divagation

The expansion of criticism in the same thirty years was not a whit less marked than the vast divagation of the novel.

He had an unconquerable and sometimes very irritating habit of digression, of divagation, of aside.

They are not very easy to select from, for their author's singular tendency to divagation affects them.

Yet it is this very divagation that is called reason, wisdom, morality.

In his finest passages, as in his most trivial, he is at the mercy of the will-o'-the-wisp of divagation.