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More "Musing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are irresistibly drawn together, so these gay children of pleasure had, by a common impulse, on rising from table, moved each to each, and formed a group round the fireplace. Randal stood a little apart, musing; the wit examined the pictures through his eye-glass; and Mr. Avenel drew the Baron towards the sideboard, and there held him in whispered conference. This colloquy did not escape the young gentlemen round the fireplace: they glanced ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... Doctor seemed to have been seized with a thoughtful fit, and stood there musing, as if he were making some plan as ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... father)—and all the nine hundred and ninety-nine pretty nothings we hear of, after a brief absence. These will send his heart a long way from the coach, and therefore keep him in the full enjoyment of wakefulness. But this train of delectable musing is by no means exhaustless. The roll of the wheels gradually becomes naturalized to the ear, and the body moves in sympathy with the coach; the road gets very monotonously barren; the lounge in the corner—how suitable then to this solitary languor! Lulled here, the traveller for awhile admires ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... her Pail of milk from the field to the farmhouse, when she fell a-musing. "The money for which this milk will be sold, will buy at least three hundred eggs. The eggs, allowing for all mishaps, will produce two hundred and fifty chickens. The chickens will become ready for the market when poultry will fetch ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... most treasured secret. I would obtain the truth from her the following day—in the mean time—But, while I was occupied by multiplying reflections, Lord Raymond returned. He asked for my sister; and I delivered her message. After musing on it for a moment, he asked me if I were about to return to London, and if I would accompany him: I consented. He was full of thought, and remained silent during a considerable part of our ride; at length he said, "I must apologize to you for my abstraction; the truth ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... is, Whose brasen tops your worthy self made proud; The ground an altar, base for such a bliss With pity torn, because I sighed so loud. And since my skill no worship can impart, Make you an incense of my loving heart. Sad all alone not long I musing sat, But that my thoughts compelled me to aspire, A laurel garland in my hand I gat; So the Muses I approached the nigher. My suite was this, a poet to become, To drink with them, and from the heavens be fed. Phoebus denied, and sware there was no room, Such to be poets as fond fancy led. ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... I said to myself, once or twice, as I stood at the parlor door. I was musing upon the name perhaps ten or fifteen seconds, and when I looked up, they were each both smiling at ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... suitable spot for the conception of a history of the origin, rise, decline and fall of the great maritime Republic, whose dominions, still smiling and populous, surround Ravello on all sides? Gibbon found the first suggestion for his Roman History whilst musing upon the ruins of the Capitol, and he finished his great work in a Swiss garden amidst the scent of acacia bloom; might not the annals of the Amalfitan Republic likewise spring from reflections made upon this terrace, where the memories of a former ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... flies out at the open door. Gerome's picture was in three panels. The first showed the poet opening the door to the sobbing Cupid, with his bedraggled wings and dripping curls; in the next, the rosy ingrate wounds his benefactor; in the third, the poet sits disconsolate by his hearth, musing over the days when Love was his guest, if but for an hour. As the story was an old one, so many an artist before Gerome had played with it as a subject for a picture. Jean-Francois Millet himself, another pupil of Delaroche, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... enthusiast and the worshiper of beauty "lose themselves" in ecstasy. The "fine frenzy" of the thinker is typical. From Archimedes, whose life paid the forfeit of his impersonal absorption; from Socrates, musing in one spot from dawn to dawn, to Newton and Goethe, there is but one form of the highest effort to penetrate and to create. Emerson is right in saying of the genius, "His greatness consists in the fullness in which an ecstatic state is realized in ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... her twenty-first birthday," he said, "in three weeks. Then I must give her the packet. So—so—with the portrait of her father, and his marriage-certificate." He fell into a fit of musing, with the papers in his hand. "She will be safe, whatever happens to me; and as for me, if I lose her—of course I shall lose her. Why, what will it matter? Have I not lost all, except Iris? One must not be selfish. Oh, Iris, what a surprise—what a surprise ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... edge of the bed in their little room in San Jose that night, a musing expression ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... butter was dear in those parts and the Devotee laid all that came to him together in a jar he had, till he filled it and hung it up over his head for safe keeping. One night, as he sat on his bed, staff in hand, he fell a-musing upon the butter and the greatness of its price and said in himself, "Needs must I sell all this butter I have by me and buy with the price an ewe and take to partner therein a Fellah[FN68] fellow who hath a ram. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... While I was musing amidst these scenes in the mood of Hamlet, two old men, as my little ghost called them, appeared on the scene to answer to the gravedigger and his companion. They christened a mountain or two for me, "Kearnsarge" among the rest, and revived some old recollections, of which ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... And still musing, Mrs. Mayfield replied: "Yes, and they peeped at one another in their heavenly nest until the sun, man-like, came and spoiled ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... epistle and placed it in its envelope; then she sat musing. How cruel it would be to break this butterfly on the wheel of bitter circumstance! It would be irrational, she thought, "to expect the strength that could submit to and endure the inevitable from her. She will at once suffer more and less than my Katie. ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... like the pleasure derived from reading a good book. Emerson, expressing our debt to a book says: 'Let us not forget the genial, miraculous, we have known to proceed from a book. We go musing into the vaults of day and night; no constellation shines, no muse descends, the stars are white points, the roses brick-colored leaves; and frogs pipe, mice cheep, and wagons creak along the road. We return to the house and take up ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... said Dave, presenting himself at the door while Christy was still musing over the incidents ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic
... Professor, "I was turning into a French sweet-shop the other day, to buy my usual tribute for the children, when I suddenly remembered that they would no longer be children, and had to march out again, crestfallen, musing on the march of time and the mutability ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... Graham—prig; What was thy delighted musing? Now accepting, now refusing, Till on the Admiralty pitch'd, Still would that thought his speech prolong; To gain the place for which he long had itch'd, He call'd on Bobby still through all the song; But ever as his sweetest theme he chose, A sovereign's golden chink was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... into the game he'd want to stick for a showdown; if he started out now bucking old man Packard, he would perhaps wind up in the scrap-heap. It was just as well to think things over before he plunged in—which set him musing ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... love to rise ere gleams the tardy light, Winter's pale dawn;—and as warm fires illume, And cheerful tapers shine around the room, Thro' misty windows bend my musing sight Where, round the dusky lawn, the mansions white, With shutters clos'd, peer faintly thro' the gloom, That slow recedes; while yon grey spires assume, Rising from their dark pile, an added height By indistinctness given.—Then to decree The grateful thoughts ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... these verdant glades Might startle STANHOPE, musing on his Ranges, But not the angriest of Royal Shades May now arrest the progress of Time's changes. True, much is yielded yet to Swelldom's "Sport," But some aver that even its ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 27, 1892 • Various
... shake of Edith's small, shapely head served for answer. After a little, she spoke in a musing tone: "He is going to have money of his own, very soon, but I don't think it would attract me now. I like him personally, of course, but—there is no career, no ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... for all the world just like my father!" cried Rose, and walkt away, half in sorrow, half in anger; while Edward went musing to ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... under his calm exterior he had a fervor which made him easily feel the presence of poetry in everyday events; and the forms of the Juden-gasse, rousing the sense of union with what is remote, set him musing on two elements of our historic life which that sense raises into the same region of poetry;—the faint beginnings of faiths and institutions, and their obscure lingering decay; the dust and withered remnants with which they are apt to be covered, only ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... singularities which belonged to him, and made very observable parts of his appearance and manner, may not be omitted, it is requisite to mention, that while talking or even musing as he sat in his chair, he commonly held his head to one side towards his right shoulder, and shook it in a tremulous manner, moving his body backwards and forwards, and rubbing his left knee in ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... the bow, and fell into a musing fit upon the past and the future. How happily for us is it ordained that in the most stirring existences there are every here and there such little resting-spots of reflection, from which, as from some eminence, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... her own room, reading and writing and musing at her leisure; she drove or walked every fine afternoon, sometimes alone, sometimes attended by Mary, who hated these stately drives and walks. She dined tete-a-tete with Mary, except on those rare occasions when there were visitors—the Vicar and his ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the picture gently into my unresisting fingers and closed them over it. 'My sister Marjorie is a wonderful girl,' he said, with a bright smile. He was silent for a little while as if musing upon her and then his ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... waters gently glide along, In murmuring cadence to the Poet's ear, Who, stretch'd at ease your flowery banks among, Views with delight your glassy surface clear, Roll pleasing on through Otways sainted wood; Where "musing Pity" still delights to mourn, And kiss the spot where oft her votary stood, Or hang fresh cypress o'er his weeping urn;— Here, too, retir'd from Folly's scenes afar, His powerful shell first studious Collins strung; Whilst Fancy, seated in her rainbow car, Round him her flowers ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... the town. For a moment he believed there was no one about at all. The little town, with its main street and its secondary thoroughfares bordered by low structures, might have been regarded as the habitation of lesser creatures than human beings, as it stood there musing after the departed night, in the midst of limitless wastes of sand. That group of houses might have been likened to some kind of larger birds, hugging the earth in trepidation, ready to take ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... and musing of the past rather than the future, she asked herself whether in that case she would still be caring for Raymond; but she turned from such a thought and smothered the secret indignation still lying red-hot and hidden under ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... notwithstanding his cupidity was not a little excited by the fees, but he doubted whether the sheriff, his deputy, or any other constable would execute the warrant in his stead; nor did any plausible excuse present itself to account for transferring it to other hands. Thus musing, with fear and avarice contending in his breast, he walked up the street. But it may be necessary to tell how Basset got into the dilemma, and, in order to do so, we ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... its former position, and she sat for some time musing over his question and answer, till a familiar waymark put all such thoughts to flight. They were passing Deepwater Lake, and would presently be at aunt Miriam's. Fleda looked now with a beating heart. Every foot of ground was known to her. She was seeing ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... summer ruled the happy hours, And golden fruit hung down mid opening flowers; When, if you chanced among the woods to stray, The rosy-footed dryad led the way,— Or if, beside a mountain brook, your path, You ever caught some naad at her bath: 'Twas in that golden day, that Damon strayed. Musing, alone, along a Grecian glade. Retired the scene, yet in the morning light, Athens in view, shone glimmering to the sight. 'Twas far away, yet painted on the skies, It seemed a marble cloud of glorious dyes, Where yet the rosy morn, with lingering ray, Loved on the sapphire pediments to play. ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... alone and musing in the barroom over the occurrences of the evening. Of all the incidents, that of the entrance of Joe Morgan's child kept the most prominent place in my thoughts. The picture of that mournful little face was ever before me; and I seemed all the while to hear the word "Father," uttered ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... may be all right," Fresno repeated, reassuringly; then hearing the object of their discussion approaching with his trainer, the two strolled out through the bunk-room, Stover a prey to a new-born suspicion, Fresno musing to himself that diplomacy was not ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... south room," said Aunt Hitty, musing; "that bed has the two old Aunt Ward blankets on it, and the great blue quilt, and two comforters. Then mother's and my room, two pair—four comforters—two quilts—the ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Mrs. Aholiah Luce came walking into the village, spent, forlorn, and draggled. She went straight to the town office, and seated herself in front of the musing first selectman. ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... be visited, she reached the one where rested Fame, that trembling, luminous globe of beauty it was so vitally necessary for her to achieve. "How come he c'n talk like that?" she demanded of herself, musing on the lodger's wonderful exhibition over the greasy ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... could hardly believe that he, the Swift who chid the Lord Treasurer, rallied the Captain General, and confronted the pride of the Duke of Buckinghamshire with pride still more inflexible, could be the same being who had passed nights of sleepless anxiety, in musing over a cross look or a testy word of a patron. "Faith," he wrote to Stella, with bitter levity, "Sir William spoiled a fine gentleman." Yet, in justice to Temple, we must say that there is no reason to think that Swift was more unhappy at Moor ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... came over me, for I realised it was the last time I should behold the sun go down. There was such a look of calm beauty everywhere that I could hardly realise the fact that we were surrounded by troop upon troop of armed men ready to deal out fire and destruction at a word; but once more my musing was interrupted by the big Boer. He brought us coffee again, and this time cake ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... coals we peer, And musing at the luring flames, We watch each isle of crystal green. Anear the billows swirl with rage, 'Mid lashing waves that cope king Fear To strands and sands where elfin games Make rich each midnight's fleecy dream That some Mad wand'ring, goblin sage, ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... if he be," rejoined my friend, in a sort of musing soliloquy; while, with his eyes fixed upon the ground, he kept pulling his "goatee" to its ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... night, Amid its lonely hours and dreary, When we Close the aching sight, Musing sadly, lorn and weary, Trusting that tomorrow's light May ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... next to Ida Francia, forgot his sufferings. Meanwhile Dick and the Senator resumed their old seats on the banquette. After a while the Senator relapsed into a fit of musing, and Dick fell asleep. ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... of it was," Miss Oliver continued in a musing voice, searching her memory—"the awkward part was, poor ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... and amused. Bessie was silent for a few minutes and full of thought. Presently, in a musing, meditative voice, she said, "Ambition! I suppose all men who have force enough to do great things long for an opportunity to do them; and that we call ambition. Harry Musgrave is ambitious. He is going to be a lawyer. What can ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... such care and diligence. Seeing how the maiden loved it, and was happy there, I had laboured hard to fence it from the dangers of the wood. And here she had corrected me, with better taste, and sense of pleasure, and the joys of musing. For I meant to shut out the brook, and build my fence inside of it; but Lorna said no; if we must have a fence, which could not but be injury, at any rate leave the stream inside, and a pleasant bank beyond it. And soon ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... the river cows for coolness stand. And sheep for breezes seek the lofty land, A youth whom AEsop taught that every tree, Each bird and insect, spoke as well as he, Walk'd calmly musing in a shaded way, Where flowering hawthorn broke the sunny ray, And thus instructs his moral pen to draw A scene that obvious ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... chairs, with cupboards whose lozens gave view to punch-bowls and rummers and silver ladles, a room where the two brothers would convene at night while John was elsewhere, and in a wan candle light sit silent by the hour before cooling spirits, musing on other parlours elsewhere in which spurs had jingled under the board, musing on comrades departed. It was hung around with dark pictures in broad black frames, for the most part pictures of battles, "Fontenoy," "Stemming the ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... said Talbot, in a musing tone, "very strange. All this that I have been telling you seems now removed back away to a far, far distant past. It is as though it all happened in ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... a contented dream not common to girls who have reached her age,—especially girls who have seen the phases of life which she had seen. Yet few of the faces in the streets that led her home were more gravely lined. She puzzled one at the first glance, and at the second. An artist, meeting her musing on a canal-bridge one day, went home and painted ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... fond mama thought endowed with art sense,—Toddie had throughout my recital the air of a man who was musing on some affair of his own, and Budge's exclamation had hardly died away, when Toddie commenced to wave aloud an extravaganza ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... was standing there musing, his daughter came up. "I think, father, you and mother, next time, had better take my advice," said that incorrigible and unmanageable young lady; just about as opposite a character to the usual child of that ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... theirs," observed the gardener, with a musing smile when he was alone; "but theirs nearly had a jolly spill there ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... crushed it under foot. Mr. Konig grinned vindictively and turned away, while Captain Davenport leaned against the cabin and for half an hour spoke no word, contenting himself with gazing to leeward with an expression of musing hopelessness ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... of England, musing on Belleisle and his Anti-Pragmatic industries and grandiosities,—"how Chief-Bully Belleisle stept down into the ring as a gay Volunteer, and foolish Chief-Defender George had to follow dismally heroic, as a Conscript of Fate,"—drops these ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... hard to see such a man as Shandon," Pen said, musing, and talking that night over the sight which he had witnessed, "of accomplishments so multifarious, and of such an undoubted talent and humour, an inmate of a gaol for half his time, and a bookseller's ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... perfect, a model to young and old, of irreproachable virtue and of all wonderful qualities. In the course of the play, however, he shows himself very nimble-witted, credulous, and impulsive, quick to anger and quicker still to forgive; with thoughts all turned to sadness and to musing; a poet—ever in extremes; now hating his own rash errors to the point of demanding the heaviest punishment for them; now swearing that he will revenge himself on women by writing against them; a philosopher—he jests with his gaoler ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... prank, O think you, Friend with the musing eye, Who watch us stepping by With doubt and dolorous sigh? Can much pondering so hoodwink you! Is it a purblind prank, O think you, ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... slowly homeward, musing thoughtfully: "This is a strange world," she soliloquized. "Let philosophers air their utopian theories about its containing the elements of universal happiness. I know that human nature, as it is now constituted, is too selfish and mean to arrive at a state of absolute ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... from my meal, saluted him, and went musing up the valley road, pondering upon what it could be that the Jews sacrificed in this remote borough, but I could not for the life of me imagine what it was, though I have had a great many ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... mistakes with them—perhaps more as the years go on: they love me, however, for they know that I mean well, and it would haunt me if they fell into bad hands. Now I am not sure that Mr. Scougall would choose the best successor. Before he married I could have trusted his judgment." She fell a-musing again. "Archibald is here in Plymouth," she added inconsequently. "My ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fact shocked him. He would not think of it. He might get a letter from her by two o'clock. With pleasure thrilling through every nerve, he imagined how she would word her confession. For she had yielded to him; he had felt her body move towards him and had seen the surrender in her eyes. While musing thus, passion began to stir in ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... through and through; which he was able to do quite at his ease, for Love is invisible, and comes in and goes out as he likes, without anyone calling him to account for what he does. Well then, when they gave the signal for the onset our lacquey was in an ecstasy, musing upon the beauty of her whom he had already made mistress of his liberty, and so he paid no attention to the sound of the trumpet, unlike Don Quixote, who was off the instant he heard it, and, at the highest speed Rocinante was capable of, set out to meet his enemy, his good squire ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... So he sat musing there, very depressed at heart, till at length Mrs. Parsons came and discovered him in a half-doze. She, too, was somewhat changed, for of a sudden age had begun to take a hold of her. Her hair was white now, and her plump, round face had withered like a spring apple. Still, she greeted ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... the evening, with eyes fixed upon the elders of the party who are talking and arguing—here once more is that same uncertain, romantic, incalculable future; the last word is with the new generation, the budding morrow, old enough now to be musing and speculating over its own visions. "Yes, I will do such things—!" says Nicolenka; and that is the natural end of ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... of a mighty cascade, Where a pool of the stream a deep resting-place made, And rock-rooted oaks stretched their branches on high, The friar stood musing, and throwing ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... his pocket-book. The giver was dead and gone to dust, sleeping in an old churchyard near the Strand, forgotten by all who had ever known her—except one. Sometimes in the twilight a tall figure would stand musing beside that forgotten grave for awhile, then turn away and walk swiftly up the narrow river street, across the Strand, and through the archway to ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... swiftly on the pathways of the cliff, she neared Paimpol; and musing upon these two months without letters, she grew a ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... sadly, to our rolltop and fell to musing. We picked up a magazine and found some pictures showing how Mary Pickford washes her hair. "If I am sun-drying my hair," said Mary (under a photo showing her reclining in a lovely garden doing just that), "I usually have the opportunity to ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... did nothing but question with her anxious eyes, for this was such a wonder to her, and she could not understand. But he only sat musing with a smile over the things he remembered. And ...
— A Little Pilgrim • Mrs. Oliphant
... his paddling, he looked at it doubtfully, his brow puckering over his grave eyes. The canoe began to drift backward in the current, but he made no effort to check it, instead, he sat there staring at the distant flag, with a musing look upon his face, as if he were debating some question with himself. At last he spoke aloud, after the habit of men who ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... "but it means too much scrimp for you. It is what I did not anticipate. If I had more time for outside practice"—he stopped, as if musing. "And if it weren't ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... of geographical distribution of animals, of embryology, of paleontology. He had massed his facts about his theory, condensed them and recondensed, until his volume of five hundred pages was an encyclopaedia in scope. During those long years of musing he had thought out almost every conceivable objection to his theory, and in his book every such objection was stated with fullest force and candor, together with such reply as the facts at command might ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... break. Even its position terrestrially is one of the elements of a new interest, and for no particular reason save that the incident of the night had occurred there Oak went again into the plantation. Lingering and musing here, he heard the steps of a horse at the foot of the hill, and soon there appeared in view an auburn pony with a girl on its back, ascending by the path leading past the cattle-shed. She was the young woman of the night before. ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... shuffled the pack of letters indifferently through his hands. Suddenly he came upon a little grey envelope. He opened it at once and scanned its contents with the speed of his craft. Afterward he laid it down before him on the desk and surveyed it with a cool and musing smile. "So?" he remarked. " That's ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... was not musing upon the economy of hell-ships, or the characters of bucko mates, during the balance of that trick at the wheel. The lady's message to Newman possessed ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... amidst those new surroundings, I used to go about musing and pondering within myself. Then I saw plainly why he had taken my little children from me. It was that I should have nothing else to attach myself to. No such thing as love and happiness, you understand. I was to be only a master builder—nothing ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... she among the many there, the thralls Of the cold tyrant's cruel lust; and they Laughed mournfully in those polluted halls; But she was calm and sad, musing alway On loftiest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... than Natural Philosophy? To have been always tossing about some Theological question would have been to have made that their private diversion the excess of which they themselves disliked in the public. To have been eternally musing on Civil business and distresses of their Country was too melancholy a reflection. It was Nature alone which could pleasantly entertain ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... we declined visiting, in spite of repeated invitations, given with all the bonhommie in the world, as if there had really been anything to see but dirty water and soap-suds. We comprehended, afterwards, as we sat musing in the farm-yard, watching the vagaries of some angry turkeys, whose combs became perfectly white with passion, as they contended with their fellows, that the reason of so much pride and admiration ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... countenance, he entered the undertaker's warehouse. This man was civil; to him Thaddeus gave the entire sum, half of which the apothecary had rejected with so much derision. The undertaker's politeness a little calmed the irritated feelings of the count, who returned home musing on the vile nature of that class of mankind who can with indifference heap ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... wise. He was sitting by his window after the noon repast, musing, as he was wont, on his dear son. The song of the bees busy in the herb-garden was very pleasant to his ear, the warm, still air overcame him, and he slept. Suddenly he heard a voice calling—a voice he knew in every fibre of his being and yet could set ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... about that. That's nothing to make a fuss about. Death?" he went on musing—our horses had fallen to a walk again— "It looks you in the face a moment: you put out your hands: you touch— and so it is gone. My dear boy, it isn't for us that ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... pensive Nun, devout and pure, Sober, stedfast, and demure, All in a robe of darkest grain, Flowing with majestick train, And sable stole of Cipres Lawn, Over thy decent shoulders drawn. Com, but keep thy wonted state, With eev'n step, and musing gate, And looks commercing with the skies, Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes: There held in holy passion still, Forget thy self to Marble, till With a sad Leaden downward cast, Thou fix them on ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... the eminent engineer. He was distinctly a man of genius, and what is called 'a character.' He was always in the clouds - not in the vapour of his engine-rooms, nor busy inventing machines for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, but musing on metaphysical problems and abstract speculations about the universe generally. In other respects a ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... long period of musing by the fire, "I'm going to take the team of gray wolf-hounds with a two-day supply of food and go see what all this talk about Russians means. I won't be in danger of being followed by natives, for I shall start long before sunrise. I'd send the ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... grandfather. It did not seem to have occurred to the man that the same terrific charge could be brought against a much more august Personage, and with much the same futility. Surely it is more to the purpose that he will have an English grandson, That is the worst of musing when you neglect method ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... seconds the capitalist lingered, musing. Then he broke the stillness, hurling a bomb into the air ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... Neptune and Apollo at Troy under Laomedon, or as did Renault of Montauban in his latter days: I will serve the masons, I'll set on the pot to boil for the bricklayers; and, whilst the minced meat is making ready at the sound of my small pipe, I'll measure the muzzle of the musing dotards. Thus did Amphion with the melody of his harp found, build, and finish the great and renowned ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... and disliking the vehicle of a hackney coach, I walked forward to the inn at which the stranger had been left; musing much on the prospect before me, which was once more ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... noise? Seyton. It is the cry of women, my good lord. [Exit. Macbeth (musing). I have almost forgot the taste of fears. The time has been, my senses would have cool'd To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir As life were in 't: I have supp'd full with horrors; Direness, familiar to my slaughterous ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... my Dream did lapse and intermit, and I lost sight, for a while, of the Pilgrim and his perils, much musing whether he, though verily valiant and of manifest good will, were wise in making this dangerous adventure, or at all like to fare safely through and escape the ditch, the bog, the darkness, and the demoniac denizens of this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... of musing and reflecting, her heart began, in a moment, to bubble over with such excitement that, much against her will, her thoughts in their superabundance rolled on incessantly. So speedily directing that a lamp should be lighted, she ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... "When first, a musing boy, I stood beside Thy starlit shimmer, and asked my restless heart What secrets Nature to the herd denied, But might to earnest hierophant impart; When lo! beside me, around and o'er, Thought whispered, 'Arise, O ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... toward nightfall, may, perhaps, have observed, that, immediately upon emerging from the sacred vegetable preserve, a couple of the more elderly and designing of them assumed a sudden air of abstracted musing, and reduced their progress to a most dignified and leisurely walk, as though to convince the human beholder that their recent proximity to the cabbages had been but the trivial accident of a ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... level, when they issued into the common life of the street, and they walked home as much like driving home as they could. On the way the reader, who was so remotely lost in thought that the writer could scarcely find him, made himself heard in a musing suspiration: "There was something missing. Can ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... After musing a little while I told him that emancipation had not yet passed through the legislature, and that perhaps it never would, reminding him that there was often many a slip between the cup and the lip; to which observation the man in black ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... understand the child's aversion," said Mr. Dundas in a half-musing, half-suspicious way. "Leam seems to be all that is good and kind to her, but nothing that she does can soften the little creature's dislike. It must be natural instinct," he added in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... He was silent again, musing deeply, while Logan marvelled more and more what his real original business might be. All this affair of the documents and the muniment-room had arisen by the merest accident, and would not have arisen if the Earl had found Merton at home. The Earl obviously had a difficulty in ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... came to the end of the valley. Now I saw in my dream, that at the end of the valley lay blood, bones, ashes, and mangled bodies of men, even of pilgrims that had gone this way formerly; and while I was musing what should be the reason, I espied a little before me a cave, where two giants, Pope and Pagan, dwelt in old time; by whose power and tyranny the men, whose bones, blood, ashes, etc., lay there, were cruelly put to death. But by this place ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... look for a moment with a wistful, musing little look of her own, and then, nodding her pretty head several times, like a dimpled philosopher (of the very best school) who was moralizing on Life, heaved a little sigh, and gave up things in general for a bad job, as she had previously been ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... rapidly and with facility. We are getting reconciled to halls and bedchambers with unhomelike stone floors and no carpets—floors that ring to the tread of one's heels with a sharpness that is death to sentimental musing. We are getting used to tidy, noiseless waiters, who glide hither and thither, and hover about your back and your elbows like butterflies, quick to comprehend orders, quick to fill them; thankful for a gratuity without regard to the amount; and always polite—never ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... religion and politics were forbidden topics. 'To have been always tossing about some theological question would have been to make that their private diversion of which they had had more than enough in public; to have been musing on the Civil Wars would have made them melancholy; therefore Nature alone could entertain them.' After the Restoration a meeting was held at Gresham College in London, and a committee was appointed, with Wilkins as chairman, to draw up a scheme for the Royal Society. The King ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... forced calmness of expression had changed to one of deep and melancholy musing; "it will indeed be better thus. See, here is much gold; you will commend him to the care of that admirable woman who already watches one scarcely ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... a seat of scorn, Bare,—shameless,—till, for fresh disaster, From end to end, one April morn, 'Twas riddled like a pepper caster,— Drilled like a vellum of old time; And musing on this final mystery, The Poet left off scribbling rhyme, And took to studying ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... his eyes closed and his head leant back against the veranda, and he said with a vague smile, as if musing aloud, ...
— Different Girls • Various
... which he had just escaped and to which he was soon to return. He changed his tone and his subject with amazing versatility, from the bitterest satire to idyllic sweetness, or to a pleasant kind of clever naivete which is truly his own. We see him musing among the firs and the pine-trees of his native Provence, or riding on the top of the diligence under the scorching sun and listening, in a Sterne-like fashion, to the conversation which took place between the facetious ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... temples like balm. Its refreshing effect, however, penetrated no deeper than the mere surface of the frame; for as I walked by the side of Mdlle. Reuter, my heart was still hot within me, and while I was musing the fire burned; then spake ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... still to come. Poetry hath hitherto been with me rather the Recreation of a Mind conscious of its Health, than the deliberate Task-work of a Soule that must hereafter give an Account of its Talents. Yet my Mind, in the free Circuit of her Musing, has ranged over a thousand Themes that lie, like the Marble in the Quarry, readie for anie Shape that Fancy and Skill may give. Neither Laziness nor Caprice makes me difficult in my Choice; for, the longer I am in selecting my Tree, and laying my Axe to ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... have gathered round me as I sit musing in the gloaming. The leading goat is a handsome animal, generally respected and feared by the rest of the herd. He has excellent knowledge, inherited and acquired, of the uses of mountains, and his venerable beard adorns a head of undisputed male ascendancy in the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... one old nook, where she had many and many a time sat musing, and laid their burden softly on the pavement. The light streamed on it through the coloured window—a window where the boughs of trees were ever rustling in the summer, and where the birds sang sweetly all day ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... eels out of a large gleaming wet net. The silvery scales glistening through the meshes full of water, the golden river and scarlet petticoat, the beautiful black eyes deep and pensive, which seemed darkened in their musing by the surrounding sunlight struck the artist, perhaps even rather trivially, like some coloured print on the titlepage of a song in ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... the moment of this musing I began to doubt whether I was really alone,—to ask myself whether there might not be something more than a mere shuddering of light in the thing that rocked beside me: some presence that haunted the ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... but it is certain many lives were lost, though how many was not ascertained, as a number were carried away by the stream. Special care was afterwards taken by the authorities to prevent such catastrophes. After stopping some time at Raj Ghat I returned to my home, musing on what I had seen, and longing for the time when the millions of India will seek cleansing and life, where alone ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... to time the warden's wife glanced from her sewing toward the motionless figure, reluctant to obtrude upon her revery, yet equally loath to leave her a prey to melancholy musing. After a while, she saw the black lashes quiver, and fall upon the waxen cheeks, then, as she watched, great tears glittered, rolled slowly, dripped softly, but there was no sigh, no sound of sobs. Leaning closer, she laid her arm across the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Leonard stood for a while musing upon the curiously tangled web in which he found himself involved. Here he was, committed to a strange and desperate enterprise. Nor was this all, for about him were other complications, totally different from those which might be expected in connection with such a mediaeval adventure, ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... outburst, he crumpled the scribbled paper in his fist and crushed it under foot. Mr. Konig grinned vindictively and turned away, while Captain Davenport leaned against the cabin and for half an hour spoke no word, contenting himself with gazing to leeward with an expression of musing hopelessness on ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... be lost. One evening when Eyre had taken the first watch, the horses, in their search for grass, had wandered about a quarter of a mile from the camp. He had followed them, and was sitting on a stone beneath the moonlight, musing on his gloomy prospects, when he was startled by a flash and a report. Hastening to the camp, he was met by Wylie, who was speechless with terror, and could only wring his hands and cry: "Oh, massa". When he entered, he saw Baxter ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... reflection of other men, for already she had suitors in plenty. Upon one of them her musing lingered. He had brought to her gifts of the friendly smile, of comradeship, of youth's debonair give-and-take. She did not try to analyze her feeling for Winthrop Beresford. It was enough to know that he had brought into her existence ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... that smiled, And hushed is the laughter I heard when a child— Yet often when musing they float back to me, And I see them and hear it as clear as can be! And I'm playing again, while the heart strings all thrill, By the old spring house at the foot of ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... as his three legs would carry him. Only one event in his life had eclipsed this in happiness—the interview in front of the White House. He rapped on the window with his stick, thereby frightening Cynthia half out of her wits as she sat musing sorrowfully by the fire. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 4-1/2 by 3-1/2 inches, and it belonged to Queen Elizabeth. Inside she has written a note in which she says: 'I walke manie times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holy Scriptures, where I plucke up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences by pruning, eate them by reading, chawe them by musing, and laie them up at length in the hie seat of memorie by gathering them together, so that having tasted thy swetenes I may the less perceive the ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... there musing and looking down through the plate-glass at the delicate porcelain beneath, a faint sound intruded itself upon the stillness. It gave him another idea. Part of the floor was stone-paved, but part ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... maiden last met by our travellers, and whose appearance had so favorably impressed them, had not been altogether uninfluenced by the encounter. Her spirit was of a musing and perhaps somewhat moody character, and the little adventure related in our last chapter, had awakened in her mind a train of vague and purposeless thought, from which she did not strive to disengage herself. She ceased to pursue the direct path back to Charlemont, the moment she had persuaded ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... Fluxion, musing. "The Josephine is a fast vessel. Under the most favorable circumstances, she would make the run in eight days. A fair passage would be twelve days. If I remain one day in Genoa, where my sister lives, the ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... would soon take to quarrelling, as often happened in that tap-room, when Tom Bull softly came again, having gone but a step beyond the threshold of the place. He stepped, as though aimlessly, to our place, like a man watched, fearing the hand of the law; and for a time he sat musing, toying with the glass ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... grove, While yet there was no fear of Jove. 30 Com pensive Nun, devout and pure, Sober, stedfast, and demure, All in a robe of darkest grain, Flowing with majestick train, And sable stole of Cipres Lawn, Over thy decent shoulders drawn. Com, but keep thy wonted state, With eev'n step, and musing gate, And looks commercing with the skies, Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes: 40 There held in holy passion still, Forget thy self to Marble, till With a sad Leaden downward cast, Thou fix them on the earth as fast. And joyn with thee calm Peace, and Quiet, Spare ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... sat musing bitterly on his sad fate, while his dog came and laid his head sympathizingly on ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... ogling, and rhyming, and sighing, Who's musing, and pining, and whining, and dying: When a thousand of lies ev'ry minute he tells— What is he, my friends, but a fool ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... Forster to accelerate. They might be her husband and her son. It was the first time that the spare bed had been ordered. Reflection, however, convinced her that her hopes were strung upon too slight a thread; and, musing on the improbability of not having ascertained during a year the fact of her master having so near a relative—moreover, her son was not in existence—she sighed, and dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Before the gentlemen had finished their wine, Amber was in bed, and Mrs Forster ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... his late disputant. Once he spoke in low, quick tones to his companion, and he stirred the boughs with his feet like an animal that is restive. At that moment the watchfulness of Deerslayer had a little abated, for he sat musing on the means of renewing the negotiation without giving too much advantage to the other side. It was perhaps fortunate for him that the keen and bright eyes of Judith were as vigilant as ever. At the instant ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... that under his calm exterior he had a fervor which made him easily feel the presence of poetry in everyday events; and the forms of the Juden-gasse, rousing the sense of union with what is remote, set him musing on two elements of our historic life which that sense raises into the same region of poetry;—the faint beginnings of faiths and institutions, and their obscure lingering decay; the dust and withered remnants with which they are apt to be covered, only enhancing for the awakened perception ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... romance and strong common-sense," thought Harley, musing over the letter. "She wants the romance without paying the price. Now I wonder if that is not rather more the characteristic ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... he continued, musing, 'to be mixed up together! But we'll let them rest in peace. I'd better let you have what was entrusted to me, and then, mayhap, ye'll be better ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... old, of irreproachable virtue and of all wonderful qualities. In the course of the play, however, he shows himself very nimble-witted, credulous, and impulsive, quick to anger and quicker still to forgive; with thoughts all turned to sadness and to musing; a poet—ever in extremes; now hating his own rash errors to the point of demanding the heaviest punishment for them; now swearing that he will revenge himself on women by writing against them; a philosopher—he ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... he begins to crowd A thousand thoughts within a pulse's space; There seem'd so brief a pause of life allow'd, His mind stretch'd universal, to embrace The whole wide world, in an extreme farewell,— A moment's musing—but an age to tell. ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the like of this sleeping youth whom I passed but now, how shall I know him? Alas, the length of my travail and travel! How shall I go about in search of a somebody I know not, one whom, if I saw him face to face I should not know?" So saying he turned back, musing anent that sleeping youth, and coming to him, he still sleeping, dismounted from his mare and sat down by his side. He fixed his eyes upon his face and considered him awhile and said in himself, "For aught I wot, this youth may be Malik ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... Thus musing, Mortimer De Royster adjusted his one eye glass, selected a delicately-colored necktie from his rather large stock, and attired himself to go out and call at Roy's hotel, which ...
— The Boy from the Ranch - Or Roy Bradner's City Experiences • Frank V. Webster
... He fell to musing, and as he did so the dreaded shadow Chris had anticipated fell across the doorway. A moment later Claggett Chew, limping from an old wound and a newly received bruise, ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... gently nurtured Boston boys, Wendell Phillips began the study of law. Doubtless the sirens sang to him, as to the noble youth of every country and time. Musing over Coke and Blackstone, perhaps he saw himself succeeding Ames and Otis and Webster, the idol of society, the applauded orator, the brilliant champion of the elegant ease, and the cultivated conservatism ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... brimming stream, the leisurely herds, the growing grass. All seemed to be moving together, neither lingering nor making haste, to some far-off end within the quiet mind of God. Everything seemed to be waiting, musing, living the untroubled life of nature, with no thought of death or care or sorrow. I passed a trench of still water that ran as far as the eye could follow it across the flat; it was full from end to end of the beautiful water violet, the pale lilac flowers, with their faint ethereal scent, ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in the conservatory, musing over the gloomy anticipations her dreams had cast over her thoughts, Louis Marie came towards her. A beam of joy lit up her hectic cheek; she impressed a kiss on the forehead of her darling son, and playfully reproved him for the dreams that ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... And musing thus on the general inclination of our instincts towards injustice I met unexpectedly, at the turn of the road, as it were, a shape of duplicity. It might have been unconscious on Mrs. Fyne's part, but her leading idea appeared to me to be not to keep, not to preserve ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... be so much as named with that life's sweetness, we, lifting ourselves yet more ardently to the Unchanging One, did by degrees pass through all things bodily—beyond the heaven even, and the sun and stars. Yea, we soared higher yet by inward musing. We came to our own minds, and we passed beyond them, that we might reach that place of plenty, where Thou feedest Israel for ever with the food of truth, and where life is the Wisdom by which all these things are made. And whilst ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... though musing, "the dead come back to life—sometimes—and in strange shape, and, mayhap, I know the truth. To-morrow when yonder body is borne on high for burial we will speak of it again. Till then rest you all, and prepare to face that ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... been enough. Now the lady merely smoked and chuckled. When I again uttered "Well?" with a tinge of rebuke, she came down from her musing, but into another and distant field. It was the field of natural history, of zoology, of vertebrates, mammals, furred quadrupeds—or, in short, skunks. One may as well be blunt in ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... spots. And the patterings of the feet in that short walk had worn the board into hollows at the treads. I felt those hollows with my hands, traced their formation, and despite my unhappy plight could not refrain from musing upon the stories which those hollows could relate—stories of abandoned hope, frenzy, madness, resignation, suppressed fury, and pathetic awaiting of the doom ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... to whom had never before been exhibited these samples of imperial riches craned their necks, and the looks of some were musing and of others keenly eager. The room fell silent, and still they gazed and gazed at the small heap of glistening stones and those few grains of gold. They were busy men in the vanguard of a quickened age, and theirs were its ardors, its Argus-eyed fancy and potent imagination. Show ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... He departed, musing. How plainly he could see the patch of garden in the summer sunshine and the white hollyhocks nodding above the ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... her where she is sitting, then, With lotus-blossom on ankle and arm Wearing thine emblems, and musing of nought But the meeting to ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... there was some brilliant shrubbery which seemed to light up the whole picture with the effect of a sweet and melancholy smile. I felt as if spirits were there,—or as if these shrubs had a spiritual life. In short, the impression was indefinable; and, after gazing and musing a good while, I retraced my steps through the Irish hamlet, and plodded ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... spring came Gervaise often went and sought refuge with Goujet. She could no longer sit musing on a chair without immediately thinking of her first lover; she pictured him leaving Adele, packing his clothes in the bottom of their old trunk, and returning to her in a cab. The days when she went out, she was seized with the most foolish fears in the street; she ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... here detailed, that George Willison was wandering over the grounds of Warriston, on the north side of Edinburgh. He had been with a letter to the Laird of Warriston, and, in coming back, as was not uncommon with him, was musing, in a half dreaming, listless kind of state, as he sauntered through the planted grounds in the neighbourhood. His attention was in an instant arrested by the sounds of voices, and he stood, or rather sat down, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... keeping-room of the master of Scarthey, and here, for the greater part, daily sat Sir Adrian Landale, placidly reading, writing, or thinking at his table; or at his organ, lost in soaring melody; or yet, by the fireside, in his wooden arm-chair musing over the events of that strange world of thought he had made his own; whilst the aging black retriever with muzzle stretched between his paws slept his light, lazy sleep, ever and anon opening an eye of inquiry ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... an arm-chair, and fell to musing, and thought how wonderfully his life had been changed in these few short weeks. He could hardly get back across the gulf which separated him from the self who had come back into those rooms after Easter, full of anticipations of the pleasures and delights of the coming summer term and vacation. ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... lonely musing, wilful nursing of dark care, I will join the joyous circle of the dear ones gathered there, Who with smiles will greet my advent, and in that delightful room Shake aside the dreary shadows of this scene of ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... former shape, and "while I was musing the fire burned." I then looked out toward the festival ground and saw that Satan had returned to Mr. World and was explaining to him how helpful these festivals were ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... passion is variously developed; some feel positive delight in slaying, others are indifferent. An old soldier, who had been in Waterloo, informed me that to his mind there was no pleasure equal to running a man through the body, and that he could lie awake at night musing on the pleasurable sensations afforded him by ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... that point. However much she may have yawned, at the tender age of ten, over a certain dissertation on the etiquette of travel, given one summer afternoon by Mademoiselle D'Ormy, Felicia aged twenty-seven, embarked upon her first journey alone, found herself musing with mighty comfort upon the charming definiteness of those never-to-be-forgotten axioms. For Mademoiselle had made the small Felicia recite them over and over until she was ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... her undying love— (Perchance her happy spirit oft would stray Round their dear footsteps wheresoe'er they rove) And Europe's turf grow green her heart above. No more could grief or joy disturb her breast. Soft by her tomb let musing Fancy move! Let not a sound of thoughtlessness molest The melancholy spot of ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... eye and felt all the leaps potential in that luxurious torpor? Who has not attributed some little romance to the passer-by? Who has not sometimes exchanged places even with things inanimate, and drawn some new moral experience from following the movement of stars or of daffodils? All this is idle musing or at best poetry; yet our ordinary knowledge of what goes on in men's minds is made of no other stuff. True, we have our own mind to go by, which presumably might be a fair sample of what men's minds are; but unfortunately our notion of ourselves is of all notions the most biassed ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Musing in this manner, he walked on until he found himself in one of the principal streets of St. Petersburg, in front of a house of antiquated architecture. The street was blocked with equipages; carriages one after the other drew up in front of the brilliantly illuminated ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... dogs attempted to hunt, their eyes were so blinded and hoodwinked that they could not proceed, but were obliged to lie down and scrape the incumbrances from their faces with their fore-feet, so that, finding my sport interrupted, I returned home musing in my mind on the oddness of ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... I moved with the languid crowd on the Riva, Musing with idle eyes on the wide lagoons and the islands, And on the dim-seen seaward glimmering sails in the distance, Where the azure haze, like a vision of Indian-Summer, Haunted the dreamy sky of the soft Venetian December,— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... the many there, the thralls Of the cold tyrant's cruel lust; and they Laughed mournfully in those polluted halls; But she was calm and sad, musing alway On loftiest enterprise, till on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... music. This difference, being seized, would put an end to much musical sectarianism. There has been much contention whether the music of the modern Italian school, that of Rossini and his successors, be impassioned or not. Without doubt, the passion it expresses is not the musing, meditative tenderness, or pathos, or grief of Mozart or Beethoven. Yet it is passion, but garrulous passion—the passion which pours itself into other ears; and therein the better calculated for dramatic effect, having a natural ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... I was lounging upon an odorous bed of pine needles. The sun shone warmly, the sky gleamed bright azure through the openings of the great trees, a dry west breeze murmured through the forest. I was lying on my bed musing idly and watching a yellow woodpecker when suddenly I felt a severe bite on my shoulder. I imagined an ant had bitten me through my shirt. In a moment or so afterward I received, this time on my breast, another bite that left no room for imagination. There was ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... Wrapped in musing stands the sprite: 'Tis the middle wane of night, His task is hard, his way is far, But he must do his errand right Ere dawning mounts her beamy car, And rolls her chariot wheels of light; And vain are the spells of fairy-land, He must work with ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... me alone and musing in the barroom over the occurrences of the evening. Of all the incidents, that of the entrance of Joe Morgan's child kept the most prominent place in my thoughts. The picture of that mournful little face was ever before ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... office to-morrow," she sipped the last of her black coffee slowly. "All the rest of the facts there ever will be about Edward Clayte are in that room—aren't they?" Her voice was musing; she looked straight ahead of her as she finished softly, "What time ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... Ned ceased his musing. Something was taking place down below that he could not explain. The tank seemed to be slackening her progress. More and more slowly she approached the edge ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... To the musing or drowsy traveller by rail how space and time are annihilated! He is barely conscious of progress, only when the brakeman with measured tone shouts the name of the station; he looks up from his paper or rouses from his doze, looks out at the cheerless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... be no pleasure like the pleasure derived from reading a good book. Emerson, expressing our debt to a book says: 'Let us not forget the genial, miraculous, we have known to proceed from a book. We go musing into the vaults of day and night; no constellation shines, no muse descends, the stars are white points, the roses brick-colored leaves; and frogs pipe, mice cheep, and wagons creak along the road. ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... Trenck could remain sad and silent under all these evidences of royal favor; no one understood how this gallant young officer could enter upon this campaign with bowed head and heavy brow; he should have sat upon his horse proud and erect—not dreaming, not lost in melancholy musing. ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... through the long wreck of the fair portico that had once extended from the bridge to the basilica, till he came to the broad flight of steps leading to the walled garden-court of old Saint Peter's. There he loved to sit musing among the cypresses, wondering at the vast bronze pine- cone and the great brass peacocks which Symmachus had brought thither from the ruins of Agrippa's baths, wherein the terrible Crescenzi had fortified themselves during more than ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... the large European galleries contain specimens of his work and in the majority of cases the pictures are queried. That fatal (?) which, since curators are more erudite and conscientious, is appearing more frequently than in former years, sets one to musing over the mutability of pictorial fortunes. Also, it awakens suspicions as to the genuineness of paint. Restorations, another fatal word, is usually a euphemism for overpainting. Between varnish and retouching ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... her seat and looked about her. How long had she sat there musing—dreaming dreams which every instinct of womanly pride compelled her to renounce? She wondered if he had gone. Once more came that mingled hope and fear that he might seek an interview with her before leaving. The hope was stronger than ever, and ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... one of the new books her friend had brought her, she was for a while unconscious of everything else. Then, as the twilight deepened, she closed the book, and having again concealed it, sat watching the stars just beginning to appear, one by one, and musing, as she often did, on her own life. Why had she not, with her passionate love of the beautiful and her thirst for knowledge, been given the birth and training, the social advantages of any one of that little ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... them, and, at intervals, pecans. The pecan-trees grew thickly along the borders of the creeks, while the mesquites cloaked with gossamer wide portions of the flats; and here and there in the valleys and on the sides of the hills the sombre, self-enwrapped live-oaks stood about, like philosophers musing amid the general lightness. Spanish-dagger, bear-grass, and persimmon-bushes freckled the sides of the rocky divides with dark spots, and mistletoe hung its fine green globes like unillumined lanterns in the branches of the mesquites. Over the plains ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... sympathised with her dearest possession, a Dutch doll called Mary Jane, since a lamentable accident had bereft it of both its legs; and she had dived into the schoolroom and fished it out of the dark corner reserved for the mangled and thrust it in my face before I had well done musing on the nature and extent of my love for Moses—for I try to be conscientious—and bracing myself to meet the ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... ourselves, in whose hands nature has placed a fairy wand, with which they no sooner touch us, than straightway we forget the evils of life, the darkness lifts from our souls, and we are reconciled to existence."[201] The musing suggestiveness of reading when we read only for reading's sake, and not for reproduction nor direct use, was as delightful to our laborious drudge as to others, but he could indulge himself with little of this sweet idleness. It was in harder labour that he passed most of his mornings. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... Nor for yours neither. You've ungently, Brutus, Stole from my bed: and yesternight at supper You suddenly arose, and walk'd about, Musing and sighing, with your arms across; 240 And when I ask'd you what the matter was, You star'd upon me with ungentle looks: I urg'd you further; then you scratch'd your head, And too impatiently stamp'd with your foot: Yet I insisted, yet ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... most true That musing meditation most affects The pensive secrecy of desert cell, Far from the cheerful haunt of men and herds, And sits as safe as in a senate-house; For who would rob a hermit of his weeds, 390 His few books, or his beads, or maple dish, Or do his grey hairs any violence? But Beauty, like ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... about the Jutland fight as people believe, and that when he protests he sank a ship, he did very completely sink a ship. I am the more confirmed in this belief by a still small voice among the Jutland reports, musing aloud over an account of an unaccountable outlying brawl witnessed by one of our destroyers. The voice suggests that what the destroyer saw was one German ship being sunk by ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... acquaintance only a short time before, and first discovered his good feeling towards me during my misfortune: I felt the value of this favor the more warmly, as no one is apt to seek a closer connection with invalids. He spared nothing to give me pleasure, to draw me away from musing on my situation, to hold up to my view and promise me recovery and a wholesome activity in the nearest future. How often have I been delighted, in the progress of life, to hear how this excellent man has in the weightiest affairs shown himself useful, and indeed a blessing ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... waves tossing in that shoreless lake of fire, I could see the black myriads of the damned rise out of them and struggle and sink and rise again; and I knew that Joan was seeing what I saw, while she paused musing; and I believed that she must yield now, and in truth I hoped she would, for these men were able to make the threat good and deliver her over to eternal suffering, and I knew that it was in their ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... be surprised to hear of anything they do,' answered he, 'so mad are they generally reported to be; but that India is governed by infidel old women, that has never yet reached our ears. Perhaps it is so. God knows,' continued he, musing, 'for mad people do ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... rode at an anker, we saw the similitude of a storme rising at Northnorthwest, and could not tell where to get rode nor succor for that winde, and harborough we knew none: and that land which we rode vnder with that winde was a lee shore. And as I was musing what was best to be done, I saw a saile come out of a creeke vnder the foresayd Caninoz, which was my friend Gabriel, who forsooke his harborough and company, and came as neere vs as he might, and pointed vs to the Eastwards, and then we weyed and followed ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... that still clung to life would be withered and dead. The trees, as if weeping at the evanescence of the life around them, shed their leaves at the faintest breeze. These fluttered to the ground, or, falling into the tranquil stream, were carried away by it, and passed from sight. Ayrault stood musing and regretting the necessity of such general death. "But," he thought, "I would rather die than lose my love; for then I should have had the taste of bliss without its fulfilment, and should be worse off than dead. Love ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... Amine, musing. "But," continued she, "is not this connected with your resolution of going ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... she said, musing, as she played a pretty little hand on the table, and no doubt thinking about mad young Harry Estridge; 'tis not impossible, William, that old folks, and young folks, too, should ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... became untalkative as the coffee came. Fitzgerald was musing over the impulse which had seized him in asking Breitmann to share his dinner. He was genuinely pleased that he had done so, however; but it forced itself upon him that sometime or other these impulses would land him in difficulties. On his part the recipient of this particular ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... from the lookout, and descended, musing profoundly, to the shore. He communicated the result of his observations to his companions, in Delaware, and a short and earnest consultation succeeded. When it terminated, the three instantly set about ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... they had been wed, when it happened that as Sir Guy lay by a window of his tower, looking out upon the landscape, he fell to musing on his life. He thought, "How many men I have slain, how many battles I have fought, how many lands I have taken and destroyed! All for a woman's love; and not one single deed done for my God!" Then he thought, "I will go a pilgrimage ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... in whose musing mind [15] Those ages live which Time has cast behind, To every spot shall lead his wondering guests On whose known site the beam of glory rests: Here Chatham's eloquence in thunder broke, Here Fox persuaded, or here Garrick spoke; Shall boast how Nelson, fame and death in view, ...
— Eighteen Hundred and Eleven • Anna Laetitia Barbauld
... sweet Alice, my neighbour, Stands musing beneath the pine tree; And her look says—"I have a lover Who ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... plan had taken hold upon his fancy, for he kept musing to himself till we were called to dinner and the company of Mrs. Rankeillor; and that lady had scarce left us again to ourselves and a bottle of wine, ere he was back harping on my proposal. When and where was I to meet my friend Mr. Thomson; was I sure of Mr. T.'s ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... retired within, and lights were gleaming in the upper windows of the houses; but knots of neighbours still stood about here and there, talking and laughing loudly. Cargrim strolled slowly down the street towards the Eastgate, musing over his late experience, and enjoying the coolness of the night air after the sultry atmosphere of the coffee-room. The sky was now brilliant with stars, and a silver moon rolled aloft in the blue arch, shedding down floods of light on the town, ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... velvets; as she floated to the head of her table, with opals shining among her priceless point laces, and some tropical flower with leaves of glistening gold crowning her bronze hair; as she glided down in a waltz along the polished floor, or bent her proud head over ecarte in a musing grace that made her opponent utterly forget to mark the king or even play his cards at all; as she talked in the low music of her voice of European imbrogli, and consols and coupons, for she was a politician and a speculator, or lapsed into a beautifully ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... I was left to myself, sometimes musing on the islanders— but no longer fearing them because the captain's unflappable confidence had won me over—and sometimes forgetting them to marvel at the splendors of this tropical night. My memories took wing toward France, in the ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... do it for you,' said Harry; 'but there is only one other person in the world to please whom I would bring my father into such odd company as yon man's;' and he went in, looking but half pleased; and as we took our way to the Grange I was musing who that other person might be Harry was so ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling
... he was reading in a spiritless whisper. Neither of us had lunched that day. His curly head was propped upon his arm, his near-sighted eyes close to the book. He never stirred. He was too faint to sway his body or to gesticulate. I was musing wearily, and it seemed as though my hunger was a living thing and was taking ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... sat silent for some minutes, musing on the odd chance of destiny which required him to make his own return to normal life contingent on the arrest of a mysterious criminal, who was merely suspected, and had ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... which displeases and wearies me. In my little house on the Euganean hills, I hope to pass my few remaining days in tranquillity, and to have always before my eyes my dead, or my absent, friends." I was musing on these circumstances as I walked along the village, till a venerable old woman, seated at her door with her distaff in her hand, observing me, soon guessed the cause of my excursion; and offered to guide me to Petrarch's ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... spoken words to which something within bore witness as truth, and she knew not what to say. Emma, too, lay musing for some time; and then raising her head, and resting it upon her hand, she said: "How wonderfully self-denying Jesus was, Miss Sliver. Nobody appreciated the Saviour when he was upon earth, not even the disciples; ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... through much unwonted fatigue of late, and while thus musing he fell asleep, with his head against the wall. He was half wakened by the sound of voices, and presently became aware that two persons were examining the walls, and comparing the paintings with some others, which one of them had evidently seen. If ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fingered shreds of hair, her maidenhair, her mermaid's, into the bowl. Chips. Shreds. Musing. Mute. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the mystery is over, that the person who did find her again happened to be Mr. Rollo. Yet she had hardly seen him all day before that. Wych Hazel had half forgotten her situation in enjoying its beauties and musing in accordance with them; and then suddenly looking up to the great piece of rock nearest her, she saw him standing there, looking down at her with the calm face and handsome gray eyes which she had noticed ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... it strange that no one should remain on guard amid a life so savage and isolated as that of these simple people, when he was aroused by a touch on his arm, as he sat musing on a log before the embers ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... What struck Isabel first was that he was sitting while Madame Merle stood; there was an anomaly in this that arrested her. Then she perceived that they had arrived at a desultory pause in their exchange of ideas and were musing, face to face, with the freedom of old friends who sometimes exchange ideas without uttering them. There was nothing to shock in this; they were old friends in fact. But the thing made an image, lasting ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... Grumpy (musing). Could it have been his own? In the fierceness of the struggle might he have torn it off in order to give himself greater freedom? Was he offering it to his assailant as a bribe? Was he—but first we must find if he was wearing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... Tiberias from the rage of the Galileans; for I could not deny that those of Tiborias had written to the king, and invited him to come to them; for his letters to them, in answer thereto, would fully prove the truth of that. So I sat a long time musing with myself, and then said to them, "I know well enough that the people of Tiberias have offended; nor shall I forbid you to plunder the city. However, such things ought to be done with discretion; ...
— The Life of Flavius Josephus • Flavius Josephus
... been musing a good deal over my "Dooiney-molla"[1]: he is now taking shape, and looms rather large. I believe you will like him, and his fiery little groom. These good souls do well to visit my dreams: they are such a comfort; and, do you know, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... subversive or reconstructive system of thought. But the depth and sincerity of feeling which explains his marvellous intensity of pathos is sometimes a pleasant relief to the sentimentalism of his greater predecessor. Nor is it hard to understand why his passages of sweet and melancholy musing by the quiet Ouse should have come like a breath of fresh air to the jaded generation waiting for the fall of the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... I was musing in this manner by the bank one day when I felt myself touched on the shoulder. It was the crutch of the Old Gentleman, who had been wheeled hither, as was his custom, by ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... unconscious of this gaze, pursued her meditations. Her eye caught the hour-glass that stood on a small table beside her. "Sand after sand," said she, musing to herself—"Sand after sand, thought after thought. The same sand ever trickling there; the same thought ever coursing through my mind. Oh, love! love! They say it enlarges the heart; I think it contracts it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... honour is but another name for pride; which easier bears the consciousness of guilt, than the world's just reproofs. But 'tis the fashion of the times; and in defence of falsehood and false honour, men die martyrs. I knew not that my nature was so bad. [Stands musing. ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... how when the dawn, Her early light diffusing, Your petals first flung open wide; His steps beside chill Neckar drawn, You see him silent by your side, Upon its Spring perennial musing. ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... upon her musing, and as she put the receiver to her ear and said "hello" she was almost as much astonished as delighted to hear in reply the voice of Felix Brand himself. He told her that he had just got home, after another beastly trip into the back woods of West Virginia, ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... and determined that she would not let doubts of what she really did not doubt torment her. But still she sat on and on upon the bench in the shade musing on many things—on the Contessa Violante, on the steps Ludovico had said that he would take this very first day of Lent towards the open breaking off of all engagement with that lady, and on the amount of scandal and difficulty ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... surface of the globe, which the next earthquake may burst, the Vatican, with its marvels of statuary, the ruined temples of the old gods and heroes, the Campagna, the Pope, and—Flora. We had but a glimpse of her. It was one night, at the Colosseum. We had been musing about that vast and solemn pile by the moonlight, which silvered it over with indescribable beauty, and at last, accompanied by our guides, bearing torches, we ascended through dark and broken passages to the upper benches ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... looked at Burleson dreamily, then turned, musing with bent head, sounding a note, a tentative chord. And then ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... I was conveyed in a covered carriage to Carrickmacross, blackened with bruises, stiff and sore, and scarcely able to stand—musing over the strange transactions which had happened that day—and wrapped in a countryman's frieze coat which had been borrowed ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... answered. 'Sit not musing with some serpent in your breast, or some new persuasion to offer Father Adam the apple yet ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... was dusky—it was too hot for lamps—and she sat slowly moving her fan and looking out on the little arm of the sea which is so pretty at night, reflecting the lights of Cambridgeport and Charlestown. I supposed she was musing upon the loved ones she was to leave behind, her married daughters, her grandchildren; but she struck a note more specifically Bostonian as she said to me, pointing with her fan to the Back Bay—'I shall see nothing ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... "No office to-morrow," she sipped the last of her black coffee slowly. "All the rest of the facts there ever will be about Edward Clayte are in that room—aren't they?" Her voice was musing; she looked straight ahead of her as she finished softly, "What time ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... off myself, Sneak," said Joe, musing on the odd affair as they rode briskly along, "if I hadn't been afraid of cutting your throat. I knew you wasn't born ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... threadbare frock uniform coat, bearing on the left breast four tarnished and lack-lustre stars. Then came the incident of the immortal signal. "We must give the fleet," said Nelson to Blackwood, "something by way of a fillip." After musing a while, he said, "Suppose we signal, 'Nelson confides that every man will do his duty'?" Some one suggested "England" instead of "Nelson," and Nelson at once caught at the improvement. The signal-officer explained that the word "confide" would have to be ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... He was musing quite intently before this table when a quick step behind him made him turn. Styles, the officer, having now been over the house, had returned, and was standing before him in the attitude of one who has something ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... from her by two o'clock. With pleasure thrilling through every nerve, he imagined how she would word her confession. For she had yielded to him; he had felt her body move towards him and had seen the surrender in her eyes. While musing thus, passion began to stir in him, ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... prisoners, and soon picked out his man. Maroney did not seem to be doing any thing particular, but sat musing by himself. In this manner, brooding over their misfortunes, White and Maroney spent the evening until the hour of retirement. The next day White kept by himself, pondering over what he should do. In the course of the day his ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... thought, with a fierce blazing up through the murk of her musing. "I hate t' live. But they ain't no hope. I'm tied down. I can't leave the children, and I ain't got no money. I couldn't make a living out in the world. I ain't never seen anything an' ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... 19th. I have been musing upon "my sorrow was stirred." Can it be that every heart is a treasury of sadness which has but to be stirred up to set us in mourning? Is it proportionate to the amount of evil? Does a certain amount of evil necessarily bring a certain ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... tender assurance of a particular regard for me, left me to the composure and refreshment of a sweet slumber; waking out of which, and getting up to dress before Mrs. Cole should come in, I found in one of my pockets a purse of guineas, which he had slipt there; and just as I was musing on a liberality I had certainly not expected, Mrs. Cole came in, to whom I immediately communicated the present, and naturally offered her whatever share she pleased: but assuring me that the gentleman had very nobly rewarded ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... diamonds, and next door is a den full of children who wait for their day's one meal until their mother has come home with her chance earnings. A strange enough region wherein to wander and muse. Inextinguishable laughter were perchance the fittest result of such musing; yet somehow the heart grows heavy, somehow the blood is troubled in its course, and the pulses ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... from her fit of musing by an unwonted sound—a hollow tapping, tapping, tapping, which seemed to come from a corner of the attic where the shadows gathered most dun and dark. The girl drew in her head from the window with a startled expression on her face, and was then more than ever aware of the strange sound ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... 110 Rich golden verdure on the waves below. Slow glides the sail along th' illumin'd shore, And steals into the shade the lazy oar. Soft bosoms breathe around contagious sighs, And amourous music on the water dies. 115 Heedless how Pliny, musing here, survey'd Old Roman boats and figures thro' the shade, Pale Passion, overpower'd, retires and woos The thicket, where th' unlisten'd ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... suspected," said Mrs. Bloomfield, in a sort of musing manner; "the men have been won over, and this young creature has absolutely been left without a protector in the most ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... "Musing sit I on the settle By the firelight's cheerful blaze, Listening to the busy kettle Humming long forgotten ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... and interest Edith listened to the story of my dream. When, finally, I had made an end, she remained musing. ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... spot, Ye towers sublime, deserted now and drear, Ye woods deep sighing to the hollow blast! The musing wand'rer loves to linger near, While History points to all ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... presently seemed to hold converse with the ancient founders and royal benefactors of certain venerable establishments! I then little imagined that it would ever fall to my lot to be either walking or musing within the precincts of the Abbey of Jumieges;—or rather, of the ruins of what was once not less distinguished, as a school of learning, than admired for its wealth and celebrity as a monastic establishment. Yes, my friend, I have seen and visited the ruins of ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... heave of the ever restless Atlantic. She slid over the shoulder of one big wave and into the trough of another with a steady rhythmic glide that spoke well for her seaworthy qualities. Frank, snugly out of the nipping wind in the shelter of the gasolene drums, was silent for several minutes musing over the adventurous voyage on which they were setting out. Thus he had not noticed a change coming over Harry and Billy. Suddenly a groan fell on his ear. Startled, the ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Fairfax fell a-musing upon those apocryphal men who might be subjugated by the charms of ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... pondered upon all that she had endured—and might still be enduring—for his sake: a glimmer of something like generosity and compassion flickered for a brief space over the surface of the cast-steel heart. He rose, and leaned out into the steady, outer moonlight, musing for several minutes, and then began muttering aloud. "It would be as well to clear off one debt at least. I did pass my word. She deserves this sacrifice, if it were only for never complaining: let her have her way. By G—d, I'll go off to-morrow evening, and I'll tell Cecil so ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... would a new day after sitting up a whole night. How far this was occasioned by Knight Sutton habits, and how far it was her own fault, was not what she asked herself, though she sat up for a long time musing on the change in her way of life, and scarcely able to believe that it was only last Sunday that she had been sitting with her mother over their fire at Rocksand. Enough had happened for a whole month. Her darling project was fulfilled; the airy castle of former days had become a substance, ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... impenetrable. Musing on what had passed with Monteith, and on the likelihood of any hero appearing, who, by freeing his country, could ever claim the privilege of investigating the mystery which was now his care. Wallace ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... the road two and two, she beside her class with her simple cotton sunshade, her little thumb cocked up against its stem; and Phillotson behind in his long dangling coat, handling his walking-stick genteelly, in the musing mood which had come over him since her arrival. The afternoon was one of sun and dust, and when they entered the exhibition room few people were present but themselves. The model of the ancient city ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... than thou. He said, and Menoetiades the wrath Of shaft-arm'd Phoebus shunning, far retired. 865 But in the Scaean gate Hector his steeds Detain'd, uncertain whether thence to drive Amid the warring multitude again, Or, loud commandment issuing, to collect His host within the walls. Him musing long 870 Apollo, clad in semblance of a Chief Youthful and valiant, join'd. Asius he seem'd Equestrian Hector's uncle, brother born Of Hecuba the queen, and Dymas' son, Who on the Sangar's banks in Phrygia dwelt. 875 Apollo, so disguised, him thus bespake. Why, Hector, hast thou left the fight? ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... tried By natural ills, received the comfort fast, While budding, at thy sight, my pilgrim's staff Gave out green leaves with morning dews impearled. I seek no copy now of life's first half: Leave here the pages with long musing curled, And write me new my future's epigraph, New angel mine, unhoped ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... always avoided bad company. She did her duty in the house as a good mouser, and when mice grew scarce she went hunting for game; she had a hole under the eaves near the chimney, through which she could enter the hut at any time of the night or day. While Philip was musing after tea on the "Pons Asinorum" by the light of a tallow candle, Pussy was out poaching for quail, and as soon as she caught one she brought it home, dropped it on the floor, rubbed her side against Philip's boot, and said, "I have brought a little game for breakfast." Then Philip stroked ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... Phocion the most powerful speaker. His oratory, like small coin of great value, was to be estimated, not by its bulk, but its intrinsic worth. He was once observed, it is said, when the theater was filling with the audience, to walk musing alone behind the scenes, which one of his friends taking notice of, said, "Phocion, you seem to be thoughtful." "Yes," replied he, "I am considering how I may shorten what I am going to say to the Athenians." Even Demosthenes himself, who used to despise ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... deck, musing into a sheer muddle this singular business of the Maharajah of Ratnagiri's gift to the Queen of England, with all sorts of dim, unformed suspicions floating loose in my brains round the central fancy of the fifteen thousand pound stone there, when the captain returned. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... was part of Pink's little code of philosophy, she fell a-musing happily, while Hilda walked beside her in a kind of silent rage, almost hating herself for the fulness of vigor, the superabundant health and buoyancy, which she felt in every limb. She looked sidelong at the transparent cheek, the wasted frame, the unearthly radiance ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... fed the fire and stirred it, till the sparkles in delight Snapped their saucy little fingers at the chill December night; And in dressing-gown and slippers, I had tilted back "my throne—" The old split-bottomed rocker— and was musing ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... spent a pleasant afternoon musing over these papers. Their variety is endless, and the dispositions of mind displayed by these librarians are wide as the poles asunder. Some of them babble like babies, others are evidently austere scholars; some are gravely bent on the best methods of classifying catalogues, economizing ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... to the shoulders, catching eels out of a large gleaming wet net. The silvery scales glistening through the meshes full of water, the golden river and scarlet petticoat, the beautiful black eyes deep and pensive, which seemed darkened in their musing by the surrounding sunlight struck the artist, perhaps even rather trivially, like some coloured print on the titlepage of a song in ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... listen to one of the wisest, most enlightened, and most agreeable of men. There was only one subject on which his eminence seemed scrupulous never to touch, and that was religion; or so indirectly, that it was only when alone that Lothair frequently found himself musing over the happy influence on the arts, and morals, and ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... now," said Napoleon; adding, in a musing tone, "he very good man, plenty money; give Injun money all time. Him very good white man, that man; ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... ever saw a stone I liked as well as this," said Father Payne, musing over another piece. "Think what millions of years this has been like that,—before Abraham was! It has never seen the light of day before—it's a splash of some molten stone, which fell plop into a cool sea-current, I suppose. I wish I knew all about it. The question, is, why is ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... which, like strains that sigh Through charmed gardens, all who hearing die; Its solemn music he does not pursue To distant ages out of human view; Nor listen to its wild and mournful chime In the dead caverns on the shore of Time; But musing with a calm and steady gaze Before the crackling flames of living days, He hears it whisper through the busy roar Of what shall be and what has been before. Awake the Present! shall no scene display The tragic passion of the ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... The humane governor, musing upon the sentence, considered a little upon it; and turning to the two honest Englishmen, said, "Hold; you must reflect that it will be long ere they can raise corn and cattle of their own, and they must not starve; ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... stroke of the fatal hour, I sat there, thinking that this life of ours is neither long nor short, but that it can appear very wonderful, entertaining, and pathetic, with symbolic images and bizarre associations crowded into one half-hour of retrospective musing. ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... so spake, his Highness Duke Francis fell into a deep fit of musing. At last he exclaimed, "Good Joel, you are a fanatic, an enthusiast—surely we know the name of God; or what hinders us ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... most gentle, most unfortunate, Crowned but to die—who in her chamber sate Musing with Plato, tho' the horn was blown, And every ear and every heart was won, And all in green array ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... While musing, around me has gathered a heap Of the leaflets, all dying and dead; And I see in my reverie plainly revealed The slope of life's hill, in my boyhood concealed By the forms ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... she removed her rich evening costume, then donning a warm flannel wrapper, she seated herself before the glowing grate, clasped her hands around her knees, and, gazing upon the bed of red-hot coals, she fell to musing. ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... heed. He went directly into the saloon and looked about him. At a table, back toward him, sat a stocky figure, playing cards and reaching for the rum container at his side. Adrian stood a moment, musing; then his right hand slid down to his hip; a forward stride and the left hand fell on the ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... the forest one evening, saw the younger of the two, who was a great hunter, sitting mournfully under an oak, and looking with musing ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... Prince and Princess Galitzin, as between a good brother and a good sister. Their house, he notices, had once been the residence of Barneveldt. Men like Diderot are the last persons to think of their own historic position, else we might have expected to find him musing on the saving shelter which this land of freedom and tolerance had given to more than one of his great precursors in the literature of emancipation. Descartes had found twenty years of priceless freedom (1629-1649) among the Dutch burghers. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... of lonely musing, Such as in evening silence come, When, soft as birds their pinions closing, The heart's best feelings gather home. Then in our souls there seems to languish A tender grief that is not woe; And thoughts that once wrung groans of anguish Now cause but ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... heard the musing voice of the woman, "you have not the face of a lucky man." She raised her eyes with renewed interest. "And so that was the way of it. After doing your work you simply walked off and made for your rooms. That sort of thing succeeds sometimes. I suppose it was agreed ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... since the night when Ella Hastings died, and alone in his chamber the husband was musing of the past, and holding, as it were, communion with the departed, who seemed this night to be so near that once he said aloud, "Ella, are you with me now?" But to his call there came no answer, save the falling of the summer rain; and again, with ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... died, and passed away, and with them all their graces, their triumphs, their rivalries, their admirers; the whole empire of love and pleasure in which they ruled—"all dead, all buried, all forgotten," I find a cloud of melancholy stealing over the present gaieties around me. I was gazing, in a musing mood, this very morning, at the portrait of the lady whose husband was killed abroad, when the fair Julia entered the gallery, leaning on the arm of the captain. The sun shone through the row of windows on her as she passed ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... General, as if musing with himself, "it is strange, but these very young creatures seldom do give their first preferences to persons of corresponding age. Girls love to look up to men with reverence. It ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... the long wreck of the fair portico that had once extended from the bridge to the basilica, till he came to the broad flight of steps leading to the walled garden-court of old Saint Peter's. There he loved to sit musing among the cypresses, wondering at the vast bronze pine- cone and the great brass peacocks which Symmachus had brought thither from the ruins of Agrippa's baths, wherein the terrible Crescenzi had fortified themselves during more than a hundred years. ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... to be out in the air. Matilda went round the corner, into Butternut Street, and made for Mr. Sample's grocery store, every step being a delight. Why could not the inside world be as pleasant as the outside? Matilda was musing and wishing, when just before she reached Mr. Sample's door, she saw what made her forget everything else; even the mischievous little boy who belonged to Mrs. Dow. What was he doing here in Butternut Street? ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... an instant musing with his eyes fixed on the ground, and then proceeded—"But Heaven, that knows our imperfect nature, accepts of our imperfect obedience, and hath delayed, though not averted, the bloody end of thy daring life. The destroying angel hath stood still, as of old by the threshing-floor ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... with himself, he sauntered along, musing over Henrietta Temple, and building bright castles in the air. A man engaged with his ideas is insensible of fatigue. Ferdinand found himself at the Park gate that led to Ducie; intending only a slight stroll, he had already rambled half way to his beloved. It was a delicious afternoon: ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... cares for him, there was a sort of disturbing, unquiet element in the history of every day. The longing for him to come home at night,—the wish that he would stay with her,—the uncertainty whether he would or would not go and spend the evening with Sally,—the musing during the day over all that he had done and said the day before, were a constant interior excitement. For Moses, besides being in his moods quite variable and changeable, had also a good deal of the dramatic element ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... you have few sources of pleasure," said Cornelia, in a musing tone, as her eyes wandered over her ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... by Matthew Arnold's 'occasional habit of harking back and loitering in mind among the sepulchres.... Nothing which leaves us depressed is a true work of art.' Yet, it may be answered, the habit of musing among tombs has inspired good poetry; and when doubt and dejection, perplexed meditation over insoluble problems, are in the air, a poet does well to express the dominant feelings of his time; and a modern Hamlet ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... centre of this flood of fiery light, a human form appeared, drawn against the gilded background, as distinctly, and seemingly as palpable, as though it would come within the grasp of any extended hand. The figure was colossal; the attitude musing and melancholy, and the situation directly in the route of the travellers. But imbedded, as it was, in its setting of garish light, it was impossible to distinguish its just proportions or ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... find much to interest him," went on the rector in a musing tone. "The position of the Anglican Church in America should afford him an object of much consideration. I understand," he added, feeling his way, "that his Grace is a ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... stirring of the air window-sashes changed their positions with a soft knock in their frames. And whether the place had life in this sense or not, it had at all events a winsome personality. It needed but an hour of musing for Oleron to conceive the idea that, as his own body stood in friendly relation to his soul, so, by an extension and an attenuation, his habitation might fantastically be supposed to stand in some relation to himself. He even amused ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... closed on Mrs. Amherst a resolve which had taken shape in Justine's mind during their talk together made her seat herself at her writing-table, where, after a moment's musing over her suspended pen, she wrote and addressed a hurried note. This business despatched, she put on her hat and jacket, and letter in hand passed down the corridor from her room, and descended to the entrance-hall below. She might have ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... their rise and origin from the left capsule of the heart, bring, through several circuits, ambages, and anfractuosities, the vital spirits, to subtilize and refine them in the ætherial purity of animal spirits. Nay, in such a studiously meditating, musing person, you may espy so extravagant raptures of one, as it were out of himself, that all his natural faculties for that time will seem to lie suspended from each their proper charge and office, and his exterior senses to be at a stand. In a word, ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... while he was reading in a spiritless whisper. Neither of us had lunched that day. His curly head was propped upon his arm, his near-sighted eyes close to the book. He never stirred. He was too faint to sway his body or to gesticulate. I was musing wearily, and it seemed as though my hunger was a living thing and was taking part ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... stretch'd wide, We paddled to the other side: Where being Landed safe by hap, As Sol fell into Thetis' Lap. A ravenous Gang bent on the stroul, Of (f) Wolves for Prey, began to howl; This put me in a pannick Fright, Least I should be devoured quite; But as I there a musing stood, And quite benighted in a Wood, A Female Voice pierc'd, thro' my Ears, Crying, You Rogue drive home the Steirs. I listen'd to th' attractive sound, And straight a Herd of Cattel found Drove by a Youth, and homeward ...
— The Sot-weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland • Ebenezer Cook
... Geraint, a little spleenful yet, Across the bridge that spanned the dry ravine. There musing sat the hoary-headed Earl, (His dress a suit of frayed magnificence, Once fit for feasts of ceremony) and said: 'Whither, fair son?' to whom Geraint replied, 'O friend, I seek a harbourage for the night.' Then Yniol, 'Enter therefore and partake ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... been betrayed," observed Sir George, musing, "before this the king would have had ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... after musing a moment; "there ain't no real reason, o' course. On'y I thought—An' you not mentionin' a ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Joachim must have known what he was like, and would never have told me to keep him if he had not been honest. Perhaps he is perfectly honest, and when I meet him in heaven how ashamed I shall be of myself for having had doubts!" And then she fell to musing on what sort of an appearance a chastened and angelic Dellwig would probably present, and looked up suddenly ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... Long he sat, musing in his mind, and then rose and put on all his armour, and seized a sword that Hector had given him one day when they two fought in a gentle passage of arms, and took courteous farewell of each other, and Aias had given Hector a broad sword-belt, wrought with gold. This ...
— Tales of Troy: Ulysses the Sacker of Cities • Andrew Lang
... his mind to the abstruse mysteries of multiplication of money, but generally in vain, and at others whiling away the time with his books, for though there were only seven of them, including Bible and Prayer-book, a very little reading could be the text of so much musing, that these few perfectly sufficed him. And then he was the nurse of any orphaned lamb or sick chicken that Patience was anxious about, and his care certainly saved many ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... for a man to select for a rendezvous: just the secret spot where a maiden could listen without trembling at intruders; and it struck me that this must have been the trysting place of my parents. For an hour I remained there, castle-building for the future, and musing on the past, when I heard a voice, close to me on the other side of the cell, the back of which was turned towards the hall. I knew the voice to be that of the old lady, who, it appears, had, as usual, come out in ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... him, that he knows nothing of me. You will tell him, however, that the person his good nature has laid under obligations to him, is one LeFevre, a lieutenant in Angus's; but he knows me not,' said he a second time, musing. 'Possibly, he may my story,' added he; 'pray tell the captain I was the ensign at Breda whose wife was most unfortunately killed with a musket-shot, as she lay in my arms in my tent.' 'I remember the story, an't please your honor,' said I, very well.' 'Do you so?' said he, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... one day while he was brooding and musing and quarrelling without definite reason, in the arms of his beloved, that the profound, melancholy motif in the first movement of his symphony in D minor came to him. This symphony gradually grew into the great vision of ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... he was writing the poems, the chief of which we have named, was a labouring husbandman on the little farm of Mossgiel, a pursuit which affords but few leisure hours for either reading or pondering; but to him the stubble-field was musing-ground, and the walk behind the plough, a twilight saunter on Parnassus. As, with a careful hand and a steady eye, he guided his horses, and saw an evenly furrow turned up by the share, his thoughts were on other themes; he was straying in haunted glens, when spirits have power—looking ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... did not pause, yet while it pressed on, its hearers musing lingered behind. Why were the long lost ones not to be spoken of? For fear of betraying some blame of the childlike aunts for the scarlet-fever? The unworthy thought was put aside and ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... evening when the poor woman was sitting in the dark in the self-hypnotized condition of the utter emptiness of her living death, she heard Christophe playing. It was his habit to sit at the piano in the half-light, musing and improvising. His music irritated her, for it disturbed the empty torpor into which she had sunk. She shut the window angrily. The music penetrated through to her room. Madame Germain was filled with a sort of hatred for it. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... reached the eastern angle of the chateau, yet always with the same result. He straightened himself at last, and his manner was more calm; his frenzied haste was gone, and deliberately he now raised his torch and let its light shine again over the waters. He pondered them a moment, his dark eyes musing almost regretfully. ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... good-night, and turned her head to the wall—not to sleep, but to muse on those fiery, dark-brown eyes that had looked such mysterious meanings into hers, and that thrilling deep-toned voice that had breathed such sweet praise in her ears. And so musing, Nora fell asleep, and her reverie passed ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... encourage the little girl in musing over novels, or listening to talk on this subject, until she dreams herself in love. There is indeed little danger of this where friends have not made it a theme for perpetual inuendos and jests, but spoken frankly, simply, and seriously of ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... a tolerably obvious distinction between two principal ways of examining character. One is a musing, subjective method of delineation, in which the various shades and windings seem to reveal themselves with a certain spontaneity, and we follow many recesses and depths in the heart of another, such as only music stirs ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... gentleman. "It is I who must apologize for the rudeness of nodding and beckoning to a perfect stranger. But the fact was, I could not regard you as a stranger. Seeing you at your window, smoking and reading, day after day, while I was smoking and musing at mine, I gradually came to sympathize with you, and to wish that the distance across the lots was short enough to allow us to converse. I thought, perhaps, that on some subjects we might interest each other. Now, be good enough to fill that pipe and smoke it, while ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... rather love in its romance than its reality. What were those of Constance for him? She knew not herself at that time. Had she been of a character one shade less ambitious, or less powerful, they would have been love, and love of no common character. But within her musing, and self-possessed, and singularly constituted mind, there was, as yet, a limit to every sentiment, a chain to the wings of every thought, save those of one order; and that order was not of love. There was a marked difference, in all respects, between the ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had gone through much unwonted fatigue of late, and while thus musing he fell asleep, with his head against the wall. He was half wakened by the sound of voices, and presently became aware that two persons were examining the walls, and comparing the paintings with some others, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she was at vespers, I went for a walk outside the town, my heart full of her image and of an eager desire to pass all my days by her side. I had sense enough to see that for the present this was impossible, and that the bliss which I relished so keenly must be brief. This gave to my musing a sadness which was free from everything sombre, and which was moderated by pleasing hope. The sound of the bells, which has always moved me to a singular degree, the singing of the birds, the glory of the weather, the sweetness of the landscape, the ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... panorama did not long delay his musing fancy. A dull smart like that of a healing wound drew his mind to a succession of scenes on the frontier. He dwelt with that strange fascination which belongs to the memory of hardships—and which we are all too apt to mistake for regret—upon his life of toil and danger in the wide desolation ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... went directly to her oratory, musing all the way, as she walked through the gallery, upon the subject; turning it this way and that way in her fancy—Ave Maria!—what can La-Fosseuse mean? said she, ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... my sight In devious tracery that Passage lay; Mocking me with its undeveloped truth, Wealth unappropriated, glory lost! Cruel is she who took from me that substance With which I might have conquered an escape, Leaving me, a forlorn old spirit, sere and grey. Musing through barren hours upon the past, I think with bitterness on those who once Were friends and lovers—Queen, companions, Wife! Forgotten! yes, forgotten by them all! The luxuries of the world-taxing city, The kisses of their children, smiles of men Renowned ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... may to musing incline, Now that grey-bearded Winter makes Autumn resign; The hills all around us their russet put on, And the skies seem in mourning for loss of the sun. The winds make the tree, where thou sitt'st, shake its ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... modern unbelievers might feel inward doubts. That night the forester sought the earl again, and brought with him a verdurer or under keeper. This man had seen the whole affair, had seen Drogo pick up Hubert's arrow after the latter was gone, and stand as if musing over it, when a deer came that way, and Drogo let fly the shaft at once. Then he discovered the spectator, and bribed him with all the money he had about him to keep silence, which the fellow did, until he heard of the trial by combat and the accusation ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... of the night of distant years, That flashed unnoticed, save by wrinkled eld Musing ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... indeed, have their Catiline or Crispin D'Espremenil, dusky-glowing, all in renegade heat; their boisterous Barrel-Mirabeau; but also they have their Lafayettes, Liancourts, Lameths; above all, their D'Orleans, now cut forever from his Court-moorings, and musing drowsily of high and highest sea-prizes (for is not he too a son of Henri Quatre, and partial potential Heir-Apparent?)—on his voyage towards Chaos. From the Clergy again, so numerous are the Cures, actual deserters have run over: two small parties; in the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... He sat musing with the dead chicken in his hand, forgetful of time, till a ring of his own door-bell called him in to receive a note from Miss Penelope, thanking him for his invitation to little Rosamond, but declining it in the most ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... prohibition David's warlike career. We may note the earnestness and the motive of the king's desire to build the Temple. 'It was in my heart'; that implies earnest longing and fixed purpose. He had brooded over the wish till it filled his mind, and was consolidated into a settled resolve. Many a musing, solitary moment had fed the fire before it burned its way out in the words addressed to Nathan. So should our whole souls be occupied with our parts in God's service, and so should our desires be strongly set towards carrying out what in solitary meditation ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... If a youth sat musing and intently looking into the fire, it was a sign that some one was throwing an evil spell over him, or fascinating him for evil. When this was observed, if any one without speaking were to take the tongs and turn the centre coal or piece of wood in ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... the operation of ungoverned Chance? I had ventured upon deck and thrown myself down, without attracting any notice, among a pile of ratlin-stuff and old sails in the bottom of the yawl. While musing upon the singularity of my fate, I unwittingly daubed with a tar-brush the edges of a neatly-folded studding-sail which lay near me on a barrel. The studding-sail is now bent upon the ship, and the thoughtless touches ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... tenderness they would easily penetrate each other's most secret thoughts. This would continue forever in the calm of an enduring affection. It seemed to her that she felt him there beside her. And an unusual sensation came over her. She remained long musing thus, when suddenly she thought she heard a footstep behind the house. "If it were he." But it passed on and she felt as if she had been deceived. The air became cooler. The day broke. Slowly bursting ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Arthur said no more, but fell into a grave fit of musing. Presently he roused himself, and said, "But, mamma, how can I go in two days? Are there not things to be done? Mustn't I have a lot of new clothes, ...
— Left at Home - or, The Heart's Resting Place • Mary L. Code
... the relation of mother and little child! He lay for a long while musing about it. Why hadn't he followed Rosamund over the threshold of the nursery just now? The mystery had ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... door. Gerome's picture was in three panels. The first showed the poet opening the door to the sobbing Cupid, with his bedraggled wings and dripping curls; in the next, the rosy ingrate wounds his benefactor; in the third, the poet sits disconsolate by his hearth, musing over the days when Love was his guest, if but for an hour. As the story was an old one, so many an artist before Gerome had played with it as a subject for a picture. Jean-Francois Millet himself, another pupil of Delaroche, though ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... induced her to sell Punch to a low fellow—but of course you know nothing about that," said I, in a musing tone, as I thought of the strange manner in which this portion of my doggie's history had come to light, but I was recalled from my reverie by the contemptuous tones of my little companion's voice, as ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... which harmonizes so well with ancient places, whose pensive silence seems the trance of memory musing over the young and lovely life that illuminated its lost years—that Hawthorne is so intimately associated with the Old Manse. Yet that was but the tent of a night for him. Already, with the Blithedale Romance, which is ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... no believer in ghosts,—I see thee very plainly sometimes, thou quaint White Father, moving through winter-mists in the narrower Paris of another century; musing upon the churches that arose at thy bidding under tropic skies; dreaming of the primeval valleys changed by thy will to green- gold seas of cane,—and the strong mill that will bear thy name for two hundred years (it stands solid unto this day),—and the habitations made for thy ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... 'twixt the rise and fall, Like relic-seers, shall one by one Stand musing o'er our empty hall; And setting moons shall brood upon The ...
— Poems • Alice Meynell
... Treasurer, rallied the Captain General, and confronted the pride of the Duke of Buckinghamshire with pride still more inflexible, could be the same being who had passed nights of sleepless anxiety, in musing over a cross look or a testy word of a patron. "Faith," he wrote to Stella, with bitter levity, "Sir William spoiled a fine gentleman." Yet, in justice to Temple, we must say that there is no reason to think that Swift was more unhappy at Moor Park than he would have been ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of the Galileans; for I could not deny that those of Tiborias had written to the king, and invited him to come to them; for his letters to them, in answer thereto, would fully prove the truth of that. So I sat a long time musing with myself, and then said to them, "I know well enough that the people of Tiberias have offended; nor shall I forbid you to plunder the city. However, such things ought to be done with discretion; for they of Tiberias have not been the only betrayers ...
— The Life of Flavius Josephus • Flavius Josephus
... called agitators, as if the discussion of right and wrong were itself a wrong, as if the letting in of light upon the darkness were a deed of darkness. Nevertheless, the Nation became thoughtful over the question of the rights of man. While it was musing the fire burned, and an irrepressible conflict came. In the issue it was settled that no man should be held by another man in involuntary servitude in this common and ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children's hands, in front-yard plots—now standing by wallsides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests;—the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... did we meet long years of yore? And why did we strike hands and say "We will be friends and nothing more"; Why are we musing thus to-day? Because because was just because, And no one knew ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... survive a fortnight—and what signifies an exertion that can at worst only accelerate my death a few days?" I marvelled at the composure of this reply, for his appearance sufficiently vouched the truth of his prophecy, and rode home {p.017} to my uncle's (then my abode), musing what there could be in the spirit of authorship that could inspire its votaries with the courage of martyrs. He died within less than the period he assigned—with which event ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... as to events was over, as I stood musing, I said, 'Have you no evidence that he repented?' and alluded to the mystery of his death, and the message ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... forward my battle-axe; for I love not too light a weapon. You see, Hilda, when it has not weight one must sometimes repeat the blow; especially if the mail be strong. But with a heavy axe and a stout arm there is no need for that. I had begun this weapon," continued the youth, as if he were musing aloud rather than speaking to his companion, "with intent to try its metal on the head of the King; but I fear me it will be necessary to use it in cracking a viking's headpiece before ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... own time" evidently meant to Thora the reading of Ian's letter over again. And also a little musing on what Ian had said. There was, however, no hurry about Jean Hay's letter and it was so pleasant to drift among the happy thoughts that crowded into her consideration. So for half an hour Jean's letter lay at her side untouched—Jean was so far outside her dreams and ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... can't one have nostrils as well as eyes in one's mind?) when I think of this place. And oh, I nearly forgot to tell you about that great feature, the museum and library, though we spent two hours browsing in it, and "musing" (appropriate word for Easthampton!) by the fountain in its garden. They've made the building look as Elizabethan as though it had been shipped from Surrey; and its books and pictures and relics are fascinating. So are the girls who are the guardians of the place. ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... While thus musing, Welbeck's countenance and gesture displayed emotions too vehement for speech. The glances that he fixed upon me were unsteadfast and wild. He walked along the floor, stopping at each moment, and darting looks of eagerness upon me. A conflict of passions kept him mute. At length, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... unbroken. When the two armies faced each other on the plain of Plassey the odds were so great that on the very eve of the battle a council of war counselled retreat. Clive withdrew to a grove hard by, and after an hour's lonely musing gave the word to fight. Courage, in fact, was all that was needed. The fifty thousand foot and fourteen thousand horse who were seen covering the plain at daybreak on the 23rd of June 1757 were soon thrown into confusion ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... continued, musing, 'to be mixed up together! But we'll let them rest in peace. I'd better let you have what was entrusted to me, and then, mayhap, ye'll be better able to form ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sat in silence, musing on the many phases of this curious project; then Beth came to Mr. Merrick's side and ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... tangle—and the knot has been cut very rudely," said Mr. Brooke, in a musing tone. "Of one thing I am quite certain, we were not fit to have the care of you, Lesley—your aunt and I. You would never have been in this position, my poor child, if we ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... rested still, As musing on that message we had heard, And brooding on that 'End it when you will,' Perchance awaiting yet some other word; When keen as lightning through a muffled sky Sprang forth ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... Antonia did not attempt to finish her interrupted sketch. She sat on, lost in a world of musing. At last she uttered ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... weary with tossing and beset with horrid phantoms of remorse and jealousy, instantly fell dead in love with that sun- chequered, echoing corner. Holding his feet, he stared out of a drowsy trance, wondering, admiring, musing, losing his way among uncertain thoughts. There is nothing that so apes the external bearing of free will as that unconscious bustle, obscurely following liquid laws, with which a river contends among obstructions. It seems the very play of man and destiny, and ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... still, and its master was weary. He sat there, quietly musing, feeling the sweet and tranquil presence near him. Now the fire was screened, the lights were out, save one dim glimmer, and he had lain down on the couch with the letter in his hand, and slept the ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... generation ahead of the others in her conception of inherited, personal rights. As the dinner dragged on, there occurred no further opportunity for talk until near the end, when suddenly the clear, even tones of Miss Hitchcock's voice brought his idle musing to an end. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Bridesmaids were patting one another's sashes awry and speaking of the Bride's freckles. Coachmen tied white ribbons on their whips and bewailed the space of time between drinks. The minister was musing over his possible fee, essaying conjecture whether it would suffice to purchase a new broadcloth suit for himself and a photograph of Laura Jane Libbey for his wife. Yea, ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... pool Floats in her parlour still and cool; While the slim bird its lean wires shakes, As into piercing song it breaks; Till Peter's pale-green eyes ajar Dream, wake; wake, dream, in one brief bar; And I am sitting, dull and shy, And she with gaze of vacancy, And large hands folded on the tray, Musing the afternoon away; Her satin bosom heaving slow With sighs that softly ebb and flow, And her plain face in such dismay, It seems unkind to look her way: Until all cheerful back will come Her cheerful gleaming spirit home: ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... slaying, others are indifferent. An old soldier, who had been in Waterloo, informed me that to his mind there was no pleasure equal to running a man through the body, and that he could lie awake at night musing on the pleasurable sensations ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... of Westminster Hall; and this wood, enjoying the universal Irish exemption from vermin, is said never to harbor a spider. Morogh was once told that William Rufus intended to make a bridge of his ships, and conquer Ireland. After some musing, Morogh asked, "Hath the King, in his great threatening, said, 'If it please God?'" "No!" "Then, seeing he putteth his trust only in man, and not in God, I fear not ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the hangings that no secret entrance might be concealed behind them, gathered a heap of rushes together, and lay down on them, wrapped in his mantle, across the doorway. The Duke was soon asleep; but the Squire lay long awake, musing on the possible dangers that surrounded his charge, and on the best ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge
... an enterprise. The world now lay before him as he had wished it—an enchanted land in which he could move with as great freedom as a prince in the magical kingdoms of Arabia. The Present became sharpened to poignancy. Even as he stood there musing over the marvel of the new world into which he had leaped—the old thin world of years condensed into one thick week—he realized that this very wondering had cost him five precious minutes. A dozen ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... hope, the least, the dimmest, Ere I drain the poisoned cup: Tell me I may tell the chymist Not to make that arsenic up! Else, this heart shall soon cease throbbing; And when, musing o'er my bones, Travellers ask, "Who killed Cock Robin?" They'll be told, ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... and now they have him as it were bolted with a lock of a hundred keys which can never be unlocked, except by the concurrence of every key in the hands of a hundred different men and they scattered to a hundred different places. And now they stand musing as to what invention in all the domain of mind and matter can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than ...
— The Disfranchisement of the Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 6 • John L. Love
... the marble fell her ermine tread. And when the king, reclined in musing mood, Lifts, at the gentle sound, his stately head, Low at his feet ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... away, and the morning dawned, but it brought no alleviation to her sorrow. At an early hour she rose from her couch, and, as if led by an instinctive impulse, she drew near the window that commanded a view of the garden. There, musing on the vision of her past night, she was surprised by the entrance of Lisarda, one of her attendants. She came bustling in with an air of importance, and apparently with a firm resolution that no opportunity should escape in ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... Hath the heart of Age, That life's tide hath staunchly breasted, Wrought, achieved and nobly rested, Musing with calm retrospection Their past pilgrimage; Many a sweet and wise reflection Hath the ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... treaty they parted; and Mr. Cargill, after musing for a short while upon the singular chance which had sent a living man to answer those doubts for which he was in vain consulting ancient authorities, at length resumed, by degrees, the train of reflection and investigation which Mr. Touchwood's visit had interrupted, and in a short time lost ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... had ever before been known in these kingdoms; I was sitting alone at evening in my library, and my thoughts had wandered from the book before me to the circumstances which made this national calamity be felt almost like a private affliction. While I was thus musing the post-woman arrived. My letters told me there was nothing exaggerated in the public accounts of the impression which this sudden loss had produced; that wherever you went you found the women of the family weeping, and that men could scarcely speak of ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... ascetic, under that great grief, seemed to lose his senses. His heart filled with anxiety and sorrow, the king, however, did not again swoon away. Comforted by them, he remained silent, indulging in melancholy musing. He that reads of this great battle, which is like unto a sacrifice, between the high-souled Dhananjaya and Adhiratha's son, so also he that hears the account of this battle read, both obtain, O ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... and looked about her. How long had she sat there musing—dreaming dreams which every instinct of womanly pride compelled her to renounce? She wondered if he had gone. Once more came that mingled hope and fear that he might seek an interview with her before leaving. The hope was stronger ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... about her the comfort of the room entered into her like warmth, and, opening her arms in a happy gesture, she threw herself among the pillows of the couch and lay watching the rapid yellow flames. Even in the midst of her musing she laughed suddenly to find that she was thinking of the phrase with which Funsten had dismissed the name of Arnold Kemper: "The only favourable thing one can say of him is to say nothing." Was it really so bad as that she wondered, with a dim memory that somewhere, back ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... despite the knowledge of their language with which they graciously credited me, I hunted about in vain for the French equivalent of "I know my own mind." Whereupon, allowing the conversation to take another turn, I fell to musing on those untranslatable words, together with the whole episode of the Mozart manuscript and the drawings of M. Ingres, including that rainy, chilly day at Montauban; and also another day of travel, even wetter and colder, ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
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