultory discussion of an ordinary sessions of the Second Volksraad, in which I represented Johannesburg, that one day in September, 1899—to be precise, the afternoon of the 28th—the messenger of the House came to me with a note, and whispered, "A message from ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... and all were happier that morning, though none knew why. Days passed, desultory and sweet, and with a pile of books about him, he lay in a long cane chair under the trees; then the book would drop on his knees, and blowing smoke in curling wreaths, he lost himself in dramatic meditations. It was pleasant to see that Emily had grown innocently, childishly ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... against the sky; the stars came out in twinkling myriads and the dash and roar of the river was an accompaniment to their desultory chat. ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... traveled much abroad, and had a keen memory, welcomed the reminiscent mood, and the desultory conversation for the rest of the way was such as might have been expected between two intelligent, sympathetic acquaintances, thrown together during ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... fire; conversation was desultory. Muddy and weary young officers, who had been at the front all day, came in and warmed themselves for a moment before going up to their cold rooms. The owner of the broken wind shield arrived and was placated. Continuous relays of tea were coming and going. Colonel ——, who ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... was desultory fighting with the Indians; there was a long boundary dispute with the Argentine, settled in 1880; and in 1865 Chilean sympathy with Peru in a quarrel with Spain led to a foolish war with Spain. The ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... last the chance of writing had come. That she had always loved reading is plain from certain incidents in this present book; her opportunities for reading, however, had been limited. She now began, in a tentative and perhaps desultory fashion, to set down her youthful reminiscences. About this time she became acquainted, through one of its members, and by one of those hazards of destiny which too rarely diversify the dull industrial life of a city, with a circle of young literary men, of whom possibly the most important was the ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux
... time for divided councils. If I would have you remember anything I have said in these desultory remarks, it would be to remember at this critical hour in the nation's history we must not be divided. The triumphs of the war are yet to be written in ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... Yao-ch'en says: "The only chance of life lies in giving up all hope of it." This concludes what Sun Tzu has to say about "grounds" and the "variations" corresponding to them. Reviewing the passages which bear on this important subject, we cannot fail to be struck by the desultory and unmethodical fashion in which it is treated. Sun Tzu begins abruptly in VIII. ss. 2 to enumerate "variations" before touching on "grounds" at all, but only mentions five, namely nos. 7, 5, 8 and 9 of the subsequent ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... that fortress in the distance, on an insulated eminence adjacent to a low range of hills. Meer Baber Beg has placed his fortress in a very respectable state of defence, quite adequate to repel the desultory inroads of his predatory neighbours; but commanded by and exposed to enfilade from the hills about it, on one of these hills he has built a tower as a kind of outwork, but it is very weak ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... thing, Mockwooders agreed, that "explained" the Strangs. It was the desultory gossip of fashionable breakfast tables how Evelyn Strang was frequently seen at the gardener's cottage, talking to the poor mother about her youngest. The gardener's wife had other children, all strong and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Ujong Sapo, at the entrance of Borneo river. The time since I last added to my most desultory journal is easily accounted for. I have been at Singapore and Malacca, and am now anchored off Borneo Proper, with seven vessels, and an eighth is hourly expected. It is difficult, with such a force, to be moderate; and, with Sir Thomas Cochrane's other duties and engagements, it is probably impossible ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... dining-room at the "Ritz," and Olivia found the dinner delightful. The three men, after some desultory talk about common friends and the ordinary London subjects, fell to talking about their work and their fighting in France. She was most pleased by the evident respect and admiration with which the other two regarded her husband. It was a new experience for her to be married to a man for whom ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... been early in the morning actually engaged. The simple answer is that Bougainville remained ignorant of what was happening. Nothing but an actual messenger coming through with the news would have enlightened him, and in the confusion none came till eight o'clock. The sound of desultory firing borne faintly against the wind from the neighborhood of the city had little significance for him. It was a chronic condition of affairs, and Bougainville's business was to watch the upper river, where an attack was really expected. It was a rare piece of good-fortune ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... be good for a young clergyman to have much to say to her. They have not been so cordial to them of late, but that is partly owing to poor Mrs. White's foolish talk, and in part to young Alexis having been desultory and mopy of late—-not taking the interest in his music he did. Mr. Lee says he is sure some young woman is at the bottom ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... weather, and with poor insulation, they may rise to such a point at which it would be dangerous to touch the circuit even with one hand, the leaks being sometimes so great as to cause the lamps to burn in a fitful, desultory manner, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... quick eye caught the marks of a certain wear and tear in the face which neither his bath nor his valet had been able to obliterate. The thin lips—thin for a man so fat, and which showed, more than any other feature, something of the desultory firmness of his character—drooped at the corners. The eyes were half their size, the snap all out of them, the whites lost under the swollen lids. His greeting, moreover, had ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... upon them—and me too, as a matter of fact—as rather a shock one evening, when Robin, during the course of a desultory conversation on education in general, suddenly launched forth more suo into a diatribe against the English Public ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... make but one. The accountant substitutes "short cuts'' in adding where all the operations should be taken in regular order and made as automatic as the few short cuts previously developed. The executive has the habit of depending upon "desultory'' memory where the logical should be developed. The salesman in speaking to a critical customer says "he don't,'' instead of saying "he doesn't''; "gents' goods'' instead of "men's goods.'' Every investigation into the human actions and the human methods of thinking as involved in business ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... evening Aunt Rachel had ever spent. She was the center of attraction; she had found a mission—not a desultory one, but one far-reaching in scope, so it seemed to her; and like a war-horse, she was after ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... best thing he had gained in Paris was a complete liberty of spirit, and he felt himself at last absolutely free. In a desultory way he had read a good deal of philosophy, and he looked forward with delight to the leisure of the next few months. He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... and Frank to my office. They tried to be casual, engaged me in desultory nothings. Frank looked reproachful—I ...
— Question of Comfort • Les Collins
... his physical appetite. He gorged books. He tore the hearts out of them, but did not study systematically. Do you read books through? he asked indignantly of some one who expected from him such supererogatory labour. His memory enabled him to accumulate great stores of a desultory and unsystematic knowledge. Somehow he became a fine Latin scholar, though never first-rate as a Grecian. The direction of his studies was partly determined by the discovery of a folio of Petrarch, lying on a shelf where he was looking ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... of our hero, Edward Waverley, was of a nature somewhat desultory. In infancy, his health suffered, or was supposed to suffer (which is quite the same thing), by the air of London. As soon, therefore, as official duties, attendance on Parliament, or the prosecution of any of his plans of interest or ambition, called his father ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... we saw, fought with rapier, and he soon spoiled Markham. Rapier and dagger especially; that is a more silent duel, but a terribly serious one! Perhaps the reader will like to take a view of one such serious duel in those days, and therewith close this desultory chapter. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... boys kept up a desultory conversation, but at last this ceased, and Fitz suddenly lifted his head with a jerk and began to look wonderingly round ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... and Ruth saw that it took all his strength to do it. The boys and girls were still shouting for her in a desultory fashion. Jerry laid his finger on his lips, nodded at his visitor, and stepped swiftly out of sight along the ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... to do more than to present the provisions of the bill. My brief statement led to a desultory debate, participated in almost exclusively by Democratic Senators, the Republican Senators remaining silent. Several votes were taken, each showing a majority of more than two-thirds in favor of the bill and against all amendments. It passed the Senate ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... with certainty. His chances of education were evidently very scanty, for he must have left school while yet a boy, in order to learn his trade,—that of a machinist. He had thenceforth little time and less opportunity for literary culture. His reading was desultory, and the poetic faculty, expending itself on whatever subjects came to hand, produced great quantities of manuscripts, which were destroyed almost as soon as written. The idea of publishing them does not seem to have presented itself to his mind. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... bye, don't let me forget to ask you to bring with you my Persian Dictionary in case you come into these Parts. I read very very little: and get very desultory: but when Winter comes again must take to some dull Study to keep from Suicide, I suppose. The River, the Sea, etc., ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... with the gall and hysop of Harry Glen's humiliation was the martyr feeling that his holiest affections had been ruthlessly trampled upon by a cold-hearted woman. His desultory readings of Byron furnished his imagination with all the woful suits and trappings necessary to trick himself ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... foreign-looking little damsel evidently surprised him. He congratulated them both upon the relation between them, and said he need not wish the young lady happiness in her new home, for he believed Mrs. Delano always created an atmosphere of happiness around her. After a few moments of desultory conversation, Flora left the room. When she had gone, Mr. Percival remarked, "That is a very fascinating ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... 120 which preceded the battle of Waterloo. Either our generation expected more from Christianity, or it was far more shocked by the sudden outbreak of this fierce war than our ancestors were by the almost chronic condition of desultory campaigning to which they were accustomed. The latter is probably the true reason. The belief in progress, which at the beginning of the industrial revolution was an article of faith, had become a tacitly accepted presupposition ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... advancing mobs the street-end pickets retired on the Prison and were admitted as the surging crowds amalgamated, surrounded the walls, and opened a desultory fire at the loopholes and such of the defenders as fired ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... wished to win the world's cold ear, Nor, prized by those he loved, its blame could fear; Its praise he left to those who, at their will, The ingenious strain of torturing art could trill! Content, as random fancies might inspire, If his weak reed, at times, or plaintive lyre, He touched with desultory hand, and drew Some softened tones, to Nature not untrue. 140 The leaves, O Derwent! on thy bosom still Oft with the gust now fall—the season pale Hath smote with hand unseen the silent vale, And slowly steals the verdure from ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... the Serbians turned on the invaders with superior forces and defeated them. The Austrian retreat to the Drina which followed, necessitated the evacuation of Belgrade on Dec. 15. Since then, the situation on the Serbian frontier has been a deadlock, only desultory and insignificant fighting occurring for the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... return in the springtime of his manhood to his native town as professor in the Academy of Geneva, to be a youth of great promise, destined to become distinguished. But the years slipped by, and his literary performance, consisting of desultory essays and several slight volumes of verse, was not enough to justify the prophecy. His life more and more became that of a bachelor recluse and valetudinarian. When he died, in 1881, at sixty years of age, after much suffering ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Portugal; the Portuguese king, expelled by the French in 1808, fled to his colony, which was made a kingdom 1815, and an empire in 1822. The emperor, Pedro II., was driven out in 1889, and a republic established on the federal system, which has been harassed ever since by desultory civil war. The capital is Rio Janeiro; Bahia and Pernambuco, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... in a desultory kind of way for the last week here. Coming from Kimberley, where we had gone to holloa back French (you could follow him by scent all the way from the dead horses), we made a forced march and rejoined him here by the river, where he is busily engaged, with Kitchener ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... and I were alone together, after that unhappy evening, was an hour or two after breakfast on the following day, when the gentlemen were gone out, after the usual time spent in the writing of letters, the reading of newspapers, and desultory conversation. We sat silent for two or three minutes. She was busy with her work, and I was running over the columns of a paper from which I had extracted all the pith some twenty minutes before. It ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... slope of the hill behind the lighthouse and above the miners' village there stood an old thatched barn, and about this a knot of men and youths loitered, smoking and talking in a desultory, discontented fashion. On the other side of the barn a shrill cackling proclaimed the presence of some of the feminine portion of the community, and the occasional squall of a baby or a squeal of a bigger child testified to ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... the parsonage and Jane Riggs, as rigid as starched linen could make a human being, admitted them, and presently after a little desultory conversation, the collection, which was really a carefully made one, and exceedingly good and interesting, was being displayed. Then came the charming little tea which Von Rosen had planned; then the suggestion with ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Life of Agassiz we are told that the great scientist "could not bear with superficial study: a man should give his whole life to the object he had undertaken to investigate. He felt that desultory, isolated, spasmodic working avails nothing, but curses with narrowness and mediocrity." This is exactly the view of one of our babies, already introduced, the little wise Lulla, who always knows her own mind and sticks to her intentions, ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... Oranges, lemons, pickles, soft bread and butter, and even apple-sauce, were one or the other daily distributed. Such unwearied attention is the more appreciated, when one remembers the number of females who subsequently arrived, and the desultory and fitful labor performed. Passing from one hospital to another, and bestowing general sympathy, with small works, is not what wounded men want. It was very soon perceptible how the men in that hospital appreciated the solid worth of the one and ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... Malatesta, the bizarre and brilliant tyrant of Rimini, who committed the fatal error of embroiling himself beyond all hope of pardon with the Church, and who died discomfited in the duel with his warier antagonist. Urbino profited by each mistake of Sigismondo, and the history of this long desultory strife with Rimini is a history of gradual aggrandisement and consolidation for the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... [the Pilgrim's Progress,] while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it. Dr. Johnson, all whose studies were desultory, and who hated, as he said, to read books through, made an exception in favor of the Pilgrim's Progress. That work, he said, was one of the two or three which he wished longer. In every nursery the Pilgrim's Progress is ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... been founded on purely imaginary grounds, for neither the falseness nor the furtiveness could now be detected—but he succeeded in captivating all my sympathy. Long after dinner was over, and the salle empty, we sat smoking our cigars, and discussing politics, literature, and art in that suggestive desultory manner which often gives ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... military academy, he entered the army as a sub-lieutenant, knowing, as he tells us, a little Latin, and no Greek, but possessing, with very tolerable acquirements in the mathematics, a fair share of the scattered erudition won by readings more desultory ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... Lethbury. She proved to him by statistics that he smoked too much, and that it was injurious to the optic nerve to read in bed. She took him to task for not going to church more regularly, and pointed out to him the evils of desultory reading. She suggested that a regular course of study encourages mental concentration, and hinted that inconsecutiveness of thought is a sign of ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... philosophic indifference. A parting visit to the gallant "Griffons," who threw the slipper, in the shape of three hearty cheers and a "tiger," wasted a whole morning. It was 12.30 P.M. before the mission boat turned her head towards the southern bank, and her crew began to pull in the desultory manner of the ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... away some time and I talked with her son, who was sociable but desultory and kept moving over the place, always with his fan, as if he were properly impatient. Sometimes he seated himself an instant on the window-sill, and then I made him out in fact thoroughly good-looking—a fine brown clean young athlete. He failed to tell me ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... After some desultory wanderings for a year or two along the shores of Lake Erie, among the prosperous towns then springing up, the family, with its Canadian home forfeited, and in quest of another resting-place, came to Milan, Ohio, in 1842. That pretty ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... an authour not systematick and consequential, but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual allusions and light hints, is not to be expected from any single scholiast. All personal reflections, when names are suppressed, must be in a few years irrecoverably obliterated; and customs, too minute to attract the notice of law, such as mode of dress, formalities ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... only for a desultory pretense of business. Horsemen led their mounts away from the more public racks, and tethered them to back fences and willow branches in the shelter of the river banks, where stray ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... he continued, resuming the tone of his desultory conversation, as he held up to the rich light of a censer one of the magnificent vases—"to dream has been the business of my life. I have therefore framed for myself, as you see, a bower of dreams. In the heart of Venice could I have erected a better? You behold ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Mr. Young and me one evening that twenty or thirty years ago there was a bitter war between their own and the Sitka tribe, great fighters, and pretty evenly matched. After fighting all summer in a desultory, squabbling way, fighting now under cover, now in the open, watching for every chance for a shot, none of the women dared venture to the salmon-streams or berry-fields to procure their winter stock of food. At this crisis one of the Stickeen ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... live under conditions less severe. After receiving a meager schooling, he entered a lawyer's office, where most of his work consisted in sweeping the office and running errands. In his idle moments the lawyer's library was at his service. Of this crude and desultory reading ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... may be granted,—and must be granted in candour: but, when I go on to ask myself the question, what permanent advantage the mind gets by such desultory reading and hearing, as this literary movement encourages, then I find myself altogether in a new field of thought, and am obliged to return an answer less favourable than I could wish to those who are the advocates of it. We must carefully distinguish, Gentlemen, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... at Norwich, being then about thirty-six years old, he had already completed the Religio Medici; a desultory collection of observations designed for himself only and a few friends, at all events with no purpose of immediate publication. It had been lying by him for seven years, circulating privately in his own extraordinarily perplexed ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... shipped off for life, as you thought, and you did remember his funeral tears over his owl, and"—a quaver of voice and betrayed earnestness revealed the jealous pang shooting across the heart of the speaker; but her own was too heavy and deeply anxious to prolong this desultory talk. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited. But although he at different times, in a desultory manner, committed to writing many particulars of the progress of his mind and fortunes, he never had persevering diligence enough to form them into a regular composition. Of these memorials a few have been preserved; but the greater part was consigned ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... possibly stand. Add to which, that the most virtuous members in the present would be chosen into the new legislature, which, if the constitution were but once fairly established, would not regard the murmurs of any town or province." After this, a desultory conversation took place, in which some were of opinion that it would be proper, on the introduction of the subject into the Assembly, to move for a committee of inquiry, which should collect facts ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... facility as a writer, and for twenty years has maintained a quasi or direct connection with the press. He is not lacking in the culture of desultory reading, and when he chooses to do so can bear himself like a gentleman. Of such a thing as dignity of character, he appears to have but a faint conception. Pedantry is more to him than profundity, and to tickle the ear of the town with a cheap witticism, he deems a ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Common. 'Twas on that verdant spot we met—nor can I ever forget the majestic courtesy of Mrs. Chuff, as she remembered having had the pleasure of seeing me at Mrs. Perkins's—nor the glance of scorn which she threw at an unfortunate gentleman who was preaching an exceedingly desultory discourse to a sceptical audience of omnibus-cads and nurse-maids, on a tub, as we passed by. 'I cannot help it, sir,' says she; 'I am the widow of an officer of Britain's Navy: I was taught to honour my Church and my King: and I cannot bear ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... were now appointed joint guardians of Scotland, still in the name of Baliol. For some years after this our accounts of Wallace are slight and obscure; but he appears to have returned with a chosen band of followers to the practice of the desultory warfare in which he had originally distinguished himself. The legendary histories continue to detail his deeds of prowess performed in harassing the enemy both on their marches and in their camps and strongholds. And to fill ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... clothing, and sunk in soft sticky mud over the ankles. All night long they had peeped over the parapet, or fired through the loopholes at the German trench a hundred yards off. And all night long they had been galled and stung by that 'desultory rifle fire' that the despatches mention so casually and so often, and that requires to be endured throughout a dragging day and night before its ugliness and unpleasantness ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... it by Mr. Southey in his Minor Poems. ("Poetical Works", vol. ii, p. 170.) "Coleridge"—says a schoolfellow [1] of his who followed him to Cambridge in 1792, "was very studious, but his reading was desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sake of exercise: but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in conversation; and, for the sake of this, his room, (the ground-floor room on the right hand of the staircase facing ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... relative to the origin of chanties, or to attempt to trace the four lines of Captain Billy Bones' song to any source beyond their appearance in "Treasure Island." In a more or less extensive, though desultory, reading of a little of almost everything, the writer has never stumbled upon any chanty or verse from which the famous quatrain might have sprung. Nor has he ever met anyone who remembers to have read or heard of anything of ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... hut there was no place for guests. Presently the men drifted out to the chip pile, where they lingered a while in desultory talk. Roxy and Johnnie, partly undressed, occupied the one bed; and later the host and his guest came in and lay down, clothed just as they were, with their feet to the fire, ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... time limped by on crutches. She barely heard the desultory conversation about her: she felt as if her life was beating itself out against those red windows. A clock in the market-place chimed the hour of nine: she counted the strokes, with a sense of wonder when they stopped. She seemed to have been ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... period, she could have no possible claim, but to a house which was her own for ever, or, at least, could solely by her own choice be transferred, she determined, as much as was in her power, in quitting her desultory dwellings, to empty her mind of the transactions which had passed in them, and upon entering a house where she was permanently to reside, to make the expulsion of her past sorrows, the basis upon which to ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... all.... My poor life and heart, how weak I am!" she moaned, in a relaxed, desultory way, heedless of Liddy's presence. "Oh, how I wish I had never seen him! Loving is misery for women always. I shall never forgive God for making me a woman, and dearly am I beginning to pay for the honour of owning a pretty face." She freshened and turned to Liddy suddenly. "Mind ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... and go into it thoroughly; and this gives girls not only employment for the time, but gives the mind power to seize every other subject presented to it. If you are quite alone, your reading is apt to become desultory. I find it useful to take once or twice a week a walk with Riddell of Balliol, and go through a certain period of Old Testament history; it makes me get it up, and then between us we hammer out so many more ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thing was a failure, and they knew it. Next day, at the lunch hour and in the wash room, there was a little desultory talk about the stag. But the meat of such an aftergathering is contained in phrases such as "I says t'him" and "He says t'me." They wasted little conversation on the stag. It was much more exciting to exhibit letters on blue-lined paper with the red triangle ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... of this scheme, von Schalckenberg had, as I have said, made certain arrangements which, after a little desultory talk with M'Bongwele, he proceeded to carry out. The first impression which he desired to produce upon the king was that of our invulnerability to injury; and with this object he produced a little red rosette, which he offered to attach to any portion of his own person, and ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... the five young people ate without the presence of their elders, as even Mrs. Temple was absent, having been picked up in a friend's motor car during the afternoon and whisked away to a country home near Southampton, all adjourned to the gallery. A desultory conversation was maintained, but presently at a whisper from Frank, Della slipped indoors with him. Then from the long french windows of the music room came two voices mingling harmoniously in ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... from his post in the upper hall, where I had last seen him. Only a few minutes previously I had peeped into the lower hall to satisfy myself that everything was right; at that time he was leaning on the balustrade, engaged in a desultory conversation with Officer Morrison, stationed below. But in ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk |
