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More "Contemplative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... discipline that he had chosen for himself, which brought out his deficiency in practical work in a manner which lowered him in his own eyes, to a degree almost satisfactory to himself. He was not, indeed, without humility, but his nature was self-contemplative and self-conscious enough to perceive his superiority of talent, and it had been the struggle of his life to abase this perception, so that it was actually a relief not to be obliged to fight with his own complacency in his powers. He had learned not to think ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... Walton's joy as a contemplative man has been mine from youth; as witness these three fishing sonnets, just found in the faded ink of three or four decades ago, which may give a gleam of country sunshine on a page or two, and would have rejoiced my piscatorial ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... merely opened the inquiry into the nature of ideas of Beauty and Relation, by analysing (as far as I was able to do so) the two faculties of the human mind which mainly seized such ideas; namely, the contemplative and imaginative faculties. ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... growing preponderance of women—and especially of unmarried women—among our poetic leaders is, I think, to be found in the fact that women, more often than men, command the means of living for a generous portion of the year that vital, unstrenuous, contemplative existence demanded by poetry as an antecedent condition of its creation. It is a significant fact that, according to Arnold Bennett, nearly all of the foremost English writers live far from the town. Most of the more promising American ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... Nature has inscribed on the heart, apart from all reflection on the utility of punishment, an independent, immediate, and instinctive approbation of the sacred law of retribution. This is the point at which a hitherto purely contemplative sympathy passes over into an active impulse, which prepares us to support the victim of attack and insult in his ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... conceive. In his singular character the dual nature alternately presented itself, and his extreme exactness and astuteness represented, as I have often thought, the reaction against the poetic and contemplative mood which occasionally predominated in him. The swing of his nature took him from extreme languor to devouring energy; and, as I knew well, he was never so truly formidable as when, for days on end, he had been lounging in his arm-chair ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... talents, his character, and even the position he assumed. A certain nonchalance announced that he easily laid aside these faculties from the conviction of his ability to recover all his forces at the moment when he should require them. His brow was contemplative, his look composed, his mouth serious and somewhat sad; the deep inspiration of antiquity was mingled in his physiognomy with the smiles and the carelessness of youth. At the foot of the tribune he was loved with familiarity; ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Madame Beck's eyes the five letters found a certain favour. One day after she had borrowed them of me (in speaking of so suave a little woman, one ought to use suave terms), I caught her examining me with a steady contemplative gaze, a little puzzled, but not at all malevolent. It was during that brief space between lessons, when the pupils turned out into the court for a quarter of an hour's recreation; she and I remained in the first classe alone: when I met her eye, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... circumstances of life, and all the shining ones, lie on the part you would invite me to. But if I could bring myself to fancy, what I think you do but fancy, that I have any talents for active life, I want health for it; and besides it is a real truth. I have, if possible, less inclination, than ability. Contemplative life is not only my scene, but is my habit too. I begun my life where most people end theirs, with all that the world calls ambition. I don't know why it is called so, for, to me, it always seemed to be stooping, or climbing. I'll tell you my politic and religious sentiments in a few ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... lain in some genuine tradition of his words, as they were caught and treasured by some disciple more susceptible than the rest to the mystical and contemplative element in Jesus. These words, handed down through congenial spirits, and deeply brooded; these ideas caught by minds schooled in the blending of Hebraic with Platonic thought,—minds accustomed to rely on the contemplative imagination as the discloser ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... of laughter came from the windows as the villagers, slowly opening the papers they held, came upon the caricature of Peggy McNutt. The subject of the cartoon had, with his usual aggressiveness, secured the best "standing room" available, and his contemplative, protruding eyes were yet fixed upon the interior of the workroom. But now, his curiosity aroused, he looked at the paper to see what his neighbors were laughing at, and his expression of wonder slowly changed ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... immerse herself in that atmosphere of contemplative eternity, and so strangely did it affect me that I should not have been surprised to have awaked a century or so later and found her just beginning to ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... ways she was only a child. All her years had been passed in confinement, either beside her dying father or, later, between the four walls of the Ursuline Convent. And during those years her soul had been fed on a contemplative, ecstatic religion, a kind of sanctified superstition, which she would have deemed ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... erected in 1880 by some French Sisters who had come to London in 1865, and settled at Fulham in 1867 in a house near the site of the present convent. There are eleven nuns, of whom three are lay Sisters. They are devoted to the contemplative life. Just opposite is a large brewery, established 1867. At the east end of Eustace Road is a small brick Wesleyan chapel, hidden away in a corner, which deserves a word of mention, as it is a German chapel and the services are in ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... plan was perhaps insufficient. At any rate, it is well to found another house: Carthusians of course, for they are holy, popular, and inexpensive. Henry, who was generous enough for lepers, hospitals, and active workers, did not usually care very much for contemplative orders, though his mother, the Empress Matilda, affected the Cistercians and founded the De Voto Monastery near Calais, and he inherited something from her. These considerations may have first prompted ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... of their works, such as The Princess and The Angel in the House, was due to their strictly poetic merits. At any rate, the poetry of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, lacking narrative interest, palatable platitudes, lyric lilt, but being, rather, contemplative, aloof, delicately minor and in many ways curiously modern, must have fallen on ears not attuned to it. He had none of the Bolshevik revolutionary vitality of Whitman, to thrive and grow by the opposition he created. He could have aroused no opposition. ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... man's happiness; for of God alone is it true that His Being is His Happiness. Secondly, life means the operation of the living, by which operation the principle of life is made actual: thus we speak of active and contemplative life, or of a life of pleasure. And in this sense eternal life is said to be the last end, as is clear from John 17:3: "This is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... harmony with Anaxagoras's wisdom; if, indeed, it be true that he, by a kind of divine impulse and greatness of spirit, voluntarily quitted his house, and left his land to lie fallow and to be grazed by sheep like a common. But the life of a contemplative philosopher and that of an active statesman are, I presume, not the same thing; for the one merely employs, upon great and good objects of thought, an intelligence that requires no aid of instruments nor supply of any external materials; whereas the ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... start, seeing them at some little distance. His full, contemplative eyes rested upon them for a moment almost devoid of questioning. It was not the face of a man who finds himself confronted with the discovery of his duplicity and his hypocrisy. There was a strange doubt stirring in the blacksmith's ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... left of Montague sat Somers, lord keeper; older, of more steady demeanor, of fuller figure, of bold face and full light eye, a politician, not a ponderer. At the right of Montague, grave, silent, impassive, now and again turning a contemplative eye about him, sat that great man. Sir Isaac Newton, known then to every nobleman, and now to every schoolboy, of the world. A gem-like mind, keen, clear, hard and brilliant, exact in every facet, and forsooth held in the setting of an iron body. Gentle, unmoved, self-assured, Sir ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... Being of a contemplative turn of mind, he pursued the track of the mystical divines, and having acquired great reputation in Spain, and being desirous of propagating his sublime mode of devotion, he left his own country, and settled at Rome. Here he ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... of Lorenzo, are three masterly figures. An heroic, martial, deeply contemplative figure sits in grand repose. A statesman, a sage, a patriot, a warrior, with countenance immersed in solemn thought, and head supported and partly hidden by his hand, is brooding over great recollections and mighty deeds. Was this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... from Divine light as heaven from earth,'[539] and wholly useless to one who would 'be well qualified to write notes upon the spirit and meaning of the words of Christ;'[540] it is impossible not to feel that he is approaching very closely to the morbid pietism of the recluse. His was indeed no mere contemplative asceticism, but fruitful in practical virtues; and even its weaker points stand out in noble contrast with the deficiencies of an age which admired prudential religion, and took in good earnest the words of the Preacher as to being righteous overmuch.[541] ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... metaphysical opinions what they may, who but some fantastic individual, or ultra-contemplative scholar, ever thinks of subjecting to them his practical notions of bettering his condition! And how soon is it likely that men will leave off endeavouring to secure themselves against the uneasier chances of vicissitude, even if Providence ordains them to do so ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... Simurgh, their god, traverse seven Seas (according to others seven Wadys) of Search, of Love, of Knowledge, of Competence, of Unity, of Stupefaction, and of Altruism (i.e. annihilation of self), the several stages of contemplative life. At last, standing upon the mysterious island of the Simurgh and "casting a clandestine glance at him they saw thirty birds[FN250] in him; and when they turned their eyes to themselves the thirty birds seemed one Simurgh: they saw in themselves the entire ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Bible. The stage had been his cradle. He continued all his days a student. In him met the meditative and the observing faculties. In his love of fishing, his love of painting, his love of music we see the brooding, contemplative spirit joined to the alert in mental force and foresight when he addressed himself to the activities and the objectives of the theater. He was a thorough stage manager, skillful, patient and upright. His company was his family. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... at the door in a contemplative attitude, fancied that his master called him, and, coming ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... humbling—may be gathered from the fact that a big tear might have been seen, long gathering in her eye;—the next moment she brushed off the intruder with an impatience of gesture, that plainly showed how much her proud spirit resented any such intrusion. The tear dispersed the images which had filled her contemplative mood, and rising from her sylvan seat, she prepared to move forward, when a voice calling at some little distance, drew her attention. Giving a hasty glance in the direction of the sound, she beheld a young man ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... decided that it was his love of conversation; his conversation had been better than ever. He had given up walking; he was no longer a humorous stroller. He sat all day in a chair—almost any chair would serve, and was so dependent on what you would do for him that, had not his talk been highly contemplative, you might have thought he was blind. The reader already knows more about him than Isabel was ever to know, and the reader may therefore be given the key to the mystery. What kept Ralph alive was simply the fact that he had not yet seen enough of the person in the world in whom ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... believing in the War at all, though he is within ear-shot of it all the time. His difficulty is due to the last thing he saw before he left his office: three men standing at his gate, in that attitude of contented and contemplative leisure which one associates with Saturday afternoons and village pumps, looking at nothing in particular and spitting thoughtfully as occasion required. One of them was a British soldier, one a French soldier and one a German soldier. The whole picture suggested anything ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 15, 1917 • Various
... with the severity of her invectives. In fact, she had determined, according to the vulgar phrase, to tell him a bit of her mind—and a very small bit of it, she was well aware, would be sufficient to satisfy Count Ericson of the condition of all the rest. But the lover was in a contemplative mood, and stood as silent as a milestone, and looking almost as animated and profound. She sighed, she coughed, she drops her handkerchief. All wouldn't do—the milestone took no notice—Christina at last grew angry, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... licentious drones, the robbers, at once, and disgrace, of the busy hive? or had the hand of avarice and rapine expelled from the temple, not the ribalds who polluted, but the faithful priests who served the shrine in honour and fidelity? The arguments of Henderson, in this contemplative hour, rose with double force before him; and could scarcely be parried by the appeal which the Abbot Ambrosius had made from his understanding to his feelings,—an appeal which he had felt more forcibly amid ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... endeavours and unexhausted invention of his tormentors, who harassed him with such a variety of mischievous pranks, that he began to think all the devils in hell had conspired against his peace; and accordingly became very serious and contemplative on ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... created them find a home under the helmet of the soldier. So they became lifeless; they were at once formally systematized and classified, subjected to strict proportions and rules, and cast, as it were, in moulds. This arrangement enabled the conqueror, without waste of time in that long contemplative stillness out of which alone the beauty of the true Ideal arises, out of which alone man can create like a god, to avail himself at once of the Greek orders, not as a sensitive and delicate means of fine aesthetic expression, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... reasons best known to himself, soon relapsed into a thoughtful, contemplative silence. Between us, he was sorely vexed and disappointed. When the gallant start was made from the glen of "dead men's bones," he found that he was to be cast utterly aside, quite completely ignored by the fair ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Around its rim ran an inscription in Latin, warning mortal man that time flows as swiftly as water and exhorting him to make the most of his hours; after which piece of Jacobean moralising it set itself shamelessly to beguile all who might pass that way into an abandonment of contemplative repose. On all sides of it a stretch of smooth turf spread away, broken up here and there by groups of dwarfish chestnut and mulberry trees, whose leaves and branches cast a laced pattern of shade beneath them. On one side the lawn sloped gently down to a small ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... be called the grandsons of God. If poetry deals with moral philosophy, painting deals with natural philosophy; if poetry describes the action of the contemplative mind, painting represents the effect in motion of the action of the mind; if poetry terrifies people with the pictures of Hell, painting does the same by depicting the same things in action. If a poet challenges the painter to represent ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... are for pacifying Ireland by coercion. How can you vindicate your consistency?" Surely my honourable friend cannot but know that nothing is easier than to write a theme for severity, for clemency, for order, for liberty, for a contemplative life, for a active life, and so on. It was a common exercise in the ancient schools of rhetoric to take an abstract question, and to harangue first on one side and then on the other. The question, Ought popular discontents to be quieted by concession or coercion? would ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a contemplative eye, looked at his daughter through the haze of his tobacco smoke as if seeing her for the first time. In a way this was so. He was not one to take heed of time or happenings. When he was not obliged to work, he was ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... was sure to hear of Augusta frequently, and to see some part, at least, of the letters which she was to write to her brother; he might also hope to be remembered in these letters as her "good friend and tutor;" and to these consolations his quiet, contemplative, and yet enthusiastic disposition, clung as to a secret source of pleasure, the only one which life seemed ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... the speculative sense, with the tendency which carries a man toward the contemplative study of life and nature as a whole, is the critical sense—the tendency which, in the realm of action and concrete performance, carries him, as Amiel expresses it, "droit au defaut," and makes him conscious at once of the weak point, the germ of failure in a project or ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... river gave him. He had a boat of his own at Putney, and whenever Sir Hugo did not want him, it was his chief holiday to row till past sunset and come in again with the stars. Not that he was in a sentimental stage; but he was in another sort of contemplative mood perhaps more common in the young men of our day—that of questioning whether it were worth while to take part in the battle of the world: I mean, of course, the young men in whom the unproductive labor of questioning is sustained by three or five per cent, on capital ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... often confined to the ungrateful task of analyzing the uniform play of human passions, is occasionally rewarded by the appearance of events, which strike like a hand from heaven, into the nicely adjusted machinery of human plans, and carry the contemplative mind to a higher order of things. Of this kind, is the sudden retirement of Gustavus Adolphus from the scene; — stopping for a time the whole movement of the political machine, and disappointing all the calculations of human prudence. Yesterday, the very soul, ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... ye "contemplative ones!" Even Zarathustra was once the dupe of your godlike exterior; he did not divine the serpent's coil with which ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... abroad that I had lived two days and nights without meat or drink, some began to believe that I was a holy madman, while others supposed me to be stark mad; wherefore they consulted to send for certain men who dwell in the mountain, who lead a contemplative life, and are esteemed holy as we do hermits. When they came to give their judgment concerning me, and were debating among themselves for upwards of an hour on my case, I pissed in my hands, and threw the water in their faces, on which they agreed I was no saint, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... received a letter necessitating their departure for town on Monday night. But this fact should not have condemned her to a solitary evening, Ella reflected. She should have been thoughtful enough to change her own plans to correspond with the change in the plans of her guests. A nice, quiet, contemplative evening beside the still waters may suit the requirements of some temperaments, but it was not just what Ella regarded as most satisfying to her mood of the hour. It was a long time since she had spent a lonely evening, ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... seen it, air to the lungs that have once inhaled it, or thought to the mind in which it has once been conceived. I defied Heaven itself to rob me of this divine embodying of my desires. I had seen her, and that was enough. For the contemplative, to see is to enjoy. It scarcely mattered to me whether she loved me, or whether she passed me by without perceiving me. I had been touched by her splendor, and was still enveloped in her rays; she could no more withdraw them from me than the sun can take from the earth the beams which he ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... friend, why are we so content to censure others? Let us be fair and pass judgment on ourselves. But the contemplative life we lead is merely the result of indolence, which we gloss over by reflections on the vanity of all things. We are content with our rags. Why? Because we are too lazy to earn better. We reproach the unscholarly ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... a spiritual and contemplative life, which is holy and commendable, the chief employment of those who lead it being to celebrate the praises of God; O, that the would likewise, betake themselves intirely to a regular and sober life! how much more agreeable would they render themselves ...
— Discourses on a Sober and Temperate Life • Lewis Cornaro
... is noteworthy that these are the classes which smoke least. On the other hand, I confess that it induces a certain lassitude, and a lounging, easy mode of life, which is fatal both to the precision of manners and the vivacity of conversation. The mind of a smoker is contemplative rather than active, and if the weed cures our irritability, it kills our wit. I believe that it is a fallacy to suppose that it encourages drinking. There is more drinking and less smoking in England than in any other country of the the civilized world. ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... squares to the Calle Mayor, the only thoroughfare of the town that yet retains some vestige of traffic. It is a fine, long street bordered by stone arcades, within which are the shops, and without which in the pleasant afternoon are the rosy and contemplative shopkeepers. It would seem a pity to disturb their dreamy repose by offering to trade; and in justice to Castilian taste and feeling I must say that nobody does it. Halfway down the street a side alley runs to the right, called Calle de Cervantes, ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... our readers will have seen by the preceding page, we have commenced engraving the above series of pictures. "The Age of Innocence," by Sir J. Reynolds, representing a young Hippopotamus seated under a shady tree, presents to the contemplative mind a charming union of youth ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... on the summer-clad landscape can gaze, In the orison hour, nor break forth into praise,— Who, through this fair garden contemplative rove, Nor feel that the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of the devil of hell, a manner of high-mounted bands and neckerchiefs for women, which did so closely cover their bosoms that men could no more put their hands under. For they had put the slit behind, and those neckcloths were wholly shut before, whereat the poor sad contemplative lovers were much discontented. Upon a fair Tuesday I presented a petition to the court, making myself a party against the said gentlewomen, and showing the great interest that I pretended therein, protesting that by the same reason I would cause the ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Mathews calls Mr. Hawthorne "Mr. Noble Melancholy," in the next number of the paper. You know, what you read was the introduction only. It is singular how many people insist that Mr. Hawthorne is gloomy, since he is not. He is pensive, perhaps, as all contemplative persons must be; especially when, as in him, "a great heart is the household fire of a grand intellect" (to quote his own words), because he sees and sympathizes with all human suffering. He has always seemed to me, in his remote moods, like a stray Seraph, who had experienced in his ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... some distance along the road towards Mont Blanc, and, in a tranquil and contemplative mood, had paused to watch the various effects of sunset. He leaned against a tree by the roadside, at the corner of a path which led from the highway to a private residence. Again it was August, exactly four years since he had quitted C——, exactly four years since the most singular event ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... in his possession of Vittorio, took no part in the bargaining that was going on at the hotel steps, a few yards away, and all along the line of the garden wall. He was standing beside the iron railing, pulling at a contemplative cigar, and listening, with considerable relish, to the wrangling of the gondoliers, when he heard a voice just under the wall, saying: "Buona ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... I thought there was no one here. My dear Miss Wilder, you look contemplative; but I fancy it wouldn't do to ask the subject ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... delights of a French cit. Moireau seated himself in the pit, just opposite the box of the gentlemen in waiting. The performance was "Castor and Pollux." At the commencement of the second act a sudden noise and bustle drew Moireau from the contemplative admiration into which the splendor of the piece had thrown him. The disturbance arose from a general move, which was taking place in the box belonging to the gentlemen in waiting. Madame d'Egmont had just arrived, attended by four or ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... mass in her chamber. After mass she taketh something to recreate nature, and soe goeth to the chapelle, hearinge the divine service and two lowe masses. From thence to dynner, during the tyme of whih she hath a lecture of holy matter (that is, reading from a religious book), either Hilton of Contemplative and Active Life, or some other spiritual and instructive work. After dynner she giveth audyence to all such as hath any matter to shrive unto her, by the space of one hower, and then sleepeth one quarter of an hower, and after she hath slept ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... soon enforc't to flye Thence into Egypt, till the Murd'rous King Were dead, who sought his life, and missing fill'd With Infant blood the streets of Bethlehem; From Egypt home return'd, in Nazareth Hath been our dwelling many years, his life 80 Private, unactive, calm, contemplative, Little suspicious to any King; but now Full grown to Man, acknowledg'd, as I hear, By John the Baptist, and in publick shown, Son own'd from Heaven by his Father's voice; I look't for some great change; to Honour? no, But trouble, as old Simeon plain foretold, That to ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... writing, the attention of the reader naturally is called again and again to the same scenes. But this book is written not so much with an eye to its literary quality, as to afford the visitor to Lake Tahoe—whether contemplative, actual, or retrospective—a truthful and comprehensive account and description of the Lake and ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... like to retire for a year, in order to write the book I had so often contemplated, and never found time to begin. This, I reflected, was a place of peace, of freedom from all distraction, the place for calm, contemplative meditation. ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... can the imagination be more effectually or safely exercised and improved than by the constant perusal and study of our best Poets. Poetry appeals to the universal sympathies of mankind. With the contemplative writers, we can indulge our pensive and thoughtful tastes. With the describers of natural scenery, we can delight in the beauties and glories of the external universe. With the great dramatists, we are able to study all the phases of the human mind, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... in the main those which seem more passive, more troubled with physical inertia, more contemplative when a little older, less apt in learning to act out new movements, less quick at taking ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... alarmed. Colden, it is true, was not a faultless or steadfast character. No gross or enormous vices were ascribed to him. His habits, as far as appearances enabled one to judge, were temperate and chaste. He was contemplative and bookish, and was vaguely described as being ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... GOD no doubt, but they will not subject themselves to the entire guidance of His Spirit; in short, it is far easier to bring a soul from a state of sin to that of grace, than it is to lead a busy, active, zealous person to the hidden, contemplative ...
— Gold Dust - A Collection of Golden Counsels for the Sanctification of Daily Life • E. L. E. B.
... provoking. The contemplative German had collected a lot of short ham-bones—where she found them I cannot imagine—and had made of them a border around my wife's flower-bed. The bones stuck up straight a few inches above the ...
— Rudder Grange • Frank R. Stockton
... said, 'Do not eat the fruit of the stricken branch,'" replied Hien, "and this person will never owe his success to one who is so detestable in his life and morals that with every facility for a scholarly and contemplative existence he freely announces his barbarous intention of becoming a pirate. Truly the Dragon of Justice does but sleep for a little time, and when he awakens all that will be left of the mercenary Tsin Lung and those ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... erected a hut for him nigh to the tent in the door of which he squatted, usually with Marufa beside him, throughout the day, with ever a contemplative eye upon his victim, an eye which Birnier was sure was eagerly seeking some excuse to plead that he had inadvertently rendered the magic impotent, and must ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... very difficult to resist the social influences into which they may be thrown. This was probably the case even where that influence tended to degrade him from the plane he would have occupied, if left to himself. His spiritual life seemed to lack that vigor and buoyancy so infinitely important to contemplative men. He appeared to be ever yearning for something which should add robustness to his convictions. After a pause of some ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... is the history of the work, which, with the "Origin of Species", marks an epoch in the history of biological sciences—the work with which the cautious, peace-loving investigator ventured forth from his contemplative life into the arena of strife and unrest, and laid himself open to all the annoyances that deep-rooted belief and prejudice, and the prevailing tendency of scientific thought at ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... answer was forthcoming. The man turned from the woman, and his eyes sought the child's cot. There was no softness in his regard. It was deeply contemplative. That was all. It was the woman who displayed feeling as she followed his gaze, and the lighting of her beautiful ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... which, like his hair, was black, encircled his chin, and a moustache was suffered to adorn his lip. His dress was black and a plain stock, without a collar, surrounded his throat. His eyes were large, black, and piercing, and the expression of his countenance was contemplative and sad. ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... incident in Alcott's life helps confirm a theory—not a popular one—that men accustomed to wander around in the visionary unknown are the quickest and strongest when occasion requires ready action of the lower virtues. It often appears that a contemplative mind is more capable of action than an actively objective one. Dr. Emerson says: "It is good to know that it has been recorded of Alcott, the benign idealist, that when the Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, heading the rush on the U.S. Court House in Boston, to rescue a fugitive ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... indeed wonderful," Shelby said, and Benjamin Crane looked happily contemplative of the seances in the future when Madame would utilize this miraculous gift of hers in ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... self-analysis. They are mainly men of action, and are supposed to lack the contemplative vision. That was the old belief. This war, however, which has shattered so many accepted ideas, has destroyed that conviction too. Nothing is more surprising than the revelation of their feelings disclosed in the soldiers' letters. They are the most intimate of human documents. Here and ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... for Joanna outside the Law Courts. In the stillness of the August evening and the yellow dusty sunshine, he looked almost contemplative, standing there with bowed head, looking down at his hands which were folded on his stick, while one or two pigeons strutted about at his feet. Joanna's heart melted at the sight of him. She went up to him, and ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... airman with sudden alarm in his voice. "Hold tight!" And they began to shoot towards earth faster than they had risen. They came down, by what seemed a miracle to Mr. Lavender, who was still contemplative, precisely where they had gone up. A little group was collected there, and as they stepped out a voice said, "I beg your pardon," in a tone so dry that it pierced even the fogged condition in which Mr. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... he said, "I think with you, that the life of a husbandman of all others is the most delectable. It is honorable, it is amusing, and, with judicious management, it is profitable. To see plants rise from the earth and flourish by the superior skill and bounty of the laborer fills a contemplative mind with ideas which are more easy to be conceived than expressed." "Agriculture has ever been the most favorite amusement of my life," he wrote after the Revolution, and he informed another correspondent ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... in a man's day when his brain is more contemplative than during that brief space when he is lathering his face, preparatory to shaving. Plying the brush, Jimmy reviewed the situation. He was, perhaps, a little too optimistic. Not unnaturally, he was inclined to look upon his luck as a sort ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... that St. Brendan's legend, with such qualities in prose and verse, made itself at home in many lands and languages, and became for centuries a widespread popular favorite and matter of general belief, also influencing the most permanent literature of a high contemplative cast, which we might suppose to be out of touch with it altogether. Certain of its more unusual incidents are found even in Arab writings of romance founded on fact, as in Edrisi's narrative of the Magrurin explorers of Lisbon and the adventures of Sinbad related ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... Contemplative Man's Recreation, being a discourse of Fish and Fishing, not unworthy the perusal of most Anglers, of 18 pence price. Written by Iz. Wa. Also the Gipsee, never known Play of the Spanish Gipsee, never till now published: Both printed for Richard ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... think) scorn to delight, so much they be content little to move, saving wrangling whether "virtus" be the chief or the only good; whether the contemplative or the active life do excel; which Plato and Boetius well knew; and therefore made mistress Philosophy very often borrow the masking raiment of poesy. For even those hard-hearted evil men, who think virtue a school- name, and know no other good but "indulgere genio," ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... complexion of pallor, but did not give her a colour. The lips, on the contrary, were satin red, and Orde was mildly surprised, after his recent talk, to find them sensitively moulded, and with a quaint, child-like quirk at the corners. Her eyes were rather contemplative, and so black as to ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... savage force that has made the contemplative soul of spiritual inquiry writhe under the startling contradictions of history. When this force has been aroused with fear it has snarled and roared defiance; when it has been enraged by opposition or the lash of mastership ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... the purposes of others, and in concealing their own, men who must have been formidable enemies and unsafe allies, but men, at the same time, whose tempers were mild and equable, and who possessed an amplitude and subtlety of intellect which would have rendered them eminent either in active or in contemplative life, and fitted them either to govern ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... divert myself by seeing the wondrous variety of prospects, beasts, birds, fishes, insects, and vegetables, with which God has been pleased to enrich the several parts of this globe; a variety which, as it must give great pleasure to a contemplative beholder, so doth it admirably display the power, and wisdom, and goodness of the Creator. Indeed, to say the truth, there is but one work in his whole creation that doth him any dishonour, and with that I have long since avoided holding ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... and generous disposition that did not disdain the lighter side of human nature, a heart too full of kindness to cherish wrath for long, and an almost boyish love of fun that could scarcely be repressed. If this was the individual in his quieter and contemplative moods, an energy that never tired, and a warlike spirit that only needed the occasion to blaze forth, revealed the man of action. It may be pronounced a paradox to say so, but to the end of his life the true Gordon was more of the soldier than ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... first time the lumberman's face lost, during a single instant, its mask of immobility. His steel-blue eyes flashed, his mouth twitched with some strong emotion. For the first time, too, he spoke without his contemplative pause ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... that His own being is His happiness. In another way life is taken to mean the activity on the part of the living thing by which activity the principle of life is reduced to act. Thus we speak of an active or contemplative life, or of a life of pleasure; and in this way the last end is called life everlasting, as is clear from the text: "This is life everlasting, that they know Thee, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... had strayed elsewhere, for the reason that it had become taken up with grave meditation on the subject of the purchase just made. Suddenly finding himself no longer a fictitious proprietor, but the owner of a real, an actually existing, estate, he became contemplative, and his plans and ideas assumed such a serious vein as imparted to his features an ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... Inns higgle pedler-like, vigilant of the Liberties of England, as they call them. In the end, Mackinsy kept his law-office or got it restored to him; 3,000 pounds a year without excess of work; a man much the gentleman, according to the rule then current: in contemplative rare moments, the man, looking back through the dim posterns of the mind, might see afar off a certain pirouetting Figure, once far from indifferent, and not yet quite melted into cheerless gray smoke, as so much of the rest is—to Mr. Mackinsy and us. I have made, in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... favorite philosophy of many of the Church fathers, and so introduced into Christian thought and life the Platonic dualism, that sharp distinction between the temporal and the eternal which belittles the practical life and glorifies the contemplative. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect;—for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action. Now one of Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is, to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself, Shakespeare, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... being asked how many shares of the Communal land he will take, and replies in a slow, contemplative way, "I have two sons, and there is myself, so I'll take three shares, or somewhat less, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... later life, unpublished, as immature, and partly no doubt because he came to recognize in it an unbecoming arrogance of tone, for its title was 'Temporis Partus Maximus' (The Greatest Birth of Time.) But six years later he defines these "vast contemplative ends" in his famous letter to Burghley, asking for preferment which will enable him to prosecute his grand scheme and to employ other minds in aid of it. "For I have taken all knowledge to be my province," ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... may seem, you cannot always be sitting at the Master's feet in that contemplative, ecstatic mood sometimes attributed to Mary. Like Martha, we have to do a good deal of serving. Whether we are encumbered by 'much serving' is a separate question; but if we are to fulfil the Divine tasks we have to do a great deal of serving as well as praying and trusting. I may ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... the girths of the saddle, and, unstrapping the bag of gold which was attached to the holsters, he placed it by his side on the rock, while he splashed his hands and face in the cool water. By-and-by he drew up the girths, mounted his horse dreamily, for he was a man of contemplative moods, and rode away from the way-side well, forgetful of his treasure, which lay temptingly on the flat rock, ready to the hand of the first comer. Not so his faithful dog, who, having in vain tried to lift the bag, which was too heavy for him, ran swiftly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... are all lively and desirous of seeing the world as thoroughly as possible before going to roost or broil. As a general thing, we find in the large house sixteen young fowls of the contemplative, flavourless, resigned-to-the-inevitable variety; three more (the same three every night) perch on the roof and are driven down; four (always the same four) cling to the edge of the open door, waiting to fly off, but not in, when you attempt to close it; nine huddle together ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... mean it? He spoke of me to you?" And the good Nabob, quite proud, would look around him with movements of the head that were supremely laughable, or perhaps assume the contemplative air of a devotee who should hear the name of ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... afforded opportunity for the self-consciousness of the nation to express itself in all its variety and force. The unbending religious dogmatism of the Sadducees, the comprehensive practical sense of the Pharisees in religious and Rational concerns, the contemplative mysticism of the Essenes, they are the most important offshoots from the Jewish system as held at that time. In consequence of the external conditions that brought about the destruction of the Maccabean state[12] after a century's ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... power. Yet, during all these multitudinous exertions, time would be found for the composition of a discourse on Natural Theology, that bears no marks of haste or excitement of mind, but presents as calm a face as though it had been the laborious production of a contemplative philosopher. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... thought of Germany since the time of Kant. It would be necessary to indicate how, by breaking a way through the narrow creeds and equally narrow scepticism of the previous age, the new spirit extended the horizon of man's active and contemplative life, and made him free of the universe, and the repository of the past conquests of his race. It proposed to man the great task of solving the problem of humanity, but it strengthened him with its past achievement, and inspired him with the conviction of its ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... another look at the old place," I said, one day in August as I was passing the lodge, and rode at a quiet contemplative walk down the avenue. I hung my rein over one of the rails of the porch steps, and passed round into the garden. Not a flower to be seen; but the place of them famously supplied with potatoes and other useful articles—and the same evidence ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... the Clerk of Oxenford. This character varies from that of Chaucer, as the contemplative philosopher varies from the poetical genius. There are always these two classes of learned sages, the poetical and the philosophical. The Painter has put them side by side, as if the youthful clerk had put himself under the tuition of the mature poet. Let the Philosopher always be the servant ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... Sometimes it is a little boy or girl, sometimes an old woman, and early in the morning whoever has the post collects the whole flock, drives it to a chosen feeding ground, spends the day there, and brings it back at night. It must be a contemplative life, and in dry weather pleasant. I think it would suit a philosopher if he could choose his days. In our Franconian village the gooseherd was a little boy, vastly proud of his job. Every morning, long before we were up, he would stride past our windows piping the same tune, and at the sound ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... drop of dew. It is suspended from a leaf. It glints, and gleams, and glows, in the clear morning light. As you look into it, if you are in a contemplative mood, the drop of dew expands into a world; and what a world of beauty! It seems a very paradise, where the redeemer of the Lord might walk; where angels might ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... absently, as he carried his eyes from the contemplative stare with which they had been regarding the vagaries of a butterfly on the skylight. "What have ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... or of a lover for his sweetheart, is a sweet bond of agreement and exchange trade in a lovely contest. The love of a father for his son or daughter, where it is love at all, is a broad, generous, sad, contemplative giving without thought of return, a hail and farewell to a troubled traveler whom he would do much to guard, a balanced judgment of weakness and strength, with pity for failure and pride in achievement. It is a lovely, generous, philosophic ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... occupation was proof of a reflective and contemplative organization, and he had brought him away without any other recommendation. The noble carriage of this gentleman, for whom he believed himself to be engaged, had won Planchet—that was the name of the Picard. He felt a slight disappointment, however, when he saw that this place ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... I'll not have that. A Murray aye had a bed to go to and a sup to eat. (After a contemplative pause.) Here, I'll give you three pounds and you can ...
— The Drone - A Play in Three Acts • Rutherford Mayne
... and grace of Goldsmith's line, but with a fresh local spirit, have not been more perfectly reproduced, nor with a more distinct revelation of a new spirit, than in this poem. It is retrospective and contemplative, but it is also full of the buoyancy of youth, of the consciousness of poetic skill, and of blithe anticipation. Its tender reminiscence and occasional fond elegiac strain are but clouds of the morning. Its literary form is exquisite, and its general ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... was shipwrecked, though he never ceased to long to return to his old greatness, he gave all his time to writing and to science. He spent many peaceful hours in the garden that he loved. "His lordship," we are told, "was a very contemplative person, and was wont to contemplate in his delicious walks." He was generally accompanied by one of the gentlemen of his household "that attended him with ink and paper ready to set down presently ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... prosperity from the philosophic tenor of his former life. He abated nothing of his peripatetic exercises; and repaired duly in the morning, as he had done in former years, to St. James's Park,—where he sate in contemplative ease amongst the cows, inhaling their balmy breath and pursuing his philosophic reveries. He had also purchased an organ, or more than one, with which he solaced his solitude and beguiled himself of uneasy thoughts ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... are of a more sedate, contemplative character. Philosophy becomes the rigid mistress of your life, enchanting enthusiasm the companion of mine. Suppose she lead me now and then in pursuit of a meteor; am not I happy in the chase? When one illusion vanishes, another ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... not be touched nor offended, but be "reinstated in the apostolic grace," met with no response. It was this quarrel with Julius II. which prevented the completion of the sepulchral monument. The "Moses" and the figures supposed to represent the Active and the Contemplative Life, and three Caryatides (since removed) represent the whole of the original design, "a parallelogram surmounted with forty statues, and covered with reliefs and other ornaments."—See Duppa's Life, etc., 1856, pp. 33, 34, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... very heavy outside, us lay for inside Belle Isle, and carried open water most across t' Straits. Well, sir, t' wind veered round all of a sudden, just as us was abeam of t' Devil's Table, and t' Gulf ice came out of t' Straits fair roaring"—and Uncle Rube took another contemplative puff ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... nitre, or the power of steam, or of electricity, or of magnetism. These energies always existed in Nature, and they were always discernible. They seemed, some of them unserviceable, some noxious, some no better than a sport to children,—until contemplative ability, combining with practic skill, tamed their wild nature, subdued them to use, and rendered them at once the most powerful and the most tractable agents, in subservience to the great views and designs of men. Did fifty thousand persons, whose mental ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Catherine rose and stood contemplative before a long mirror that was in her room. Catherine de Vaucelles was now, at twenty-three, in the full flower of her comeliness. Blue eyes the mirror showed her,—luminous and tranquil eyes, set very far apart; honey-colored ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... perverted, that its ideas are mere fantasy to common men. Whether the artist becomes poet or philosopher, moralist or founder of a religion, his sexual doctrine is nothing but a barren special pleading for pleasure, excitement, and knowledge when he is young, and for contemplative tranquillity when he is old and satiated. Romance and Asceticism, Amorism and Puritanism are equally unreal in the great Philistine world. The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political orations, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... most experienced physiognomist in the world would have failed to observe the slightest trace of cunning, or want of a balanced mind in their expression. During the progress of his story he had continually held his ring where he could see it, and several times had raised it to the light, in a contemplative sort of way, as if he drew some satisfaction from its appearance. He bowed his head in his hands as he ceased speaking, and some moments elapsed before he looked up, though when he did ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... without knowing whither or why; but as a fact—a great and mysterious fact—to be pondered over, studied, and perchance in some small measure understood. By the multitude these men were sneered at as eccentric or feared as supernatural. Their calm, clear, contemplative attitude seemed either insane or diabolic; and accordingly they have been pitied as enthusiasts or killed as blasphemers. One of these great souls may have been a prophet or preacher, and have called ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... she looked at him to learn the effect of her words of encouragement. He had let the oars drift alongside, and the boat had come to a standstill. Everything on earth seemed taking a contemplative rest, as if waiting to hear the avowal of something from his lips. At that instant he appeared to break a resolution hitherto zealously kept. Leaving his seat amidships he came and gently edged himself down beside her upon the narrow seat at ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... subject, but sovereign, through virtue. Each thing has virtue in its nature, which does that to which it is ordained; and the better it does it so much the more virtue it has: hence we call that man virtuous who lives a life contemplative or active, doing that for which he is best fitted; we ascribe his virtue to the horse that runs swiftly and much, to which end he is ordained: we see virtue of a sword that cuts through hard things well, since it has been made to do so. Thus speech, which is ordained to express human thought, ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... proportionate to that end. Again, man's good is threefold as stated in Ethic. i, 8; one consisting in external things, for instance riches; another, consisting in bodily goods; the third, consisting in the goods of the soul among which the goods of the contemplative life take precedence of the goods of the active life, as the Philosopher shows (Ethic. x, 7), and as our Lord declared (Luke 10:42), "Mary hath chosen the better part." Of these goods those that are external are directed to those which belong to the body, and those which belong ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... preparing stories to begin with detail work, often a gesture or side issue which one has remembered from hearing a story told, but if this is done before the contemplative period, only scrappy, jerky and ineffective results are obtained, on which one cannot count for dramatic effects. This kind of preparation reminds one of a young peasant woman who was taken to see a performance of "Wilhelm Tell," and when questioned as to the plot could only sum it up saying, ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... picking flies with his whip from the horses' backs. He had a smooth countenance, deeply tanned, and pale, clear blue eyes. At his side sat a priest in black, a man past middle age, with ashen, embittered lips, and a narrowed, chilling gaze. They were silent, contemplative; but, from the seat behind them, flowed a constant, buoyant, youthful chatter. A girl with a shining mass of chestnut hair gathered loosely on a virgin neck was recounting the thrilling incidents of "commencement week" for the benefit of a heavily-built young man with a handsome, masklike countenance. ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... him heart's ease and peace, and there was no one to disabuse his mind of the delusion. After nearly two years in the monastery, while sitting with his father at the cloister board on the event of his ordination to the priesthood, he declares to his father that he enjoys the quiet, contemplative life that he has chosen. Surely, he made a mistake by becoming monk, but Catholics cannot fault him for that mistake. If the life of monks and nuns is really what they claim that it is: the highest and most perfect form of Christianity, ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... angling is the contemplative man's recreation, and, having had in these later years much to con over in my mind, I know that he is right. But it is no occupation for a fuming man, and as I marched up and down I forgot all about my cork, till, with a short laugh that had the tail ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... selfish, and unselfish. It is concentric. The love of a husband for his wife, or of a lover for his sweetheart, is a sweet bond of agreement and exchange trade in a lovely contest. The love of a father for his son or daughter, where it is love at all, is a broad, generous, sad, contemplative giving without thought of return, a hail and farewell to a troubled traveler whom he would do much to guard, a balanced judgment of weakness and strength, with pity for failure and pride in achievement. It is a lovely, generous, philosophic blossom which rarely ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... putting her under a financial obligation to a stranger. He accepted the money quite simply, and turning away to speak to a porter, he tucked the two-shilling piece into his waistcoat pocket, while an odd, contemplative little smile curved ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... was surveying the moon, walking in her brightness, and taking her progress among the constellations, a thought rose in me which I believe very often perplexes and disturbs men of serious and contemplative natures. David himself fell into it in that reflection, When I consider the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and stars which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other. Hereditary wealth afforded me an education of no common order, and a contemplative turn of mind enabled me to methodize the stores which early study very diligently garnered up.—Beyond all things, the study of the German moralists gave me great delight; not from any ill-advised admiration of their ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... stiff, grey hair stood up in irregular tufts above her weather-beaten forehead. Her host, sitting sidewise on the edge of the table so that he could swing one leg freely and spit cleanly through the open window, bit off a contemplative quid of "blackjack" tobacco, and waited for her to unfold the problems ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... lived on the earth. For myself, I would rather have seen Lamb himself once, than to have lived with Judas. Herbert, to my great delight, has not changed; I should know him anywhere,—the same serious, contemplative face, with lurking humor at the corners of the mouth,—the same cheery laugh and clear, distinct enunciation as of old. There is nothing so winning as a good voice. To see Herbert again, unchanged in all outward essentials, is not only gratifying, but valuable as a testimony to nature's success ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... furnish a complete refutation of the assertion so frequently made by ignorant and prejudiced writers that the Indian had no religion excepting what they are pleased to call the meaning less mummeries of the medicine man. This is the very reverse of the truth. The Indian is essentially religious and contemplative, and it might almost be said that every act of his life is regulated and determined by his religious belief. It matters not that some may call this superstition. The difference is only relative. The religion of to-day has ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... theory—not a popular one—that men accustomed to wander around in the visionary unknown are the quickest and strongest when occasion requires ready action of the lower virtues. It often appears that a contemplative mind is more capable of action than an actively objective one. Dr. Emerson says: "It is good to know that it has been recorded of Alcott, the benign idealist, that when the Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, heading the rush on the U.S. Court House in Boston, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... I said, "of contemplative Orders of monks and nuns, who say that they specialise in prayer, and give up their whole ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... does not look specially clever," said Franks, in a contemplative voice. "Her speech is nothing at all remarkable; in fact, in conversation I think her ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... of her music, and the applause at the end of every evening, applause without which she could not live. To say that no thought of my stage life ever crosses my mind would be to tell a lie that no one would believe; all thoughts cross one's mind, especially in a convent of a contemplative Order where the centre of one's life is, as Mother Mary Hilda would say, the perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament exposed upon the altar; where, as she teaches, next to receiving Holy Communion, this ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... think, however, that the spirit of Palamas rests within the narrow confines of his native land. On the contrary, it knows no chains and travels freely about the earth. He is a faithful servant of "Melete," the Muse of contemplative study, a service which is very seldom liked by Modern Greeks. In his preface to his collection of critical essays entitled Grammata he rebukes his fellow countrymen for this: "On an old attic vase," he says, "stand the three original ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... who have been stained by crimes, whatever may have been their services to civilization. Most of them have yielded to their great temptations. But Marcus Aurelius, on the throne of the civilized world, was modest, virtuous, affable, accessible, considerate, gentle, studious, contemplative, stained by novices,—a model of human virtue. Hence he is one of the favorite characters of history. No Roman emperor was so revered and loved as he, and of no one have so many monuments been preserved. Everybody had his picture or statue in his house. He was more than ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... contended for the prize with the most celebrated of his contemporaries, and still remained the friend of his rivals; a circumstance which evinces either the goodness of his heart, or the superiority of his genius. [101] But the talents of Numerian were rather of the contemplative than of the active kind. When his father's elevation reluctantly forced him from the shade of retirement, neither his temper nor his pursuits had qualified him for the command of armies. His constitution was destroyed by the hardships of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... they proceeded on their way toward the fish-corrals, of which there were two situated near each other, both belonging to Capitan Tiago. From afar were to be seen some herons perched in contemplative attitude on the tops of the bamboo posts, while a number of white birds, which the Tagalogs call kalaway, flew about in different directions, skimming the water with their wings and filling the air with shrill cries. At the approach of the ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... in the cabin and the men choosing various spots outside, that he became talkative again for a while. We lay in the blank—we had spread on some soft, dry sand in preference to the stable, where Taylor and Tommy had gone. Under the contemplative influence of the stars, ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... to crow like chanticleer, That fools should be so deep-contemplative; And I did laugh sans intermission An hour by ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... and happy nature mingled itself with mine. She kindled a domestic fire within my heart, and took up her dwelling there, even in that chill and lonesome cavern hung round with glittering icicles of fancy. She gave me warmth of feeling, while the influence of my mind made her contemplative. I taught her to love the moonlight hour, when the expanse of the encircled bay was smooth as a great mirror and slept in a transparent shadow; while beyond Nahant, the wind rippled the dim ocean into a dreamy brightness, which grew faint afar ...
— The Village Uncle (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Washington Irving, the apt and deserved soubriquet of 'the picturesque explorer of America.' To the pleasure which Mr. Lanman derived from these pursuits he added a sportsman's love for the field and took genuine delight in the 'contemplative art' of angling. He was the first American to cast the artificial fly in the Saguenay region and to describe for the angler the charms of that since famous locality. He has followed this sport in nearly every State in the Union, never without his sketching ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... more sedate, contemplative character. Philosophy becomes the rigid mistress of your life, enchanting enthusiasm the companion of mine. Suppose she lead me now and then in pursuit of a meteor; am not I happy in the chase? When one illusion vanishes, another ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... surprise, because of course she was going out in a minute, put it into her ulster pocket. But, curiously enough, the sight of her face only intensified an impression that had been strong on him during the last part of their walk—the impression that she was a long way off. It wasn't the familiar contemplative brown study, either. There was an active eager excitement about it that made it more beautiful than ever he had seen it before. But it was as if she were looking at something he couldn't see—listening to ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... of our active, aggressive, material, Occidental civilization to sneer and scoff at the quiet, passive, and less material civilization of the Orient. We despise—that is, the unthinking majority do—the studious, contemplative Oriental. We believe in being "up and doing." But in this one particular of worry we have much to learn from the Oriental. If happiness and a large content be a laudable aim of life how far are we—the occidental world—succeeding in attaining it? Few there be ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... "that of all diversions which ingenuity ever devised for the relief of idleness, fishing is the worst qualified to amuse a man, who is at once indolent and impatient, such men's Rods are quickly discarded." My advice to those who are desirous of enjoying "the contemplative man's recreation," is that they undergo a probationary course, under the guidance of a competent professor. Three or four days of diligent observation employed in watching the manual operations of an instructor, would go far towards giving them a pretty good idea of how to set about ...
— The Teesdale Angler • R Lakeland
... flushed at that chance allusion to Fareham's picture. It brought back a vision of the Convent parlour, and she standing there with Fareham's miniature in her hand, wonderingly contemplative of the dark, strong face. At that stage of her life she had seen so few men's faces; and this one had a power in it that startled her. Did she divine, by some supernatural foreknowledge, that this face held ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... evidently still dissatisfied for he continued to back vigorously, drawing the protesting little lamplighter after him. When he had put perhaps twenty feet between himself and the lamp-post Bill achieved his usual upright attitude and his countenance assumed its habitual contemplative expression, the haunted look faded from his sagacious eye and his flaming nostrils resumed their normal benevolent expression. Taking note of these swift changes, it occurred to Mr. Shrimplin that rather ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... were suddenly checked by the sound of soft footsteps in the sand behind her. She turned swiftly. Her dreamy, contemplative mood changed to one closely akin to panic, as out of the shadows tall and dominant in his Potlatch robes, the White ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of life,—remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit,[46] to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption.[47] Henceforth it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. Observe, too, the impossibility of ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... pernicious habit of almost constant seclusion in his library, where he revolves, as if fascinated, the philosophy of doubt, or some equally distressing themes; all which has now issued as you see. The contemplative and the active life are both necessary to man, no doubt; but in ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... thus questioned, gave in the midst of that big assemblage of contemplative Munis a full and proper answer in words consonant with their ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... active Religious Orders could beat all other forms of association at their own game—that they could teach and work more cheaply and effectively, and so on—well, the most foolish Political Economist had to confess that the Religious Orders made for the country's welfare. And as for the Contemplative Orders——" ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... groups, found the conversation of the larger annoying because it prevented him from hearing that of the smaller. It was carried on for the greater part by his mother and Mr. Trumble; Laura sat silent between these two; and Lindley's mood was obviously contemplative. Mr. Wade Trumble, twenty-six, small, earnest, and already beginning to lose his ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... volume merely opened the inquiry into the nature of ideas of Beauty and Relation, by analysing (as far as I was able to do so) the two faculties of the human mind which mainly seized such ideas; namely, the contemplative and imaginative faculties. ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... say that I was among the first thousand who made the pioneer voyage on hyperdrive to the star group beyond Centaurus. We returned in triumph with our fantastic but true tales of the organic planet Vita and the contemplative humanoids of Nirva who will consciousness into subjectively grasping the life and beauty of subatomic space. The knowledge we brought back assured that the fatal disease of ennui could never again attack man though they lived ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... appearing between the yellow houses at the end of the street, intensely blue, and sparkling in the rays of the afternoon sun. It was altogether a soothing scene; and had he been alone he would have sunk into that state of intellectual apathy which is so often miscalled contemplative. The homely duties of hospitality, however, compelled him to exert himself for the entertainment of his guest. Several of the people they had just met at Mrs. Beale's went past together, laughing and talking, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... to some shelter'd cave, Dost there reveal me to myself, and show Of my own bosom the mysterious depths. And when with soothing beam, the moon's pale orb Full in my view climbs up the pathless sky, From crag and dewy grove, the silvery forms Of by-gone ages hover, and assuage The joy austere of contemplative thought. ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... and had not taken time to reconsider them. They were not narrative pieces, in which the interest of the story carries you along in reading, whether the diction is perfected or not, but mostly short lyrical poems, and contemplative pieces, which are always much more effective when found amongst other descriptions of poetry or in a magazine, than when collected together in a volume. They were generally sad, a common fault with poetesses; but poor Elsie had more excuse for taking that tone than ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... be 168 or 170 years since the French first landed at this point. It was just 59 since the British power had supervened, and 39 since the American right had been acknowledged by the sagacity of Dr. Franklin's treaty of 1783. But to the Indian, who stood in a contemplative and stoic attitude, wrapped in his fine blanket of broadcloth, viewing the spectacle, it must have been equally striking, and indicative that his reign in the North-West, that old hive of Indian hostility, was done. And, had he been a man of letters, he might have inscribed, with ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... has the roughest tongue and the tenderest heart of any cat in Paris. If you observe the colour of his coat, it is rather blue than grey; a certain indication of goodness in these contemplative creatures. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... by our author upon the validity of "the principle of the Unconditioned or the Infinite." "Supposing it were conceded that some faint glimmering of this great truth [the existence of a First Cause] might, by induction, have been discovered by contemplative minds, by what means could they have demonstrated to themselves that he is eternal, self-existent, immortal, and independent?"[365] "Between things visible and invisible, time and eternity, beings finite and beings infinite, objects of sense and objects of faith, the connection is not perceptible ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Ju's usually busy tongue was taking a well-earned rest, and his hawk-like visage was shrouded in a deep, contemplative repose. His always bloodshot eyes were speculative as he surveyed the smoke-laden scene from behind his shabby bar. The place was full of drinkers and gamblers. The hour was past midnight. And he was estimating silently the further spending possibilities of his customers, ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... universal law of kinds and essence. This double nature of good, as it is specifically developed in man, not as humanity only, for man is not limited to his kind in his intelligence, or in his will, or in his affections,—this double nature of good, as it is developed in man, with his contemplative, and moral, and religious grasp of a larger whole than his particular and private nature can comprehend—with his large discourse looking before and after, on the one hand, and his blind instincts, and his narrow isolating senses on the other—with that distinctive human nature ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... Whether the artist becomes poet or philosopher, moralist or founder of a religion, his sexual doctrine is nothing but a barren special pleading for pleasure, excitement, and knowledge when he is young, and for contemplative tranquillity when he is old and satiated. Romance and Asceticism, Amorism and Puritanism are equally unreal in the great Philistine world. The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... conversation of his "guide, philosopher, and friend" strangely distasteful to him. That cynical manner of looking at life, which not long ago had seemed to him the only manner compatible with wisdom and experience, now grated harshly upon those finer senses which had been awakened in the quiet contemplative existence he had of late been leading. He had been wont to enjoy Captain Paget's savage bitterness against a world which had not provided him with a house in Carlton-gardens, and a seat in the Cabinet; but to-night he was revolted by the noble Horatio's ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... joys to the contemplative mind. A slow procession of white ducks, walking delicately, with heads lifted high and timid eyes, in a long line, has the air of an ecclesiastical procession. The singers go before, the minstrels follow after. There is something ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... For my part I shall never die for love, being as I am, too general-contemplative for the narrow passion. I am in some sort a ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... has created 'two great lights,'—the greater light to rule man's busy day—and that is Reason, and the lesser to rule his contemplative ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... and his exaltation of the man of action above the man of thought are typical. His heroes, fair-haired and blue-eyed, stalwart and vigorous, relying on strength and longing for adventure, tender-hearted and contemplative when not aroused to violent action and bent on deeds of valor, personify the national ideal. His whole vision of life is Scandinavian, bright and vivid, with a tinge of melancholy. Tegner was, with Geijer and Ling, the first to adopt national ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... was to me what light is to the eye that has once seen it, air to the lungs that have once inhaled it, or thought to the mind in which it has once been conceived. I defied Heaven itself to rob me of this divine embodying of my desires. I had seen her, and that was enough. For the contemplative, to see is to enjoy. It scarcely mattered to me whether she loved me, or whether she passed me by without perceiving me. I had been touched by her splendor, and was still enveloped in her rays; she could no more withdraw them from me than the sun can take from the earth the beams which ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... combination with the speculative sense, with the tendency which carries a man toward the contemplative study of life and nature as a whole, is the critical sense—the tendency which, in the realm of action and concrete performance, carries him, as Amiel expresses it, "droit au defaut," and makes him conscious at once of the weak point, the germ of failure in a project or an action. It ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... unacceptable to the reader. Few subjects are more interesting than the popular legends of a country, which are the source from whence many of our later novelists draw several of their writings: they offer a field for reflection to the contemplative observer of man; and those of Germany, although some are disfigured with a little too much absurdity in their details, are confessedly a mine of wealth to the lover of research in such matters. Here Schiller first drew the sources of his inspiration; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... eternity to eternity. As the oak dies and leaves its eternal image in the seed which never dies, so these grand river-forced ravines, abused and disabused as may be, go on for ever, despite the scribblers, and one finds the best in his imagination returning by some back-lane to contemplative thought. But as a casual traveler, may I say that the first experience I had of the gorges made me modest, patient, single-minded, conscious of man's significant insignificance, conscious of the unspeakable, wondrous grandeur of ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... It had the effect of a preposterous misfit. Johnson consulted with a thin-legged, short-skirted verger about the disposition of the party. The officiating clergy appeared distantly in the doorway of the vestry, putting on his surplice, and relapsed into a contemplative cheek-scratching that was manifestly habitual. Before the bride arrived Mr. Polly's sense of the church found an outlet in whispered criticisms of ecclesiastical architecture with Johnson. "Early Norman arches, eh?" he said, ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... to you, when you were walking alone and in contemplative mood, to lie flat on your face in the grassy underbrush of a forest, amid the peculiar vegetation, of many and varying species, that grows between the fallen autumn leaves, and to let your eyes stray along ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... immediately below us, was filled with a family of Kabyles, which consisted chiefly of a magnificent virago of a wife, tattooed, with a fine gold ring in her nostrils, who seemed to have a trying life with her mild and contemplative old husband. She had more children than one could count without giving the matter that close attention which might be misinterpreted. She cradled them in the manger every night. Loud as her voice was, though, I could ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... worthily employed. Whenever I pass by St. James's Street, having the privilege, like the rest of the world, of looking in at the windows of 'Blight's,' or 'Foodle's,' or 'Snook's,' or the great bay at the 'Contemplative Club,' I behold with respectful appreciation the figures within—the honest rosy old fogies, the mouldy old dandies, the waist-belts and glossy wigs and tight cravats of those most vacuous and respectable men. Such men are best there during the day-time surely. ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... too severe," returned Juliet. "We are apt to forget during the excitement of the moment the cruelty we inflict. I read old Izaak Walton when a child. He made me mistress of the whole art of angling. It is such a quiet contemplative amusement. The clear stream, the balmy air, the warbling of happy birds, the fragrant hedge-rows and flowery banks, by which you are surrounded, make you alive to the most pleasing impressions: and amidst sights and sounds of beauty, you never reflect that you are acting the ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... and manner then made on me is now perfectly revived. He was six feet and one inch high, broad and athletic, with very large limbs, entirely erect, and without the slightest tendency to stooping; his hair was white, and tied with a silk string; his countenance lofty, masculine, and contemplative; his eye light gray. He was dressed in the clothes of a citizen, and over these a blue surtout of the finest cloth. His weight must have been two hundred and thirty pounds, with no superfluous flesh; all was bone ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... Could any contemplative mind doubt for a moment the ability of the white population of the Union, if justly disposed, to raise the colored population of the country, in a short time, to the platform of a decent respectability? With unjust prejudice laid ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... observation of Nature is the secret of his power as a writer. He disdained nothing, for nothing seemed too small for him. Nature, in none of its phases, could appear insignificant to his fertile and mellow soul. When he could not soar in the high regions of contemplative philosophy, he stooped as low as the little child whose rosy cheek he patted, and who then became to him a teacher and a study. An insect crawling on a leaf,—a bit of grass bringing the joy of its short life around the stones of the pavement,—a cloud floating ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... illuminates the contents of the volume. The poetic fancy and what were then the politics of the original, appear in the choice of subject and attitude. Dr. Darwin sat to Mr. Wright about the same period. That was a simply contemplative portrait, of the most ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... (aisthetikos) it means what has to do with sense-perception as a source of knowledge; and this is still its meaning in Kant's philosophy ("Transcendental Aesthetic''). Its limitation to that function of sensuous perception which we know as the contemplative enjoyment of beauty is due to A. G. Baumgarten. Although the subject does not readily lend itself to precise definition at the outset, we may indicate itsscope and aim, as undeibtood by recent writers, by saying that it deals ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... woods and pastures, beneath the August sky, did but imperfectly symbolize the lack of dew and moisture, that, since yesterday, as it were, had blighted my fields of thought, and penetrated to the innermost and shadiest of my contemplative recesses. The change will be recognized by many, who, after a period of happiness, have endeavored to go on with the same kind of life, in the same scene, in spite of the alteration or withdrawal of some principal circumstance. They discover (what heretofore, perhaps, ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a long silence dropped down. Ope-Kwan borrowed Koogah's pipe for a couple of contemplative sucks. One of the younger women giggled nervously and ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... him. From the lofty ceilings fell the voices of guardian angels. There was not a flagstone in the halls, not an ashlar of the walls, not a bough of the plane-trees, but it spoke to him of the delights of his contemplative life, his lispings of tenderness, his gradual initiation, the favours vouchsafed him in return for self-bestowal, all that happiness ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... men of action, practical men in the eminent sense, are the least disposed to contemplate and to theorize: their energy is not delayed in contemplation, it rushes at once into will. And conversely, that contemplative men, philosophers, are often very mediocre in practical matters, weak willed, and therefore neglected and thrust aside in the tumult of life. It is easy to see that these distinctions are merely empirical and quantitative. Certainly, the practical man has no need ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... appointment, and Joseph, sitting alone, waiting for the sound of her step, had drifted into a reverie concerning himself and his summer's work. He was kneeling in the midst of a dusty little group of last year's studies, regarding them with newly contemplative eyes. Were they, after all, with all their muddy color and uncertain composition, better—actually better, in the fundamentals that count, than those two glorified forms that ruled the room?—For the first ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... said Mr. Squincher, As in contemplative pose, He stood before the looking-glass And burnished up his nose, And brushed the dandruff from a span- Spick-splinter suit of clothes,— "Why, bless you, Mr. Squincher, You're as handsome as ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... one of admiring affection; and where the mountain and the bald rock would be productive of emotions only of strength and sternness, their softer featurings of brawling brook, bending and variegated shrubbery, wild flower, gadding vine, and undulating hillock, mould the contemplative spirit into gentleness and love. The scenery of the South below the mountain regions, seldom impresses at first, but it grows upon acquaintance; and in a little while, where once all things looked monotonous and unattractive, we learn to ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... house itself, which was formerly a convent of Cistercian monks, had a venerable appearance: and along the front that looked into the garden, was a stone gallery, which afforded me many an agreeable walk, when I was disposed to be contemplative. Now the old front is covered with a screen of modern architecture; so that all without is Grecian, and all within Gothic. As for the garden, which was well stocked with the best fruit which England could produce, there is not now the least ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... them it is for solitary reverie, or sometimes for orgies. The main part of their original literature, like that of their brothers and cousins on the Continent, consists of triumphal songs and heartrending laments. It is contemplative and warlike.[52] ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... dawn. The moment that his face framed itself in the square of the window, dawn, coming in like an AEgean sunset with a violet light, lit up his half-profile, throwing into clear relief the familiar features, and dropping a brilliant spark into each of his wide, contemplative eyes. The effect was a thing of the stage: it lent him an added wistfulness, and I felt a pang of pity for him, and a throb of something not lower than love. He walked back to his bed, whistling, while I completed my preparations ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... ignorance Avoid all magnificences that will in a short time be forgotten Being as impatient of commanding as of being commanded Defer my revenge to another and better time Desires, that still increase as they are fulfilled Detest in others the defects which are more manifest in us Disdainful, contemplative, serious and grave as the ass Do not, nevertheless, always believe myself Events are a very poor testimony of our worth and parts. Every abridgment of a good book is a foolish abridgment Fault not to discern how far a man's worth extends Folly and absurdity are not to be cured by bare admonition ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Essays of Montaigne • David Widger
... theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage. He only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion; of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis; happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... Socrates. It is all very well to have a contemplative disposition; but it need not be accompanied ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... not that I can hope to describe my sensations of that night, in such a manner as to impart them to the contemplative spirit that may read this sketch, and to afford pleasure at all comparable with that which I enjoyed; but I have thought that I might by the recital awaken some gratifying recollections of still higher flittings of the imagination into the regions of unlimited Fancy; where ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... which thou boldest most precious and dear shall be torn from thy keeping, And from the heights of Olympus, down shalt thou fall in the dust; Still the contemplative eye discerns under mutable sand-drifts Stable foundations of stone, marble and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... shining ones, lie on the part you would invite me to. But if I could bring myself to fancy, what I think you do but fancy, that I have any talents for active life, I want health for it; and besides it is a real truth. I have, if possible, less inclination, than ability. Contemplative life is not only my scene, but is my habit too. I begun my life where most people end theirs, with all that the world calls ambition. I don't know why it is called so, for, to me, it always seemed to be stooping, or climbing. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... motions he had taken unto himself astonishing quantities of lobster-omelette. Now he was leaning against the rail beside his new acquaintance and looking up at the sky, holding his chin with thumb and forefinger. Without doubt he was in one of those extraordinary and solemnly contemplative moods in which the barriers between men fall away, in which the heart opens even to strangers, and the mouth utters things which would otherwise close it in ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... who have been unfortunate enough to interest themselves in that most profitless of studies—the philosophy of art —have been at various times teased or amused by disputes respecting the relative dignity of the contemplative and ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... with a contemplative mind," replied the gentleman, resolving that the young lady should not ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... watched the Socialist. Sober, judicial, observant And full of greater wisdom he was than to laugh with the tipsy Leaders. His eyes were fixed on the Bishop, vice-regent of God upon earth. And as I watched the Socialist, the unmoved, the contemplative one, He thoughtfully took his pencil, he took the fine and large card Whereon the names of the rich foods and all the costly wines were printed, And made a few notes of the feast, notes of the Bishop's speech, Notes to remind him ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... Maimon: "Then, friend, why are we so content to censure others? Let us be fair and pass judgment on ourselves. But the contemplative life we lead is merely the result of indolence, which we gloss over by reflections on the vanity of all things. We are content with our rags. Why? Because we are too lazy to earn better. We reproach the unscholarly as futile people addicted to ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of his marriage, he retained a respect for their views which accorded well with his own nature. When he had to speak or write on behalf of what he believed to be the truth, it was from no motive of self-assertion or combativeness. He had the calm contemplative mind of the student, whereas Bright, the Quaker tribune, the champion of Repeal, had all the fervour of the man of action. Lister's family had been Quakers since the beginning of the eighteenth century; and at this time too they moved from Yorkshire to London, where his grandfather and ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... would have failed to observe the slightest trace of cunning, or want of a balanced mind in their expression. During the progress of his story he had continually held his ring where he could see it, and several times had raised it to the light, in a contemplative sort of way, as if he drew some satisfaction from its appearance. He bowed his head in his hands as he ceased speaking, and some moments elapsed before he looked up, though when he did so he was ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... is one of the permanent and certain characteristicks of a vigorous intellect.' Rambler, No. 103. 'Curiosity is in great and generous minds the first passion and the last; and perhaps always predominates in proportion to the strength of the contemplative faculties.' Ib. ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... One of the war poets, Joyce Kilmer, was already changing his attitude at thirty. Compare his juvenile verse, "It is not good for poets to grow old," with the later poem, Old Poets.] As the world subsides, after its cataclysm, into contemplative revery, it is inevitable that poets will, for a time, once more conceive as their ideal, not a singer aflame with youth and passion, but a poet of ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... within him. He preached in German to the general public, and his favourite themes are the present living operation of the Spirit, and the consecration of life in the world. There is, he shows, no contradiction between the active and the contemplative life; the former belongs to the faculties of the soul, the latter to its essence. In commenting on the story of Martha and Mary, those favourite types of activity and contemplation[252], he surprises us by putting Martha first. "Mary hath chosen the good part; ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... Mrs. Wix. The case was indeed that the quality of her motive surpassed the sharpness of her angles; both the combination and the singularity of which things, when in the afternoon they used the carriage, Maisie could borrow from the contemplative hush of their grandeur the freedom to feel to the utmost. She still bore the mark of the tone in which her friend had thrown out that threat of never losing sight of her. This friend had been converted in short from feebleness to force; and it was the light ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... to resume his former life of sojourn in tents and desultory practice of the arts, a life which, as it was at once highly practical and entirely dependent upon enjoyment, we may call one of contemplative activity. For twenty years he had not lived in a house, slept in a bed, or owned anything beyond the barest necessities. (The only thing he had, indeed, found himself owning, had at last removed itself.) He had been by turns poet, painter-in-water-colours, ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... of heaven, I looked about for the object that had struck me. As I did so, I perceived my husband in his window, but his eyes, while upon me, did not see me, for no change passed over him as I groped about in the grass. "In one of his contemplative moods," thought I, continuing my search. In another instant I started up. I had found a little thing like a bullet wrapped up in paper; but it was no bullet; it was a bead, a large gold bead, and on the paper which surrounded it were written words so fine I could ...
— The Hermit Of ——— Street - 1898 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... done into the English tongue," apparently by Randall, "for the common good."[69] It is a profoundly mystical book, characterized by interior depth and insight. Its central aim is the exposition of a stage of spiritual life which transcends both "the active life" and "the contemplative life," a stage which the writer calls "the Life Supereminent." In this highest stage "the essential will of God is practiced," without strain or effort, because God Himself has now become the inner Life and Being of the person, the spring ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... older ritual, in distinction from the Lamas. In China it has been used first as a synonym for {.} {.}, monks engaged in popular teaching (teachers of the Law), in distinction from {.} {.}, disciplinists, and {.} {.}, contemplative philosophers (meditationists); then it was used to designate the abbots of monasteries. But it is now popularly applied to all Buddhist monks. In the text there seems to be implied some distinction between the "teachers" ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... that swims. I deducted from the amazing information that if a fisherman sat all day in the blazing sun and had the genius to discover when he had a bite he was learning. No one ever caught bonefish without days and days of learning. Then there were incidents calculated to disturb the peace of a contemplative angler ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... entirely dissipated. The early loss of an amiable young woman, whom he had married for love, and who was quickly followed to the grave by an only child, had also served, even after the lapse of many years, to soften a disposition naturally mild and contemplative. His feelings on the present occasion were therefore likely to differ from those of the severe disciplinarian, strict magistrate, and distrustful man of ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... are still blind and dumb, not having understanding, or the undazzled and keen vision of the contemplative soul, must stand outside of the divine choir. Wherefore, in accordance with the method of concealment, the truly sacred Word, truly divine and most necessary for us, deposited in the shrine of truth, was by the Egyptians indicated by what were called among them adyta, and ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... it is girdled round by a well-trimmed hedge of limes, from which, at intervals, pollarded trees shoot up; while the corners are thickly woven each into a shady arbour, where seats are arranged for the accommodation of the contemplative. It is, however, after you have passed beneath the arch, that the holy quiet of the spot strikes you most forcibly. Laid out with singular good taste into parallelograms, and having the paths which divide them one from another, ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... faced the questioning gaze of a gray-haired man who might have been anywhere from forty-five to sixty. One hand was in the pocket of a velvet smoking-jacket, and the other held a pipe. The man's eyes were dark and deeply set. They did not seem to Lowell to be the contemplative eyes of the scholar, but rather to belong to a man of decisive action—one whose interests might be in building bridges or tunnels, but whose activities were always concerned with material things. His face ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... of the latter, their inmost heart, which would fain escape obedience. And in the case of the unique natures of noble origin, if by virtue of superior spirituality they should incline to a more retired and contemplative life, reserving to themselves only the more refined forms of government (over chosen disciples or members of an order), religion itself may be used as a means for obtaining peace from the noise and trouble ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... read. As he scanned the copies of directives, reports, operations logs, and procedures the process became automatic, and part of his consciousness turned contemplative. ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... devil of hell, a manner of high-mounted bands and neckerchiefs for women, which did so closely cover their bosoms that men could no more put their hands under. For they had put the slit behind, and those neckcloths were wholly shut before, whereat the poor sad contemplative lovers were much discontented. Upon a fair Tuesday I presented a petition to the court, making myself a party against the said gentlewomen, and showing the great interest that I pretended therein, protesting that ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... each end by scarlet poppy-beds, lay the bright beauty of the morning. The sea below was still, the air between, and the heavens above, since no cloud moved up or down the misty blue horizons. Leaning over the baluster was a young woman. She too was still; and her eyes, directed toward the sea, contemplative apparently but introspective in truth, divided in their deeps the blue of the heavens and the green of the sea. Presently a sound broke the hush. It came from a neat little brown shoe. Tap-tap, tap-tap. To the observer of infinite details, a foot is often more ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... How many things without studying nature dost thou imagine, and how many dost thou neglect?[B] But it is thy duty so to look on and so to do everything, that at the same time the power of dealing with circumstances is perfected, and the contemplative faculty is exercised, and the confidence which comes from the knowledge of each several thing is maintained without showing it, but yet not concealed. For when wilt thou enjoy simplicity, when gravity, and when the knowledge of every several thing, both what ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... almost consonant to his wishes: and returned, without feeling mortified, to the cottage we have described, where he lived a secluded yet not unhappy life. His wants were few, and his half-pay more than adequate to supply them. A happy contemplative indolence, arising from a well-cultivated mind, feeding rather upon its previous acquirements than adding to its store—an equanimity of disposition, and a habit of rigid self-command—were the characteristics ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... horses and mules lying down, and they regarded him with large, contemplative eyes as he lighted the fire and began to cook supper. The animals were on the best of terms, constituting a happy family, and the eyes with which they regarded Will seemed to him to be the ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... Mondane. Here I halted at an inn in the shadow of old walnut-trees. A few yards off, under one of the great trees, was a high wooden crucifix, around which some twenty or thirty geese were standing or lying down, all in a digestive or contemplative mood, and through the openings between the boles and the branches were seen the sunlit meadows sloping to the low willows ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... Father of all humankind Standing in garden planted by God's hand, And girt by murmurs of the rivers four, Between the trees of Knowledge and of Life, With eastward face. In worship mute of God, Eden's Contemplative he stood that hour, Not her Ascetic, since, where sin is none, No need for spirit severe. And Ceadmon sang God's Daughter, Adam's Sister, Child, and Bride, Our Mother Eve. Lit by the matin star, That nearer drew to earth and brighter ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... that came in with the angelic visitors. The whole scene is bathed in light, and the longer we look the more we see the beauty of the lines which flow in the picture as if to some heavenly music. All is action save in the grave, contemplative figure of Joseph; and his serious, resting attitude by its contrast makes more evident the leaping child, the mother half stooping to lift him, John the Baptist pressing forward and Elizabeth gently restraining him, with the two flying, ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... devices of the oligarchs, would rip off the leather or vellum, and throw them into the fire or out of the window, saying that 'now he could read with unwashed hands at his ease.' Such a person, then, is the man indifferent to books, and he sins by way of defect, being deficient in the contemplative virtue of book-loving. As to the man who is exactly in the right mean, we call him the book-lover. His happiness consists not in reading, which is an active virtue, but in the contemplation of bindings, and illustrations, ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... fiord, and were sailing up a broad and straight reach which every moment disclosed new beauties, sights fair enough to be balm to the angriest spirit. A red-roofed hamlet was on our left, on the right an ivied ruin, close to the water, where some contemplative cattle stood knee-deep. The view ahead was a white strand which fringed both shores, and to it fell wooded slopes, interrupted here and there by low sandstone cliffs of warm red colouring, and now and again by a dingle ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... Deanston the ploughing. Burns embalms all my field-mice, and Cowper drapes an urn for me in a tangled wilderness. Knight names my cherries, and Walton, the kind master, goes with me over the hill to a wee brook that bounds down under hemlocks and soft maples, for "a contemplative man's recreation." Davy long ago caught all the fermentation of my manure-heap in his retort, and Thomson painted for me the scene which is under my window to-day. Mowbray cures the pip in my poultry, and all the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... the imagination be more effectually or safely exercised and improved than by the constant perusal and study of our best Poets. Poetry appeals to the universal sympathies of mankind. With the contemplative writers, we can indulge our pensive and thoughtful tastes. With the describers of natural scenery, we can delight in the beauties and glories of the external universe. With the great dramatists, we are able to study all the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... better acquaintance!—there is, in this city of Dunedin, a certain implication of streets which reflects the utmost credit on the designer and the publicans—at every hundred yards is seated the Judicious Tavern, so that persons of contemplative mind are secure, at moderate distances, of refreshment. I have been doing a trot in that favoured quarter, favoured by art and nature. A few chosen comrades—enemies of publicity and friends to wit ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to say, and his early love of football deserted him. He was no golfer, and a good day's trout-fishing, during which he neglected to kill each trout as it was taken, caused remorse, and made him abandon the contemplative boy's recreation. Boating, riding, and walking were his exercises. He read the good books that never lose their charm—Scott, Dumas, Shakespeare, "The Arabian Nights"; when very young he was delighted with "The Book of Snobs"; he also read Mayne Reid and "Ballantyne the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The principal source of the spirit of religious contemplation is the East; now I have here in my hand a Byzantine image of Christ, which, if you will look at it seriously, may, I think, at once and forever render you cautious in the indulgence of a merely contemplative habit of mind. Observe, it is the fashion to look at such a thing only as a piece of barbarous art; that is the smallest part of its interest. What I want you to see, is the baseness and falseness of a religious state of enthusiasm, in which such a work could ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... him, I learned that in other respects he did not deviate in his prosperity from the philosophic tenor of his former life. He abated nothing of his peripatetic exercises; and repaired duly in the morning, as he had done in former years, to St. James's Park,—where he sate in contemplative ease amongst the cows, inhaling their balmy breath and pursuing his philosophic reveries. He had also purchased an organ, or more than one, with which he solaced his solitude and beguiled himself of uneasy thoughts ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... wholesome enough at times for every one; most wholesome at all times for the man pent up in London air and London work; but which takes away from the angler's most delicate enjoyment, that dreamy contemplative repose, broken by just enough amusement to keep his body active, while his mind is quietly taking in every sight and sound of nature. Let the Londoner have his six weeks every year among crag and heather, and return with ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... Pickwick's coming before the court that day with "his heartless tomato-sauce and warming-pans," and the sonorous close of the impassioned peroration with the plaintiff's appeal to "an enlightened, a high-minded, a right-feeling, a conscientious, a dispassionate, a sympathising, a contemplative jury of her civilised countrymen." It was after this, however, that the true fun of the Reading began with the examination and cross-examination of the different witnesses. These, as a matter of course, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... is singularly successful in detaching herself from all the wear and tear of modern life and has produced a book filled with sweetness, beautiful in ideas, charming in characterizations, highly contemplative, and evidencing a philosophy of ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... plants rise from the earth and flourish by the superior skill and bounty of the laborer, fills a contemplative mind with ideas which are more easy to ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... immediate foreground. Around its rim ran an inscription in Latin, warning mortal man that time flows as swiftly as water and exhorting him to make the most of his hours; after which piece of Jacobean moralising it set itself shamelessly to beguile all who might pass that way into an abandonment of contemplative repose. On all sides of it a stretch of smooth turf spread away, broken up here and there by groups of dwarfish chestnut and mulberry trees, whose leaves and branches cast a laced pattern of shade beneath them. On one side the ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... amid the piled-up luggage, the convenient spittoons, the elbowing loungers, the disconsolate "guests," the truculent Irish porters, the rows of shaggy-backed men in strange hats, writing letters at a table inlaid with advertisements, Selah Tarrant made innumerable contemplative stations. He could not have told you, at any particular moment, what he was doing; he only had a general sense that such places were national nerve-centres, and that the more one looked in, the more one ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... desires. Practical work involves a love of glory and honor. We are so organized that we find enjoyment only in what our own peculiar endowment can yield. A very sensible organization which you may take as an example. My work is contemplative, speculative and affords enjoyment through the satisfaction of correct discoveries and clear vision. In practical life I am unhappy, with money, honor, glory and all. But you, Judge Elkinson, have need of me for this very quality. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... with a start, seeing them at some little distance. His full, contemplative eyes rested upon them for a moment almost devoid of questioning. It was not the face of a man who finds himself confronted with the discovery of his duplicity and his hypocrisy. There was a strange doubt stirring in the blacksmith's heart As he approached ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... So grave, dignified, gentlemanly, and courteous did these fine truck-horses look—so full of calm intelligence and sagacity, that often I endeavored to get into conversation with them, as they stood in contemplative attitudes while their loads were preparing. But all I could get from them was the mere recognition of a friendly neigh; though I would stake much upon it that, could I have spoken in their language, I would have derived from them a good deal of valuable information touching the docks, ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... a later fruit; but it is ripening now. We have more Sisters of Charity than contemplative nuns, at this time. There are hospitals in every Christian land for the sick and the aged. It is remembered now, too, that Christ had compassion on the blind, and the deaf, and the insane: and charity to these is now the Christianity ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... might easily have been mistaken for a slightly built and shapelier variety of the gorilla but for the true man-hands and the steady, contemplative, foreseeing look in the eyes. He came and examined the mangled bulk of the Dinoceras, scrutinized the horns and tusks minutely, and strove with all his force to wrench one of the latter from its socket, as if hoping to make some use of it. ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Egypt, till the Murd'rous King Were dead, who sought his life, and missing fill'd With Infant blood the streets of Bethlehem; From Egypt home return'd, in Nazareth Hath been our dwelling many years, his life 80 Private, unactive, calm, contemplative, Little suspicious to any King; but now Full grown to Man, acknowledg'd, as I hear, By John the Baptist, and in publick shown, Son own'd from Heaven by his Father's voice; I look't for some great change; to Honour? no, But trouble, as old Simeon plain foretold, That to the fall and rising he should ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... philosophers, as they scorn to delight, so must they be content little to move: saving wrangling, whether virtue be the chief, or the only good: whether the contemplative, or the active life do excel: which Plato and Boethius well knew, and therefore made Mistress Philosophy very often borrow the masking raiment of poesy. For even those hard-hearted evil men, who think virtue a school name, and know no other good but indulgere genio, and therefore ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... especially numbers and localities, the aspect and even names of which change with a wonderful degree of rapidity in the progress of London out of town. Thus many places become daily more and more confused, and at last completely lose their identity, to the regret of the contemplative mind, which loves to associate objects with the recollection of those who "have left their celebrity ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... incongruity additions and accommodations adapted to the needs of each successive occupant, who, being for the most part proprietor, was at liberty to follow his own fancy, so that these humble dwellings remind the contemplative spectator of a production of Nature, and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to have grown than to have been erected—to have risen, by an instinct of their own, out of the native rock—so little is there in them of formality, such is ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... with Sarah had already taught him the expediency of keeping her in action. Sarah on the move might do some very startling things but a contemplative Sarah ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... had been so calm and sheltered, that she had had no experience of contrary winds, and her natural disposition was so equable, that she had very little consciously to struggle against. Perhaps her chief temptation lay in a tendency to placid contemplative Christianity, without sufficient active interest in others; and Lucy's opposite qualities acted as a counteracting stimulus, while Mary's peaceful spirit of trusting faith calmed and soothed Lucy's rather impatient disposition. Thus in all true loving Christian companionship we may help each ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... through the forest, her short, stiff, grey hair stood up in irregular tufts above her weather-beaten forehead. Her host, sitting sidewise on the edge of the table so that he could swing one leg freely and spit cleanly through the open window, bit off a contemplative quid of "blackjack" tobacco, and waited for her to unfold the ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... for of God alone is it true that His Being is His Happiness. Secondly, life means the operation of the living, by which operation the principle of life is made actual: thus we speak of active and contemplative life, or of a life of pleasure. And in this sense eternal life is said to be the last end, as is clear from John 17:3: "This is eternal life, that they may know ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... Further, while He lived in mortal flesh, it behooved Christ to lead a most perfect life. But the most perfect is the contemplative life, as we have stated in the Second Part (II-II, Q. 182, AA. 1, 2). Now, solitude is most suitable to the contemplative life; according to Osee 2:14: "I will lead her into the wilderness, and I will speak to her heart." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... once inhaled it, or thought to the mind in which it has once been conceived. I defied Heaven itself to rob me of this divine embodying of my desires. I had seen her, and that was enough. For the contemplative, to see is to enjoy. It scarcely mattered to me whether she loved me, or whether she passed me by without perceiving me. I had been touched by her splendor, and was still enveloped in her rays; she could no more withdraw ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... subtlety had become transmuted into emotional, and the harshness had disappeared; he would have been called a sad man but for his constant care not to divide himself from lively friends by piping notes out of harmony with theirs. Contemplative, he allowed his mind to be a quiet meeting-place for memories and hopes. So that, naturally enough, since succeeding to the agricultural calling, and up to his present age of thirty-two, he had neither advanced nor receded as a capitalist—a stationary ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... here till 1822, since which period the place has been totally abandoned as a military station. The bank at this place is high and the spot where the Barracks stood very pleasant, commanding a fine view of the adjacent country, having a beautiful Island directly in front. To a contemplative mind this spot must be interesting when he reflects that the soldiers who forced their way from Fredericton through the wilderness to construct these works, have fallen by the sword and disease; that the men who projected them, as well as those who superintended their construction, are ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... then, says Syrianus, do ideas subsist according to the contemplative lovers of truth? We reply, intelligibly and tetradically ([Greek: noeros kai tetradikos]), in animal itself ([Greek: en to antozoo]), or the extremity of the intelligible order; but intellectually and decadically ([Greek: noeros kai dekadikos]), in the intellect of the artificer of ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... dazzle by paying off certain old scores; even now how beautifully he plays the disinterested to curtain the designs of his ambition! John, nevertheless, did wake from his years of stupor to find himself in an uncertain position;—this was manifest by the manner in which he assumed a contemplative mood. A few shakes at the hands of his rougher politicians aroused his apprehension of being swamped in the political perplexity. Mr. Smooth paused, and took a careful view of the venerable old man, that he might learn something more of him. 'Stranger.' ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... ill-deserving if it seems to merit resentment and punishment. Nature has inscribed on the heart, apart from all reflection on the utility of punishment, an independent, immediate, and instinctive approbation of the sacred law of retribution. This is the point at which a hitherto purely contemplative sympathy passes over into an active impulse, which prepares us to support the victim of attack and insult in his ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... with contemplative favor. He was a stout, stockily-built man, with a square head and sparse gray hair that would persist in tangling and curling at the ends; and he perpetually kept his sleeves rolled up ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... sitting quietly in your room, free from all disturbing thoughts and influences. Then stand up and, assuming an easy position, cast the eyes upward and hold them in that position for thirty seconds. Instantly and involuntarily you will be conscious of a tendency toward reverential, devotional, contemplative ideas and thoughts. Then turn the eyes sideways, glancing directly to the right or to the left, through half-closed lids. Within thirty seconds images of suspicion, of uneasiness, or of dislike, will rise unbidden in the mind. Turn the eyes to one side and slightly downward, ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... a fine nature—a contemplative mind imbued with a true love of literature, and a kindness of heart that melts and makes those of others melt, for the evils to ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... Presbyterians and Scotch-Irish. Curses and anathemas were no check to the fertile soil. Grist continued to come to the mill; and the agricultural products poured into Philadelphia to be carried away in the ships. The contemplative Quaker took his profits as they passed; enacted his liberalizing laws, his prison reform, his charities, his peace with the savage Indians; allowed science, research, and all the kindly arts of life to flourish; and seemed perfectly contented with the damnation in the other ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... prayerbooks and abandoned hassocks. It had the effect of a preposterous misfit. Johnson consulted with a thin-legged, short-skirted verger about the disposition of the party. The officiating clergy appeared distantly in the doorway of the vestry, putting on his surplice, and relapsed into a contemplative cheek-scratching that was manifestly habitual. Before the bride arrived Mr. Polly's sense of the church found an outlet in whispered criticisms of ecclesiastical architecture with Johnson. "Early Norman arches, eh?" he ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... you," replied the Prefect, as he gave a long, steady, and contemplative puff, and settled himself in his chair. "I will tell you in a few words; but, before I begin, let me caution you that this is an affair demanding the greatest secrecy, and that I should most probably lose the position ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... at Colonos, was a work of Sophocles' old age; and while it can hardly be said that the fire of tragic feeling is abated in either of these plays, dramatic effect is modified in both of them by the influence of the poet's contemplative mood. The interest of the action in the Philoctetes is more inward and psychological than in any other ancient drama. The change of mind in Neoptolemus, the stubborn fixity of will in Philoctetes, contrasted with ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... her chamber. After mass she taketh something to recreate nature, and soe goeth to the chapelle, hearinge the divine service and two lowe masses. From thence to dynner, during the tyme of whih she hath a lecture of holy matter (that is, reading from a religious book), either Hilton of Contemplative and Active Life, or some other spiritual and instructive work. After dynner she giveth audyence to all such as hath any matter to shrive unto her, by the space of one hower, and then sleepeth one quarter of an hower, and after she hath slept she contynueth in prayer until the first peale ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... generated, on the one hand, in men of the world laxity of moral principle and habit, on the other hand, in minds of a more contemplative cast, it *lapsed into atheism*. From otiose gods, careless of human affairs, the transition was natural to a belief in no gods. The universe which could preserve and govern itself, could certainly have sprung into uncaused existence; for the tendencies which, ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... the fire a contemplative poke, "if you'd seen as much sorrow in the world as I have, you wouldn't want to write a ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... last to an end; he was glad when another almost immediately began. He was in luck; doubtless this was a brigade on the move. He proposed to have his breakfast at the window, when it came as come it soon must, thus refreshing his hungry body and his contemplative mind at the same time. The second battalion, as the first, were fine fellows all, suggesting the might of the Allies and the futility of the enemy's protracted resistance. Again the comic relief ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... Caesars—stately busts in marble—ranged round," each of these recalled by memory suggests some deep thought or some pleasant turn. The opening passage at once sets the note of the whole, and may be taken as a representation of Lamb's contemplative mood: ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... even more anxiously contemplative. He thought of the long, weary way to the present trading post, and of how it would be equally long and weary were a new post to be located in the hunting grounds of Little Peter. He knew how soft was the snow when it began to melt in early spring, how the snow ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... laughter came from the windows as the villagers, slowly opening the papers they held, came upon the caricature of Peggy McNutt. The subject of the cartoon had, with his usual aggressiveness, secured the best "standing room" available, and his contemplative, protruding eyes were yet fixed upon the interior of the workroom. But now, his curiosity aroused, he looked at the paper to see what his neighbors were laughing at, and his expression of wonder slowly changed to a broad grin. He straightened ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... even, of Bismarck, man of blood and iron though he was, who had builded a structure which, whilst not founded on liberty, yet was capable and gave promise of going down into history as one of the greatest examples of enlightened and even beneficent autocracy; who, in the contemplative and mellowed wisdom of his old age, often warned the nation against the very spirit which, alas, came to have sway over it, and against the very ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... waiting for Joanna outside the Law Courts. In the stillness of the August evening and the yellow dusty sunshine, he looked almost contemplative, standing there with bowed head, looking down at his hands which were folded on his stick, while one or two pigeons strutted about at his feet. Joanna's heart melted at the sight of him. She went up to him, ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... an insight into futurity, and had become aware of the transitory nature of all things, and even of the fate of the gods, who were doomed to pass away. This knowledge so affected his spirits that he ever after wore a melancholy and contemplative expression. ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... taken from the longer and more elaborate of the two MSS. containing the Treatise. The shorter form of his work On Grace and the Epistle have been added in the hope that they may meet the need of all, contemplative or active as ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... another cigarette and blew a contemplative whiff toward the crystal: "No: at best the game is a crooked one, even for the few who have really any ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... the Abbey meads was a small fish-pond where the monks used to spend many a contemplative hour with rod and line. One day, when they had had very bad luck and only caught twelve fishes amongst them, Brother Jonathan suddenly declared that as there was no sport that day he would put forth a riddle ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... the exacter studies of later ages. Light, as the indispensable condition of life, is no dream, but a fact; sight is the highest sentient faculty; and the luminous rays are real intellectual stimulants.[186-1] But such reflections will not escape the contemplative reader. ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... object, and it is a perception or an idea; at another time it perceives a connection, and it is a judgment; at yet another, it perceives connections between connections, and it is an act of reason. But however subtle the object it contemplates may become, it does not depart from its contemplative attitude, and cognition is but ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... little boy or girl, sometimes an old woman, and early in the morning whoever has the post collects the whole flock, drives it to a chosen feeding ground, spends the day there, and brings it back at night. It must be a contemplative life, and in dry weather pleasant. I think it would suit a philosopher if he could choose his days. In our Franconian village the gooseherd was a little boy, vastly proud of his job. Every morning, long before we were up, he would stride past our windows ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... taken, is a juvenile classic. She ranks very high among the women poets of the nineteenth century, her only equal being Mrs. Browning. Besides the brief poems in Sing-Song, Miss Rossetti's "Goblin Market" and "Uphill" please young people of a contemplative mood. While there is an undercurrent of sadness in much of her work, it is a natural accompaniment of her themes and ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... finest pictures here is Domenichino's Cumean Sibyl, which, like all other masterpieces, defies the copyist and engraver. The Sibilla Persica of Guercino hangs a little to the left; and with her contemplative air, and the pen in her hand, she looks as if she were recording the effusions of her more inspired sister. The former is a chaste and beautiful picture, full of feeling and sweetly coloured; but the vicinity of Domenichino's magnificent creation throws it rather into shade. Two unfinished pictures ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... the preaching of St. Patrick. Then the Christian religion was embraced and cultivated with an uncommon zeal, which displayed itself in the number and consequence of the persons who in all parts embraced the contemplative life. This mode of life, and the situation of Ireland, removed from the horror of those devastations which shook the rest of Europe, made it a refuge for learning, almost extinguished everywhere ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... court. He is fat and indolent and contemplative; but is business-like and capable when a fly comes about —reaches out a tongue like a teaspoon and takes him in. He gums his tongue first. He is always pious, in his looks. And pious and thankful both, when Providence or one of us ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... agree With a quiet, peaceable man like me, Who am not of that nervous and meagre kind That are always distressed in body and mind! And at times it really does me good To come down among this brotherhood, Dwelling forever under ground, Silent, contemplative, round and sound; Each one old, and brown with mould, But filled to the lips with the ardor of youth, With the latent power and love of truth, And with ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... mode, the form, the application, would naturally spring up. Besides, would it not be safer, wiser, to modify ideas by experience, to look abroad for patterns, to seek for an equilibrium, a juste milieu? Thus there was a diversity of systems, but all contemplative of change. No one was in favor of standing still, for there was nothing to stand upon. In a word, the agitation was not so much one of measures, of principles, or of prejudices, as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Angler, or the Contemplative Man's Recreation, being a discourse of Fish and Fishing, not unworthy the perusal of most Anglers, of 18 pence price. Written by Iz. Wa. Also the Gipsee, never till now published: Both printed for Richard Marriot, ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... have heard from that dear departed saint, Frau Therese, that healing herbs grow there which are good for wounds; in botany books I have read that they will even make boiled flesh sound again. Then, too, I long for a quiet, contemplative life after all my trials; after the sybarite existence I have led, I long for the rustic joys of the golden age. Give me ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... price, and you will feel the difference between form that impresses by sheer aesthetic rightness and form that reminds you of the late Sir Henry Irving. With all its elaborate quietness, this deep-contemplative Lohan is just a piece of rhetoric: put it beside something first-rate and you will know what to think of it as surely as you ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... the abode of tranquility." All was still: not a sound was heard save soft murmuring tones which seemed to whisper in the ear of the weary traveller, "Come, and partake of nature's bounty," and to complain that such an offer should be made in vain. To a contemplative mind, such a scene might have suggested a thousand delightful reflections. But what charms could it have for the soul of Alexander, whose breast was filled with schemes of ambition and conquest; whose eye was familiarised with rapine and slaughter; and whose ears were accustomed to the clash ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... to read. As he scanned the copies of directives, reports, operations logs, and procedures the process became automatic, and part of his consciousness turned contemplative. ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... is a place for eugenics in every type of religion. In practice, it will probably make an impression only on the dynamic religions,—those that are actually accomplishing something. Buddhism, for example, is perhaps too contemplative to do anything. But Christianity, above any other, would seem to be the natural ally of the eugenist. Christianity itself is undergoing a rapid change in ideals at present, and it seems impossible that this evolution should leave its adherents ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... life, except that he was Secretary to the Board of Rites and retired from this position to lead the contemplative life. His introduction to the European world is entirely due to Professor Giles. No mention is made of him in the French collection of the T'ang poets by the Marquis de Saint-Denys. Yet the importance of his work cannot well be over-estimated. He is perhaps the most ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... that the spirit of Palamas rests within the narrow confines of his native land. On the contrary, it knows no chains and travels freely about the earth. He is a faithful servant of "Melete," the Muse of contemplative study, a service which is very seldom liked by Modern Greeks. In his preface to his collection of critical essays entitled Grammata he rebukes his fellow countrymen for this: "On an old attic vase," he says, "stand the three original Muses, the ones that ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... road, six and twenty miles." "You seem to have no stragglers." "Never allow straggling." "You must teach my people; they straggle badly." A bow in reply. Just then my creoles started their band and a waltz. After a contemplative suck at a lemon, "Thoughtless fellows for serious work" came forth. I expressed a hope that the work would not be less well done because of the gayety. A return to the lemon gave me the opportunity to retire. Where Jackson got his lemons "no fellow could find out," but he was rarely without ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... contemplative mood forcibly reminds us of that sublime passage of holy writ, wherein that thrilling command is embodied, to "Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, when he shall rise up at the voice of ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... the ash from his cigar, and took a long contemplative whiff, as if he were about making a plunge into views even more profound. Mr. Newt, half pleased with the show of philosophy, listened with less ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... the road and distance marched that day. 'Keezleton road, six-and-twenty miles.' 'You seem to have no stragglers.' 'Never allow straggling.' 'You must teach my people; they straggle badly.' A bow in reply. Just then my Creoles started their band for a waltz. After a contemplative suck at a lemon, 'Thoughtless fellows for serious work' came forth. I expressed a hope that the work would not be less well done because of the gaiety. A return to the lemon gave me the opportunity to retire. Where Jackson got his lemons 'No fellow could ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... pace. If a dog barked it was in sleepy fashion. He yelped merely to check his loneliness. There could be no venom on his drowsy tooth. The very cows that fed along its fences were of a slower breed and more contemplative whisk of tail than are found upon the thoroughfares. Sheep patched the fields with gray and followed their sleepy banquet across ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... seemed to amuse the others, and the party broke up. A little later Florent returned to Lebigre's, and indeed he became quite attached to the "cabinet," finding a seductive charm in Robine's contemplative silence, Logre's fiery outbursts, and Charvet's cool venom. When he went home, he did not at once retire to bed. He had grown very fond of his attic, that girlish bedroom, where Augustine had left scraps of ribbons, souvenirs, and other feminine trifles lying about. There still remained ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... cast by our author upon the validity of "the principle of the Unconditioned or the Infinite." "Supposing it were conceded that some faint glimmering of this great truth [the existence of a First Cause] might, by induction, have been discovered by contemplative minds, by what means could they have demonstrated to themselves that he is eternal, self-existent, immortal, and independent?"[365] "Between things visible and invisible, time and eternity, beings finite and beings infinite, objects of sense and objects of faith, the connection is not perceptible ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... at this crisis that taste alone—that faculty which, holding a middle position between the pure intellect and the moral sense, could never safely have been disregarded—it was now that taste alone could have led us gently back to Beauty, to Nature, and to Life. But alas for the pure contemplative spirit and majestic intuition of Plato! Alas for the [Greek: mousichae] which he justly regarded as an all-sufficient education for the soul! Alas for him and for it!—since both were most desperately needed, when both were most entirely forgotten or despised [1]. Pascal, a philosopher whom ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... straggling village of many dogs and swarthy, grimy-faced children, he tarried until well after dark, making his meal of coffee, frijoles, and chili con carne, thereafter smoking a contemplative pipe. Abandoning the little lunch-room to the flies and silence he crossed the road to the saloon kept by Pete Nunez, the brother of the man whom it was Norton's present business to make answer for a crime committed. Pete, a law-abiding citizen nowadays, principally for the reason that he had ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... eminently foreign to him. Quite on the other side lay Sterling's faults, such as they were. In fact, you could observe, in spite of his sleepless intellectual vivacity, he was not properly a thinker at all; his faculties were of the active, not of the passive or contemplative sort. A brilliant improvisatore; rapid in thought, in word and in act; everywhere the promptest and least hesitating of men. I likened him often, in my banterings, to sheet-lightning; and reproachfully prayed that he would concentrate ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... away from me, contemplative. She, too, was young. Ardor appealed to her. Life stood before her, beckoning, as to me. What could the girl ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... these reflexions was very just; but it was not exactly true that Ralph Touchett had had a key put into his hand. His cousin was a very brilliant girl, who would take, as he said, a good deal of knowing; but she needed the knowing, and his attitude with regard to her, though it was contemplative and critical, was not judicial. He surveyed the edifice from the outside and admired it greatly; he looked in at the windows and received an impression of proportions equally fair. But he felt that he saw it only by glimpses and that he had not yet stood under the roof. ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... the intense effect of the lyric is due. Like the essay the lyric is a subjective composition; it is confessedly the expression of the poet's personal emotion and his own experiences. His mind, his soul, speak to us; he does not interpret the thoughts and feelings of another. The lyric is usually contemplative and full of the choicest results of the poet's meditations. It influences action indirectly through direct ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... Vincenzo Monti, it is an interesting comment on its effervescent, unstable, fictitious, and partial nature that he was its most conspicuous poet. Few men appear so base as Monti; but it is not certain that he was of more fickle and truthless soul than many other contemplative and cultivated men of the poetic temperament who are never confronted with exigent events, and who therefore never betray the vast difference that lies between the ideal heroism of the poet's vision and the actual heroism of occasion. We all have excellent principles until we are ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... the suggestion yet more irrational. She was lustrous with lovable qualities, which he genially recognized and appreciated; nay, he might love her, but the love would be a quasi-paternal one, not the love that demands absolute possession and brooks no rivalry. His attitude was contemplative and beneficent, not selfish and exclusive. His greatest pleasure would be to see her married to some one worthy of her. Meantime he might devote himself to her freely ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... "faithfully done into the English tongue," apparently by Randall, "for the common good."[69] It is a profoundly mystical book, characterized by interior depth and insight. Its central aim is the exposition of a stage of spiritual life which transcends both "the active life" and "the contemplative life," a stage which the writer calls "the Life Supereminent." In this highest stage "the essential will of God is practiced," without strain or effort, because God Himself has now become the inner Life and ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... all speculation, whether theological or scientific—the one as leading to heresy, the other to sensual ends, such as riches, fame, and those lusts of the flesh and that pride of intellect which were fatal to the contemplative and ascetic ideals of ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... same rule holds that applies to fashion,—"Alike fantastic if too new or old." Fashion changes, not only the fashions of millinery but of literature also. When the world is tired of the brilliant wit of Byron, it turns in relief to the contemplative verse of Wordsworth; when Longfellow and Tennyson have had their artistic day and a thousand imitators have ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... grandfather, wise prince that he was, would have been far from scorning the counsel of devout women in whom was the voice of God. About the year 1380 he had summoned to Paris Guillemette de la Rochelle, who led a solitary and contemplative life, and acquired such great power therefrom, so it was said, that during her transports she raised herself more than two feet from the ground. In many a church King Charles V had beautiful oratories built, where she might pray for him.[637] The grandson should do no less, for his need was still ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... sleuth-hound,[224-1] Holmes, the relentless, keen-witted, ready-handed criminal agent, as it was possible to conceive. In his singular character the dual nature alternately presented itself, and his extreme exactness and astuteness represented, as I have often thought, the reaction against the poetic and contemplative mood which occasionally predominated in him. The swing of his nature took him from extreme languor to devouring energy; and, as I knew well, he was never so truly formidable as when, for days on end, he had been lounging in his arm-chair amid his improvisations and his black-letter ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... the stables. He was within a hop, step, and jump of me. But he had a lanthorn in his hand, and he did not see me, being as I was darkling." Saying this, he assisted Miss Melville to mount. He troubled her little during the route; on the contrary, he was remarkably silent and contemplative, a circumstance by no means disagreeable to Emily, to whom his conversation ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... manner of high-mounted bands and neckerchiefs for women, which did so closely cover their bosoms that men could no more put their hands under. For they had put the slit behind, and those neckcloths were wholly shut before, whereat the poor sad contemplative lovers were much discontented. Upon a fair Tuesday I presented a petition to the court, making myself a party against the said gentlewomen, and showing the great interest that I pretended therein, protesting that ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... flash of lightning plays in Mr. Day's hair, and illuminates the contents of the volume. The poetic fancy and what were then the politics of the original, appear in the choice of subject and attitude. Dr. Darwin sat to Mr. Wright about the same period. That was a simply contemplative portrait, of the ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... Squincher, As in contemplative pose, He stood before the looking-glass And burnished up his nose, And brushed the dandruff from a span- Spick-splinter suit of clothes,— "Why, bless you, Mr. Squincher, You're as handsome ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... this unmerited persecution fell on Brother Gorenflot, he had led a contemplative and easy life, diverting himself on occasions at the Corne d'Abondance, when he had gained a little money from the faithful. He was one of those monks for whom the world began at the prior of the convent, and finished at the cook. And now he was sent forth to seek for ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... by all these subjects; quite enthusiastic, in his way, about the interests of the people, and the new field of exertion which his present prospects open to him. It is plain that he has a genius more fitted for active than for contemplative life,—and so much the better for him; for a man, this is the happiest of dispositions: and he will be happy; for there is nothing in his character incompatible with quiet enjoyment; no violent passions and feelings; no morbid sensibility; with him all is sober, ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... and holy man, Bishop Wulstan. She had lately been reading, in the Chronicles of Florence, the monk of Worcester, how "in his early life, when appointed to be chanter and treasurer of the Church, Wulstan embraced the opportunity of serving God with less restraint, giving himself up to a contemplative life, going into the church day and night to pray and read the Bible. So devoted was he to sacred vigils that not only would he keep himself awake during the night, but day and night also; and when the urgency of nature at last compelled him to sleep, he did not pamper ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... to spear up the pieces of paper which the people of London have left behind; and this paper-sticking is really the best sport to be enjoyed now on Hampstead Heath, unless one counts fishing for dace in the ponds, which I take to be the most contemplative recreation, except coal-mining, in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 26, 1920 • Various
... commented Fairchilds, his contemplative gaze moving from the face of Mrs. Wackernagel to Tillie. "But," he questioned, "Mrs. Wackernagel, why are your daughters allowed to do what you think wrong and would ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... we can derive nothing from pure contemplation. There is mystery and wonder in the veil of the occult. The earth, our life, is merely a vestibule of the universe. Contemplation alone will hold us all as inapt and as impotent as the old Monks of Athos. We have mountains of literature behind us, all contemplative, and whatever its wisdom, it has given us not one thing outside the abstract. From Plato down to the present our philosophy has given us not one tangible proof, not one concrete fact which we can place our hands on. We are virtually where we were originally; ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... questioned, gave in the midst of that big assemblage of contemplative Munis a full and proper answer in words consonant with their ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... Montague sat Somers, lord keeper; older, of more steady demeanor, of fuller figure, of bold face and full light eye, a politician, not a ponderer. At the right of Montague, grave, silent, impassive, now and again turning a contemplative eye about him, sat that great man. Sir Isaac Newton, known then to every nobleman, and now to every schoolboy, of the world. A gem-like mind, keen, clear, hard and brilliant, exact in every facet, and forsooth held in the setting of ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... a song, and sat down to play his own accompaniment with a light and beautiful touch which came as a surprise to the listening women, who knew nothing of his drawing-room talents. He went from song to song, and all at once Marie, transferring her gaze from contemplative dreams, saw Julia's face. Julia leaned forward with her elbows on her knees, her chin in her palms, looking at the man at the piano, and in her eyes ran the old tale, and her red lips smiled and her breast ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... Even the Child, usually as restless as the dragonflies themselves or those exponents of perpetual motion, the brown water skippers, was lying on his back, quite still, and staring up with round, contemplative blue eyes through the diaphanous ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... his part, went into the Faubourg and crossed to the river side of that wide street. It thus happened that he missed seeing Mr. Joseph Mangles, sunning himself upon the more frequented pavement, and smoking a contemplative cigar. Mr. Mangles would have stopped him had they met. Paul Deulin was not far behind Mr. Mangles, idling past the shops, which could scarcely have had much interest ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... original Greek form (aisthetikos) it means what has to do with sense-perception as a source of knowledge; and this is still its meaning in Kant's philosophy ("Transcendental Aesthetic''). Its limitation to that function of sensuous perception which we know as the contemplative enjoyment of beauty is due to A. G. Baumgarten. Although the subject does not readily lend itself to precise definition at the outset, we may indicate itsscope and aim, as undeibtood by recent writers, by saying that it deals successively with one great ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... unnoted with the little shaded lamp shining on his face. Instantly, in her quick fashion, she christened him, Hibou, and Hibou or Owl, became his nickname in that establishment. Indeed, with his dark eyes and strongly marked features, wrapped in a contemplative calm such as the study of the stars engenders, in that gloom he did look something like an owl, however different may have been ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... ascent you pass to a higher and much larger mountain, which seems formed by nature for a lonely contemplative life; for on one side it looks upon the sea, and on the other is covered with old trees, always green, which at once make a fruitful and a pleasing object. Hither St Thomas retired to pray with his disciples; and here it was also that he ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... which they may be thrown. This was probably the case even where that influence tended to degrade him from the plane he would have occupied, if left to himself. His spiritual life seemed to lack that vigor and buoyancy so infinitely important to contemplative men. He appeared to be ever yearning for something which should add robustness to his convictions. After a pause of some ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... man to rule society with dignity; Mr. Watt, to lead the contemplative life of a deeply introverted and patiently observant philosopher. He was one of the most complete specimens of the melancholic temperament. His head was generally bent forward, or leaning on his hand in meditation; his shoulders stooping, and his chest falling in; his limbs lank and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... that, suh," would be the answer given with a contemplative squint of the placid, pale eye. "I reckin my calculations won't be very fur out ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... volume of poems in less than four months, and had not taken time to reconsider them. They were not narrative pieces, in which the interest of the story carries you along in reading, whether the diction is perfected or not, but mostly short lyrical poems, and contemplative pieces, which are always much more effective when found amongst other descriptions of poetry or in a magazine, than when collected together in a volume. They were generally sad, a common fault with poetesses; but poor Elsie had more ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... current now and floating by his side. "It's Mamie—so far as I've had it from you—who'll be their great card." And then as his contemplative silence wasn't a denial she significantly added: "I ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... too often confined to the ungrateful task of analyzing the uniform play of human passions, is occasionally rewarded by the appearance of events, which strike like a hand from heaven, into the nicely adjusted machinery of human plans, and carry the contemplative mind to a higher order of things. Of this kind, is the sudden retirement of Gustavus Adolphus from the scene; — stopping for a time the whole movement of the political machine, and disappointing all the calculations of human prudence. ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... what is passing in the world, but not to feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with it. It is such a life as a pure spirit might be supposed to lead, and such an interest as it might take in the affairs of men, calm, contemplative, passive, distant, touched with pity for their sorrows, smiling at their follies without bitterness, sharing their affections, but not troubled by their passions, not seeking their notice, nor once dreamt of by them. He who lives ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... to every part of its progress after hatching, until it becomes a bird, or winged animal, in the form of its parent stock. A farther attention to the nature and quality of the form cannot fail to cause astonishment in the contemplative mind; to observe in the least as well as in the largest kinds, yea, in the invisible as in the visible, that is, in small insects, as in fowls or great beasts, how they are all endowed with organs of sense, ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... harvests of autumn, the vicissitudes of the tide and the revolutions of the sky, and praise his Maker in lines which no reader shall lay aside. The subject of the disputation is not piety, but the motives to piety; that of the description is not God, but the works of God. Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the merits of his Reedemer, is already in a higher state ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... external form of nature and the many beauties around him were disregarded; and at length, after three hours, he sat down to rest at a rock by the wayside. Sitting here, he drew forth from his pocket a well-used pipe, which he filled and lighted; after which he sat smoking, and surveying, in a contemplative manner, the scene ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... being, turned their attention to other and more trifling matters. Coffee was served in the living room, and through the fragrant smoke of Pennington's fifty-cent perfectos a sprightly three-cornered conversation continued for an hour. Then the Colonel, secretly enraged at the calm, mocking, contemplative glances which Bryce ever and anon bestowed upon him, and unable longer to convince himself that he was too apprehensive—that this cool young man knew nothing and would do nothing even if he knew something—rose, pleaded the necessity for looking over some papers, and bade Bryce good- ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... forgetting the existence of cities. Farthest of the three homes from the railroad, and where the hills begin, Philip and Ruth Van Doren chose their abode. And you may see them any day that you care to penetrate to their broad pastures, riding together, viewing with contemplative eyes the distant peaks or the cattle that are the Governor's delight, a link, he says, between the present and the olden times when the world was young. And often at night, when they are not with the Congdons or the Bennetts, they ride for hours in silence, so great is ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... to a new life beckoning from three points of the compass. That point which did not beckon was behind them. Flaxen-haired Swedes and Norwegians; square- jawed, round-headed North Germans; square-shouldered, loose-jointed Russians with heavy contemplative eyes and long hair, looked curiously at each other and nodded understandingly. Jostling them all, with a jeer and an oblique joke here and there, and crude chaff on each other and everybody, the settler from the United States asserted himself. He invariably obtruded himself, with ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... have left it for good and all?" asked Macloud, blowing a smoke-ring and watching him with contemplative eyes—"Well, the place is the same—only more so. A good many people have come back. The Heights is more lively than when you left, teas, and dinners, and tournaments and such like.—In town, the Northumberland's resuming its regulars—the ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... consciousness of the world around him would have been a very different affair; however obscure, however reserved, his own personal life, his sense of the life of his fellow-mortals would have been almost infinitely more various. The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... religious, so that they may be warned and advise their subordinates of it, so that they may not perplex themselves or meddle in any case of these secular judicial proceedings, or with claims of third parties. For their occupation does not consist in this, but in the contemplative life, and in the exercise of the spiritual activities; and, moreover, the gravest disadvantages to the service of our Lord result from the contrary course. You shall advise me of what you shall do and what you shall have ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... He spoke of me to you?" And the good Nabob, quite proud, would look around him with movements of the head that were supremely laughable, or perhaps assume the contemplative air of a devotee who should hear the name ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... it is true, was not a faultless or steadfast character. No gross or enormous vices were ascribed to him. His habits, as far as appearances enabled one to judge, were temperate and chaste. He was contemplative and bookish, and was vaguely described as being somewhat visionary ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... readers will have seen by the preceding page, we have commenced engraving the above series of pictures. "The Age of Innocence," by Sir J. Reynolds, representing a young Hippopotamus seated under a shady tree, presents to the contemplative mind a charming union of ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... consider) the Dramaticall is the most absolute, in regard of those transcendent Abilities, which should waite upon the Composer; who must have more then the instruction of Libraries which of it selfe is but a cold contemplative knowledge there being required in him a Soule miraculously knowing, and conversing with all mankind, inabling him to expresse not onely the Phlegme and folly of thick-skin'd men, but the strength and maturity ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher
... the Elegy was composed were well adapted to soothe and cherish that contemplative sadness which, when the wounds of grief are healing, it is a luxury to indulge, and that the poet did indulge them is self-evident in many ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... too soon. One should not whirl through such a choice bit of England in the cars; one should rather wish to amble over the way after a sleepy, contemplative old horse, as we used to make rural excursions in New England ere yet railroads were. However, all that's bright must fade, and ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... now," said the honourable Frederick Fitzroy, addressing himself to Dashall, "You have now become a retired, steady, contemplative young man; a peripatetic philosopher; tired with the scenes of ton, and deriving pleasure only from the investigation of Real Life in London, accompanied in your wanderings, by your respectable relative of Belville-Hall; and yet while ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... of a blazing hot London day when I went down the hard to the water's edge, among the small, pink-legged boys, paddling, and the usual group of contemplative workmen, who smoke their pipes by the landing place. The river was half empty, and emptying itself still more as the ebb ran down. The haze of heat and twilight blurred shapes and colours, but the fine old houses of the historic "Mall," the tower of the church, and the tall elms ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... little of Schopenhauer's passive and contemplative receptivity here! Rather a mingling of being in ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... as a special and sacred office whereby the nun became the mystic bride of the Church, and it was no uncommon thing for the sisters, when racked and tortured by the temptations of the world, to fall into these ecstatic contemplative moods wherein they became possessed with powers beyond those of earth. In that age of quite universal ignorance, it is not to be wondered at that the emotional spirit was too strongly developed in all religious observances, ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... as fat, but by no means as saucy, as ever. Last week his youngest boy died,—little Kirsajee Samsajee Bonnarjee, a contemplative young fire-worshipper, with eyes as profound as the philosophy of Zoroaster. I saw the dismal procession depart from the house, and my heart ached ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... that, if we are the victims of this force, we should have nothing to fear, from the freedom of our Ego, for the autonomy of the determinations of our will. In short the description up to here is sublime, but quite a contemplative, intuitive sublimity:— ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... upon to champion the Alexandrian community in its hour of need. Although the ascent of the stupid but honest Claudius dispelled immediate danger from the Jews and brought them a temporary increase of favor in Alexandria as well as in Palestine, Philo did not return entirely to the contemplative life which he loved; and throughout the latter portion of his life he was the public defender as well as the teacher of his people. He probably died before the reign of Nero, between 50 and 60 C.E. In Jewish ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... is a finer, nobler thought When day is done and night has brought The contemplative hours and sweet, And rest to weary hearts and feet, If man can stand in truth and say: "I have been useful here to-day. Back there is one I chanced to see With ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... knowledge which Francis had of the sweets and fruits of mental prayer, he constantly urged his brethren to practise it, and they profited so fully by his instructions, that most of them became spiritual and contemplative men. "A religious," he said, "must principally desire to acquire the spirit of prayer. I believe that, without this, peculiar favors cannot be obtained from God, nor any great progress made in His service. When one is sorrowful and uneasy, he should ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... never again subject to it. I long continued to value Wordsworth less according to his intrinsic merits, than by the measure of what he had done for me. Compared with the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically far ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... two shields with rampant lions, which are good. Opposite the Loggia, on the other side of the street, is a highly decorative lintel, which appears to have belonged to a palace of the Cippico, with two contemplative lions and half-length angels in roundels with scrolls. The caps have the same kind of foliage as is seen at Curzoia and Sebenico. The Austrian-Lloyd office is on the ground floor of a tower of the Venetian period, ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... them find a home under the helmet of the soldier. So they became lifeless; they were at once formally systematized and classified, subjected to strict proportions and rules, and cast, as it were, in moulds. This arrangement enabled the conqueror, without waste of time in that long contemplative stillness out of which alone the beauty of the true Ideal arises, out of which alone man can create like a god, to avail himself at once of the Greek orders, not as a sensitive and delicate means of fine aesthetic expression, but as a mechanical ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... wishes: and returned, without feeling mortified, to the cottage we have described, where he lived a secluded yet not an unhappy life. His wants were few, and his half pay more than adequate to supply them. A happy contemplative indolence, arising from a well cultivated mind, feeding rather upon its previous acquirements, than adding to its store—an equanimity of disposition, and a habit of rigid self-command—were the characteristics of Edward Forster; ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... with the convenient livings and promotions of the church, daily intromit and exercise themselves in secular offices and rooms, as stewards, receivers, auditors, bailiffs, and other temporal occupations, withdrawing themselves from the good contemplative lives that they have professed, not only to the damage but also to the perilous example of your loving and obedient subjects; to this we your bedesmen answer that beneficed men may lawfully be stewards and receivers to their own bishops, as it evidently appeareth ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... Verisschenzko grew contemplative, "that the result of deliberately turning the current of events like that must have some momentous consequence. Mind you, I think you were right. I should have advised it as I have told you, because of that swine ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... a gate-post! This sort of chariot is affected—particularly at the trot—by a kind of pitching movement to and fro across the axle, which well entitles it to the style of a Noddy. The hood describes a considerable arc against the landscape, with a solemnly absurd effect on the contemplative pedestrian. To ride in such a carriage cannot be numbered among the things that appertain to glory; but I have no doubt it may be useful in liver complaint. Thence, perhaps, its ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Active and Contemplative Life;—not, I think, a happy one, though beautifully painted. It presents, apart from its terminating comment no necessary intellectual suggestion; is rendered, by the, comment itself, hardly consistent with Leah's express love of ornament; and, if it were not for the last ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... of a contrast, and as a testimonial to the planetary growth of man's emotional nature, gained from the ages of progress; let us question modern man as he leans confidingly, in a contemplative mood, against the broad trunk of some giant of the forest. With uncovered head, he muses in silence; he senses a vague feeling of awe for this magnificent specimen of matured life in the vegetable world. With every sense attuned to the overtones and undertones, produced by the vibrations of nature's ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... Lady Jones, who had it from Sir Simon's family, that I had a more honourable view than at first was apprehended. I said, We fellows of fortune, Mr. Williams, take sometimes a little more liberty with the world than we ought to do; wantoning, very probably, as you contemplative folks would say, in the sunbeams of a dangerous affluence; and cannot think of confining ourselves to the common paths, though the safest and most eligible, after all. And you may believe I could ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... sudden embrace, three hours before, the twain had kept apart. She seemed stilled, almost alarmed, at what had occurred, while the novelty, unpremeditation, mastery of circumstance disquieted him—palpitating, contemplative being that he was. He could hardly realize their true relations to each other as yet, and what their mutual bearing should be before ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... moderation. Hence was it that the ancients pronounced Athens to be the seat of sages, because, enriched with an air of the greatest purity, it prepared with glad liberality the lucid intellects of its sons for the contemplative part of life. Assuredly for the body to imbibe muddy waters is a different thing from sucking in the transparency of a sweet fountain. Even so the vigour of the mind is repressed when it is clogged by a heavy atmosphere. Nature herself hath made us subject to these ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... guileless way she has of looking at you. It's a pity she seems a little enthusiastic. And her figure is good, and she moves about lightly, and she has a quiet voice. I like her best when she suddenly stands still, and listens attentively and gravely, then becomes contemplative and shakes her hair back. Yes, I agree, Panshine isn't worthy of her. Yet what harm is there in him? However, as to all that, why am I troubling my head about it? She will follow the same road that all others ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... driven out of Paradise, tasting the first fruits of bitterness as they had done of bliss. But their pangs were such as a pure spirit might feel at the sight—their tears "such as angels weep." The pathos is of that mild contemplative kind which arises from regret for the loss of unspeakable happiness, and resignation to inevitable fate. There is none of the fierceness of intemperate passion, none of the agony of mind and turbulence of action, which is the result of the habitual ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... philosophy of many of the Church fathers, and so introduced into Christian thought and life the Platonic dualism, that sharp distinction between the temporal and the eternal which belittles the practical life and glorifies the contemplative. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... waited, watching his dark contemplative eyes as they looked across the water at the ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... the gutter in the Rue du Bac!' I exclaimed with Madame de Stael from the height of the Coppet terrace. The spectacle of nature interests only contemplative and religious minds powerfully. Mine was neither the one nor the other. My habits of analysis and observation make me find more attraction in a characteristic face than in a magnificent landscape; I ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... a standstill. Miss Tyrell, with her toes on the fender, gazed in a contemplative fashion at the fire. "I didn't know——" began Fraser, who was ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... replied Marcos at length in his contemplative way, having given the matter his consideration. And perhaps that was ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... Exile had opened to me a new heaven and a new earth, whose freshness and calm charmed thought away from all vain questionings; the fascination of outward things had for a while cooled the useless ardour of introspection. But it was inevitable that the bland ease of such a contemplative life should bring no enduring satisfaction to the mind; it was not an end in itself, but a mere means to serenity, a breathing-space useful to the recovery of a long-lost fortitude. The time was ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... Lee sat still, his cigarette unlighted, his broad black hat far back upon his close-cropped hair, his eyes serenely contemplative upon the pink of the sky above the pines. Then he slipped from his place and, though each single movement gave an impression of great leisureliness, it was but a flash of time until he stood ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... Ralph Touchett had had a key put into his hand. His cousin was a very brilliant girl, who would take, as he said, a good deal of knowing; but she needed the knowing, and his attitude with regard to her, though it was contemplative and critical, was not judicial. He surveyed the edifice from the outside and admired it greatly; he looked in at the windows and received an impression of proportions equally fair. But he felt that he saw it only by glimpses and that he had not yet stood under the roof. The door was fastened, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... observes, "It appears strange that, in so early a stage of civilisation, the monks should be so alive to the beauties of nature. The contemplative habits of monastic life must at all times have imparted to the mind a feeling of abstract beauty, independent of any idea of real utility. Secure of an uniform, peaceful existence, limited in his pleasures and his ambition, sheltered by his sacred office, above others, ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... it's not that," answered the other, still moodily contemplative of his boots. "I really like the lady well enough—love her, I daresay. I have not had much experience of the tender passion since I was jilted by an Oxford barmaid—whom I would have married, by Jove. But the truth is, the lady in question isn't free to marry just yet. There's a husband ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... horses' backs. He had a smooth countenance, deeply tanned, and pale, clear blue eyes. At his side sat a priest in black, a man past middle age, with ashen, embittered lips, and a narrowed, chilling gaze. They were silent, contemplative; but, from the seat behind them, flowed a constant, buoyant, youthful chatter. A girl with a shining mass of chestnut hair gathered loosely on a virgin neck was recounting the thrilling incidents of "commencement week" for the benefit of a heavily-built young man with a handsome, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... On rising from my chair, I moved so brusquely that my dress caught on to an invisible splinter of wood, and was torn. My mother turned to a visitor, who had arrived about five minutes before and had remained in contemplative ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... as if it had been the work of his prime. If anyone sees in it an evidence of weakness, he is seeing only what he had expected to see. As Mr Rockstro remarks, not a trace of the "failing power" of which the grand old man complained is to be found in any part of it. It is a model of descriptive, contemplative work, and must please by its thoughtful beauty and illustrative power. True to Nature in its minutest details, it yet never insults her by trivial attempts at outward imitation where artistic suggestion of the hidden ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... afford many simple joys to the contemplative mind. A slow procession of white ducks, walking delicately, with heads lifted high and timid eyes, in a long line, has the air of an ecclesiastical procession. The singers go before, the minstrels follow after. There is something liturgical, too, in the way in which, as if by a preconcerted ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a measure proportionate to that end. Again, man's good is threefold as stated in Ethic. i, 8; one consisting in external things, for instance riches; another, consisting in bodily goods; the third, consisting in the goods of the soul among which the goods of the contemplative life take precedence of the goods of the active life, as the Philosopher shows (Ethic. x, 7), and as our Lord declared (Luke 10:42), "Mary hath chosen the better part." Of these goods those that are external are directed to those which ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... an apothecary's assistant, and a cicerone, and he got tired of all these callings. Begging was, to his mind, too hard work, and it was more trouble to be a thief than to be an honest man. Finally he decided in favour of contemplative philosophy. He had a passionate preference for the horizontal position, and found the greatest pleasure in the world in watching the shooting of stars. Unfortunately, in the course of his meditations ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... for Americans to visit the dance-halls at least once. He had gone into them repeatedly. Other railroaders who were his associates enjoyed going into these places, and Harboro, rather than be alone in the town, had followed disinterestedly in their wake, and had looked on with cold, contemplative eyes at the disorderly picture they presented: unfortunate Mexican girls dancing with cowboys and railroaders and soldiers and nondescripts. Three Mexicans, with harp, violin, and 'cello had supplied the music: the everlasting national ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... single adjective, uttered curtly, as between men who required no great tale of words wherewith to understand each other. A few were considered to be of sufficient value and importance to tell their own story and make their way in the world thereupon. He held these out with a face of grave and contemplative patronage. ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... he might easily have been mistaken for a slightly built and shapelier variety of the gorilla but for the true man-hands and the steady, contemplative, foreseeing look in the eyes. He came and examined the mangled bulk of the Dinoceras, scrutinized the horns and tusks minutely, and strove with all his force to wrench one of the latter from its socket, as if hoping to make some use of it. Then, fastidiously selecting a shred of ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... can't all live so. The outside work must go on, and somebody must do it. But of course we have the hardest time, since while in the world we must not be of it. I have come, of late, to think that both classes are needed, the contemplative and the active, and God does certainly take the latter aside now and then as you suggest, by sickness and in other ways, to set them thinking. Holiness is not a mere abstraction; it is praying and loving and being consecrate, but it is also the ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... and D, E, F, pages 152 [Transcribers Note: Diagram X] and 153 [Transcribers Note: Diagram XI], are examples of the influence to be associated with the horizontal and vertical lines. A is nothing but six straight lines drawn across a rectangular shape, and yet I think they convey something of the contemplative and peaceful sense given by a sunset over the sea on a calm evening. And this is entirely due to the expressive power straight lines possess, and the feelings they have the power to call up in the mind. In B a little more incident and variety has been introduced, and although ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... our author upon the validity of "the principle of the Unconditioned or the Infinite." "Supposing it were conceded that some faint glimmering of this great truth [the existence of a First Cause] might, by induction, have been discovered by contemplative minds, by what means could they have demonstrated to themselves that he is eternal, self-existent, immortal, and independent?"[365] "Between things visible and invisible, time and eternity, beings finite and beings infinite, objects of ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... "Then, friend, why are we so content to censure others? Let us be fair and pass judgment on ourselves. But the contemplative life we lead is merely the result of indolence, which we gloss over by reflections on the vanity of all things. We are content with our rags. Why? Because we are too lazy to earn better. We reproach the unscholarly as futile ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... much as Napoleon on St. Helena took a pleasure to read military works. The field of his ambition was quite closed; he was done with action, and looked forward to a ranch in a mountain dingle, a patch of corn, a pair of kine, a leisurely and contemplative age in the green shade of forests. "Just let me get down on my back in a hayfield," said he, "and you'll find there's no more snap to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Jolter with contemplative favor. He was a stout, stockily-built man, with a square head and sparse gray hair that would persist in tangling and curling at the ends; and he perpetually kept his sleeves rolled up over his ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... in the mind, fasten itself on the mind, be uppermost in the mind, occupy the mind; have in one's mind. make an impression; sink into the mind, penetrate into the mind; engross the thoughts. Adj. thinking &c v.; thoughtful, pensive, meditative, reflective, museful^, wistful, contemplative, speculative, deliberative, studious, sedate, introspective, Platonic, philosophical. lost in thought &c (inattentive) 458; deep musing &c (intent) 457. in the mind, under consideration. Adv. all things considered. Phr. the mind being on the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... was going out in a minute, put it into her ulster pocket. But, curiously enough, the sight of her face only intensified an impression that had been strong on him during the last part of their walk—the impression that she was a long way off. It wasn't the familiar contemplative brown study, either. There was an active eager excitement about it that made it more beautiful than ever he had seen it before. But it was as if she were looking at something he couldn't see—listening ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... After a contemplative glance at his companion's well-knit figure, Balt gave in, with the final caution: "Don't let them get the upper hand, or there won't be no ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... a tendency in preparing stories to begin with detail work, often a gesture or side issue which one has remembered from hearing a story told, but if this is done before the contemplative period, only scrappy, jerky and ineffective results are obtained, on which one cannot count for dramatic effects. This kind of preparation reminds one of a young peasant woman who was taken to see a performance of "Wilhelm Tell," and ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... trades vary in structure and spirit. There is an immense difference between the temper of the tumultuous structural iron workers and the contemplative cigar-makers, who often hire one of their number to read to them while engaged in their work, the favorite authors being in many instances Ruskin and Carlyle. Some unions are more successful than others in collective bargaining. Martin Fox, the able leader of the iron moulders, signed ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... devotion to games and to the chase; in his middle age he laid aside these pursuits, and, applying himself actively to business, was a good administrator, as well as a brave soldier. But at last it seemed to him that the only life worth living was the contemplative, and that the happiness of the hunter and the statesman must yield to that of the philosopher. It is doubtful how long he survived his resignation of the throne, but tolerably certain that he did not outlive his ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... in the United States. The pendulum worked well. It came and went, to and fro, slowly along the line of Indifference, without ever transgressing as its extreme limits on either hand, Moderate Desires and Slight Troubles. I led obscurely a contemplative life, and I was generally considered a queer character. I fulfilled my duties, and took little heed of any one. Whenever I had an hour at my disposal, I sought solitude in the neighboring woods, far from ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... will tell you," replied the Prefect, as he gave a long, steady and contemplative puff, and settled himself in his chair. "I will tell you in a few words; but, before I begin, let me caution you that this is an affair demanding the greatest secrecy, and that I should most probably lose the position I now hold, were ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... all-wise, he was sad and oppressed, for he had gained an insight into futurity, and had become aware of the transitory nature of all things, and even of the fate of the gods, who were doomed to pass away. This knowledge so affected his spirits that he ever after wore a melancholy and contemplative expression. ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... that will occur to a contemplative mind, that the world contained, from the time when it was a nebulous mass, all the materials of the future individuals of the animate and inanimate creation,—that the elaborate creatures of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, as well as every mineral, were floating in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... moments of illumination wherein we attain the eternal vision the soul is occupied, and the person attempting to think is occupied, with what I call "the difficult work of art" of concentrating its various energies and fusing them into one balanced point of rhythmic harmony. This effort of contemplative tension is a "creative effort" similar to that which all artists are compelled to make. In addition to this aspect of what I call "creation," there also remains the fact that the individual soul modifies and changes that first half-real something which I name the objective mystery, ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... distinction and contrast between contemplative life and actual existence was quite in the Rasmus Nielsen spirit; the use that was made of it here was strange. One would suppose that the example adduced established that similar natural qualifications, similar family and other conditions, in other words, the actual essential ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... irregularly in the middle, flowed in natural ringlets over her shoulders, and whenever she chanced to stoop, fell over and hid from view her lovely bosom. Gazing into the depths of her strange blue eyes, when she was in a contemplative mood, they seemed most placid yet unfathomable; but when illuminated by some lively emotion, they beamed upon the beholder like stars. The hands of Fayaway were as soft and delicate as those of any countess; for ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... Walton says that angling is the contemplative man's recreation, and, having had in these later years much to con over in my mind, I know that he is right. But it is no occupation for a fuming man, and as I marched up and down I forgot all about ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... even for such a School as is described below. Then came the cathartic virtues, by which the subtle body, that of the emotions and lower mind, was purified; thirdly the intellectual, belonging to the Augoeides, or the light-form of the intellect; fourthly the contemplative, or paradigmatic, by which union with God was realised. Porphyry writes: "He who energises according to the practical virtues is a worthy man; but he who energises according to the purifying virtues is an angelic man, or is also a good ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... unmarried women—among our poetic leaders is, I think, to be found in the fact that women, more often than men, command the means of living for a generous portion of the year that vital, unstrenuous, contemplative existence demanded by poetry as an antecedent condition of its creation. It is a significant fact that, according to Arnold Bennett, nearly all of the foremost English writers live far from the town. Most of the more promising American poets of both sexes, however, have ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... Genius had advanced, and stood near us. I cannot tell you how I knew him, but I knew him to be the Genius of Death. Breathless as I was at beholding him, I soon became familiar with his features. First they seemed only calm; presently they grew contemplative; and lastly beautiful; those of the Graces themselves are less regular, ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... be it well understood, Was a man of very contemplative mood— He would pour by the hour, o'er a weed or a flower, Or the slugs, that came crawling out after a shower; Black beetles, bumble-bees, blue-bottle flies, And moths, were of no small account in his eyes; An "industrious flea," he'd by no means ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... world would have failed to observe the slightest trace of cunning, or want of a balanced mind in their expression. During the progress of his story he had continually held his ring where he could see it, and several times had raised it to the light, in a contemplative sort of way, as if he drew some satisfaction from its appearance. He bowed his head in his hands as he ceased speaking, and some moments elapsed before he looked up, though when he did so he was ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of life,—remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit,[46] to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption.[47] Henceforth it is an object of beauty, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... described their discovery of the chasm and revealed some of his thoughts concerning it, but Wabi betrayed only passing flashes of interest. At times he seemed strangely preoccupied and would stand in an idle, contemplative mood, his hands buried deep in his pockets, while Rod or Mukoki proceeded with the little duties about the table or the stove. Finally, after arousing himself from one of these momentary spells, he pulled a brass shell from his pocket and held it ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... a fascinating personality. He is not socialistic and faithful, like the ant, for example: he is anarchistic, wild, temperamental, and fond of adventure. He is also contemplative by nature, like other philosophers. How many an evening, at midnight, when I have wanted a sandwich, I have found him and his friends standing still, lost in thought, by the sink. When I poke him up, he blinks with his antennae and slowly makes off. On the other hand, he can run at high ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... framed itself in the square of the window, dawn, coming in like an AEgean sunset with a violet light, lit up his half-profile, throwing into clear relief the familiar features, and dropping a brilliant spark into each of his wide, contemplative eyes. The effect was a thing of the stage: it lent him an added wistfulness, and I felt a pang of pity for him, and a throb of something not lower than love. He walked back to his bed, whistling, while I completed my ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... filaments in its slow current, and between the woodland openings there are glimpses of vivid velvet sward, even at times when the wild oats and "wire-grasses" of the plains are already yellowing. The placid river, unstained at this point by mining sluices or mill drift, runs clear under its contemplative shadows. Originally the camping-ground of a Digger Chief, it passed from his tenancy with the American rifle bullet that terminated his career. The pioneer who thus succeeded to its attractive calm gave way in turn to a well-directed shot from the revolver of a quartz-prospector, equally ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... in that variety lies her loveliness," answered Algernon. "It is the constant and eternal change going forward that interests us, and gives to nature her undying charm. Man—high-souled, contemplative man—was not born to sameness. Variety is to his mind what food is to his body; and as the latter, deprived of its usual nourishment, sinks to decay—so the former, from like deprivation of its strengthening power, becomes weak and imbecile. Again: as coarse, ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... ornament of folly. In the times of its inventor, and for many succeeding ages, it was expressive of modesty and worth; in our days it is the badge of impudence and vain pretensions. It was formerly the symbol of the profound contemplative genius, it is now the mark of the superficial and unthinking practitioner. It was once reverenced by kings and clothed in the robes of nobility; it is now (according to its true acceptation) abandoned and ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus
... at me," saith he. "How can I be perfect, that am wedded man? [Note 2.] Thou wist well enough that perfect men be only found among the contemplative, not among them that dwell in the world. Yet soothly, I reckon man may dwell in the world and love Christ, or he may dwell in cloister and ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... of the three homes from the railroad, and where the hills begin, Philip and Ruth Van Doren chose their abode. And you may see them any day that you care to penetrate to their broad pastures, riding together, viewing with contemplative eyes the distant peaks or the cattle that are the Governor's delight, a link, he says, between the present and the olden times when the world was young. And often at night, when they are not with the Congdons or the ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... the horses and mules lying down, and they regarded him with large, contemplative eyes as he lighted the fire and began to cook supper. The animals were on the best of terms, constituting a happy family, and the eyes with which they regarded Will seemed to him to ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... with which the astrologer had closed his tale. He was a man of venerable appearance, with flowing, white beard that descended to his waist. And yet, although his face was furrowed with the lines of old age, his eyes were wonderfully youthful in their contemplative calm. ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... his lichen-clad pillar, with paws comfortably folded, a tuft of grass growing in each ear and rubus bushes along his back. And yonder is an old chief poised on a taller pillar, apparently gazing out over the landscape in contemplative mood, a tuft of bushes leaning back with a jaunty air from the top of his weatherbeaten hat, and downy mosses about his massive lips. But no rudeness or grotesqueness that may appear, however combined with the decorations that nature has added, may possibly provoke mirth. ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... of view are different in different countries. We may find ourselves looking, not only at political questions, but at incidents in natural history from a different point of view when we are on different sides of an ocean. The other day I was in a contemplative mood not far from Washington. I was thinking what a great country I was in, how much larger the rivers were and how vast the distances, and generally working up in my own mind an impression of the great size of the country. Then I happened to recall this incident of the golden-crested ...
— Recreation • Edward Grey
... your ingenuity in a rational and contemplative manner.—No, I do not proscribe certain forms of philosophical speculation which involve an approach to the absurd or the ludicrous, such as you may find, for example, in the folio of the Reverend Father ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... drill, inculcate, instil, indoctrinate. Thoughtful, contemplative, meditative, reflective, pensive, wistful. Tire, weary, fatigue, exhaust, jade, fag. Tool, implement, instrument, utensil. Trifle, dally, dawdle, potter. Try, endeavor, essay, attempt. Trust, confidence, reliance, assurance, faith. Turn, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... organ Coerne has written much and well. There is an adaptation of three pieces from the string quartette (op. 19); a graceful Minuet, a quaint Aria, and a Fugue. Then there are three Marches, which, like most marches written by contemplative musicians, are rather thematic than spirited, and marked by a restless and elaborate preparation for some great chant that is longed for, but never comes. Besides these, there are a very pleasant Pastoral, a good Elevation, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... learned that in other respects he did not deviate in his prosperity from the philosophic tenor of his former life. He abated nothing of his peripatetic exercises; and repaired duly in the morning, as he had done in former years, to St. James's Park,—where he sate in contemplative ease amongst the cows, inhaling their balmy breath and pursuing his philosophic reveries. He had also purchased an organ, or more than one, with which he solaced his solitude and beguiled himself of uneasy thoughts if he ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... that, as the Platonic ideas are divided into three species, of which one tends to the contemplative or speculative life, one to active morality, and the third to the idle and voluptuous, so are there three species of love, of which one raises itself from the contemplation of bodily form to the consideration of the spiritual and divine; the other only continues ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... apprehensions, to be greatly distressed at our danger: so we turned back, after having had a short interview with an old man seated in a shed on the edge of the precipice. His white beard, which covered his breast, suited well with his sedate and contemplative air, and gave him much the aspect of a hermit. Our appearance did not in the least discompose him, nor did he take any notice of us till desired to do so by Ookooma; he then bowed slightly, but immediately resumed his fixed look, as if he ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... Why, Mr. Danver, they're the cog-wheels of the whole machinery. They only keep their bodies apart that their minds may be more free. Nobody has the good of mankind so much at heart as a contemplative. They are keeping the machinery going ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... entirely separated from his sister. He was sure to hear of Augusta frequently, and to see some part, at least, of the letters which she was to write to her brother; he might also hope to be remembered in these letters as her "good friend and tutor;" and to these consolations his quiet, contemplative, and yet enthusiastic disposition, clung as to a secret source of pleasure, the only one which life seemed to ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... rise from the earth and flourish by the superior skill and bounty of the laborer, fills a contemplative mind with ideas which are more easy to ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... their room, the friends enjoyed a long and contemplative smoke upon the wide piazza in front of their windows, listlessly regarding the ever-varied marine view that lay before them in flashing breadth and beauty. Their next labor was to array themselves in wonderful morning-costumes of very shaggy English cloth, shiny flasks and ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... than he had thought, so still sat the contemplative mountaineer, so alluring were the details of the landscape. The enthusiasm of the amateur is always a more urgent motive power than the restrained and utilitarian industry ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... is like the life on earth, but less active, more contemplative, and sin and money-making are almost absent. The wicked of all sorts have one fate; they are fired off the planet. We can overcome the attraction of gravitation by our Toto powder. These executions are strange to ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... and Andrew, never a very robust person, was early sent to the best schools in the neighborhood, and much care taken by his mother to have him at least educated for a profession—the ministry. This resolve was more perhaps decided upon from the naturally stern, contemplative, and fixed principles of young Jackson; as at the early age of fifteen, he was by nature well prepared for the scenes being enacted around him, and in which, even those young as himself, were called upon to take an active part. This was in the days of the revolution, ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... never been in haste to reach its turbid outlet, but go reluctantly from town to town with whole days before them, yes, perhaps, it was an age in making its first journey. It loses its way often, but cares not so there be a pleasant meadow to meander through or a contemplative fisherman to companion its course. The Charles has never gained force, as man is said to do, by having obstacles to overcome. It treats all the dams which intercept its current with a lenient benevolence, never having been known to ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... once pronounce the portrait excellent, and dwell upon its merits with apparent delight. A portrait of Mr. Labouchere, however, he generally failed to recognise. The portrait represented the Member for Northampton in a contemplative mood, certainly not characteristic of his habitual ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... career with the writing of essays, then issued two charming volumes of humorous and contemplative travel, "An Inland Voyage" and "Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes"; then collected, in his "New Arabian Nights" a number of fanciful short stories he had been publishing in a magazine. In 1883 he first caught the attention of the larger ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... the extremely immediate gaze of two serried ranks of male creatures on each side of her path, save here and there to recognise one of them with an imperceptible nod, is one of her daily duties. The number of young men here who, like the coenobites of old, lead the purely contemplative life is enormous. They muster in especial force on the Pincio, but the Corso all day is thronged with them. They are well-dressed, good- humoured, good-looking, polite; but they seem never to do a harder stroke of work than to stroll from the Piazza Colonna to the Hotel de Rome ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the castle, we must "do" it, after the set fashion. Reminders meet us at the threshold that it is in form a real place of defence, contemplative of wars and rumors of wars, and not a mere dwelling by any means in original design. A roadway, crooked and raked by frowning embrasures, leads up from the peaceful town to the particularly inhospitable-looking twin towers of Henry VIII.'s gateway, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... a series of essays filled with literary charm and individuality, not self-willed or over-assertive, but gracious and winning, sometimes profoundly contemplative, and anon frolicsome and more inclined to chaff than to instruct—but interesting and ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... Peleus' son Achilles, by the ever-living Gods To Peleues given, put on. Those arms the Sire, Now old himself, had on his son conferr'd But in those arms his son grew never old. 240 Him, therefore, soon as cloud-assembler Jove Saw glittering in divine Achilles' arms, Contemplative he shook his brows, and said, Ah hapless Chief! thy death, although at hand, Nought troubles thee. Thou wear'st his heavenly 245 Who all excels, terror of Ilium's host. His friend, though bold yet gentle, thou hast slain And hast the brows and bosom of the dead Unseemly bared: ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... first taken hold of the most active and important part, and if I may be allowed to call it, the heart of this body, from thence was on one side by a quick passage, and in its more refined parts, communicated through the blood to the contemplative, and reasoning, the head, which it inspired with noble thoughts and resolutions; and on the other, to the inferior extremities, which were thereby rendered more expedite and readier to obey the dictates of the head in a rougher method of opposition, from each of which extremities ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... that is done, the agents that do it, and the circumstances of time and place under which it is done; or, to say the matter in three words,—action, actors, and setting. Only when all three elements conspire can something happen. Life suggests to the mind of a contemplative observer many possible events which remain unrealized because only one or two of the necessary three elements are present,—events that are waiting, like unborn children on the other side of Lethe, until the necessary conditions shall call them into being. We observe a man who could ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... about that, suh," would be the answer given with a contemplative squint of the placid, pale eye. "I reckin my calculations won't be very fur out of the ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... warned and advise their subordinates of it, so that they may not perplex themselves or meddle in any case of these secular judicial proceedings, or with claims of third parties. For their occupation does not consist in this, but in the contemplative life, and in the exercise of the spiritual activities; and, moreover, the gravest disadvantages to the service of our Lord result from the contrary course. You shall advise me of what you shall do and what you shall ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... Roach, though sometimes a little bit testy, and, on the whole, not without faults, was as good-natured an anchorite as ever said mass or brewed a contemplative bowl of punch. If he refused to go down to the Mills, he would not have been comfortable again that night, nor indeed for a week to come. So, with a sigh, he made up his mind, got quietly into his surtout and mufflers which hung on the peg behind the hall-door, clapped on his hat, grasped his ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the first efforts of sportive nature. When a country arrives at a certain state of perfection, it looks as if it were made so; and curiosity is not excited. Besides, in social life too many objects occur for any to be distinctly observed by the generality of mankind; yet a contemplative man, or poet, in the country—I do not mean the country adjacent to cities—feels and sees what would escape vulgar eyes, and draws suitable inferences. This train of reflections might have led me further, in every sense of the word; but I could ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... named Mr. Barnet. He was a contemplative fellow with a pipe in his mouth. After having worked at the place for half a day he sent ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... writings the careful reader will come across pleasant references to foreign manners and customs, betokening the keen humorous observer, and the possession of that wide-eyed faculty that takes a pleasure, half contemplative, half the result of animal spirits, in watching the way of the world wherever you may chance to be. Of another and an earlier traveller, Sir Henry Wotton, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... two more sonnets written in contemplative mood, just to give the reader a fuller idea not of the verse, as verse, but of the spirit in the old squire. There is no title to ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... we ascertained that we were now quite near Hartington and Dovedale. Hartington was a famous resort of fishermen and well known to Isaak Walton, the "Father of Fishermen," and author of that famous book The Compleat Angler or the Contemplative Man's Recreation, so full of such cheerful piety and contentment, such sweet freshness and simplicity, as to give the book a perennial charm. He was a great friend of Charles Cotton of Beresford Hall, who built a fine ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... mountains, and on the interior plains; the fish principle in nature, from which it results that they may be found in water in so many places, in greater or less numbers. The natural historian is not a fisherman, who prays for cloudy days and good luck merely, but as fishing has been styled "a contemplative man's recreation," introducing him profitably to woods and water, so the fruit of the naturalist's observations is not in new genera or species, but in new contemplations still, and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation. The seeds of the ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... that scowled at her from the solemn, mournful pages; and anon, when startled from sleep by these awful visions, she would soothe herself to rest by murmuring the metrical version of the Lord's Prayer contained in the "Purgatory." Most emphatically did Mrs. Hunt disapprove of the studious and contemplative habits of the ambitious child, who she averred was indulging dreams and aspirations far above her station in life, and well calculated to dissatisfy her with her humble, unpretending home and uninviting future. Education, she contended, was useless ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Joanna outside the Law Courts. In the stillness of the August evening and the yellow dusty sunshine, he looked almost contemplative, standing there with bowed head, looking down at his hands which were folded on his stick, while one or two pigeons strutted about at his feet. Joanna's heart melted at the sight of him. She went up to him, and touched ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... had left—here glimmering faintly at a picket station, and there at a larger encampment, glowing first in a circle of blaze, then of illumined smoke, that in its upward course gradually darkened into the blackness of night. To men of contemplative habits, and many such there were, though clad in blouses, the scene was strongly suggestive. Our states emblemed in the lights of the valleys and the mountain ridge as the much talked of "impassable barrier." But faith in the success of a cause Heaven founded, ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... she glanced at Martin Luther with a contemplative eye, "when you're done eating run over and ask your Maw to send me a pair of Billy's britches and a shirt. No, maybe young Ez's 'll be better, and bring 'em and Martin Luther on back to the kitchen to me." With which she disappeared into ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... sheer three thousand feet below, is thinly enough populated, though a great river and the line of railway from Manresa to Barcelona run through it. So clear is the atmosphere that at the great distance the contemplative denizens of the monastery may count the number of the railway carriages, while no sound of the train, or indeed of any life in the ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... senseless sequence, resembling the hazards of destiny itself. He nourished a conviction that there must be some logic lurking somewhere in the results of chance. He thought he had seen its very form. His head swam; his limbs ached; he puffed at his pipe mechanically; a contemplative stupor would soothe the fretfulness of his temper, like the passive bodily quietude procured by a drug, while the intellect remains tensely on the stretch. Nine, nine, aught, four, two. He made a note. The next winning number of the great prize was forty-seven ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... is all very well in its way, no doubt, but much more fascinating to the contemplative man are the books that have not been written. These latter are no trouble to hold; there are no pages to turn over. One can read them in bed on sleepless nights without a candle. Turning to another topic, primitive man in the works of the ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... you are a fisherman? Well, you haste a great pleasure in store, as well as an opportunity to learn something of the 'contemplative man's recreation.' I ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... of Hazlitt's style concerning which much has been said both in praise and in blame is his inveterate use of quotations. His pages, particularly when he is in a contemplative mood, are sown with snatches from the great poets, and the effect generally is of the happiest. A line of Shakespeare's or of Wordsworth's, blending with a vein of high feeling or deep reflection, transfigures the entire passage as if by magic. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... character. He is so animated, too, by all these subjects; quite enthusiastic, in his way, about the interests of the people, and the new field of exertion which his present prospects open to him. It is plain that he has a genius more fitted for active than for contemplative life,—and so much the better for him; for a man, this is the happiest of dispositions: and he will be happy; for there is nothing in his character incompatible with quiet enjoyment; no violent passions and feelings; no morbid sensibility; with him ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... up in his chair, and Durant caught him smiling to himself, a contemplative, almost voluptuous smile; was it at the prospect ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... survived, fully justified his prediction. Men and women who fall into trances remain sometimes for several days without food, respiration, or pulsation of the heart, as if they were dead. Thauler, a famous contemplative (philosopher) maintains that a man may remain entranced during a week, a month, or even a year. We have seen an abbess, who when in a trance, into which she often fell, lost the use of her natural functions, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... one who would 'be well qualified to write notes upon the spirit and meaning of the words of Christ;'[540] it is impossible not to feel that he is approaching very closely to the morbid pietism of the recluse. His was indeed no mere contemplative asceticism, but fruitful in practical virtues; and even its weaker points stand out in noble contrast with the deficiencies of an age which admired prudential religion, and took in good earnest the words of the Preacher as to being righteous overmuch.[541] ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... character and natural gifts, Leo the Thirteenth is essentially active rather than contemplative, and it is not surprising that the chief acts of his pontificate should have dealt rather with political matters than with questions of dogma and ecclesiastical authority. It has certainly been the object of the present ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... come over the spirit of your journey, since your steps have turned towards your ancestral sea-side home. An excursion to invigorate health impaired by labors, too arduous for age, in the public councils, and expected to be quiet and contemplative, has become one of fatigue and excitement. Rumors of your advance escape before you, and a happy and grateful community rise up in their clustering cities, towns, and villages, impede your way with demonstrations of respect and kindness, and convert your ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... possible to conceive. In his singular character the dual nature alternately presented itself, and his extreme exactness and astuteness represented, as I have often thought, the reaction against the poetic and contemplative mood which occasionally predominated in him. The swing of his nature took him from extreme languor to devouring energy; and, as I knew well, he was never so truly formidable as when, for days on end, he had been lounging in his arm-chair amid his ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... not miss his wife or his daughters. He had become again the mild, contemplative youth he was in college, before he had a profession and a family to grind for, before the two needs which shape our destiny had made of him pretty much what they ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... which enjoins patience and humility, as well as encourages the spirit of liberty and progress. But whatever may have been their blunders and crimes, and however marked the providence of God in overruling them for the ultimate good of Europe, still, all contemplative men behold in the Revolution the retributive justice of the Almighty, in humiliating a proud family of princes, and punishing a vain and oppressive nobility for the evils they ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... figure of Jim Ludlow, ticket agent and tenor of the Presbyterian choir. And leaning cross-legged beneath the station eaves, giving the effect of supporting the low roof, were half a dozen slowly masticating, soberly contemplative gentlemen—loose-jointed caryatides, whose lank sculpture forms the sole and invariable ornamentation of the facades of all Western stations. But nowhere did the young woman's expectant eyes alight upon the person ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... from the side-door Mr. Vickers stood smoking a contemplative pipe; the side-door itself had just closed behind a tall man in corduroys, who bore in his right hand a large mug ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... became acquainted with during this residence of two years in Boston, was Jonathan Phillips. He was a merchant by profession, but inherited a large fortune, and was never, that I know, engaged much in active business. He led, when I knew him, a contemplative life, was an assiduous reader, and a deeper thinker. He had [51] a splendid library, and spent much of his time among his books. If he had had the proper training for it, I always thought he would have made a great metaphysician. His conversation was often profound, ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... many treasures the woods and hillsides yielded that "would do for Tommy." Surrounded by playthings such as never child out of fairyland had before, it is to be hoped that Tommy was content. He appeared to be serenely happy, albeit there was an infantine gravity about him, a contemplative light in his round gray eyes, that sometimes worried Stumpy. He was always tractable and quiet, and it is recorded that once, having crept beyond his "corral," [Footnote: Corral: an inclosure for animals.]—a hedge of tessellated [Footnote: Tessellated: checkered.] pine boughs ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... in a very singular manner, the genius and energy of his character, which is fierce, contemplative, daring, and tyrannical; attributes not exerted but on particular occasions, but, when put forth, overpowering all opposition. Elevated on the high dead limb of some gigantic tree that commands a wide view of the neighbouring ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... eyes burned more steadily now. It was the fire which is unquenchable—the fire of a lasting hate, vengeful, terrible. Then her tone dropped to a contemplative soliloquy. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... a domestic animal, and naturally conservative in its tastes—averse, therefore, to uproar, and to all those given to change. Its propensities are to meditation and contemplative tranquillity, for which reason it has been held in reverence by nations of a similar staid and composed disposition, and has been the favorite companion and constant friend of grave philosophers and thoughtful students. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... the box of the captured American packet, was nothing more than a project or draft of a treaty, which possibly the Dutch would never have completed. So far as they knew, he said, it might be merely a "speculative essay," or a "contemplative prospect;" and therefore it was no justifiable or assignable ground for going to war with them. These were arguments, however, for party purposes; opposition conceived that the declaration of war between England and Holland was setting the seal to Lord North's political embarrassments, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... irregular, announced that he slept. The captain then arose, for a moment critically examined the sleeping man, holding his head a little on one side, whistling softly, and stepping backwards to get a good perspective, but always with contemplative good humor, as if Catron were a work of art, which he (the captain) had created, yet one that he was not yet entirely satisfied with. Then he put a large pea-jacket over his flannel blouse, dragged a Mexican ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... so full of song, Singing above me, on the mountain-ash. And thou too, desert stream! no pool of thine, Though clear as lake in latest summer-eve, Did e'er reflect the stately virgin's robe, The face, the form divine, the downcast look Contemplative! Behold! her open palm Presses her cheek and brow! her elbow rests On the bare branch of half-uprooted tree, That leans towards its mirror! Who erewhile Had from her countenance turned, or looked by stealth ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... Shelby said, and Benjamin Crane looked happily contemplative of the seances in the future when Madame would utilize this miraculous gift of hers ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... about three feet by four and set it on end against the bank. The cold grey of morning was already colouring the east, and in the growing light Ayrault beheld a vision of Violet within the ice. The face was at about three fourths, and had a contemplative air. The hair was arranged as he had formerly seen it, and the thoughtful look was strongest in the beautiful grey eyes, which were more serious than of yore. Ayrault stood riveted to the spot and gazed. "I could have been happy with her," he mused, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... this cloystered place of ours Is but newe reared; the founder, hee still lyves, A souldier once and eminent in the feild, And after many battayles nowe retyrd In peace to lyve a lyff contemplative. Mongst many other charitable deedes, Unto religion hee hathe vowed this howse, Next to his owne fayre mantion that adjoynes And parted only by a slender wall. Who knwes but that hee neighboring us so neare And havinge doone this unto pious ends, May carry over us and our behavioures ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... presence of the gigantic feathered biped Simurgh, their god, traverse seven Seas (according to others seven Wadys) of Search, of Love, of Knowledge, of Competence, of Unity, of Stupefaction, and of Altruism (i.e. annihilation of self), the several stages of contemplative life. At last, standing upon the mysterious island of the Simurgh and "casting a clandestine glance at him they saw thirty birds[FN250] in him; and when they turned their eyes to themselves the thirty birds seemed one Simurgh: they saw in themselves the entire Simurgh; they saw in the Simurgh ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... is so remarkable for its Doric simplicity, as well as being essential to mark the concluding period of the contemplative man's day) have not been admitted into ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... cautiously, went into the library with the message, John Prather stood half smiling to himself as he looked around the hall. The effect seemed to please him in a contemplative fashion, for he rubbed the palms of his hands together, as he had in his survey of the diamond counters. He was serenity itself as John Wingfield, Sr. burst out of the library, ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... the lungs that have once inhaled it, or thought to the mind in which it has once been conceived. I defied Heaven itself to rob me of this divine embodying of my desires. I had seen her, and that was enough. For the contemplative, to see is to enjoy. It scarcely mattered to me whether she loved me, or whether she passed me by without perceiving me. I had been touched by her splendor, and was still enveloped in her rays; she could no more withdraw them from me than the sun can take from the earth the beams which he has ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... hand. The good-will can be sustained only by a mind that now and then withdraws itself from its engagements, and expands its view to the full measure of life. For the momentary inhibiting of the narrower practical impulses, and the evoking of this quiet and contemplative mood, the love of nature and the love of art are the most ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... the end of a blazing hot London day when I went down the hard to the water's edge, among the small, pink-legged boys, paddling, and the usual group of contemplative workmen, who smoke their pipes by the landing place. The river was half empty, and emptying itself still more as the ebb ran down. The haze of heat and twilight blurred shapes and colours, but the fine old houses of the historic "Mall," the tower of the church, and the tall elms and taller chimneys ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... seen Judas Iscariot than any other person who had lived on the earth. For myself, I would rather have seen Lamb himself once, than to have lived with Judas. Herbert, to my great delight, has not changed; I should know him anywhere,—the same serious, contemplative face, with lurking humor at the corners of the mouth,—the same cheery laugh and clear, distinct enunciation as of old. There is nothing so winning as a good voice. To see Herbert again, unchanged in all outward essentials, is not only gratifying, but valuable as a testimony to nature's ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of Denmark itself, as well as of the Nether-Saxon Circle;—till in the latter of these years he slightly rallied, and got a supportable Peace granted him (Peace of Lubeck, 1629); after which he sits quiet, contemplative, with an evil eye upon Sweden now and then. The beatings he got, in quite regular succession, from Tilly and Consorts, are not worth mentioning: the only thing one now remembers of him is his alarming accident on the ramparts of Hameln, just at the opening of these Campaigns. At ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... hope to come here silently, to let every man, every house and every brick of the houses silently teach me, and, after having learned many fair and useful things, to return silently and thankfully home. Unfortunately I cannot now be a silent and contemplative pupil in this place, as I desired to be, but I must speak, forced by the time in which we are living and suffering. I will speak in order not to teach you, but to thank you. And I have to thank you much in the name of the Serbian nation ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... distance marched that day. "Keazletown road, six and twenty miles." "You seem to have no stragglers." "Never allow straggling." "You must teach my people; they straggle badly." A bow in reply. Just then my creoles started their band and a waltz. After a contemplative suck at a lemon, "Thoughtless fellows for serious work" came forth. I expressed a hope that the work would not be less well done because of the gayety. A return to the lemon gave me the opportunity to retire. Where Jackson ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... and induce habits of orderly, tranquil, contemplative, or social amusement, moderate exercises and recreation, soothing to the nerves, has been the most needed "mission" for New York. We think we see daily evidence that the Park accomplishes not a little in this way. Unfortunately, the evidence is not of a character to be expressed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... things more readily than Agatha did, for her spirits were lighter. Not that Agatha was unhappy, or inattentive to her father; but she was quieter than Marie and of a more contemplative mood. She also had dark hair, but it was a dark brown, and she wore it braided close to her forehead. Her complexion was clear and bright, her forehead was white, and the colour in her cheeks, when she had colour there, was that of the clearest carnation. She was considerably taller than Marie, ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... to reflect on the unpleasantness of her situation; the threat of a conventual seclusion sounded harshly to her ear. She fancied it would be more advantageous to society that her good offices should continue in requisition, than that they should be for ever lost by an untimely adoption of a contemplative life. ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... got any necks, then?" said a third, abruptly—a little, contemplative, dark man, smoking ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... you make," I said, "of contemplative Orders of monks and nuns, who say that they specialise in prayer, and give up their whole ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... each is appropriate. These are the epic poem, the drama, and the novel. Each purports to be, in some sort, a reflex of human life and action, as obeying certain laws and tending to a certain end. In each men are represented, not as at rest, or in contemplative isolation, but in co-operation or collision. In each there is a combination of two elements, an outer element of incident, an inner of passion and character. In view of these common features, we might be tempted at first sight to suppose the difference between the three ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... sixty years. I-Ching himself seems to regard the two Vehicles as alternative forms of religion, both excellent in their way, much as a Catholic theologian might impartially explain the respective advantages of the active and contemplative lives. "With resolutions rightly formed" he says "we should look forward to meeting the coming Buddha Maitreya. If we wish to gain the lesser fruition (of the Hinayana) we may pursue it through the eight grades of sanctification. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... and out, doubtless impatient at this prolonged stay when the cup was empty; and, in one of these inspectory visits, the old man addressed her, scarcely raising his contemplative gaze from the embers, where he had been poking his eyes out for the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... never fish, except in stress of dire necessity, in the Odyssey, and Homer's own Diomede and Odysseus would never stoop to assassinate a companion when engaged in the contemplative man's recreation. We here see the heroes in late degraded form as on the Attic stage. (4) The Cyclics introduce Helen as daughter of Nemesis, and describe the flight of Nemesis from Zeus in various animal forms, a Marchen of a sort not popular with Homer; an Ionic ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... this fascinating ruin, which has the best preserved stage of any Greek theatre now in existence. From the top of the hill is one of the most magnificent views in Sicily, and here our travellers sat in contemplative awe until Uncle John declared it was time to return to ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... such a spot as a romantic, visionary mind might choose for its vagaries,—such a spot as an elevated, contemplative one might select for its aspirations after higher hopes, which seldom come in the tumult of life. Mr. Draper felt at once that the place was congenial to the taste and habits of his wife; it awoke in his own mind the recollection ...
— Rich Enough - a tale of the times • Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee
... humaneness issuing in "Dammit, ye shan't!" Rats, meanwhile dangling, they as well as their fate hanging uncertain. At last they are lowered. (The Mate talking, I think, over his shoulder at Nicholas, who stands, probably in contemplative fashion, legs apart, face serious, brain calculating income derivable from rats skinned alive.) The line rising in a minute, I turn on my elbow to witness the end. Alas! Helas!! Ach Himmel!!! How are the mighty fallen! Two grey shining lumps, each with tapering tail dropped ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... long while in the city of London without having any definite object, and yet be amused, for there are few occupations more pleasant, more instructive, or more contemplative, than looking into the shop windows; you pay a shilling to see an exhibition, whereas in this instance you have the advantage of seeing many without paying a farthing, provided that you look after your pocket-handkerchief. Thus was ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... narrow groove of money-making, sport and society to which their vision had been limited—even his small contribution to the new state of things seemed to count, as each brick counts in a well-built wall. He had done little in public life; he would always be by nature a contemplative and a dilettante; but he had had high things to contemplate, great things to delight in; and one great man's friendship to ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... shelf of rock by the side of the spring, cushioned with mosses, afforded us a comfortable resting-place. Elder Staples, in his faded black coat and white neck-cloth, leaned his quiet, contemplative head on his silver-mounted cane: right opposite him sat the Doctor, with his sturdy, rotund figure, and broad, seamed face, surmounted by a coarse stubble of iron-gray hair, the sharp and almost severe expression of his keen gray ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... step, and jump of me. But he had a lanthorn in his hand, and he did not see me, being as I was darkling." Saying this, he assisted Miss Melville to mount. He troubled her little during the route; on the contrary, he was remarkably silent and contemplative, a circumstance by no means disagreeable to Emily, to whom his conversation had ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... of separate nature, but that it should interweave itself with the ties of social life, and be employed in adding beauty to its nearest, dearest interests. Now, the English, he continues, are more disposed to an active than to a contemplative life. They possess, it must be owned, a character of much earnestness and energy; yet, from the earliest times, their attention has been more directed to the cultivation of the mechanical arts and the sciences appertaining to them ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... great industry her volume of poems in less than four months, and had not taken time to reconsider them. They were not narrative pieces, in which the interest of the story carries you along in reading, whether the diction is perfected or not, but mostly short lyrical poems, and contemplative pieces, which are always much more effective when found amongst other descriptions of poetry or in a magazine, than when collected together in a volume. They were generally sad, a common fault with poetesses; but poor Elsie had ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
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