Visitant

1612-13, John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi Act I, Scene III, Ambition, madam, is a great man's madness, / That is not kept in chains and close-pent rooms, / But in fair lightsome lodgings, and is girt / With the wild noise of prattling visitants, / Which makes it lunatic beyond all cure.

One visit is enough to begin an acquaintance; and this point is gained by it, that when the visitant comes again, he is no more a stranger.

The Company had now ſtaid ſo long, that Mrs. Fitzpatrick plainly perceived they all deſigned to ſtay out each other. She therefore reſolved to rid herſelf of Jones, he being the Viſitant, to whom ſhe thought the leaſt Ceremony was due.

Pleasure is oft a visitant; but pain Clings cruelly to us, like the gnawing sloth On the deer’s tender haunches: late, and loth, ’Tis scar’d away by slow returning pleasure.

We by no means mean to say that Lady Anne's happy and pleasant little party would not have received a new impetus if a Moore, a Bulwer, a Hook, or those monopolists of beauty and wit, Mrs. Gore and Mrs. Norton, or those daughters of Apollo, ycleped Mitford, Pardoe, and Strickland had been mingled with her "blue spirits and grey;" but we do mean to say that they were very happy without them, and that much, perhaps all, of the "feast of reason and the flow of soul," for which these distinguished individuals are loved, and sought, and honoured, would have been lost in the melée of dancing, singing, chattering, and flirting, to which the major part of the visitants were devoted.

Mrs. Treadhill, stringy but pleasant, met the visitants in the kitchen, and whined, "He’s failing fast. […]"

Matsumura felt almost sure that his ghostly visitant had been none other than the Soul of the Mirror.

In the afternoon, Aaron felt the cypresses rising dark about him, like so many high visitants from an old, lost, lost subtle world, where men had the wonder of demons about them, the aura of demons, such as still clings to the cypresses, in Tuscany,