Definition of "incessantly"

We see the eye subdued, the practised smile, / The word well weighed before it pass the lip, / And know not of the misery within: / Yet there it works incessantly, and fears / The time to come; for time is terrible, / Avenging, and betraying.

1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], “The Confession”, in Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume I, London: Henry Colburn, […], page 136

"You are old, father William," the young man said, / "And your hair has become very white; / "And yet you incessantly stand on your head— / "Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

1865 November (indicated as 1866), Lewis Carroll [pseudonym; Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, London: Macmillan and Co.

There were the tawny rocks, like lions couchant, defying the ocean, whose waves incessantly dashed against and scoured them with vast quantities of gravel.

1865, Henry D[avid] Thoreau, “The Shipwreck”, in [Sophia Thoreau and William Ellery Channing], editors, Cape Cod, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, page 14

But just there a small hairy terrier exploded out at the gate, like a floor-mop impelled by some sort of internal combustion, which sent him off into a frenzy of yapping, incessantly jerked backwards by the explosive force of his own detonations.

1938, Norman Lindsay, Age of Consent, 1st Australian edition, Sydney, N.S.W.: Ure Smith, published 1962, page 59