"Flit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... roaring with the terrific thunder of its own vitality, this hall in which no common voice could make itself heard produced nevertheless an effect of magical stillness, silence, and solitude. We were alone in it, save that now and then in the far-distant spaces a figure might flit and disappear between the huge glinting columns of metal. It was a hall enchanted and inexplicable. I understood nothing of it. But I understood that half the electricity of New York was being generated by its engines of a hundred and fifty thousand horse-power, ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... a fine warm day in June. Out of the town the air is soft and pure. Bird and bee flit from tree to tree, from blue-bell to rose, till at sun-set they hie ...
— The First Little Pet Book with Ten Short Stories in Words of Three and Four Letters • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... he." So I went on into the wood, still hoping to find, in some one of its mysterious recesses, my lost lady of the marble. The sunny afternoon died into the loveliest twilight. Great bats began to flit about with their own noiseless flight, seemingly purposeless, because its objects are unseen. The monotonous music of the owl issued from all unexpected quarters in the half-darkness around me. The glow-worm ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... to London, and did pretty well for a bit; Then the business dropped to nothing, and the manager took a flit,— Stepped off one Sunday morning, forgetting the treasury call; But our luck was in, and we managed right on our feet ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... toiling at the work they loved. They took no pattern from the houses of men, but each man wrought what his inner eye had seen and carved in marble the visions of his dream. All over the roof of one of the palace chambers winged lions flit like bats, the size of every one is the size of the lions of God, and the wings are larger than any wing created; they are one above the other more than a man can number, they are all carven out of one block of marble, the chamber itself is hollowed from it, and it is borne aloft upon the ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... keeper at Whitby Saw a couple of Zeppelins flit by; Though she felt a sharp sting, It's a curious thing That she never knew which she ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... still intervene, And all my comfort flies; Like Noah's dove, I flit between Rough seas and stormy skies. Anon the clouds depart, The wind and waters cease, While sweetly o'er my gladdened heart Expands the bow of peace; Bow of peace, bow of peace, Expands the ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... the world at midsummer only makes my loneliness more keen. The butterflies flit through the meadows like wandering souls of last year's flowers that died and were buried by the snow. The harvest moon, red-gold and wonderful, will rise slowly up out of the sea. The path of light will lie on the still ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... read by another person, without an inward struggle?—In mere passive silent reading the thoughts remain mere thoughts, and these too not our own,—phantoms with no attribute of place, no sense of appropriation, that flit over the consciousness as shadows over the grass or young corn in an April day. But even the sound of our own or another's voice takes them out of that lifeless, twilight, realm of thought, which is the confine, the 'intermundium', as it were, of existence and ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... a step forward; there was a sharp report, and he staggered back. "Flit?" cried Mr Preddle, excitedly. "Yes, but not hurt," replied Mr Frewen. "The bullet struck my collar, and it was like something giving me a ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... don't see each other often," the old fairy woman had said. "You flit in like, and flit away again as if you was a butterfly, I think sometimes when I'm sitting here alone. When you come to stay you're mostly flitting about the wood and I only see you bit by bit. But I couldn't tell you, Miss, my dear, what it's like ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Fitz, who from your suburb grange Where once I tarried for a while, Glance at the wheeling Orb of change And greet it with a kindly smile; Whom yet I see, as there you sit Beneath your sheltering garden tree, And watch your doves about you flit And plant on shoulder, hand and knee, Or on your head their rosy feet, As if they knew your diet spares Whatever moved in that full sheet Let down to ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... flit, One little sandpiper and I; And fast I gather, bit by bit, The scattered driftwood bleached and dry. The wild waves reach their hands for it, The wild wind raves, the tide runs high, As up and down the beach we flit, One little sandpiper ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... the despair and joy of Ethan Frome. The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches. The fact that he had no right to show his feelings, and thus provoke the expression of hers, made him attach a fantastic importance to every change in her look and tone. Now ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... of absolute indifference to her whether he loved her or not, so long as he was at hand to take her about. And she didn't intend to encourage him, either. Love meant ties and responsibility—Alice proved that clearly enough. There was plenty of time for love. Let her flit first. Let her remain young as long as she could, careless and care-free. The fact that she was married was just an accident, an item in her adventure. It didn't make her less young to be married, and she didn't see why it should. Martin understood, and that was why ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... two. Kitty—nervous without being sensitive, temperamental without temperament, a woman who seemed to flit and never light—and Roxanne, who was as young as spring night, and summed up in her own ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... her agents and her spies, Gliding through temples, baths, and theatres; Possess all angles, corners, noonday halts, And darknesses; they flit with casual poison Softly; the city secretly is filled With murmurs, lifted eyebrows, and with sighs. The mischief's in the very blood of Rome Unless the sore that feeds it is ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... that house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom, And flit from room ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... every now and then as a form that I loved glided amongst them, but even that form dragged after it a chain of painful, fettering considerations, and the gleams of light that it threw round it were only like those weak, pallid flashes of sun that flit through the clouds of thunder ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... in that enchanting time when men are still asleep in their nests, and even "My Lord Sun" has not arisen from his; when the air is sweet and fresh, and as free from the dust of man's coming and going as if his tumults did not exist. It was so still that the flit of a wing was almost startling. The water lapped softly against the shore; ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... dust and heat of the Piazza one comes into a cool cloister that surrounds a quadrangle open to the sky, in which a cypress still lives. The sun fills the garden with a golden beauty, in which the butterflies flit from flower to flower over the dead. I do not know a place more silent or more beautiful. One lingers in the cool shadow of the cloisters before many an old marble,—a vase carved with Bacchanalian women, the head of Achilles, or the bust ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... INTELLECTUAL, one lays himself liable to the accusation of having forsaken democracy. For all that, "fundamental brainwork" is behind every respect-worthy piece of writing, whether it be a lightsome lyric that seems as careless as a redbird's flit or a formal epic, an impressionistic essay or a great novel that measures the depth of human destiny. Nonintellectual literature is as nonexistent as education without mental discipline, or as "character building" in a school that is slovenly in scholarship. Billboards along the highways ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... torment until the dawn, haunted her during the day. She would read in her room, or remain at her prayers, in the hopes of distracting herself from the struggle, until sleep seemed the supreme necessity: then, when she lay down, sleep would flap its wings in mockery and flit away, leaving her wide-awake staring at the darkness of the room or of her own eyelids, until the windows began to glimmer and the cocks to ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... displaying their rich white and chestnut plumage to perfection. Now they chase each other for very joyfulness, uttering their sharp twittering notes; then they hover with expanded wings like miniature Kestrels, or dart downwards with the velocity of the sparrowhawk; anon they flit rapidly over the neighboring pool, occasionally dipping themselves in its calm and placid waters, and leaving a long train of rings marking their varied course. How easily they turn, or glide over the surrounding ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [March 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... Mohoro river, monkeys slide down the ropes formed by parasitic plants that hang from the tree branches, to dip their hands in the water to drink; only to flee, chattering to the tree-tops, as they meet the gaze of apparently slumbering crocodiles. Great painted butterflies flit above the beds of lilies that fringe the muddy lagoons, the hippopotamus wallows lazily in the warm sunlit waters. Here, it is true, is the Equatorial Africa of our schoolboy dreams; and the birds have little but their glittering plumage to ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... inhabitants. Some "seem to take us into the dense forest among mocking echoes from, the life outside; others show us the trolls tobogganing down the highest peaks of Norway; in some we feel human souls hovering over reefs; in others, memories of the old sun-lit land flit before us; but in none do we meet with sentimentalism, despondency, or disconsolateness." But with their weird and minor strains, and their odd jumps from low tones to high, on first acquaintance they strike the ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... in the convulsions of death, and will be registered by the destroying angel! May a form like this draw thy curtain when thou sleepest, and grasp thee with its clay-cold hand! May a form like this flit before thy soul when thou diest, and drive away thy expiring prayer for mercy! May a form like this stand by thy grave at the resurrection, and before the throne of God when he pronounces thy doom! (He faints, the servants receive him ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... that is, whenever he could catch her, a smiling rosy, dimple-cheeked little girl, whom he called "Fanny," and the rest of the party "Lady Frances." It was a pretty sight to see her break away from them all, and flit about the ruins and through the dark tangled alleys of the groves, like a bird on the wing. She laughingly skipped up and down the Witches' Staircase with the rest, but she lingered longest in the haunted cave, looking about her wistfully, as though she expected to see the enchanted ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... a scrap of cambric, dried her eyes like magic, and began to flit about the garden, humming a light air under her breath. Her dress was of an old-fashioned sort of book-muslin—it was made full and billowy; her figure was round and yet lithe, her hair was a mass of frizzy soft rings, and when the dimples played in her ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... the faces of our friends Unfamiliar traits she lends— Quaint, white witch, who looketh down With a glamour all her own. Hushed are laughter, jest, and speech, Mute and heedless each of each, In the glory wan we sit, Visions vague before us flit; Side by side, yet worlds apart, Heart becometh ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... troop—stranded on the Island of Calypso. After some mention of the fate of the other Greeks, Jupiter decrees that Ulysses shall return to Ithaca, where many suitors are besieging his wife Penelope. In obedience with this decree, Pallas (Minerva) dons golden sandals—which permit her to flit with equal ease over land and sea—and visits Ithaca, where Ulysses' son, Telemachus, mournfully views the squandering of his father's wealth. Here she is hospitably received, and, after some conversation, urges Telemachus to visit the courts of Nestor and Menelaus to inquire ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... bright rays athwart the clear blue sky. The dust and foulness which the night has hidden stand revealed. But in the forests and hills the pulses of nature beat fresh and full; the leopard and the tiger slink away; the gay flowers open; the birds flit to and fro, and with woodland music welcome the rising day. In the city all forms of life quicken into active exercise. The trader sits ready on his stall; the judge is on the bench; the physician allays pain; the mother tends ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... witness to such sacrilege. "That OLD man!" he raved. And when I said I was not a young girl myself he got all the madder. Well, I allowed him to think I was going to marry Dr. Denbigh (I wonder what the doctor would say), and as a consequence Harry will flit to-morrow, and he is with poor little Peggy out in the grape-arbor, and she is crying her eyes out. If he dares tell her what a fool he is I could kill him. I am horribly afraid that he will let it out, for I never saw such an alarmingly impetuous youth. Young Lochinvar ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... recently my pilot and I nearly had to do this, but were just able to glide across a small salient. I am thus qualified to describe a typical series of incidents preceding the announcement, "one of our machines is missing," and I do so in the hope that this may interest you, madam, as you flit from town to country, country to town, ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... was not silent. His box was on the stage; and ever and anon the syren shot a glance which seemed to tell him that he was marked out amid this brilliant multitude. Each round of applause, each roar of ravished senses, only added a more fearful action to the wild purposes which began to flit about his Grace's mind. His imagination was touched. His old passion to be distinguished returned in full force. This creature was strange, mysterious, celebrated. Her beauty, her accomplishments, were as singular and as rare as ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... he spoke he saw a strange expression flit across her face. The next instant she rose and going across to her husband's chair stood looking down upon him with ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Bunratty, that moths and butterflies come to life by shaking themselves out, one fine day, from a dull-looking, shapeless, ugly thing they call a grub, in which they have been buried for a long time. They unfold their wings and fly out in the sunshine, and flit from flower to flower, and they look beautiful and happy—the world, the wicked world, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... from which they kept one detachment in check. Meanwhile, in our own quarter the fight raged furiously. A large body of Spaniards, slipping past O'Brien, came on again and again. We beat them back, but they gave us no rest. Our men began to fall, and once I saw a shade of anxiety flit across the colonel's face. It was gone in less than a second, but it confirmed my opinion that we could not hold ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... compromise with the tops of the boots, managed to protect also the lower half. His features were delicate, and would have been called handsome had they belonged to a proportionately delicate body; in his eyes hovered a dreamy vagueness which seemed to come and vanish, and to flit from one feature to another, suggesting the idea of remoteness, and a feeling of hopeless strangeness to the world and all ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the mad world seethes. Hansoms, like cantering beetles, with diamond eyes Run through the moons of it; busses in yellow and red Hoot; and St. Paul's is a bubble afloat in the skies, Watching the pale moths flit and ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... frugality the lights burn dim and low. But anon sounds the signal from the front of the house. Strike up the band; here comes a sucker! Somebody resembling ready money has arrived. The lights flash on, the can-canners take the floor, the garcons flit hither and yon, and all ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... moment of clever, double meanings; veils raised by words, as petticoats are lifted by the wind; tricks of language, cleverly disguised audacities; sentences which reveal nude images in covered phrases, which cause the vision of all that may not be said to flit rapidly before the eyes of the mind, and allow well-bred people the enjoyment of a kind of subtle and mysterious love, a species of impure mental contact, due to the simultaneous evocations of secret, shameful and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... kept saying to himself; "an' sic sma' white han's! an' sic a bonny flit! Eh hoo she wad glitter throu' the water in a bag net! Faith! gien she war to sing 'come doon' to me, I wad gang. Wad that be to lowse baith sowl an' body, I wonner? I'll see what Maister Graham says to that. It's a fine question to put till 'im: 'Gien a body was to gang wi' a mermaid, ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... was borne to be healed of his hurts. With straining eyes the fisherman watches the mist-wrapped islet, and, peering through the evening haze, cheats himself into the belief that giant forms are moving upon its shores and that spectral shapes flit across its sands—that the dark hours bring back the activities of the attendant knights and enchantresses of the mighty hero of Celtdom, who, refreshed by his long repose, will one day return to the world of men and right the ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... "We've certainly got a couple of hours before they find where we came out. Then, very likely, they'll start a fresh search for us among the ruined houses. That would give us a bit more pull in making a flit of it." ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... chirps in agony, when she might pass unnoticed by keeping still. The most marked exception which I have noticed is the Red Thrush, which, in this respect, as in others, has the most high-bred manners among all our birds: both male and female sometimes flit in perfect silence through the bushes, and show solicitude only in a sob which is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... mark for the rifles of the sportsmen and the sling-shots of small boys. As if sufficient attention were not attracted to it by its plumage, it must needs keep up a noisy, guttural rattle, ker-r-ruck, ker-r-ruck, very like a tree-toad's call, and flit about among the trees with the restlessness of a fly-catcher. Yet, in spite of these invitations for a shot to the passing gunner, it still multiplies in districts where nuts abound, being "more common than the robin" about Washington, ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... pit-pat from their burrows on the hill; Hangs within the gloom its weary head the shining daffodil. In the valley underneath us through the fragrance flit along Over fields and over hedgerows little quivering drops of song. All adown the pale blue mantle of the mountains far away Stream the tresses of the twilight flying in the wake of day. Night comes; ...
— By Still Waters - Lyrical Poems Old and New • George William Russell
... fury doubly keen, Fierce on the Deacon rush'd the raging Dean; Nor less the dauntless Deacon dare withstand The brandish'd weight of Toe's uplifted hand. [38]The ghost of themes departed, that, of yore, Disgraced alike, the Doctor praised or tore, On paper wings flit dimly through the night, And, hovering low in air, beheld the fight. Each ill-starr'd verse its filthy den forsakes, Black from the spit, or reeking from the jakes; The blot-stain'd troop their shadowy pages spread, And call for vengeance on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... than back flitted the bevy of girls again into the study, until the small room was full to overflowing. It was like seeing a company of fat bumble-bees, their portly bodies resplendent in black and gold, buzz heavily out of a room, and a gay flight of pale-blue and lemon butterflies flit back in their places. All the daughters fell upon their father, Margaret, Bridget, Isabel, Sarah, Mary, and Susanna; there they all were! tugging off his heavy riding-boots and gaiters, putting away the whip on the whip-rack, while little Mary perched herself proudly ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... thoughts from the most searching human eye, but this cannot be done on Mute. As a consequence each one can read the character of his comrades, and the normal citizen well knows what necessary allowance to make for the impure thoughts that flit through the ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... Indian seas, Where scent comes forth in every breeze. Thou hast not seen the rich grape grow For miles, as far as eyes can go; Thou hast not seen a summer's night When maids could sew by a worm's light; Nor the North Sea in spring send out Bright hues that like birds flit about In solid cages of white ice— Sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Love-one-place. Thou hast not seen black fingers pick White cotton when the bloom is thick, Nor heard black throats in harmony; Nor hast thou sat on stones that lie Flat on the earth, that once did rise To hide proud kings ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... spirits. The walking are the logicians: the winged are the instinctive and poetic. Natures that must always walk find many a bog, many a thicket, many a tangled brake, which God's happy little winged birds flit over by one noiseless flight. Nay, when a man has toiled till his feet weigh too heavily with the mud of earth to enable him to walk another step, these little birds will often cleave the air in a right line towards the bosom of God, and show the way where he could ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... the deep woods of Mexico, Where screams the "painted paraquet," And mocking-birds flit to and fro, With borrowed notes they half forget; Where brilliant flowers and poisonous vines Are mingled in a firm embrace, And the same gaudy plant entwines Some reptile of a poisonous race; Where spreads ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... chaplets on their head Of fresh woodbind, be such as never were To love untrue in word, in thought, nor deed, But ay steadfast; nor for pleasance, nor fear, Though that they should their heartes all to-tear,* *rend in pieces* Would never flit,* but ever were steadfast, *change *Till that their lives there asunder ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... have seen another spring In floral beauty rise, And happy birds on gladsome wing Flit through the azure skies. Though sickness bowed my feeble frame Through winter's cheerless hours, Life's sinking torch resumes its flame ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... properly quaint and amusing! Though your wife ran away with a soldier that day, And took with her your trifle of money; Bless your heart, they don't mind - they're exceedingly kind - They don't blame you - as long as you're funny! It's a comfort to feel If your partner should flit, Though YOU suffer a deal, THEY don't mind it a bit - They don't blame you - ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... earth; and to them is given a soul from among the stars, perfect in their form and alive with heavenly instincts, which complete with wondrous speed their rapid courses. Wherefore, my son, by you and by all just men that soul must be retained within its body's confines, nor can it be allowed to flit without command of him by whom it has been given to you. You may not escape the duty which God has trusted to you. Live, my Scipio, and shine with piety and justice, as your grandfather did and I have done. It is your duty to your parents and to your relatives, but especially ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... "I flit about, I skip, I roam Through houses past the telling, Through many a stately ducal home, And many a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... and make out the whole; and, had she plainly told this to Helen, it would have been better for all parties: but she continued to talk of the people they had seen, to hide her thoughts from Helen, who all the time felt as in a feverish dream, watching the lights of the carriage flit by like fiery eyes, while she thought only of the strange words she had heard and why they should have made Beauclerc ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... and teach it rather A tune to drown the ballads of thy father. For thou hast nought to cure his fame, But tune and noise, and eccho of his shame. A rogue by statute, censured to be whipt, Cropt, branded, flit, neck-flockt: go, you ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... bank an' brae are clad in green, An' scatter'd cowslips sweetly spring; By Girvan's fairy-haunted stream, The birdies flit on wanton wing; By Cassillis' banks, when e'ening fa's, There let my Mary meet wi' me, There catch her ilka glance o' love, The bonnie blink ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... impressed by the scene, but when he saw a shadowy figure flit between two of the wigwams, and was certain he heard a movement in the lodge behind him, he hastily concluded it was the time for action and not meditation. With a start that might have betrayed him, he quickly left his position and ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... swoln with blooms Like chrysalids impatient for the air, The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run Along the furrows, ants make their ado; Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark Soars up and up, shivering for very joy; Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek Their loves in wood and plain—and God ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... out a cigarette and was lighting it when he heard a swift, stealthy step close behind him. He dropped the match as he swung round, pushing back his canvas chair, and found his eyes dazzled by the sudden darkness. Still he thought he saw a shadow flit across the veranda and vanish into the mist. Next moment there were heavier footsteps, and a crash as a man fell over the projecting legs of the chair. The fellow rolled down the shallow stairs, dropping a pistol and then ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... be allowed so far to indulge the imagination, as to suppose a being entirely confined to the nether world—some 'dusky melancholy sprite,' like Umbriel, who could 'flit on sooty pinions to the central earth,' but who was never permitted to 'sully the fair face of light,' and emerge into the regions of water and of air; and if this being should busy himself in investigating the structure of the globe, he might frame theories the exact converse of those usually ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... will. Just as Parsifal, overcoming all resistance, drives away the guards of the castle and springs up on the ramparts, the magician waves his wand. He and his tower sink from view, and a beautiful garden appears, in which lovely damsels flit excitedly about in very scanty attire. After a few moments spent in motionless admiration of the scene before him, Parsifal springs down into the garden, where he is immediately surrounded by the fair nymphs. They pull him this way and that, tease and cajole him, ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... flies, From flower to flower, and loads her labouring thighs 490 With treasured sweets, robbing those flowers, which, left, Find not themselves made poorer by the theft, Their scents as lively, and their looks as fair, As if the pillager had not been there. Ne'er doth she flit on Pleasure's silken wing; Ne'er doth she, loitering, let the bloom of Spring Unrifled pass, and on the downy breast Of some fair flower indulge untimely rest; Ne'er doth she, drinking deep of those rich dews Which chemist Night prepared, that ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... awake a while, watching the sparks fly, and the shadows flit, feeling the cold wind on my face, listening to the crackle of the fire and the ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... two days Dr. Rauparaha had much writing to do, and passed his mornings and afternoons in the quiet library. Sometimes, as he wrote, a shadow would flit across the wide, sunlit veranda, and Helen Torringley would flit by, nodding pleasantly to him through the windows. Only two or three times had he met her alone since he came to Te Ariri, and walked with her through the grounds, listening ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... to dwell upon the years of youth. They are the sweetest in life; and these memories constitute most of the happiness of declining life. Incidents in our pilgrimage awaken the almost forgotten, and then how many, many memories flit through the mind, and what a melancholy pleasure fills the soul! We think, and think on, calling this and that memory up from the grave of forgetfulness, until all the past seems present, and we live over the bliss ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... clank of machinery makes the hills rumble, the hiss of steam and the sighs of the soldering-furnaces are like the complaint of some giant overgorging himself. The river swarms with the fleets of fish-boats, which skim outward with the dawn to flit homeward again at twilight and settle like a vast brood of white-winged gulls. Men let the hours go by unheeded, and forget ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... chrysalids impatient for the air, The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run Along the furrows, ants make their ado; Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark Soars up and up, shivering for very joy; Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing gulls Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek Their loves in wood and plain—and God renews ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... the panes, the wind blew tempestuously: "One lies there," I thought, "who will soon be beyond the war of earthly elements. Whither will that spirit—now struggling to quit its material tenement—flit ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... began to dance, and flit about the studio, like an incarnate sprite of jollity, pausing at last on the extremity of one toe, as if that were the only portion of himself whereby his frisky nature could come in contact with the earth. The effect in that shadowy chamber, whence the artist had so ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... say, what nymph will prize the flame Which seems, as marshy vapours move, To flit along from dame to dame, ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... the street! Well I know it, as is meet! Did he not, before her face, Seek to brand me with disgrace? From the chiselled lips of wit Let the fire-flakes lightly flit, Scorching as the snow that fell On the damned in Dante's hell? With keen-worded opposition, playful, merciless precision, Mocking the romance of Youth, Standing on the sphere of Truth, He on worldly wisdom's plane Rolled ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... Limpid pool, Golden notes from sunset's lute For shadows Draped in green With purple feet To dance and swim Through irridescent undulatings. Dusk descends; Mauve cloudlets— Dying butterflies— Flit and fly and die In the opalescent ocean of mist That grows dark and still, Kisses away the last gold From the brow of the hills; Till the coral crescent With its wand of breeze Makes silver ripple-music On the ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... huddled together in groups to withstand the buffeting of winter winds; and here Sylvia sat within a rocky nest she knew, during many a happy solitary hour, watching the sword-fishers go out or return, and the smaller mackerel boats flit lightly ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... said: "Forgive me, Mr. Carrollton. I sent Gritty home on purpose to see if you would be annoyed, for I felt vexed because you would not humor my whim and meet me at the bridge. I am sorry I caused you any uneasiness," she continued, as she saw a shadow flit over his ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... the Northmen may here be closed. Borne along by the living current of events, we leave them behind, high up on the remoter channels of the stream. Their terrible ravens shall flit across our prospect no more. They have taken wing to their native north, where they may croak yet a little while over the cold and crumbling altars of Odin and Asa Thor. The bright light of the Gospel has penetrated even to those last haunts of Paganism, and the fierce ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... numerous birds that flit through the trees as visitors, or else stay with us and nest in secluded places, how comparatively few do we really depend upon for the aerial colour and the song that opens a glimpse of Eden to our eager eyes and ears each year, ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... tales of treasure and wonder; and if France does not make haste she will find herself one of the least among European Powers. Besides, let us build up a nation in the New World, and we may have some more fighting. The rumours of war that flit up and down in France are mere woman's talk. My blade is rusting in the scabbard, and now that the Emperor and King Francis are complimenting each other like two schoolgirls, it is long likely to remain so. But in the New World there will be a glorious opportunity for a struggle with Spain. ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... musician, as well as the student of aesthetics, will do well to examine by what means these various effects are produced. In the second nocturne, F sharp major, the brightness and warmth of the world without have penetrated into the world within. The fioriture flit about as lightly as gossamer threads. The sweetly-sad longing of the first section becomes more disquieting in the doppio movimento, but the beneficial influence of the sun never quite loses its power, and after a little there is a relapse into the calmer mood, with a close like a hazy ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... see neither anxious faces nor bent shoulders there. Our people walk upright, as becomes free men. Then, through the long winter, when the snow lies firm and white, and the wheat crop has been hauled in, you can hear the jingling sleigh teams flit across the prairie from homestead to homestead under the cloudless blue. The settlers enjoy themselves when their work is done—and ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... the wonder flit, Or heart's desire of her, all earth in it. We saw the heavens fling down their rose; On rapturous waves we saw her glide; The pearly sea-shell half enclose; The shoal of sea-nymphs flush the tide; And ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... flit before his imagination of the way in which he might build up this tremendous inquiry. He would begin by hunting up people, everybody who seemed to have ideas and promise ideas he would get at. He would travel far—and exhaustively. He would, so soon as the ideas seemed ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... of outraged honor in the person of the "no-good husband" bursting in on games of cards with wild charges which only the payment of big money could suppress—suppress you understand, purely for the sake of the lady: outraged honor could accept no atonement. Then the lady would flit for the winter to those beauty doctors of Paris and New York, who operate on wrinkles and lay up muniments for fresh campaigns; and the "colonel" would betake himself to resorts where balm is accorded wounded honour; while loose-mouthed, simple-eyed young fellows went East for the winter ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... with men, and with the thoughts of men, 60 I held but slight communion; but instead, My joy was in the wilderness,—to breathe The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,[131] Where the birds dare not build—nor insect's wing Flit o'er the herbless granite; or to plunge Into the torrent, and to roll along On the swift whirl of the new-breaking wave Of river-stream, or Ocean, in their flow.[132] In these my early strength exulted; or To follow through ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... throbs with youthful pain at the glance of your eyes, the ascetic lays the fruit of his austerities at your feet, the songs of poets hum and swarm round the perfume of your presence. Your feet, as in careless joy they flit on, wound even the heart of the hollow wind with the tinkle ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... Some flit through our hearts like birds darting under the foliage of trees, then out again, lost in the sunshine; others linger awhile and we nestle them in our bosoms until we forget that they are there, and ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... made of right soldierly stuff; but he felt a distinct shiver flit along his back. His past life had not lacked thrilling adventures and strangely varied experiences with desperate men. Usually he met sudden emergencies rather calmly, sometimes with phlegmatic indifference. This passionate ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... There's no use of you tryin' to discourage me, because I'm gonna buy a car. Here I am makin' all kinds of money and I might as well be a bum!—no automobile or nothin'. I should have had a car long ago; all the big leaguers own their own tourin' cars. There's no class to you any more, if you don't flit from place to place in your ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... process of reasoning, and was simply obliged to accept the fact and give up trying to solve the riddle. He found himself dragged into society and courted, wondered at and envied very much as if he were one of those foreign barbers who flit over here now and then with a self-conferred title of nobility and marry some rich fool's absurd daughter. Sometimes at a dinner party or a reception he would find himself the centre of interest, and feel unutterably uncomfortable ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... I want to talk to him, or I'll simply flit back to Eros, and thank him much for a pretty retainer that didn't do him any good but gave me a nice profit ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... flit my memory o'er, Deck'd in the smiles which then ye wore, In the same gay and varied dress, I cannot but admire and bless! What though some anxious throbs would beat, Some fears within my breast retreat, Yet then I found sincere delight, Whenever beauty met my sight, Whether of nature, ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... Persistently, and do it with a will: The greater part keep wavering to and fro, And now all right, and now all wrong they go. Prisons, we all remember, oft would wear Three rings at once, then show his finger bare; First he'd be senator, then knight, and then In an hour's time a senator again; Flit from a palace to a crib so mean, A decent freedman scarce would there be seen; Now with Athenian wits he'd make his home, Now live with scamps and profligates at Rome; Born in a luckless hour, when every face Vertumnus wears was pulling a grimace. Shark Volanerius tried ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... length relieved; a rude folding-door opened opposite, and showed a low dim sitting-room beyond, from which there rose a few steps to the entrance of my chamber. On these appeared, not, alas! the fancied visitant who was to flit about my bedside, and mix her bright presence with my dreams, but stately and severe, with a pale cheek and compressed lip, her ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... grave the robin sings, And swarms of bright and happy things Flit all about with sunlit wings, But I am cheerless, Rosaline! The violets in the hillock toss, The gravestone is o'ergrown with moss; For nature feels not any loss, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... the after-math of fat wheat-fields, where float like myriad little nets of silver gauze the webs of the crafty weavers, and where a whole world of winged small folk flit from tree-top to tree-top of the low weeds. They are all mine—these Kentucky wheat-fields. After the owner has taken from them his last sheaf I come in and gather my harvest also—one that he did not see, ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... spoke; and amongst other labels on his baggage was one marked Khartoum. His hands were sinewy and his face was bronzed, while his eyes, brown and deep-set, held in them the glint of the desert places of the earth: the mark of the jungle where birds flit through the shadows like bars of glorious colour; the mark of the swamp where the ague mists lie dank and stagnant in the rays of ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... easier or a pleasanter height to climb than the Motterone, if, in Italian heat, you can endure the disappointment of seeing the summit, as you ascend, constantly flit away to a farther station. It seems to throw its head back, like a laughing senior when children struggle up for kissings. The party of five had come through the vines from Stresa and from Baveno. The mountain was strange ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "should any one be interested in my stories any more than in the thousand and one stories published this year? Mine are among the number of trivial things that compose the tedium which we call life." His thoughts will flit back over the past, and his own life will seem hardly more real than the day's work on the easel if he be a painter, on the secretaire if he be a writer. He will seem to himself like a horse going round and round a well. ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... on knowledge, and could convict him most triumphantly of a barbarian ignorance. Up and down they wandered, and she gave him eyes, whether for Artemis, or Aphrodite, or Apollo, or still more for the significant and troubling art of the Renaissance, French and Italian. She would flit before him, perching here and there like a bird, and quivering through and through ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... glass. But it is usually impossible for one on the ground to see the finest blooms, which turn their faces to the sunlight above the canopy of green. Gray apes chatter in the tree-tops; strange tropic birds of gorgeous plumage flit from bough to bough, monstrous reptiles slip silently through the undergrowth; insects buzz in swarms above the putrid swamps; occasionally the jungle crashes beneath the tread of some heavy animal—a rhinoceros, perhaps, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... eye, cunning hand, ready brain, broad back, and warm heart; in want of a wife mayhap; a man that can earn his own bread and another's;—half a dozen others' when the half dozen come? Would not that be a good sort of lodger? Such a question as that too did flit, just flit, across the widow's sleepless mind. But then she thought so much more of the wolf! Wolves, she had taught herself to think, were more common ...
— The Courtship of Susan Bell • Anthony Trollope
... to her bed, leaving the lamp burning on the table; but its gloomy light, instead of dispelling her fear, assisted it; for, by its uncertain rays, she almost fancied she saw shapes flit past her curtains and glide into the remote obscurity of her chamber.—The castle clock struck one before she closed her ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... in time to see several gray forms flit rapidly between the bushes. He stepped to the edge of the road, and saw some wolves spring out through the bushes, and go straight ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty |
