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More "Pensive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... It stood by my hammock last night; my conscious soul looked through my closed eyelids, and sleep felt its dreadful presence. If it comes again I will throw myself into the sea! Hush!" he whispered, "it stands by the cabin door, so pale! so pale! Come not near me, pensive ghost. Give ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... gallows-bird!" "Down with the damned renegade!" dispelled what doubt remained. A shade of melancholy deepened the expression of the sweet, thoughtful mouth; then, as by volition, the habitual look of pensive cheerfulness came back, and he ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... nothin'," said Texas, glancing with pensive eyes to a point far up the sun-baked street where his gaze rested upon a pretentious house in a neatly-fenced yard where there were green things that gave a restful impression. "Circumstantial evidence ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... The figs refer to the anus and the pomegranates, like the sycomore, to the female parts. Me nec faemina nec puer, &c., says Horace in pensive mood. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... studied his task conscientiously. His official letters were written with the utmost gravity, and transmitted the commands of the minister in solemn phrases. Monsieur Phellion's face was that of a pensive ram, with little color and pitted by the small-pox; the lips were thick and the lower one pendent; the eyes light-blue, and his figure above the common height. Neat and clean as a master of history and geography in a young ladies' school ought to be, he wore fine ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... very long complain, for fearing one Menelaus, an usher of a school, might, among other misfortunes, find me alone in the inn, I made up my wallet, and, very pensive, took me a lodging in a private place near the sea: there, after I had been mewd up for three days, reflecting afresh on my despis'd and abject condition, I beat my breast, as sick as it was; and, when my deep sighs would suffer me, often cry'd out; "Why ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... to him. He then left a polite, tender note for Charlotte, and returned to New-York. His first business was to seek Montraville, and endeavour to convince him that what had happened would ultimately tend to his happiness: he found him in his apartment, solitary, pensive, ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... appearance of Ebba this sentiment of uneasiness and melancholy sympathy. When after supper he bade adieu to his uncle and cousins, when he was alone in his room, he smiled when he remembered the amiable gayety of Alete, but became sad and pensive when he recalled the dreamy look of her young sister, the sad melancholy glance which shone over her face like the ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... overwhelming burst of grief is calmed into the gentle tear of recollection—when the sudden anguish and the convulsive agony over the present ruins of all that we most loved is softened away into pensive meditation on all that it was in the days of its loveliness—who would root out such a sorrow from the heart? Though it may sometimes throw a passing cloud over the bright hour of gayety, or spread a deeper sadness over the hour of gloom, yet who would exchange it, even ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... gay," Felix admitted. "They are sober; they are even severe. They are of a pensive cast; they take things hard. I think there is something the matter with them; they have some melancholy memory or some depressing expectation. It 's not the epicurean temperament. My uncle, Mr. Wentworth, is a tremendously high-toned old fellow; he looks as if he were ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... Come, pensive Nun, devout and pure, Sober, steadfast, and demure. * * * * * With even step and musing gait; And looks commercing with the skies, Thy wrapt soul ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... XL Pensive, above an hour, with drooping head, He rested mute, ere he began his moan; And then his piteous tale of sorrow said, Lamenting in so soft and sweet a tone, He in a tiger's breast had pity bred, Or with his mournful wailings rent a stone. And so he sighed and wept; like rivers ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... tent, and, rising very early, at the President's suggestion they took a walk before sunrise about the great camp, inspecting the field, the artillery, the quarters, and all the appurtenances of the army. Lincoln was in a pensive mood, and scarcely a word was spoken. Finally, just as the sun was rising, they reached a commanding point; the President stopped, placed his left hand upon Mr. Hatch's shoulder, and slowly waving his right in the direction of the great city of tents, seriously inquired: "Mr. Hatch, what is all ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... raven blackness over shoulders that seemed chiseled. I began to think myself the happiest of men, for my system had always a bit of poetic fire in it. And then these charms, which had already begun to rob my heart of its peace, were made more seductive by a calmly resolved and yet pensive expression of countenance. Indeed, at a second glance, it seemed to approach melancholy, and bespoke that frame of mind when sorrow feeds most upon ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... activity of his mind, which was always being exercised on subjects of grave speculation, removed him from the noise and bustle of commonplace society. He was somewhat silent, inclined to solitude, and of a pensive countenance; yet no man found him difficult of access: his courtesy was exquisite, and among familiar friends he was noted for the flashes of a delicate and subtle wit. Collections were made of his apophthegms by friends, and some are recorded by his anonymous biographer.[5] Their finer perfume, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... together in my childhood's home, Aunt Ruth and I, and sunny-hearted May. She was a fair and most exquisite child; Her pensive face was delicate and mild Like her dead mother's; but through her dear eyes Her father smiled upon me, day by day. Afar in foreign countries did he roam, Now resting under Italy's blue skies, And now with Roy ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... in his own room, with Oscar lying across the rug at his feet, his mind refused to be quieted. One picture after another presented itself to his imagination: the proud-souled enthusiast longing for the wild winter nights and the dark Atlantic seas; the pensive maiden, shuddering to hear the fierce story of Maclean of Lochbuy; the spoiled child, teasing her mamma and petting her canary; the wronged and weeping woman, her frame shaken with sobs, her hands clasped in despair; the artful and ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... horses and chariots of fire. Chariots and horses are emblems of flight; but if sleep were descending upon the hero of the prophetic age, twilight would more appropriately have drawn her soft veil over nature, birds would have begun their vespers, clouds would have put on their changing, pensive colors, while cadences of music, breathed by the winds, would have shed lethargic influences into the scene. Inspiration does not trifle with us by really meaning such a preparation for a sleep of ages, and yet informing us, in so many words, that "the Lord would ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... the cracks-man's glance. She was then more beautiful than aught that ever he had dreamed of. Such hair as was hers, woven seemingly of dull flames, lambent, witching! And eyes!—beautiful always, but never more so than at this moment, when filled with sweetly pensive contemplation.... Was she reviewing the last twenty-four hours, dreaming of what had passed between her and that silly fool, Maitland? If only Anisty could surmise what they had said to each other, how long they had been acquainted; ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... the pensive nymph oppressed, And secret passions laboured in her breast. Not youthful kings in battle seized alive, Not scornful virgins who their charms survive, Not ardent lover robbed of all his bliss, 5 Not ancient lady when refused a kiss, Not tyrants fierce that unrepenting ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... with the flax, she smiled, as though some pleasing thought had touched her mind. Her smile had the effect of sudden sunshine in the dark room where she sat and span,—it was radiant and mirthful as the smile of a happy child. Yet her dark blue eyes remained pensive and earnest, and the smile soon faded, leaving her fair face absorbed and almost dreamy. The whirr-whirring of the wheel grew less and less rapid,—it slackened,—it stopped altogether,—and, as though startled by some unexpected sound, the girl paused and listened, pushing away the ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... them to the fight! What dangers threaten them—yet still they write: A hapless tribe! to every evil born, Whom villains hate, and fools affect to scorn: Strangers they come, amid a world of woe, And taste the largest portion ere they go. Pensive I spoke, and cast mine eyes around; The roof, methought, return'd a solemn sound; Each column seem'd to shake, and clouds, like smoke, From dusty piles and ancient volumes broke; Gathering above, like mists condensed they seem, Exhaled in summer from the rushy ...
— The Library • George Crabbe
... ever fand her, Till by himsel' he learned to wander, Adown some trottin' burn's meander, And no thick lang; Oh sweet to muse and pensive ponder ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... sashed; nurse a kitten with a blue ribbon round its neck; say that you like chocolate-creams; open your eyes very wide, and suck the tip of one finger occasionally. Let your manner generally vary between the pensive and the mischievous; always ask for explanations, especially of things which cannot possibly be explained in public. Do not attempt this pose unless your figure is mignon and your complexion pink. Do not be too realistic; never be sticky or dirty—men do ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... of an insect-like buzz, divided into stanzas of two syllables each, with a pensive strain running through it, as if the heart of the little singer were filled with sadness. While it sounds rather faint at a distance, close at hand it has ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... recognized the tune as that which Thelma had sung at her spinning-wheel, and his bold bright eyes grew pensive and soft, as the picture of the fair face and form rose up again before his mind. Absorbed in a reverie, he almost started when Lorimer ceased playing, and ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... ane ancient and godly matron, (the Lard at his cuming was absent.) In his cumpany war only with him Williame Kirkaldy, now Lard of Grange, and some otheris that wated upoun his chalmer. The Lady at suppar, persaving him pensive, begane to conforte him, and willed him to tack the werk of God in good parte. "My portioun, (said he,) of this world is schorte, for I will nott be with you fyvetene dayis." His servandis reparing ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... contrive to see her profile, dimly lighted by the flickering oil lamp; a very perfect profile, he thought; a forehead that was neither too high nor too low, a small aquiline nose, a short upper lip, and the prettiest mouth and chin in the world. It was just a shade too pensive now, the poor little mouth, he thought pityingly; and be wondered what it was like when it smiled. And then he began to arrange his lines for winning the smile he wanted so much to see from those thoughtful lips. It was, of course, for the gratification of the idlest, most vagabond curiosity ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... Crossing were obliterated by a vast sheet of water stretching to the foothills. The up stage was stopped at Grangers; the last mail had been abandoned in the tules, the rider swimming for his life. "An area," remarked the "Sierra Avalanche," with pensive local pride, "as large as the State of Massachusetts is now ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a shrill voice, rudely breaking the pensive reverie, and with a start, she shut the desk, exclaiming as she ran to the door: "They ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... mentally digestive laugh. And if they have now, like a monarch with a troop of dwarfs, too many jesters kicking the dictionary about, to let them reflect that they are dull, occasionally, like the pensive monarch surprising himself with an idea of an idea of his own, they look so. And they are given to looking in the glass. They must see that something ails them. How much even the better order of them will endure, without a thought of the defensive, when the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bade him enter. He went in, and a tall lady in black, with plain linen collar and wristbands, rose to receive him. They confronted each other. Time and trouble had left their trace, but there were the glorious eyes, and jet black hair, and the face, worn and pensive, but still beautiful. It was the woman he had loved, the ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... repose, so vast our throng. Three hundred wretches here, denied all light, In crowded quarters pass the infernal night. Some for a bed their tattered vestments join, And some on chest, and some on floors recline; Shut from the blessings of the evening air Pensive we lay with mingled corpses there: Meagre and wan, and scorched with heat below, We looked like ghosts ere death had made us so: How could we else, where heat and hunger joined Thus to debase the body and the mind? Where cruel thirst ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... pensive, rain-washed, mid-day light, which served to heighten rather than mitigate the prevailing, very unattractive and rather stuffy disorder obtaining in the room, Theresa Bilson, not without chokings and lamentations, gave forth the story of ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... to which Lucie, sometimes pensive, sometimes amused and laughing, listened in the echoing corner, until her little daughter was six years old. How near to her heart the echoes of her child's tread came, and those of her own dear father's, always active and self-possessed, and those ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... very young are nice-looking without being beautiful, very supple and pensive, and with expressive eyes. They lack the unsteady, insincere countenance of the men, and have reposeful, placid faces, with occasional good features. There is a good deal of character in their firmly closed ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... virgin of the skies, How great thy use, how great thy blessing, every thing that lives. Lives not alone nor or itself: fear not and I will call, The weak worm from its lowly bed, and thou shalt hear its voice. Come forth worm and the silent valley, to thy pensive queen. ...
— Poems of William Blake • William Blake
... was in the tower, a gentleman of his acquaintance got access to him, and found him very pensive and melancholy concerning the prevailing defections amongst many of the ministers of Scotland, and, having lately got account of their proceedings at the general assembly held at Glasgow, anno 1610, where the ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... thine image here's so deeply graven, That nought can e'er efface it. Trust me, then, love, As I would thee. There's not a thought I own, No, not a fond emotion of my soul,— Not e'en the slightest ripple o'er the mind, When calm and pensive as it used to be, But I would tell it thee. O couldst thou view my heart, and see thyself So firmly master of its deep recesses, Thou wouldst be confident. If thou shouldst be ignoble, fear not me, Love shall draw out thy patent of descent, And trace thy ancestry to more than ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... remarkable for its activity in affairs of state and religion, but by no means given to dreaming, this fair flower of American genius rose up unexpectedly enough, breaking the cold New England sod for the emission of a light and fragrance as pure and pensive as that of the arbutus in our woods, in spring. The flower, however, sprang from seed that rooted in the old colonial life of the sternly imaginative pilgrims and Puritans. Thrusting itself up into view through the drift of a later day, it must not be confounded ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... disposition of the river's mind to pensive psalmody quite logically accounted for by the previous statement (itself by no means ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Puritanic stiffness still in his garb and mien, and a red-coated officer of the old French war; and there comes the shop-keeping Pyncheon of a century ago, with the ruffles turned back from his wrists; and there the periwigged and brocaded gentleman of the artist's legend, with the beautiful and pensive Alice, who brings no pride out of her virgin grave. All try the picture-frame. What do these ghostly people seek? A mother lifts her child, that his little hands may touch it! There is evidently a mystery about the picture, that perplexes these poor Pyncheons when they ought ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... overwhelming. But Berenice was a refined, cultivated, and dignified woman of society; such a woman never loses her self-possession; she is always mistress of the situation. Berenice was so now. But for the bright light in her usually pensive dark eyes, and the rosy flush on her habitually pale cheeks, there was no difference in her aspect, as, with her hand lightly resting on Mr. Brudenell's arm, she advanced towards ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... journey has successful been, The fierce Almanzor will obey the queen. I found him, like Achilles on the shore, Pensive, complaining much, but threatening more; And, like that injured Greek, he heard our woes, Which, while I told, a gloomy smile arose From his bent brows: And still, the more he heard, A more severe and sullen joy appeared. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... there was an old gentleman, of the age of sixty-three, in a bob-wig, and inclined to be stout, who always played the lover. He was equally excellent in the pensive Romeo and the bustling Rapid. He had an ill way of talking off the stage, partly because he had lost all his front teeth: a circumstance which made him avoid, in general, those parts in which he had to force a great ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... her features, though not of classic outline, were radiant with life. Her eye was one of the finest I have ever seen—rich, deep-toned, and eloquent, speaking volumes in each varying expression, and generally suggestive of pensive emotion. Irving was about eight years her senior, and this difference was just sufficient to draw out that fond reliance of female character which he has so beautifully set forth in the sketch of 'The ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... to stay nearly a half hour. She put the baby to sleep and sat waiting with her pensive young eyes gazing at the leaping flames. She heard him stop and answer the call of an owl from the woods. A whip-poor-will was softly singing from the bushes nearby. He stopped to call him also, and then found an excuse to linger ten minutes ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... poem in all literature than that one in which the pensive and moral Schiller portrays the struggle of an ingenuous youth who would find the source of moral purification in the moral law; who would seek the power that can transform him, in the mere imperatives of his conscience, and the mere struggling ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... may enjoy an analysis of certain pages in "Ma Piece," for instance, the wonderful description of an alerte at 2 A.M. above the village of Tailly-sur-Meuse (pp. 131, 132). With the vigorous picturesqueness of these sentences we may compare the pensive quality and the solidity of touch which combine to form such a passage as the following account of a watch at Azannes (August 14, 1914):—"La nuit est claire, rayee par les feux des projecteurs de Verdun qui font des barres d'or dans le ciel; ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... had changed—he felt it before she reached him—before she uttered a word. He had never seen her in a long dress until to-day; and in putting on Mrs. Gay's gown she seemed to have clothed herself in that lady's appealing and pensive manner. The black skirt, flowing between them on the grass, divided them more completely than the memory of their quarrel. He was chilled because it made her appear reserved and distant; she was embarrassed because she had not yet learned to walk in ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... a reply as to the sister-in-law's state, and a few words on the progress of the flitting, there was a silence while Mr. Audley read the letters that had come for him in his absence, and Cherry's face became more and more pensive. At last, when Mr. Audley laid down his letters, and leant against the chimneypiece, she ventured to say, 'Is ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... more than pensive at the ticket-window, she hesitated, then stopped and observed him. That she should observe anybody was in a way a coincidence, for, as it happened, she was herself the most observed person in all the place. ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... camp, but let its fragrant story Blend with the breath that thrills With hopvines' incense all the pensive glory That fills the ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... eyes wandered away from the bone-yellow pages of the ancient document and grew pensive in dreamy meditation. This record was opening, for her, the door of intimately wrought history upon the past of her family and her nation when both had been in ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... people. In a commonwealth, where the People was sovereign, and the persons of the magistrates ever changing, those little comfortable commercial operations could not be managed so easily as in civilized realms like France and England. The old Leaguer thought with pensive regret, no doubt, of the hard, but still profitable bargains by which the Guises and Mayennes and Mercoeurs, and a few hundred of their noble adherents, had been brought over to the cause of the king. He sighed at the more recent memories of the Marquis de ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... chosen from the first calallada he meets; who requires no further protection from the cold than a pair of linen trousers, in that favored clime where the seasons roll on in one perennial summer; who, more than all this, finds at eve, under the rustling palm-trees, pensive beauties, eager to reward with their smiles the one who murmurs in their ears those three words, ever new, ever beautiful, ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... in a pensive mood, my vanity got the better of my pity. I could not but highly plume myself on my masterly management in getting rid of Bartleby. Masterly I call it, and such it must appear to any dispassionate thinker. The beauty of my procedure seemed to consist in its perfect quietness. ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... may its symmetry and beauty show, A look, a character, the pencil seize, Give to the form where youthful graces glow, An air of pensive dignity and ease, ...
— Poems • Matilda Betham
... her list to include sausages and a pie, cheese and rolls, besides the usual tea and stewed tomatoes. The girls ate the little meal with their hats and wraps on, a sense of change filled the air, and they were all a little pensive, even with an unexpected ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... His days were spent in study, dreams, lonely walks across green fields, and homecomings when, with his mother's hand in his, he would talk or recite to her in order to clarify the thought that pressed upon him. Very calm, very peaceful and very beautiful were those days. "The pensive attitude of mind brings the best result—not the active," he used to say. It was then he wrote to his old friend, Diodati: "You asked what I am about—what I am thinking of? Why, with God's help, I am thinking of immortality. Forgive ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... is too much, too much for mortal Eyes! I see a Monarch seated on a Throne—but seems most sad and pensive. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... mysterious personage return?" said the inquisitive gentleman. "Never!" replied the Baronet, with a pensive shake of the head: "I never saw him again." "And pray what has all this to do with the picture?" inquired the old gentleman with the nose—"True!" said the questioner—"Is it the portrait of this crack-brained ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... William to the States General. Mr Vanslyperken proceeded from the admiral's to the charming widow, to whom he imparted this unwelcome intelligence. She, of course, was grave, and listened to his protestations with her little finger in her mouth, and a pensive, ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... most men do in selecting a wife. Tell Dr. Leet that I am glad he found me in a pigeon hole of his memory, but that I am a long way from being "the blue-eyed bunch of mischief" he describes. I wish you would tell him that I am slender, pale, and pensive with a glamour of romance and mystery hovering about me; that is the way I would ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... spurred on her horse, saying to her people, "Ho there! Don't let him kill her." But when the seneschal's lady arrived close to them, she turned her horse's head quickly and the sight she beheld prevented her from hunting. She came back pensive, and then the lantern of her intelligence opened, and received a bright light, which made a thousand things clear, such as church and other pictures, fables, and lays of the troubadours, or the domestic ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... admiration and jealousy. He was ashamed to admit the aversion inspired by the wounded man, so sorely wounded that he was unable to see what was going on around him. His hatred was a form of cowardice, terrifying in its persistence. How pensive were Marguerite's eyes if she took them off her patient for a few seconds! . . . She had never looked at him in that way. He knew all the amorous gradations of her glance, but her fixed gaze at this injured ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Louis, was of nearly the same age with Hortense. He was a young man of fine personal appearance, very intelligent, of scholarly tastes, and of irreproachable character. Though pensive in temperament, he had proved himself a hero on the field of battle, and he possessed, in all respects, a very noble character. Many of the letters which he had written from Egypt to his friends in Paris had been intercepted by the British cruisers, and were published. They ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... of the month of May 1825 Lucien had lost all his good spirits; he never went out, dined with Herrera, sat pensive, worked, read volumes of diplomatic treatises, squatted Turkish-fashion on a divan, and smoked three or four hookahs a day. His groom had more to do in cleaning and perfuming the tubes of this noble pipe than in currying and brushing down the horses' coats, and ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... mortals in its tomb; By ev'ry plague and ev'ry ill possessed, Ev'n purgatory itself to thee's a jest; Emblem of hell, nursery of vice, Thou crawling university of lice; When wretches numberless to ease their pains, With smoke and all delude their pensive chains. How shall I avoid thee? or with what spell Dissolve the enchantment of thy magic cell? Ev'n Fox himself can't boast so many martyrs, As yearly fall within thy wretched quarters. Money I've none, and debts I cannot pay, Unless my vermin, will those debts defray. ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... track, of nights spent in trees, and days spent in hunger and combats. By degrees, the fate of the unfortunate king interested his auditors so greatly, that the play languished even at the royal table, and the young king, with a pensive look and downcast eye, followed, without appearing to give any attention to it, the smallest details of this Odyssey, very picturesquely related by ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... her face is as one perfect sunbeam. Surely never has she looked so lovely. The smile dies, her lips close, a pensive sweetness creeps around them, and one terms one's self a fatuous fool to have deemed her at her best a moment since; and so on through all the many changes that only serve to show how countless is ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... To the eyes of childhood nothing could be more beautiful. It was a pink and pensive cow with a slight clerical expression, a very dignified animal, caught in the act of sedately skipping ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott
... matter of fact, I didn't, but I suppose," added Mrs. Lascelles, as her rich voice fell into a pensive (but not a pathetic) key, "I suppose it is you who are much more surprised at seeing me. I can't help it if you are, Captain Clephane. I am not really a religious person. I have not flown to that extreme as yet. But it has been a comfort to me, sometimes; ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... all the rest. She grew pensive and sank into a reverie. Suddenly the door of the salon opened, and Camille entered. After inquiring after her health, he informed her that in consequence of a cold he, too, had been sick; and, as he was now free from business engagements, ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... profound. Mark what blunders parents constantly make as to the nature of their own offspring, bred, too, under their eyes, and displaying every hour their characteristics. How often in the nursery does the genius count as a dunce because he is pensive; while a rattling urchin is invested with almost supernatural qualities because his animal spirits make him impudent and flippant! The school-boy, above all others, is not the simple being the world imagines. In that young bosom are often stirring passions as strong as our own, desires ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... to his—the eyes with the drooping, pensive corners deepened by dark lashes which Miss ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... answer, but retired sad and pensive to his own home, where he spent the night in pondering what was best for him to do; for there was no likelihood he should be able to defend himself against the power of the king's son; therefore he at length concluded he would travel abroad and see the world. Being ready to depart, ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... persons lament in a pensive and apologetic sort of way, "Yes, I have a great weakness for fine books." The very presence of this mis-called weakness, however, is unmistakable proof of great mental strength, and those who suffer from it may find solace in the fact that the giants of commerce, leading ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... should be pensive at the demise of Lorenzo, is there any reason why Aurora should weep outright upon the same occasion? This Aurora, however, weeping and stately, all nobleness and all tears, is a magnificent creation, fashioned ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... out in December, but there were times when the Doctor wondered if she was really as keen about it as she pretended to be. He found her once or twice, her usually active hands idle in her lap, and a pensive droop ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... on. A great bustle and much preparation seemed to be going on within the convent, and veiled figures were flitting about, whispering, arranging, &c. Sometimes a skinny old dame would come close to the grating, and, lifting up her veil, bestow upon the pensive public a generous view of a very haughty and very wrinkled visage of some seventy years standing, and beckon into the church for the major-domo of the convent (an excellent and profitable situation, by the way), or for padre this ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... at all the ideal sister, being tall and dark, and with nothing peculiarly devotional or pensive in her cast of feature. Her face was a fine, earnest one. Her movements were full of energy and decision, though not quick or sharp. The whole impression left was that of one by nature far from humility, ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... Roi bears no definite date, but is a sort of pensive autumn reverie following the Rocky Mount convention of last summer. This grave and dignified journal is credited to the House of Tillery, and if typographical evidence may be accepted, it belongs most particularly to that ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... the G.F.S. girl arrived, and as Mysie came to a halt in delight at the aspect of a young one that had just crept out into public life, the sister was called to the window. She was a great deal younger and more of the present day in style than her sister, and had pensive-looking grey eyes, with a somewhat bored languid manner as she shook hands ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... late when we rose from conference, and I betook me to the princess's apartments. She was pensive that evening; yet, when I left her, she flung her arms about me and grew, for an instant, bashfully radiant as she slipped a ring on my finger. I was wearing the King's ring; but I had also on my little finger a plain ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... mustered, even before discussion of the first magnum. She was indeed a very pretty girl of the Scotch cast of beauty, that is, with a profusion of hair of paley gold, and a skin like the snow of her own mountains in whiteness. Yet she had not a pallid or pensive cast of countenance; her features, as well as her temper, had a lively expression; her complexion, though not florid, was so pure as to seem transparent, and the slightest emotion sent her whole blood at once to her face and neck. Her form, though under the common size, was remarkably ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... long, sweet child, Thou too shalt be a page unto a King. I'm glad Alarcos smiled not overmuch; Your smilers please me not. I love a face Pensive, not sad; for where the mood is thoughtful, The passion is most deep and most refined. Gay tempers bear light hearts—are soonest gained And soonest lost; but he who meditates On his own nature, ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... Jean—fair-haired, blue-eyed, pensive Jean—was seated in the cellar with her uncle. She had brought him his daily dinner in a tin can, and he having just finished it, was about to resume his work while the niece rose to depart. Time ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... on thee, Love, when each hour Of twilight comes, with pensive mood, And silence, like a spell of power, Rests, in its depth, on field and wood; And as the mingling shadows brood Still closer o'er the lonely sea, Here, on the beach where first we woo'd, I 'll pour to heaven ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... wilt, and here nigh this well thou shalt find me, and so passed on his way. Then the king sat in a study, and bade his men fetch his horse as fast as ever they might. Right so came by him Merlin like a child of fourteen year of age, and saluted the king, and asked him why he was so pensive. I may well be pensive, said the king, for I have seen the marvellest sight that ever I saw. That know I well, said Merlin, as well as thyself, and of all thy thoughts, but thou art but a fool to take thought, for it will not amend thee. Also I know what thou art, and who was thy father, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... Kate—who during the voyage would at one time be in the highest spirits, and the next pensive, as if occupied by a world of thought—"I declare if that one isn't the very image of Mr Trotter, our curate at Allington! He has the same little tuft of hair on top on his head; and, besides, he has the identical same way of popping it on one side when he used to speak, and staring at you ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... declining day, And bring the hour my pensive spirit loves; When, o'er the mountain flow descends the ray That gives to silence the deserted groves. Ah, let the happy court the morning still, When, in her blooming loveliness array'd, She bids fresh beauty light the vale, or hill, And rapture warble ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... hillside, or it was in streams and patches. We travelled along the vale without appearing to ascend for some miles; all the reaches were beautiful, in exquisite proportion, the hills seeming very high from being so near to us. It might have seemed a valley which nature had kept to herself for pensive thoughts and tender feelings, but that we were reminded at every turning of the road of something beyond by the coal-carts which were travelling towards us. Though these carts broke in upon the tranquillity of the glen, they added much to ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... Berta tucked a pensive skip in between steps as they moved through the gloomy corridor past rain-beaten windows. "It wasn't like Gertrude to burst out like that just because Sara came late to our domestic evening, but it did spoil the fudges and the game ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... moments when Dorothea's exuberance made him pensive and sad; he felt the weight of his forty years; they were inclined to make him hypochondriacal. Was it the vengeance of fate that made him slow up when they came to a hill, while Dorothea ran on ahead and ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... after she went about somewhat pensive, as though a troublous thought were on her; and when, three days thereafter, she met the wood-mother, she spake to her even as they parted, and said: Mother, much wisdom hast thou learned me, and now ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... rejoiced, for reasons of her own, that it was made. She began to find the occupation diverting, and characteristically did not hesitate to allow her critic to form most alarming conclusions as to the state of matters at the Red House. She was pensive, and mild, and a little surprised when Miss Temperley, with a suppressed gasp, urged that the question was deeply serious. It amused Hadria to reproduce, for Henriette's benefit, the theories regarding the treatment and training of children that she had found current ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... course, at the bottom of it. He probably felt that it was a pity. We usually feel so on hearing that a pretty and charming girl is engaged to be married. We think that she might have done so much better for herself, and we grow pensive or possibly sentimental over her lost opportunity when contemplating him in the mirror as he shaves. Like all so-called happy events, an engagement is not usually a matter of universal rejoicing. Some one is, in all probability, left to think twice about it. ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... of an air of superiority; but with Mr. Harte, to dress well was simply a natural instinct. His long, drooping moustache and the side-whiskers of the time—incongruous as the comparison may seem—called to mind the elder Sothern as "Lord Dundreary." His natural expression was pensive, even sad. When one considers that pathos and tragedy, perhaps even more than humor, pervade his ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... our literary connoisseurs who cast a retrospective glance over days long past, may awaken into memory that delicately constructed and pensive-looking man, of Pearl-street, recognized by the name of Charles Smith. I believe he was a New-Yorker. Pulmonary suffering was his physical infirmity—his relief, tobacco, the fumes of which aver surrounded him like a halo. He abounded in the gloom and glory of the American Revolution, and published, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Perhaps we'd better keep it quiet—though I must tell Aunt JULIE—it will make her so happy to hear that you burnt a manuscript on my account! And, besides, I should like to ask her whether that's a usual thing with young wives. (Looks uneasy and pensive again.) But poor old EJLERT'S manuscript! Oh Lor, you know! Well, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... the Earth's atmosphere helped to cloud their intelligence. Certain it is, they returned very pensive, very cross, and ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... the children, she stopped. Then she turned up her veil, and Elsie saw with astonishment that it was really the lady who had spoken to them that morning, but so changed, that it was no wonder Elsie had not known her. The face that had looked so gay and smiling was now sad and pensive; the fair curling hair, falling in pretty confusion over the white forehead, was drawn smoothly back under the neat crape bonnet, ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... of life had changed for him. Before this time he had known it but speculatively; now he thought he knew it as a practical man; though perhaps he did not, even yet. Nevertheless humanity stood before him no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art, but in the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum, and with the leer of ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... ought to be used like murderers. Upon these words, away ran eight of my men, with the boatswain and his crew, to complete their bloody work; and I, seeing it quite out of my power to restrain them, came away pensive and sad; for I could not bear the sight, much less the horrible noise and cries of the poor wretches that fell ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... remarkable stillness in the air, amid which you can hear a withering leaf rustling down. I will not think that the time of bare branches and brown grass is so very near as yet; Nature is indeed decaying, but now we have decay only in its beautiful stage, wherein it is pensive, but not sad. It is but early in October; and we, who live in the country all through the winter, please ourselves with the belief that October is one of the finest months of the year, and that we have many warm, bright, still days yet before us. Of course we know we ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... ever fand her, Till by himsel' he learn'd to wander, Adown some trottin' burn's meander, An' no think lang: O sweet to stray, an' pensive ponder ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... again sang Chibiabos, Sang a song of love and longing, 335 In those accents sweet and tender, In those tones of pensive sadness, Sang a maiden's lamentation For her lover, her Algonquin. "When I think of my beloved, 340 Ah me! think of my beloved, When my heart is thinking of him, O my sweetheart, my Algonquin! "Ah, me! when I parted from him, Round my neck he hung the wampum, 345 As a pledge, the snow-white ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Driven headlong from the pitch of Heaven, down Into this Deep; and in the general fall I also: at which time this powerful key Into my hands was given, with charge to keep These gates for ever shut, which none can pass Without my opening. Pensive here I sat Alone; but long I sat not, till my womb, Pregnant by thee, and now excessive grown, Prodigious motion felt and rueful throes. At last this odious offspring whom thou seest, Thine own begotten, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... in general vanish like the morning mist before the sun; whereas, if you quail before it, it is sure to become more imminent. I have fervent hope that the words of my mouth sank deep into the hearts of some of my auditors, as I observed many of them depart musing and pensive. I occasionally distributed tracts amongst them; for although they themselves were unable to turn them to much account, I thought that by their means they might become of service at some future ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... her own room, she could easily see that very window where she was told the man came to take his prospects. The thought that it was the Duke de Nemours, entirely changed the situation of her mind; she no longer found herself in that pensive tranquillity which she had begun to enjoy, her spirits were ruffled again as with a tempest: at last, not being able to stay at home, she went abroad to take the air in a garden without the suburbs, where she hoped to ...
— The Princess of Cleves • Madame de La Fayette
... and forlorn marches of the last fortnight silence had for the most part fitlier expressed our emotions; or, if we sang, the melodies were pensive and often sad. But now all was changed. We saw that our painful trials were rapidly drawing to a close, and it is only the truth to say that we rejoiced ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... lonely hast thou stood Here all forsaken and forgot! All men failed thee to visit save Some idle lover of sylvan haunts Who trod, perchance, this hallowed spot, And cast a pensive eye upon This lovely glade, thy sole abode (Full lost in these continuous woods), And brooding o'er thy lowly lot, Oft thus did muse: "This cabin lone Here stands to tell the tale of him, Back-woodsman brave, who having ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones
... lingered on the still night air. There was a pensive gladness in the man's heart as he tightly held her little hand and led her to ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... those of the setting sun do not. Then the sunlight is whiter and newer in the morning,—not so yellow and diffused. A difference akin to this is true of the two seasons I am speaking of. The spring is the morning sunlight, clear and determined; the autumn, the afternoon rays, pensive, lessening, golden. ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... made it up no one ever knew. But after much talking and crying, kissing and laughing, the breach was healed, and peace declared. A slight haze still lingered in the air after the storm, for Fanny was very humble and tender that evening; Tom a trifle pensive, but distressingly polite, and Polly magnanimously friendly to every one; for generous natures like to forgive, and Polly enjoyed the petting after the insult, like ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... spectacles, and darted one glance which, with the rapidity and comprehensiveness of lightning, seemed to envelop and take in, as it were, the whole inventory of Miss Jemima's personal attractions. Now Miss Jemima, as I have before observed, had a mild and pensive expression of countenance; and she would have been positively pretty had the mildness looked a little more alert, and the pensiveness somewhat less lackadaisical. In fact, though Miss Jemima was constitutionally mild, she was not de natura pensive; she had too much of the Hazeldean ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hazel eye Outshines the light gazelle's, And hid beneath its brilliancy, A pensive shadow dwells. But I've seen it illumed with a mischievous light, Which the sparkles displayed in the meteor's flight Cannot meet, as her laughter reverberates round, And merrily echo responds ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... presence I feel a sense of peace, of security, of home! Happy! thrice happy! he who will take her to his breast! Of late she has assumed a new charm in my eyes,—a certain pensiveness and abstraction have succeeded to her wonted gayety. Ah, Love is pensive,—is it not, Cleveland? How often I ask myself that question! And yet, amidst all my hopes, there are hours when I tremble and despond! How can that innocent and joyous spirit sympathize with all that mine has endured and known? How, even though her imagination be dazzled by some prestige around ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... peppermint bull's-eye—on the short grass, he patted a little beetle that pushed its way across a world of disproportionate size, and then, by peevishly pulling the end of his whip which hung from Mr. Russell's pensive hand, he suggested that the pursuit should continue. So they walked to the crest of wood that stands at the top of the Ring, a compressed tabloid forest, fifty yards from side to side, as round as ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... will not tell him till he returns. Otherwise he would leave Rome at once, and we do not want him back just immediately, do we?" And I toyed with her rippling gold tresses half mechanically, while I wondered within myself at the rapid success of my scheme. She, in the meantime grew pensive and abstracted, and for a few moments we were both silent. If she had known! I thought, if she could have imagined that she was encircled by the arm of HER OWN HUSBAND, the man whom she had duped and wronged, the poor fool she had mocked at and despised, whose life had been an obstruction in ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... said Roderick; and the next minute they were sailing smoothly over the polished floor, with all the fair pictured faces, the crimson draperies, the pensive Madonnas, Dutch boors, Italian temples, and hills, and skies, circling round them like the ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... tossed wistaria bloom Foam up in purple turbulence, Where twining boughs have built a room And wing'd winds pause to garner scents And scattered sunlight flecks the gloom, She broods in pensive indolence. ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... have written as if their hearts were old before their time; their pensive morning twilight has been as cool and saddening as that of evening in more common lives. The profound melancholy ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... whenever any considerable number of them were in company, scarcely a day passed without some overtures being made for contests of this kind, and it was often very unpleasant to me to see the object of the contest sitting in pensive silence watching her fate, while her husband and his rival were contending for his prize. I have, indeed, not only felt pity for those poor wretched victims, but the utmost indignation, when I have seen them won, perhaps ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... handles which do not fall out, the equity of selling that which does not belong to you—all these things chased each other across Festus Clasby's mind. The Son of the Bard stood silent by the cart, looking away down the road with a pensive look on ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... joyous youth, what soul hath never known, Thought, feeling, taste, harmonious to its own? Who hath not paused while Beauty's pensive eye Asked from his heart ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... exultingly leaps forth To hail the coming of the genial spring, Shedding around from her green lap the buds, In winter's rugged casket long enshrined, To form the chaplet of the infant year.— Young pensive moralist!—'tis sweet to muse On beauties which escape the vulgar eye, To talk with Nature 'mid her woodland paths, And hear an answering voice in every breeze.— You court her beauties with a lover's zeal; You hear her voice, nor understand ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... sweetest," she said, and her voice was full and tremulous, though still with its crisp brightness of tone. It was as if she caressed with her whole being, with those hidden possibilities of passion which troubled her yet, only as the vibration of strong music, making her joy pensive and her sadness sweet. She felt that she was walking in a pleasant and vivid dream; she was happy, she could not tell why; nor could she ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... of this nature was even imputed to L'Aubespine, the French ambassador; and that minister was obliged to leave the kingdom. The queen, affecting to be in terror and perplexity, was observed to sit much alone, pensive and silent; and sometimes to mutter to herself half sentences, importing the difficulty and distress to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... spirit of "Childe Harold," it is not satirical; it is more pensive than bitter, and reveals the loneliness and sorrows of an unsatisfied soul,—the unrest of a pilgrim in search for something new. It seeks to penetrate the secrets of struggling humanity, at war often with those certitudes which are the consolation of our ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... scarce believe the tidings, Till I stood above her grave, And beheld those flaxen ringlets, That so late did buoyant wave, Lie beside a face whose features Still in death did sweetly smile And methought angelic beauty Lingered on her cheeks the while. At the pensive hour of twilight, Oft do angel-footsteps tread Near her grave, and flowers in beauty Blossom o'er the early dead; And a simple marble tablet Thence doth unassuming rise, And these simple words are on it,— "Here our Angelina lies." Oft at night, when others ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... an utterly calm face and the pensive attitude of one who has all the time that he needs to examine a delicate situation from every point of view. He had reached one of those minutes which he called the "superior moments of existence," those which ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... spray of a thousand fountain jets, and makes the bosquets which shadow the regal staircase a haunt of the water nymphs as well as of the Dryads. You fancy, as your unwary foot presses the concealed springs that it is the white hands of mischievous Naiads which dash the water in your face, a pensive melancholy settles upon you with the mysterious dusk, and you are startled by Undine's "short, quick sobs," and are loth to believe that the plaintive sounds with which the air pulses are but the dropping of rills in and ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... coming back down the hill, picking our way among the graves, a pensive Chinaman stopped us to ask our assistance in finding him a lucky spot in which to bury his father, who died a year ago but was still above ground. He was sorry to hear that we could not pretend to any knowledge of such things. He ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... spouse, his soul's far dearer part; At home he sought her, but he sought in vain: She, with one maid of all her menial train, Had thence retired; and with her second joy, The young Astyanax, the hope of Troy: Pensive she stood on Ilion's towery height, Beheld the war, and sicken'd at the sight; There her sad eyes in vain her lord explore, Or weep the wounds her bleeding country bore. Hector this heard, return'd without delay; Swift through the town he trod his former way, Through streets of palaces and ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... garden-room and its picturesque bow. It was a favourite occupation of Miss Mapp's, when there was a decent gathering of artists outside, to pull a table right into the window of the garden-room, in full view of them, and, quite unconscious of their presence, to arrange flowers there with a smiling and pensive countenance. She had other little playful public pastimes: she would get her kitten from the house, and induce it to sit on the table while she diverted it with the tassel of the blind, and she would kiss it on its sweet little sooty head, or she would write ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... between two persons so opposite in tastes, habitudes and appearance as John Silverthorn and Bill Vibbard. John was a hard reader, and Bill a lazy one. John was thin and graceful, with something pensive yet free and vivid in his nature; Bill was robust, prosaic and conventional. There was an air of neglect and a prospective sense of worldly failure about Silverthorn, but you would at once have singled out Vibbard as being well cared for, and adapted to push his way. Their likes and dislikes even ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... relieved of present responsibility, evolved other less pressing but more pensive thoughts. He thought not of himself or his bleeding wound, for he had bled before for his country, when he earned his stars and made his fame secure at Trafalgar; but as the sun went down that night he thought that no more in ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... returned to the seat, and for some time remained silent and in a pensive attitude. Philip also had his own thoughts, and did not open his ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... ... 'He will wake mamma!' Sanin promptly darted out into the street, thrust a few kreutzers into the organ-grinder's hand, and made him cease playing and move away. When he came back, Gemma thanked him with a little nod of the head, and with a pensive smile she began herself just audibly humming the beautiful melody of Weber's, in which Max expresses all the perplexities of first love. Then she asked Sanin whether he knew 'Freischuetz,' whether he was fond of Weber, and added that though she was herself ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... to a barber at Rome, could imitate to a nicety almost every word it heard. Some trumpets happened one day to be sounded before the shop, and for a day or two afterwards the magpie was quite mute, and seemed pensive and melancholy. All who knew it were greatly surprised at its silence; and it was supposed that the sound of the trumpets had so stunned it, as to deprive it at once of both voice and hearing. ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... grew sober again when Bert said with a pensive cadence: "Well, I tell you, those were days of hard work; but many's the time I've looked back at 'em these last three years, wishin' they'd never ended an' that ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... not reply; he stood looking down, pensive and resigned—tired, perhaps, now that the anxieties of the last ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... back a pace or two, and for some moments remains silent— pensive. Perhaps she is thinking of a sailor saved from sharks after falling among them, and more still of the man who saved him. Whether or no, ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... cropping heather buds, of whirring flocks of partridges, of the sooty coot and the speckled teal, of the fisher herons, of the green-crested lapwing, of clamoring craiks among fields of flowering clover, of robins cheering the pensive autumn, of lintwhites chanting among the buds, of the mavis singing ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... Bressant, originally the least inclined of any of the circle to be pensive and sombre, he now seemed occasionally to contend with shadows of some kind. He was far from being habitually gloomy, but his moods were not to be depended upon; sometimes a turn of the conversation would seem to alter him; sometimes a word which he himself might ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... solitudes ascend, I sit me down a pensive hour to spend; And, plac'd on high above the storm's career, Look downward where a hundred realms appear; Lakes, forests, cities, plains, extending wide, 35 The pomp of kings, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... were these convictions gaining strength, but no opportunity occurred to assist any of them. Meanwhile she grew pensive and silent, oppressed by the helpless misery which she saw around ...
— A Child's Anti-Slavery Book - Containing a Few Words About American Slave Children and Stories - of Slave-Life. • Various
... interrupt some tale of scandal, or some description of a toupee. Active wit, however despicable when compared with intellectual, is yet surely better than the insignificant click-clack of modish conversation," casting his eyes towards Miss Larolles, "or even the pensive dullness of affected silence," changing ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... confidence in their master, as we watch them brandishing their weapons or hurrying to the attack, and see the shock of battle and the death-blows given and received. The human-headed bulls, standing on guard at the gates, exhibit the calm and pensive dignity befitting creatures conscious of their strength, while the lions passant who sometimes replace them, snarl and show their teeth with ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... was on the point of calling him) threw his superb viaduct across the deep ravine which divides it from Albano. At the risk of seeming to fantasticate I confess that the Pope's having built the viaduct— in this very recent antiquity—made me linger there in a pensive posture and marvel at the march of history and at Pius the Ninth's beginning already to profit by the sentimental allowances we make to vanished powers. An ardent nero then would have had his own way with me and obtained ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... last night, I to Jove's palace went, (The brightest part of all the firmament) Instead of all those gods, whose thick resort Filled up the presence of the thunderers court; There Jove and Juno all forsaken sate, Pensive, like kings in their declining state: Yet (wanting power) they would preserve the show, By hearing prayers from some few men below: Mortals to Jove may their devotions pay; The gods themselves to Proserpine do pray. To Sicily ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... had little less); not honour and titles, attendants and equipages; in a word, not all the things we call pleasure, could give me any relish, or sweeten the taste of things to me; at least, not so much but I grew sad, heavy, pensive, and melancholy; slept little, and ate little; dreamed continually of the most frightful and terrible things imaginable: nothing but apparitions of devils and monsters, falling into gulfs, and off from steep and high precipices, and the like; ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... the sorrows and sins of the kingdom, and habits necessarily restricted to that bare sufficiency which just supports life. The manners of the young ladies were equally mild, uncomplaining, and respectable; the only difference was, that Constantia was pensive and dejected, Isabel active and cheerful in adversity. The former seemed to move in a joyless routine of duty; but Isabel was so animated that only the most minute observer could tell that she ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... the steep hill, their heads bowed, pensive, their horses walking at a slow gait. Stubbornly restless, Anastasio made the same observation to other groups; the soldiers laughed at his candor. If a man has a rifle in his hands and a beltful of cartridges, surely ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... living thing that seemed pensive and sad there was a lovely, delicate fawn, which rested, with her head drooping, at the foot of a rose bush, on the summit of the little green mound which was the centre of this delightful spot. Perhaps the lovely creature is after being weaned from ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... bird on the linden tree, From which November leaves were falling, Sweet were its notes, and wild their tone; And pensive there as I paused alone, They spake with a mystical voice to me, The sunlight of vanish'd years recalling ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... Mourning is a grief at the bitter death of one who was dear to you. Sadness is a grief attended with tears. Tribulation is a painful grief. Sorrow, an excruciating grief. Lamentation, a grief where we loudly bewail ourselves. Solicitude, a pensive grief. Trouble, a continued grief. Affliction, a grief that harasses the body. Despair, a grief that excludes all hope of better things to come. But those feelings which are included under fear, they define thus:—There is sloth, which ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... was now thirty-seven years of age—with the experience of a sexagenarian. No longer the impetuous, arbitrary, hot-headed youth, whose intelligence and courage hardly atoned for his insolent manner and stormy career, he had become pensive, modest, almost gentle. His genius was rapid in conception, patient in combination, fertile in expedients, adamantine in the endurance or suffering; for never did a heroic general and a noble army of veterans manifest ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... devil incarnate. He, too, had his demon as well as Liszt, and only, as Ehlert puts it, "theoretical fear" of this spirit driving him over the cliffs of reason made him curb its antics. After all the couleur de rose portraits and lollipop miniatures made of him by pensive, poetic persons it is not possible to conceive Chopin as being irascible and almost brutal. Yet he was at times even this. "Beethoven was scarce more vehement and irritable," writes Ehlert. And we remember the stories of friends and pupils who have seen this slender, refined ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... rotatory burnings, That round and round incalculably reel— For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel— In that red realm from which are no returnings; Where toiling, and turmoiling, ever and aye He, and his thoughts, keep pensive working-day. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... him master, and have shown him the same loving reverence which he gave to Chaucer. Minor poets like Sidney, Drayton, and Daniel paid tribute to his inspiration; Milton was deeply indebted to him, especially in Lycidas; and many of the pensive poets of the seventeenth century show traces of his influence. "Spenser delighted Shakespeare," says Mr. Church; "he was the poetical master of Cowley, and then of Milton, and in a sense of Dryden, and even Pope." Giles and Phineas ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... what she would do in aforesaid case, Mr. Fletcher decided to put one before her as speedily as possible, so he said, in a pensive tone, and with a ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... idleness, and taste no scenes But such as art contrives, possess ye still Your element; there only ye can shine, There only minds like yours can do no harm. Our groves were planted to console at noon The pensive wanderer in their shades. At eve The moonbeam, sliding softly in between The sleeping leaves, is all the light they wish, Birds warbling all the music. We can spare The splendour of your lamps, they but eclipse Our softer satellite. Your songs confound Our more harmonious notes. ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... had as frequently postponed the fulfilment of his word. At last, weary of beseeching him, she devised a speech which she trusted might have the desired effect. Accordingly, when the monarch came to see her one day, he found her in a pensive mood, playing with her pretty boy; and the lad, being presently set upon his feet, he promptly tottered down the room, whereon she cried out to him, "Come here, you little bastard!" Hearing this word of evil import applied to his son, the monarch begged ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... not gay," Felix admitted. "They are sober; they are even severe. They are of a pensive cast; they take things hard. I think there is something the matter with them; they have some melancholy memory or some depressing expectation. It 's not the epicurean temperament. My uncle, Mr. Wentworth, is a tremendously high-toned old fellow; he looks as if ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... tomb; By ev'ry plague and ev'ry ill possessed, Ev'n purgatory itself to thee's a jest; Emblem of hell, nursery of vice, Thou crawling university of lice; When wretches numberless to ease their pains, With smoke and all delude their pensive chains. How shall I avoid thee? or with what spell Dissolve the enchantment of thy magic cell? Ev'n Fox himself can't boast so many martyrs, As yearly fall within thy wretched quarters. Money I've none, and debts I cannot pay, Unless ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... evening, our family party was assembled in the hall, to enjoy the refreshing breeze. Sophy was playing some favorite Scotch airs on the piano, while Glencoe, seated apart, with his forehead resting on his hand, was buried in one of those pensive reveries that made him so interesting ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... particular appeal lay in her eyes. They seemed to be quite marvelously deep and clear, so darkly gray that they looked black in certain lights, and they were so shadowed and pensive that sometimes they gave the image of actual sadness. For all the isolation of her home she was no stranger to romance; but the romance that was to be seen, like a gentleness, in her face was that of the great, shadowed forest in ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... Tuscan flower-girls delight to cheer Each pensive exile with thy scented leaves, Fit largess of a clime to fancy dear, Which a new ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... The owl foresaw, in pensive mood, The ruin of her ancient seat; And fled in haste, with all her brood, To seek a more ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... and fro with a pensive air, and ideas came to him as he spoke on in a slow, meditative fashion. "My orders! well, my orders, they are, first, that you must act with the very greatest prudence. Yes, don't gather a mob of promenaders ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... walked on air, and to Mrs. Getz and the children she seemed almost another girl, with that happy vibration in her usually sad voice, and that light of gladness in her soft pensive eyes. The glorious consciousness was ever with her that the teacher was always near—though she saw him but seldom. This, and the possession of the precious certificate, her talisman to freedom, hidden always in ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... pride themselves on their superior knowledge of the world, though their sober habits have commonly saved them from the demoralization of a sailor's life. But the untravelled Fayalese peasantry are a very gentle, affectionate, childlike people, pensive rather than gay, industrious, but not ingenious, with few amusements and those the simplest, incapable of great crimes or very heroic virtues, educated by their religion up to the point of reverent ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... china animals on the mantlepiece. She was a great animal lover, and, being a favorite with every one, she received many votive offerings. Her shrine was an amusing one to look at. A green china frog played a tuneless guitar; a pensive monkey gazed with clasped hands and dreadfully human eyes into futurity; there were sagacious looking elephants, placid rhinoceroses, rampant hares, two pug dogs clasped in an irrevocable embrace, an enormous ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... are clearly obsolete. No, no, I'll mount his saddle! There's my place! How often have I dreamt, in pensive ease, He bore me, buoyant, through the world apace, His mane a flag of freedom ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... passed between them, and whether it was some divine apparition, or merely a man of flesh and blood, was never discovered, for he seems to have kept his mother in ignorance of the whole affair. From that time onward his conduct changed. He grew pensive, mild, and charitable. He entered, as youthful acolyte, a neighbouring Convent of Salacian monks, and quickly distinguished himself for piety and the gift of miracles. In the short space of three years, or thereabouts, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... days later: "I incline rather more to Master Humphrey's Clock than Old Humphrey's—if so be that there is no danger of the pensive confounding master with a boy." After two days more: "I was thinking all yesterday, and have begun at Master Humphrey to-day." Then, a week later: "I have finished the first number, but have not been able to do more in the ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... with his usual thoughtful and pensive smile, "we may be allowed to vary that simile, I would, separating the universal and eternal course of Destiny from the fleeting generations of human life, compare the river before us to that course, and not it, but the city scattered on its banks, to the varieties ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... succeeded a sort of lethargic sleep, from which it was not easy to arouse her, so that she could be made to take any notice of what was passing around her. But now she awoke, clear and collected; and, glancing round the room, with a sort of pensive animation, met and answered the inquiring and solicitous look of her son with an affectionate smile. Presently her wandering eye rested on some objects of the landscape, glimpses of which she had caught ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... mist before the sun; whereas if you quail before it, it becomes more imminent. I have fervent hope that the words which I uttered sunk deep into the hearts of some of my hearers, as I observed many of them depart musing and pensive. I occasionally distributed tracts among them, for although they themselves were unable to turn them to much account, I thought that by their means they might become of service at some future time, and might fall into the ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... however, there was a pause,—the deep pause of flagging spirits, that always follows mirth and wine. No one would have believed, on beholding the pensive faces, and hearing the involuntary sighs of the party, that from these, but a moment before, had arisen so loud and wild a laugh. During this interval Edward Walcott (who was the poet of his class) volunteered the following song, which, ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... spoke the worthy gentleman strove to open the coach door; but the horseman, to whom the latter part of his speech was addressed, and who had now dismounted, was beforehand with him. The door swung open, and a young lady, of a delicate and pensive beauty, placed one hand upon the deferential arm of Mr. Marmaduke Haward and descended from the painted coach to the flower-enameled sward. The women amongst the assembled guests fluttered and whispered; for this was youth, beauty, wealth, ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... beauty of these 'interference spectra' may not have been partly owing to the extreme sobriety of the observer? no refreshment, it appears, having been attainable the night before at the Grands Mulets, except the beverage diluted with dirty snow, of which I have elsewhere quoted the Professor's pensive report,—"my memory of that tea is ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... stupid day; Sir George is civil, attentive, and dull; Emily pensive, thoughtful, and silent; and my little self as peevish as an old maid: nobody comes near us, not even your brother, because we are supposed to be settling preliminaries; for you must know Sir George has graciously condescended ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... Still in pensive mood, he was passing the park of Lavardens when he heard some one calling him. Looking up, he saw the Countess of Lavardens and her son Paul. She was a widow; her son a handsome young man, who had made a bad start in the world and now contented ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the platform, sat his two young nephews. He presented them separately to the departments and the army as in the direct line of inheritance. This scene must have produced a profound impression upon the younger child, Louis Napoleon, who was so thoughtful, reflective, and pensive. ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... with magic, methinks, And the future was given to her gaze; For an obelisk marked her abode, and a sphinx On her threshold kept vigil always. She was pensive and ever alone, nor was seen In the haunts of the dissolute crowd; But communed with the ghosts of the Pharaohs, I ween, Or with visitors ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... was pensive and doubtful still "So help me! you couldn't have made all this up out ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... the small-pox, which left her rather marked. I know not if she was handsome, but it is clear that she was very winning, with all the charming contrasts, the twofold nature of the maidens of Provence. Lively and pensive, gay and sad, by turns, she was a good little worshipper, but given to harmless pranks withal. Between the long church services, if she went into the country with girls of her own age, she made no fuss ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... of Ebba this sentiment of uneasiness and melancholy sympathy. When after supper he bade adieu to his uncle and cousins, when he was alone in his room, he smiled when he remembered the amiable gayety of Alete, but became sad and pensive when he recalled the dreamy look of her young sister, the sad melancholy glance which shone over her face like the ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... little poor-looking child, who had stood near, watching what was going on. Daisy turned to look at her as Mr. Lamb's question was thrown at her over the counter, in a tone very different from his words to herself. She saw a pale, freckled, pensive-faced little girl, in very slim clothing, her dress short and ragged, and feet bare. The child had been looking at her and her baskets, but now suddenly looked away ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... who love the pensive song To whom all sounds of Mirth are dissonant! There are who at this hour Will ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... starting as from a pensive reverie. "Ah, to be sure. Now, what would you say, Mr. Mallalieu? How ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... he did not want amongst his Court. This done, he sent for the donor to thank him in person. As the captain walked up the beach, his majesty advanced to meet him, looking every inch a king in the sober dignity of a dress-coat. The waistcoat imparted an air of pensive melancholy that mightily became the Prime Minister, whilst the Lord Chamberlain, as he skipped to and fro in his white gloves, looked a courtier indeed. The trousers had become the subject of an unfortunate dispute, in the course of which they had sustained such injuries ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... winds, with evening's wandering airs, With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars. Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire, And visions rise, and change, ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... at least I dare affirm, Since genius too has bound and term, There is no bard in all the choir, Not Homer's self, the poet-sire, Wise Milton's odes of pensive pleasure, Or Shakespeare whom no mind can measure, Nor Collins' verse of tender pain, Nor Byron's clarion of disdain, Scott, the delight of generous boys, Or Wordsworth, Pan's recording voice,— Not one of all can put in verse, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... opiates my soul gradually settled into a sort of pleasing pensive melancholy. Has it not been said, that melancholy is a characteristic of genius? I make no pretensions to genius: but I am persuaded that melancholy is the habitual, perhaps the natural state of those who have the misfortune to feel ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... not, I suppose, at the moment thinking of anything more original to say. He departed in a pensive mood. ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... world in her tender years, she learned from their pages to form false and extravagant notions concerning it. She used to build castles in the air, was subject to fits of tender melancholy, and, like Miss Cornelia, adored moonlight, pensive music, and sentimental poetry. But she would have shrunk from contact with a brigand, in a sugar-loaf hat, with a carbine slung across his shoulder, and a stiletto in his sash, with precisely the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Those we have chosen are only slaves we have happened to buy; and their life is but feeble; they hold themselves shyly aloof, ever watching for a chance to escape. But the reasons we have deserved stand faithfully by us; they are so many pensive Antigones, on whose help we may ever rely. Nor can such reasons as these be forcibly lodged in the soul; for indeed they must have dwelt there from earliest days, have spent their childhood there, nourished ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... symmetry and beauty show, A look, a character, the pencil seize, Give to the form where youthful graces glow, An air of pensive dignity and ease, ...
— Poems • Matilda Betham
... the kind supposed. Though she incessantly by looks disclosed, That something unrevealed disturbed the soul, And o'er her mind had absolute control. Whatever presents Constance might receive, Still pensive sighs her breast appeared to heave: Her tints of beauty too, began to fail, And o'er the ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... of the sunrise; the old man becomes a child once more. But this second childhood is not like the first; it is as melancholy as the other is joyous. It is the same with lyric poetry. Dazzling, dreamy, at the dawn of civilization it reappears, solemn and pensive, at its decline. The Bible opens joyously with Genesis and comes to a close with the threatening Apocalypse. The modern ode is still inspired, but is no longer ignorant. It meditates more than it scrutinizes; its musing is melancholy. We see, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Whether the poor girl, in spite of her new resource, her music, would have any feeling of loneliness upon her now—just at first—that she had not had before; whether she saw those very puffs of steam and smoke that he saw, as he sat in the train thinking of her; whether her face would have any pensive shadow on it as they died out of the distant view from her window; whether, in telling him he had done her so much good, she had not unconsciously corrected his old moody bemoaning of his station in life, by setting ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... I have no constitution, and never shall be strong," observed Rose, in a pensive tone, as if it was rather a nice ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... grace, some delicacy here and there, now and then a touch of real, if by no means exquisite, sentiment. At this moment Lady Holme found them soothing. There was a certain music in them and very little reality. They seemed to represent life as a pensive phantasmagoria of bird songs, fading flowers, dying lights, soft winds and ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... in my childhood's home, Aunt Ruth and I, and sunny-hearted May. She was a fair and most exquisite child; Her pensive face was delicate and mild Like her dead mother's; but through her dear eyes Her father smiled upon me, day by day. Afar in foreign countries did he roam, Now resting under Italy's blue skies, And now ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... to lie there in shivering heaps. From these larvae gradually emerge features and voices,—the luncheon-bell at last stirs them with the thrill of returning life. They look up, they lean up, they exchange pensive smiles of recognition,—the steward comes, no fiend this time, but a ministering angel, and, lo! the strong man eats broth, and the weak woman clamors for pickled oysters. And so ends my description of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... straighten out one's limbs, And leap elastic from the level counter, Leaving the petty grievances of earth, The breaking thread, the din of clashing shears, And all the needles that do wound the spirit, For such a pensive hour of soothing silence. Kind Nature, shuffling in her loose undress, Lays bare her shady bosom;—I can feel With all around me;—I can hail the flowers That sprig earth's mantle,—and yon quiet bird, That rides the stream, is to me as a brother. ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... just below the hills; multitudes of rooks inhabit its steeple and fill throughout the day the air with their cawing. The place wears a remarkable air of solitude, but presents nothing of gloom and horror, and seems just the kind of spot in which some quiet pensive man, fatigued but not soured by the turmoil of the world, might settle down, enjoy a few innocent pleasures, make his peace with God, and then compose himself to his ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... one day be 'at home with the Lord,' and in the light of that blessed hope the transiency of this life changes its whole aspect, loses the last trace of sadness, and becomes a solemn joy. Why should we be pensive and wistful when we think how near our end is? Is the sentry sad as the hour for relieving guard comes nigh? Is the wanderer in far-off lands sad when he turns his face homewards? And why should not we rejoice at the thought that we, strangers and foreigners here, shall soon depart to the true ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... mellow voice bade him enter. He went in, and a tall lady in black, with plain linen collar and wristbands, rose to receive him. They confronted each other. Time and trouble had left their trace, but there were the glorious eyes, and jet black hair, and the face, worn and pensive, but still beautiful. It was the woman he had loved, the ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... that, of all God's gifts to the sight of man, color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay color, and sad color, for color cannot at once be good and gay. All good color is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... drawing-room party, the ladies expect that for a long while, if not all evening, they will be left alone in it. For a time they scarce know how to employ themselves. With Helen, amusement is out of the question. She has flung herself into a fauteuil, and sits in pensive attitude; of late, ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... than the earth from the sun,—from her gallant neighbor, the table, and the hall. But Bergmann's gaze must have followed her all this distance, for it suddenly met hers, and the tall, grave fellow flushed under her pensive glance. The hostess looked at him just at this moment, and saw the blood mount ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... little knowest thou, that hast not tride, What hell it is in suing long to bide: To lose good days that might be better spent, To waste long nights in pensive discontent. To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow, To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow. To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares; To eat thy heart through ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... showing amid the snow of the petticoats. Up they go; you can almost hear their light false voices into the summer of the leaves, where Loves are garlanded even as of roses. Masks and arrows are everywhere, all the machinery of light and gracious days. In the Watteaus the note is more pensive; there is satin and sunset, plausive gestures and reluctance—false reluctance; the guitar is tinkling, and exquisite are the notes in the languid evening; and there is the Pierrot, that marvellous white animal, sensual and witty ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... careful restoration that has taken place at Ellerburne and Sinnington. The font is one of those unadorned, circular basins which generally date from the thirteenth century. One of the village inns is known as "The Durham Ox," and bears a sign adorned with a huge beast whose pensive but intelligent eye looks down upon all passers-by. The village stocks that used to stand outside the churchyard wall on the east side, near the present schoolhouse, are remembered by the older inhabitants. They were taken away about forty years ago. ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... United States decides to go off its collective rocker," Boyd finished. "Exactly." He stared down at his cigarette for a minute with a morose and pensive expression on his face. He looked, Malone thought, like Henry VIII trying to decide what to do about all ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... condemned his sentiments, thought him a mere time-serving casuist, and said that 'the fact of his work on Moral and Political Philosophy being made a text-book in our Universities was a disgrace to the national character.' We parted at the six-mile stone; and I returned homeward pensive but much pleased. I had met with unexpected notice from a person whom I believed to have been prejudiced against me. 'Kind and affable to me had been his condescension, and should be honoured ever with suitable regard.' He was the ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... were baulk'd, my last resort, I left the Muses to frequent the Court; Pensive each night, from room to room I walk'd, To one I bow'd, and with another talk'd; Inquir'd what news, or such a lady's name, And did the next day, and the next, the same. Places I found, were daily giv'n away, And yet no friendly ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... down among grapevines covered with ripe clusters, they heard a woman's voice which called, or rather sang in pensive notes: ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... telegram in his hand, the porter appeared at the door with letters. Guy seized them at once, with some little impatience. The first was from Cyril. He tore it open in haste, and skimmed it through rapidly. Montague Nevitt meanwhile sat languid in his chair, striking a pensive note now and again on his violin, with his eyes half closed and his lips parted. Guy drew a sigh of relief as ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... 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 the fair Hesperian tree ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... mustache. In spite of his air of granite imperturbability, she saw that his fair skin was subject to little flushes of embarrassment or shyness, like a girl's. As she was in a mood to criticize, she called this absurd and said of his blue eyes, resting on her with a pensive directness, as though he were studying her from a long way off, that they were hard. Deep-set and caverned under heavy, overhanging brows, they more than any other feature imparted to his face the frowning ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... tributes due unto your natural vein. Your tears have passion in them, and a grace Of genuine freshness, which our hearts avow; Your smiles are winds whose ways we cannot trace, That vanish and return we know not how— And please the better from a pensive face, And thoughtful eye, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... desires the pensive ALCEA burns, 70 And, like sad ELOISA, loves and mourns. The freckled IRIS owns a fiercer flame, And three unjealous husbands wed the dame. CUPRESSUS dark disdains his dusky bride, One dome contains them, but two beds divide. 75 ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... earth! how sweetly pretty, how amiable and adorable; and such eyes, dark and lustrous!—full of witchcraft, burning and humid as an April sun after a shower. Some there are, also, of pensive blue, pregnant with promises, soft and almond-shaped, like the divine eyes of the Italian Cenci. Supple as the young and slender branches of willow, are these divinities, fresh as new opened tulips, and brisk and gay as the golden-speckled trout in the sparkling current. In their ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... while piped the pensive wind, To hear thy harp, by British Fairfax strung, Prevailing poet, whose undoubting mind Believed the magic wonders that ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... shiver, for the wind was keen. 'Twas a poor statue underneath a mass Of leafless branches, with a blackened back And a green foot—an isolated Faun In old deserted park, who, bending forward, Half-merged himself in the entangled boughs, Half in his marble settings. He was there, Pensive, and bound to earth; and, as all things Devoid of movement, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... is a thoughtful, pensive, kind-hearted man, feeling keenly the wrong that has been done him, but not at all given to cherishing a resentful temper; and here, if I mistake not, his language relishes of the benevolent, meditative, and somewhat sentimental melancholy ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... and Christina was no longer a single phenomenon, but a series of developments. It was like sailing in agreeably rough water. No pensive mood could survive the sight of mighty Frikkie gambolling like a young bull in the company of Paul; nor could quiet hours impart a melancholy while the welkin rang with the voice of the kleintje bullying the adoring Kafirs. Where before life had glided, now it steeplechased, ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... brought, on which is placed the gardener, with a spade, a cord, and a large basket. Four strong men carry him on their shoulders. His wife follows on foot, and the old folks come after with a grave and pensive air; then the nuptial procession march two by two to the measure of the music. The firing of pistols recommences, the dogs bark more loudly than ever at the sight of the gardener thus borne in triumph, and the children jeer him as he passes. The procession ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... eyes, tin toys, trains, carts, mechanical horses, carriages, steam-engines with diminutive boilers, Lilliputian tableware of porcelain, pine Nativities, dolls both foreign and domestic, the former red and smiling, the latter sad and pensive like little ladies beside gigantic children. The beating of drums, the roar of tin horns, the wheezy music of the accordions and the hand-organs, all mingled in a carnival concert, amid the coming and going of the crowd, pushing, stumbling over one another, with their faces turned ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... this month, stealing from half-blown bowers, Bathed the young cowslip in her sunny showers, Pensive I travell’d, and approach’d the plains, That met the bounds of Severn’s wide domains. As up the hill I rose, from whose green brow The village church o’erlooks the vale below, O! when its rustic form first met my eyes, What wild emotions swell’d the rising sighs! ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... unfamiliar. A thin mist was drifting across the country, getting lost in valleys where it piled up into fleecy mounds, getting caught in tree-tops where it fluttered like tattered banners. Every now and then, with the suddenness of our approach, we would startle an aged shepherd, muffled and pensive as an Arab, strolling slowly across moorlands, followed closely by the sentinel goats which led his flock. The day had been strangely mystic. Time seemed a mood. I had ceased to trouble about where I was going; that I knew my ultimate destination was sufficient. ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... prithee why so pensive? I have had the pleasantest Adventure this Afternoon, going to the Bank to receive Mony; in Pater-Noster-Row I saw two of the loveliest Sempstresses the Trade e'er countenanc'd; I went into the Shop, struck up a Bargain, whipt over to the Castle, where ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... on a lofty vase's side, Where China's gayest art had dyed The azure flowers that blow; Demurest of the tabby kind, The pensive Selima, reclin'd, 5 Gaz'd on the ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... was a small man, of light but elegant make, and peculiarly symmetrical. His head was quite small, but his countenance was of an imposing character; and his eye, brilliant but not fierce, often melted into a pensive tenderness. Such was Jeffrey's appearance on the bench in his latter days. I should have little judged from it that he was the relentless critic, whoso withering sarcasm was felt from the garrets of Grub Street to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... felt remorse at having bound her to secrecy. She was so pensive, and so wistful, and her eyes were so loyal, that he felt he owed her a ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... strange magnetisms,' said Langham, seized as he spoke by the pensive prettiness of the bent head and neck, 'and they show themselves ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... can hear a withering leaf rustling down. I will not think that the time of bare branches and brown grass is so very near as yet; Nature is indeed decaying, but now we have decay only in its beautiful stage, wherein it is pensive, but not sad. It is but early in October; and we, who live in the country all through the winter, please ourselves with the belief that October is one of the finest months of the year, and that ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... good sense, ripe reflection; and he never forgot his origin; his dress, his equipages, his furniture, all were of the greatest simplicity. His air and his deportment were so also. He was tall, dark, and thin; had an aspect pensive, slow, and somewhat mean; with very fine and expressive eyes. He deplored the signal faults that he saw succeed each other unceasingly; the gradual extinction of all emulation; the luxury, the emptiness, the ignorance, the confusion of ranks; the inquisition in the place of the police: he ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... Jacques does not hold his gun very valiantly. He is a melancholy lad. But we must not blame him for that; dreamers can be just as brave as those who never dream at all. His little brother Etienne, the tiniest mite in the regiment, looks pensive. He is ambitious; he would like to be a general officer right away, and that ...
— Child Life In Town And Country - 1909 • Anatole France
... tenacious grasp, had told her repeatedly that the English cousin was ready to offer up his life to her happiness in this world. Many a time she would turn her glance upon me—not a grateful glance, but, as it were, searching and pensive—a glance of penetrating candour, a young girl's glance, that, by its very trustfulness, seems to look one through ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... officers on the evening before the engagement, at which time, it was afterwards reported, he gave his advice to attack the rebels; and when it was overruled, he afterwards saw the colonel walk by himself in a very pensive manner.] ...
— The Life of Col. James Gardiner - Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, September 21, 1745 • P. Doddridge
... sighed the master resignedly. "She smiled so divinely. Henner girls never smile, do they, Selim? Have you noticed that they are always pensive? Perhaps you haven't. It doesn't matter. But this one smiled. I say," coming back to earth, "have they begun to distil the water? I've ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... scout powers that be, of judging stalking photographs preliminary to awarding the Audubon prize offered by the historical society in his home town. Perhaps he was under the influence of a little pensive regret that the season was coming to an end and wished to have this lonely parting with his beloved hills and trees. It is of no consequence. About all he actually did was to kick a stick along before him and pause now and again to examine the caked ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... boy who threw a fork at his brother and put his eye out. But he didn't mean to, and the brother forgave him, and he never did so any more," observed Jill, in a pensive tone, wishing to show that she felt all the dangers of impatience, but was sorry ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... PELLY pensive in manner and enigmatical in allusion; felt it particularly hard thus to be placed in the dock, as if he were an Irish County Councillor under Prince ARTHUR's new Bill. Only last Friday, in debate preceding the very Division now under discussion, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 19, 1892 • Various
... walkers from the heat of the summer's sun. It was Aminta's favorite retreat, and thither she came in the morning to paint her sisters, the white Bengal roses, the red cactus and the graceful clematides, which surrounded her charming retreat. There in the evening, pensive and reflective, the young girl suffered her glance to stray over the vast horizon of the sea gilded by the sun's expiring rays. On the day we speak of, Maulear found her reading, or rather seeming to read, for her book rested on her knee, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... hearing some noise in the gardens of the Tuileries, the young prince threw himself into the arms of the Queen, crying out, "Grand-Dieu, mamma! will it be yesterday over again?" A few days after this affecting exclamation, he went up to the King, and looked at him with a pensive air. The King asked him what he wanted; he answered, that he had something very serious to say to him. The King having prevailed on him to explain himself, the young Prince asked why his people, who ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... do that," conceded Johnnie dutifully, those changeful eyes of hers full of pensive, denied desire, as they swept the dainty gowns of the women before her. "I do—you're right. I wouldn't think of spending my money for a dress-body like that when I'm mighty near as barefoot as a rabbit this minute, and the little 'uns back ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... the cold dew of heaven Lay on the humbler graves around, what time The pale moon gazed upon the turfy mounds, Pensive, as though like me, in lonely muse, Twere brooding on the dead inhumed beneath. There while with him, the holy man of Uz, O'er human destiny I sympathised, Counting the long, long periods prophecy Decrees to roll, ere the great day ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... methinks, when wisdom shall assuage The griefs and passions of our greener age, Though dull the close of life, and far away, Each flower that hailed the dawning of our day, Yet o'er her lovely hopes that once were dear, The time-taught spirit, pensive, not severe, With milder griefs her aged eye shall fill, And weep their falsehood, though she love ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... whole faculties, her whole mental powers, became absorbed in that weary watching; long before she died, she was childish, and only conscious of one wish—to sit in that long high window, and watch the road, along which he might come. She was as faithful as Evangeline, if pensive and inglorious. ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... The good-looking man who plays upon the double-bass is equally prudent with regard to his trophies, which he has hung up around the post on which is pinned the score to which he looks for directions when it becomes necessary to bind together with string-music the pensive interchanges of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... the languishing Sultana; but then her eyes, they banished all idea of the Seraglio, and were the most decidedly European, though the most brilliant that ever glanced; eagles might have proved their young at them. To a countenance which otherwise would have been calm, and perhaps pensive, they gave an expression of extreme vivacity and unusual animation, and perhaps of restlessness and arrogance: it might have been courage. The lady was dressed in the costume of a Chanoinesse??? of a Couvent des dames nobles; an ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... as she was for him to leave; but a few minutes light and careless talking, carried on at whatever effort, was a sacrifice which he owed to his mortified vanity, or his self-respect. He glanced from time to time at her sad and pensive face. ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the quiet tone of an unobserving and uninterested third party, led them into their former habits of easy chat, and, after having served awhile as the channel of communication through which they chose to address each other, set them down to a pensive game at chess, and very dutifully went to tease papa, who was still busied with his drawings. The chess-players, you must observe, were placed near the chimney, beside a little work-table, which held the board and men, the Colonel, at some distance, with ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... Lord Chesterfield's Letters produced an airiness and jauntiness that were quite foreign to his nature. His favourite authors were Jeremy Taylor, Bacon, and Milton. After many months reverential communion with these Goliaths of literature he became pensive and contemplative, and his manner more chastened and severe. The secluded village in which he dwelt had been his birthplace, and there he remained to the day of his death. He knew nothing of the outer world, and the rector ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... to realize how much you have promised. It was certain that I must pay the expenses of his illness, and it was equally certain that I should not have enough money to pay my college bills as well; the whole thing made me very pensive. ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... her, and unbleached linen sleeves tucked up 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 a ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... the remnants of thy splendour past Shall pilgrims, pensive, but unwearied throng; Long shall the voyager, with th' Ionian blast, Hail the bright clime of battle and of song; Long shall thy annals and immortal tongue Fill with thy fame the youth of many a shore; Boast of the aged! lesson of the young! Which sages venerate ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
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