"Fitfully" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... together. On the front the wind was higher, lashing the waves, and the moonlight shone fitfully on the distant cliffs, the harbour mouth, and the sea. The two girls clung together, and as Peter walked by Julie she took his arm. Conversation was difficult as they battled their way along the promenade. ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... but fitfully, awakening again and again to recall the extraordinary fact that I was now engaged to be married, to go over the incidents of the evening. Indifferent to the backings and the bumpings of the car, the voices in the stations, the clanging of locomotive bells ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... river, and heartily wish themselves at home. He had no companion of his own age, and was just too young and too enterprising to be welcome to gentlemen bent more on amusing themselves than pleasing him. He was roughly admonished when he spoilt sport or ran into danger; his cousin Charles was fitfully good-natured, but generally showed that he was in the way; his uncle Kit was more brief and stern with him than 'Sweet Honey's' pupil could endure; and Honor was his only refuge. His dreariness was only complete when the sedulous civilities of his aunt carried ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... at every sheltered corner, as if to get away from the wind; the changed livery of the shops—the golden tissues of summer, the delicately-tinted shawls, and gossamer ribbons, and flaunting muslins, woven of nobody knows what—whether of "mist and moonlight mingling fitfully," or of sunset shadows overshot with gold, giving way to gorgeous velvet, and fur, and sumptuous drapery glowing and burning with the tints of autumn, and, like distant fires seen through a fall of snow in mid-winter, full of comfort and warmth; and all the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... pleasure-dome of Kubla Khan in Xanadu, and twenty other whimsical things. At nearly midnight, when we go to bed, we take a last look at it. It is a ruin, like the Colosseum,—great gaps of darkness are there, with broken rows of splendor. The lights are gone on one side the dome,—they straggle fitfully here and there down the other and over the facade, fading even as we look. It is melancholy enough. It is a bankrupt heiress, an old and wrinkled beauty, that tells strange tales of its former wealth and charms, when the world was at its feet. It is the once ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... a strange wistful smile which was surely not Edith's. There, she bent over him,—touched him again,—how cold her hands were; the touch chilled him to the heart. The snow had now begun to fall in large scattered flakes, whirling fitfully through the air, following every chance gust of wind, but still falling, falling, and covering the earth with its ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... them was Dupont de Nemours,(23) who saw a temporary popularity of the Physiocrats in the early years of the French Revolution, when the Constituent Assembly threw the burden of taxes on land. But the fire blazed up fitfully for a moment, only ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... of the second day of the new year. The mercury hovered a few degrees above zero. The winds that swept down from the North were keen and biting, and the mist-like snow fell fitfully. An old man, his once tall form bent by the burdens and sorrows of sixty odd years, his step slow and shuffling, his clothes unkempt and tattered, his long beard flowing down upon his breast, his eye still bright ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... other name could we so fitly close the story of our ancient capital, a story fitfully told with many breaks and omissions, yet offering some thread of connection to link together the different eras of a picturesque and characteristic national life. Had space and knowledge permitted, there is, in the records of Scottish ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... where were the friends and companions of this beautiful, lonely woman, shut into this small room, in the silence of a twilight that hung damp and gray outside, and that the smouldering fire lighted but fitfully within, while the low murmur of ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... last here, in Kirkstall crypt, concerning fate and life. Here, where the dark pool reflects the chancel pillars, and the cattle lie in unhindered rest, the soft sunshine on their dappled bodies, instead of priests' vestments; their white furry hair ruffled a little, fitfully, by the evening wind deep-scented ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... but very fitfully; and one may say almost with a ghastly glare. The very lads who had eaten his father's dinners at Eton, and shared his four-oar at Eton, knew much better than to associate with him at Cambridge now that they had put on the toga virilis. They were still as prone as ever to fun, frolic, and devilry—perhaps ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... shed door opened. We knew it by the light which suddenly streamed upon the night. It was the light from a lantern held high, a light flickering and uncertain. It blinked and trembled and swayed as if held in a shaking hand. We knew whose was the lean, lank figure, fitfully revealed, which held it. ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... endeavouring by every means to excite sensation in different parts of my body, and so to weaken the enemy by creating a division. It continued from one in the morning till half-past five, and left me pale and fainty. It came on fitfully, but not so violently, several times on Thursday, and began severer threats towards night; but I took between 60 and 70 drops of laudanum, and sopped the Cerberus just as his mouth began to open. ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... park in front of Cranbury, there occurs that fitfully blooming plant, lady's-tresses—Neottia Spiralis autumnalis- -and a profusion of brown-winged orchis and cowslips. All the slopes are covered with copsewood, much of it oak, the tints of which are lovely shades of green in spring and golden-brown in early autumn. The whole ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... night she slept fitfully, being always afraid to sleep, and something weaker when she woke from it. The Professor and I took in turns to watch, and we never left her for a moment unattended. Quincey Morris said nothing about his intention, but I knew that all night long he patrolled ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... which showed itself in the general conduct of society. Europe was just emerging from that gloom which had settled down so closely upon the older civilizations after the downfall of the glory that was Rome, and the light of the new day sifted but fitfully through the dark curtains of that restless time. Liberty had not as yet become the shibboleth of the people, superstition was in the very air, the knowledge of the wisest scholars was as naught, compared with what we know ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... seen through the mists of the deep, Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes, What is that which the breeze o'er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam, In full glory reflected now shines in the stream; 'Tis the star-spangled banner; oh, long may it wave O'er the land of the free and ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... in the fog at the fragments of philosophy, they continued fitfully; Septimius calming down his enthusiasm thus, which otherwise might have burst forth in madness, affrighting the quiet little village with the marvellous things about which they mused. Septimius could not quite satisfy himself whether Sibyl Dacy shared in his belief of the success of his ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... her mistress's head against the full warmth of her bosom, rocked her, and moaned over her, mixing comfort and lamentation in one offering, and so contrived to draw the tears out from her, a storm of tears; not fitfully hysterical, but tears that poured a black veil over the eyeballs, and fell steadily streaming. Once subdued by the weakness, Vittoria's nature melted; she shook piteously with weeping; she remembered Laura's words, and thought of what she had done, in terror and remorse, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of flame which hung over the island was pierced by long lines of smoke that stretched far above the glare and clutched with sooty fingers at the stars, now fitfully coming back to view at our distance. The rumbling ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... dire attack: But those behind cried "Forward!" And those before cried "Back!" And backward now and forward Wavers the deep array; And on the tossing sea of steel, To and fro the standards reel; And the victorious trumpet-peal Dies fitfully away. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... into the attitude of each. Intuitively Joan guessed that Gulden's arising to follow her had turned their eyes inward. Gulden remained silent and inactive at the edge of the camp-fire circle of light, which flickered fitfully around him, making him seem a huge, gloomy ape of a man. So far as Joan could tell, Gulden never cast his eyes in her direction. That was a difference which left cause for reflection. Had that hulk of brawn ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... seemed to abate, and as if satisfied with the mischief at this moment consummating, the wind grew comparatively calm. The gusts came by fitfully, like the closing sobs of some fretful and peevish babe, not altogether ceasing with the indulgence of its wishes. As I stood absorbed in a reverie, the nature of which I cannot now accurately determine, the maiden gently touched ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... seven, a heavy shower fell, lasting about twenty minutes. At this time the gale increased; black, heavy clouds covered the sky, through which the moon glittered fitfully, allowing us to see in the distance a long line of white, plunging foam rushing toward us,—sure indication, to a sailor's eye, of a stormy time. A gloom overhung every thing; the banks of cloud seemed to settle around us; the moan of the ocean grew louder and more fearful. Still our little ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... the lanthorn-bearer only fitfully, but to the terror-stricken women he appeared to be preternaturally tall and broad, with wide caped coat pulled up to his ears and an old-fashioned tricorne hat on his head; his face was entirely hidden by a black mask, and his hands by ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... the time the child was not only gay but patient, not fitfully, but steadily, resigned, sparing of requests, reluctant to be served, inventive of tender and pious little words that she had never used before. "You are exquisite to me, mother," she said, at receiving some ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... calmly settled back her shoulders, and arranged her head and eyes so well as to seem at a distance in rapt attention, while having a nice little dream of her own. But suddenly all was broken up. The sexton (whose license as warden of the church, and even whose duty it was to hear the sermon only fitfully, from the tower arch, where he watched the boys, and sniffed the bakehouse of his own dinner)—to the consternation of every body, this faithful man ran up the nave, with his hands ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... an open door in the back, the Banquet Hall is seen in faint moonlight, which shines fitfully through a deep bow-window in the opposite wall. To the right, an entrance- door; further forward, a curtained window. On the left, a door leading to the inner rooms; further forward a large, open fireplace, which casts a glow over the room. It is a ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... most obvious duty was to set about the restoration of the Royal Castle, the Hrad[vs]any, with its venerable cathedral. Both castle and cathedral were inadequate to the high mission of Prague as a royal and imperial residence. The castle had been repaired fitfully by one king or another as we have seen, and had been provided with strong towers chiefly used as dungeons, and had been allowed to fall into disrepair by the impecunious and extravagant John. The cathedral was probably in not much better case. We have ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... o'er the edge of the moon And wistfully gazed on the sea Where the Gryxabodill madly whistled a tune To the air of "Ti-fol-de-ding-dee." The quavering shriek of the Fly-up-the-creek Was fitfully wafted afar To the Queen of the Wunks as she powdered her cheek With the pulverized rays of ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... projecting upper stories, much carved and gilded, their deeply projecting roofs or eaves tiled with shells cut into panes, which let the light softly through, while a sky of deep bright blue fills up the narrow slit between. Then in the shadow below, which is fitfully lighted by the sunbeams, hanging from all the second stories at every possible interval of height, each house having at least two, are the richly painted boards of which I wrote before, from six to ten feet long, some ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... was dark; heavy clouds sailed swiftly across the sky, the wind moaned fitfully, bending the tall trees as it were in anger, then whispering round them as though suing for pardon. Lillian had never been out at night alone before, and her first sensation was one of fear. She crossed ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... injured were lifted by kindly, careful hands into the ambulance compartment. The train drew slowly away from the scene of the accident, gradually gathering speed, and Diana, worn out with strain and excitement, dozed fitfully to the ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... point of view, beyond his dreams. In the exchange of scraps of gossip and latest London anecdotes between Miss Guion and Drusilla Fane, on which Henry Guion commented, Davenant felt himself to be looking at a vivid but fitfully working cinematograph, of which the scenes were snatched at random from life as lived anywhere between Washington and Simla, or Inverness and Rome. The effect was both instructive and entertaining. It was also in its way enlightening, since it showed him the true standing ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... leave me!" And he ran toward the dark fields. The Arno formed lagoons, upon which the moon, half veiled, shone fitfully. He walked through the water and the mud, with a step rapid, blind, like that of one intoxicated. She took fright and shouted. She called him. But he did not turn his head and made no answer. He fled with alarming recklessness. She ran after him. Her ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... different ways. To recur to the events in question: the Duke of Brunswick objected to issuing the manifesto, and only owing to the weariness or weakness of old age, yielded to the insistence of the emigres at his headquarters: the insurrection at Paris came about doubtfully and fitfully; the issue on 10th August hung mainly on the personal bearing of the King; the massacres were the work of an insignificant minority, which the vast mass regarded with sheer stupefaction; and even the proclamation of the French Republic ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the Arsenal between three and four o'clock waked her. She sprang to her feet and looked out the window. The street lamps flickered fitfully in the drizzling rain. No one was passing. There were ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... were large, dark, and, as the novelists say, 'melting.' Her face was a perfectly regular oval, having a clear olive complexion, with warm hints of subdued colour in it. Her lips were most provocative, and all about the edges of that dark cloud, her hair, the light played fitfully through a lattice of stray tendrils. A very pretty picture indeed, Miss Foster was perfectly conscious of her charms, and a mistress of coquettishness in her use of them. A true child of pleasure-loving Sydney, she might have posed with very little preparation as a Juliet or a Desdemona, and ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... They talked fitfully, as intimate friends do. The old man knew that it was worry over the town's harsh reaction to the Sunday fox hunt that had brought Terry to him. He broached ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... the automobile ran but fitfully the seventy-five kilometres to Niort, the whole party, with fear and trembling, scarcely daring to turn sidewise to regard the landscape, or take an extra breath. There was no assistance to be had this side of Niort, and should the sparking arrangements go back ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... had only just wakefulness enough to whisper back good-night and to put up her cheek to be kissed. Dick also curled up as though heather was his usual bed; and very soon both were asleep, though at first rather fitfully and restlessly, for they were over-tired. But whenever they woke for a moment they were lulled to sleep by the voice of the woman, who sat on a stool watching them and crooning a song to herself. The children were too sleepy to catch the words, ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... reason have returned, fitfully and at uncertain times. On these rare occasions he has spoken of you, has expressed the desire that you should still be kept in ignorance, that he shall ever be to the world dead. You perceive, therefore, though it is my duty to tell you this, it ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... was wakeful,—he lay at the foot of one of the tallest pine-trees, and stared persistently at the radiant sky through the network of dark branches. Now and then he smiled as though he saw some beatific vision—sometimes he plucked fitfully at the soft long moss on which he had made his couch, and sometimes he broke into a low, crooning song. God alone knew the broken ideas, the dim fancies, the half born desires, that glimmered like pale ghosts in the desert of his brain,—God alone, in the ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... otherwise the party was unchanged; for Morewood, who had come originally only for two days, had begged leave to stay, received it on condition of showing due respect to everybody's prejudices, telegraphed for his materials, and was fitfully busy making sketches, not of Lady Claudia, to her undisguised annoyance, but of Stafford, with whose face he had been wonderfully struck. Stafford himself was the only one of the party, besides his artistic tormentor, who had not abandoned himself to the charms of idleness. ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... side chapel, with its black oak screen, and a tawny-cheeked Belgian priest at the altar beginning the mass. Scattered round and picturesquely grouped were the crones and maidens aforesaid, on their wicker-chairs. A few surviving lamps twinkled fitfully, and shadowy figures crossed as if on the stage. But aloft, what an overpowering immensity, all vaulted shadows, the huge pillars soaring upward to be lost in ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... great surgeon, with his two assistants, was in the hall; he was on the stairs; he was lost to sight. There was a momentary rush and bustle, the closing of a door. Peter came out, whispering to himself, and disappeared somewhere. The others, clustered in the library, spoke fitfully. ...
— In The Valley Of The Shadow • Josephine Daskam
... Abel's face, and he walked up and down the room, no longer carelessly, but fitfully; stopping sometimes—again starting more rapidly—then leaning against the mantle, on which the clock pointed to midnight—then throwing himself into a chair or upon a sofa; and so, rising ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... these, nor of any others, do the special marks and merits of Dumas appear? How does it happen that these marks and merits appear constantly and brilliantly in all the best work assigned to Dumas, and more fitfully in almost all its vast extent? There may be a good deal of apple in some plum-jam and perhaps some vegetable-marrow. But plumminess is plumminess still, and it is the plumminess of "Dumasity" which we are here to ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... dream the Judge approached the waiting crowd. His mouth was parched, his heart beat fitfully. He wanted that piercing voice to wake the echoes again, to take up the story of the old blood-feud, to goad him into doing that which he had not the courage to do. Vanished was his pride of intellect, and of fine achievement. ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... too much for poor Mars Plaisir. He looked upon his master, now spreading his thin hands over the fire, his furrowed face now and then lighted up by the blaze which sprang fitfully through the smoke—he thought of the hall of audience at Port-au-Prince, of the gardens at Pongaudin, of the Place d'Armes at Cap Francais on review-days, of the military journeys and official fetes of the Commander-in-Chief, and he looked ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... had slept but fitfully, and in his wakeful hours had regretted with self-denunciation, that his name was to be voted upon that day. In his waking dreams he had thought once of withdrawing his candidacy, even at the polls. When he slept, he was riding once more, through the beautiful night—not ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... flame;—for the branches that he fed it with, were not branches from the Tree of Life,—but from another tree that grew in Paradise,—and they were wet with the unhealthy dews of night, and more unhealthy wine; and thus, amid smoke and ashes the fire burned fitfully, and went out with a glare, which ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... is opened by this phenomenon. Here we have a star fitfully variable to an astonishing extent, and whose fluctuations are spread over centuries, apparently in no settled period, and with no regularity of progression. What origin can we ascribe to these sudden flashes and relapses? What conclusions are we ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Fitfully Mrs. De Peyster pondered this matter of finances. She had money so near, yet utterly unreachable. Her house was filled with negotiable wealth, but she dared not go near it. Judge Harvey would secure her money gladly; but if the previous ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... phantoms. To and fro, to and fro glided the wraith-forms, vanishing and appearing. The soft rustling sound of the snow was the rustle of their movements. Across the gleam of light, streaking coldly through the pane, flickering fitfully on the wall, floated shadows ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... did not sleep, though he dozed occasionally for a few minutes at a time, dreaming fitfully, waking and dozing, of the Master and the Mistress, and the lodging they had shared of late. The whole of the next day he passed in the same employment, except that, in the afternoon, he had to go through the wearisome ceremony of being introduced to a number of strange ladies, not one ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... was colder than on the day before, when Flossie and Freddie had been lost, and the sun shone fitfully from behind clouds. ...
— Bobbsey Twins in Washington • Laura Lee Hope
... that his ears had deceived him, got up and went to the door. It was a dark night; the clouds were heavy with snow, that had fallen fitfully when the wind lulled. Untrodden snow lay up to the porch; there was no sight nor sound of any human being. Sweyn strained his eyes far and near, only to see dark sky, pure snow, and a line of black fir trees on a hill brow, bowing down before the wind. "It must have been the wind," he ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... neurasthenic. He has gone just as far as his vitality will take him. His mind is fagged and worn out and will not concentrate. He is nervous, irritable, and wretched. His appetite is capricious, and he sleeps fitfully. For a few days he pulls himself together and plunges into work, but the effort exhausts him and he falls back further than before. He is unhappy and despondent, his viewpoint changes and the future looks ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... still the same Robert Browning, though here and there visibly touched by the hand of time. Passages of sweet or majestic music, or of exquisite fancy, alternate with its long stretches of argumentative thought; and the light of imagination still plays, however fitfully, over statements of opinion to which constant repetition has given a suggestion of commonplace. But the revision of the work caused him unusual trouble. The subjects he had chosen strained his powers of exposition; ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... saw himself in chain armour charging the Saracen. The story of the terrible idol with the golden eyes, the secret rites, the knight led from the penitential cell and buried at daybreak, the execution of the Grand Master at the stake, turned in his head fitfully; cloud-shapes that passed, floating, changing incessantly, suddenly disappearing, leaving him again Mike Fletcher, a strained, agonized soul of our time, haunted and hunted by an idea, overpowered by an idea as a wolf ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... at the ceiling which was revealed fitfully by the dying fire. She still felt dead, numb, but this was a peaceful sort of grave, so remote, so silent. That endless torturing thought—the chain of weary reproach and useless speculation, which beset every waking ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... Belgian bicycle strapped to the side. There were small wagons, and more great wagons crowded with twenty, thirty, forty people: aged brown women, buried like shrunk walnuts in a mass of shawls, girls sitting listlessly on piles of straw, and children fitfully asleep or very much awake and ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... of logs on the fire. The room was cold. As the wood caught and the names curled around the rough bark, the big tester bed, with its carved posts and valance of white muslin, threw long shadows across the room, and in their brass candlesticks the candle-light flared fitfully from the mantel, touching lightly the bowl of holly with its scarlet berries, and throwing pale gleams of color on the polished panels of the old mahogany wardrobe on the opposite wall. For a moment he watched the play of fire and candle, then got up and began to walk backward and ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... gusty and overcast, and as Lily and Selden moved toward the deserted gardens below the restaurant, spurts of warm rain blew fitfully against their faces. The fiction of the cab had been tacitly abandoned; they walked on in silence, her hand on his arm, till the deeper shade of the gardens received them, and pausing beside a bench, he said: "Sit ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... concentrated and paled. The pupils of them were specks. She paled to the lips, then slowly flooded as with a tide of sanguine. She withdrew herself from him; simply dropped him off her. She said nothing; but she watched him steadily, while within her the masked fire gleamed and fitfully leapt. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... Casey slept fitfully in the car and discovered that even a wall bed in a despised apartment house may be more comfortable than the front seat of a Ford. His bones ached by morning, and he was hungry enough to eat raw bacon and relish ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... Tuscany Hills; blue distances; a rolling horizon; a sky rimmed like a broken cup; a shallow, winding river, gleaming fitfully in the sun; a compact city in a valley, a city of red-tiled roofs, of domes and towers and palaces, of ruined ivy-grown walls and battlements; shades of Michelangelo and Dante and Machiavelli, the Borgias and the Medicis: Florence, the ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... Gloucester was the leading member, little or nothing is known, except that in financial matters it attempted, after the manner of new brooms, to sweep clean. Soon the attention of Gloucester and his following was occupied by subjects more absorbing than a branch of reform fated to be treated fitfully. In this instance the new administration had as usual demanded its victims—and among their number was Chaucer. For it can hardly be a mere coincidence that by the beginning of December in this year, 1386, Chaucer had lost one, and by the middle of the same month the other, of ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... granite monster look like a cruel idol surrounded by a sea of blood. The brilliant red of the heavens flamed in its stony eyes, and gave them a sentient look as of contemplated murder,—and the same radiance fitfully playing on the half-scornful, half-sensual lips caused them to smile with a seeming voluptuous mockery. Dr. Dean stood transfixed for a while at the strange splendor of the spectacle, and turning to his two silent ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... an hour, perhaps, elapsed; I could see nothing, and my patience was almost exhausted, when on a sudden the beam of moonlight so earnestly expected filtered fitfully into the den, and there, though faintly, was revealed to me the form of my uncle lying motionless upon the truckle bed—apparently ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... the impression is conveyed of a shy recluse, alternately bashful in disposition and bold in thought, gifted with original and various capacities, but capacities which seemed to have developed themselves in the shade, without sufficient energy of will or desire to force them, except fitfully, into the sunlight. Shakspeare calls moonlight the sunlight sick; and it is in some such moonlight of the mind that the genius of Hawthorne found its first expression. A mild melancholy, sometimes deepening into gloom, sometimes brightened into a "humorous sadness," characterized his early creations. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... hour there was not a sound in the forests of Drowned Valley except in the dead timber where unseen woodpeckers hammered fitfully at the ghosts of ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... between it and the cars was a moving mass of loafers and passengers. On the tracks, engines, tolling heavy bells, were mightily moving, the glare from their cyclopean eyes dulling the light of a forest which was burning fitfully on a mountain side; and on open spaces great fires of pine logs were burning cheerily, with groups of men round them. A band was playing noisily, and the unholy sound of tom-toms was not far off. Mountains—the Sierras of many a fireside ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... darkness, only fitfully broken by the firelight, we ate our supper under what shelter the low cliff afforded. Our boyish spirits were much subdued and awed by the peril we had passed through and the sombre scene ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... the window, and unbarring the shutters, opened it. The streets were wet and glistening below, but the clouds had cleared, and a pale watery moon shone out fitfully from ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... was a cry. Ray had found the water falling from an oozy bank, and there we dozed fitfully until we were startled by ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the group. The evening shadows grew deeper outside. The firelight cast long crimson shafts of light into the corners, and flickered fitfully over the faces and ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... seem wonderful how her hatred towards me could grow so intense and active as it did. But she had begun to suspect, by some involuntary betrayal of mine, that there was an abnormal power of penetration in me—that fitfully, at least, I was strangely cognizant of her thoughts and intentions, and she began to be haunted by a terror of me, which alternated every now and then with defiance. She meditated continually how the incubus could be shaken off her life—how she could be freed from this hateful bond to ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... his obscure, terrible glimpses of scenery were in essence something quite new.... Ossian's images were far from "nature methodized." His imagination illumined fitfully a scene of mountains and blasted heaths, as artificially wild as his heroines were artificially sensitive; to modern readers they resemble too much the stage-settings of melodrama. But in 1760, his descriptions ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... amazed at poor Rick? A young man so unfortunate," here he fell into a lower tone, as if he were thinking aloud, "cannot at first believe (who could?) that Chancery is what it is. He looks to it, flushed and fitfully, to do something with his interests and bring them to some settlement. It procrastinates, disappoints, tries, tortures him; wears out his sanguine hopes and patience, thread by thread; but he still looks to it, and hankers after it, and finds his whole world treacherous ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... see through the mists of the deep Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes, What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now discloses? Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam, In full glory reflected now shines on the stream; 'Tis the star-spangled banner; O long may it wave O'er the land of the free, and the home ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... frequent, while occasional flashes of forked lightning emanating from a point low down upon the south-western horizon, began to light up the surroundings for a fraction of a second with their transient glare. Soon low moaning sounds became fitfully audible far aloft, and little scurrying gusts of hot wind came sweeping across the lagoon, causing the fire on the knoll to roar and blaze with sudden intensity, while the ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... to be excused from supper on the night of her arrival, drank the glass of milk that Mrs. Carder gave her, and at an early hour laid an aching head on her pillow and slept fitfully ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... Tom Blacker, dozing fitfully on a cot in the quarters of a grumpy Lieutenant-Colonel, was awakened suddenly, and summoned to the ...
— Get Out of Our Skies! • E. K. Jarvis
... whole body aching, his arm and shoulder throbbing in agonizing pain. The men proved attentive and considerate; but he lay down exhausted and courted sleep, hardly hearing what they said. Sleep came to him only fitfully, and he was glad when break of day brought a change. They rode on through the second day, usually in sober silence, on into another dusk and another night of torture. A third day and a third dusk followed, ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... an alley between high buildings afforded a retreat and the breeze blew there fitfully, and Mr. Chick stepped to that oasis of shade in the glare ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... fitfully, as if the old clerk's weary soul had been making feeble struggles to be released from its frail ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it a moment. The cabin lamp—taking long swings this way and that—was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man's bolted door,—a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of the elements. ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... The old man lay stretched on the bare earthen floor, his head pillowed upon a large stone. His body was covered by blankets, but his arms were crossed on his breast outside of them and embraced his crucifix. His eyes were closed, but he was still breathing fitfully. Bell whispered, in response to ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... to bury Vannelle's legacy in the Mather Safe. At all events, the minister found himself unable to dismiss a certain thin and impalpable fantasy which lingered behind that ponderous speculation of an all-embracing philosophy. For the past two years he had fitfully sought, or rather persuaded himself that he sought, some clue through the sad labyrinth of his fate. He had indulged in the most morbid conditions of his physical organism; there was neither steadiness in his purpose nor firmness in his action. He yearned for that proximity to hidden ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... roar of artillery, the rattle of Maxims and rifles sank fitfully away. A tall raw-boned major of artillery stretched his cramped limbs in the observation station, paused to look with callous eyes over the devastated fields before him, then sought the trench. Earlier in the day the Allies had been shelled out of an ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... day of his tactless juvenile proposal—for so he saw it now. They had only met that once, when he was home for Christmas. On the second occasion, they had missed. Throughout the War they had corresponded fitfully; but her letters, though affectionate and sisterly, lacked an unseizable something that affected the tone of his response. He had been rash enough, once, to presume on their special relation. But he was no longer a boy; and ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... Arthur set him down at the old house door. A cool winter breeze was fitfully rustling the dry leaves and giving a monitory brush past the house now and then; whispering that Christmas was near, and snow coming. Staying for no look at the sunlight in the tree-tops, Rollo marched in and went straight ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... independent, sovereign part of the independent, sovereign whole, as the phrase should go, until the great rebellion should call for new constructions and clear definitions. Thenceforth for twenty years the fiery lines of war receded fitfully northward, till stayed at the Battle of the Thames, quenched in the life-blood of the heroic, the ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... night for all of them. The floor was their only bed, and their only covering some empty bags that had contained supplies. But even under these circumstances they managed to doze off fitfully. ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... thrilling. But when middle age arrives, often prematurely, they forget the thrill and excitements; they become obsessed by certain other lesser things that are deficient in any kind of Cosmic Vitality. The thrill goes out of life: a light dies down and flickers fitfully; existence goes on at a low ebb—something has been lost. From this numbed condition is born much of the blind anguish ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... round-backed young lady, with auburn ringlets, a fancy belt, and an expression of limited tolerance for a gentleman who could not choose quickly between fried fish, fried steak, and baked beans. The train for Marmion left Boston at four o'clock in the afternoon, and rambled fitfully toward the southern cape, while the shadows grew long in the stony pastures and the slanting light gilded the straggling, shabby woods, and painted the ponds and marshes with yellow gleams. The ripeness of summer lay upon the land, and yet there was nothing in the country Basil Ransom traversed ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... particoloured marble that had been the high altar once. Here and there, half buried in the debris at my feet, I saw fragments of memorial tablets, a battered corona, the twisted remains of a great candelabrum, and over and through this mournful ruin a cold and rising wind moaned fitfully. Silently we clambered back over the mountain of debris and hurried on, heedless of the devastation around, heartsick with the ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... is not likely to permit any trivial cause to turn him aside, and the five Sioux made rapid progress so long as the light in the wood allowed them to do so. This, however, was a comparatively short time; and, after progressing fitfully and uncertainly for several hundred yards, they finally drew up ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... remainder of the day, could settle to nothing for thinking of the Poor Travellers. When the wind blew hard against the windows,—it was a cold day, with dark gusts of sleet alternating with periods of wild brightness, as if the year were dying fitfully,—I pictured them advancing towards their resting-place along various cold roads, and felt delighted to think how little they foresaw the supper that awaited them. I painted their portraits in my mind, and indulged in little ...
— The Seven Poor Travellers • Charles Dickens
... morning's invitation that he was too busy to accept. But he had come and except for that first moment of astonishment Conscience had been gay and untroubled. She at least was safe from the perils which this reunion held for him. So, as he chatted, he kept before his thoughts like a standard seen fitfully through the smoke of battle the reminder, "She must feel, as she wishes to feel, that it has left ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... cards and their bottle. It had been bad enough to find them sullen and inhospitable, but as the liquor stimulated their unhealthy imaginations it was worse to feel the covert looks stealing now and again toward them. Joyce, sleeping fitfully in the arms of Moya, woke with a start to see them drinking together ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... the east 'tis ever brighter, Though the sun gleams fitfully; Far and wide the mountain summits Swim above the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... subsided to a low murmur here and there about the car, caught fitfully between the rising and falling of the blast; the lamps grew dim; and the majority of the castaways settled themselves among the flickering shadows to think—to forget the present, if they ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sad Easter Monday. Even nature seemed to feel the pressure of the brooding horror, for heavy clouds piled up towards noon and a chill wind blew fitfully from the north, bending the young corn and the creaking tree-tops, and moaning about the straw-covered roofs. Then an icy cold rain descended on the village, sending the children, the only humans still unconscious of the fear that had come on them all, into the houses to play ...
— The Case of The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... was only half asleep, kicked out in such an alarming manner, that for some seconds, his boots gyrated fitfully all over the family hearth, filling the whole circle with consternation. For, when Mr Bull did kick, his kick was tremendous. And he always kicked, when the Bulls of Rome ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... through which all clear outlines would show blurred and unreal. Sometimes—most often, perhaps—that haze would be irradiated with sanguine visionary hopes and expectations. Sometimes it would be fitfully darkened with all the horrors of despair. But whether in gloom or gleam, the realities of his position would be lost. He never, certainly, contracted a debt which he did not mean honourably to pay. But either he had never possessed the faculty of forming a just estimate of future ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... these gales are commonest in February, and hence this month is held in marked dread. Some years ago, in the season referred to, a storm burst upon our shores, whose like only a few of the older among us had ever known. After fitfully moaning from the northward and eastward for a day or two, the wind, one morning, finally settled due north-east,—thus sweeping directly upon the land,—and blew a hurricane. It was excessively cold, too, yet not so cold but that a fine, dry snow was falling, though from the fury of the wind ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... his heirlooms, laboriously disengaging himself from his kilt. Fitfully throughout this process he would warble snatches of an air which Miss Gallosh ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... intellectual virtue. An act, to be perfection and happiness, must be done easily, sweetly, and constantly. But no act of the intellect can be so done, unless it rests upon a corresponding habit. If the habit has not been acquired, the act will be done fitfully, at random, and against the grain, like the music of an untrained singer, or the composition of a schoolboy. Painful study is not happiness, nor is any studied act. Happiness is the play of a mind that is, if not master of, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... her stepdaughter looked under any supposedly ingenious personal experiment. She had always been lovely about the stepdaughter's material braveries—had done, for her, the very best with them; but there had ever fitfully danced at the back of Maggie's head the suspicion that these expressions were mercies, not judgments, embodying no absolute, but only a relative, frankness. Hadn't Charlotte, with so perfect a critical vision, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James |
