"Fitful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... window of a dwelling across some open fields to the left, and I thought of repairing thither; but some deep-mouthed dogs began to bay directly, and then the lamp went out. A tiny stream sang at the roadside, flowing toward some deeper tributary; lighting a cigar, I made out, by its fitful illuminings, to wash the limbs of the jaded nag. Then I led him for an hour, till my own limbs were weary, troubled all the time by weird imaginings, doubts, and regrets. When I resumed the saddle the horse had a firmer step and walked pleasantly. I ventured after a time to incite him to ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... extend to the Mother of Heretics mercy which they had refused to her children, these men did not believe. The presence of an enemy ever lurking within a league of their gates, ever threatening them by night and by day, had shaken their nerves. They feared everything, they feared always. In fitful sleep, in the small hours, they heard their doors smashed in; their dreams were disturbed by cries and shrieks, by the din of bells, and ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... in yonder," said Hillocks, pointing to the smithy, whose fire sent fitful gleams across the dark road, "and he's carryin' on maist fearsome. Ye wud think tae hear him speak that auld Hornie wes gaein' louse in the parish; it sent a grue (shiver) doon ma back. Faigs, it's no cannie to be muckle wi' the body, for the Deil and Donald seem never ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... assistance. The backwoods people had to front peril and hardship without stint, and they loved for the moment to leap out of the bounds of their narrow lives and taste the coarse pleasures that are always dear to a strong, simple, and primitive race. Yet underneath their moodiness and their fitful light-heartedness lay a spirit that when roused was terrible in its ruthless and stern intensity ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... to spirits that at such times only could be evoked by him from the Aidenn, close by whose portals his disturbed soul sought to forget the ills to which his constitution subjected him—close by the Aidenn which were those he loved—the Aidenn which he might never see, but in fitful glimpses, as its gates opened to receive the less fiery and more happy natures whose destiny to sin did not involve the doom of death. He seemed, except when some fitful pursuit subjugated his will and engrossed his faculties, always to bear the memory of some ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... other principle is psychical, or mental, or artificial, introducing various more or less capricious changes that are supposed to be emendations; and its operation is, to some extent, uncertain and fitful."[1] ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... time, having turned his face partially aside from the fire, he was watching unconsciously the fitful gleaming of a light cast on the opposite wall by the occasional flaring up of a tongue of ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... during that day and the next, Netta made fitful efforts to exert herself, but it was evident to all that her body was getting weaker, and every one dreaded the journey in prospect, ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... the load of timber on the ice. The skaters hardly felt the weight more than in propelling the empty sledge. When they got upon the open surface of the pond, they might expect aid from the steady swelling of the sail, now fitful, as gusts swept down, snow-laden, from the tree-covered banks of the stream. They hardly noticed the gradually increasing power of the wind behind them; but the flakes in the air perceptibly thickened, even before they had reached ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... where I nightly serve Him who is throned in light, have dared to claim The poet's franchise, though I may not hope To wear his garland; hear me while I tell My story in such form as poets use, But breathed in fitful whispers, as the wind Sighs and then ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... chart and compass. It led Ralph Peden out into a cloudy June dawning. It was soft, amorphous, uncoloured night when he went out. Slate-coloured clouds were racing along the tops of the hills from the south. The wind blew in fitful gusts and veering flaws among the moorlands, making eddies and back-waters of the air, which twirled the fallen petals of the pear and cherry blossoms in the little ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... long night broke, and a tropical sun smote down upon the rolling water. Jane Porter had dropped into a fitful slumber—the fierce light of the sun upon her upturned face awoke her. She looked about her. In the boat with her were three sailors, Clayton, and Monsieur Thuran. Then she looked for the other boats, but as far as the eye could reach there was nothing to break the fearful monotony of that ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to do that night, after making Prince secure. The boys ate a little mid-night supper, and from the tent of the girls came the odor of chocolate, which Grace insisted on making. Then, after fitful slumbers, morning came. ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Rainbow Lake • Laura Lee Hope
... now falling over her. She leaned her aching head on the shoulders of the older and stronger woman by whose side she sat, and at last her sorrow brought the surcease of sleep. The fire threw its fitful flicker on her haggard face, lighting up in strange relief the lines of agony and the moisture of the freshly fallen tears. Now and again she sobbed in her slumber—a sob that shook her soul—but she slept, and sleep ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... &c. adj.; kink. V. be capricious &c. adj.; have a maggot in the brain; take it into one's head, strain at a gnat and swallow a camel; blow hot and cold; play fast and loose, play fantastic tricks; tourner casaque[Fr]. Adj. capricious; erratic, eccentric, fitful, hysterical; full of whims &c. n.; maggoty; inconsistent, fanciful, fantastic, whimsical, crotchety, kinky [U. S.], particular, humorsome[obs3], freakish, skittish, wanton, wayward; contrary; captious; arbitrary; unconformable &c. 83; penny wise and ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... couch Where moans in fitful pain The mistress of this splendid home, With aching heart and brain. The fever burning in her veins Tinges with carmine bright That sunken cheek—alas! she needs ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... gigantic trick tower, in which three long Gothic arches, between octagonal tourelles, enclose several tiers of windows. At the top is a great clock, and below the church a grove of elms, through which fitful sunlight falls on the grass and the dead red of the brick pavement (so grateful to feet sore with the sharp stones of other Dutch cities), where groups of fishermen are collecting in their blue ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... which the novice will encounter is the uncertainty of the wind currents. With a low velocity the wind, some distance away from the ground, is ordinarily steady. As the velocity increases, however, the wind generally becomes gusty and fitful in its action. This, it should be remembered, does not refer to the velocity of the machine, but to ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... that the marriage years of his life would be the best, the most distinguished, and most useful. With the utmost pains he had chosen a wife. He had acted with the greatest caution in no weak or superficial, or haphazard, or fitful way. Nevertheless, the outlook was dismal. This first step in decline from his ideal caused him much pain and restlessness, and led him to think cynically of many doctrines to which, in serene moments, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... on the richness of the green leaves. The hops were yellowing, and to him they had the beauty and the passion which poets in Sicily have found in the purple grape. As they walked along Philip felt himself overwhelmed by the rich luxuriance. A sweet scent arose from the fat Kentish soil, and the fitful September breeze was heavy with the goodly perfume of the hops. Athelstan felt the exhilaration instinctively, for he lifted up his voice and sang; it was the cracked voice of the boy of fifteen, and Sally ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... influence would have come in for the first time with Surrey and Wyatt, and the whole sequence would have been just what a plain man would expect. Not only by his inconvenient possession of genius, but also by his great, if fitful industry, and by what we can hardly call by any name but good luck, Chaucer shoots up suddenly between Gower and his natural successors, and thus revolutionises the standard of poetry by which ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... for ticket-holders. In '46, Earl Grey propounded the Tasmanian convict village scheme. In '47, he announced total abolition. In '48, another complete revolution took place, and all convicts were to be sent to Van Diemen's Land. This extravagance of upstart theory and fitful experiment without end, all tended to check colonial enterprise and destroy ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... a train speeding Balkanward across the flat, green Hungarian plain two Britons sat in friendly, fitful converse. They had first foregathered in the cold grey dawn at the frontier line, where the presiding eagle takes on an extra head and Teuton lands pass from Hohenzollern to Habsburg keeping—and where a probing official beak requires to delve in ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... Through which her eerie pathway lay. You ask if she had beauty's grace? I know not—but a nobler face My eyes have seldom seen; A keen and fine intelligence, And, better still, the truest sense Were in her speaking mien. But bloom or lustre was there none, Only at moments, fitful shone An ardour in her eye, That kindled on her cheek a flush, Warm as a red sky's passing blush And quick with energy. Her speech, too, was not common speech, No wish to shine, or aim to teach, Was in her words displayed: She still ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... slipped into the shadow of the Preaching Tree it had grown dark. Fitful lightning flashed. In the meadow fireflies were thick. They made him think of the eager beating of many fiery little hearts, exposed by gloom, lost again in that opalescent glare on the horizon against which the ragged ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of inward defiance of the news from over-seas, the humiliation of which had now culminated in the disasters of the Black Week. Flame only shows the brighter for a sombre background. And Poppy, during this ill-starred period, had been as a flame to her admirers and associates—a fitful, prankish flame, full of provocation and bedevilment, the light of it inciting to all manner of wild doings and, in the end, not infrequently scorching those pretty shrewdly who were over-bold in warming ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... to bear upon loose particles of solid matter. It would, indeed, seem that the slow and comparatively regular movements of the heavy, unelastic water ought to affect such particles very differently from the sudden and fitful impulses of the light and elastic air. But the velocity of the wind currents gives them a mechanical force approximating to that of the slower waves, and, however difficult it may be to explain all the phenomena ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... they leave their boundaries undefined; a mile nearer or farther, what does it matter? Moreover, their fitful or nomadic occupation of the land leads to oscillations of the frontiers with every attack from without and every variation of the tribal strength within. Their unstable states rarely last long enough in a given form or size to develop fixed boundaries; ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... very cold, the spring had been fitful and stormy, but May had suddenly burst upon the country with one broad, bright smile of sunshine and flowers. If Timothy had loitered on the way to school when the frost nipped his nose, and the ground was muddy, and the March winds crept up his jacket sleeves, it was hard to hurry now when every ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... north aisle of Henry VII's Chapel, Westminster Abbey, while in the south aisle he sees the tomb and effigy of her old rival and enemy, Mary Queen of Scots (S397). The sculptured features of both look placid. "After life's fitful fever they sleep well." ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... from this time. In this child I lived, breathed, and had my being, until later events startled my individuality once more into its old currents of existence. Not that I merged myself entirely in Ernie, sickly, wayward, fitful, ugly little mite that he was undeniably. Nay, rather did I draw him forcibly into my own sphere of being and find nutrition in ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... respect to the more fitful and fantastic expression of the "Italian Gothic," our author is again to be blamed for his loose assumption, from the least reflecting of preceding writers, of this general term, as if the pointed buildings of Italy could in any wise be arranged in one class, or criticised in general ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... through the long night he sat with his touch, which compelled quiet, upon her body, for when, after she had fallen at last into a fitful slumber, he arose and lowered the lights, she started up with a scream and called out that she was "alone—fearfully alone!" Then, as he returned to his chair, she reached for him in the darkness and clung desperately to his outstretched arm, ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... agreeable volume provided by his vigilant companion,—the best energies of his mind and the freshest hours of life were absolutely given to Art. This is the great lesson of his career: not by spasmodic effort, or dalliance with moods, or fitful resolution, did he accomplish so much; but by earnestness of purpose, consistency of aim, heroic decision of character. There is nothing less vague, less casual in human experience, than true artist-life. Rome is the shrine of many a dreamer, the haunt of countless inefficient enthusiasts. But ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... being able to foresee any result, he beheld a thousand vague and shadowy images passing before his eyes. That subterranean love, so long crouched at the foot of his soul's stairway, had climbed a few steps higher, guided by some fitful glimmer of hope. The weight of the impossible no longer pressed so heavily upon his breast, now that he believed himself aided by the gods. In truth, who would have dreamed that the much-boasted charms of the daughter ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... bare, and comfortless, and dim With that strange, fitful glimmer that is shed By candles casting shadows weird and grim, Above ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... ascend the flight of stairs that led to her sixth floor, dragging herself along by the railing. One day she fell on the stairs: the other servants picked her up and carried her to her chamber. But that did not stop her; the next day she went downstairs again, with the fitful gleam of strength that invalids commonly have in the morning. She prepared mademoiselle's breakfast, made a pretence of working, and kept moving about the apartment, clinging to the chairs and dragging herself along. Mademoiselle took pity on her; she forced ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... step which she well knew to be that of her aunt Charlotte. Then she arose, and as her aunt drew near she pulled back the bolt and opened the door. The little oil lamp which she held threw a timid fitful light into the gloom, and Linda looked up unconsciously into the darkness of the roof over ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... stored in a wonderfully retentive memory against an occasion for their use. To a very fully equipped mind he brought the service of a robust and acute judgment. Moreover when he applied his mind to a subject he had a faculty of intense, if fitful concentration; he could seize with great force on the heart of a matter; he had the power in a wonderfully short time of extracting the kernel and leaving the husk. His judgments in writing are like those recorded by Boswell ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... consider seriously what he would give at any moment to have the power of arresting the fairest scenes, those which so often rise before him only to vanish; to stay the cloud in its fading, the leaf in its trembling, and the shadows in their changing; to bid the fitful foam be fixed upon the river, and the ripples be everlasting upon the lake; and then to bear away with him no darkened or feeble sun-stain (though even that is beautiful), but a counterfeit which should seem no counterfeit-the true and perfect image of ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... was at the ship's side, shading his eyes against the dazzle that made a brassy light over sea and sky. The Ryukyu Islands, off the port beam, were not visible in the metallic haze that grew as the sun arched higher. The fitful wind gave promise of stopping altogether and leaving both ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... discovered the door and descended the steps, and he found himself in a gloomy and lonesome valley. Jagged mountains, black as night, rose on either side, and huge rocks seemed ready to topple down upon him at every step. Through broken clouds a watery moon shed a faint, fitful light, that came and went as the clouds, driven by a moaning wind, passed ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... dominion is a memory of the past; and when we evoke its departed shades, they rise upon us from their graves in strange, romantic guise. Again their ghostly camp-fires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... in her own strange, fitful way over Le Gardeur. She had no thought of losing him wholly. She would continue to hold him in her silken string, and keep him under the spell of her fascinations. She still admired him,—nay, loved ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the day there were light variable winds, such as, according to Fuzl Khan, might be expected at that season of the year. The northeast monsoon was already overdue. Its coming was usually heralded by fitful and uncertain winds, varied by such squalls or storms as ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... around Major Braithwaite and the scout and they did not order them back, because this was a time when all would wish to know, and in the night and darkness they waited patiently and hopefully to see what the fitful flashes of ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... as he strips and runs With a brilliant, fitful pace, It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones Who win in the lifelong race. And each forgets that his youth has fled, Forgets that his prime is past, Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead, In the glare of ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... that portion of the Atlantic occupied by the Clan Macgregor. The wind had died away in fitful puffs. The waves had subsided. Marked accessions to the deck population were in evidence. Everybody looked cheerful. But Achilles, which is to say the Tyro, sulked in his tent, otherwise ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... an establishment of her own. This, rather mysteriously to Gwendolen, appeared suddenly possible on the death of her step-father, Captain Davilow, who had for the last nine years joined his family only in a brief and fitful manner, enough to reconcile them to his long absences; but she cared much more for the fact than for the explanation. All her prospects had become more agreeable in consequence. She had disliked their former way of life, roving from one foreign watering-place ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... fact that she uniformly keeps a lamp burning in her little window at night. By keeping this light, and the entrance to the harbor open, a small vessel may enter with the greatest safety. During the silent watches of the night, the widow may be seen, like "Norma of the Fitful Head," trimming her little lamp with oil, being fearful that some misguided and frail bark may perish through her neglect; and for this she receives no manner of remuneration—it is pure, unmingled philanthropy. The poor woman's kindness does not rest ...
— Gems Gathered in Haste - A New Year's Gift for Sunday Schools • Anonymous
... again led the way with cheery cry. The rain came dashing down in fitful, misty streams; but she merely pulled the rim of her sombrero closer over her eyes, and rode steadily on, while he followed, plunged in gloom as cold and gray as the storm. The splitting crashes of thunder echoed from the high peaks like the voices of siege-guns, and the lightning ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... of Hugh for a time, but Mr. Britling was fitful and irritable and quite prepared to hold Mr. Direck accountable for the laxity of the War Office, the treachery of Bulgaria, the ambiguity of Roumania or any other barb that chanced to be sticking into his sensibilities. They ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... and there among the trees, torches of lightwood threw a wild and fitful light over the little cluster of graves, revealing the long, straight boxes of rough pine that held the remains of the two negroes, and lighting up the score or two of russet mounds where slept the dusky kinsmen who ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... had been some fitful confidence during those few days of acute illness. Why should not the girl have the man if he were lovable? And the Duchess referred to her own early days when she had loved, and to the great ruin ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... fastidious, any bush or hollow in a rock serving his purpose. For ourselves, after exchanging the “felice notte” with the Count and his friends, we lingered over a scene so singular in civilised Europe, though with such I had been familiar in other hemispheres. The smouldering fires cast fitful gleams on piled arms and the hardy men sleeping around in their sheepskins or shaggy cloaks; the deep silence of the woods was only broken by a neighing horse or the bay of a hound, and presently the stars shone out from the vault of heaven with a lustre ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... the clouds are rolling heavy, Fitful gusts distend his sail; See the whirlpool's foaming eddy, Hear the seagull's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 579 - Volume 20, No. 579, December 8, 1832 • Various
... own ponderous horns; the wild-looking Hottentots and Bushmen; the big phlegmatic Dutchmen; the bristling thorns of the mimosas, cropping out of comparative darkness; the varied groups of emigrants; the weird forms of the clumps of cactus, aloes, euphorbias, and other strange plants, lit up by the fitful glare of the camp-fires, and canopied by the star-spangled depths of a southern sky—all seemed to them the unbelievable ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... of his ribs was broken. After an hour or two, he became perfectly silent, and began, tentatively and in a half-hearted way, to lick some of his bruises and abrasions. Then, before this task was half accomplished, wise Nature asserted her claims, and the exhausted Wolfhound fell into a fitful sleep just before daybreak. When he woke, fully a couple of hours later, much of his pain and misery remained with him; but the fear had given place to other feelings, chief among which came the determination to escape from the dominion of ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... the light of the lamp, as a drinker examines his bottle at the end of a repast, he had not seen his father's eye pale. The cowering dog looked alternately at his dead master and at the elixir, as Don Juan regarded by turns his father and the phial. The lamp threw out fitful waves of light. The silence was profound, the viol was mute. Belvidero thought he saw his father move, and he trembled. Frightened by the tense expression of the accusing eyes, he closed them, just as he would have pushed down a window-blind on an autumn night. He stood motionless, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... fortunate enough to discover at unlettered Trieste, an excellent copyist able and willing to decypher a crabbed hand and deft at reproducing facetious and drolatic words without thoroughly comprehending their significance. At first my exertions were but fitful and the scene was mostly a sick bed to which I was bound between October '83 and June '84. Marienbad, however, and Styrian Sauerbrunn (bed Rohitsch) set me right and on return to Trieste (Sept. 4, '84), we applied ourselves to the task of advertising, the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... very occupied still and his vision clouded as he passed into the cool shade of the temple, and he did not see a small, dainty person with an impish face perched high on a broken wall, with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, and a queer, fitful, half-serious, half-bored expression in her dark eyes. Instead, seeing no one and thinking himself alone, he sat down on a low wall quite near to her and stared gloomily at the ground. Diana, not a little amused, surveyed him at her leisure. "What in the world," she wondered, "was this ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... to you now for help in a matter on which my own conscience throws such a fitful and uncertain light that I cannot trust it. I know that you are a good man, Atherton, and I humbly beseech you to let me have your judgment without mercy: though it slay me, I will abide by it.... Since her father's ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... time again met by the withering blast. Before nine o'clock the attacking lines had lost more than five hundred men, and as many Canadians had fallen on the hill. The dead and mangled lay literally in heaps. As darkness deepened, lit only by the wan light of a fitful moon and the awesome flare of volley after volley, the fearful screams of the dying could be heard above the roar of the Falls and the whistle of cannon ball. Riall, the commander of the Canadians, had been wounded ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... haunt of life is the floor of the Deep Sea, the abyssal area, which occupies more than a half of the surface of the globe. It is a region of extreme cold—an eternal winter; of utter darkness—an eternal night—relieved only by the fitful gleams of "phosphorescent" animals; of enormous pressure—2-1/2 tons on the square inch at a depth of 2,500 fathoms; of profound calm, unbroken silence, immense monotony. And as there are no plants in the great abysses, the animals must live on one another, and, in the long ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... settled prematurely down, black and stormy; and though the fury of the gale seemed at one time to have spent itself, the wind veered to the implacable east, and instead of fitful gusts, a steady roaring blast freighted with rain smote the darkness. The officer conducted his prisoner across the dim corridor, and opened the door of the small anteroom, which frequent occupancy had ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... with excitement, for she felt that I was willing to admire her.... As she swept round the stage, her slender waist swayed to the music, and her graceful head and neck bent with it like a flower that bends with the impulse given to its stem by the fitful temper ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... into the woods, along the meres, and to other lonely places, and got into the habit of remaining whole hours at some favourite spot, lying flat on the ground, with his face toward the sky. The flickering shadows of the sun; the rustling of the leaves on the trees; the sailing of the fitful clouds over the horizon, and the golden blaze of the sky at morn and eventide, were to him spectacles of which his eye never tired, with which his heart never got satiated. And as he grew more and more the constant worshipper of nature, ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... canopy Of dull and doomed regret; Where on the unseen verges yet, O yet, At intervals, Trembles, and falls, Faint lightning of remembered transient sweet— Ah, far too sweet But to be sweet a little, a little sweet, and fleet; Leaving this pallid trace, This loitering and most fitful light a space, Still some sad space, For Grief to see her ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... first interview with his grandfather. All his experience of the ties of relationship, however limited, was full of tenderness and rapture. His memory often dwelt on his mother's sweet embrace; and ever and anon a fitful phantom of some past passage of domestic love haunted his gushing heart. The image of his father was less fresh in his mind; but still it was associated with a vague sentiment of kindness and joy; and the allusions to her husband ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... exchanged for a quick trot. And there is not even a point of comparison between his sweet sing-song, and the wavy, snow-like, spirit-like motion of Milton's loftier passages; or the gliding, pausing, fitful, river-like progress of Shakspeare's verse; or the fretted fury, and "torrent-rapture" of brave old Chapman in his translation of Homer; or the rich, long-drawn-out, slow-swimming, now soft-languishing, and now full-gushing melody of Spenser's ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... the fire engines have been busy. Water has been constantly playing on the burning ruins. At times the fire seems almost extinguished, but fitful flames suddenly break out afresh in some new quarter, and again the water and ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... chafers whirring, A little piping of leaf-hid birds; A flutter of wings, a fitful stirring, A cloud to the eastward ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... their voices, in an indistinct, fitful way, reached him where he sat. At first there was nothing peculiar in the tone, but in a few minutes it was evident that Maggie was getting angry. Allan rose then and went slowly toward them. Where the hill touched the beach ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... beyond the barriers of Blarwyn Fells throughout the afternoon, was near them now, and had burst in deep-mouthed battle among the ravines at the other side, and over the broad lake, that glared like a sheet of burnished steel under its flashes of dazzling blue. Wild and fitful blasts sweeping down the hollows and cloughs of the fells of Golden Friars agitated the lake, and bent the trees low, and whirled away their sere leaves in melancholy drift in their tremendous gusts. And from the window, looking on a scene enveloped in more than the darkness of ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... lower my spirits as I was lowering my friend's. After several times obtaining the same result from a like experiment in which all the circumstances were varied except my own personality, I took it as an established inference that these fitful signs of a lingering belief in my own importance were generally felt to be abnormal, and were something short of that sanity which I aimed to secure. Clearness on this point is not without its gratifications, as I have ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... was persistently stormy, though no rain fell—the gale had increased in strength, and the white moon only occasionally glared out from the masses of white and gray cloud that rushed like flying armies across the sky, and her fitful light shone dimly, as though she were a spectral torch glimmering through a forest of shadow. Now and again bursts of music, or the blare of discordant trumpets, reached our ears from the more distant thoroughfares where the people were still ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... moved on the heavenly procession of the seasons; and as each new one passed with smile and song, and strewed its flowers or fruits on Bylow Hill, the memory of one who after life's fitful fever slept soundly at last was ever a sweet forgetting of all that had once been bitter, and a sweeter and sweeter remembrance of whatsoever things had been pure, lovely, and ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable
... A wondrous form, and fair; With jewels bright she plaiteth Her shining golden hair: With comb of gold prepares it, The task with song beguiled; A fitful burden bears ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... fain to abandon their picnics and forest excursions, their botanical researches and distant-race meetings—nay, even croquet itself, that perennial source of recreation for the youthful mind, had to be given up, except in the most fitful snatches. In this state of things, amateur concerts and acted charades came into fashion. The billiard-room was crowded from breakfast till dinner time. It was a charmingly composite apartment—having one long wall lined with bookshelves, sacred ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... thing, even for those accustomed to underground labor, to search an unfamiliar spot by torch-light; the fitful gleam makes the objects on which it falls difficult of identification. It is doubtful whether one has seen this or that before or not—whether we are not retracing old ground. Even to practiced eyes these objects, too, are not so salient as the tree or the stone which marks a locality above-ground; ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... class reading:— On the Beach at Night Bivouac on a Mountain Side To a Locomotive in Winter A Farm Picture The Runner I Hear It was Charged against Me A Sight in Camp By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame Song of the Broad-Axe A Child said What is the grass? ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... blank as a baby's. The lovely, opalescent dawn began to show in the East, and Malone swore at it. Then, haggard, red-eyed, confused, violently angry, and not one inch closer to a solution, he fell into a fitful ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... are shut, and the breeze when they are open, are all fully appreciated on first starting, but soon the novelty wears off, and the discomforts are so numerous, that it is pronounced, at best, a barbarous conveyance. The greedy cry and gestures of the bearers, when, on changing, they break a fitful sleep by poking a torch in your face, and vociferating "Bucksheesh, Sahib;" their discontent at the most liberal largesse, and the sluggishness of the next set who want bribes, put the traveller out of patience with the natives. The dust when the slides are open, and the stifling heat ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... heard a new sound, some one singing. It was probably a sleigh-load of young folk returning from a country tea-meeting, he reflected. Then he suddenly sat up straight. Something familiar in the fitful sounds made him slip out to the door and listen. The wind was lulled for a moment, and he could dimly discern a figure going along the road. And he could hear a voice raised loud and discordant in the 103rd psalm! Old Angus came back ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... is said. But storms when I was young Would still pass o'er like Nature's fitful fevers, And rendered all more wholesome. Now their rage, Sent thus unseasonable and profitless, Speaks like the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... surface of Alava is very mountainous, especially on the north, where a part of the Pyrenees forms its natural boundary. It is separated from Logrono by the river Ebro, and its other rivers are the Zadorra and the Ayuda. The climate is mild in summer, fitful in autumn and spring, and very cold in winter, as even the plains are high and shut in on three sides by mountains snow-clad during several months. The soil in the valleys is fertile, yielding wheat, barley, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the old scow was being borne along with a strong, steady-motion, unlike its first fitful drift; it brought her heart to her throat,—for just so, it seemed to her, would a torrent set that was hastening to plunge over the side of the earth. She remembered, with a start of cold horror, Zoe's dim tradition of a fall far off in the river. She had never seen one, but Zoe ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... lay some distance back from the railroad station, so that, although it took longer to go by automobile than by train, the car made us independent of the rather fitful night train service and ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... a tenseness to the atmosphere, as if it were charged with the electricity of a coming storm, a tingling waiting which made the men prone to become silent and then talk again in fitful outbursts. Or it might be said that it was like a glass full of precipitate which only waits for the injection of a single unusual substance before it settles to the bottom and leaves the remaining liquid ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... lost in a reverie as profound as that from which I had aroused her; and the only sound I heard was the rain on the window and the fitful gusts of wind ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... by my Edith's bed-side through long, weary midnight hours, and she wakes from her fitful slumbers and asks for you. 'Why does she never come to see me now? There's no arm raises me so lightly, no hand bathes my brow so gently, as hers. Will you ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... in eighteenth-century England. Hitherto working men had taken only a fleeting and fitful interest in politics. How should they do so in days when newspapers were very dear, and their contents had only the remotest bearing on the life of the masses? The London mob had bawled and rioted for "Wilkes and Liberty," but mainly ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... distaste for exertion and society, a fitful appetite, low spirits,—these are all the symptoms noticed at first. Then, one by one, come palpitation of the heart, an unhealthy complexion, irregularity, dyspepsia, depraved tastes,—such as a desire to eat slate-pencil dust, chalk, or clay,—vague pains in body ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... soon after this that my stepmother made her one vain effort to break though the stillness of our lives. My Father's energy seemed to decline, to become more fitful, to take unseasonable directions. My mother instinctively felt that his peculiarities were growing upon him; he would scarcely stir from his microscope, except to go to the chapel, and he was visible to fewer and fewer visitors. She had taken a pleasure in his literary eminence, and she was aware ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... a horse to try its sinew and bone, or a child to feel its fineness and warmth. They were for the most part silent, and when any sound came through the dusk from them to the officers at their fire, it was murmurous and fitful as of men speaking low and brokenly. There was no sound of the noisy controversy which was generally heard, the give-and-take of the camp-fire, the firing backwards and forwards that went on on the march; if a compliment was paid a gun by one of its special ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... they should persist in the ways of pollution. Those who have read her 'Woman,' may remember some daring comparisons therein suggested between these Pariahs of society and large classes of their respectable sisters; and that was no fitful expression,—no sudden outbreak,—but impelled by her most deliberate convictions. I think, if she had been born to large fortune, a house of refuge for all female outcasts desiring to return to the ways of Virtue, would have been one of her most ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Latrigg was buried. In the glory of the August afternoon, the ladies of Seat-Sandal stood with Julius in the shadow of the park gates, and watched the long procession winding slowly down the fells. At first it was accompanied by fitful, varying gusts of solemn melody; but as it drew nearer, the affecting tones of the funeral hymn became more and more distinct and sustained. There were at least three hundred voices thrilling the still, warm air with ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... for itself on the point of decency. It is, however, but child's play after all, and abounds with toys and games, from a half-penny whistle to an electric machine. Leipsic is now in its waking hours; but a short time hence her fitful three weeks' fever will have passed away, and, weary with excitement, or as some say, plethoric with her gorge of profits, she will sink into a soulless lethargy. Her streets will become deserted, and echo to solitary footsteps; and whole rows of houses, with their ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... comely cheeks, Wind-play tossed their hair, Creeping things among the grass Stroked them here and there; Meggan piped a merry note, A fitful wayward lay, While shrill as bird on topmost twig Piped merry May; 70 Honey-smooth the ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... and was threatening a frost—the great enemy of fever. The falling leaves and the fitful gusts of chill wind presaged the coming of winter. The ear caught the ring of sounds more distant and more distinct now that the languor of summer was gone, and all animal nature seemed more invigorated ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... quenched her sunshine. She lived in an elevated region full of love and wonder, taking kindly alike to reverence and to hope; but she was seldom excited, her feelings were not shallow enough to be easily troubled with excitement, or made fitful with agitation. ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... There was a struggle going on worthy the soul of this noble-minded youth. He was trying to solve a problem which vacillated between right and wrong. It was no common task, for when duty pointed the way, the form of self overshadowed the path, and showed only fitful gleams of light. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... looked at the big clock in the corner of the kitchen. The early dark was already creeping into the room, hiding itself under table and chair, showing the light of the isinglass doors of the cooking-stove with a fitful radiance, making Marion lonely and homesick, for you could hear the clock tick, the room was so still. Then Aunt Betty lighted two yellow tallow candles that stood in iron candlesticks on the mantel-shelf, put up a leaf of the kitchen table, ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... gloomy silence. Gordon, Smith and Hart began a fitful conversation, but a message was immediately passed up to them from Mr. Whitehead, who sat at the bottom of one of the tables, to stop talking. At the end of tea the guests filed ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... had to endure the apparently causeless fluctuation of spirits incidental to one compelled to dwell for long periods of time in the fitful ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... speak to him; but they pressed his wasted hand, and sat in silence round him, trying to see with his eyes and hear with his ears, and listening to the fitful words which sprang from time ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... arrayed in virgin white of pear and cherry blossom, with here and there a blush from apple-trees and a faint glimmer of delicate green against cool grey of stone walls showing among the purples of trunks and branches warming into new life under the fitful rays of April sunshine. The sunshine draws out colour from soaring spires or copper domes of churches and from the quaint towers and pinnacles of old Prague's former defences against enemies that came like storm clouds from out of the west or ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... general, upon the ornamental; of the merely fashionable you already know my opinion. Not that this most fitful dame has no rights that deserve respect, but her feeble light is a black spot in the radiance of real fine art. When you can give no other reason for liking what you like than that Mistress Fashion approves, beware! beware!—trust ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... of fitful slumber by the noise at her door, she sprang from her bed to the floor, every terror that lurked in her acutely tense mind and diseased imagination starting up and almost overwhelming her. The idea of flight—one of the strongest of all instincts—seized ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... She learned with a glance, and remembered with extraordinary tenacity everything she had acquired. But she was neither tender nor deferential, and to induce her to study you could not depend on the affections, but only on her intelligence. So she was often fitful, capricious, or provoking, and her mother, who, though accomplished and eager, had neither the method nor the self-restraint of Mr. Ferrars, was often annoyed and irritable. Then there were scenes, or rather ebullitions on one ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... week at Warrenton was anything but agreeable. The cold northwest winds swept through our camps, carrying chilly discomfort everywhere. The men shivered over their log fires; but while the fitful wind drove the smoke and fire into their faces, it froze their backs. At our head-quarters, as we drew closely about our fire, dreading equally the chilly winds and the provoking clouds of smoke, one of the party, ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... at first in fitful dashes from the southeast, began to come more steadily and swiftly after eleven o'clock, and was so warm that the snow softened to a sloppy state. The air carried a tinge of haze, and conditions were oppressive. It was labor to breathe. Never, except one deadly hot July ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... the day. Even Milton, in his boyish compositions, wrote after Spenser and Shakespeare, with their contemporaries, had created modern English poetry. Whatever there was in Spenser's early verses of grace and music was of his own finding: no one of his own time, except in occasional and fitful snatches, like stanzas of Sackville's, had shown him the way. Thus equipped, he entered the student world, then full of pedantic and ill-applied learning, of the disputations of Calvinistic theology, and of the beginnings of those highly speculative ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... and Quebec, and frequently engaged with Montcalm's floating batteries; while in the mean time the roar of artillery from a dozen different quarters filled the simmering July days, and lit the short summer nights with fiery shapes, and drew in fitful floods the roving thunder-clouds that at this season of the year in North America are apt to lurk behind ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... mighty advantage—for Greece. Now, finally, for the use made of this advantage. To that point I have already spoken. By the clamorous and undeliberative qualities of the Athenian political audience, by its fitful impatience, and vehement arrogance, and fervid partisanship, all wide and general discussion was barred in limine. And thus occurred this singular inversion of positions—the greatest of Greek orators was obliged ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... conviction which assures spirits like his of the future, however dark the present may appear. But, could he have beheld it, the morning, moving westward in the track of the Puritan emigrants, had passed from his hemisphere only to shine again in this with no fitful ray, but with a steady brightness which will one day reillumine the feudal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... display. The clouds rose slowly, lingering beyond the western hills with no wind to aid their progress. Finally she partly undressed, and throwing on a kimono settled herself comfortably upon her cot, to await the uncertain storm, ready to shut the windows in case of driving rain. By and by fitful breezes fluttered through the room, the low rumbling of thunder was heard, and presently a soft patter of drops on the leaves. The lightning grew brilliant. The nurse dreamed and waked by turns. At length she was aroused by steps ...
— Polly of the Hospital Staff • Emma C. Dowd
... seen. "It is well," said Arthur; "now, bear me to the water's edge; and hasten, I pray thee, for I have tarried over-long and my wound has taken cold." So Sir Bedivere raised the King on his back and bore him tenderly to the lonely shore, where the lapping waves floated many an empty helmet and the fitful moonlight fell on the upturned faces of the dead. Scarce had they reached the shore when there hove in sight a barge, and on its deck stood three tall women, robed all in black and wearing crowns on their heads. "Place me in the barge," said the King, and softly Sir Bedivere lifted ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... blood in my ears Strumming always the same, And the gable-cock With its fitful grate, And ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... with bursts of rain and fitful flashes of lightning, which lighted up the decks of the American ship as she tossed on the waves. The storm had left her in a sadly disabled condition. The shattered top hamper had fallen forward, cumbering up the forecastle, ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... surprised by the exquisite neatness and cleanliness of every part of the building. We drove from St. Peter's to the church of St. Onofrio, to visit the tomb of Tasso. A plain slab marks the spot, which requires nothing but his name to distinguish it. "After life's fitful fever he sleeps well." The poet Guidi lies in a little chapel close by; and his effigy is so placed that the eyes appear fixed upon ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... which the theologian proper never has done or will do. And thus whatever of calmness or endurance Job alone, on his ash-heap, might have conquered for himself, is all scattered away; and as the strong gusts of passion sweep to and fro across his heart, he pours himself out in wild fitful music, so beautiful because so true, not answering them or their speeches, but now flinging them from him in scorn, now appealing to their mercy, or turning indignantly to God; now praying for death; now in perplexity doubting whether, in some mystic way which ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... of humor, but it did not always serve him. Occasionally it was fitful, and when summoned by irony ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... toiling among bleak Scythian steeps in the hazy background. Above the storm-cloud flitted ominous patches of scud, rapidly advancing and receding: Attila's skirmishers, thrown forward in the van of his Huns. Beneath, a fitful shadow slid along the surface. As we gazed, the cloud ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... itself, under promising omens: now, and more and more henceforth, he began to look on Literature as his real employment, after all; and was prosecuting it with his accustomed loyalty and ardor. And he continued ever afterwards, in spite of such fitful circumstances and uncertain outward fluctuations as his were sure of being, to prosecute it steadily with all the ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... early in the morning, and with our blankets strapped to our backs and rations in our pockets for two days, set out along an ancient and in places an obliterated bark road that followed and crossed and recrossed the stream. The morning was bright and warm, but the wind was fitful and petulant, and I predicted rain. What a forest solitude our obstructed and dilapidated wood-road led us through! five miles of primitive woods before we came to the forks, three miles before we came to the "burnt shanty," a ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... instantly followed as corollary to it a CONFEDERATION OF BAR, which quite dimmed the fame of Radom, and indeed of all Confederations prior or posterior! As the Confederation of Bar and its Doings, or rather sufferings and tragical misdoings and undoings, still hang like fitful spectralities, or historical shadows, of a vague ghastly complexion, in the human memory, one asks at least: Since they were on this Planet, tell us where? Bar is in the Waiwodship Podol (what we call Podolia), some 400 miles southeast of Warsaw; not far from ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... nobles came and pressed her, and Jean whispered to her not to show herself a fule body, and disgrace herself before the English, setting the harp before her and attending to the strings. Eleanor's fingers then played over them in a dreamy, fitful way, that made the old Earl raise his ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fourth cylinder fell—a brilliant green meteor—as I learned afterwards, in Bushey Park. Before the guns on the Richmond and Kingston line of hills began, there was a fitful cannonade far away in the southwest, due, I believe, to guns being fired haphazard before the black ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... had long since declared that there was no hope. In one of those fitful bursts of anger, in which Charles from time to time indulged, even in his state of exhaustion and in his dying moments, he had desired to be left by his doctors and attendants, and he slumbered his last slumber in this world, before closing his eyes for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... Mysterious Stranger'! It happened by a queer sort of accident, which came pretty near relieving you of the duty of replying to this letter. I was out in my little boat, which carries a sail too big for her, as I know and ought to have remembered. One of those fitful flaws of wind to which the lake is so liable struck the sail suddenly, and over went my boat. My feet got tangled in the sheet somehow, and I could not get free. I had hard work to keep my head above water, and I struggled desperately to escape from my toils; ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... hope—everything to suffer. I diligently set to work to expel you utterly from my thoughts; and I tell you candidly, I endeavoured to love another, who was brilliant, and witty, and universally admired. But her fitful, stormy, exacting temperament was too much like my own to suit me. I tried faithfully to become attached to her, intending to make her my wife, but I failed signally. My heart clung stubbornly to its old worship; my restless, fiery spirit could find no repose, ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... long time before he slept; and the sleep, when it came, was fitful. Perhaps he had brooded too much over his fall from grace. As the night wore on he was not sure, half the time, whether he was dreaming or awake. And so eventful were his slumbers, and so real the events therein, that ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... above Dunskaith he stood to scan The outer ocean for the Viking ships, Peering below his hand, with panting lips A-gape, but wide and empty lay the sea Beyond the barrier crags of Cromarty, To the far sky-line lying blue and bare— For no red pirate sought as yet to dare The gloomy hazards of the fitful seas, The gusty terrors, and the treacheries Of fickle April and its changing skies— And while he scanned the waves with curious eyes, The sea-wind in his nostrils, who had spent A long, bleak winter in ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... proved to be our last meeting. I went to Paris; a fitful correspondence intervened, grew infrequent, ceased; then a little later, came to me the notification, very brief and official, of his death in the French Hospital of pneumonia. It was followed by a few remembrances of him, sent ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... and Arabella sat at the other side of the fire, at some distance from it, on a sofa, and carried on a fitful conversation in whispers, of which a word would now and then reach the ears of the wretched mother. It consisted chiefly of a description of the man's illness, and of the different sayings which had come from ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... a strange crowd that stood there in the driving storm, lit up by the fitful flashes of ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... general discontinued his fitful overseering. He rose early and spent his long days sitting upon the front porch, smoking an old briar pipe and reading the Richmond papers. Occasionally he would ride at a jogging pace round the fields, giving ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... self-abasement he tried to find solace in the thought that Flamel had sanctioned his course. Flamel, at the outset, must have guessed to whom the letters were addressed; yet neither then nor afterward had he hesitated to advise their publication. This thought drew Glennard to him in fitful impulses of friendliness, from each of which there was a sharper reaction of distrust and aversion. When Flamel was not at the house, he missed the support of his tacit connivance; when he was there, his presence seemed the assertion of ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... chief, and in some places the only, supporters of religion. Even in Paris, where Freethinkers abound, the women go to church and favor the priest. Naturally, they impress their own views on the children, for while the father's influence is fitful through his absence from home, the mother's is constant and therefore permanent. Again and again the clergy have restored their broken power by the hold upon that sex which men pretend to think the weaker, although they are obviously the sovereigns of every ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... The fitful rush of the wind was now disturbed by a portentous sound: it was a quick and heavy knocking at the outer door. Pearson's wan countenance grew paler, for many a visit of persecution had taught him what to dread; the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... subduing these fierce nobles, and perhaps of developing the people at large, the nation itself, if that is not too modern an ambition. The reign of Law, broken and disturbed by a hundred storms, but still henceforward with a statute-book to fall back upon and some fitful authority at its command, began in ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... of moral truth, to the uttermost confines of Christendom.* A wide frontier had been laid naked by this unexpected disaster, and more substantial evils were preceded by a thousand fanciful and imaginary dangers. The alarmed colonists believed that the yells of the savages mingled with every fitful gust of wind that issued from the interminable forests of the west. The terrific character of their merciless enemies increased immeasurably the natural horrors of warfare. Numberless recent massacres were still vivid in their recollections; nor was there any ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... energy was fitful; lassitude and depression again invaded him. He was warned by Sir Andrew Clark to lay aside all the burden of his work. Accordingly, early in May, just after his sixtieth birthday, he sent in his formal ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... matters to move me. Clouds were gathering on the world; the times were fitful; the air was thick with rumours from abroad; the sleep of the Continent was breaking up, and Europe lay in the anxious and strange expectancy in which some great city might see the signs of a coming earthquake, without the power of ascertaining at what moment, or from what quarter, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... fitful gusts between A sound came from the land; It was the sound of the trampling surf, On the rocks ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... he skims along, Uttering his sweet and mournful cry; He starts not at my fitful song, Or flash of fluttering drapery; He has no thought of any wrong; He scans me with a fearless eye. Stanch friends are we, well tried and strong, The little sandpiper ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... his extravagance. She embittered his daily bread by blaming him for what he spent on it; she wore her oldest dresses, and would have had him go shabby in token of their adversity. Her economies were frantic child's play,—methodless, inexperienced, fitful; and they were apt to be followed by remorse in which she abetted him ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... Jesuit mission the last days of Champlain are inseparably allied. A severe experience had proved that the colonizing zeal of the crown was fitful and uncertain. Private initiative was needed to supplement the official programme, and of such initiative the supply seemed scanty. The fur traders notoriously shirked their obligations to enlarge the colony, {133} and after 1632 the Huguenots, ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... slowly kindled in a weak, fitful fashion. I first became slightly curious about myself. Why had I slept so profoundly? Why was I so nerveless and stupid after ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe |
