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More "Brooding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Brooding over the alteration in his future, he exchanged hardly a word with his cousin, during the prolonged journey, which they continued together, as though mutual reluctance to part bound them indissolubly. Logic said there should be a powerful repugnance between those whom ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... in the brooding air—that mysterious hush, which is the music of night's gentle footsteps, and insensibly its soothing influence stole over the unquiet of his restless thoughts—the warring powers of soul and sense grew silent and ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... mental processes of different peoples. One cannot say that a Hebrew, in virtue of being a Hebrew, would necessarily act and think thus and thus, while a Greek, in virtue of being a Greek, would necessarily act and think in some other definite way. Here and there a fervid or brooding mind among the Greeks, such as that of AEschylus, might often approach the lines of Hebraism. Here and there some son of Shem must have been mentally constituted more like the sons of Javan. None the less, when we survey the history and study the literature of these two races as a whole, it ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... set the whole place alight. The head on the pillow turned and I saw a face looking up at me which seemed to me to have more malignancy and wickedness than ever I had dreamed of in a nightmare. It was the flush of red over the cheekbones, and the brooding eyes full of loathing of me, and of everything else, that impressed me. I'll never forget my start as, instead of the chubby face of an infant, my eyes fell upon this creature. I took the mother ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stately pagoda. In another charming view a brook appeared to flow in at the front door of a stout gentleman's house, and out at his chimney. In a third a zig-zag wall went up into the sky like a flash of lightning, and a bird with two tails was apparently brooding over a fisherman whose boat was just going ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... been brooding in my mind for some months past. I must have been but an ill companion for him, and indeed he bore with my waywardness much more kindly than I ever thought possible; and when four days since we came to this sad house, where he was to have joined us, and I found only dismay and wretchedness, and ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... him little chance for brooding over his worries, for Lawyer Ed left more and more to him as the days went on. Not that he did any less, but the temperance campaign was on again, all racial and religious prejudices forgotten, in the glory of the fight. ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... we perceived the Island to be strangely overcast with Fogs, which no Brightness could pierce, so that a kind of gloomy Horror sat always brooding over it. This had something in it very shocking to easy Tempers, insomuch that some others, whom Patience had by this time gained over, left us here, and privily convey'd themselves round the Verge of the Island to find a Ford ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... little gray, dim room now, and waited with brooding eyes. Within, all was quiet with that air of awesome mystery peculiar to the cloister, which so soon gives place with increasing familiarity, to a sense of deadly monotony. It is only from outside that the mystery of the cloister continues to interest. Juanita knew every stone in this silent ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... of sorrow is the regretting or brooding over past actions, especially in connection with the dead. Perhaps something that should have been done was neglected, or something was done that should have been left undone. Over this the sufferer broods by the hour, leading to a form of sad resignation that is rather ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... opposition, he thought it necessary to strengthen himself by new devices. He extorted hostages and a new oath of fidelity from his barons. He raised a great army, to divert the thoughts of his subjects from brooding too much on their distracted condition. This army he transported into Ireland; and as it happened to his father in a similar dispute with the Pope, whilst he was dubious of his hereditary kingdom, he subdued Ireland. At this time he is ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... scarlet and golden autumn, it had almost seemed to him that he was executing living and beloved friends. Now an inimical force of Nature threatened to rob him of them and of his remuneration as well. Yet as he stood there, with the sweat and grime of his labor drying on his forehead, his brooding eyes held a patriarchal dignity ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... beginning of the end. He turned in panic. They couldn't be over half a mile away. In a panic of indecision he turned first east then west, then facing due south he hesitated a moment to take one last look at the clear open skies, and with a muffled prayer plunged into the brooding depths of ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... planting bulbs, and transmute it into a symbol of the resurrection of the dead; its capacity for turning fact into truth and brown earth into beauty; for remoulding the broken syllables of human speech into sheer music; for lifting the mind, bowed down by wearying thought and haunting fear, into a brooding ecstasy wherein weeping is changed into laughter and autumnal premonitions of death into assurance of life, and the narrow paths of individual experience are widened into those illimitable spaces where the imagination rules. Poetry does all this, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... know how cruel it is—or give a look—they do not know how cold it is—and are gone without a second thought about it; but it sinks into the woman's heart and rankles there. For the instant it is like a mortal blow, it hurts so, and in the brooding spirit it is exaggerated into a hopeless disaster. The wound will heal with a kind word, with kisses. Yes, but never, never without a little scar. But woe to the woman's love when she becomes ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... our acquaintance with the historic muse were sufficiently intimate to enable us to invoke her aid on this occasion. But she is far away, thinking of treaties and protocols, and "eventualities" far in the orient, brooding o'er lost Sebastopol. ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... few characters that Strauss could not paint, in those days, so, too, there seemed few situations, few atmospheres, to which he could not do justice. A couple of measures, the sinister palpitation of the timpani and the violas, the brooding of the wood-wind, the dull flickering of the flutes, the laboring breath of the strings, and we are lying on the death-bed, exhausted and gasping for air, weighed by the wrecks of hopes, awaiting the cruel blows on the heart that will end everything. Horns and violins ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... disturbed, the Count decidedly approved of an arrangement which left his host and himself alone together in the stern. In his present state of mind the Baron was capable of any indiscretion were he compelled to talk; while, silent and brooding in isolated majesty, he looked to perfection the part of returning exile. So, evidently, ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... human motive and human act. Russia is a world apart: that is the sum and substance of the tale. In the island stories we have the same elaborate projection of the East, of its fantastic barbarism, of brooding Asia. And in the sea stories we have, perhaps for the first time in English fiction, a vast and adequate picture of the sea, the symbol at once of man's eternal striving and of his eternal impotence. Here, at last, the colossus has found its interpreter. There is in "Typhoon" and "The Nigger ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... words the glow went out of her face. She listened with her eyes brooding on the hollow and a glowing flame of temper smouldering in them. Judith's long patience was giving way. She had been flicked on the raw too often of late. And now her aunt was confiding her grievances to Mrs. Tony ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... breeches supplied to all the world? And are any mortal vistas more gorgeously illuminated by the red guidebook of the Tourist than are the stately and storied ruins where the sentimentalist seeketh the brooding of a tender melancholy, and findeth it not in the presence of couriers, cabmen, beggars, photograph-peddlers, stovepipe hats, tie-backs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... much of Berenice, and he passed hours in brooding over thoughts of her. He was convinced that she was not engaged. She had spoken of Stanford's visit, and it had seemed to Wynne that she had conveyed the impression that her relations to the visitor were less intimate than might at first sight appear. If she were free—the thought made his ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... you to forget all that I told you yesterday," she said. "I had been brooding so long that I had begun to fancy all sorts of impossible things. I see very clearly now that this man Hume could have had nothing of any consequence to do with Mr. Morris. It was a romance—a rather foolish fancy, and ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... possession of "Smith." Average Jones had studied and restudied the columns, both reading matter and advertising, until he knew them almost by heart. During the period of waiting for his order to be brought he was brooding over the problem, when he felt a hand-pressure on his shoulder and turned to confront Mr. Thomas Colvin McIntyre, solemn of countenance and groomed with a supernal modesty of elegance, as befitted a rising young diplomat, already Fifth Assistant ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the humanists, with any others, under the head 'Superbia.' He describes how, fancying themselves children of Apollo, they walk along with affected solemnity and with sullen, malicious looks, now gazing t their own shadow, now brooding over the popular praise they hunted after, like cranes in search of food. But in the sixteenth century the indictment was presented in full. Besides Ariosto, their own historian Gyraldus gives evidence of this, whose treatise, written under Leo X, ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... household was still asleep. There he came into contact with the workmen, and saw their hopeless, wretched, impoverished lives; listened to Bitska's jests, and to the rumbling of the wagonettes—identified himself with the life of the factory, which dominated all like some fabulous brooding monster. ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... tobacco conduced to clarity of thought. And mayhap it did. At least, there presently followed a mental calm that expelled all this confusion. The goal waxed and waned as he gazed down the great avenue with its precise rows of lamps. Far away he could discern the outline of the brooding Louvre. ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... absence. Know then my condition and divulge not my case." When Ghanim heard her words and knew that she was a concubine of the Caliph, he drew back, for awe of the Caliphate beset him, and sat apart from her in one of the corners of the place, blaming himself and brooding over his affair and patiencing his heart bewildered for love of one he could not possess. Then he wept for excess of longing, and plained him of Fortune and her injuries, and the world and its enmities (and praise ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... has been dark with brooding cares that would not lift themselves, and on whom chilling rains of sorrow have fallen at intervals through all his years, death is but the clearing-up shower; and just behind it are the songs of angels, and the serenity and ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... hour of rejoicing over the new-born babe, past transgression brought forth its legitimate fruits. Sullenness and strife were brooding in the bosoms of the Egyptian bond-woman and her son; and the quiet eye of the mother saw all the danger arising from the jealous hate and rivalry of the first-born ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... has lived with his brother, and spends his time in brooding over his grievances and bewailing his shattered illusions. He has lost none of that fluency which gained him an ephemeral literary reputation, and can speak by the hour on political and social questions to any one who will listen ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... from which we may enjoy a strikingly beautiful view of the ancient city, lying asleep in the rich, peaceful valley of the Stour, and the mighty cathedral towering over the red-tiled roofs of the town, and looking, as a rustic remarked as he gazed down upon it "like a hen brooding over her chickens." Erasmus must have been struck by some such aspect of the cathedral, for he says, "It rears its crest (erigit se) with so great majesty to the sky, that it inspires a feeling of awe even in those who look at it from ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... of wandering widely to catch incident or adventure; they are everywhere about us; each day is a succession of escapes and joys,—not perhaps clear to the world, but brooding in our thought, and living in our brain. From the very first, Angels and Devils are busy with us, and we are struggling against ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... read what I have written I see how pointless it is. It is possible, indeed, that brooding over my personal calamity magnifies in my mind the sense of danger to this friend through me, and that I only need to find the right relation of friendliness coupled with aloofness which will secure him against any too ardent attachment. Certainly ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... relation between individuals of successive generations, but the very structure of the individuals themselves. It is by the study of heredity that we shall learn to understand the individual. For instance, experimental breeding of the fowl reveals the existence of the brooding instinct as a definite unit, which enters, or does not enter, into the composition of the individual, and which is quite distinct from the capacity to produce eggs. Here is a definite distinction ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... his office, the brain worker should cultivate the habit of forgetting all about his business, except in so far as he believes that some particular point needs special attention out of office hours. The habit of brooding over business is detrimental to efficiency and is also suicidal ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... was that Miss Caldegard had never seen a humming bird, and therefore found herself brooding on the blueness of all the blue things in her experience, from willow-pattern china to the waters of the Mediterranean, instead of considering the answer which she must give to ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... without suspicion by the children not as a nurse, but as a playmate. Weeks passed. The four played together with a greater harmony than the three had ever attained. Day after day the Reverend Orme sat waiting in his study and brooding. The dreaded call never came. He began to distrust ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... unwieldy in body, and had given up service, on account of his age, during the late campaigns, still coveted after command in a distant war beyond the seas. And whilst Sylla was departed for the camp, to order the rest of his affairs there, he sat brooding at home, and at last hatched that execrable sedition, which wrought Rome more mischief than all her enemies together had done, as was indeed foreshown by the gods. For a flame broke forth of its own accord, from under the staves of the ensigns, and was with difficulty ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... his eyes for one instant to his cousin's face, with an expression so full of brooding hatred and defiance that even ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... arrive who might be alarmed at seeing an elephant at large. He was addicted to minding his own business, and never paid the slightest attention to any occupants of cage or enclosure. He was quite unaware of the hostility which he had aroused in the perverse and brooding heart of ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... was a savage, brooding sort of man with tangled hair and dreamy eyes, and he came in without any preface, saying, "I have lost all my arrows. They have turned into birds." Then as he saw that they all stared at him, he said "Well, you ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... man who had a relish for pain; and I sympathised with, though I did not love him—not so much because his feelings, as because his raiment was torn, and he, who was generally the most lively and locomotive of all, was now depressed and sedentary, like the lover of Constance, brooding upon his silent grief, as on its nest the dove, while we remained at the dinner-table, and finally backing out of the drawing-room at an early hour, as though our ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... desolate sky there was something that wearied, in the brooding clouds, something that saddened. It penetrated the freezing city cut by the freezing river, the splendid city with its towers and domes, its quays and bridges and its thousand spires. It entered the squares, it seized the ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... of the mountain men had asked him, with an obvious attempt to make the question casual, how he liked the Basin, how long he thought his work would keep him there. Each, as he turned away, followed him with that long, speculative, brooding look. Always, heretofore, his relations with these mountain people had been easy, sympathetic and cordial. Now all at once, without reason, they held him at arm's length and regarded him with suspicious if ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... not, indeed, paid the whole of his promised ransom; but an immense amount had been received, and it would have been more, as he urged, but for the impatience of the Spaniards. Pizarro, telling no one of the dark purposes he was brooding over in his own mind, issued a proclamation to the effect that the ransom was considered to be completely paid, but that the safety of the Spaniards required that the Inca should be held captive until they were still further reinforced. Soon rumours began to be ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... times across the sea that she had no fear of it; and she went up-stairs with me to say last words and give last commissions with her usual cheerfulness. Notwithstanding the relief which I had felt during the evening from her expressions of a moral and religious kind, I yet had a brooding fear of the effect of association with a mind so lively and so full of error as Remington's. What help or what sustaining power for her there might be in her husband I could not tell; but be it more or less, I feared she would not avail herself of it. Indeed, I feared that she was daily becoming ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... expression of surprise upon his features, turned toward his junior. He had seen men before with the jungle madness upon them—the madness of solitude and unrestrained brooding, and perhaps ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... absorbed by the heat from a snatching flame below. It was exactly a year and a day since her husband's death, and she had packed herself away in his own corner of the settle, her hands clasped across her knees, and her red-brown eyes brooding on the nearer embers. She was not definitely speculating on her future, nor had she any heart for retracing the dull and gentle past. She had simply relaxed hold on her mind; and so, escaping her, it had gone wandering off into shadowy prophecies of the immediate years. ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... set me brooding o'er the desert drear, Where broodeth darkness as the deepest night. From many a mosque there comes the call to prayer; I hear no voice that calls on Christ for light. But still I wait For the messenger of Christ, ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... he despised himself for it, for this attitude of the schoolboy in which he held himself. Until now he had believed that he was free from such a preposterous and morbid bondage, free on account of his constitutional indifference towards vice, his innate love of the brooding calms of refinement and of the upper snowfields of the intellect. The discovery of his mistake irritated him, but the irritation could not conquer its cause, and each day the longing to sit once more grew upon him until it became almost ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... poor and miserable, and it was only when he found Innismaan and the Blaskets, where there is neither riches nor poverty, neither what he calls 'the nullity of the rich' nor 'the squalor of the poor' that his writing lost its old morbid brooding, that he found his genius and his peace. Here were men and women who under the weight of their necessity lived, as the artist lives, in the presence of death and childhood, and the great affections and the ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... Mrs. Martindale,' said Percy, reading a second time the lines to which she alluded. 'They do recall the evening scene; Mount Vesuvius and its brooding cloud, and the trails of phosphoric light upon the sea. I mark these for approval. But have you anything to say for ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... son studied the low brooding sky, the dying world, listened to the wailing, mourning winds, the sighing of the grasses and it too said wearily, "Yes—what's ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... of God was brooding upon the face of the waters," and perhaps was calling into being the ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... given Sir Guy my thoughts on the theme of Hamlet, and have told him I planned a speech wherein should be made patent Hamlet's desperate weariness of life, sickened by brooding on ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... week, Creede and Hardy dawdled about the place, patching up the gates and fences and cursing the very name of sheep. A spirit of unrest hovered over the place, a brooding silence which spoke only of Tommy and those who were gone, and the two partners eyed each other furtively, each deep in his own thoughts. At last when he could stand it no longer Creede went over to the corner, and dug ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... brooding away in the city." The lad's bright, clear eyes looked frankly into the captain's as he continued. "I have been making a fool of myself, Captain. Got into some mischief with a crowd of fellows at school. Of course, I ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... the lot of so many poor suffering souls seemed to me so much more desolate than that of this unhappy lady, who had, I imagined, much to console her. It even seemed to me that the grief I had witnessed was somewhat morbid and overstrained; and, thinking that it would perhaps divert her mind from brooding too much over her own troubles, I ventured, when she had grown calm again, to tell her some of my memories. I asked her to imagine a state of the world and the human family, in which all women were, in one sense, on an equality—all possessing the same capacity for suffering; ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... the life, I tell you! Constantly new faces and new languages. Never a minute free for nerves or brooding. No trouble about what to do—for the work is calling to be done: night and day, bells that ring, trains that whistle, 'busses that come and go; and gold pieces raining on the counter all the time. That's the life ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... Flamborough. But far away, among the mountains and the dreary moorland, the "intake" of the coming winter was a great deal worse to see. For here no blink of the sea came up, no sunlight under the sill of clouds (as happens where wide waters are), but rather a dark rim of brooding on the rough horizon seemed to thicken itself against the light under the sullen march of vapors—the muffled funeral of the year. Dry trees and naked crags stood forth, and the dirge of the wind went to and fro, and there was no ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... night by casting firebrands into them! At last, not at three miles distance, but by a close siege, he shook the very gates of Carthage itself. And thus he succeeded in drawing off Hannibal when he was still clinging to and brooding over Italy. There was no more remarkable day, during the whole course of the Roman Empire, than that on which those two generals, the greatest of all that ever lived, whether before or after them, the one the conqueror of Italy, and the other of Spain, drew ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... death. "Pansay went off the handle," says Heatherlegh, "after the stimulus of long leave at Home. He may or he may not have behaved like a blackguard to Mrs. Keith- Wessington. My notion is that the work of the Katabundi Settlement ran him off his legs, and that he took to brooding and making much of an ordinary P. & 0. flirtation. He certainly was engaged to Miss Mannering, and she certainly broke off the engagement. Then he took a feverish chill and all that nonsense about ghosts developed. Overwork started his illness, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... heedlessly, intent only on walking away her pain, over gray, brooding fields and winding slopes, and along the skirts of ruinous, dusky pine woods, curtained with fine spun purple gloom. Her dress brushed against the brittle grasses and sere ferns, and the moist night wind, loosed from wild places far away, blew her ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... hers was truly "mother's love." And what notes are there attuned to sacred music, in all the broad vocabulary of the English tongue, which gives any idea of the sentiment that links a woman to her babe, except the three simple syllables, "mother's love!" Brooding over the tiny stranger, ready to laugh or cry; exultant with hope and pride, despondent with fear, quivering with anguish if the "wind of heaven doth visit its cheek too roughly," and singing hosannas of joy when it ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... were talking about good St. Francis, whose heart overflowed with love to every living creature—mankind, animals, birds, and flowers, and whose whole life was given up to their service—Miss Sherman hugged close her little jealous grievance and, brooding over it, gave no thought to the associations of the place they had just visited, or to the glorious Italian landscape through which they ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... ye'll leave wi' McGilp, and he'll find a way for sending it on. I'm sair sweirt tae part frae my bonny horses for yon mauk's sake. . . . And there's the bonny spaewife, Hamish; if anything comes wrong tae that lass I'll be relying on you." And then for a long time he sat brooding at the fire. ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... aristocratical old edifice, which sits, like a brooding hen, on the southern bank of the James River. It looks down upon a shady pocket, or nook, formed by an indentation of the shore, from a gentle acclivity, thinly sprinkled with oaks, whose magnificent branches afford habitation to sundry ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... not, affected, in order to please him, the externals of austerity; absolute power oppressed all spirits, extorting from them that hypocritical complaisance which is liable to engender; corruption was already brooding beneath appearances of piety; the reign of Louis XV. was to see its deplorable fruits displayed with a haste and a scandal which are to be explained only by the oppression exercised in the last ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... infantile blitheness left her face. The sadness which is inherent in the Irish countenance spread over it, like sudden mist over a landscape. The ancient brooding aspect of the ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... Browning may have with the mystic or the symbolist for whom the whole sense-world is but the sign of spiritual realities, it is plain that this way of envisaging existence found little support in the character of his senses. He had not the brooding eye, beneath which, as it gazes, loveliness becomes far lovelier, but an organ aggressively alert, minutely inquisitive, circumstantially exact, which perceived the bearings of things, and explored their intricacies, noted how the mortar was tempered in the walls and if any ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... closed room," This drama—at once his most typical, moving, and beautiful performance—swims in an atmosphere of portent and bodement; here, as Pater noted in the work of a wholly different order of artist, "the storm is always brooding;" here, too, "in a sudden tremor of an aged voice, in the tacit observance of a day," we become "aware suddenly of the great stream of human tears falling always through the shadows of the world." Mystery and sorrow—these are its keynotes; separately or in consonance, they are sounded ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... the minister himself drew up a chair and sat down. The question was daring, but the whole way and manner of the man were so quiet and gentle, so sympathizing and firm at once, that it would have lured a bird off its nest; much more the brooding reserve from a heart it is not nursing but killing. Diana looked at him, met the wise, kind, grave eye she had learned long ago to trust,—and broke down. All of a sudden; she had not dreamed she was in any danger; she was ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... the same at the Sylvester Arms. The little man sat alone with Red Wull, exchanging words with no man, drinking steadily, brooding over his wrongs, only now and again galvanized ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... in fitful gusts; but the air no longer carried the scorch of burning oil. The sky that had blazed all day in fiery brass darkened and closed near to earth, a throbbing thing of the Desert night brooding over life: a oneness of space rimmed round by the ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... rank he obtained. He was but a distant relation to the head of the House which he afterwards represented. Brought up in an Italian university, he was distinguished for his learning and his eccentricities. There too, I suppose, brooding over old wives' tales about freedom, and so forth, he contracted his carbonaro, chimerical notions for the independence of Italy. Suddenly, by three deaths, he was elevated, while yet young, to a ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that each day brought its regular work, and its close found her too weary for the brooding so often the bane of idleness. Yet, in spite of all that was encouraging, the cheering words spoken to her, the elation of Aun' Sheba and the excitement resulting from her humble prosperity, she was ever conscious of a dull ache at heart. Clancy had gone ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... bad, and that every evil that there is has its compensating balm. Then the brave man, as our German cousins say, possesses the world, whereas the melancholy man does not even possess his own share of it. Exercise, or continued employment of some kind, will make a man cheerful; but sitting at home, brooding and thinking, or doing little, will bring gloom. The reaction of this feeling is wonderful. It arises from a sense of duty done, and it also enables us to do our duty. Cheerful people live long in our memory. We remember joy more readily than sorrow, and always look back with tenderness ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... den. Human faces had grown so distasteful to him, that the very sight of the servant whose business it was to clean the rooms produced a feeling of exasperation. To such a condition may monomaniacs come by continually brooding over one idea. For the last fortnight, the landlady had ceased to supply her lodger with provisions, and he had not yet thought of demanding an explanation. Nastasia, who had to cook and clean for the whole house, was not ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... and beauty of Djenan-el-Maqui were as nothing in comparison with the fascination of the Monster with the Maw, vast, dark, and patient, waiting for its evening provender. To Charmian it seemed like a great personality. Often she found herself thinking of it as sentient, brooding over the opera, secretly attentive to all that was going on in connection with it. She loved its darkness, the ghostly lightness of the covers spread over it, the ranges of its gaping boxes, the far-off mystery of its galleries receding into a heaven of ebon blackness. She wandered ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... millions of that old man upstairs he could have been proud of her, and by an odd reasoning, even more ashamed of himself than he was now. He was not thinking of the Thorpe millions, however, as he sat there brooding; he was not wondering what Anne would do for him when she had her pay in hand. He was dumbly praising himself for having refused to sell his soul to Templeton Thorpe in exchange for the fifty thousand dollars with which the old man had baited him on three separate occasions, ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... man in the camp had been assigned to some particular task. Major Bach did not encourage idleness; it only fomented brooding and moping over our position, was his argument. But he was also a staunch believer in forced labour, which was quite a different thing. Consequently we found ourselves condemned to some of the most filthy tasks conceivable. Incidentally, however, these duties only served to reveal still ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... the hill, and had gone forth to fish. How instantaneously did all dreariness and heaviness of the earth's spirit flit away before one smile of the beneficent sun! This proves that all gloom is but a dream and a shadow, and that cheerfulness is the real truth. It requires many clouds, long brooding over us, to make us sad, but one gleam of sunshine always suffices to cheer up the landscape. The banks of the river actually laughed when the sunshine fell upon them; and the river itself was alive and cheerful, and, by way of fun and amusement, it had swept away many wreaths of meadow-hay, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... become saturated with the Fear. He dwelt upon the unseen and the unknown till the burden of eternity appeared to be crushing him. Everything in the Northland had that crushing effect—the absence of life and motion; the darkness; the infinite peace of the brooding land; the ghastly silence, which made the echo of each heartbeat a sacrilege; the solemn forest which seemed to guard an awful, inexpressible something, which neither word nor ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... But brooding lay the sun of my love upon me, in his own juice stewed Zarathustra,—then did shadows and doubts ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... evening was abroad. It marched along the roads, stole over the meadows, and sat brooding in the forest; the shimmering waterways ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... insidious ken The caitiff eyes your steps aloof, and oft Lies perdu in a nook or gloomy cave, Prompt to enchant some inadvertent wretch With his unhallowed touch. So, (poets sing) Grimalkin, to domestic vermin sworn An everlasting foe, with watchful eye Lies nightly brooding o'er a chinky gap, Portending her fell claws, to thoughtless mice Sure ruin. So her disembowell'd web Arachne, in a hall or kitchen, spreads Obvious to vagrant flies: she secret stands Within her woven cell: the humming prey, Regardless ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... scene from the Seven Circles of Dante. The place was a rookery of pterodactyls. There were hundreds of them congregated within view. All the bottom area round the water-edge was alive with their young ones, and with hideous mothers brooding upon their leathery, yellowish eggs. From this crawling flapping mass of obscene reptilian life came the shocking clamor which filled the air and the mephitic, horrible, musty odor which turned us sick. But above, ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it with Geraint, who issuing forth That morning, when they both had got to horse, Perhaps because he loved her passionately, And felt that tempest brooding round his heart, Which, if he spoke at all, would break perforce Upon a head so dear in thunder, said: "Not at my side. I charge thee ride before, Ever a good way on before; and this I charge thee, on thy duty as a wife, Whatever happens, not to speak to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... general counsels apply with special force to this part of life, and in particular the one which bids us all live busy and positive lives. Brooding is not a wholesome occupation for anybody at any time, but, on the other hand, through hours of active effort emotion finds an outlet and our natures are restored to peace. Introspection is to many people an actual ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... at the same time explained that it would not be safe; for that if the slaves were allowed books and knowledge, they would soon not be content with their condition, and would be banding together to make themselves free. I knew all this, and I had been brooding over it; and now when the powerful hand of the overseer came in to hinder the little bit of good and comfort I was trying to give the people, my heart was set on fire with a sense of sorrow and wrong that, as I said, no child ought ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... assumed modesty—do you sit down like a sage and criticise my explanation of the readings, and whatever idle babble you say has come into my head? Have you come full of envy, and dejected because nothing is sent you from home; and while the discussion is going on, do you sit brooding on nothing but how your father or your brother are disposed towards you:—"What are they saying about me there? at this moment they imagine I am making progress and saying, He will return perfectly omniscient! I wish I could ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... by Raymond's voice bidding him join him at tea. Strolling in pyjamas and slippers into the sitting-room which they shared the subaltern found his comrade lying lazily in a long chair and attired in the same cool costume. The outer doors and windows of the bungalow were still closed against the brooding heat outside. Inside the house the temperature was little cooler despite the punkah which droned ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... misunderstanding, which could be put right by a few honest words and a little open dealing. Human beings so often live at cross purposes with each other, when a frank word, or a simple confession of wrong, almost a look or a gesture, would heal the division. Resentment grows through brooding over a fancied slight. Hearts harden themselves in silence, and, as time goes on, it becomes more difficult to break through the silence. Often there are strained relations among men, who, at the bottom of their ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... again; and who would wish to be the first to pronounce that gentle wife a widow? Darker and still deeper grew the overshadowing cloud, and the hopes of the trusting ones less. Mrs. Grosvenor would sit for whole days brooding over her sorrows, clinging to the last ray of hope, with almost the insanity of hope; but the last spark finally went out, never again to be rekindled. The untiring wheels of time still went their rounds, ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... discoursing on the coming of the blessed peaceful, bloodless millennium! Think of the passenger pigeons that fifty or sixty years ago filled the woods and sky over half the continent, now exterminated by beating down the young from the nests together with the brooding parents, before they could try their wonderful wings; by trapping them in nets, feeding them to hogs, etc. None of our fellow mortals is safe who eats what we eat, who in any way interferes with our pleasures, or who may be used for work or food, clothing ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... having nothing particular to engage them, kept brooding over two things. These two things came together all at once, and a resolution was the consequence. I shall soon explain what ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... deep brooding o'er the cane Had locked the source of softer woe And burning pride and high disdain Forbade the gentler tear to flow," said ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... off, his whip under his arm, brooding over his own thoughts and lifting up one after the other his heavy wooden shoes daubed with clay. Certainly he desired to marry Celeste Levesque. He wanted her with her child because she was the wife he wanted. He could ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... be a sense of divine magic in the very atmosphere, through all the luminous day, brooding over the vapoury land, over the ghostly blue of the flood—a sense of Shinto. With my fancy full of the legends of the Kojiki, the rhythmic chant of the engines comes to my ears as the rhythm of a Shinto ritual mingled with ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... heaviness after meals, with eructations or belchings of gas, or local discomfort and unnatural action affecting, at different times, almost every organ of the body. It is well known that insanity may result from the loss of sleep and constant brooding over the symptoms that the patient ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... was supposed to be asleep. He always regarded this religious experience as the most important part of his education; it had the effect, not only of enlarging his mind, but also of restraining his impatience, and softening a disposition that was growing hard and bitter with brooding over the disadvantages suffered by himself and his race. He greatly needed something that would help him to look beyond his bondage and encourage him to hope ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... full-fruited knowledge of the later works. We lingered often in the sepulchral chapel of San Lorenzo, and watched Michael Angelo's dim-visaged warrior sitting there like some awful Genius of Doubt and brooding behind his eternal mask upon the mysteries of life. We stood more than once in the little convent chambers where Fra Angelico wrought as if an angel indeed had held his hand, and gathered that sense of scattered dews and early bird-notes which makes ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... all series of vital actions, each item of the phenomenon in question is so interlinked with the rest, that an explanation of a part can never be considered final, so long as any problem remains unresolved. The latest experimentator, brooding over hitherto neglected details, may always hope to light upon some clue that shall unravel the entire entanglement in a different manner, and reform upon a new basis ideas now grouped in pretended fixity. The ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... of Jesus is perfect. Its touch is always gentle and full of healing. Its helpfulness is always wise. Its tenderness is like the warmth of a heavenly summer, brooding over the life which accepts it. All the love of God pours forth in the friendship of Jesus. To be his beloved is to be held in the clasp of the everlasting arms. "I and my Father are one," said Jesus; his friendship, therefore, is the friendship of the Father. Those ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... shore; a red-shirted solitary figure straying along the water's edge; tiny sea-gulls darting and dipping in the waves around the steamer; a vista up some wide-mouthed affluent; and a great peaceful stillness brooding over all,—such were the happenings, too small for incidents, which accorded perfectly with the character of the Volga. For the Volga cannot be compared with the Rhine or the Hudson in castles or scenery. It has, instead, a grand, placid charm of its own, imperial, indefinable, and sweet. ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... perfect stage scene for a secret meeting of conspirators. In the daylight, the tower was ugly with its rubble of fallen stones—unkempt like a ragged tramp—but in the moonlight there was a glamour of ages in its mournful brooding. Elaine was right to make her sketch at night-time. Riviere placed the campstool for her, and watched her in silence as she plied her ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... in him a brooding despondency. He felt quite sure that the realists were right about Life: it wasn't worth ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... troubled by the heat lightning of passion that incessantly fluttered in its bosom and threatened to bolt from the blue, their fears will be laid to rest in the contemplation of Mr. Allen's new work which is pervaded by an intense summer calm—the brooding calm of the Country of the Spirit—but which does not preclude, rather is reached through, the fierce fightings of human spirit for victory over the evil passions of human nature—the fiercest struggle that can rend asunder the human breast, ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... humiliating, for the applause of his fellows and the sympathy of friends. With feelings so morbidly sensitive, and with such a lamentable incapacity for straightforward openness in any relation of life, he was naturally a dangerous companion. He might be brooding over some fancied injury or neglect, and meditating revenge, when he appeared to be on good terms; when really desiring to do a service to a friend, he might adopt some tortuous means for obtaining his ends, which would convert the service into an injury; and, if he had once become ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... and when he had given them all his reasons for thinking so, his hearers were of the same opinion; but Mr Proctor continued very doubtful and perplexed, clear though the story was. He sat silent, brooding over the new mystery, while the ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... time that the boats had turned, the whole scene had become involved in a murky twilight, through the gloom of which the brig, still with every stitch of canvas set, could with difficulty be made out. Still, although it seemed to me that the brooding squall might burst upon us at any moment, the atmosphere maintained its ominous condition of stagnation until the boats had reached within some four cables' lengths—or somewhat less than half-a-mile—of us; when, as I was intently watching their progress, I saw the sky suddenly ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... the aged Bishop eddied the brooding silence within the Cathedral. Without waiting for a reply he turned again to his table and took up a paper ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... enjoyable if the artist had taken less pains. To study her more ambitious tales is like an attempt to master some new system of psychology. The metaphysical power, the originality of conception, the long brooding over anomalies and objections—these are all there: but the rapid improvisation and easy invention are not there. Such qualities would indeed be wholly out of place in philosophy, but they are the essence ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... hear the Nameless, and descend Into the Temple-cave of thine own self, There, brooding by the central altar, thou May'st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice, By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise; For knowledge is the swallow on the lake, That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there But never yet hath dipt into ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... by the brooding silence that seemed to envelop the place, and tortured by tragic thoughts in which her father occupied a prominent position—almost crazed by the memory of what had happened during the preceding twenty-four hours—she fled across the patio ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... like the troubled sea which cannot rest.' But if I trust, my soul will become like the glassy ocean when all the storms sleep, and 'birds of peace sit brooding on the charmed wave.' 'Peace I leave with you.' 'Let not your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... amid His angels high, Spreads over all in brooding joy; On great wings borne, entranced they lie, And all is bliss ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... continually producing the same things which other people say or write. Whenever, after producing something which gives me perfect satisfaction, and which has cost me perhaps days and nights of brooding, I chance to take up a book for the sake of a little relaxation, a book which I never saw before, I am sure to find in it something more or less resembling some part of what I have been just composing. ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... attentively, and for two or three minutes was lost in thought, while some purpose of importance seemed to have gathered and sit brooding upon his countenance. He held up his finger towards his satellite, Cristal Nixon, who replied to his signal with a prompt nod; and with one or two of the attendants approached Fairford in such a manner as to make him apprehensive ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... some one, and I don't see why Grascour should not have as good a chance as another." Anderson had stalked away, brooding over the injustice of his position, and declaring to himself that this Belgian should never be allowed to ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... the camps of both that he destroyed in one night by casting firebrands into them! At last, not at three miles distance, but by a close siege, he shook the very gates of Carthage itself. And thus he succeeded in drawing off Hannibal when he was still clinging to and brooding over Italy. There was no more remarkable day, during the whole course of the Roman Empire, than that on which those two generals, the greatest of all that ever lived, whether before or after them, the one the conqueror of Italy, and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... "Still brooding on all the possible relations of his old friend to the life and the love that he has left, the poet now compares him to some genius of lowly birth, who should leave his obscure home to rise to the highest office of state, and should sometimes in the midst of his greatness, remember, as in a ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... as she was by jealousy and angry will, was the sheer longing for human help that must always be felt by the lonely and the weak. Confession, judgment, direction—it was on these tremendous things that her inner mind was brooding all the time that she sat talking to Father Benecke of the Jewish influence in Bavaria, or the last number of the ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his mind does not incline to zeal, exertion, perseverance and struggle, and he has not succeeded in his religious life' (has not broken through the bonds). And, continuing, Buddha says that just as a hen might sit carefully brooding over her well-watched eggs, and might content herself with the wish, 'O that this egg would let out the chick,' but all the time there is no need of this torment, for the chicks will hatch if she keeps watch and ward over them, so a man, if he does not think what is to be, but keeps watch and ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... sighed among the leaves, like rustling silk. The far-off drowsy drum of a grouse intruded on the vast stillness. The silence of the birds betokened a message. That mysterious breathing, that beautiful life of the woods lay hushed, locked in a waiting, brooding silence. Far away among the somber trees, where the shade deepened into impenetrable gloom, lay a menace, ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... and the watch below turned out, too restless to sleep, and all through those hours of darkness the sailors walked the decks in groups, again and again staring up at the foretopmast cross-trees, where the mysterious bulk of blackness sate, squatted, or hung motionless, like some brooding fiend, or incarnation of ill-luck, sinking by force of meditation its curses not loud, but deep, into the bottom ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... had eaten, drunk his coffee, and rested for a while, he was not so lively and talkative as on the previous day. He had been brooding and speculating ever since last summer, when the motor traffic started, and did I think it would be a good idea for him to hire three grown men, too, and build a much ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... on the verge of tumbling headlong, clinging on—how, it was impossible to guess, and flung here and there on patches of green carpet glued on to the steep hill-sides; while other peaks towered higher still, like vast calcined hay-cocks, with doubtfully dead craters still brooding internal fires, and trailing smoky clouds which, as they blew off, really seemed to be coming out ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... irritated, Ellen became at length very ready to take offence, and nowise disposed to pass it over or smooth it away. She seldom showed this in words, it is true, but it rankled in her mind. Listless and brooding, she sat day after day, comparing the present with the past, wishing vain wishes, indulging bootless regrets, and looking upon her aunt and grandmother with an eye of more settled aversion. The only other person she ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... yell of anguish as the ball cut through the midst of the pirates, a tremendous crash that followed almost instantly the report of the cannon, a sort of brooding hush, then a thunderous reverberation compared with which all other noises of the night ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... quite worth your while. The house presents only a casual side to the street—one fancies it does not take much interest in its upstart neighbors—but imagination makes us believe that it regards with brooding tenderness the lovely tidal river which winds away through the marshes to the sea. Interesting as the house is for its architectural features and for its delightful location—despite the nearness of the passing train—yet it is on neither of these ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... effect were observed by the colonists as days of fasting, prayer, and humiliation. All business was laid aside, the shops were closed, the churches opened, and the church-bells tolled as on some funeral occasion; and between praying at church, and fasting at home, and brooding over their grievances, the good people were very miserable indeed. Although they suffered great inconvenience from their observance of the non-importation agreement, yet they bore it patiently and cheerfully, ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... woman had the habit of sitting till late at night with the black chicken in her lap. The friendliness the visit was meant to show was by no means returned by Mrs. Kruse, who sat in her overheated room quietly brooding away the time. So when Effi perceived that her coming was felt as a disturbance rather than a pleasure she went away, staying merely long enough to ask whether there was anything the invalid would like to have. But all offers ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... where we were billeted reminded me strongly of my home in Donegal with its fields and dusky evenings and its spirit of brooding quiet. Nothing will persuade me, except perhaps the Censor, that it is not the home of Marie Claire, it so fits in with the ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... Now it so happens that what he would cure her of is incurable, being, in fact, eternal, divine—simple human love. So, to his pious and cynical admonitions she answers with strange inconsistency. Long brooding over his taunts will sometimes make her, to whom he is always the divinity, actually believe, despite her reiteration, that she had sinned out of obedience to him, that she really is a polluted creature, guilty of the unutterable crime ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... the same time; her different tendencies appear consecutively, not simultaneously, in exact accordance with her impulses. For Mary Stuart was never quiet an instant: even in her prison she shared in the movement of the world; her brain never ceased working; she was brooding over her circumstances, her distress and her hope, how to escape the one and realise the other: sometimes indeed there came a moment of resignation, but only soon to pass away again. She throws all her thoughts ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... not love Godfrey, but his conversation amused her, and helped to divert her mind from brooding over unpleasant thoughts. She received him with kindness, for his situation claimed her sympathy, and she did all in her power to reconcile him to the change which had taken place in his circumstances. ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... with much show of special regard, and never was soft and tender with her. But, on the other hand, he did not now love her the less because she opposed his wishes. He was a constant, undemonstrative man, given rather to brooding than to thinking; harder in his words than in his thoughts, with more of heart than others believed, or than he himself knew; but, above all, he was a man who having once desired a thing would ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering. There was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... consummation of what opium can do for human nature. I, whose disease it was to meditate too much and to observe too little, and who upon my first entrance at college was nearly falling into a deep melancholy, from brooding too much on the sufferings which I had witnessed in London, was sufficiently aware of the tendencies of my own thoughts to do all I could to counteract them. I was, indeed, like a person who, according to the old legend, had entered the cave of Trophonius; ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... fell a prey to melancholy brooding for a few brief moments, then resolutely cast the mood off his spirit. He was little given to morbid reflections. Men whose lives are daily liable to forfeit rarely are. It was characteristic of him ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... retired to Germany, was spent in industry, if not in peace and quietness. He could not fail to be cast down by the utter failure of his English partnership, and the loss of the fruits of his ingenious labours. But instead of brooding over his troubles, he determined to break away from them, and begin the world anew. He was only forty-three when he left England, and he might yet be able to establish himself prosperously in life. He had his own head and ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... silenced an adversary; and sometimes they have been applied on more solemn, and even tragical occasions. When Rinaldo degli Albizzi was banished by the vigorous conduct of Cosmo de' Medici, Machiavel tells us the expelled man sent Cosmo a menace, in a proverb, La gallina covava! "The hen is brooding!" said of one meditating vengeance. The undaunted Cosmo replied by another, that "There was no ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the right thing, forgot and hastened back, suffered all the various desperations of the eleventh hour, and turned homeward, dropping their parcels with that undimmed good-will that once a year makes gracious the universal human face. This brotherhood swam and beamed before the cow-puncher's brooding eyes, and in his ears the greeting of the season sang. Children escaped from their mothers and ran chirping behind the counters to touch and meddle in places forbidden. Friends dashed against each other with rabbits and magic lanterns, greeted in haste, and were gone, amid ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... disagreeable phases of mountain life were gone; so was the pedestal from which he had descended to make a closer study of the people. For he felt now that he had gone among them with an unconscious condescension; his interest seemed now to have been little more than curiosity-a pastime to escape brooding over his own change of fortune. And with Easter-ah, how painfully clear his mental vision had grown! Was it the tragedy of wasting possibilities that had drawn him to her-to help her-or was it his own ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... man. He happened to visit King William III of England, and was very much offended because during the interview, the king occupied a comfortable arm chair, while the elector, being simply a count, was given a chair to sit in which was straight-backed and had no arms. Brooding over this insult, as it seemed to him, he went home and decided that he too should be called a king. The question was, what should his title be. He could not call himself "King of Brandenburg," for Brandenburg was part of the Empire, and the emperor ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... I will go and confess the wrong, so that I shall dare to look up to the dear Lord again," then he saw the little kid under the knife before him and it all began over again in his mind from the beginning; so that with thinking and brooding, and the weight he carried, he was very tired by night, and crept home in the streaming rain as if he didn't ...
— Moni the Goat-Boy • Johanna Spyri et al
... struggled against her influence, and risen in the world in defiance of her power. To explain the danger which now awaited them, we must return to their old family enemy, Sir Robert Percy. Master of Percy-hall, and of all that wealth could give, he could not enjoy his prosperity, but was continually brooding on plans ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... freedom,—could walk without support, though with slow, uncertain, uneven steps; his articulation was now hardly impaired, though he never spoke except in answer to questions, and then with evident unwillingness. He took little or no notice of what passed around him, but ever seemed brooding over his own misfortunes,—that is, if his mind retained any activity, of which it ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... pleasant shade, and he had thrown his sombrero on a chair. I noted how his high brow was bronzed by the sun and there were golden lights in his broad beard. There was something massive and imposing in the man as he sat there in brooding thought. ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... as white as the girl's, beads of sweat on her brow, paralyzed by her utter inability to render aid—a new sensation to Mrs. Kildare. Maternity as she had known it was a thing of awe, of dread, a great brooding shadow that had for its reverse the most exquisite happiness God allows to the earth-born. But maternity as it came to Mag Henderson! None of the preparations here that women love to make, no little white-hung ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... curiously impersonal and incomparably direct touch that is peculiar to Greek, as in the verses by Antipater of Sidon,[7] that by some delicate magic crowd into a few words the fugitive splendour of the waning year, the warm lingering days and sharp nights of autumn, and the brooding pause before the rigours of winter, and make the whole masque of the seasons a pageant and metaphor of the lapse of life itself. Or a later art finds in the harsh moralisation of ancient legends the substance of sermons on the emptiness of pleasure and the fragility of loveliness; and the ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... Homer, and Dante, and Shakspeare, and Milton, in search of subjects worthy of his hand; he loved to grapple with whatever he thought too weighty for others; and assembling round him the dim shapes which imagination readily called forth, he sat brooding over the chaos, and tried to bring the whole into order and beauty. His coloring is like his design; original; it has a kind of supernatural hue, which harmonizes with many of his subjects—the spirits of the other world and the ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... relief, a joyful moment; yet on that very day, and on the next before he rode away, I, even I who had been unjustly and cruelly struck with a horsewhip, felt my little heart heavy in me when I saw the change in his face—the dark, still, brooding look, and knew that the thought of his fall and the loss of his home was exceedingly bitter to him. Doubtless my mother noticed it, too, and shed a few compassionate tears for the poor man, once more homeless on the great plain. But he could not be kept after that insane outbreak. To strike ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... beautiful, mournful, and full of the most touching expression—the drooping head and the supporting hand are unrivalled in the arts. Opposite is the monument of the nephew. The attitude of Lorenzo is marked by such a cast of deep melancholy brooding as to have acquired for it the title of "il pensiero." Beneath are the personifications of Evening and Dawn. Twilight is represented by a superb manly figure, reclining and looking down; the breadth of chest and the fine balance of the sunk shoulder are masterly, while the right limb, which ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... Richard's expedition are variously stated by different authors. That usually assigned by the English—a desire to divert his mind from brooding over the loss of his wife, "the good Queen Anne," seems wholly insufficient. He had announced his intention a year before her death; he had called together, before the Queen fell ill, the Parliament at Westminster, which readily voted him "a ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... The brooding heat culminated at last in an evening of furious storm, and Muriel speedily left the dinner-table to watch the magnificent spectacle of vivid and almost continuous lightning over the sea. It was a wonder that always drew her. She did not feel the nervous ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... ransom would come, when the Indians discovered that the castle set their expedients and artifices at defiance. Deerslayer, however, treated these passing suggestions as the ill-digested fancies of girls, making his own arrangements as steadily, and brooding over the future as seriously, as if they had never fallen ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... the man only through his music have thought of him as wholly a dreamer and a recluse, a poet brooding in detachment, and unfriendly to the pedestrian and homely things of the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was overflowingly human, notably full-blooded. On his "farm" (as he called it) at Peterboro he lived, when he was not composing, ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... fact, only the statement of a logical necessity. How could any human being enter into a loving communion with that great Friend whose love is always brooding over our race, who is seeking to do us good and not evil all the days of our lives, who is kind even to the unthankful and the evil,—and not be a lover of his fellow men and a servant ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... man's breast lay, concealed by his external calm, those memories and aspirations which are as strong as passions. In his earlier years, when he had been put to hard shifts for existence, he had found no leisure for close and brooding reflection upon that spoliation of just rights—that calumny upon his mother's name, which had first brought the Night into his Morning. His resentment towards the Beauforts, it is true, had ever been an intense but ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... was the night, Wherein the Prince of light His reign of Peace upon the earth began: The winds with wonder whist Smoothly the waters kist, Whispering new joys to the mild ocean, Who now hath quite forgot to rave, While birds of calm sit brooding on the ...
— Christmas Sunshine • Various
... trees, unharmed as yet by scathing fire or biting axe. Proudly they lifted their crests to the wind and the sun, while down below, their great boles were wrapped in perpetual shade and calm. Life, mysterious life, lurked within those brooding depths, and well did the friendly trees keep the many secrets of the ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... one not easily to be forgotten. It led us through a sublime waste, a wilderness of mountains and pine forests, over which the spirit of loneliness and silence seemed brooding. Above and below little could be seen but the same dark green foliage. It overspread the valleys, and the mountains were clothed with it from the black rocks that crowned their summits to the impetuous streams that circled round ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... country, won by the sword, held by the sword, in spite of all that ignorant demagogues in England may say, Fred Daleham felt all the more keenly the disappointment of his inability to follow the career that he would have chosen. However, he was a healthy-minded young man, not given to brooding and vain regrets. ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... were." Leila rose, her brooding face lighting suddenly. "You have a most forgiving heart, Beauty. As for myself, a few sound bumps will do them no harm. Make no mistake. Those of the Sans who are presentable," she smiled broadly, "will ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... altogether impossible that a character of this kind can have been combined with the generous although mistaken enthusiasm which the theory attributes to him.[1] But, on the other hand, the passion of avarice may easily have been nourished by brooding with disappointment on Messianic visions; and the theory of De Quincey may supply important hints for unravelling the mystery of ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... startled by the feeling she showed. Evidently he had touched one of the few sore places in this pure heart. It was as though her memory of her father had in it elements of almost intolerable pathos, as though the child's brooding love and loyalty were in perpetual protest even now after this lapse of years against the verdict which an over-scrupulous, despondent soul had pronounced upon itself. Did she feel that he had gone uncomforted out of life—even by her—even by religion? ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... air was still and brooding; across the sky scudded ragged masses of clouds, advanced guard of the storm that was mustering along the horizon; everywhere there was a feeling that foreboded snow. In the sky, few stars were visible, and those glimmered with a cold, wan light; at the zenith a solitary planet burned steadfastly. ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... the hopes it held: With smoke and brooding vapors intercurled, As the thick roofs and walls close-paralleled Shut out the fair horizons of ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... consult me who stood brooding and majestic, that is if I can be majestic. I whispered ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... fatal September morning that ominous warning was ringing in his ears again and again. Down in the bottom of his brooding heart he knew, and well knew, that had he obeyed, as he should have obeyed, Warren's orders, this catastrophe could not have occurred, and that he more than any other man on earth was responsible for the death of these gallant fellows, who, whether ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... daughters, even more miserable, had not been permitted to escape to starvation. We found at Grahovo the body of which those we had seen were the fringe,—a mass of despairing, melancholy humanity, brooding over the misery to come, homeless, foodless, and the guests of a people only less poor than themselves, the hospitable hovels of the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... submitted my conscience to a yoke; and in secret truth my will had no such autocratic power. Long contemplation of a shadow, earnest study for the welfare of that shadow, sympathy with the wounded sensibilities of that shadow under accumulated wrongs, these bitter experiences, nursed by brooding thought, had gradually frozen that shadow into a rigor of reality far denser than the material realities of brass or granite. Who builds the most durable dwellings? asks the laborer in "Hamlet;" and the answer ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... infinite felicity, inconsistent with the state even of the unfallen, for the angels who rejoice over repentance cannot but feel an uncomprehended pain as they try and try again in vain, whether they may not warm hard hearts with the brooding of their kind wings. So that we have not to banish from the ideal countenance the evidences of sorrow, nor of past suffering, nor even of past and conquered sin, but only the immediate operation of any evil, or the immediate coldness and hollowness ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... throughout shut his nephew, not merely from his heart, but also from his confidence, at first out of sheer neglect, and afterwards, as the lad grew towards manhood, from deliberate intent. For, by continually brooding over his embittered life, he had at last impregnated his weak nature with the savage cynicism which embraced even his one comrade; and the child he had originally chosen as a solace for his loneliness, became in the end the victim of a heartless experiment. ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... unheralded. He does not prophesy their course, he does not forecast the weather even for twenty-four hours; the atmosphere becomes slowly, slowly, but with occasional lifts and reliefs, of such a brooding breathlessness, of such a deepening density, that you feel the wild passion-storm nearer and nearer at hand, till it bursts at last; and then you are astonished that you had not foreseen it yourself ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... from a mental breakdown to flee to the country or wilderness and there live the life of a recluse, and from my father's last letter it was evident that he had had a nervous breakdown from anxiety and brooding over the loss of my mother, to whom he evidently was devotedly attached. It might, therefore, be possible that this strange, wild man himself was my father, an unpleasant possibility. At any rate, I felt that I could not rest, at least until ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... myself and brooding away in the city." The lad's bright, clear eyes looked frankly into the captain's as he continued. "I have been making a fool of myself, Captain. Got into some mischief with a crowd of fellows at school. Of course, I got caught and ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... CLAIRE: (in her brooding way) Anything is important enough for that—if it's important at all. (to the vine) I thought you were out, but you're—going ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... better chance to serve the country, than we now possess. Far along in the horizon, they discern mild skies and halcyon seas, while fogs and darkness and mists blind other sons of humanity from beholding all this bright vision. It was not so that we accomplished our last great victory, by simply brooding over a glorious Whig future. We succeeded in 1840, but not without an effort; and I know that nothing but union, cordial, sympathetic, fraternal union, can prevent the party that achieved that success from renewed prostration. It is not,—I would say it in ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... putting others in their places. It seems but common justice to leave a successor free to act by instruments of his own choice. If my respect for him did not permit me to ascribe the whole blame to the influence of others, it left something for friendship to forgive, and after brooding over it for some little time, and not always resisting the expression of it, I forgave it cordially, and returned to the same state of esteem and respect for him which had so long subsisted. Having come into life a little ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... by the payment of heavy fines, and before long gave them back their lands. The king's victory was so complete that neither of the earls could forgive it. In 1295, Gloucester died, without opportunity of revenge; but Hereford lived on, brooding over his wrongs, and in later years signally avenged the trial at Abergavenny. Meanwhile the conqueror of the principality had shown unmistakably that the liberties of the march were an anachronism, since the marchers ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... filled with lectures, classes, interviews, and reunions with old friends. Beneath a hollow smile and a life of ceaseless activity, a stream of black brooding polluted the inner river of bliss which for so many years had meandered under the sands of ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... born and bred as she had been, to voluntarily open up a correspondence with a man who was as yet little more than a mere acquaintance; but, all the same, he chafed under that silence and spent many a wakeful hour at night brooding ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... Bermondsey, in Blackwall and Oxford Street, were gathered bundles of hilarity, lingering near the scenes of their recent splendours. A thousand sounds, now of revelry, now of complaint, disturbed the brooding calm of the sky. A thousand impromptu concerts were given, and a thousand insults grew precociously to blows. A thousand old friendships were shattered, and a thousand new vows of eternal comradeship ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... during most of his life, but he did so in full consciousness of the background of doom. He trifled because he knew, if he did not trifle, he would go mad with thinking about Heaven and Hell. He sought in the infinitesimal a cure for the disease of brooding on the infinite. His distractions were those not of too light, but of too grave, a mind. If he picnicked with the ladies, it was in order to divert his thoughts from the wrath to come. He was gay, but on the ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... was greeted with loud applause by a court in which McMurdo saw many familiar faces. Brothers of the lodge smiled and waved. But there were others who sat with compressed lips and brooding eyes as the men filed out of the dock. One of them, a little, dark-bearded, resolute fellow, put the thoughts of himself and comrades into words as the ex-prisoners ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... went wild when he turned it out to play. It played with Mrs. Eldred's proportions till it became tormented with visions of shapeless and ungovernable size. He saw her figure looming in the doorway, brooding over his table and his bed, rolling through space to inconceivable confines which it burst. For though this mass moved slowly, it was never still. When it stood it quivered. Worse than anything, when it ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... Beneath my feet My nestlings call: And down I fall Unerring, true, Through heaven's blue; And haste to fill Each noisy bill. My brooding breast Stills their unrest. Sweet, sweet, Their quick hearts beat, Safe in the nest: Ah, sweet, sweet, sweet! ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... As it is, we are keenly affected by the struggles of maternal tenderness in the midst of her preparations for the cruel deed. Moreover, she announces her deadly purpose much too soon and too distinctly, instead of brooding awhile over the first confused, dark suggestion of it. When she does put it in execution, her thirst of revenge on Jason might, we should have thought, have been sufficiently slaked by the horrible death of his young wife and her father; and the new motive, namely, that Jason, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... whatever utility these elements may have in allaying the restless irritability of nervous and excitable patients, always produce serious evils upon those consumptive invalids of a melancholy turn of mind, or whose spirit is broken by hope deferred. Brooding over their melancholy condition, in a foreign land, away from the comforts of home, without the solace and cheering influence of friends and relations, they soon break down and perish.' M. Carriere and Sir James Clark consider the climate of Rome adapted only ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... Grace sat there brooding over her life problems with a new thought in her mind. She dimly realized that a woman must have a genuine message herself before she tries to give it to the world. And alas, her message was sadly deficient, she found. ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... evening, the distant hills, when Valentine sauntered forth, were of an intense solid blue, gloomy and pure, behind them lay wedges of cloud edged with gold, all appeared still, unchanging, and there was a warm balmy scent of clover and country crops brooding over ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... Carrier sat brooding on his hearth, now cold and dark, other and fiercer thoughts began to rise within him, as an angry wind comes rising in the night. The Stranger was beneath his outraged roof. Three steps would take him to his chamber door. One blow would ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... long Her brooding thoughts would pry; She could not think that he must soon— That he must ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... comprehending what was new to him than at a happier period. A stranger founding his judgment upon these circumstances would have said that the dulness of the child's intellect widely contradicted the promise of his features, but the secret was in the direction of Ilbrahim's thoughts, which were brooding within him when they should naturally have been wandering abroad. An attempt of Dorothy to revive his former sportiveness was the single occasion on which his quiet demeanor yielded to a violent display ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... five years and four months old; he died after a sickness of between two and three days. Mr. Kelly was a kind and excellent husband, and affectionate father. He doted on his child; and the loss so preyed upon his spirits, that it produced a brooding melancholy, which he predicted would eventually cause his death. After this time, General Samuel Houston, of Texas, made him very advantageous and liberal offers if he would establish himself in that State. He left Boston for the purpose, but was detained in Philadelphia by the sickness ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... cast so strangely with the rude people of the mountain wilderness, the companionship of such a spirit and mind was a necessity. Unconsciously Sammy had supplied the one thing lacking, and by her demands upon his thought had kept the shepherd from mental stagnation and morbid brooding. Day after day she had grown into his life—his intellectual and spiritual child, and though she had dropped the rude speech of the native, she persisted still in calling him by his backwoods title, ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... that he had got an armful, and that his heart was touched by the ecstasy; and sang again: "Oh, Barto, Barto! my boot is sadly worn. The toe is seen," etc., half-way down the stanzas. Without his knowing it, and before he had quitted the court, he had sunk into songless gloom, brooding on the scenes of the night. However free he might be in body, his imagination was captive to Barto Rizzo. He was no luckier than a bird, for whom the cage is open that it may feel the more keenly with its little taste of liberty that it is tied ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Sancho opened his eyes and raised his head, which he had been holding down, brooding over his unlucky excursion; and looking at the pilgrim he recognised in him that same Ricote he met the day he quitted his government, and felt satisfied that this was his daughter. She being now unbound embraced her father, mingling ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... were journeying on toward their destination, Pocahontas, at Werewocomoco, was daily with her father, watching him with alert ears and eyes, for she saw that the old ruler was brooding over some matter of grave import, and she drew her own inference. Only when planning to wage war on an alien tribe or plotting against the Jamestown settlers did he so mope and muse and fail to respond ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... them; for we had frequently made fires to apprize them of our approach, yet none appeared in return as answers. This disappointment, as might be expected, served to increase the ill-humour of the Leader and party, the brooding of which (agreeably to Indian custom) was liberally discharged on me, in bitter reproach for having led them from their families, and exposed them to dangers and hardships, which but for my influence, they said, they might have spared themselves. Nevertheless, ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... immunity from danger on payment of a tax. Thus men cease protecting themselves, and so in the course of time lose the ability to protect themselves, because the faculty of courage has atrophied through disuse. Brooding apprehension and crouching fear are the properties of civilized men—men who are protected by the State. The joy of reveling in life is not possible in cities. Bolts and bars, locks and keys, soldiers ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... see Uncle Arthur in the morning," he answered quickly, uncovering his brooding thoughts. "It won't do any good, perhaps, but I will try it. I have never asked him for a cent for myself, and I won't now. He may help Corinne this time, now that Garry is dead. There must be some outside money due Garry that he has not been able ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... so, at last, she consented and agreed that, for the present at least, she would receive the widow's money, but only until she could resume her place on the boards of the theater. But the deed of gift drove the brooding shadows out of the heart and eyes ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... gray-gloomed giant of Wade's mind, the morbid and brooding spell, had gained its long-encroaching ascendancy. He had again found the man to whom he must tell his story. Tragic and irrevocable decree! It was his life that forced him, his crime, his remorse, ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... you marrying so well, Peter," she finished with a backward motion of her head toward the room where the parlour set, banished long ago from the town house, symbolized for Ellen the brooding ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... of forty seconds that seemed as many minutes a thunder-brooding tension hung in the stillness of the room—then without haste or excitement Rick Joyce took off his hat and dropped it to the floor. After it he flung his mask, and when he had crossed the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... Bible begins with the account of the Priestly Code of the creation of the world. In the beginning is chaos; darkness, water, brooding spirit, which engenders life, and fertilises the dead mass. The primal stuff contains in itself all beings, as yet undistinguished: from it proceeds step by step the ordered world; by a process of unmixing, first of all by separating out the great ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... the purpose of changing the meaning to correspond with a modification in the characters for which they stand. The first movement sets before us five themes illustrative of the most prominent traits in the complex nature of Faust; the three most important being (a) typical of brooding, speculative inquiry, (b) the longing of love, (c) the enthusiasm ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... of most of her chums, and decidedly to the envy of one. Lorna, who had settled herself by her side on the steps, was not pleased to be deserted. She could never quite forgive Irene for having so many friends. The brooding cloud that had temporarily dispersed settled down again. When the girls got up to explore the temple she marched glumly away by herself. All the beauty and wonder and loveliness of the scene was lost upon her; ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... would return to Pevensey as a chapman, selling at no price or profit, till they suffered him to sleep in the empty room, where he would plumb and grope, and steal away a few bars. The great store of it still remained, and by long brooding he had come to look on it as his own. Yet when we thought how we should lift and convey it, we saw no way. This was before the Word of the Lord had come to me. A walled fortress possessed by Normans; in the midst a forty-foot tide-well out of which to remove ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... the presence of the Queen, believing that every eye which rested on her produced some baneful result; while her very attendants were dismissed from her presence when they had terminated their duties, and she thus remained hour after hour in solitude, brooding over the sickly fancies of her disordered brain. The sight of her husband's murderer had, however, instantly and for ever restored the healthful tone of her mind. She did not weep, for she had already exhausted all her tears; she asked no mercy, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... hardly speak; and as he lay there impassive, Miriam's hatred of his silent white face increased. She had too much self-control to express herself; but at times she was almost on the point of breaking out, of storming at him, and asking him whether he had no pity for her. One night, as she sat brooding at the window, and her trouble seemed almost too much for her, and she thought she must give way under it, a barrel organ stopped and began playing a melody from an opera by Verdi. The lovely air ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... drink—which with industry they could easily do. All this might not make them cheerful; but they would certainly be less a prey to melancholy while engaged in some active industry, than if they remained brooding over their fate. ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... the revolution who fell into their hands. These examples had unquestionably some influence in unbridling the revengeful passions of the royalists, and letting loose the spirit of slaughter which was brooding in their bosoms. The disposition to retaliate to the full extent of their power, if not to commit original injury, was equally strong in the opposite party. When fort Granby surrendered, the militia attached to the legion ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... so to speak, ever since she had anything to confide. She could not tell the old mother her doubts and cares; the would-be sisters seemed every day more strange to her. And she had misgivings and fears which she dared not acknowledge to herself, though she was always secretly brooding ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... came," said Ivan, as though brooding, and not hearing Alyosha's exclamation. "I knew he had ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Holding the same idea as the then obscure sect of the Rosicrucians, some of whom he had perhaps encountered in his travels in Germany, he imagined that, by means of the philosopher's stone, he could summon these kindly spirits at his will. By dint of continually brooding upon the subject, his imagination became so diseased, that he at last persuaded himself that an angel appeared to him, and promised to be his friend and companion as long as he lived. He relates that, one day, in November 1582, while he was ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... a mighty rage for the stroke that had been given his father. But he let no tear fall from his eyes and he sat very still, brooding in his heart evil for the wooers. Odysseus, after a while, lifted his head ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum
... him and, taking up the bottle, refilled their glasses. Then, catching the dull, brooding eye of Mr. Stobell as that plain-spoken man sat in a brown study trying to separate the serious from the jocular, he drank success to their search. He was about to give vent to further pleasantries when he was stopped by the mysterious ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... wide red roof that seemed to hover in the whitewashed walls and green shutters; while white smoke from an old gray-rock, mud-daubed chimney melted away among the tree-tops into the lavender of the coming day. It looked like a great brooding white hen setting in a nest of radiant woods, and I felt like a little cold chicken as Sam led the way through the low, wide door for me to creep under the sheltering wings. In about two seconds we were all sheltered in complete ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... just heard, he fell into a state of sadness, of inexpressible despondency. There is in a life of opulence without employment this terrible disadvantage: nothing turns its attention, nothing protects the mind from brooding on its sorrows, on itself. Never being compelled to occupy itself with the necessities of the future, or the labors of each day, it remains entirely a prey to great mental afflictions. Being able to possess all that ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... for us, here and there, over which to reach each other," thought Lynda; "it's the one path for us both." Then her eyes grew tenderly brooding as she remembered how 'twas a little child that had led ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... all the morning, our men silent and brooding; Black smoked cigar after cigar with a dogged assumption of indifference; the German came to us often with his desperate gestures and his woe-begone face. It was well on in the afternoon before the position changed in any way, and I had gone down with the Captain to the ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... doesn't realize I am most grown—she—she doesn't think I amount to much I guess." The boy had been brooding; his manhood affronted because he had not been permitted to share in ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... and Peter looked out over the old town. In the glow of sunset the thin iron modern spire of the cathedral had a grace not its own, and the roofs below it showed strong and almost sentient. One could imagine that the distant cathedral brooding over the city heard, saw, and spoke, if in another language than ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... transmigrations of souls, mystic marriages, the summoning of spirits, the creation of the world by means of attributes, or how the Godhead had concentrated itself within itself in order to unfold the finite Many from the infinite One; such were the favorite studies of the brooding youth of fifteen. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... not bring himself, next day, to join their party for tiffin at the Flowery Pagoda. But in the midst of his brooding, Teppich and the fat Sturgeon assailed the nunnery gate with pot-valiant blows and shouts. They had brought chairs, to carry him off; and being in no mood to fail, though panting and struggling, they packed him into a palanquin with many bottles of the best wine known to Fliegelman and Sons. ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... marsh-land outside. Suddenly and completely the noise ceased below, and the child seized her opportunity and crept downstairs. All was still in the big living-room, only in the dim recess of the fireplace the old lord was sitting, a silent, brooding figure, in his deep armchair. The rest of the household, men and women, gentle and simple, were all crowded in the doorway, breathlessly intent on something outside. Threading her way through them the child crept outside ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... one friend to whom Sam turned now was Jeff. He came for comfort, to sit long hours in the office while Farnum did his night work. Sometimes he would read; more often sit brooding with his chin in his hands. When the midnight rush was past and Jeff was free they would go together ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... energy. The separate notes are never picked out and made into ornaments; all the expression goes to passage after passage, realised acutely in their sequence. Where others give you hammering on an anvil, he gives you thunder as if heard through clouds. And he is full of leisure and meditation, brooding thoughtfully over certain exquisite things as if loth to let them pass over and be gone. And he seems to play out of a dream, in which the fingers are secondary to the meaning, but report that meaning with ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... loneliness fell away. Another chapter in the great game of hide and seek that had kept her from brooding until to-night? The doorbell carried a new message these days. Nine o'clock. Who could be calling at that hour? She had forgotten to advise Cutty of the fact that someone had gone through the apartment. She could not positively assert the fact. Those articles in her bureau she herself might ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... plainly-furnished chamber which was half study, half dressing-room—withdrawing himself from his guests under pretence of having business-letters to write to his people at Bradford and Leeds; sat with his open desk before him, and made no attempt to write; sat brooding over thoughts of his young wife, and regretting ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... no time for brooding, for he was working hard at his lessons with the village Priest; and as to little Daria, she had quickly adapted ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... Silas had been blessed with a wife, to whose nimbler wits he might have submitted the case, it is probable that he would not have sat for so long a time in his great chair brooding over the contents of the violet-tinted envelope from Boston. But unfortunately the good minister had been forced to lay his helpmate beneath the rough sods of the village churchyard some three years previous. Since this sad event, it is scarcely ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley
... appeared. Why was he late? Could he have missed the way by any chance? And later—as the hours passed without bringing him—could anything have happened to him? More than once her troubled gaze fell upon Brill Healy with a brooding question in it. The man had received only the day before his party's nomination for sheriff, and he was doing the gracious to ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... resource of address and subtlety to bring about a more human state of affairs. And she accomplished her object. Rezanov, at the end of a week was not only infuriated but alarmed. He knew the imagination of woman, and guessed that Concha, in her brooding solitude, distorted all that was unfortunate in the present and dwelt morbidly on the future. He knew that she must resent his part in the long separation, no doubt his lack of impulsiveness in not proposing elopement. There was a priest in his company who, although he ate below the ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... They set me brooding o'er the desert drear, Where broodeth darkness as the deepest night. From many a mosque there comes the call to prayer; I hear no voice that calls on Christ for light. But still I wait For the messenger of Christ, who ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... Being is thus represented sometimes as the third person of the Trinity, in the form of a dove brooding over chaos; sometimes as the second person, and therefore a youth; sometimes as the first person, and therefore fatherly and venerable; sometimes as the first and second persons, one being venerable and the other youthful; and sometimes as three persons, one venerable and one youthful, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... upon himself should be put in operation to retrieve his affairs, made him often reluctant to quit his study however much he found himself exhausted. However, the employment served to occupy his mind, and prevent its brooding over the misfortune which had befallen him, and joined to the natural contentedness of his disposition prevented any approach of despondency. 'Here is an old effort of mine to compose a melo-drama' (showing me one day a bundle of papers ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... leaving him faint by the wayside. Not until he was clean gone did he have the least suspicion that it had been there, and (if he could have known it) the first glimmering of reawakening pulse in him was the considering of its nature. Brooding upon it, while he grieved over his languor, he discovered that it had not been hard and scaly, like your ordinary vampire, but soft-lipped, brown-eyed, warm-fleshed, cloudy-haired; in fact, a pretty woman. Now, in all his previous ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... sunken garden are the Rising and the Setting Sun, by Adolph A. Weinmann. (p. 69.) In the east the Sun, in the strength of morning, the masculine spirit of "going forth," has spread his wings for flight; in the west, the luminary, now essentially feminine, as the brooding spirit of evening, is just alighting. The sculptural adornment of the shafts is detailed in the ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... wheeled about and went to the door. Paused. Still with that brooding dark look on his face ...
— Old Mr. Wiley • Fanny Greye La Spina
... Articles of Confederation for the management of the affairs of the Union at home and abroad was demonstrated to them by the painful and mortifying experience of every day. Washington, though in retirement, was brooding over the cruel injustice suffered by his associates in arms, the warriors of the Revolution; over the prostration of the public credit and the faith of the nation, in the neglect to provide for the payments ...
— Orations • John Quincy Adams
... in common with his lodger, who was a thin, dark, spectacled man, with a stoop which gave the impression of actual, physical deformity. I remember that during our short visit we found the vicar garrulous, but his lodger strangely reticent, a sad-faced, introspective man, sitting with averted eyes, brooding ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the end of his days he was, occasionally, visited by seasons of spiritual gloom and depression, which, no doubt, were chiefly, if not solely, the result of physical causes. It was an error that grew readily out of the brooding introspection and self-anatomy which marked the religious habit of the times. The close connection between physical causes and morbid or abnormal conditions of the spiritual life, was not as well ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... meadowlark uttered her strong but tender note. Over a deserted field a turkey buzzard hovered low, and alighted on a stake in the fence, standing a moment with outstretched, vibrating wings till he was sure of his hold. A soft, warm, brooding day. Roads becoming dry in many places, and looking so good after the mud and the snow. I walk up beyond the boundary and over Meridian Hill. To move along the drying road and feel the delicious warmth is enough. The cattle low long and loud, and look ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... perhaps, when dusk falling over the city heralded brooding night, he would emerge from his room to visit his favorite pool room, where, in an atmosphere blue with smoke, he would lounge in a chair at a wall and exchange gossip of sport and sporting things with other hangers-on. From there he might wander in upon a friendly "crap" or card game ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... the house into an Italian villa kept Beatrice from brooding too much over her embonpoint. She enjoyed the endless conferences with the decorators, drapers, artists, and who-nots, with Gay's suave, flattering little self always at her elbow, his tactful remarks about So-and-so being altogether ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... here I lie all huddled and hidden, (Oh, the eternity it seems!) Brooding desolate and bed-ridden, Living ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... [aside]. For the deep design I handle, For my double plot I come Raging to this simple home, Now to work the greatest scandal Ever seen. Here, brooding o'er him, This wild lover mad with ire, I will fan his jealous fire, I will place myself before him, Catch his eye, and then as fleeing, In invisible gloom array me. [He affects to come in, and being seen by LELIUS muffles himself in his cloak, ...
— The Wonder-Working Magician • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... gesticulate, you wring your hands and roll your eyes like a man possessed by a devil who will not leave him; and I have always observed, that the devil most obstinate to be expelled is a secret. I knew you were a Corsican. I knew you were gloomy, and always brooding over some old history of the vendetta; and I overlooked that in Italy, because in Italy those things are thought nothing of. But in France they are considered in very bad taste; there are gendarmes who occupy themselves with such affairs, judges who condemn, and scaffolds which avenge." ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... wife drove down the Park. Saton followed her eyes, noticing her slight start, and gazed after them with brooding face. ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... least the family, worshipped in the form of Confucius; his precepts and admonitions, the sacred hiao or filial submission, the tablets and ancestral piety, were a part of her blood; as was the infinitely fainter infusion of Buddhism; yet in her intellectual brooding it was to the Tao-teh-king that she returned. She paused to recall that, the brace at last removed, she was practically completely recovered; but the bent, the bracing, given ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... imagine all sorts of things," said Aleck, who felt that he must do something to keep his companion from brooding ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... sitting brooding over her fire about ten o'clock that night when a sealed and registered envelope was brought up ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... stronger than ourselves. [35] I seem to hear some one say, why did you not think of this before you revolted? But I answer, Cyrus, because the soul within me was stung beyond endurance by my wrongs; I could not sit and ponder the safest course, I was always brooding over one idea, always in travail of one dream, praying for the day of vengeance on the miscreant, the enemy of God and man, whose hatred never rested, once aroused, once he suspected a man, not of doing wrong, but of being better than himself. [36] And because he is a villain, he will always find, ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... Republic, no Republic which could have been voted by any Assembly of Frenchmen would have satisfied the Insurgents of Paris. The political leanings of the Assembly may be put out of the question in searching for the origin of the Civil War. That war was hatched in the brooding minds of Parisian workmen, intent on one single object, and it became practicable when the Revolution of September last put arms in their hands and the capitulation of February ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... creatures he has made for the duties they must perform. His care is continual, not only over us, but over them all. He hears the young ravens when they cry, and the ducks and the chickens are not forgotten by him. To the duck he has not given the brooding wings of the hen-mother; but he has given her a coat of down, from which she can make a warm ...
— The Nest in the Honeysuckles, and other Stories • Various
... favorite, and compels us to include this dramatic study of the French Revolution among the choicest of his creations. Its period and scene have never—save by Carlyle—been so brilliantly illuminated. Dickens was brooding on this story at a time when, wretchedly unhappy, he was approaching the crisis of a separation from his wife: the fact may help to explain its failure to draw on that seemingly inexhaustible fountain of bubbling fun so familiar ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... aided in the union of Corsica with France. He should have followed her fortunes and have succumbed only with her." Throughout his youth he is at heart anti-French, morose, "bitter, liking very few and very little liked, brooding over resentment," like a vanquished man, always moody and compelled to work against the grain. At Brienne, he keeps aloof from his comrades, takes no part in their sports, shuts himself in the library, and opens himself up only to Bourrienne in explosions ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... he had before adored. But a priest separates them, and Melchior goes mad. An old doctor, who makes a study of insanity, determines to try and cure him, and induces the girl to appear to him, disguised as St. Cecily herself, while he sits brooding at the organ. Thinking her at first to be indeed the Saint he had worshipped, Melchior falls in ecstasy at her feet, but soon discovering the trick kills her in a sudden paroxysm of madness. The horror of the act restores his reason; but, with the return of sanity, the dreams and visions of the artist's ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... enchanted gardens, breathing the scent of love's own roses mingled with the keen salt air that blew in from the sea of liberty. A fresh, new blessed life was opening before her. The clogging vapors of the past were rolling away at last. The unreasoning instinctive rebellion, bred of ennui and brooding dissatisfaction with the conditions of her existence and the people about her, had by a curious series of accidents been hastened to its acutest development; thought had at last fermented into active resolution, and the anticipation of action flooded her soul with peace and joy, in which ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of art had not a vital fragrance and savour more precious than the full-fruited knowledge of the later works. We lingered often in the sepulchral chapel of San Lorenzo, and watched Michael Angelo's dim-visaged warrior sitting there like some awful Genius of Doubt and brooding behind his eternal mask upon the mysteries of life. We stood more than once in the little convent chambers where Fra Angelico wrought as if an angel indeed had held his hand, and gathered that sense of scattered dews and early bird-notes which makes an hour among his relics seem ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... that Theodora had to sustain, and in that unequal warfare, her whole frame underwent an appalling change: her eyes glistened, and her hands shook violently, as she threw back with a resolute movement the tresses of her redundant hair. Again she stopped as if brooding over some frightful design; her throat became swollen with hysteric affection; the blood that hitherto had seemed congealed in its source, rushed with impetuosity down its wonted channels, and the blue veins ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... through the hum of torrent lone, And brooding mountain-bee, There sobs I know not what ground-tone ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... And I've often wondered what it could be. He certainly's a queer stick. Got to admit that. Always brooding. Good fellow all right, and, for a 'sphinx' as you call him, likable. But I wonder what ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... condition that was, a condition to breed bravery. In this early morning hour Beni-Mora looked magically clean. Domini thought of the desperate dirt of London mornings, of the sooty air brooding above black trees and greasy pavements. Surely it was difficult to be clean of soul there. Here it would be easy. One would tune one's lyre in accord with Nature and be as a singing palm tree beside a water-spring. She took up a little vellum-bound book which she had laid at night ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... such thoughts dispel! No voice, no footstep can I hear! (Where Night and Silence brooding dwell, Spreads thy cold reign, ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield
... Van Decht, fascinated by the climate, the primitive but delightful life, and a firm believer in the possibilities of the country, still lingered in the capital, and already the results of his large investments were beginning to be felt. Only a few people knew of the hidden danger which was ever brooding over the land—a danger which Ughtred had realized from the first, and which from the first he had set himself steadfastly to avert. A soldier himself, he knew something of the horrors of war. Nothing seemed to ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... pale, or rather livid, with open mouth, and hair stuck together with cold sweat, he stood apart, brooding. But the cure who had suddenly arrived on the scene, ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... listened to for a moment. Lord Hutchinson still made attempts at negociation, but they were all vain; nothing could induce her to change her purpose. Irritated by studied insults abroad; incensed by threats of ministerial vengeance; brooding over the wrongs she had endured from one who had promised before the altar of God to love and cherish her through life; and, above all, assured of the popular support, she pursued her way; and she reached ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... pioneer, is already exhibiting the painful signs of senility and decay apparent in Virginia and the Carolinas; the freshness of its agricultural glory is gone, the vigor of its youth is extinct, and the spirit of desolation seems brooding over it."[7] ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... consequence was, that her whole life, owing to—to—the unsuitableness of your tempers, and the strongly-contrasted materials which formed your characters, was one of almost unexampled suffering and sorrow. With this example before my eyes, and with the memory of it brooding over and darkening your own heart—yes, papa—my dear papa, let me call you with the full and most distressing recollections connected with it strong upon both of us, let me entreat and implore that you will not urge nor force me into a union with this hateful and repulsive ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... above was brilliant with the gleam of a thousand stars, the moon was shining behind some silvery clouds, the great masses of foliage in the park were just stirred with the whisper of the night, and sweetest odors came from heliotrope and mignonnette; the brooding silence of the summer ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... his stern contemporaries of the Commonwealth as from those who debased literature in the age of the Restoration, yet belongs rather to the older than the newer period. In the midst of evil men and the gloom of evil days the brooding thought of a great poetical work was at length matured, and the Christian epic, chanted at first when there were few disposed to hear, became an enduring monument of genius, learning, and art. His early poems ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Aeschylus' poetic work was not only due, we may be sure, to his native genius and gifts, powerful as they were, but were partly inspired by the personal share he took in the great actions of a heroic national uprising. In the same way, the poet's brooding thoughtfulness on deep questions—-the power of the gods, their dealings with man, the dark mysteries of fate, the future life in Hades—though largely due to his turn of mind and temperament, was doubtless connected with the place where ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... grows worse day by day, till all at once she realizes that a distressing female complaint is established. Her doctor has made a mistake. She has lost faith in him; hope vanishes; then comes the brooding, morbid, melancholy, everlasting BLUES. Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound instantly asserts its curative powers in all those peculiar ailments of women, and the story recited above is the true experience ...
— Treatise on the Diseases of Women • Lydia E. Pinkham
... brighten at her approach, and sad hearts grow glad as she gives a cheerful smile to one, says a kind word to another, administers a glass of her punch or lemonade to a third, hands out an apple or an orange to a fourth, or a book or game to a fifth, and relieves the hospital of the gloom which seemed brooding over it. But not in these ways alone does she bring comfort and happiness to these poor wounded and fever-stricken men. She encourages them to confide to her their sorrows and troubles, and the heart that, like the caged bird, has been bruising itself against the bars of its cage, ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... be sensitive about it! All us girls think it ever so romantic, and we call you sometimes the lord of the realm, and when we see you walking through the darkling wood at evenfall we say, ‘My lord is brooding upon the ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... the time with her instead. Because of this she had lived all Sunday in the dread of his coming. Yet very often she found herself arrested in the midst of some homely action, letting some tap run on to inordinate splashings, some pot boil to an explosion of flavoured fumes, because she was brooding with an infatuated smile on his rich colours and rich ways, on the slouch by which he dissembled the strength of his body, the slow speech by which he dissembled the violence of his soul. But there returned at once her hatred of him, and she would long to lay her ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... found trust in Providence began to falter. Was prayer, she wondered forlornly, to fail her like everything else? Suddenly, however, and when things were at their darkest, a helping hand was offered. One bitter evening, as she sat brooding in the miserable lodging where she had secured temporary shelter, she was visited by a Mrs. Buchanan, claiming her as a friend of the long distant past. The years fell back; and, with an effort, Lola recognised in the visitor a girl, now a mature ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... on the contrary, always brings before me the rush and hurry of the world of people, and the wood pewee its under-current of eternal sadness. Into the mood induced by the melancholy pewee song breaks how completely and how happily the cheery optimism of the chickadee! Brooding thoughts are dissipated, all is not a hollow mockery, and life is still ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... he took to silent brooding. Though he never said a word to his mother about the disappointment he had experienced, she knew precisely what he had gone through, and spared him the humiliation that would have followed any questions she ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... part. There is not a wrinkle on his brow; no unpleasant thought appears to shade the jovial light of his broad face. He sits down to dinner with evidently a good appetite; he sleeps soundly at night, and troubles not his poor head by brooding over misfortunes which he cannot mend, or charging himself with the direction of plots which he is not competent to manage. But, if not fitted to take the lead in cabinets, nature has formed him to shine in a procession. He has a portly figure, a face radiant with blandness, dissimulation, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... to build up the centre of brooding peace in which she found herself. Her nature answered to the finest vibrations, and at first her joy in loving had been too great not to bring with it a certain confusion, a readjusting of the whole scenery ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... a man of science, Dr. Holmes added abundant knowledge of the new sort; and apt, unexpected bits of science made popular, analogies and illustrations afforded by science are frequent in his works. Thus, in "Elsie Venner," and in "The Guardian Angel," "heredity" is his theme. He is always brooding over the thought that each of us is so much made up of earlier people, our ancestors, who bequeath to us so many disagreeable things—vice, madness, disease, emotions, tricks of gesture. No doubt these things are bequeathed, ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... with the same sidewise attention, but his face was brooding, his half-veiled eyes were red and threatening. What would happen in the nighttime as the stage pursued its lonely way across the bleak prairie? Since Red Kimball meant to appeal to the law in his revenge against Brick, there was no danger of his transgressing ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... at first that his fits of brooding restlessness came from a memory of Anna. But phrases he had blurted cut half-consciously had given her a sense of their causes. The thought of Anna had died in him. Neither consciousness of her suffering nor memory of the years they had lived together had yet awakened ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... the earthly good I prayed for, but to raise me above earth and all of earthly good. Opening my inner vision to behold, far as the eye of the finite may behold, what is comprehended in the omniscient glance of the Infinite—removing the clouds brooding so darkly over my spirit, and filling it with holy joy, by imparting radiant glimpses of the soul's calmer and higher life in the land beyond—'the life that rights the wrongs, and reveals the mysteries ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... under-officer then, in the Army of the Central State—his name then was Taro. She—herself no more than a slip of a girl at that time—remembered him as a queerly silent young man—insignificant in physique and manner. He had escorted her once to a Venus festival; in a strange, brooding, humble, yet dignified fashion, he had spoken of love. She had laughed, and soon forgot the incident. But Tarrano had not forgotten. The daughter of the great Dr. Brende had fired his youthful imagination. Who knows what ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... and questioned the wide atmosphere, that, brooding palpitant between her and the lake, still withheld the desolating secret that horizon must have whispered to horizon throughout the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... and the moonlit camp, with its anxious generals, its weary soldiers, its fearful machinery of destruction, all strewn along the bank of the great river, remained plunged in silence, as if brooding over the chances of the morrow and the failures of the past. And hardly four miles away another army—twice as numerous, equally confident, equally brave—were waiting impatiently for the morning and the final ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... world to them; men of genius as it interprets to them and to the world the mystery of music. Genius men must reverence, and they are not apt to do it boisterously. Is not the influence of fine character, which is only genius for virtue, like the brooding of God over chaos? Which is chaos only to the blind, but teems with generous, melodious laws to the spiritually discerned. Creation is the opening of eyes, not the fabrication of objects. "Let there be light" is the creative fiat, spoken ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... it go at that—'her mere presence'—" rejoined Bundy. But Solon protested, defending the lady's activities. He became sensitive to any mention of her name, and fell to brooding. He believed her to be a model woman, and little Roscoe to ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... the reaction should be especially sharp in Russia. The Slav peoples that form the great bulk of her population are notoriously sensitive. Shut up for nearly half the year by the rigours of winter, they naturally develop habits of brooding introspection or coarse animalism—witness the plaintive strains of their folk-songs, the pessimism that haunts their literature, and the dram-drinking habits of the peasantry. The Muscovite temperament and the Muscovite climate naturally lead to idealist strivings against the hardships of ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... moment sewing on buttons for herself, but soon descended, smiling, to greet him. As he looked at her coming down the stairway, Bailey thought of the great calm of a starry night in the country. Some women always bring the sense of freshness and repose and brooding peace when they enter ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... balm. Then the brave man, as our German cousins say, possesses the world, whereas the melancholy man does not even possess his own share of it. Exercise, or continued employment of some kind, will make a man cheerful; but sitting at home, brooding and thinking, or doing little, will bring gloom. The reaction of this feeling is wonderful. It arises from a sense of duty done, and it also enables us to do our duty. Cheerful people live long in our memory. We remember joy ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... equation had been made; all worldly knowledge and experience affirmed it to be impossible. "What was the explanation? What is time? What is life? I felt myself beginning to doubt the reality of all things. And so this was the mystery which my friend had been brooding over since his return from abroad. No wonder it had changed him. More to be wondered at was it that it ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... the beauty of the city that they have left behind, better than when they were pressing through its narrow streets. And though the view of the receding houses from the far-off waters may be an illusion, our view of the past, if we see God brooding over it all, and working in it all, is no illusion. The meannesses are hidden, the narrow places are invisible, all the pain and suffering is quieted, and we are able to behold more truly than when we were in the midst of them, the bearing, the purpose, and the blessedness ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Heatherlegh, "after the stimulus of long leave at Home. He may or he may not have behaved like a blackguard to Mrs. Keith-Wessington. My notion is that the work of the Katabundi Settlement ran him off his legs, and that he took to brooding and making much of an ordinary P. & O. flirtation. He certainly was engaged to Miss Mannering, and she certainly broke off the engagement. Then he took a feverish chill and all that nonsense about ghosts developed. Overwork started his illness, kept it alight, and killed him, poor devil. ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... friend leads us away from the din and rush of the city into "God's great out-of-doors." Having walked with him on "Some Winter Days," one is all the more eager to follow him in the gentler months of Spring—that mother-season, with its brooding pathos, and its seeds stirring in their sleep as if they dreamed ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... discern mild skies and halcyon seas, while fogs and darkness and mists blind other sons of humanity from beholding all this bright vision. It was not so that we accomplished our last great victory, by simply brooding over a glorious Whig future. We succeeded in 1840, but not without an effort; and I know that nothing but union, cordial, sympathetic, fraternal union, can prevent the party that achieved that success from renewed ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... according to custom, bare-headed and bare-legged. He was enfeebled by confinement and affliction; by constantly brooding over the unknown fate of his child, and the disastrous interruption of his experiments. He sat bowed down and listless; his head sunk upon his breast; his whole appearance that of one "past hope, abandoned, and by himself ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... delicate poetry of the Kentucky land makes itself felt as silence and repose. Still skies, still woods, still sheets of forest water, still flocks and herds, long lanes winding without the sound of a traveller through fields of the universal brooding stillness. The sun no longer blazing, but muffled in a veil of palest blue. No more black clouds rumbling and rushing up from the horizon, but a single white one brushing slowly against the zenith like the lost wing of a swan. Far beneath it the silver-breasted hawk, using ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... Ustane were sitting round a fire in the cave just before bedtime, when suddenly the woman, who had been brooding in silence, rose, and laid her hand upon Leo's golden curls, and addressed him. Even now, when I shut my eyes, I can see her proud, imperial form, clothed alternately in dense shadow and the red flickering of the fire, as she stood, the wild centre of as weird a scene as I ever witnessed, and ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... suspire Twice a man's heart and render it to Heaven Who gave it, after offerings paid and given, And games of men and horses, she brought forth His regal arms for hero of most worth In the broad Danaan host, who was adjudged Odysseus by all voices. Aias grudged The vote and wandered brooding, drawn apart From his room-fellows, seeding in his heart Envy, which biting inwards did corrode His mettle, and his ill blood plied the goad Upon his brain, until the wretch made mad Went muttering his wrongs, ill-trimmed, ill-clad, ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... Tom gathered a tolerably clear notion of the poor poet's state of body and mind; as a self-indulgent, unmethodical person, whose ill-temper was owing partly to perpetual brooding over his own thoughts, and partly to dyspepsia, brought on by his own effeminacy—in both cases, not a thing to be pitied or excused by the hearty and valiant Doctor. And Tom's original contempt for Vavasour took a darker form, perhaps one too ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... were filled with lectures, classes, interviews, and reunions with old friends. Beneath a hollow smile and a life of ceaseless activity, a stream of black brooding polluted the inner river of bliss which for so many years had meandered under the sands of all ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... Quite unconsciously the brooding anxiety of the afternoon slipped from Sheldon, and he felt strangely cheered at the sight of her running up the steps laughing, face flushed, hair flying, her breast heaving from the violence ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... James Courtenay undoubtedly was, and earnest as he felt to become different to what he had been in olden time, he could not shake off from his mind the sad memory of the past. His mind was continually brooding upon poor little Dobbin's death, and upon the share which he had in it. For now he knew all the truth. He had seen old Leonard, and sat with him for many hours; and at his earnest request the old man had told him all the truth. "Keep nothing back from me," said the young squire, as he sat ...
— The One Moss-Rose • P. B. Power
... and immensity of the water and the night we passed. It was but two minutes ere we touched the shore and said good-night, and went our way and left the ferryman. But in that brief passage he had opened our souls to everlasting things—the freshness, and the darkness, and the kindness of the brooding, all-enfolding night ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... enormous moments when the whole of life was bound up solely in the unspeakable necessity to win. Astounding trick of thought from what beset him! He was alone upon The Strip, in an overcoat, on the way to forty, not a sound, not a soul, and with that brooding sense of being upon the edge and threshold of something ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... in thick and fast, bringing benches for the Mastersingers to sit upon, and arranging everything in the church for the trial of song. David kept watching Walther, who had flung himself into a great ecclesiastical chair, and sat there brooding. After observing him in silence ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... in his own writing, partly in that of his amanuensis—of one of his daughters, it is probable—is in the library of Trinity College, and may be seen by the curious. The spirits of these venerable men still haunt the scenes of their studious youth, and with their mighty shadows brooding over us, what is the value of dollars ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... half-awakened Senses, endeavouring daily to acquire for himself some knowledge of this strange Universe where he had arrived, be his task therein what it might. Infinite was his progress; thus in some fifteen months, he could perform the miracle of—Speech! To breed a fresh Soul, is it not like brooding a fresh (celestial) Egg; wherein as yet all is formless, powerless; yet by degrees organic elements and fibres shoot through the watery albumen; and out of vague Sensation grows Thought, grows Fantasy and Force, and we have ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... firmest hope Can dissipate the dread of cold neglect; Yet I, strange fate! though jealous, though disdained, Absent, and sure of cold neglect, still live. And amidst the various torments I endure, No ray of hope e'er darted on my soul, Nor would I hope; rather in deep despair Will I sit down, and, brooding o'er my griefs, Vow everlasting absence from ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... with a sigh, and turned away from the window. She was above all things practical, and fully realized the folly of brooding over the inevitable, but the marriage of her nephew was a sore point with her. She proceeded in her stately way down the broad and shallow steps of the old staircase, hung with armour and trophies and family portraits. At the bottom of the stairs she encountered a manservant bearing a tray with ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... hard hit; Spain and Italy were both unusually low-spirited; and there was an extra solemnity about the British Isles that told its own sad tale. Englishmen, when they have lost more than they can afford, generally take it out of themselves in surly, brooding self-reproach. Frenchmen give vent to their disgust and annoyance by abusing the game and its myrmidons. You may hear them, loud and savage, on the terrace, "Ah! le salle jeu! comment peut-on se laisser eplucher par des brigands de la sorte! Tripot, ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... was now brooding over the Susquehanna, and the autumn leaves were being tinged with red. The struggle of the year 1778 seemed over and Brant decided to spend the winter at Niagara. Accordingly he set out with a band of warriors from his entrenched position at Unadilla and went forward by easy stages along ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... in the room a constraint like a tangible inhibition against any natural spontaneity fell over them. Kendric read in Barlow's look no joy at the sight of him but only a sullen brooding; Betty flashed one look at him in which was nothing of last night's friendliness but an aloofness which might have been compounded of scorn and distrust; Bruce ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not DOING but BEING, and not BEING merely, but BECOMING—that is what the critical spirit can give us. The gods live thus: either brooding over their own perfection, as Aristotle tells us, or, as Epicurus fancied, watching with the calm eyes of the spectator the tragicomedy of the world that they have made. We, too, might live like them, and set ourselves to witness ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... him, the first white man to look upon the scene, lay the open way to two thousand miles of fair pasture-lands and brooding desert-wastes — of limitless plains and boundless rolling downs — of open grassy forests and barren scrubs — of solitary mountain peaks and sluggish rivers; and, though then hidden from even the most brilliant imagination, the wondrous potentialities ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... Gammit that there was also an abundance of bears. From the garden, at length, he had ventured to the yard and the barn. In a half-barrel, in a corner of the shed, he had stumbled upon the ill-fated white top-knot hen, faithfully brooding her eggs. Undeterred by her heroic scolding, and by the trifling annoyance of her feathers sticking in his teeth, he had made a very pleasant meal of her. And still he had heard nothing from Mrs. Gammit, who, for all her indignation, could not depart from her ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... mongrel. There isn't a single thoroughbred Rhode Island Red hereabouts. I aim to get a setting of pure eggs for Polly this spring if I sell my hawgs as good as Mr. Adam perdicks I will. I brought her as a present to you, Miss Nancy, 'cause she's been a-brooding about two days, and if you get together a setting of eggs the last of next week she'll hatch 'em all. She carried ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Ancient Mariner" was planned, to pay for the expenses of the holiday, and was begun by Wordsworth and Coleridge together, though there is actually very little of Wordsworth's work in it, and the spirit of it, the air of mystery and the sense of brooding elemental forces with which its simplest lines are somehow invested, belongs to Coleridge alone, and to that strange genius of his, which only twice or thrice in his life—in "Christabel," "The Ancient Mariner," and "Kubla Khan"—produced poetry of ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... substance, who lived very easily in the country; his mother had died when he was quite a child, and this sorrow had been borne very heavily by his father, who had loved her tenderly, and after her death had become morose and sullen, withdrawing himself from all company and exercise, and brooding angrily over his loss, as though God had determined to vex him. He had never cared much for the child, who had been peevish and fretful; and the boy's presence had done little but remind him of the wife he had ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... inactivity and spiritless brooding, a sort of languor—a trembling of the limbs—oppresses her; but presently, as the cold, crisp air creeps into her young blood, she quickens her steps, and is soon walking with a brisk and healthy ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... Owen, even then, both physically and morally, furnished her with the oddest of commentaries on his father's mien and mind. He would never, the family sighingly recognized, be nearly as handsome as Mr. Leath; but his rather charmingly unbalanced face, with its brooding forehead and petulant boyish smile, suggested to Anna what his father's countenance might have been could one have pictured its neat features disordered by a rattling breeze. She even pushed the analogy farther, and descried in her step-son's mind a quaintly-twisted reflection of her ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... the rest were talking, as if brooding over something; at length he exclaimed, "I say, Rogers, I'll not have you call me old Higson—they were ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... the little fire, and brooding almost to insanity over the strange revolution that a few hours had made in her life, driving her so suddenly from her own hereditary manor-house, her home of wealth and honor and safety, out into the perilous wilderness, a fugitive from ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... Whether it was that he was sick for Tomaso, whom he adored, or that he stewed in a black rage over the blows and pitchforkings, hitherto unknown to him, no one could surely say. He would do nothing but crouch, brooding, sullen and dangerous, at the back of his cage. Hansen noted the green light flickering fitfully across his pale, wide eyes, and prudently refrained ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... once simple and symbolic, which begins to worry Khalid. "For in the evening of the day he related it to me," writes Shakib, "I found him sitting on the edge of his bunk brooding over I know not what. It was the first time he had the blues. Nay, it was the first time he looked pensive and profound. And upon asking him the reason for this, he said, 'I am thinking of the paper-boats which I used to sail down the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... her stainless and holy, intact of evil or deceit; what was she now? My whole brain reeled; the foundations were taken away; earth and heaven met; even as when the West forges tempest and lightning-bolts upon its melancholy hills, brooding and muttering hour by hour, till at length the livid gloom rushes upward against sun and stars, and the blackening sky shuts down upon the blackened earth, cowering at the shock, and the torrents and flames are let loose ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... promise of what was to be a man fit for all offices of active rural life, and to be, in mature age, the selectman, the deacon, the representative, the colonel. As for Septimius, let him alone a moment or two, and then they would see him, with his head bent down, brooding, brooding, his eyes fixed on some chip, some stone, some common plant, any commonest thing, as if it were the clew and index to some mystery; and when, by chance startled out of these meditations, he ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... black mass brooding over our very mastheads began to pivot away from the ship's side silently. And now I forgot the secret stranger ready to depart, and remembered only that I was a total stranger to the ship. I did not know her. Would she do it? How was she to ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... the words the girls acted out with gestures the dancing ghosts, the brooding forest, the rubbing sticks and the leaping fire. So they proceeded through the strange measures, ending up in a close circle around the fire, all making the hand sign of fire together. Gladys began to be stirred with a desire to sit ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... grief which had been brooding over her troubled mind all day, broke suddenly in a tempest of weeping. She could have given no reason for her distress; but all at once, on the eve of that day which was to give a new colour to her life, panic seized her, and she trembled at the step she was ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... her brooding, shivered a little when the rabbit cried. She started forward to save it—she who had taught the little black dog to hunt gophers and prairie-dogs!—and when she was too late she scolded the dog in the language ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... He was brooding in this chair, with his eyes cast down upon the ground, when Mrs Gamp came in to tell him that the little room was ready. Not being quite sure of her reception after interfering in the quarrel, Mrs Gamp, as a means of interesting ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... exquisitely carved choir-stalls black with age and use, its choir balustrade and pulpit of translucent alabaster, and its dim old altar-piece by Tintoretto, the town boasts the Loggia or council chambers, the palace of the Venetian governors, the noble mansion of the Arnieri, and, brooding over all, a towering campanile, five centuries old. The Lion of St. Mark, which appears on several of the public buildings, holds beneath its paw a closed instead of an open book—symbolizing, so I was told, the islanders' dissatisfaction with ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... anxious hearts and troubled faces in the farmhouse that day, for Death was brooding there again, and they who watched his shadow darkening around them spoke only in whispers, as they obeyed the physician's orders. When Richard first came in Mrs. Markham wound her arm around his neck, ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... of the white owl sweeping Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star, Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried, Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown evejar. Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting; So were it with me if forgetting could be willed. Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring, Tell it to forget the source ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was gone now; tired without reason, she plodded on along the road in her little white shoes, head bent, brown eyes brooding, striving to fix her wandering thoughts on Duane Mallett to fight down the threatening murmurs of a peril ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... desolation around the grimly cold volcano, alone, the old Indian made his last stand, and in a rude cabin, beside a tiny spring that seeped from under the black rock on the mountain-side, lived in splendid isolation—silent, brooding, desiring only to be left in peace with his few ponies, his small herd of cattle and the memories and traditions of ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... and after the horror of the unearthly cry that I had heard, and now the sound of my own lusty voice, the silence that fell seemed curiously brooding and ominous. ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... indeed . . . And yet To me, when nights are weird and wet, Without those comrades there at tryst Creeping slowly, creeping sadly, That lone lane does not exist. There they seem brooding on their pain, And will, ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... close in shore; a red-shirted solitary figure straying along the water's edge; tiny sea-gulls darting and dipping in the waves around the steamer; a vista up some wide-mouthed affluent; and a great peaceful stillness brooding over all,—such were the happenings, too small for incidents, which accorded perfectly with the character of the Volga. For the Volga cannot be compared with the Rhine or the Hudson in castles or scenery. It has, instead, a grand, placid charm of its ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... signs of secret grief, nor even of wounded pride. The girl had never been more radiant, her cheeks a-glow, her eyes so soft and lustrous that sometimes her mother's grew dim at sight of them. She remembered a time when her own mirror had shown her just such a look of brooding revery. ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... you have broken will loathe you and will be always brooding and scheming to strike a fresh blow. The children will be taught to curse you. The infant being moulded in the womb will have breathed into its starved body the vitality of hate. It is not they—it is you who are blind Samsons pulling down the ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... to his fly one by one, and were landed in his basket easily enough, and soft-throated frogs piped to him from ponds in the fields behind, and the smell of budding verdure from the land mingled with the breeze from the sea. But Caius was not happy; he was brooding over the misery suggested by what he had just seen, breathing his mind after its unusual rush of emotion, and indulging its indignant melancholy. It did not occur to him to wonder much why the object of his pity had made that quick errand to the cellar in the chine, or why she ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... unfolding expanse phlegmatically. They called it the Red Basin. But to me, fresh for the sight, it beckoned with fantastic issues. Even the name breathed magic. Wizard spells hovered there; the railroad had not broken them—the cars and locomotives, entering, did not disturb the brooding vastness. A man might still ride errant into those slumberous spaces and discover for himself; might boldly awaken the realm and rule with a princess ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... Pool, that it all lay there with its gloomy circles, with its alti guai, and that he himself should see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we went thither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into 'mystic unfathomable song'; and this his Divine Comedy, the most remarkable of all modern ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the trail Through the brooding forest-gloom, Down the shadowy, lonely vale Into silence, like a room Where the light of life has fled, And the jealous curtains close Round the passionless ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... sort Maupassant based some of his most felicitous stories. But Maupassant did not use sexual incidents for the sake of sex feeling; for him such incidents were various symbols, flickering images, of life, incarnations of the brooding spirit of cynicism and scorn. We have already seen that to Fielding, for whom they were of less special significance on their own account, they were presented as assertions of boisterous physical eagerness, of delight in energetic life for ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... cat on the mother grouse Brooding her young in the wind-bent weeds, Or listens to heed with a start of greed The bittern booming ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... lay down upon his thick, springy mattress of fir-brush, with his feet toward the fire, and slumbered as only a decent, hard-working man can. Out among the dancing shadows that flitted among the snow-mantled bushes and heavily laden trees a hundred and fifty eyes glared in the brooding darkness—as though all the wolves in the forest were gathering there. Later, when the sound of heavy breathing was heard round the fires, a fierce, wolfish-looking dog, bolder than the rest, left its snowy bed to hunt for more sheltered quarters. There was a whine, a snarl, then the ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... wet, indeed? A heavy brooding inertia, Trenchard has told me, seemed to seize them all. "They were not pleasant trees, you know," I remember his afterwards telling me, "all dirty and tangled, and we all looked dirty too. There was an unpleasant ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... it is good to be here. We are free. We have enough to eat. We have sunshine, water, and shelter. What more do you want? (Arnes is silent.) I know you are brooding over something you don't want to tell me. You seem more gloomy every day. Are you longing to ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... he would to keep awake, the bishop felt his eyelids drooping—closing under the deluge of light. Once more there approached him that spirit of malevolence brooding in the tense sunny calm, that baleful emanation which seemed to drain away his powers of will. It laid a weight upon him. He ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... for a long time silent. The talkative woman in the rocker also kept silence, brooding over many things. Finally ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... impression left on the mind by this survey of the Christian people of New York in 1730 is of a mass of almost hopelessly incongruous materials, out of which the brooding Spirit of God shall by and by bring forth the unity ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... of this class, however, goes out for the sake of exercise only, it does not in general produce so good an effect, as might be expected; for he is continually brooding over the state of his health: there is no new object to arrest his attention, and he is constantly reminded of the cause of his riding. Exercise will therefore be most effectual when employed in the pursuit ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... the valley at a brisk pace, becoming more aware of the clouds and atmospheric haze. Distant objects seemed blurred by the mist, taking on a somber, brooding grayness. For all Kolin could tell, he and the others were isolated in a world bounded by the rocky ridge behind them and a semi-circle of damp trees and bushes several hundred meters away. He suspected that the hills rising mistily ahead were part of a continuous ...
— The Talkative Tree • Horace Brown Fyfe
... that fluttered about the embers of the fire threw their wavering light on the person of the sullen recluse. At such moments it would not have been difficult to have fancied the dusky savage the Prince of Darkness brooding on his own fancied ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... me, ye'll leave wi' McGilp, and he'll find a way for sending it on. I'm sair sweirt tae part frae my bonny horses for yon mauk's sake. . . . And there's the bonny spaewife, Hamish; if anything comes wrong tae that lass I'll be relying on you." And then for a long time he sat brooding at the fire. ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... me who stood brooding and majestic, that is if I can be majestic. I whispered something and ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... back to the public house where he had stabled his horse; but he trudged it cheerfully, brooding with delight on Letty's beauty, and her lovely confidence in Tom Helmer—a personage whom he had begun to feel nobody ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... powers that the son of the Augsburg Bohemian came to lay his finger upon the very core and composition of perhaps the haughtiest, the subtlest, the most dread despot since the Caesars? Henry VIII. and Fisher; the Lais Corinthiaca, the Duchess of Milan, his brooding wife; dancing children, and dancing Death; Christ on the Cross, Christ in the Grave, Christ Arisen; lambs in the fields, woods and hills, gaping peasants, wild battle;—put them side by side, the poor ghosts ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... who seemed to take the lead in the circle, "how lovely and amiable are you even in your resentments! They are not with you a morose and gloomy sullenness brooding over imaginary wrongs, and collecting venom and malice from every corner to the heart. In your breast anger itself takes a milder form, and is gentle, generous and gay. Yet why, my Imogen, should you harbour ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... on, but without addressing her more than before, still turning himself almost exclusively to Franks—"Suppose somebody walking along Oxford Street, brooding over an injury, and thinking how to serve the man out that had done it to him. All the numberless persons and things pass him on both sides and he sees none of them—takes no notice of anything. But he spies a man in Berners Street, in the middle ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... again in a quiet rapid voice. 'Have you really shown the slightest regard, I won't say for me, or even for Alice, but for just the obvious difficulties and—and proprieties of our position? I have given up as far as I can brooding on and on over the same horrible impossible thoughts. I withdraw unreservedly what I said just now about punishment. Whatever the evidence, it is not even a wife's place to judge like that. You will ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... poems in blank verse, graver and more dignified, yet even more vivid, and far more life-encompassing, which bore the rounded impress of the living human being, instead of the shadowy motion of the lively human fancy—these are the birth of a process of imaginative brooding upon the development of man by means of individuality throughout the slow, unceasing flow of human history. Browning evidently grew aware that whatever these poems of personality might prove to be worth to the ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... had gone on very well—communication with the world seemed to have commenced all at once. Nearly every family took a different newspaper, and these being exchanged with each other, afforded plenty of food for the mind, and prevented it brooding too deeply ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... went, as I thought, heavily enough. A while afterwards my father rose and came into the hall, where from my bed I could see Steinar seated on a stool by the fire brooding. He asked where the men of Agger were, and Steinar told him what he ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... twilight lingered over the silent moor, with its old Pictish mounds and burial places, giving them an indescribable aspect of something weird and eerie. No one could have been insensible to the mournful, brooding light and the unearthly stillness, and Margaret was trembling with a supernatural terror as she stood amid the solemn circle of gray stones and looked over the lake of Stennis and the ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... that hung over my poor father. The dark moods, since my mother's death, came over him more and more often; it seemed, when he was in one of them, that his mind was not itself. He never slighted his work,—that was like the breath he drew,—but when it was done, he would sit for hours brooding by the fireplace, looking at the little empty chair where my mother used to sit and sing at her sewing. And sitting so and brooding, now and again there would come over him as it were a blindness, and a forgetting of all about him, so that when he came out of ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... in the bank. But the robber lost his nerve at the instant when he should have dropped his claws to strike. He swerved aside and shot upward in a great slant to a dead spruce top, where he stood watching intently till the dark beak of a brooding kingfisher reached out of the hole to receive the fish that her mate had brought her. Whereupon Koskomenos swept away to his watchtower above the minnow pool, and the hawk set his wings toward the outlet, where a brood of ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... degrees of success, but not one had actually failed. They had come into the house, which was their Open Sesame to college, in twos and threes. Few of them were pretty, but even the plainest of their faces bore the unmistakable stamp of intelligence that marks the scholar. The half-brooding, anxious look in young eyes and the womanly dignity, prematurely gained through hand to hand conflict with poverty, were certain indications that the girls of Harlowe House were there for earnest work and not ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... chimney, and in the fence a little gate stands just ajar, as though some one had drawn it to with faltering hand; and I stand and wait and gaze at that gate and the sand of the garden path—wonder and rapture in my heart. All that I behold seems new and different; over all a breath of some glad, brooding mystery, and already I catch the swift rustle of steps, and I stand intent and alert as a bird with wings folded ready to take flight anew, and my heart burns and shudders in joyous dread before the approaching, the ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... now the gown To arms had yielded, from the town, Our rude self-summoned levies flocked to see The new-come chiefs and wonder which was he. No need to question long; close-lipped and tall, 80 Long trained in murder-brooding forests lone To bridle others' clamors and his own, Firmly erect, he towered above them all, The incarnate discipline that was to free With iron curb ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... chair and looked at her. Truth to tell, I only partially credited her story myself, and yet I was positive she believed every word of it. Ten years brooding on a fancied injustice by a woman living alone, and doubtless often in dire poverty, had mixed together the actual and the imaginary until now, what had possibly been an aimless flirtation on the part of the young ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... distance that remained of their walk, Maskull was very thoughtful and uneasy. He understood nothing. Whatever object his eye chanced to rest on changed immediately into a puzzle. The silence and stillness of the mountain peak seemed brooding, mysterious, and waiting. Panawe gave him a friendly, anxious look, and without further delay led the way down a little track, which traversed the side of the mountain and terminated in the mouth of ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... know something. Get yourself planted in God's garden, and learn to GROW. Woo the sun of life, which is love, and the breeze which is enthusiasm, an impulse from that same creative Spirit, which, brooding upon the primeval waters, out of void brought fulness, and out of chaos ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... was a burden of mystery Brooding on all that night; and, when at last Chapman replied, I knew he felt it, too. The curious pedantry of his wonted speech Was charged with living undertones, like truths Too strange and too tremendous to be breathed ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... Dugald's barbarous eleven o'clock supper was over, and then she had gone to her room, stirred the fire, and dropped down upon the hearth-rug to think it over. She thought over it for a long time, her handsome eyes brooding over the red coals, but after about half an hour she spoke out aloud to ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... draw our swords, and search the house; Pull him from the dark hole, where he sits brooding O'er his cold fears, and each man kill his ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Thomas Otway
... looked heavy, and once, as she was passing my bench deep in thought, I surprised a look of blank terror on her face. One can understand that even a millionaire's daughter might spend sleepless nights brooding over a failure. But that look of mortal dread! How well I know it! How often have I seen it, preceding some sordid or brave tragedy of want and wretchedness in Our Square! What should it mean, though, on Barbran's sunny face? Puzzling over ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... us, here and there, over which to reach each other," thought Lynda; "it's the one path for us both." Then her eyes grew tenderly brooding as she remembered how 'twas a little child that had led ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... was, and earnest as he felt to become different to what he had been in olden time, he could not shake off from his mind the sad memory of the past. His mind was continually brooding upon poor little Dobbin's death, and upon the share which he had in it. For now he knew all the truth. He had seen old Leonard, and sat with him for many hours; and at his earnest request the old man had told him all the truth. "Keep ...
— The One Moss-Rose • P. B. Power
... celestial ocean across the sky. The winged disk has almost always two cobra serpents attached to it, and often two rams' horns; the meaning of the whole combination is that Ra protects and preserves, like the vulture brooding over its young, destroys like the cobra, and creates like the ram. This is seen by the modification where it is placed over a king's head, when the destructive cobra is omitted, and the wings are folded together as embracing ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... Italians. I shall have occasion elsewhere to maintain that in their literature at least the Italians were not a highly imaginative race; nor were they subject to those highly wrought conditions of the brooding fancy, termed by the northern nations Melancholy, which Duerer has personified in his celebrated etching, and Burton has described in his Anatomy. But in their love and hatred, their lust and their cruelty, the Italians required an intellectual element ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... flavor and reflect their inverted gracefulness in the calm waters of the lake.... The mountains sloping up from either side are delineated in the mirroring surface and form an archway for the snow-capped and broken pinnacle that towers above the others like a sentinel brooding in his frosty and eternal isolation.... Far off in the distance I can see the black and white walls of the KATUN GLACIER and know that, throughout this region, gold and silver, as well as lead and copper, most certainly abound.... In our unending tramp today ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... a period of bitter brooding I rebelled, and took the matter up with the Commander-in-Chief. I argued, "As I am not only doing a man's work on a boy's pay but actually superintending the stock and tools, I am entitled to certain individual rights in the choice of ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Keen eyes accustomed to study potentialities of nations discerned in the gathering a new portentous fact. A week ago to-day political parties in House of Commons preserved customary attitude of hostility. Across the floor they snapped at each other distrust and dislike. Long-brooding revolt of armed forces in Ireland had leaped into flame. Mob and military had come to blows. Victims of the affray lay dead in the streets of Dublin. In the House rancour between Unionists ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... which seemed laboriously gathered from the tears of tortured experience, had become an obsession. She was silent, brooding over it; but she herself was there, larger, less puzzling and negative than hitherto,—an awakening force. The man lost his anchor of convention and traditional reasoning. He felt with her an excitement, a thirst for ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... for the swish of the paddles, was brooding and full of menace. Paul, so sensitive to circumstance, felt as if it were a sullen sky, out of which would suddenly come a blazing flash of lightning. But to Henry the greatest anxiety was the narrowing of the river which must come before long. The Ohio was not a mile wide everywhere, ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... ride—and you," flashed Carley, contrarily. She knew he had meant the deep-walled canyon with its brooding solitude. ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... certain conditions of light, Hastings is magnificent, with the craggy Castle Hill in its midst surmounted by its imposing ruin. The smoke of the town, rising and spreading, shrouds the modernity of the sea front, and the castle on its commanding height seems to be brooding over the shores of old romance. Brighton has no ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... his benefactor; and he would say, "Verily my maternal uncle hath driven me from his doors and hath preferred my brother before me; but, an Almighty Allah empower me, I will indeed cast him into doom of death." Hereat he fell to brooding over the ruin of his relative, and after a long while he went, one day of the days, and wrote a letter to Akhyash Abna Shah,[FN32] physician to the King of Persia and 'Ajam or Barbaria-land, and the following ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... I could help it, be so continually brooding over the dark and gloomy face of my condition [all nature, you know, my dear, and every thing in it, has a bright and a gloomy side] as to be thought unable to enjoy a more hopeful prospect. And this, not only for my own sake, but for yours, who take ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... Preston. He laughed at me as usual, but at the same time explained that it would not be safe; for that if the slaves were allowed books and knowledge, they would soon not be content with their condition, and would be banding together to make themselves free. I knew all this, and I had been brooding over it; and now when the powerful hand of the overseer came in to hinder the little bit of good and comfort I was trying to give the people, my heart was set on fire with a sense of sorrow and wrong that, as I said, no child ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... at least no misconception; there was kindness upon all sides; and I believe my patron and his wife might again have drawn together if he could but have pocketed his pride, and she forgot (what was the ground of all) her brooding on another man. It is wonderful how a private thought leaks out; it is wonderful to me now how we should all have followed the current of her sentiments; and though she bore herself quietly, and had a very even disposition, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rose to meet a passing breeze, then fell back against the softness of her arm. A great grey-winged night moth fluttered past them. From the high bough of a distant maple came the frightened twitter of little birds, wakeful in the night, and the soft, murmurous voice of the brooding mother, soothing them. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... the hill. It was long and low, with a wide red roof that seemed to hover in the whitewashed walls and green shutters; while white smoke from an old gray-rock, mud-daubed chimney melted away among the tree-tops into the lavender of the coming day. It looked like a great brooding white hen setting in a nest of radiant woods, and I felt like a little cold chicken as Sam led the way through the low, wide door for me to creep under the sheltering wings. In about two seconds we were all sheltered in complete comfort. At a huge fire that was a great glow of oak coals ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... of the nests," whispered Addison. "And see that head and long, pointed beak, just over the top of it! The old hen heron is brooding." ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... history of the Creation, the Fall, and the Deluge. Taking our position at the west end of the chapel and looking upwards, we see in the first compartment God dividing light from darkness; in the second, creating the sun and the moon and the solid earth; in the third, animating the ocean with His brooding influence; in the fourth, creating Adam; in the fifth, creating Eve. The sixth represents the temptation of our first parents and their expulsion from Paradise. The seventh shows Noah's sacrifice ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... sail out into unknown seas, beneath skies unfamiliar, with small light from the stars, without chart, without pilot, the port to which we are bound being one as yet unvisited by mortal man—or woman! Heavy mist, and dark cloud, and threatening storm appear to us brooding over that doubtful sea. But something of prophetic vision is required of us. We are told that all perils which seem to threaten the first stages of our course are entirely illusive—that they will vanish as we approach—that we shall soon ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... particular shock of superstitious alarm; which, or whether any of these causes it were that kept me apprehensive, and on the watch for disastrous change, I will not here undertake to determine. Too certain it is that I was so. I never ridded myself of an over-mastering and brooding sense, shadowy and vague, a dim abiding feeling (that sometimes was and sometimes was not exalted into a conscious presentiment) of some great calamity travelling towards me; not perhaps immediately impending—perhaps ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... were brought up in the country know that the old-fashioned hatching of eggs in the hay-mow required four or five weeks of brooding, but there are new modes of hatching by machinery, which take less time and do the work in wholesale. So, while the private home may brood into life an occasional falsity, and take a long time ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... been feeding his morbid imagination by brooding over these things, and that living alone in that lonely old house of weird associations must have led him to live such an unnatural life that he had become a ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... same, I couldn't help contrasting Arthur with Gregory, and though Greg might be called the more important and prosperous man, yet there was always a barrier he wouldn't pass, while Arthur, though brooding by nature, could get about himself now and again, and in them rare moments, you felt there was a nice, affectionate side to him that only ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... to relate here a trifling, but memorable adventure I had with the said Grimm one day, on which we were to dine at the fountain of St. Vandrille, I will let it pass: but when I thought of it afterwards, I concluded that he was brooding in his heart the conspiracy he has, with so much success, since carried ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... down the Park. Saton followed her eyes, noticing her slight start, and gazed after them with brooding face. ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... way for sending it on. I'm sair sweirt tae part frae my bonny horses for yon mauk's sake. . . . And there's the bonny spaewife, Hamish; if anything comes wrong tae that lass I'll be relying on you." And then for a long time he sat brooding at the fire. ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... be measured, that I ceased on the spot to feel any doubt as to her knowing my secret, though I did not in the least suspect that Miss Tita had not just spoken the truth. She had not betrayed me, but the old woman's brooding instinct had served her; she had turned me over and over in the long, still hours, and she had guessed. The worst of it was that she looked terribly like an old woman who at a pinch would burn her papers. Miss Tita pushed ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... on that note, a long, illuminating pause. The note itself was a divine inspiration. It rang all golden. It thrilled to the verge of the dominant chord in Anne. It touched her soul, the mother of brooding, ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... admit Mary Raymond. Her babyish face looked white and wan in the clear morning light. For hours after her door had closed upon Marjorie and her mother she had sat on the edge of her bed in her pretty blue party frock, brooding on her wrongs. When she had finally prepared for sleep, it was only to toss and turn in her bed, wide-awake and resentful. At daylight she had risen listlessly, then fixing upon a certain plan of action, had bathed, put on a simple house gown and ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... outside was smoked, the inside was sweet and palatable, and neither was disposed to be fastidious. The preparation of the meal took considerable time, but they had abundance of that, and occupation prevented their brooding over their solitary situation. ...
— Brave and Bold • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... handle," says Heatherlegh, "after the stimulus of long leave at Home. He may or he may not have behaved like a blackguard to Mrs. Keith- Wessington. My notion is that the work of the Katabundi Settlement ran him off his legs, and that he took to brooding and making much of an ordinary P. & 0. flirtation. He certainly was engaged to Miss Mannering, and she certainly broke off the engagement. Then he took a feverish chill and all that nonsense about ghosts developed. Overwork started his illness, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of velveteen on his back; his trousers were short to the knees, old and spotted; his boots were worn at the heel and patched. It wasn't Velasco—it was a gypsey, a tattered, beggarly ragamuffin, with dark, brooding eyes and a laugh on his lips, a laugh that was like a ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... language, I know, are those of a perfect lady. But any one who'd lamped me in that get-up, covered with oil and dust and dirt, would know that never again could I be a perfect lady. I'm a wiper, a greaser, a clodhopper, and, according to the sullen and brooding-eyed Ikkie, a bit of a slave-driver. And the odd part of it all is that I'm wringing a perverse sort of enjoyment out of the excitement and the novelty of the thing. I'm being something more than a mere mollusk. I'm making my power felt, and producing ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... in Giotto, was the great Florentine when Beatrice beheld him. The familiar mask represents that youthful beauty as somewhat saddened by years of exile, by the accidents of an unequal fortune, and by the long brooding memory of his life's one, deep, irreparable loss. We see in it the warrior who served in the great battle of Campaldino: the mourner who sought refuge from grief in the action and danger of the war waged by Florence upon Pisa: the magistrate whose justice proved his ruin: the exile who ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... father, had first come into the district. He called to mind, too, that he had seen his mother as she was driving home the cattle from the moors. He watched the lad almost furtively, and he wondered why it was that he was afraid to speak. It seemed to him as though some mysterious power were brooding over this lonely dwelling and forbidding him to learn the ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... a dreary walk back to the public house where he had stabled his horse; but he trudged it cheerfully, brooding with delight on Letty's beauty, and her lovely confidence in Tom Helmer—a personage whom he had begun to feel nobody trusted as ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... sober reflection of manhood, even in minds capable of sober reflection. The Civil War, be it noted, did not depose the insolent Britisher from his bad eminence in the schoolboy imagination. The Confederates were, after all, Americans, though misguided Americans; and the fostering, the brooding upon, intestine rancours was felt by teachers and pupils alike to be impossible. But there is in the juvenile mind at any given moment a certain amount of abstract combativeness, let us call it, which must find an outlet somewhere. Hatred is a natural ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... silence; for the sun had set and the father was no longer reading. Shadows deepened into twilight, and twilight into gloaming. And it was the hour when the brooding spirit of the vast prairie solitudes fills the stillness of night with voiceless eloquence. Why should I attempt to transcribe the silent music of the prairie at twilight, which every plain-dweller knows and none but a plain-dweller may understand? What wonder that the race native ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... could not have much indulged in this solitary, idle brooding, for she had work to do, and must be up and doing. First, she had to summon a Privy Council, which met at Buckingham Palace;—more than eighty Peers, mostly solemn old fellows, who had outlived their days of romantic sentiment, if ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... now brooding over the Susquehanna, and the autumn leaves were being tinged with red. The struggle of the year 1778 seemed over and Brant decided to spend the winter at Niagara. Accordingly he set out with a band of warriors ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... strange gleam of contentment in Irma Gluyas' eyes when she followed Fritz Braun, two weeks later, into the train for Breslau. Her secret master had redoubled every tender care, and there was a brooding peace ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... was hurrying toward the village of C——, his mother and sister were brooding over the disgrace which they feared threatened them. They could have spared all their painful feelings, for she of the "low family" ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... his courtiers brave That they should before to Viborg hie; No thought he had that Ranild the lad Was brooding a subtle treachery. ...
— Marsk Stig - a ballad - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... as I stood at my spot of thought In the white-stoned Garth, brooding thus her wrong, Her husband neared; and to shun his view By her hallowed mew I went ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... was deep silence in the room, and the trembling women in the adjoining chamber hung upon this silence with beating hearts, well aware what a storm of passion was brooding within it. ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... in silence retraced their steps to Brudenell Heights. Both were brooding over Ishmael's defeated hopes and over that strange fatality in the lot of the poor that makes them miss great fortunes for the lack of ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... and dried-up sea! so old! So strewn with wealth, so sown with gold! Yes, thou art old and hoary white With time and ruin of all things, And on thy lonesome borders Night Sits brooding o'er with ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... possesses completely—the immediate perception of the end and of the means. Putting aside the question of the subject (and to a great portrait a common sitter will doubtless not always contribute), the highest result is achieved when to this element of quick perception a certain faculty of brooding reflection is added. I use this name for want of a better, and I mean the quality in the light of which the artist sees deep into his subject, undergoes it, absorbs it, discovers in it new things that were not on the surface, ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... coldness toward his Saviour. And almost to the end of his days he was, occasionally, visited by seasons of spiritual gloom and depression, which, no doubt, were chiefly, if not solely, the result of physical causes. It was an error that grew readily out of the brooding introspection and self-anatomy which marked the religious habit of the times. The close connection between physical causes and morbid or abnormal conditions of the spiritual life, was not as well understood ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... swift and dim, where Winter Night sat brooding like the last dark thoughts of many who had sought a refuge there before her. Where scattered lights upon the banks gleamed sullen, red and dull, as torches that were burning there to show the way to Death. Where ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... great green hollow that lay all silent and deserted 'neath the ghostly moon, where nought stirred in the windless air, where bush and tree cast shadows monstrous and distorted, and where no sound brake the brooding quiet save the murmurous ripple of the brook that flowed to lose itself in the gloomy waters of ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... his work in the gloomy room in Lincoln's Inn, and in spite of heart-sickness he worked on stolidly and well. The evenings were his worst time, when he went back to the empty house at Cheyne Walk and sat on the balcony brooding over his troubles, until the light faded and an eerie ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... of nature with her toys. Memories beset his brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... visage as dark as mourning weed—brooding, I could not but doubt, over the unjustifiable and disgraceful insult I had offered to him. I had already settled in my own mind how I was to behave on the occasion, and had schooled myself to believe, that true honour ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... mansion is yon everlasting sky. Driven by despiteful wrong she takes her seat, In lowly grief, at Jove's eternal feet. There of the soul unjust her plaints ascend: So rue the nations when their kings offend— When, uttering wiles and brooding thoughts of ill, They bend the laws, and wrest them to their will. Oh! gorged with gold, ye kingly judges, hear! Make straight your paths, your crooked judgments fear, That the foul record may no more be seen— Erased, forgot, as ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... remark here, that this kind of pondering is a process with which the ancients could have been but imperfectly acquainted. They, for the most part, found the exercise of fantasy more pleasant than careful observation, and subsequent brooding over facts. Hence it is, that when those whose education has been derived from the ancients speak of 'the reason of man,' they are apt to omit from their conception of reason one of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... little Anglo-Indian widow loves him, without any effort to win or hold her affection on his side!" Gilbert said to himself, as he walked back to Lidford in the darkening November afternoon, brooding always on the one subject which occupied all his thoughts; "and can I doubt his power to supersede me if he cared to do so—if he really loved Marian, as he never has loved Mrs. Branston? What shall I do? Go to him at once, ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... evening after Michael's departure, she was seated in his room, brooding, when suddenly she heard a ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... hung over the hitching post in front of the post office listening with a beatific smile to the sound of the saw and the hammer that came from the Opera House going up at the corner of Prouty Avenue and Wildwood Street. The Major's eyes held the brooding tenderness of a patron saint, as he looked the length of the wide street of the ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... the beauty of which was revealed by the low cut of her simple frock. Moira was a decided brunette, with that wonderful quality of skin to be seen only among brunettes who have roses in their cheeks; her brow was broad and spiritual; in her eyes, large, black, and listrous, there was a brooding tenderness not untouched with sorrow— some such expression, indeed, as da Vinci put in the eyes of his Mona Lisa. Her nose was patrician, her face oval; her lips, full and red, were slightly parted in the adorable Cupid's bow which is the inevitable ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... it I was ordered away, and at last I regarded it with a sort of fear, as if it were a kind of incomprehensible animal. The day was passed in idleness and almost silence; perhaps not a dozen sentences were exchanged in the twenty-four hours; my companion always the same, brooding over something which appeared ever to occupy his thoughts, and angry if ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... craven weakling's part, And, stifling outcries, moaned not loud but deep, Like the deep roaring of a wounded bull. But in this plight, prostrate and desperate, Refusing food and drink, my hero lies Amidst the mangled bodies, motionless. That he is brooding on some fell design, His wails and exclamations plainly show. But, O kind friends, 'twas to this end I came, Enter the tent and aid me if ye can; The words of friends ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... Saxon, brooding over her problem of retaining Billy's love, of never staling the freshness of their feeling for each other and of never descending from the heights which at present they were treading, felt herself impelled toward ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... saw the Seigneur could forget him—a tall figure with stooping shoulders; a pale, deeply lined, clean-shaven face, and a forehead painfully white, with blue veins showing; the eyes handsome, penetrative, brooding, and made indescribably sorrowful by the dark skin around them. There were those in Pontiac, such as the Cure, who remembered when the Seigneur was constantly to be seen in the village; and then another person was with him always, a tall, handsome youth, his son. They were ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Bugle Song, the no-less famous Cradle Song, and the rest. In 1833 Tennyson's friend, Arthur Hallam, died, and the effect of this great sorrow upon the poet was to deepen and strengthen the character of his genius. It turned his mind in upon itself, and set it brooding over questions which his poetry had so far left untouched; the meaning of life and death, the uses of adversity, the future of the race, the immortality of the soul, and the dealings ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... about 1 in. in diameter of body, mottled pale brown and grey, brooding over a flat egg capsule almost of the same tints as itself. It was on the trunk of the jack fruit tree, and so closely resembles the egg-capsule produced by contiguous fungi as to be absolutely invisible unless the gaze happened to be concentrated on the spot. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... elements of nature are wielded by the Hand that called them forth, and can stay them at His will, and the sun breaking forth smilingly and scattering the clouds, made us feel that the storm had but refreshed the parched earth and cleared the sultry atmosphere. Not so with the storm which has been brooding in the hearts of a handful of ambitious men, and which has burst forth at last, its bolts directed by no wise or merciful power, and by the hands of selfish and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... Seven Day's Fight, And deep in the wilderness grim, And in the field-hospital tent, And Petersburg crater, and dim Lean brooding in Libby, there came— Ah heaven!—what ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... St. Louis and Mr. Blakely a young society beau, the magnitude of their flirtation had well-nigh stopped her marriage, Miss Wren saw opportunity for her good offices and, so far from avoiding, she sought the society of the major's brooding wife. She even felt a twinge of disappointment when the young officer appeared, and after the initial thirty-six hours under the commander's roof, rarely went thither at all. She knew her brother disapproved of him, ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... the lovely, peaceful, healing days passed, that bitter and contracted heart had to expand somewhat. Gradually the ferocity faded, leaving in its room an anxious and brooding wonder. God knows what thoughts passed through that somber mind in those long hours, when, concentrated upon himself, he must have faced the problem of his future and, like one before an impassable stone wall, had to fall back, baffled. He could be sure of only one thing: that never again ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... approach a life He deals directly with a soul through the influence of the Holy Spirit, and life receives its most holy nurture in those sacred hours. Therefore, the highest service permitted a Sunday School teacher is to pray effectually for the brooding Spirit to rest upon the pupils in his class. The mother can do nothing which shall mean so much for the precious life in her arms as learning, herself, the secret of prevailing prayer, for, "If we ask anything according to His Will, He heareth us; ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... thus with himself, the mysterious whispers of the night came nearer to him, in the blackness of garden trees, ancient trees of College gardens brooding alone, whispering alone through the dark hours, of that current of young life which is still flowing past them; how for hundreds of years it has always been flowing, and always passing, passing, passing so quickly to the great silent sea of ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... nothing to do, the time hanging very heavy on her hands, disappointed, unhappy, frequently irritated, Ellen became at length very ready to take offence, and nowise disposed to pass it over or smooth it away. She seldom showed this in words, it is true, but it rankled in her mind. Listless and brooding, she sat day after day, comparing the present with the past, wishing vain wishes, indulging bootless regrets, and looking upon her aunt and grandmother with an eye of more settled aversion. The only other person she saw was Mr. Van Brunt, who came in regularly to meals; but he never said anything ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... were the paramount chief Hintza, the chief Macomo, and others. The first, forgetting the deliverance wrought for him by the settlers and British troops in 1828, secretly stirred up the Kafirs, whilst the second, brooding over supposed wrongs, fanned the flame of discontent raised among the Hottentots by the proposal of a ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... gathered around Grasper so thickly, that he found it almost impossible to keep his head above water. Two thirds of his time were spent in efforts to raise money to meet his payments, and the other third in brooding sadly and inactively over the embarrassed condition of his affairs. This being the case, his business suffered inevitably. Instead of going on and making handsome profits, as he had once done, he was actually ...
— Lessons in Life, For All Who Will Read Them • T. S. Arthur
... them with loathing. They inspire neither terror nor pity, only the sickness of the shambles. And yet it would be unjust to ascribe their unimaginative ghastliness to any special love of cruelty. This evil element may be rationally deduced from false dramatic instinct and perverted habits of brooding sensuously on our Lord's Passion, in minds deprived of the right feeling ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... something subduing in the influence of that silent and solemn and awful presence; one seemed to meet the immutable, the indestructible, the eternal, face to face, and to feel the trivial and fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharply by the contrast. One had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice—a spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of ages, upon a million vanished races of men and judged them; and would judge a million more—and still be there, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... weary servants closed the great house, darkened the lights, and everything sank into silence, broken only now and then by the call of a night bird in the shrubbery, or the whistle of a far-away locomotive. The full moon sailed high in the deep blue heaven, brooding over the sleeping world in its mystery, its ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... been particularly tender and helpful, she looked at Eveley with brooding eyes, and said, "You are such a nice girl, but I sort of blame you because father is not with us. You are so much cleverer than I,—couldn't you have opened my eyes before it ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... lie down anywhere, as, like all ruined buildings in France, the ground was covered with filth, and the smell was shocking. O'Brien was very thoughtful, and would hardly answer any question that I put to him; it was evident that he was brooding over the affront which he had received from the French officer. At daybreak, the door of the church was again opened by the French soldiers, and we were conducted to the square of the town, where we found ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... to permit the events to happen unheralded. He does not prophesy their course, he does not forecast the weather even for twenty-four hours; the atmosphere becomes slowly, slowly, but with occasional lifts and reliefs, of such a brooding breathlessness, of such a deepening density, that you feel the wild passion-storm nearer and nearer at hand, till it bursts at last; and then you are astonished that you had not foreseen it yourself from ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... seemed as if the crew had looted the Minnie B in a thorough and extraordinary manner, and then had simply vanished. Every now and then in their search the two would find themselves standing motionless, open-mouthed, listening intently to the brooding silence. ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... undisturbed; and the moonlit camp, with its anxious generals, its weary soldiers, its fearful machinery of destruction, all strewn along the bank of the great river, remained plunged in silence, as if brooding over the chances of the morrow and the failures of the past. And hardly four miles away another army—twice as numerous, equally confident, equally brave—were waiting impatiently for the morning and the final settlement of the ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... "Khafz al-jinh" drooping the wing as a brooding bird. In the Koran ([vii. 88) lowering the wing" demeaning ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... of Gabriel's service passed off much the same as the first, and so it went for almost a week; but the boy saw day by day that Brother Stephen's chain became more and more unbearable to him, and that he had long fits of brooding, when he looked so miserable and unhappy that Gabriel's ...
— Gabriel and the Hour Book • Evaleen Stein
... madness. Thus to be is not to live, if life be what I sometimes dream, and dare to think it might be. To breathe, to feed, to sleep, to wake and breathe again, again to feel existence without hope; if this be life, why then these brooding thoughts that whisper ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... solitary inn, in a solitary village, am I set by myself, to amuse my brooding fancy as I may. Solitary confinement, you know, is Howard's favourite idea of reclaiming sinners; so let me consider by what fatality it happens, that I have so long been exceeding sinful as to neglect the correspondence of the most valued friend I have on earth. To tell you that ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... for they had taught that "we are all his offspring;" and he seems to have felt that in asserting the common brotherhood of our race, he would strike a chord of sympathy in the loftiest school of Gentile philosophy. He thus "recognized the Spirit of God brooding over the face of heathenism, and fructifying the spiritual element in the heart even of the natural man. He feels that in these human principles there were some faint adumbrations of the divine, and he looked for their firmer delineation ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... gone; at length I am alone. I cannot bear the presence of these men, except in action. Their words, even their looks, disturb the still creation of my brooding thought. I am once more alone, and loneliness hath been the cradle of my empire. Now I do feel inspired. There needs no mummery now ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... and making inquiries. What she was told there decided her. She took up the course and enjoyed it. It occupied her mind and prevented her brooding over the past. She might have made many friends among the other students, but she was careful to treat them only as acquaintances. Her recent experience with "friends" was too fresh in her mind. She studied hard and applied her ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... this class, however, goes out for the sake of exercise only, it does not in general produce so good an effect, as might be expected; for he is continually brooding over the state of his health: there is no new object to arrest his attention, and he is constantly reminded of the cause of his riding. Exercise will therefore be most effectual when employed in the pursuit ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... Wild Life in the Tree Tops, by Captain C. W. R. Knight. This English book, large and flat, shows with the aid of the camera, the merlin pursuing her quarry, young tawny owls in a disused magpie's nest, female noctules and their young, the male kestrel brooding, and a male buzzard that has just brought a rabbit to the younglings in the nest. Plenty of other pictures like these! The chapters deal with the buzzards of the Doone country, the lady's hawk, woodpeckers, brown owls, sparrow-hawks, herons and ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... I sat last night brooding over this thing till almost dawn. I could not bring myself to the thought of offering my work again to be judged by such people. I made up my mind to take a different course—I sat and wrote a long letter to a certain poet whom ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... Hutchinson still made attempts at negociation, but they were all vain; nothing could induce her to change her purpose. Irritated by studied insults abroad; incensed by threats of ministerial vengeance; brooding over the wrongs she had endured from one who had promised before the altar of God to love and cherish her through life; and, above all, assured of the popular support, she pursued her way; and she reached the shores of England on the 6th of June. Although government had made no preparation ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... cheerful smile to one, says a kind word to another, administers a glass of her punch or lemonade to a third, hands out an apple or an orange to a fourth, or a book or game to a fifth, and relieves the hospital of the gloom which seemed brooding over it. But not in these ways alone does she bring comfort and happiness to these poor wounded and fever-stricken men. She encourages them to confide to her their sorrows and troubles, and the heart that, like the caged bird, has been bruising itself against the bars of its cage, from grief ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... care; Brooding on hours misspent, To see the spectre of Despair Come to our lonely tent; Like Brutus, 'midst his slumbering host, Summoned to ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... those gloomy winter days when the whole ocean looks sullen—heavy with brooding storms. No blue foamy sweeps, no lovely sea-green calms; nothing but leaden-coloured hills of water, swelling and sinking, with black valleys between. Agatha remembered a story she had read or heard in her childish ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... below, haggard and brooding, suffering from one of the spells of reaction that commonly followed his misdeeds. By night of the second day he cast off his gloom and came on deck, the old reckless ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... I dread to be left alone all day. You may laugh at me, but I feel as if something terrible were hanging over me—or you. The spiritual oppression is like the physical presentiment sensitive temperaments suffer when a thunder-storm is brooding, but not ready to break. Yet I can refer my fears ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... love! by gracious Heaven design'd, At once the source and glory of mankind! 'Tis this can toil, and grief, and pain assuage, Secure our youth, and dignify our age; 'Tis this fair fame and guiltless pleasure brings, And shakes rich plenty from its brooding wings; Gilds duty's roughest path with friendship's ray, And strews with ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... got the better of him he would have owned the justice of her words, and all might have been well. Instead of that, he went to his room, brooding upon his misfortune, and soothing his wounded ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... no answering sign. Bundled again in the soft quilt, he sat in the wagon-box, brooding. For he had divined, with the instinct of the savage, that if the shack on the rise before them would find a faithful friend in him who sat beneath the wavering cross, it was threatened by the presence of a dangerous ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... that Lucille was moody and abstracted next morning. Sometimes for a few moments she talked and smiled as before, but this was fitfully, and with an effort. She appeared like one brooding over some wrong that had taken possession of her thoughts, or some dark and angry scheme which engrossed her imagination. She soon left Julie and retired to her ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... circumstance of war have quite lost in my eyes their fictitious glitter. I have still no doubt that the shock of moral earthquakes wakens a vivid sense of life, both in nations and individuals; that the fear of dangers on a broad national scale, diverts men's minds momentarily from brooding over small private perils, and for the time gives them something like largeness of views; but, as little doubt have I, that convulsive revolutions put back the world in all that is good, check civilisation, bring the dregs of society to its surface; ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... flying home to the arbor where the nest was, and having twittered out a little vesper-song, put its head under its wing, near his mate, which sat brooding in the nest over some little eggs, and the thought stole into her heart, "Will God take care of them and not me?" and she watched the peaceful sleep of the family over her head as if it ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... unhappy lady to his fate. Far from being consoled from the conversation he had just heard, he fell into a state of sadness, of inexpressible despondency. There is in a life of opulence without employment this terrible disadvantage: nothing turns its attention, nothing protects the mind from brooding on its sorrows, on itself. Never being compelled to occupy itself with the necessities of the future, or the labors of each day, it remains entirely a prey to great mental afflictions. Being able to possess all that gold can procure, it desires or regrets ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... doubted of that Malebolge Pool, that it all lay there with its gloomy circles, with its alti guai, and that he himself should see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we went thither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into 'mystic unfathomable song'; and this his Divine Comedy, the most remarkable of all ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the provincial and the transient has passed in American statesmanship. To-day our destiny is brooding over every sea. We are dealing with the world and with the unborn years. We are dealing with the larger duties that ever crowned and burdened human brows. American statesmanship must be as broad as American destiny and as brave as American duty. And American statesmanship will be all ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... pulsations of Nature, the cultivator lives his daydream. What there is of squalor, and drudgery, and carking care in his life melts into a brief oblivion, and he is a man in the presence of his God with the holy stillness of Nature brooding over him. With lengthening shadows comes labour and a re-awaking. The air is once more full of all sweet sounds, from the fine whistle of the kite, sailing with supreme dominion through the azure depths of air, ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... power! her varied strains Thrill with a magic spell the human heart. She wakens memory—brightens hope—the pains, The joys of being at her bidding start. Now to her trumpet-call the spirit leaps; Now to her brooding, tender tones it weeps. Sweet music! is she portion of that breath With which the worlds were born—on which they wheel? One of lost Eden's tones, eluding death, To make man what is best within him feel! Keep open his else sealed up depths of heart, And wake to active life the better part Of his ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... decaying flowers perfume clings In silent tribute to the blossoms dead, So memory, brooding o'er his spirit fled, Nought but ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... poets have never emerged. A soaring, speculative imagination, and an impetuous, resistless self-will, were his distinguishing characteristics. From first to last he concentrated himself within himself; brooding over his own fancies and imaginations to the comparative disregard of the incidents and impressions which suggested them; and was little susceptible of ideas originating in other minds. We behold the result. He lives alone in a world of mountains, streams, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... paddled away, and Hukweem came back without the slightest suspicion. As I had supposed, from the shape of the nest, she did not sit on her two eggs; she sat on the bog instead, and gathered them close to her side with her wing. That was all the brooding they had, or needed; for within a week there were two bright little loons to watch ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... popular at the shed. He was a brooding, unsociable sort of man, and it didn't make any difference to the chaps whether he had a union ticket or not. It was pretty well known in the shed—there were three or four chaps from the district he was ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... life, and to be, in mature age, the selectman, the deacon, the representative, the colonel. As for Septimius, let him alone a moment or two, and then they would see him, with his head bent down, brooding, brooding, his eyes fixed on some chip, some stone, some common plant, any commonest thing, as if it were the clew and index to some mystery; and when, by chance startled out of these meditations, he lifted his eyes, there would be a kind of perplexity, a dissatisfied, ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... alike, were permissible in the Chapel-Room and in the presence of her late companions. The subject, unhappily, had called for too frequent mention, by now, for any circumlocution to be incumbent in the discussion of it. But here, in the brooding quiet of this bedchamber, and in Lady Calmady's presence, all that was changed. Trenchant statements of opinion, words of blame, were proscribed. The sinner, if spoken of at all, must be spoken of with due reticence and respect, his wilfulness ignored, the unloveliness of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... indeed, a look of the First Napoleon. Was it the hair? Yes, it must be; but the head was not so square, so firm set; and what a world of difference in the grand effect! The one had been distant, splendid, brooding (so she glorified him); the other was an impressionist imitation, with dash, form, poetry, and colour. But where was the great strength? It was lacking. The close association of Parpon and Valmond—that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... toward the house. A moment or so later he stood on the veranda gazing out at the streaming cattle as they moved toward the wide home pastures, under the practised hands of the ranchmen. It was a sight to inspire any cattleman, and, for a moment, the brooding eyes of the master of it all lit with a flash of their former appreciation. But the change was fleeting. The blue depths clouded again. The question once more flashed through his brain—what—what was the ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... chauffeur for not getting off an hour ago. No sooner had the car started, however, than he fell into a serious mood, telling Stephen of many things which he had thought out in the night—things which might be helpful in finding Victoria. He had been lying awake, it seemed, brooding on this subject, and it had occurred to him that, if Mouni should prove a disappointment, they might later discover something really useful by going to the annual ball at the Governor's palace. This festivity had been put off, on account of illness ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... that second ridge," he had said to Field, in sending him forward with the bulk of the platoon, and Field, who had been silent and brooding, woke at the summons and, all animation at the scent of danger, spurred swiftly ahead to join the advance and see for himself what manner of hindrance awaited them, leaving the baker's dozen of his platoon to trot steadily on under lead of its sergeant, while Ray, ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... anticipated ruin before the sun goes down. Here two or three are gathered on one side, whispering and watching that they are not overheard; there a solitary, with his arms folded and his hat slouched, brooding over departed affluence. Mechanics, thrown out of employment, are pacing up and down with the air of famished wolves. The violent shock has been communicated, like that of electricity, through the country to a distance of hundreds of miles. Canals, railroads, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... been sober and from that day forth he had not taken even a drink. It was noted also that nothing was doing in the direction of developing his mine; and another quality, the rare gift of reticence, had taken the place of his brag. He sat off by himself, absent-minded and brooding, which was not ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... only member of that illustrious company who can profitably be compared with Burke in strength and impressiveness of personality, in a large sensibility at once serious and genial, in brooding care for all the fulness of human life. This striking pair were the two complements of a single noble and solid type, holding tenaciously, in a century of dissolvent speculation, to the best ideas of a society that was slowly passing. They were powerless to hinder the inevitable ...
— Burke • John Morley
... This continued brooding was not without its effect upon the girl, and slowly but surely destroyed her sense of proportion. No longer was the education and civilization of the Indians the uppermost thought in her mind. With Lapierre, she came to regard the ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... easy and generous, but he had never been in the habit of thinking much, and thinking, especially as it led to brooding, was not good for him. From the first, of course, he had been hurt that the office should have thought it necessary to send Bannon to supersede him, but so long as he had plenty to do and was in Bannon's company every hour of the day, he had not taken time ...
— Calumet "K" • Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster
... to him: 'Mr. Headlam, we ought to have a new Church, which should include all who have the common ground of faith in and love for man.' And a little later I found that my friend Mr. W.T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, had long been brooding over a similar thought, and wondering whether men 'might not be persuaded to be as earnest about making this world happy as they are over saving their souls.' The teaching of social duty, the upholding of social righteousness, the building up of a true commonwealth—such would be among the ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... but common justice to leave a successor free to act by instruments of his own choice. If my respect for him did not permit me to ascribe the whole blame to the influence of others, it left something for friendship to forgive, and after brooding over it for some little time, and not always resisting the expression of it, I forgave it cordially, and returned to the same state of esteem and respect for him which had so long subsisted. Having come into life a little later ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... sat at the helm one fine evening, about a week after their departure from Fairyland, brooding deeply over this subject. The boat was running before a light breeze, at the rate of about four or five knots, and the men, who had been obliged to row a good part of that day, were sitting or reclining on the thwarts, or leaning ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... little while longer, the prolongation of his life would have been most disastrous both for Austria and Hungary. I believe after the death of Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo and after a year of war the German Emperor and autocracy were brooding over a plan according to which, on the death of Francis Joseph, the successor should be allowed to rule only as King or Grand-Duke of Austria, the title of Emperor of Austria to disappear and German Princes to be placed upon the thrones of Hungary and of a new kingdom of Bohemia. These and ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... first dread passed away,—slowly, but creeping on with unfailing certainty, the Shadow returned. It fell like a brooding storm over the fireside of home; he fancied a like shadow following his mother's steps, darkening his baby-sister's smile; and as if in revenge for so long an absence, the Shadow forced itself upon him more strenuously than ever, till poor Roger Pierce was like a bruised and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... conversation in a cold sweat. He told himself over and over again that he was a fool, but still he could not get the hellish idea out of his mind. He found himself brooding over it all day and lying awake at night, haunted by images of himself in a wheel-chair, and without any hair on his head. He realized that the sensible thing would be for him to go to a doctor and make certain about his condition; but he could not ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... in Providence began to falter. Was prayer, she wondered forlornly, to fail her like everything else? Suddenly, however, and when things were at their darkest, a helping hand was offered. One bitter evening, as she sat brooding in the miserable lodging where she had secured temporary shelter, she was visited by a Mrs. Buchanan, claiming her as a friend of the long distant past. The years fell back; and, with an effort, Lola recognised in the visitor a girl, now ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... of those persons who love brooding over their own sensations, though I cannot endure such persons myself. And so, after the first transport of heartfelt joy, I promptly began to give myself up to all sorts of reflections. When I had got half a mile from the house of the retired lieutenant, I flung my hat up in the air, in excessive ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... sheer from the hand of the islesman, Fatal to ravenous fish, plung'd she to the depth of the ocean: Where in a cavern'd recess, the abode of the sisterly Sea-nymphs, Thetis the goddess appear'd, in the midst of them sitting dejected; For she was ruefully brooding the fate of her glorious offspring, Doom'd to a Phrygian grave, far off from the land of his fathers. Near to her standing anon, thus summon'd her wind-footed Iris: "Thetis, arise! thou art called by Zeus ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... kissed me on the mouth and eyes and brow, Wonderful kisses, so that I became Crowned above Queens—a withered beldame now, Brooding ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... fact, been brooding over some affair of the heart. A day in advance he therefore gave proper injunctions to Pei Ming. "As I shall be going out of doors to-morrow at daybreak," he said, "you'd better get ready two horses and wait at the back door! No one ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... immense interest in him. Some of the details of his opulence—Pemberton could spare him none of them—evidently fed the boy's appreciation of all his friend had given up to come back to him; but in addition to the greater reciprocity established by that heroism he had always his little brooding theory, in which there was a frivolous gaiety too, that their long probation was drawing to a close. Morgan's conviction that the Moreens couldn't go on much longer kept pace with the unexpended impetus with which, from month ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... day has been all confusion and wretchedness. How can I write about it?—and yet, I must write. Anything is better than brooding over ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... properly. All the same, I felt at this time that I had come to the humble conclusion, in a way I can hardly explain, that this extraordinary work was still beyond my comprehension. For a long time I gave up brooding over this composition, and I turned my thoughts with simple longing towards a clearer and calmer ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Mary Raymond. Her babyish face looked white and wan in the clear morning light. For hours after her door had closed upon Marjorie and her mother she had sat on the edge of her bed in her pretty blue party frock, brooding on her wrongs. When she had finally prepared for sleep, it was only to toss and turn in her bed, wide-awake and resentful. At daylight she had risen listlessly, then fixing upon a certain plan of action, had bathed, put on a simple house gown and ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... 'All that can be known I know it' (which some newspapers substituted for line 2) would express a rather vulgar, Whewellian foible of omniscience, which was quite foreign to the Master's nature; the line as originally written was intended to express the rather sad, brooding manner the Master had of giving his oracles, as though he were a spectator of all time and existence, and had penetrated into the mystery of things. Of course, the last line expressed, with necessary exaggeration, what, as a fact, was his attitude to certain ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... been fighting the desert, and now it lay in his rear, a mystic, dun-colored land of hot sandy waste and silence; brooding, menacing, holding out its threat of death—a vast natural basin breathing and pulsing with mystery, rimmed by remote mountains that seemed tenuous and thin behind the ever-changing misty films that spread from horizon ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... now, with the grace of a Greek god and the thews of a bull, and, by all the tenets of apedom, should have been sullen, morose, and brooding; but he was not. His spirits seemed not to age at all—he was still a playful child, much to the discomfiture of his fellow-apes. They could not understand him or his ways, for with maturity they quickly forgot their youth and ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of efficiency, astigmatic with regard to practical life, and he never worked out a philosophy in the accepted sense of the term. He was a lyric poet who wrote psychology when he failed to sustain the poetic mood. In the Engadine and at Sils-Maria, brooding in a rocky void wherein he touched the sharp edge of infinity, he sang a Dionysian hymn to life against the melancholy products of German learning and against those Nihilistic snares which he thought lurked in Christian doctrine. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... all through those hours of darkness the sailors walked the decks in groups, again and again staring up at the foretopmast cross-trees, where the mysterious bulk of blackness sate, squatted, or hung motionless, like some brooding fiend, or incarnation of ill-luck, sinking by force of meditation its curses not loud, but deep, into the bottom of ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... was much attached to him, and was allowed considerable freedom of speech in consequence of his value and fidelity, thought fit to remonstrate. He attributed his master's lowness of spirits entirely to his brooding over the accident, and said one morning when he had brushed the clothes and ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... roused by a subject that interested him. As for Moses, although quite ready at any moment to indulge in friendly intercourse, he seldom initiated a conversation, and Spinkie, grasping the mast and leaning against it with his head down, seemed to be either asleep or brooding over his sorrows. Only a few words were uttered now and then when Nigel asked the name of a point or peak which rose in the distance on either hand. It seemed as if the quiescence of sea and air had fallen like a soft mantle on the party and subdued them ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... regions which no summers cheer, Where brooding darkness covers half the year, To hollow caves the shivering natives go; Bears range abroad, and hunt in tracks of snow: But when the tedious twilight wears away, And stars grow paler at the approach of day, The longing crowds to frozen mountains run; Happy who first can see the glimmering ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... world's work? Men go out to-day to face a life shadowed by vast industrial, commercial, and social problems. Life has grown complicated, involved, hard to understand, difficult to deal with. Tension, conflict, subtlety, surprise, and amid it all, or over it all, a vast brooding weariness that ever and again turns the heart sick. Oh the pains and the perils of the going out! There are elements of danger in modern life that threaten all the world's toilers, whatever their work may be and wherever they may have to do it. There is the danger ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... show us what sort of painter was at the head of the Muranese School at the time when it rivalled that of the Bellini. Alvise has two reading saints on either side of the altarpiece of 1480, and of these the Baptist is one of his best figures, "admirably expressive of tension and of brooding thought." It is large and free in stroke, and particularly advanced in the treatment of the foliage. Close by hangs a character-study of St. Clare; type of a strenuous, fanatical old woman, one which belongs ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... left alone to worry herself ill, brooding over the whole affair, is about the worst thing that could happen to her just now. It was only a play-baby spill, but it seems the worst accident that the world ever knew to her. She's got to be roused! I'll sit up here and see that ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... but more clearly (this was when a liner hooted down the back of my neck) that any fear which would begin to do justice to the situation would, if yielded to, incapacitate me for the rest of my days. A shadow of spread sails, deeper than the darkening twilight, brooding over us like the wings of Azrael (Pyecroft said she was a Swede), and, miraculously withdrawn, persuaded me that there was a working chance that I should reach the beach—any beach—alive, if not dry; and (this was when an economical tramp laved our port-rail with ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... walking quite quickly, now. Until the heat of our rising anger could find some other expression, we had to seek relief in physical action. I had no doubt that Jervaise in his own more restrained way was as angry as I was myself. His sardonic sneer had intensified until it took the shape of a fierce, brooding anger. ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... refer to this debate with Cox to show how local prejudices obscured the problem then involved. The people of Ohio were divided on parallel lines, for Cox and I agreed on Kansas, but he was for Douglas and I for Lincoln, while the south was brooding over secession, if either Lincoln or Douglas should ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... Holloway lodgings, he began to look about for a fit place for the homeless girl—a place, he thought to himself, which must combine several special advantages; plenty of work—she wanted that to take her mind off brooding; good, honest, upright people; and above all, no religion. Ronald recognised that last undoubted requirement as of absolutely paramount importance. 'She'll stand any amount of talk or anything else ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Sydney they found Goody still at the "Grosvenor," seemingly quite happy. At first he had been feeble and despondent, but he knew a large number of people, whose visits kept him from brooding and, on his daughter's return, she found him quite a Society man in his old-fashioned way. Hil asked him to come out to Blue Gums, but he preferred the hotel, so both she and May left him there, perfectly content. Hil found ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... gravity. His eyes might strive, but all they would see was the oily swell of the Dogger Bank, and the great plowed field of Biscay Bay, and the smash of foam against the Hebrides. Never would a space in the watery horizon open and show him a threshold of beauty with quiet, brooding face.... And when he came home, either late or early, or on time to the moment, it was, "Och, is it yourself?" And the only interruption to the house was the little more trouble he caused. And his gifts ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... face had paled and thinned since her arrival; there was an anxious fold between her brows, and her mouth drooped at the corners. If her old friends—Sister Rose of the convent, for instance—had seen her, they could hardly have recognized this spiritless, brooding maiden for the joyous ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... injuring by repeated biting, shaking, tearing, etc. From this original meaning the word has enlarged until now it means to tease, to trouble, to harass with importunity or with care or anxiety. In other words it is undue care, needless anxiety, unnecessary brooding, fretting thought. ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... explained that it would not be safe; for that if the slaves were allowed books and knowledge, they would soon not be content with their condition, and would be banding together to make themselves free. I knew all this, and I had been brooding over it; and now when the powerful hand of the overseer came in to hinder the little bit of good and comfort I was trying to give the people, my heart was set on fire with a sense of sorrow and wrong that, as I said, no child ought ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... hour, and silence now Is brooding, like a gentle spirit o'er The still and pulseless world. Hark! on the winds The bell's deep tones are swelling; 'tis the knell Of the departed year. No funeral train Is sweeping past; yet, on the stream and wood, With melancholy light, the moonbeams rest Like a pale, spotless shroud; the air ...
— Songs from the Southland • Various
... bedside or pacing the corridor outside. Two days later he was stooping to kiss an infant presented to him on a cushion of cramoisi velvet. His happiness was crowned at last, and life spread before him a prospect of many such years. But tragedy was already brooding over this scene of pleasure, although none, least of all the King, seemed to see the shadow ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... shackled, that they could walk but slowly, and their brutal conductors kept urging them on, chiefly by coarse language and oaths, now and then accompanied by a severe stroke with a slave-whip carried by one of them. The recovered fugitives looked very dejected, and were, no doubt, brooding over the consequences of their conduct. The elder of the party, a stout fellow of about forty-five years old, of very sullen look, had a distinct brand on his forehead of the initials S.T.R. I afterwards inquired ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... fact, until his friend's arrival, Tom was thoroughly beaten down and wretched, notwithstanding his efforts to look hopefully forward, and keep up his spirits. His usual occupations were utterly distasteful to him; and, instead of occupying himself, he sat brooding over his late misfortune, and hopelessly puzzling his head as to what he could do to set matters right. The conviction in which he always landed was that there was nothing to be done, and that he was a desolate and blighted being, deserted ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... Black are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea of Thought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead. Monsters uncouth and wild, arise in premature, imperfect resurrection; the several parts and shapes of different things are joined and mixed by chance; and when, ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... graceful the Duke is," she thought. "How heavy this man, and dull and slow. The Duke's face is at once kindly and spirited, the Count's brooding and awkward. The Duke is a man, the ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... being triumphantly executed, Harry embraced his fond parent with the utmost affection, and retired to his own apartments, where he stretched himself on his ottoman, and lay brooding silently, sighing for the day which was to bring the fair Miss Amory under his paternal roof, and devising a hundred wild ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not being a perfect woman, had sundry small faults; she was proud, after a certain fashion of her own; slightly sentimental, which is rather a failing than a fault; but her worst trait was a brooding, fault-seeing, persevering tact at making herself miserable, scarce ever equalled. The smallest bit of vantage-ground was enough for a start, and on that foundation Lizzy took but a few hours of suspicion and imagination to build up a whole Castle Doubting. The cause ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... had some existence in fact, were no longer clearly known to his wife and children; but this disappointment had played a very large part in their lives, and had poisoned the life of Sir Francis much as a disappointment in love is said to poison the whole life of a woman. Long brooding on his failure, continual arrangement and rearrangement of his deserts and rebuffs, had made Sir Francis much of an egoist, and in his retirement his temper became increasingly difficult ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... famous University Commission, and contributed ideas to the subject of academic reform on more sides than one. But such matters he found desultory and unsatisfying; he was in a state of famine; his mind was suffering, not growing; he was becoming brooding, melancholy, taciturn, and finally pessimist (pp. 306, 307). Pattison was five-and-forty before he reached the conception of what became his final ideal, as it had been in a slightly different shape his first and earliest. He had always been a voracious reader. When 'the flood of the Tractarian ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... for many a week No other occupation seek; But, while one sits and looks around, The other makes the woods resound With cawings loud, or frequent brings Worms, seeds, or such delicious things, And kindly feeds his brooding mate From ...
— CAW! CAW! - The Chronicle of Crows, A Tale of the Spring-time • RM
... a confusion in the minds of the Egyptian dragomans with the two brooding birds of Osiris, Isis and Nephthys, considered as Zarait, that is to say, as two birds of a different species, according to the different traditions either ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... events. My retreat was thronged with occasional migrators from London; my books were mingled with the news and scandal of the day. All spoke to me of Lady Merton; not as I loved to picture her to myself, pale and sorrowful, and brooding over my image; but gay, dissipated, the dispenser of smiles, the prototype of joy. I contrasted this account of her with the melancholy and gloom of my own feelings, and I resented her seeming happiness as an ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to see Mrs. Kruse, whose condition aroused her sympathy. This poor woman had the habit of sitting till late at night with the black chicken in her lap. The friendliness the visit was meant to show was by no means returned by Mrs. Kruse, who sat in her overheated room quietly brooding away the time. So when Effi perceived that her coming was felt as a disturbance rather than a pleasure she went away, staying merely long enough to ask whether there was anything the invalid would like to have. But all ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... watched Anne. She had Peggy in her arms. Such women were made, he felt, to be not only the mothers of children, but the mothers of the men they loved—made for brooding tenderness—to inspire—to sympathize. ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... of my last stay in Paris, when ill, miserable, and despairing, I sat brooding over my fate, my eye fell on the score of my "Lohengrin", totally forgotten by me. Suddenly I felt something like compassion that this music should never sound from off the death-pale paper. Two words I wrote to Liszt; his answer was the news ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... hour, came ever a throng Of piteous wanderers, sinful folk and sad, And still the brothers ministered, but long The day seemed, with no prayer to make them glad; No holy, meditative joys they had, No moment's brooding-place could poor prayer find, Mid all those heart to heal and all those ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... prison-house. The physical exertion kept us in a state of excellent health, and consequently in fairly good spirits; the labour, though of anything but an intellectual character, kept our minds sufficiently employed to prevent our brooding over our ill fortune; we were allowed to take matters pretty easily so long as we did not dawdle too much, and thus entail upon our lounging guard the unwelcome necessity of scrambling to their feet and hunting up our whereabouts; our daily labours brought with them ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... cooed like a brooding dove. Of course everybody would understand and appreciate. He made a memorandum of the ten pounds ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... who sat almost directly before it. To the left of her was Marcia, pale and sad, and close beside her Horace Penfield. Heavens! He jumped impatiently to his feet. He was simply getting into a morbid muddle sitting here brooding over this matter. He must have action, action of some kind, and obeying a sudden impulse, he decided to ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... the menace of night; Then a long, lonely, leaden mere Backed by a desolate fell, As by a spectral battlement; and then, Low-brooding, interpenetrating all, A vast, gray, listless, inexpressive sky, So beggared, so incredibly bereft Of starlight and the song of racing worlds, It might have bellied down upon the Void Where as in terror Light was ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... if by mutual consent, avoided each other during the rest of the day—Surrey feeling he could not unburden his heart to Richmond, and Richmond brooding jealously over the intelligence he had ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Then some one, a man he liked—but still oftener a woman—would approach him, and the whole figure would wake to life—a gentle, whimsical, melancholy life, yet possessed of a strange spell and pungency. Brooding, sad and deep, seemed to me to hold his inmost mind. The fatalism and dream of those Oriental religions to which he had given so much of his scholar's mind had touched him profoundly. His poems express it in mystical and somber ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Miss Desmond lost patience at last, "but she has against you, or will have if you let her stay here brooding over it. However if you like to risk it—I'm sorry I spoke." She got up and ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... says, 'there is a waiting and hoping, a looking and yearning, after an unknown something. Yes, when above there, on the mountain, the lonely eagle looks forth into the grey dawn to see if the day comes not; when by the mountain torrent the brooding raven listens to hear if the chamois is returning from his nightly pasture in the valley; and when the rising sun calls out the spicy odours of the Alpine flowers, then there awake in Nature an expectation and a longing ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... below London, Throckmorton recognised that if the young man were incredibly a fool he was incredibly steadfast too, and a steadfast fool is a good tool to retain for simple work. He had, too—the boy—a valuable hatred for Culpepper that he allowed to transfer itself to Katharine herself: a brooding hatred that hung in his blue eyes as he gazed downwards at the barge floor or spat at the planks of the side. Its ferocity was augmented by the patches of plaster that stretched over his skull and dropped over one ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... 'is the result of brooding all night on his resentment.' 'Oh no!' cried Laura, colouring with eagerness, 'you do not understand him. He could not bear it last night, because, as he has been explaining to us, that old Sir Hugh's story was ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... evening in his study, brooding over the great problem that would be solved before long, when a man dressed in black silently entered the room. Looking on Chan with a kindly smile which seemed to find its way instantly to his heart, he informed him that he was a fairy from the Western Heaven and that he ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... have been in the field, helping with the hay,' said she, in her calm, pleasant voice. I had heard her as I came near the house softly chanting some hymn-tune, and the peacefulness of that seemed to be brooding over her now. ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... her, trifling as was the thing he had seen. For behind it he had a glimpse of other and worse things, and behind all of some shadowy brooding mystery which compelled her to suffer them and forbade her to complain. What that was he could not conceive, what it could be he could not conceive: nor had he long to consider the question. He found the shifty eyes of his table-fellow fixed upon him, and, though the moment his own eyes met them ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... dear sweetness in his breast, Whose spirit thrill'd within him when she spake, And bowed before her as the flower down-prest By her light step, and who could ever make A long day happy and a midnight blest With brooding on a word, a smile, a glance, That haply served to ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... he sat alone before the fire in the cabin brooding until he was filled with savage hatred of Philip. He would think of all sorts of impossible means of eliminating this Spaniard from Claire's life; then Philip would come in, talk to him, seem so very normally friendly as ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... forgive it? That was a question that he asked himself almost daily without finding any answer. There was nothing in her manner to show that she harbored resentment or that she was brooding over plans for escaping from the bondage of her life. But women, in his experience, were deep, even cunning. Once given a strong purpose, women like Nora, pursued it to the end. Women of this type were not easily diverted by side issues ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... she said with a shrug, "I am not sorry. I found it very interesting, but of late those feelings of which I have told you have taken hold of me. I have felt as though a terrible shadow were brooding over the world." ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... must carry her reply, no wind of heaven breathe it, if it was such as he feared. There must be no "scene" in public to let loose the gossips' tongues. He sat in the bar parlor, with his huge head leaning on his hands, brooding over his wrongs, and waiting for her—for the daughter by whose wicked connivance, as he thought, he had been despoiled of his hard-earned gains. He did not reproach himself for having thrown her so much with ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... intercourse of business and acquaintance could be garnished with forms and flourishes which had lost all meaning, and thus by degrees the reality came to be superseded by that spectral shadow of "friendship," which holds by no means the least place among the various evil spirits brooding over the proscriptions and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... when she was close upon him. A faint, transient, wistful smile lightened her brooding face, pale ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... flag Floats, and the old irresistible call, The watch-word of so many ages of years, Makes men in love With toil for the race, and pain, and peril, and death! Tears, and the dread, tremendous dirge Of her brooding battleships, and hosts Processional, with trailing arms; the plaint— Measured, enormous, terrible—of her guns; The slow, heart-breaking throb Of bells; the trouble of drums; the blare Of mourning trumpets; the discomforting pomp Of silent crowds, black streets, and banners-royal ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... memories spring In the auld kirk-yard, Though time's death-brooding wing Shade the auld kirk-yard. The light of many a hearth, Its music and its mirth, Sleep in the deep dark earth ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... guess," she added in a softer tone, "that my feelings are mostly concerned with my brother. We were very fond of each other. The difference of our ages was not very great. I suppose you know he is a little younger than I am. He was a sensitive boy. He had the habit of brooding. It is no use concealing from you that neither of us was happy at home. You have heard, no doubt... Yes? Well, I was made still more unhappy and hurt—I don't mind telling you that. He made his way ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... tell what he was thinking of, and regretting her tongue's indiscretion, she tried to divert his thoughts from herself. His brooding look continued, and to remove it she had to fetch his pipe and tobacco. When he had filled it for the third time ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... moved by this intimation of his wife's desire to have him with her. His surprise and satisfaction made him curiously shy. He sat through two courses without speaking, without lifting his eyes from his plate; brooding over their separation. He was wondering whether, after all, it had been so inevitable; whether he had misunderstood her; whether, if he had had the sense to understand, he might not have kept her. It was possible she had been wounded by his absences. He had never explained ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... only by the voice of the wind, the twitter of birds beguiling perhaps with pretty nonsense the hours that would otherwise seem long to their brooding mates on the nests, and the hum of insects, my fancy began to create a future for the fair stranger—a future, rest assured, that did not leave the dreamer a calm ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... "Dwelling in the woods, O bull of the Bharata race, the high-souled Pandavas spent one and ten years in a miserable plight. And although deserving of happiness, those foremost of men, brooding over their circumstances, passed their days miserably, living on fruits and roots. And that royal sage, the mighty-armed Yudhishthira, reflecting that the extremity of misery that had befallen his brothers, was owing to his own fault, and remembering ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the earth were moved and heaven reeled above him; for his father, after a month or two of brooding, had announced, on St. Stephen's Day, that he could tolerate it no longer; that God's demands were unreasonable; that, after all, the Protestant religion was the religion of her Grace, that men must learn to move with the times, and that he had paid his last fine. At Easter, he ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... Hush! What brooding stillness is hanging over all? What's this talk in whispers, and that placard on the wall? Aha! I see it now! They're going to hang a man! Judge Lynch is on the ramparts and the Law's an ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... together side by side, she brooding over some thought of her own, and he a little crossed and disappointed at her caprice and the ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Grandon is really shocked. His mother is nervous and ill at ease. All night she has been brooding over what she saw in the carriage. Floyd will follow madame to Newport in a week or two, and the matter will be settled. She has no objection to her as a daughter-in-law if Floyd must marry, but it is bitterly hard ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Pelleas et Melisande, like persons "whispering about a closed room," This drama—at once his most typical, moving, and beautiful performance—swims in an atmosphere of portent and bodement; here, as Pater noted in the work of a wholly different order of artist, "the storm is always brooding;" here, too, "in a sudden tremor of an aged voice, in the tacit observance of a day," we become "aware suddenly of the great stream of human tears falling always through the shadows of the world." Mystery and sorrow—these are its keynotes; separately or ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... quoted on both sides. Her forward elbow is propped upon one knee; and to keep her secrets closer, for this Libyan woman is the closest of all the Sibyls, she rests her shut mouth upon one closed palm, as if holding the African mystery deep in the brooding brain that looks out through mournful, warning eyes, seen under the wide shade of the strange horned (ammonite) crest, that bears the mystery of the Tetragrammaton upon its upturned front. Over her full bosom, mother of myriads as she was, hangs the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... toward the husband and wife. In his hand, he carried a sheet of paper, roughly scrawled. As he stopped before the two, and cleared his throat, Mary withdrew herself from Dick's arms, and regarded the official with brooding eyes from out her white face. Something strange in her enemy's expression caught her attention, something that set new hopes alive within her in a fashion wholly inexplicable, so that she waited with a sudden, ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... follows righteousness, not that poverty attends wickedness, in worldly measure, but that life is the gift of a right will is her message; how we, striving for eternal life, may best meet the chances and the bitter fates of mortal existence, is her brooding care; ideal characters, or those ideal in some trait or phase, in the midst of a hostile environment, are her fixed study. So far is idealism from ignoring the actual state of man that it most affirms its pity and evil ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... Langton presently adjourned to the club, where they found Burke, Garrick, and Goldsmith, the latter still brooding over his sharp reprimand at Dilly's. Johnson, magnanimous as a lion, at once said aside to Boswell, "I'll make Goldsmith forgive me." Then calling to the poet, in a loud voice he said, "Dr. Goldsmith, something passed to-day where you and I dined; ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... whose lot had been cast so strangely with the rude people of the mountain wilderness, the companionship of such a spirit and mind was a necessity. Unconsciously Sammy had supplied the one thing lacking, and by her demands upon his thought had kept the shepherd from mental stagnation and morbid brooding. Day after day she had grown into his life—his intellectual and spiritual child, and though she had dropped the rude speech of the native, she persisted still in calling him by his backwoods title, "Dad." But the little word had come to hold a new meaning for them both. ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... called them forth: they were protests, alarm signals, trumpet-calls to action, words wrung from the writer's heart, forged at white heat, and of course lacking the finish and careful word-selection which reflection and patient brooding over them might have given. Such as they are, they belong to the history of the Anti-Slavery movement, and may serve as way-marks of its progress. If their language at times seems severe and harsh, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... came a great disaster. His employer having met with heavy losses sold all his horses and got rid of his servants, and Liddy had to go. This great change, and above all his grief at the loss of his beloved horses, was more than he could endure. He became melancholy and spent his days in silent brooding, and by and by, to everybody's surprise, Liddy fell ill, for he was in the prime of life and had always been singularly healthy. Then to astonish people still more, he died. What ailed him—what killed him? every one asked of the doctor; and his answer ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... his uplifting; a change passed upon him. In after years, when Gibbie had the idea of God, when he had learned to think about him, to desire his presence, to believe that a will of love enveloped his will, as the brooding hen spreads her wings over her eggs—as often as the thought of God came to him, it came in the shape of the silence ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... crisis of the old man's disorder was past, and he began to mend. By very slow and feeble degrees his consciousness came back; but the mind was weakened and its functions were impaired. He was patient, and quiet; often sat brooding, but not despondently, for a long space; was easily amused, even by a sun-beam on the wall or ceiling; made no complaint that the days were long, or the nights tedious; and appeared indeed to have lost all count of time, and ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... writing Latin exercises would bring contentment to Susannah's heart. There was nothing in such a request to awake suspicion and antagonism, and there was much in the regular mental exercise to keep her mind from brooding on its scepticism or upon Ephraim's kindness. As a child sits down to an intricate game, she sat down, day after day, to her lesson. Soon the stimulus of knowing that the prophet had actually mastered his grammar in two weeks wrought the determination not to lag very far ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... training to bury himself in this desolate sink-hole of iniquity; to elect to carry on an unequal war with interests that controlled the law machinery of the county and Territory—whose power extended to Washington. No doubt the young man was even now brooding over the future, planning his fight, pessimistically considering his chances of success. Potter's sympathy grew. He thought of approaching his chief with a word of encouragement. But while he hesitated, mentally debating the propriety of such ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... his own absence might have had something to do with it. So long as he had been with her, teaching her and making a daily breeze in her still life, Esther had been in a measure drawn out of herself, and kept from brooding. And then, beyond all, the natural organization of this fine creature was of the rarest; strong and delicate at once, of large capacities and with correspondingly large requirements; able for great enjoyment, and open also to keen suffering. He could see it in every glance ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... the less fortunate ladies who were not dancing at the moment for various reasons. And as they went home that night, after twelve, they talked of the vast still places of the world, "where Nature leans a brooding ear" and "where one can be reposed and strong and silent and happy" and "just drink up the atmosphere in great gusty draughts, and steep oneself in calm. None of this terrible grind from day ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... discontented bondsmen heard afresh with Vesey's ears the hateful clank of their chains, they would, in time, learn to think of Vesey and to turn, perhaps, to him for leadership and deliverance. Brooding over their lot as Vesey had revealed it to them, they might move of themselves to improve or end it altogether, by adopting some such bold plan as Vesey's. Meantime he would continue to wait and prepare for that moment, while they would be ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... and he stood in absolute darkness, hesitating, wondering. He fancied he heard cautious feet stealing across the bare floor of the hall; but not another sound broke the oppressive brooding silence of the close, musty-smelling old house. In another moment he would have spoken, have demanded the meaning of all this, when a faint gleam of light appeared at the end of the hall, and from the lower stairs a man's hand and arm became visible, ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... in his hands, and aided by days of brooding and nights of sleeplessness, it did not take Bertram long to fashion The Thing that finally loomed before him ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... observation! what a wholesome hatred for meanness and knavery! what a vast sympathy! what a cheerfulness! what a manly relish of life! what a love of human kind! what a poet is here!—watching, meditating, brooding, creating! What multitudes of truths has that man left behind him! What generations he has taught to laugh wisely and fairly! What scholars he has formed and accustomed to the exercise of thoughtful humour and the manly play of wit! What a courage ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... chin, the forehead; some feature usually shows traces of it. And when Mart Cooley turned and Whitey saw his eyes, he got his thrill. They were a hard, light, steely gray, and they looked out from lowered lids, oh, so steadily. Months of brooding in the prison had helped to harden Mart's eyes, that had needed no help in that way; brooding over imaginary wrongs, for he thought his arrest an injustice. Other men had stolen a few cows, and got away with them, but Mart was made to suffer, ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... the outstanding feature of Wild Life in the Tree Tops, by Captain C. W. R. Knight. This English book, large and flat, shows with the aid of the camera, the merlin pursuing her quarry, young tawny owls in a disused magpie's nest, female noctules and their young, the male kestrel brooding, and a male buzzard that has just brought a rabbit to the younglings in the nest. Plenty of other pictures like these! The chapters deal with the buzzards of the Doone country, the lady's hawk, woodpeckers, brown owls, sparrow-hawks, herons and ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... his voice Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away; The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice Was sad and tender as a requiem lay: Our shadowy congregation rested still, As brooding on that 'End it when ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... the doing now he saw that there were others less able to than he. Yet, had he had more leisure to observe, his anxiety would have grown, not lessened, for a cloud began to gather upon Archelaus that was like the old brooding of his youth, though less articulate, but perhaps none the less dangerous for that. There had been a softening about him those first days of Nicky's return, as there was still when he played with Jimmy; but now the look that had held a timid eagerness ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... a summer paradise for song birds, and a fine place to get acquainted with them; for the trees stood wide apart, allowing one to see the happy homeseekers as they arrived in the spring, their mating, nest-building, the brooding and feeding of the young, and, after they were full-fledged and strong, to see all the families of the neighborhood gathering and getting ready to leave in the fall. Excepting the geese and ducks and pigeons nearly ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... unspeakable relief, a joyful moment; yet on that very day, and on the next before he rode away, I, even I who had been unjustly and cruelly struck with a horsewhip, felt my little heart heavy in me when I saw the change in his face—the dark, still, brooding look, and knew that the thought of his fall and the loss of his home was exceedingly bitter to him. Doubtless my mother noticed it, too, and shed a few compassionate tears for the poor man, once more homeless on the great plain. But he could not be kept after ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... childhood his mother had been his passion, as he had been hers. Neither of them had had others to share their affection, and they were by nature creatures born to love. His first memory had been of looking up into the soft darkness of the tender eyes which were always brooding over him. He had been little more than a baby when he had somehow known that they were very sorrowful, and had realised that he loved them more because of their sorrow. He had been little older when he found out the reason ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... colony at this place, which they named Santa Maria el Antiqua del Darien, the first part of the name being that of a church in Seville, and Darien being the Indian name of the river. Balboa being now in great credit with the colonists, and brooding revenge for the former threats of Enciso, secretly plotted to deprive him of the command, alleging that they were now beyond the limits of Hojedas government, who had no authority in this place. While this was in agitation, Enciso thought proper to prohibit all the colonists ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... or does, displays her capability for profound thought and feeling, as well as her lively and romantic disposition; and as I have seen in an Italian garden a fountain flinging round its wreaths of showery light, while the many-colored Iris hung brooding above it, in its calm and soul-felt glory; so in Portia the wit is ever kept subordinate to the poetry, and we still feel the tender, the intellectual, and the imaginative part of the character, as superior to, and presiding ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... then to leave him: six of them deserted in one night. In other respects events occurred ominous of evil for the termination of the enterprise. To occupy the attention of his companions, and prevent them from brooding on apprehended ills, as well as to guard them against a surprise by any hostile natives, he set them on erecting a fort upon an eminence, at a place four days' journey distant from Lake Peoria; which, when finished, he named Breakheart ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... launching into human life. I was now nearly eighteen years old, strong, active, and well-made, full of spirits, and overjoyed at the independence which I had so much sighed for. Since the period of my dismissal from Mr Drummond's my character had much altered. I had become grave and silent, brooding over my wrongs, harbouring feelings of resentment against the parties, and viewing the world in general through a medium by no means favourable. I had become in some degree restored from this unwholesome state of mind from having rendered an important service to Captain Turnbull, for we love the ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of cheerful prairie dogs barked and jerked their ceaseless salutation. An ancient and untroubled scheme of life lay all around him, appealing in its freshness and its charm. Why should a man, a tall and strong man, with health upon his cheek, sit here with brooding and downcast eye, heedless of the miles slipping behind him like a ribbon ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... ran away and was married to the young man, whom her father had never allowed her to bring to see him, and the proud old man was left alone in his dreary mansion, brooding over what he called the heartlessness of ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... birdlings. In some nests you will find eight or ten eggs, and then you may take three or four. But if there are but three eggs, you must take only one. Always be sure to leave more than half. Be careful to gather them before the mother bird begins to set, because when her brooding-time has begun she is very jealous of her nest, and is easily frightened away; and then if the eggs have begun to harden and form young birds, they are useless to you, for you can not blow them, and they will soon change ...
— Harper's Young People, August 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... and the next; and upon the following he came both at morning and at night. Upon the evening of this fourth day Jane seemed to feel the breaking of a brooding struggle in Lassiter. During all these visits he had scarcely a word to say, though he watched her and played absent-mindedly with Fay. Jane had contented herself with silence. Soon little Fay substituted for the expression of regard, "I like oo," a warmer ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... cries and the perpetual voices ceased, the figures of men and women flitted by noiseless as ghosts. And even at night, when the streets were most crowded and the uproar loudest, it seemed that underneath the noise, and almost appreciable to the ear, there lay a deep and brooding silence, the silence of deserts ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... by gracious Heaven design'd, At once the source and glory of mankind! 'Tis this can toil, and grief, and pain assuage, Secure our youth, and dignify our age; 'Tis this fair fame and guiltless pleasure brings, And shakes rich plenty from its brooding wings; Gilds duty's roughest path with friendship's ray, And strews with roses ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... circle of rocks where the little band lay watching and wonder-struck; that is, all except Soa, who sat apart brooding, her arms clasped upon her breast. Things had befallen as she expected, as they must befall indeed, provided that Juanna did not forget her lesson or show fear, and that the dwarf did nothing foolish. But Soa knew well enough ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... around the wind doth blow, And coughing drowns the parson's saw, And birds sit brooding in the snow, And Marian's nose looks red and raw: When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl— Then nightly sings the staring owl Tuwhoo! Tuwhit! Tuwhoo! A merry note! While greasy Joan doth ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... or satisfaction in it; others hail it as a perfect interpretation of their own mood or emotion when they stand speechless before the sunrise or the afterglow or a landscape upon which the very spirit of beauty and peace is brooding. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... looks at this inert and deformed corpse. He notices the fetid odor that arises from it, the odor of the slow but sure decomposition, and he has a sort of sudden revelation. The scepticism which, for a long time, has been brooding in his heart suddenly is transformed into absolute negation, and addressing himself to Him in whom he had ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... young African. Once or twice more before breakfast-time the girls passed near that window. It remained opened, but the room behind it was blank. No face of Harry Warrington appeared there. Neither spoke to the other of the subject on which both were brooding. Hetty was a little provoked with Charley, who was clamorous about breakfast, and told him he was always thinking of eating. In reply to her sarcastic inquiry, he artlessly owned he should like another cheese-cake, and good-natured Theo, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... knowledge. He did his elegiacs and iambics well enough, but he preferred exercising himself in the rhymed Latin of the middle ages. He like history, but he loved to meditate on a land laid waste, Britain deserted by the legions, the rare pavements riven by frost, Celtic magic still brooding on the wild hills and in the black depths of the forest, the rosy marbles stained with rain, and the walls growing grey. The masters did not encourage these researches; a pure enthusiasm, they felt, should be for ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... life's circle and come back to childhood; the ruddy School-boy with his golden curls, frisking along the march; the Artisan's stuff jacket; the Noble's star-decorated coat;—the whole presenting a motley spectacle, yet with a dusky grandeur brooding over it. Onward, onward, into that dimness where the lights of Time which have blazed along the procession, are flickering in their sockets! And whither! We know not; and Death, hitherto our leader, deserts us by the wayside, as the tramp of our innumerable footsteps ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the fat man's hands, this was the secret of the latter's power. While I pondered gloomily, the sitting (so to call it) came to an end. Perhaps my unwelcome appearance somewhat contracted it. My grandfather lapsed into his chair, his chin on his chest, brooding. Excitement died in him almost visibly, like the flickering down of a spent fire. Instead of eighty, he looked a hundred and eighty, and his face was as ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... Dante, and Shakspeare, and Milton, in search of subjects worthy of his hand; he loved to grapple with whatever he thought too weighty for others; and assembling round him the dim shapes which imagination readily called forth, he sat brooding over the chaos, and tried to bring the whole into order and beauty. His coloring is like his design; original; it has a kind of supernatural hue, which harmonizes with many of his subjects—the spirits of the ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... discovering that, however original I may wish to be, I am continually producing the same things which other people say or write. Whenever, after producing something which gives me perfect satisfaction, and which has cost me perhaps days and nights of brooding, I chance to take up a book for the sake of a little relaxation, a book which I never saw before, I am sure to find in it something more or less resembling some part of what I have been just composing. You will easily conceive the distress which then comes over me; 'tis ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... with banners," indeed, was Kheyr-ed-Din in this eventful summer: things had gone badly with the crescent flag, the Padishah was unapproachable in his palace, brooding perchance on that "might have been" had he not sold his honor and the life of his only friend to gratify the malice of a she-devil; those in attendance on the Sultan trembled, for the humor of the despot ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... to try to get his goat; with cordial smiles he greets them, and when we've raised a pot, upon the mat he meets them and ties them in a knot. From Russia's frozen acres, from Grecian ports they sail, and Turkey sends her fakers to gather in the kale; old brooding Europe breeds them, these mighty men of brawn; our Strong Man takes and kneads them, and puts ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... at their worst we must needs eat and sleep, and find some degree of satisfaction in both. Honor was young, practical, healthy, and her days were too well filled to allow of time for brooding; nor had she the smallest leaning toward that unprofitable occupation. She sought and found refuge from her clamorous Ego,—never more clamorous than at the first awakening of love,—in concentrating thought ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... he; others, who were not, affected, in order to please him, the externals of austerity; absolute power oppressed all spirits, extorting from them that hypocritical complaisance which is liable to engender; corruption was already brooding beneath appearances of piety; the reign of Louis XV. was to see its deplorable fruits displayed with a haste and a scandal which are to be explained only by the oppression exercised in the last years of King ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... and to always leave more than half, as we have already begged them to do, the mother-bird will not suffer. If we could believe for a moment that our little friends would be so cruel as to disturb the brooding mother, and rob her nest of all its eggs, we would never publish another letter requesting an exchange of these pretty natural curiosities. The nesting season is now over in all the Northern States, but when it returns, we trust the young egg collectors ...
— Harper's Young People, October 19, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... furnish it with her shyly modest taste, a sense of values that bade her keep within the boundary of the atmosphere she brought with her in good old pieces tenderly used. The room was dim, even by day, from these shadows of the brooding past, and the dull blue draperies at the windows, while they touched it to a more inspiriting tone, still spoke softly of the repose a man wanted when he escaped from the outer world to the assuagement ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... must marry some one, and I don't see why Grascour should not have as good a chance as another." Anderson had stalked away, brooding over the injustice of his position, and declaring to himself that this Belgian should never be allowed to marry Florence ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... she wanted it quiet, you know, Alec," observed Hugh. "I defy any one to find a place that fills that bill better than this one. Why, not even the peep of a bird can be heard; it's just a brooding silence that would get on the nerves of most people and make them ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... fancy," Mother went on. "And you've been brooding and brooding till it seems far worse than ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... town, with its various districts and suburbs, promenades and streets, squares and cross-roads, all suddenly placed under shelter on a rainy day by the whim of some gigantic power. The deep gloom brooding in the hollows of the roofs multiplied, as it were, the forest of pillars, and infinitely increased the number of the delicate ribs, railed galleries, and transparent shutters. And over the phantom city and far away into the depths ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... pre-eminent among our English poets in being almost exclusively occupied with one theme, the mystical interpretation of nature. Both poets are of a meditative, brooding cast of mind; but whereas Wordsworth arrives at his philosophy entirely through personal experience and sensation, Vaughan is more of a mystical philosopher, deeply read in Plato and the mediaeval alchemists. ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... a gay, triumphant peal as she tripped out of the room; but as she sat in her own chamber, brooding, she muttered: "Dare I defy him? Will anything ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... The usual feminine impulsiveness and full expression of emotion is replaced in her by an extraordinary condensation of phrase and feeling. In her letters we find the eternal womanly in her yearning love for her friends, her brooding anxiety and sympathy for the few lives closely intertwined with her own. In her poems, however, one is rather impressed with the deep well of poetic insight and feeling from which she draws, but never unreservedly. In spite of frequent strange exaggeration of phrase one is always conscious ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... vanity to return again (Nor fitting me to ask, nor thee to give), Vain loves and wanderings with a fair-hair'd maid, Child of the dust as I am, who so long My captive heart steep'd in idolatry And creature-loves. Forgive me, O my Maker! If in a mood of grief I sin almost In sometimes brooding on the days long past, And from the grave of time wishing them back, Days of a mother's fondness to her child, Her ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... its narrow length for a mile along the irrigating ditch, the village of Las Plumas lay sleepily quiet under the hot, white, brooding spring sunshine. A few trim-looking places cuddled their yards and gardens close against the life-giving channel, whose green banks, covered with vegetation and shaded by trees, bisected the town. Elsewhere, naked adobe walls flanked the dusty streets and from their ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... friends and make the story known. Why had he not tried to placate her by disavowing sympathy with his mother? He would have had no compunction about doing so, but he had thought of it too late. He sat brooding over his trouble until the bartender called with respectful sarcasm to ask if he wanted to lease ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
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