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More "Solitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the sidewalls with singular disregard for the drizzling rain that sifted down upon their unmindful backs or blew softly into the faces of the few who enjoyed the luxury of "umberells." Despite the apparent solitude that kept pace with them down the narrow street,—little more than a country lane, on the verge of graduating into a thoroughfare,—the three travelers were keenly alert; their squinting, eager eyes searched the shadows beside and before them; their feet no longer dragged through the slippery, ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... girl whom extravagance of aid places in an attitude that she ends by finding "affected" had made her decide that for these few hours she must suffice to herself. She had moreover a great fondness for intervals of solitude, which since her arrival in England had been but meagrely met. It was a luxury she could always command at home and she had wittingly missed it. That evening, however, an incident occurred which—had there been a critic to note it—would have taken all colour from the theory that ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... in the course of long morning rambles; these he rehearsed with their accomplished author; these he declaimed in the solitude of his bed-chamber—until, one day, Mrs Bowldler (whom terror arresting, had held spellbound for some minutes on the landing) knocked in to know if Palmerston should run ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... someone to keep his house in order, than from any of the feeling that usually accompanies such unions. In time, however, he had come to love her, and her loss was a very heavy blow to him. It was the void that he felt in his home as much as his desire for solitude, that induced him to leave Highgate and ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... is searching, the rain ceases and the clouds part, but no trace of her missing father does she find. Light has gone and darkness has already invaded the solitude, when White Aster descries a faint red gleam through the trees and hears the droning voice of a priest chanting his prayers. Going in the direction of light and sound, White Aster soon approaches a ruined temple, standing in the midst of a grove of cypress ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... watch I went when the table was cleared, and the others had quitted the room. Uncle Ike replenished the fire, and commended my good sense in "huggin' the chimbley-corner in sech cole weather," before he left me to solitude, to Sandford and Merton, and to "Frank." I had resolved to name him for my dear cousin-in-law. When I came to read Frankenstein I marvelled at the coincidence. Frank continued warm, as I ascertained by quarter-hourly ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... Ferrara. She left him, and took refuge in her native city, then honoured by the presence of Tasso and Guarini. He bore her departure with philosophical composure, recording the event in his diary as something to be dryly grateful for. Left alone, the Duke abandoned himself to solitude, religious exercises, hunting, and the economy of his impoverished dominions. He became that curious creature, a man of narrow nature and mediocre capacity, who, dedicated to the cult of self, is fain to pass for ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... the sorrow, mine the fault, And well my life shall pay: I'll seek the solitude he sought, And stretch ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... only knew that her heroine-looking governess was laid up with severe influenza, her mother more than guessed at the kind of battle wrestled out in solitude, and was sure that more than brother, more than friend, had left her to that lonely suffering, which was being for the first time realized. But no confidence was given; when Lucilla spoke, it was only of Owen, and Mrs. Prendergast ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the place where he was confined. When was this imprisonment to be at an end? Though innocent, he had been cast into wretchedness and solitude—that was his fate. How things had been ordained for him in this world, he had now time to think over. Why had he been thus treated—his portion made so hard to bear? Well, this would be revealed "in that other life" which assuredly awaits ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... plans and amusements, the lonely orphan was left in solitude. Her aunt knew not how her heart ached after the home she had left, but the machine of the family went its own way and trod her ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... her. They are hard to find—not to be found among the many. Books and nature and her dreams—but the many will not follow her to these sources.... And yet every man and woman I know who are great to me, have entered this solitude in childhood. They were Solitaries—that seems the mark of the questers.... Why, you would not have one stay with the many—just to avoid the loneliness and the heart-pulling that leads us into ourselves. ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... left him, to seek the solitude of her own room. In a passion of tears she flung herself upon the little bed, and there she lay, a prey to such an anguish as had ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... "I requickened a corpse," he used to say. His views were extensive and daring, but often chimerical; he had reduced to a nullity the sovereign whom he governed for so long, keeping him shut up far away from the world, in a solitude which he was himself almost the only one to interrupt. "The queen has the devil in her," he used to say; "if she finds a man of the sword who has some mental resources and is a pretty good general, she will make a racket in France and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... gliding along the narrow path by the river bank, and pauses a moment at the entrance to the platform. Then it listens for a few minutes, and again hurries down to the crazy-looking steps. The black shadow standing there, like the genius of solitude, is a woman, and she has apparently come to add herself to the list of the cruel-looking river's victims. Standing there, with one hand on the rough rail, and staring with fascinated eyes on the dull muddy water, she does not hear a step behind her. The shadow of a man, who has apparently ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... ever, he is commenced lover upon the old stock, walks with his hand thrust in his bosom for negligence, moping he leans his head, face yellow, beard flowing and incomposite, eyes sunken, anhelus, breath wheezy and asthmatical, by reason of over-much sighing: society he abhors, solitude is but a hell, what shall he doe? all this while his mistresse is forward, coming, amantissima, ready to jump at once into his mouth, her he hateth, feels disgust when she is but mentioned, thinks her ugly, old, a ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... her story in readiness, replied: "I am the daughter of a deity, and have practiced religious observances in the heavenly regions. I have now come into this forest!" And the devotee, who began to think how much more pleasant is such society than solitude, asked her where her hut was, and requested to be ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... enough to keep life in them and rags about them; and he built with his own hands, aided by his faithful Ruth, the mud hovel, wherein they found the only shelter that this cold world had for them. They had left Reading, preferring solitude to averted looks and abusive tongues; and not a creature in Dorchester came near them. Alike as Jews and as poor people, they ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... in her solitude, when a creaking noise struck her ear and the door of the court was flung open. Who came out, is not yet ascertained; but, reader, should you wish to know, the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... which the conqueror of Marengo might have vailed, that the neck of the foe was the point at which the first fatal shaft of his excommunicating ire should be hurled. With rapid and decisive energy he concentrated all his powers for instantaneous action. He retired for a day to the seclusion of solitude, to summon and to spur the energies of the most self-reliant mind in Europe, as the lion draws back to gather courage for the leap. As, like the lion, he drew back; so, like the lion, did he spring forward ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... within him; and as he grows into a youth, he hankers after something which he calls sympathy, but which is really applause. He therefore makes a human crowd for himself out of carved and tapestried figures, and the few names which penetrate into his solitude, and fancies himself always the greatest personage amongst them. He simulates all manner of heroic performances and of luxurious rest. He is Eccelino, the Emperor's vicar; he is the Emperor himself. He becomes more than this; for his fancy has soared upwards ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... glow of dawning beauty, The fragrance and the dainty gloss of youth, Worn by long years of solitude and duty, I have no bloom to ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... he that preferreth before all things his rational part and spirit, and the sacred mysteries of virtue which issueth from it, he shall never lament and exclaim, never sigh; he shall never want either solitude or company: and which is chiefest of all, he shall live without either desire or fear. And as for life, whether for a long or short time he shall enjoy his soul thus compassed about with a body, he is altogether indifferent. For if even now he were to depart, he is ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... contained various treatises laying down "the first principles of Polite Learning:" these drew her eager attention; and with one or other of the not very handy volumes in her hand, she would steal out of sight of the farm, and lapt in the solitude of the moor, would sit and read until at last the light could reveal not a word more. Even the Geometry she found in them attracted her not a little; the Rhetoric and Poetry drew her yet more; but most of all, the Natural History, with its engravings of beasts and birds, poor as they were, delighted ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... exhibited some study of POSE, and a certain exaggeration of attitude, that betrayed the habit of an audience; also that her voice had an artificial accent that was not wholly unconscious, even in this lofty solitude. Yet the very next moment, when she turned, and caught Rand's eye fixed upon her, she started naturally, colored slightly, uttered that feminine adjuration, "Good Lord! gracious! goodness me!" which is seldom used in ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... endeavors to establish a solidarity for it. The group at least attests, even in this event, the wide, the wild, variety of my literary production in time and space. From the beginning the journalist's independence of the scholar's solitude and seclusion has remained with me, and though I am fond enough of a bookish entourage, of the serried volumes of the library shelves, and the inviting breadth of the library table, I am not disabled by the hard conditions of a bedroom in a summer hotel, or the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... journalism. He was attacked, vilified, and denounced by the vilest of men in the vilest of manners. Sometimes, sitting alone by himself, blind and powerless, very battleworn and sad, this old man at the end of his life must have suffered in the solitude of his soul a grief almost intolerable. But he became more human and more lovable in these ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... not observe that any one was burdened with too much game. We got off our horses to climb through the wooded hills and ravines, and passed some hours lying under the pine-trees, listening to the gurgling of the little brook, whose bright waters make music in the solitude; and, like the soldiers at the pronunciamiento, but with surer aim, pelting each other from behind the parapets of the tall trees, with fir tops. About ten o'clock we returned to breakfast; and Colonel Y—— having arrived, we are now preparing ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... said the Princess.—"Very soon it shall be three years that I have lived in solitude," she resumed, after a pause, "and this tranquillity has nothing painful to me about it. To you alone can I dare to say that I feel I am happy. I was surfeited with adoration, weary of pleasure, emotional on the surface of things, but conscious that ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... which were unintelligible to me, perhaps because I have always been more woman than artist. He always put the theater first. He lived in it, he died in it. He had none of what I may call my bourgeois qualities—the love of being in love, the love of a home, the dislike of solitude. I have always thought it hard to find my inferiors. He was sure of his high place. He was far simpler than I in some ways. He would talk, for instance, in such an ingenuous way to painters and musicians that I blushed for him. But I know now that my blush was far more unworthy than his freedom ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... you, Jean; it was my usual forgetfulness of others which so misled you. I was tired of the world, and came hither to find peace in solitude. Effie cheered me with her winsome ways, and I learned to look on her as the blithe spirit whose artless wiles won me to forget a bitter past and a regretful present." I paused; and then added, with a smile, "But, in our wise schemes, we have overlooked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... old man," said he at length: "if you live a few years longer, that period must be passed in solitude and cheerlessness:—if you suddenly fall ill you must die the lingering death of famine, without a soul to place a morsel of food, or the cooling cup to your lips; and when you shall be no more, who will follow you ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... philosophy in justification of our own pleasures: and no doubt one hears the personal prejudices of the lover of society as well as the serious thought of the student of life in the warmth with which he denounces solitude as "dangerous to reason without being favourable to virtue," and declares that "the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... exclamation Wyvis paid no attention in the least: his mood was fitful, and he was glad to step out of the ill-lighted room into the hall, and thence to the silence and solitude of ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... universe; some, for instance, animate the whole of the physical universe, and are distinguished as being what is called blended with matter, the class that gives the sense of life, of consciousness, to all those things in Nature which so much impress the mind occasionally when we are face to face in solitude with some splendid landscape—some great forest, perhaps, in the silence. We need not go into these various classes; I only mention them in order to separate from the rest that particular class of freed, ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... to journey by night till they could reach a more hospitable part of the country. They accordingly started as soon as the people in the village had gone to sleep. The stillness of the air, the howling of the wild beasts and the deep solitude of the forest made the scene solemn and impressive. Not a word, except in a whisper, was uttered; and his companions pointed out to him the wolves and hyaenas, as they glided like shadows from one thicket ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... Dee and other famous mathematicians. He was also intimate with Sir Robert Cotton, William Camden, and their antiquarian associates. Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, had a particular esteem for Allen, and would have conferred a bishopric upon him, but his love of solitude made him decline the offer. His great skill in mathematics and astrology earned him the credit of being a magician; and the author of Leicester's Commonwealth accuses him of employing the art of "figuring'' to further the earl of Leicester's unlawful designs, and of endeavouring by the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... There was no reason why he should not begin again... I remember now the intense silence of the Grande Place that day after the gas-attack, when we three men stood there looking up at the charred ruins of the Cloth Hall. It was a great solitude of ruin. No living figure stirred among the piles of masonry which were tombstones above many dead. We three were like travelers who had come to some capital of an old and buried civilization, staring with awe and uncanny fear at this burial-place of ancient ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... disposal. To these hours we owe great part of her Diary. At five she had to attend her colleague, Madame Schwellenberg, a hateful old toadeater, as illiterate as a chambermaid, as proud as a whole German Chapter, rude, peevish, unable to bear solitude, unable to conduct herself with common decency in society. With this delightful associate, Frances Burney had to dine, and pass the evening. The pair generally remained together from five to eleven, and often had no other company the whole time, except during ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of most of the gentlemen and the unexpected relief of some of her own sex, Maruja, after an evening of more than usual caprice and willfulness, retired early to her chamber. Here she beguiled Enriquita, a younger sister, to share her solitude for an hour, and with a new and charming melancholy presented her with mature counsel and some younger ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... though the companions of Beowulf stood again before us: "So, we have learned, in days of yore, of twelve beneath the stars, heroes gloriously blessed." These "heroes," these "warriors," are the twelve apostles. One of them, St. Andrew, arrives in an uninhabited country; not a desert in Asia, nor a solitude in Greece; it might be the abode of Grendel: "Then was the saint in the shadow of darkness, warrior hard of courage, the whole night long with various thoughts beset; snow bound the earth with winter-casts; ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... on three sides around a little church, which, in green and gray, seemed almost a part of its surroundings. A little church, with a little quaint bell-tower and arched doorway, built after some old, old model; it stood as quietly in the green solitude of trees and rocks, as if it and they had grown up together. It was almost so. The walls were of native greystone in its natural roughness; all over the front and one angle the American ivy climbed and waved, mounting to the tower; while at the back, the closer clinging Irish ivy covered the ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... possible." I said this with so much conviction that the two burst out laughing at me. I could not think of anything more to add, and I felt relieved when, with a warning shriek, the train dashed into a tunnel. By the time we had emerged again into the sunlight and the solitude of the open landscape I had ready an impromptu which I had been working at in the darkness. I looked straight at Miss Metford ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... No; she certainly knew or believed that Richard, her second son, had escaped and was living, and was glad to overturn the usurper without risking her child. The plot failed, and the queen dowager was shut up, where she remained till her death, "in prison, poverty, and solitude."(35) The king trumped up a silly accusation of her having delivered her daughters out of sanctuary to King Richard, "which proceeding," says the noble historian, "being even at the time taxed for rigorous and undue, makes it very probable ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... approach they run away, They leap and stare, away they bound, With a sudden angry sound, To the sunny quietude; Crouching down where nothing stirs In the silence of the furze, Couching down again to brood In the sunny solitude. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... has a reddish beard that is turning white on the left side. He cultivates the vineyard, and the owner takes half the produce; but for a consideration the man lets the small house in the Via di Santa Sabina to persons who are fond of vineyards and solitude. The only condition is that the shutters of the windows looking on the road must not be opened, lest the owner ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... streets of a city upon a sabbath morn, when crowds of well-dressed persons are seen moving in every direction; when the cheerful bells are sounding, and the beautiful smiling children are hurrying in troops to Sunday school! Here I was in solitude. I saw not the laborer resting from toil, nor the smile of infancy, nor the christian bowing before his God; but Nature proclaimed a sabbath by the silence that reigned abroad, and the splendor with which she ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... no chance for the husband and wife to speak to each other. John looked at Helen steadily a moment, but her eyes veiled any thought. In the midst of Mrs. Grier's chatter, she had gone into the solitude of her own heart, and slowly and silently light was beginning to shine into the mysterious darkness of the last few days. John's grief must have had something to do with this terrible sermon. She felt her heart leap up from the past anxiety like ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... others laughed, I could have wept, and would gladly have exchanged that gay scene, for the quiet of my own room. But this could not be, and I was forced to assume a serenity of feeling I was far from experiencing. Had you not been here, I should have given vent to my grief in solitude, and none would have been the wiser. As it is I must entreat that you will forgive me for (tho' unintentionally) making you suppose I do not sympathize in your happiness, but I do indeed, for I know that Harry is all that is good, and is ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... Italy were years of rest, of solitude, of calm. The attitude of Ibsen to Italy was totally distinct from that of other illustrious exiles of his day and generation. The line of pilgrims from Stendhal and Lamartine down to Ruskin and the Brownings had brought with them a personal interest in Italian affairs; Italian ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... blue-stocking literature, threadbare sophistries, forms erected into important principles, mediocrity elevated into consideration, and the pre-eminence of the vain, the ignorant, and the contemptible, he will shut himself up in his solitude, and say with the Englishman at Paris Je m'ennuis trs bien ici. Against the recurrence of these annoyances, day after day renewed, what nerves can hold out? As life advances, time becomes precious, every moment is counted, every enjoyment is computed; and while the effort ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various
... seems too awful. I wonder what his poor mind thinks about. When told that he would probably be sent home, he said he did not want to go. Surely somewhere in God's sweet world there is somebody who cares for and thinks about him. I cannot half express to you the sadness of his solitude. ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... steep for snow to lie, and save also for the intense azure of the sky, all is radiant whiteness. A region far distant from any haunt of man, where reigns a mountain which acknowledges supremacy to Mount Everest alone. A region of completest solitude, where the solemn silence is unbroken by the twitter of a single bird or the drone of the smallest insect, and is disturbed only by the occasional thunder of an avalanche or the grinding crunch of the glacier as ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... sky, where thousands of slaves bend over desks all day. On the ground floors are only little fruit shops and laundries and book shops, where you see copies of "Littell's Living Age" and G. W. M. Reynold's novels in the windows. And next—poor Fourth Avenue!—the street glides into a mediaeval solitude. On each side are shops ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... she said. As if these common words could express the vacancy, the blank solitude, into which her life ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... well-knit man of the world—who happens to be a heaven-born diplomatist into the bargain—to be forewarned is to be doubly armed. At the end of the half-hour of studious solitude in the smoking-room, Ormsby had pricked out his course on the chart to a boat's-length; had trimmed his sails to the minutest starting of a sheet. A glance at his watch and another at the time-table gave him the length ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... place of honorable exile for officers who may be suspected of heresy in politics, and hostility to existing institutions. They are advanced a step in rank, to repay them (and a poor requital it is) for the change from the delicious climate of Portugal, and the gaieties of Lisbon, to the dreary solitude, the arid soil, and burning and fever-laden air of the Cape de Verds. It is a melancholy thought, that many an active intellect—many a generous and aspiring spirit—may have been doomed to linger and perish here, chained, as it were, to the rocks, like Prometheus, merely for having dreamed of ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... but a spectre now, Haunting the solitude of darkened minds, Mocked out of memory by the sceptic day? Is there no corner ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... insolent, supercilious creatures could not be. Some hothouses held them. It ached her to know that she was not one of them—that, alas, she had dreamed a dream and it had not come true. She wondered at her own solitude these two years past—her indifference to the fact that she had never ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... duke was away in exile on account of a disgraceful carouse which had ended in a street fight, and Violante was spending the time, practically alone, in the quiet little town of Gallese, which is halfway between Orvieto and Rome. In this solitude, Violante and Marcello were finally surprised under circumstances which made their guilt certain, and final confession was obtained from Marcello after he had been arrested and subjected to torture. ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... Teutones, to assault Rome and Italy in the vigor of the republic. After the departure of those Barbarians, their native country, which was marked by the vestiges of their greatness, long ramparts, and gigantic moles, [69] remained, during some ages, a vast and dreary solitude; till the human species was renewed by the powers of generation, and the vacancy was filled by the influx of new inhabitants. The nations who now usurp an extent of land which they are unable to cultivate, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... the Camp of the Stone Tepees once before. There had been a chase for a cattle thief. It was thought he had hidden somewhere in the vicinity of the white semicircle, but he had not been found there, because no man in fear of pursuit could dwell more than a night in so ghostly a place of solitude. ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... with a door, or at least a screen, between him and the other party to the conversation. All the time he does not seem to have been engaged in any manner of study or work, and he appears to have simply devoted himself to the full indulgence of his {289} passion for solitude. His figure, or some sketch suggested by it, has been made use of more than once by writers of fiction, but the man himself was a living figure in the reign of William the Fourth, and died not long before ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... this lonesome cottage and said: "Viola, I feel to-night that all my honors are empty. They feel to me like a load crushing me down rather than a pedestal raising me up. I am not happy. I long for the solitude of those trees. That decaying old house calls eloquently unto something within me. How I would like to enter there and lay me down to sleep, free from the cares and divested of ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... to speak carelessly of what he imagined he saw in a lady's face. And now, Susie, good-by. I shall not inflict my miserable self longer upon you to-day, and I am one who can best cure my wounds in solitude." ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... of twilight!—in the solitude Of that pine forest, and the silent shore Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood, Rooted where once the Adrian wave flowed o'er To where the last Caesarean fortress stood,— Evergreen forest! which Boccaccio's lore And Dryden's lay made haunted ground ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... for some time remained in expectation, and in almost perfect solitude, when, at fifteen minutes before nine, an extraordinary noise that I heard outside announced to me the Emperor's arrival; and a few moments after I saw him appear, amidst cries of enthusiasm, borne on the arms of the officers who had escorted ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... seen The sky grow bright, the forest green; And many a wintry wind have stood In bloomless, fruitless solitude, Since childhood in my pleasant bower First spent its sweet and sportive hour; Since youthful lovers in my shade Their vows of truth and rapture made, And on my trunk's surviving frame Carved many a long-forgotten name. Oh! by the sighs of gentle sound, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... stillness and solitude that seemed to envelop these palaces suggested the enchanter's wand. To-morrow, perhaps, the perfect lawns where the robins hopped amidst the shrubbery would become again the rock-bound, windswept New England pasture above the sea, and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... divinity. Five others with him, seized with a holy fear, consulted a hermit how they might escape the judgment of God. To them he gave the answer of the Psalmist, "Lo, I have prolonged my flight and remained in solitude." They, too, were fired with the love of solitude, and begged of Hugh Bishop of Grenoble that he would assign them a place suitable for a retreat. This the bishop did, and the order was established at La Chartreuse in the mountains of Savoy in ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... legend struck the knife into her bosom, and handed it to her husband with the words, 'It is not painful!' Christ has gone before us in all the dreary solitude, and in all the agony and pains of life. He has hallowed them all, and has taken the bitterness and the pain out of each of them for them that love Him. If we feel that the Breaker is before us, and that we are marching behind Him, then whithersoever He ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... his late offence: "Madam, the mighty power of use Now strangely pleads in my excuse; If you unused have scarcely strength To gain this walk's untoward length; If, frighten'd at a scene so rude, Through long disuse of solitude; If, long confined to fires and screens, You dread the waving of these greens; If you, who long have breathed the fumes Of city fogs and crowded rooms, Do now solicitously shun The cooler air and dazzling sun; If his majestic eye you flee, Learn hence ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... repeter les memes banalites et a s'abaisser autant qu'on le peut au niveau des femmelettes avec lesquelles l'on vit, et qui, pour plaire, affectent plus de frivolite qu'elles n'ont reellement. Le plaisir de causer nous est defendu." Nevertheless, however much she may have mentally appreciated the solitude of a crowd, she determined to adapt herself to her social surroundings. "C'est un sacrifice," she says, "que je fais a mon Dieu et a mon devoir comme Anglaise." Impelled, therefore, alike by piety and patriotism, she cast aside all ideas of leading ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... missed no chance of riding her pony to the little valley church. Mrs. Caxton generally went with her, after the first week; but going in her car she was no hindrance to the thoughtfulness and solitude of the rides on horseback; and Eleanor sometimes wept all the way home, and oftener came with a confused pain in her heart, dull or acute as the case might be. She saw truth that seemed beautiful and glorious to her; she saw it in the faces and lives as well as in the ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... her. Masters had never been out of her mind for a moment during her waking hours, and she had slept little. She ate still less, and kept herself up in Society with punch in the afternoon and champagne at night. Only in the solitude of her room did she give way briefly to excoriated nerves; but the source of her once ready tears seemed dry. There are more scientific terms for her condition these days, but she was poisoned by love and despair. Her collapse was only a ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... ever noticed the least sign of an unhinged mind. One thought that she was too much alone; but, of course, her loss was a very recent one, and everybody knows that in grief there often comes a desire for solitude.' ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... evil, could have brought me to such despair, and hatred of life, and distaste of all pleasure, and lasting sorrow. I bitterly wept this misery, that I must needs be a laughing-stock, that marriage must be denied me, and that I must ever live in solitude. You ask for the cause of this misfortune, a matter which I am quite unable to explain. Because of the reasons just mentioned, and because I dreaded that men should know how grave was the ill afflicting me, I shunned the society of women; and, on account of this habit, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... bustling businesses of the world. In that silent retirement, in thousands of instances, a tragedy not less severe than unobtrusive is enacted, the tragedy of the lonely and breaking heart. An obscure mist of sighs exhales out of the solitude of women in the nineteenth century. The proportionate number of examples of virtuous love, completing itself in marriage, will probably diminish, and the relative examples of defeated or of unlawful love increase, until we reach some new phase of civilization, with better harmonized social arrangements, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... though an increasing taste for inactivity and solitude betokened the growth of a bastard Christianity, and though various other circumstances were indicative of tendencies to adulterate religion, either by reducing it to a system of formalism, or by sublimating it into a life of empty ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... all the skies with snow were grey, And all the earth with snow was white, I wandered down a still wood way, And there I met my heart's delight Slow moving through the silent wood, The spirit of its solitude: The brown birds and the lichened tree Seemed less a part of ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... shyness and the isolation of his exalted position hardly account for it. A humanistic scholar in a University where the practical departments were making greatest progress, engrossed in his intellectual interests in the solitude of his upper chamber while the busy commercial world went heedless by, always leisurely in the midst of a most active life, a man of religious reticence who was misunderstood because he did not make a noisy profession ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... for my own pleasure only, and amused myself with it as best I could. No sorrow weighs on me, but I long to be away—where, I do not know, but far away, perhaps in Africa or India. For my place is in the woods, in solitude... ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... the figure of the "Explorer," grim and hard and determined; silent and solitary in a land of silence and solitude, brooding over a region where "the trails run out and stop." Something urged, something called, and his blood responded. About him rose the voice of the endless leagues of pines in a hushed utterance which might ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... Caspar had shown himself an intelligent, unassuming and useful man, and the Duke of Wuertemberg was willing to retain him in his service. The laying-out of various nurseries and plantations in the pleasure-grounds of Ludwigsburg and Solitude was intrusted to the retired soldier, now advanced to the rank of captain: he removed from one establishment to another, from time to time; and continued in the Duke's pay till death. In his latter years he ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... sorry that he had shot the poor beast that lay stiffening by his side for he had leaped down, and had, as if by instinct, taken hold of Black Boy's rein, lest he should suddenly take it into his head to gallop off and leave his master in the solitude by himself. ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... the far end. Lucia was sitting in a low chair by the fireplace, under the tall shaded lamp, where the light fell full on her shoulders. She was not alone. On a settee by the other side of the open hearth sat the young lady who had intruded on his solitude in the library. The presence of the young lady filled him with ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... dearest interests lie beyond the domains of science, in the regions of faith. Science treats of things—faith is confidence in persons. Take away the persons, and of what value are the things? The world becomes at once a vast desert, a dreary solitude, and more miserable than any of its former inhabitants the lonely wretch who is left to mourn over the graves of all his former companions—the last man. Solitary science were awful. Could I prosecute the toils of study alone, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... presence of man beyond a few miles round the establishment. Years ago the fort was built, and there it stands now, with new tenants, it is true, but in its general aspect unchanged; and there it is likely to remain, wrapped in its barrier of all but impregnable solitude, for ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... in bands maltreating and plundering the people. Petrarch, who visited France at this period, tells us that he could not believe that this was the same kingdom which he had once seen so rich and flourishing. "Nothing presented itself to my eyes but fearful solitude and extreme poverty, uncultivated land and houses in ruins. Even about Paris there were everywhere signs of fire and destruction. The streets were deserted; the roads overgrown ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... Bagdad, a hermit, renowned for his sanctity, passed his days in an agreeable solitude. The neighbouring inhabitants, to obtain an interest in his prayers, daily flocked to his hermitage, to carry him provisions and presents. The holy man, without ceasing, gave thanks to God for the blessings, with which providence ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... than speculative, political rather than theological, established the Civitas Dei where once stood the Civitas Roma. This ecclesiastical masterpiece of human wisdom "may still exist in undiminished vigor," says Macaulay, "when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's." Truly the Church of Rome has left upon Christianity an ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... indifferently, putting the note into her pocket. She liked Marian's letters, and kept them to read in her hours of solitude. ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... the poison of regret. I found myself often longing for my independence, which, however, would not have contributed to my happiness, but would at least have permitted me to indulge in my secret sorrow. My temporary solitude, therefore, became precious to me, for I was about to abandon myself to sadness without annoying any one, and without exciting a curiosity which it was impossible for me to satisfy. When one evening I had been wandering alone on the banks of the lake, I was terrified by a terrible scene on the water. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... five minutes of solitude on the depressing platform of Market Blandings Station, he was what the spiritualists call a sensitive subject. He had reached that depth of gloom and bodily discomfort when a sudden smile has all the effect of strong liquor and good news administered simultaneously, warming the blood and ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... child should be taught to think and should be given opportunity for a quiet hour for self communion and self entertainment. It should be taught to live a period of solitude so that in after life it may not always be compelled to hunt around for ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... the calamities which soon after happened, men were buoyed with hope and trust. They may have hidden themselves in caves and deserts, they may have sought monastic retreats, they may have lost faith in man and all mundane glories, they may have consumed their lives in meditation and solitude, they may have anticipated the dissolution of all things, but they awaited in faith the coming of their Lord. Prepared for any issue or any calamity, a class of heroes arose to show the moral greatness of the passive virtues, and the triumphs of faith amid the wrecks of material grandeur. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... the Indians who were in the mountains, where they perpetrated marvellous massacres. Thus they ruined and depopulated all this island which we beheld not long ago; and it excites pity, and great anguish to see it deserted, and reduced to a solitude. ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... it only to declare, that "if all her hairs were worlds," she should reckon them "well lost for love;" and Pastorella fondly conceived, that she could dwell for ever by the side of a bubbling fountain, content with her swain and fleecy care; without considering that stillness and solitude can afford satisfaction only ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... moment came. Others could not help; he was alone with his thoughts, and yet, as he did no fasting, not alone in the proper use of the word. On that last day, therefore, he resolved upon retiring to some solitude. It would attract no undue attention, and he would have done according to the spirit of the shaman's instructions. After leaving the Rito he climbed to the northern mesa, and instead of resting on its brink as Shotaye had, he strolled into the timber perfectly at random, hardly conscious ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... once again the shapes and circumstances of things, as one sitting by his fireside sees castles and cottages, men, women, and children in the embers, and shapes them the better for the silence and the solitude round him? Let the reader take what reason he will. I have seen the world, and fought my way through it; have stumbled, like greater men, have risen, like lesser; have been flung into the most rapid current of the most hurried, wild, and vivid ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... can never experience the feeling of complete solitude which the Westerner knows in wild and lonely places; for him the hillside, the ravine, and the mountain gorge are peopled with presences best described as fairies, though in nothing resembling the light-hearted beings which this description ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... entries in her diary she made in this fair spot, alone, but for the sympathetic presence of her big black dog. The morning solitude was amply atoned for by the dozens of young friends who joined the "fruit parties" every afternoon, filling the air with their gay voices and wholesome, ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... our Chartreuse; what are they in retirement for? Looking back into history, with the glow of discovery in my eyes, I find records of wise men—everyone acknowledged they were wise men—who lived apart. In every age the same associate of solitude, silence, and wisdom. The holy hermits!... I grant it, they professed to flee wickedness and seek after righteousness, but now my impression is that they fled bothers. We all know they had an intense aversion to any savour of domesticity, and they never shaved, washed, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... long quiets brood, Where the calm is never stirred By the harshness of a word, But instead the singing bird Sweetens all my solitude. ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... Sociability. Life in Factories.—The social relations of man exert a great influence on sexual life. Hermits and those who live on isolated farms are interesting in this respect. Solitude generally leads man to chronic melancholia and to abnormal peculiarities, unless he has a library in his hermitage, when he may live in the spirit of the intellectual sociability derived from ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... man, passionately. "Haven't I been patient? Haven't I waited and waited, eating my heart out in solitude, and loneliness, and misery? But for your love, Kate, your undying love and faith in me—I should long ago ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... the evening dried up as it touched my burning skin. I opened my lips to the breeze; and the breeze, instead of cooling me, was itself set aglow by the fire of my breath. What torment, Chactas! to see you always near me, far from all other humankind in the deepest solitude, and yet to feel that between us there was an insuperable barrier! To pass my life at your feet, to serve you as a slave, to bring you food and lay your couch in some secret corner of the universe, would have been for me supremest happiness; ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... of sixteen to the day of her marriage Veronique's bearing was always thoughtful, and sometimes melancholy. Living in such deep solitude, she was forced, like other solitary persons, to examine and consider the spectacle of that which went on within her,—the progress of her thought, the variety of the images in her mind, and the scope of feelings warmed and nurtured in a ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... all night through. They are really the first throbbings of life, the harbingers of day; and it pleases you as much to hear them as it must please a shipwrecked seaman once again to grasp a hand of flesh and blood after years of miserable solitude. They have the freshness of the daylight life about them. You can hear the carters cracking their whips and crying hoarsely to their horses or to one another; and sometimes even a peal of healthy, harsh horse-laughter comes up to you through the darkness. There is ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at home or in a quite new place. Memory and you must go hand in hand with (at least) decent weather if you wish to cook up a proper dish of solitude. It is in these little flights of mine that I get more pleasure than in anything else. Now, at present, I am supremely uneasy and restless - almost to the extent of pain; but O! how I enjoy it, and how I SHALL enjoy it afterwards (please God), if I ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Ellen shut her lips, and Lucy, throbbing from the stripes of the encounter and seeing further parley fruitless, slipped from the room and fled to the quiet of the still night's solitude. ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... my Cleis, on my heart; And softer than a little wild bird's wing Are kisses that she pours upon my mouth. Ah, never any more when spring like fire Will flicker in the newly opened leaves, Shall I steal forth to seek for solitude Beyond the lure of light Alcaeus' lyre, Beyond the sob that stilled Erinna's voice. Ah, never with a throat that aches with song, Beneath the white uncaring sky of spring, Shall I go forth to hide awhile from Love The quiver and the crying of my heart. Still ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... beach, Omega and Thalma watched the lake eagerly, but nothing disturbed its mirror-like surface. As on the preceding night the awful silence appalled them—even though they were accustomed to the vast solitude. It was so calm and still, so full of death and mystery, that it seemed they must cry out in the agony of their emotions. As the very silence was crushing their spirits so the knowledge that only one form of life on earth stood between them and the water to which ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... but absolute and entire solitude, that is, the total and perpetual exclusion from all society, is as great a positive pain as can almost be conceived. Therefore in the balance between the pleasure of general society, and the pain of absolute solitude, pain is the predominant idea. But the pleasure of any particular social enjoyment outweighs very considerably the uneasiness caused by the want of that particular enjoyment; so that the strongest sensations relative ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... agriculture; while the ancient marshes have been changed by human industry into rich and fertile tracts, the best parts of which are precisely those conquered from the grasp of the ocean. In order to form an idea of the solitude and desolation which once reigned where we now see the most richly cultivated fields, the most thriving villages, and the wealthiest towns of the continent, the imagination must go back to times which have not left one monument of antiquity and ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... to the cemetery to pray at Joseph's tomb, as he often did. For in the city of the dead solitude may be found. When he returned neither on the first day nor on the second, she began to feel anxious. She waited up the ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... overwrought, Oliver was anxious—and hungry. He saw his cousin gather up the fragments of the letter, piece them together for rereading, then fling them from him once more. The boy wandered about aimlessly in the solitude of the big house, wishing that this long miserable day would reach an end and that Janet and Mrs. Brown would come home. It grew dark and no one returned, although, after a long time, ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... scathe and scorch the soul—which penetrate to the vital seat of happiness—and blast it, never again to put forth bud or blossom. She never objected to frequent the haunts of pleasure, but was as much alone there as in the depths of solitude; walking about in a sad revery, apparently unconscious of the world around her. She carried with her an inward woe that mocked at all the blandishments of friendship, and "heeded not the song of the charmer, charm he never ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... ask whether it was unphilosophical for an individual who had examined the educational systems of various countries, and who was crossing the Alps, to retire to a mountain solitude, and there, in the abode of that "eternal sunshine," and in the presence of Him who is the fountain of light, to contemplate a system which was to diffuse intellectual and moral light throughout his native country, ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... the abbeys which remain in ruins—those, for instance, of Fountains and Tintern—were Cistercian abbeys. They are beautiful, not because the Cistercians loved pleasant places, but because they loved solitude, whilst the Benedictines had either planted themselves in towns or had allowed towns to ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... beautiful meadows we are borne swiftly on. There we must tarry for the night, for I will not travel in the dark when I can help it. I love it. There is no solitude in the world, or at least I have never felt any, like standing alone in the doorway of the rear car on a dark night, and rushing on through the darkness,—darkness, darkness everywhere, and if one could be sure of rushing ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... own temper thus aggravated his solitude and his pain we must also keep in mind that neither among the priests, the prophets and the princes of his time, nor in the kings after Josiah, did Jeremiah find any of that firm material which under the hands of Isaiah rose into bulwarks against Assyria. The nation crumbling from within was suffering ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... said Monte-Leone, "that this is the proper hour for exercise, in this country? The complete repose of nature, the eloquent silence of night, all invite us to confidence, and make us wish for isolation and solitude—" ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... poetry of form, but of power; not of multitude, but of immensity. It does not divide into many, but aggrandizes into one. Its ideas of nature are like its ideas of God. It is not the poetry of social life, but of solitude: each man seems alone in the world, with the original forms of nature, the rocks, the earth, and the sky. It is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise, but of faith in a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power that governs ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... could see to do what virtue would By her own radiant light, though sun and moon Were in the flat sea sunk. And Wisdom's self Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, Where with her best nurse Contemplation She plumes her feathers and lets grow her wings, That in the various bustle of resort Were all-to ruffled, and sometimes impair'd. He that has light within his own ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... having taken refuge in the swamp, and there repeatedly sought for, throughout all this time he has contrived to baffle search. Nor has he either starved or suffered, except from solitude. Naturally of a social disposition, this has been irksome to him. Otherwise, he has comforts enough. Though rude his domicile, and remote from a market, it is sufficiently furnished and provided. The Spanish moss makes a soft couch, ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... Sollecitudine. The commentators will have it that this is an error for solitudine, solitude, but I see no necessity for the substitution, the text being perfectly acceptable as ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... sedulous in watching over me, even from my childhood, although he reposed more confidence in my sentiments of honour than in the guards he had placed around me. In short, kept thus between walls and in perfect solitude, having no other company than that of my attendants, I grew to womanhood, and with me grew the reputation of my loveliness, bruited abroad by the servants of my house, and by such as had been admitted to ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the fierce, unyielding, never-ceasing, ever-pressing strife of mind and unrest of life is passing, an eddy in the tide has borne him into quieter waters, and if the hum of the world reaches his solitude, it no longer rouses ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... and abused his power. At the period when he ran riot in his Satire, society had not yet caught him within its pale; and in the time of his Cains and Don Juans, he had again broken loose from it. Hence, his instinct towards a life of solitude and independence, as the true element of his strength. In his own domain of imagination he could defy the whole world; while, in real life, a frown or smile could rule him. The facility with which he sacrificed his first volume, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... those people. I found an unoccupied camp chair—one of Sim's, which he rented for funerals—and carried it to a dark spot in the shrubbery near the border of the parsonage lawn and not far from the gate. There I seated myself, lit a cigar and smoked in solitude. ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... his chance of life. Appalling too was the rapidity with which men caught the infection, dying like sheep if they attended on one another, and this was the principal cause of mortality. When they were afraid to visit one another, the sufferers died in their solitude, so that many houses were empty because there had been no one left to take care of the sick; or if they ventured they perished, especially those who aspired to heroism. For they went to see their friends without thought of themselves and were ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... scarcely any sculpture; and this, attracting my attention by a favourite contrast of colour, retained it by its own beauty. It was a Dryad, or some nymph of the woods, who had just glided from the solitude of the trees behind, and had sprung upon the pedestal to look wonderingly around her. A few large brown leaves lay at her feet, borne thither by some eddying wind from the trees behind. As I gazed, filled with a new pleasure, a drop of rain upon my face made me look up. ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... from Thurnall. From himself, indeed, he has not escaped; but the company of self is, on the whole, more pleasant to him than otherwise just now. For though he may turn up his nose at tourists and reading-parties, and long for contemplative solitude, yet there is a certain pleasure to some people, and often strongest in those who pretend most shyness, in the "digito monstrari, et diceri, hic est:" in taking for granted that everybody has read his poems; that everybody is saying in their hearts, "There goes Mr. Vavasour the distinguished ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... disposition and is remarkable in the ship for his gentleness and the mildness of his discipline. This circumstance, added to his well-known integrity and dauntless courage, made me very desirous to engage him. A youth passed in solitude, my best years spent under your gentle and feminine fosterage, has so refined the groundwork of my character that I cannot overcome an intense distaste to the usual brutality exercised on board ship: I have never ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... in the depths of her heart a feeling of apprehension. The stillness, the remoteness, the tremendous solitude, and yet—those tracks. ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... now I am just off again to the latter place, having only returned here on Saturday. Nor can I say when I shall be back here for any long while: the Kerriches are at Lowestoft; and I have yet one or two more Sea-trips to make before October consigns me once more to Cold, Indoor Solitude, Melancholy, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... appealing, but there seemed nowhere else to go. There was the library, of course, but it was a dismal place on a Sunday evening, and he didn't want to read. But, as it proved, he needn't have considered avoiding the room, for Tom didn't return after supper, and Steve finished his letter home in solitude. At eight he went over to Al Brownell's room in Torrence, not because he was especially interested in the project to be discussed, but because he had agreed to attend the gathering and was glad, besides, to get away ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... the village. But Miss Millikin said he always did prefer mountain scenery, and no doubt it was tiresome for him to have to potter about as they did. And Master Don began to give them less and less of his society in the daytime, and to wander from morn to dewy eve in solitude and independence; though whether he went up mountains to admire the view, or visited ruins and waterfalls, or spent his days hunting rabbits, no one at Applethwaite Cottage could ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... Johnson, and the fastidiousness of Gray, the critic who passed his days amidst "the busy hum of men," and the poet who mused in cloistered solitude, have fatally injured a fine natural genius in Shenstone. Mr. Campbell, with a brother's feeling, has (since the present article was composed) sympathised with the endowments and the pursuits of this poet; but the facts I had collected seemed to me to open a more important view. I am aware ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... ten mornings there. Mr. Charteris had overrated her modest literary abilities so far as to ask her advice in certain details of his new book, which was to appear in the autumn, and they had found a vernal solitude, besides being extremely picturesque, to be conducive to the forming of really matured opinions. Moreover, she was assured that none of the members of the house-party would misunderstand her motives; people were so much ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... age glided on in solitude and peace amid his favourite pursuits, at his rectory of Aston, where he had taught his two acres of garden to command the inequalities of "hill and dale," and to combine "use with beauty." The sonnet in which he dedicated his poems to his patron, the Earl of Holdernesse, describes ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... need not quote his utterances on these matters; except for their unusual violence, they were sufficiently commonplace. Had Snarley been more highly developed as "a social being" he would, no doubt, have been less intolerant; but solitude had made him blind on that side of his nature; for his fellow-men in general he had little sympathy and less admiration, his soul being as lonely as his body when wandering before the dawn on ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... the road to salvation. He then tried another Brahman at Ragagriha, the capital of Magadha or Behar, who had 700 disciples, and there too he looked in vain for the means of deliverance. He left him, followed by five of his fellow-students, and for six years retired into solitude, near a village named Uruvilva, subjecting himself to the most severe penances, previous to his appearing in the world as a teacher. At the end of this period, however, he arrived at the conviction that asceticism, far from giving peace of mind and preparing the way to salvation, was a ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... rough mountain where I stood, Homesick for happiness, Only a narrow valley and a darkling wood To cross, and then the long distress Of solitude would be forever past,— I should be home at last. But not too soon! oh, let me linger here And feed my eyes, hungry with sorrow, On all this loveliness, so ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... settled heavily upon him. Dantes was a man of great simplicity of thought, and without education; he could not, therefore, in the solitude of his dungeon, traverse in mental vision the history of the ages, bring to life the nations that had perished, and rebuild the ancient cities so vast and stupendous in the light of the imagination, and that pass before the eye ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... queen could lodge. Queen Philippa was once admitted there as a guest, but a tumult arose, and she had to flee half dressed for safety to the castle. St. Cuthbert was a hermit to whom the sight of human beings was a weariness and the solitude of the desert a delight. He was born in Scotland about the middle of the seventh century, of humble origin, and passed his early years as a shepherd near Melrose. He adopted an austere life, found a friend in the abbot of Melrose, and ultimately sickened of an epidemic, his recovery ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... sacredness and freedom, its privacy, lies outside the knowledge and experience of polygamists. Kind and neighbourly as the women were, they could not understand the desire of Mary to be sometimes by herself. She needed silence and solitude; her spirit craved for communion with her Father, and she longed for a place in which to pour out her heart aloud to Him. As often as politeness permitted, she fled to the ground reserved for her, but they followed her there, and in desperation ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... the plant they feed on, so do the thoughts on which the mind habitually nourishes itself impart their own peculiar colouring to the mental and moral constitution. On your thoughts, when you are alone, when you wander through the fields, or by the roadside, or sit at your work in useful hours of solitude, depends very much the spirit you are of when you again enter into society. If, for instance, you think over the trials of temper which you are inevitably exposed to during the day as indications of the unkindness of your fellow-creatures, you will not fail to exaggerate mere trifles into serious ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... recovery. And so, when the paroxysms came on, each more severe than the last, they were fresh agonies, and greater disappointments to him. This afternoon, he sat in the drawing-room, unable to bear the solitude of his study, or to employ himself in any way. He buried his head in his arms, which lay folded on the table. Margaret's heart ached to see him; yet, as he did not speak, she did not like to volunteer any attempt at comfort. ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... a whole Babylon of tongues in his head, like the three learned executioners of Putnam's Magazine, the devil would get his kingdom and leave him a beggar. Now as this savage can only speak his own tongue, you may fancy the solitude that must yawn between us. We may say what we please of one another without rendering our actions dangerous. Faith, as my Secretary says, it seems to me we may entertain a mutually magnificent opinion of each other without ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... their way into the city from the camp of the besiegers. And to give greater credit to the rumors, eight or ten human heads were rolled into the plaza, in whose blood-stained visages the Spaniards recognized with horror the lineaments of their companions, who they knew had been dwelling in solitude on their estates! 15 ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... always be time enough to tell her the truth. For that matter, a few days later her husband, who had been locked up for years, died in the asylum at Ville d'Avray, and Hortense, who had been recommended by her doctor a short period of rest and solitude, went to stay with a relation living near the village of Bassicourt, ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... of the Regency, Henry of Navarre contrived to fly, in spite of the plans laid to entrap him by the Queen-mother, to his own country; his wife Margaret accompanied him to his solitude; and paid the penalty of her lightness of conduct at the court of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... brought that was portable. There was nothing, from the small boy to the brass kettle, that could not be more satisfactorily polished off, in full view of one's world, than by one's self, in seclusion and solitude. Justice, at least, appeared to gain by this passion for open-air ministration, if one were to judge by the frequency with which the Villerville boy was laid across the parental knee. We were repeatedly called ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... summits, enveloped in cloud, and stretching heavenwards; huge broad crests, heathy and verdant, or torn by fissures and broken by the storms; deep ravines, jagged, precipitate, and darksome; and valleys sweetly reposing amidst the sublimity of the awful solitude. There are dark craggy mountains around the Grey-Mare's-Tail, echoing to the roar of its stupendous cataract; and romantic and beautiful green hills, and inaccessible heights, surrounding and towering over St Mary's Loch, and the Loch of the Lowes. To the sublimity of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... bronze, in photographs of original portraits, paintings, and stereoscopic views. We have seen him on horseback and on foot, on the war-path and on skates, playing the flute, cussing his troops for their shiftlessness, and then, in the solitude of the forest, with his snorting war-horse tied to a tree, ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... authority here, as it nearly always does, caused petty and undignified squabbles, which were in later days elaborated into unseemly paper conflict. It is painful if somewhat amusing to read of the acrid disputes as to the course, under the very shadow of the majestic Australian Alps whose solitude had only then been first disturbed by white men; and how, on agreeing to separate and divide the outfit, it was proposed to cut the only tent in two, and how the one frying-pan was broken by both men pulling at it. Thomas Boyd, who was the only survivor of the party in ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... told you, when you made the first loan, that I would investigate this ore. I did so years ago. Specimens were sent by me to Baltimore and tested there. Not content with that, I have studied the manufacture of iron for myself—the society of Princess Anne not grudging me plenty of solitude!—and I know that every ton of iron you make costs more than you get for it. The bog ore is easy to smelt; but it is corrupted by phosphate of ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... it now. She did feel very tired, exhausted in every fibre of her body, confused and weary in mind. She put her head in the kitchen door only long enough to say that she was not hungry, and went upstairs to fling herself on her bed, grateful for silence and solitude at last. ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... people to go to unfrequented places and to the seashore and to the hills for retirement; and you yourself have often wished this solitude. But, after all, this is only a vulgar fancy, for it is in your power to withdraw into yourself whenever you have a mind to it. One's own heart is a place the most free from crowd and noise in the world ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... an unexpected impulse. There were not wanting in the American army men who had a higher ideal of duty than mere devotion to the business of their profession. The officer commanding the First Artillery, Colonel Frank Taylor, possessed that earnest faith which is not content with solitude. "This good man," says Dabney, "was accustomed to labour as a father for the religious welfare of his young officers, and during the summer campaign his instructions and prayers had produced so much effect ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... be so much pleasanter than to be alone in such a great empty space! I should think one would hardly care to shine if its light wasted itself in the monstrous solitude of the sky. Does not a single star seem very lonely ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... continue to exist where there are no cows but the cows on the chimney-pots; nothing redolent of Pan but pan-tiles; no crop but stone crop? Who could bear to drag out a life in such a spot? Who, I ask, could endure it?' and, having cross-examined solitude after the most approved precedents, at considerable length, Mr. Pickwick thrust his head out of the ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... brave fellows fought off their terrible fate, sometimes hoping, oftener despairing, and at last, one after another, they lay down far apart in the dreary solitude of the wilderness, to ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... pitch of the horrible. I believe it occasionally, ever henceforth, keeps haunting the highly poetic temperament of his Majesty, nor ever quits him again at all; stalking always, now and then, through the vacant chambers of his mind, in what we may call the night-season (or time of solitude and hypochondriacal reflection),—though in busy times again (in daylight, so to speak) he impatiently casts it ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... signs. However, I lowered a boat. I could not see another living being anywhere. Yes. He had a book in his hand. He looked exactly as we have always seen him—very neat, white shoes, cork helmet. He explained to me that he had always had a taste for solitude. It was the first I ever heard of it, I told him. He only smiled. What could I say? He isn't the sort of man one can speak familiarly to. There's something in him. One ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... greater. We have it in our power, without arms and without rebellion, to fight against you with the weapon of a simple divorce. We can leave you to wage your wars alone. If such a multitude should withdraw into some remote corner of the world, you would doubtless tremble at your own solitude, and ask, 'Of whom ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... in his tenth year, leaving a large family of children to the sole care of his father. He had, however, considerably profited by the instruction already received at school; and having derived from his mother a taste for music and a relish for books, he invoked the muse in solitude, and improved his mind by miscellaneous reading. His father contracted a second marriage when Alexander had reached his thirteenth year; and it became necessary that he should prepare himself for entering upon some handicraft employment. He ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... did he mean by saying that something funny would happen? Was he contemplating—? Above all, his dread of being unaccompanied! Mr. Heard was aware that persons of unbalanced mind are apt to experience before some critical outbreak a pathetic horror of solitude, as though, dimly conscious of what was about to happen, they ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Guire, the Mayor of Bordeaux. I was taken prisoner in the battle where my dear and illustrious master, Sevinus, lost his life. For three years I endured the miseries of slavery; at length I broke my chains and escaped to this desert, where I have sustained myself in solitude ever since. Your features recall to me my beloved sovereign, in whose service I was from my infancy till his death." Huon made no reply but by embracing the old man, with tears in his eyes. Then Sherasmin learned that his arms enfolded the son of the Duke Sevinus. He led him to his cabin, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... in this lowly strain he went home to the solitude of his lodging, sat down before his tea-table, thrust both hands into his pockets, and, in a by no means unhappy frame of mind, brooded over ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... should find some way of letting the stranger—a man of talent unquestionably—understand that there were in the society to which he was invited, spirits of a more select sort, who felt worthy to intrude themselves on his solitude. ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... Greco, who wallow in the warm sand or rush with joyful screams into the tepid surf. The population must have increased not a little since those days, nearly a century ago, when the unhappy Shelley could find peace and solitude in his darkest hours of unrest upon these shores, where it would be well-nigh impossible for a twentieth-century poet to espy a retreat for soothing his soul in verse. Yet somehow, during the drowsy noontide rest when the active life of the South ceases, if only for an hour or so, it is ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... the blind, and they receiv'd their sight, The dead young man, and raised him from his bier, Reproved the raging Sea, and it was still: Deeds that his boyhood heard unheedingly. But here, in this strange solitude of pain With different voice they spake. And as he read, The fragrance of the mignionette he loved, Press'd 'tween the pages, ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... had been spending all these years in cities," was Craig's explanation, "I should have felt like plunging at once with you into the solitude. But as it is—well, I wondered if we shouldn't like to hear some great music to-night. Do you feel as I do—that there are times when nothing but ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... smiled painfully at the king's proposition, but he accepted his leave of absence, and withdrew to the solitude of his rooms. His heart was wounded unto death, his soul was agonized. Youth soon laid its healing balm upon his wounds and closed them; anger and contempt dried his tears, and soothed the ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... more than the persons engaged in it. The moon with the clouds driving over counts for more than a mere indication of time or weather; it is essential to the story, and lends itself to the malignity of the adversary in casting the spell of fear upon Grettir's mind. The solitude of Drangey, in the concluding chapters of Grettis Saga, the cliffs, the sea and the storms are all much less exceptional; they are necessary parts of the action, more closely and organically related to the destiny ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... reported of Merlin, that after King Vortigern was driven from power, he sought to amuse him in his solitude by bringing strange sights before his eyes, and causing pleasant sounds to salute his ears. The king supposed he heard melodious music in the air, and imagined that shepherds and shepherdesses, in rustic costume, danced before him. At times eagles and falcons were seen pursuing ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... pleasure not to be left unrecorded, the sweetness of the great fountain playing in the square before the church, and the harmony in which the city grew in every direction from it, like an emanation from its music, till the last house sank away into the pathetic solitude of the Campagna, with nothing beyond but the snow-capped mountains lighting up the remotest distance. At the same moment I experienced a rapture in reflecting that I had underpaid three hackmen during my stay in Rome, and thus contributed ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... anything prettier than the little church of Kirk Madden there. It stands in a perfect seclusion of shadowy trees,—a plain little church, that would not be at all remarkable in another situation, but is most picturesque in its solitude and bowery environment. The churchyard is quite full and overflowing with graves, and extends down the gentle slope of a hill, with a dark mass of shadow above it. Some of the tombstones are flat on the ground, some erect, or laid horizontally on low pillars or masonry. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... somewhat like that of the whitethroat; some birds have a few more notes than others. Sitting very placidly on the top of a tall tree in a village, the cock sings from morning to night. He affects neighbourhoods, and avoids solitude, and loves to build in orchards and about houses; with us he perches on the vane of a ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... is propensity, an attraction irresistible. Their minds run, we say, in that direction, and they creep or lie still, if turned in another. The young shepherd will toss eggs, spin platters, and balance knives, year after year, in solitude, with a patient energy and endurance able to command ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... saw-mill hard at work, Mrs. Tiralla would sit by her child's bed. She would hold her hand—a small, narrow, delicate-looking hand with blue veins—and they would whisper together about the joys of Paradise. Whilst all around was joyless—the dark night, the lonely farm buried in deep snow, the solitude in which a soul so often gets lost—those two would whisper together about the joys ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... so often came to work for her; or between my infant brother and the little spotted dog Brutus of which I was so fond. There was no time, or place, or circumstance, in which they did not occasionally make their appearance. Solitude and silence, however, were more favorable to their appearance than company and conversation. They were more pleased with candle-light than the daylight. They were most numerous, distinct, and active when I was alone and in the dark, especially when my mother had laid ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... ere the first of June, and in the solitude of her chamber Maggie was weeping bitterly. "How can I tell them who I am?" she thought. "How bear their pitying scorn, when they learn that she whom they call Maggie Miller has no right to that name?—that Hagar Warren's blood is flowing in her veins?—and ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... went to the kitchen. Lettice, the maid-of-all-work, was frying cakes in solitude. "Mrs. Greymer had taken Mrs. Bailey into the library," she told the countess with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... May, had lost all fear of the solitude, and with seeking eyes she wandered farther and higher day by day. She brought back wonderful flowers and ferns to Ridge House; she grew eloquent about the "lost cabins" as she called them, secreted from any gaze but that which, like hers, sought ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... carriages or strolling along the grass by the lake would have been a pleasant evening even to people more blase than X., nor did that person enjoy it any the less from catching sight of Usoof and Abu standing as lonely amongst this mass of strangers as ever he was wont to feel when brooding in his solitude at home, while they sang songs in the ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... Holy Scriptures are like a thin stream, beginning from the very fountain-head of our race, and gradually, but continuously, finding their way through an extended solitude into times otherwise known, and into the general current of the fortunes of mankind. The Homeric poems are like a broad lake, outstretched in the distance, which provides us with a mirror of one particular age and people, alike full and marvelous, but which is entirely disassociated by ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... shall have given you up, Diana, I shall love my own solitude as never before. For you will dwell there and he who has lovely thoughts ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... greater portion of it was little better than a dreary waste, inhabited by a few scattered people of questionable character, whose poverty prevented their living in any better neighbourhood, or whose pursuits and mode of life rendered its solitude desirable. Very many of the houses which have since sprung up on all sides, were not built until some years afterwards; and the great majority even of those which were sprinkled about, at irregular intervals, were of the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... more awkward feelings than I can well bear up against. My voice sunk and my head strangely confused. When I begin to form my ideas for conversation expressions fail me, even in private conversation, yet in solitude they are sufficiently arranged. I incline to hold that these ugly symptoms are the work of imagination; but, as Dr. Adam Ferguson,[412] a firm man if ever there was one in the world, said on such an occasion, What is worse than imagination? As Anne was vexed and frightened, I allowed her ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... and eaten. A religious idea was cultivated into a mania and the taste for human flesh was developed.[1097] Here also we find the usage that shamans ate the flesh of corpses, in connection with fasting and solitude, as means of professional stimulation.[1098] Preuss emphasizes the large element of sorcery in the eating of parts of a human sacrifice, as practiced in Mexico.[1099] The combination of sorcery, religious ritual, and cannibalism deserves very careful attention. The rites of the festival ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... "Must run up and put on my shoes—slippers so cold." In the not very romantic solitude of the locked bathroom she sat on the slippery edge of the ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... from the State. And even the revival of the free labourer would only have been exhibited on the most modest scale; for such legislation would have done nothing to reclaim arable land which had degenerated into pasturage, and to reawaken life in the great deserted tracts, whose solitude was only broken by the rare presence of the herdsman's cabin. To raise a cry for the restoration of free labour on this exiguous scale might have exposed a legislator to the disappointment, if not derision, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... that we knew each other too well. Though accustomed to gather together in my rooms of an evening in London, we had each his private chambers to retire to, but in the Arcadia solitude was impossible. There was no ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... startled," was my quick rejoinder, glad to explain my tremulousness in this way. "Let us go in," I added, feeling that I must escape to some place of solitude, if only to hide my shame ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... ardour of composition is often disproportioned to the merit of the work; and the public sometimes, nor unjustly, avenges itself for that forgetfulness of its existence which makes the chief charm of an author's solitude,—and the happiest, if not the ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... year, modes or periods of life, or by accidental diseases, passes from one of these temperaments to another. Thus a long use of too much fermented liquor produces the temperament of increased sensibility; great indolence and solitude that of decreased irritability; and want of the necessaries of life that ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... blighted. If you happen to possess a few ornaments which are not too expensive, distribute them among your girl-friends; say, in a repressed voice, that you do not care for such things any more. Let it be known that there is one day in the year which you prefer to spend in complete solitude. Have a special affection for one flower; occasionally allow your emotions to master you when you hear music. The hair-ornament belongs exclusively to the lower middle-classes, but wear one article of jewellery, a souvenir, which either never opens or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... space!—for the drag of the physical having been stricken off, I could enter literally into infinity and eternity. But let me tell precisely what happened that night when at precisely 10:08 in the solitude of my apartment room, I swallowed half an ounce of Relin and stretched myself out on the bed, well knowing that I was taking incalculable risks, and that insanity and even death were by no means remote possibilities of the road ahead. But let ...
— Flight Through Tomorrow • Stanton Arthur Coblentz
... bar—of Froggat Edge—until our eyes ached from the desire to distinguish the one from the other. There was Tor this, and Dale that, and such a hall and such a hamlet; but the stillness by which we were surrounded had become so delicious that we longed to enjoy it in solitude. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... through several years, when he was sent to school in Salem. "I lived in Maine," he said, "like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there I first got my cursed habits of solitude." During the moonlight nights of winter he would skate until midnight all alone upon Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows of the icy hills on either hand. When he found himself far away from his home and weary with the exertion of skating, he would sometimes take refuge in a ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... remained at the house, not going to the Wheatsheaf, the Liberal inn, with the others; preferring to await in privacy and indeed in solitude the momentous result of the poll. She had come down to Harsh with the two girls in the course of the proceedings. Julia hadn't thought they would do much good, but she was expansive and indulgent now ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... grief and solitude of the pure, there comes, at times, a strange and rapt serenity,—a sleep-awake,—over which the instinct of life beyond the grave glides like a noiseless dream; and ever that heaven that the soul yearns for is coloured by the fancies of the fond human heart, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... father, I believe it will be your best not to come to my wedding. The clutter and dingle-dangle noise of marriage guests will but disturb you, and break the serious fancies of your brain. You love repose, with solitude and silence; I really believe you will not come. And then you dance but indifferently, and would be out of countenance at the first entry. I will send you some good things to your chamber, together with the bride's favour, and there you may ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... that also," replied the Major; "but still there is solitude even with this company, and I ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... shotgun and the Bible worked side by side in the conquest of the Plains; the smell of powder was often the only incense on the altars, and human blood was sprinkled for holy water. Fort Wallace, with the Stars and Stripes afloat, looked good to me after that ten days in the trackless solitude. And yet I was disappointed, for I thought our quest might end here with nothing to show in results for our pains. I did not know Forsyth and his band, as the next twenty days were to ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... nature, which were unintelligible to me, perhaps because I have always been more woman than artist. He always put the theater first. He lived in it, he died in it. He had none of what I may call my bourgeois qualities—the love of being in love, the love of a home, the dislike of solitude. I have always thought it hard to find my inferiors. He was sure of his high place. He was far simpler than I in some ways. He would talk, for instance, in such an ingenuous way to painters and musicians that I blushed for him. But I know now that my blush was far more unworthy than ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... yet she hides romance under her cross; pale and idle she fades away and loses in the silence of the nights that beauty that stifles her and which has need of the open air. Then she is suddenly taken from this solitude, knowing nothing, loving nothing, desiring everything; an old woman instructs her, a mysterious word is whispered in her ear, and she is thrown into the arms of a stranger. There you have marriage—that is ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... the deer and the moose remained. The streams and lakes were full of trout; otter and sable still attracted the trapper, and here and there a lumberman lingered alone in his cabin, enamored of the solitude and the wild pursuits to which a hardly gentler industry had introduced him. Such lumber as could be drifted down the streams had long been cut and driven out, and the woods were left to the hunter and his prey, and to the incursions of sportsmen ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... astonishment when I received the answer. Who do you imagine, of all the people in the world, Buonaparte had raked forth to secure the Imperial Diadem upon his brow, to fight his battles, and deal in blood, but—A monk of La Trappe. For three years had he resided in Silence and solitude in this most severe society when Buonaparte suppressed it, and insisted that all the Noviciate Monks in No. 36 should sally forth and henceforth wield both their swords and their tongues; with lingering steps and slow our poor companion went. In the battle of ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... that Rienzi himself visited the scene of his exploits without detection among the crowds of pilgrims. But he was destined to reappear in a more public and disastrous manner. In his solitude his courage and his ambition revived, and he meditated new plans for restoring freedom to Rome and to Italy. The allegiance to the Church, which he had professed in 1347, was weakened by the conduct of Clement VI and by the influence of the Fraticelli, and he resolved in the future to ally ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... had never felt less sleepy. Nor did a book and a pipe before his gas log seem quite what he wanted. The vagabond streak in him was awake, the same potent wanderlust that as a boy had driven him to the solitude of the forests and the hills. This morning it sent him questing down Powers Avenue to that lower town where the derelicts of the city floated without ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... slowly emerged from the canyons and enfolded forest and hill-slope in her silent embrace. The glittering stars appeared in the heavens, and the bright, full moon rose over the eastern mountain crests. The silence, the profound solitude, the ever-present wastes of snow, the weird moonlight, and above all the hollow moans of the dying boy in her lap, rendered this night the most impressive in the life of Mrs. Foster. She says she never beholds a bright moonlight ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... his wife. Once or twice it flashed across him that he was confessing himself with an extraordinary frankness to a woman he had made up his mind to dislike. But the reflection did not stop him. The balmy night, the solitude, this loveliness that walked beside him so willingly and kindly—with every step they struck his defences from him; they drew; ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... surroundings of the place being very similar to those of the spot where I had quenched my thirst, and bathed on the previous evening—the principal difference being that here there was no waterfall. Instead, however, of this being a picturesque solitude, it had all the bustle and animation of a camp upon ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... glad you had the park gate seen to this afternoon," she said. "You know how nervous I am. My childhood in Scotland was very lonely, and ever since then I have had a vague terror of solitude and darkness." ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... visitor is stopping at So-and-so's. The district incontinently throws itself at her feet, and worships Beauty in her person. Each of the few married ladies round invites the stranger to come and stop with her, after a bit, and to lighten her heavy load of solitude, and her craving for a companion of her own sex. And Miss Ada finds it impossible to refuse these invitations; and so the district entraps her, and keeps ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... honour, he resigned himself to the charms of Mildred's society. Every day brought some new excursion to scenes of surpassing beauty, in companionship with one of the most lovely and gifted of women. Winston's theory, that what is most beautiful in nature ought to be enjoyed in solitude, was entirely overthrown. He cared to visit nothing unless in her society; nor was there any scene whatever in which her presence was not felt to be the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... Scribleri, a descendant of the famous Martinus, has expressed his suspicions of the text being corrupted here, and proposes instead of "all on" reading "alone", alleging, in favour of this alteration, the effect of solitude in raising the passions. But Hiccius Doctius, a high Dutch commentator, one nevertheless well versed in British literature, in a note of his usual length and learning, has confuted the arguments of ...
— English Satires • Various
... After the quiet and solitude of Kilmore Castle, to be at Chessington College seemed like plunging into the world. It was almost bewildering to meet so many companions, all of whom were busily occupied with employments into which she had not yet been initiated. It was an especially fresh ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... she led a life of the utmost happiness, and then death deprived her of both husband and daughter. Maria Theresa renewed her offers; but Carolina preferred to pass the rest of her days in solitude. She accepted a small pension from the Empress, and retired to a small cottage at Vitry, near Paris. After a quiet existence here for some few years more she passed away, without ever having regretted her refusal to rejoin the brilliant ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various
... want of sleep was followed by disease, and, their terrors increasing, by death. For in the daytime as well, though the apparition had departed, yet a reminiscence of it flitted before their eyes, and their dread outlived its cause. The mansion was accordingly deserted, and condemned to solitude, was entirely abandoned to the dreadful ghost. However, it was advertised, on the chance of someone, ignorant of the fearful curse attached to it, being willing to buy or to rent it. Athenodorus, the philosopher, came ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... Raymond! follow me!" The vision was three times repeated, and Raymond was convinced that it was an intimation direct from heaven. Having put his affairs in order, he set out on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James of Compostello, and afterwards lived for ten years in solitude amid the mountains of Aranda. Here he learned the Arabic, to qualify himself for his mission of converting the Mahometans. He also studied various sciences, as taught in the works of the learned men of the East, and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... glory, who are detained from us by a regard for those lives so dear to their country;—Goethe, whom the great creations of poetical fancy have not prevented from penetrating the ARCANA of nature, and who now in rural solitude mourns for his princely friend, as Germany for one of her greatest ornaments;—Olbers, who has discovered two bodies where he had already predicted they were to be found;—the greatest anatomists of our age—Soemmering, ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... week this thought recurred to her more than once. By means of some diplomatic maneuvering, the two friends managed to have their single rooms exchanged for a double. After moving in, Lila seized a moment of solitude to plan a beautiful cozy corner for Bea. She dragged her own desk into a dusky recess and set Bea's at an artistic angle at the left side of the sunniest window. Just as she was hanging her favorite ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... heading in my loneliness into those prodigious leagues of ocean which lay stretched under the sky. Whilst the hull floated she was something to hold on to, so to say, something for the eye amid the vastness of water to rest upon, something to take out of the insufferable feeling of solitude the poisonous sting ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... another fault, and that was a great irritability of temper, and many and many an hour of solitude have I passed in that closet, looking out at the quiet pine trees, and listening to the soft sighing of the winds through their branches, till my heart has been softened, and the spirit of love and gentleness has returned. I remember one instance in particular of my conquest there ...
— Two Festivals • Eliza Lee Follen
... for three days Saul had been lying lonely in the dark, fasting, and revolving many things in his heart. No doubt his Lord had spoken many a word to him, though not by vision, but by whispering to his spirit. Silence and solitude root truth in a soul. After such a shock, absolute ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... beach fringed in sand hills lay before the camp. Beyond rolled the ocean, itself a melancholy solitude droning under an azure sky. There were beach birds running in flocks down the sand as the white-ridged foam receded; overhead an Indian file of pelicans winged ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... thing that strikes me is the lifeless solitude of the bush. . . . There is a deep fascination about the freedom of ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... the situation, from Jeff's point of view, had grown more desperate as Ophelia's passion for the fascinating sojourner grew. He had even lost his relish for victuals which, with Jeff, was indeed a serious sign. In long periods of self-imposed solitude he had devised and discarded as hopeless various schemes for bringing discomfiture upon his latest and most dangerous rival. For a while he had thought somehow, somewhere, to rake up proofs of the interloper's former ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... "for it is I alone who bring misfortune on my people. A sinister fatality pursues me, and has pursued me from my earliest youth. Only one star ever rose on my troubled firmament, and that was you, Louisa. But it will not set, even though I carry out my purpose. In solitude and sorrow it will still shine hopefully upon me. My childhood was wretched, and embittered by long-continued sufferings; while I was crown prince, I had to submit to the affliction of not possessing ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... the anchorage derives its name, 'The Granite Pillar.' No appearance of human life or labour exists around; the whole is a desert, over which these columnar formations—resembling a city of the Titans, crumbling slowly into dust—hold an empire of solitude and death. The imagination is oppressed with a sense of utter desolation that withers every ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... stirs the feeling infinite, so felt In solitude, where we are least alone; A truth, which through our being then doth melt, And purify from self: it is a tone The soul and source of music, which makes known Eternal harmony, and sheds a charm, Like to the fabled Cytherea's zone, Binding all things with beauty; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... himself, "In the course of the autumn of the same year, I walked frequently into the woods, that I might think of the subject in solitude, and find relief to my mind there; but there the question still recurred, 'Are these things true?' Still, the answer followed as instantaneously, 'They are;' still the result accompanied it—surely some ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the depths of the forest as a wounded animal would have done, he cast himself upon the bosom of the earth at the foot of a great tree, to find solitude and consolation. ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... rest, in most eyes, as they certainly were in mine—I can not describe—you may conjecture—the cold, fainting sickness which overcame my soul. I could have lain myself down upon the lone, midnight rocks, and surrendered myself to solitude and storm for ever. ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... Mr. Sewell, "this sort of experimenting is too bad—too much nerve here, too much solitude, too much pine-whispering and sea-dashing are going to the making up of this ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums—how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude—utter solitude without a policeman—by the way of silence—utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... younger sister, with glistening eyes, as they sat in cheerless solitude before the blazing logs in their own room, "I have something to tell thee, and I shall mayhap want your aid ere I ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... at least forty, and she had been almost as ugly at fifteen. As her means were not equal to her weight, no one had dared redeem her from the purgatory of solitude. Until quite lately she still entertained hopes that one of the elderly Indian bachelors, who came to pass their declining years in Lancia, would ask her hand in marriage; and these hopes were founded on the fact that these gentlemen frequently contracted alliances with the daughters ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... and many as were the tears they had shed in the wretched school, still knew no other home, and had formed for it a sort of attachment which made them weep when the bolder spirits fled, and cling to it as a refuge. Of these, some were found crying under hedges and in such places, frightened at the solitude. One had a dead bird in a little cage; he had wandered nearly twenty miles, and when his poor favourite died, lost courage, and lay down beside him. Another was discovered in a yard hard by the school, sleeping with a dog, who bit at those who came to remove him, and licked ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... do? If so, thou wilt pity poor Mithridata, whose nature was most ardent, expansive, and affectionate, but who, from the necessity under which she laboured of avoiding as much as possible all contact with human beings, saw herself condemned to a life of solitude, and knew that she was regarded as a monster of pride and exclusiveness. She dared bestow no kind look, no encouraging gesture on any one, lest this small beginning should lead to the manifestation ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... weariness, for the inhabitants of that country never say, "I am tired." But there, as here, the law of change is the secret of happiness, and the joy that never ends is woven of mingled strands of labour and repose, society and solitude, music and silence. Sleep comes to them not as it does to us, with a darkening of the vision and a folding of the wings of the spirit, but with an opening of the eyes to deeper and fuller light, and with an effortless outgoing of the soul upon broader currents of life, ...
— The Spirit of Christmas • Henry Van Dyke
... of June the Cimariotes were sent back to the East, and after their departure the garrison of the fort was reduced to its usual number. I began to feel weary in this comparative solitude, and I gave way to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... now known as the Temple of Ko-sho-ji.[FN77] It was at this time that many Buddhist scholars and men of quality gathered about him but the more popular he became the more disgusting the place became to him. His hearty desire was to live in a solitude among mountains, far distant from human abodes, where none but falling waters and singing birds could disturb his delightful meditation. Therefore he gladly accepted the invitation of a feudal lord, and went to the province ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... dominions, who then went to a city called Malapur or Meliapour, on the coast of the dominions of Narsinga, and was followed by the Christians of Coulan, and even by many of the idolaters. He is said to have retired into a solitude in the mountains, where he died, and whence his body was removed for interment in a vault of the church he had built at Coulan. This church is now deserted and entirely overgrown with trees and bushes, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... replied Lady Gertrude, smiling; "our present happy circle has too many attractions to permit his resting quietly in solitude, and, with Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton's kind permission, will join us here ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... solitude of nature, she could sing to her heart's content while deftly weaving her snares or setting her traps. On one of these trips she caught a glimpse of a black fox, and suspecting him to be the thief who had been robbing her snares of some ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... quickly away; then he sought the solitude of the desert, and, having collected into a bag as much food and as many eggs as he could carry, he ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... political animal, and only in an organized society can he attain his highest development. It is not good for man to be alone; each individual needs the companionship and co-operation of his fellows; no one in solitude can attain even to self-realization. Hence, government is more than a restraining power; it is also an organizing power. It not only prevents its subjects from injuring one another; it places them where they can most effectively aid one another and work together for the common weal. It frees their ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... myself the precious word that I am dear to your Majesty again and again; and that my love to your Majesty was returned. How often I shall think of this in my altered life, in my solitude of heart! The admiration I have ever felt for the Prince has been one of the great pleasures of my life; that he should be your Majesty's husband, a constant thankfulness. I feel I owe him much, and that great approbation and admiration are not barren feelings. ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... flying in circles. My guide, who has a holy horror of customs officers and gendarmes, remained at the top of the cliff, because of a small custom-house station on the shore, while I bent my steps toward a tall red building which reared its three stories aloft in that blazing solitude, the windows broken, the roof-tiles in confusion, and over the rotting door an immense sign: 'Caisse Territoriale. Carr—bre—54.' The wind and sun and ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... sharpened; and having done, he gathered up what was left, and lay at her feet with his eyes fixed upon an old grey stone. She, too, sat brooding. The endless babble and noise of the water had hardened the sense of its being a life in that solitude. The floating of a hawk overhead scarce had the character of an animated thing. Angelo turned round to look at her, and looking upward as he lay, his sight was smitten by spots of blood upon one of her torn white ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... chagrin of most of the gentlemen and the unexpected relief of some of her own sex, Maruja, after an evening of more than usual caprice and willfulness, retired early to her chamber. Here she beguiled Enriquita, a younger sister, to share her solitude for an hour, and with a new and charming melancholy presented her with mature counsel and some younger trinkets ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... fate, abused himself, abused politics, his system, abused everything he had boasted of and prided himself upon, everything he had held up to his son as a model; he declared that he believed in nothing and then began to pray again; he could not put up with one instant of solitude, and expected his household to sit by his chair continually day and night, and entertain him with stories, which he constantly interrupted with exclamations, "You are for ever ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... measuring wit with a master, and mortified at their discomfiture, the knights of the green bag drove on, leaving the victor to solitude and his ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... not know that when she had looked after the retreating figure of her protector as he descended the stairs that night that he was really carrying away on those broad shoulders the character she had so laboriously gained during her four years' solitude. For when she came down the next morning the concierge bowed to her with an air of easy, cynical abstraction, the result of a long conversation with his wife the night before. He had taken Helen's part with a kindly cynicism. "Ah! what would you—it was ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... over SAGE'S head, and went on. So did fragments of audience, the latter towards the door, till, almost in solitude, there rolled forth the treasured peroration. This bad, but worse followed, when immediately succeeded an obscure Irishman, whom CHAPLIN vaguely remembers a few years back as a Committee Clerk, or something of that kind. Benches swiftly filled up, and an assembly that vaunts itself ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... Governor, abandoned the city in a mass. No gloomy or excited crowd, as at Vienna and Berlin, thronged the streets to witness the entrance of the great conqueror, when on the 14th of September Napoleon took possession of Moscow. His troops marched through silent and deserted streets. In the solitude of the Kremlin Napoleon received the homage of a few foreigners, who alone could be collected by his servants to tender to him the submission of ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... On the solitude, unsignalled, Broke a man Who, in air as if at home there, Seemed to scan Every fire-flecked nook of ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... a lake where the cool waves break And softly fall on the silver sand; And no stranger intrudes on that solitude, And no voices ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... it was impossible not to think with respect of the self-devotion of these men, who, after having for many years partaken (in a greater or less degree) of the habits and comforts of a civilised life, had thus voluntarily withdrawn themselves once more to their stern yet beautiful solitude (truly, as Gray calls it, a locus severus), there to practise the severities of their order, without, it may be supposed, any possessions or means, except what they were themselves enabled to throw into a common stock; ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 26. Saturday, April 27, 1850 • Various
... resolution of a fond woman, eager to keep her faith unbroken to him of her heart's first and only attachment. For you, oh Lope, my tears will flow; you alone will be the theme of my constant meditations—my fervent prayers. In my hopeless solitude, I may perhaps feel one glimpse of consolation;—the idea that you may be happy, and that even in the glittering scenes of ambition, you will sometimes revert to the cheerless abode of Theodora. ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... set his face as a flint. He did not feel that his work was done. At length the newspaper man and his company started eastward. Livingstone went some distance with them, and then, a broken old man, "clad in faded gray clothes," with bowed head and slow step, returned to his chosen solitude. Five months later the relief party reached Zanzibar, and news of Livingstone's safety and whereabouts was flashed to all parts ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... the face familiar from my earliest childhood and associated with homely household cares, there lay upon the pillow strange, august features, stern and withdrawn from all the small affairs of life. That sense of solitude, of being unsheltered in a wide world of relentless and elemental forces which is at the basis of childhood's timidity and which is far from outgrown at fifteen, seized me irresistibly before I could reach the narrow stairs and summon ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... mist creeping along the sides of the narrow, wild valley, as far as the enormous mass resting there, in the background, like a cap on the heights of Jenne, while the mighty voice of the Anio filled the solitude. Jeanne climbed upwards in silence, without replying to Noemi's questions. Noemi was becoming more and more alarmed by her silence, by her pallor, by the nervous twitching of her arm, by the sight of her lips pressed tightly together, to keep back her sobs. ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... the soldier was mortified at the thoughts of seeing his assistance unnecessary, and eagerly objected to the retirement, as a scheme that would blast the fairest promises of fame and fortune, and bury his youth and talents in solitude and obscurity. This earnest opposition on the part of Gauntlet hindered our adventurer from forming any immediate resolution, which was also retarded by his unwillingness to part with the garrison upon any terms, because he looked upon it as a part of his inheritance, which he could not dispose ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... hanging there on the wall, side by side with the forgotten Ares, blood-red,—the goddess reveals herself to the lad, poring through the dusk by taper-light, as at once a virgin, necessarily therefore the creature of solitude, yet also as the assiduous nurse of children, and patroness of the young. Her friendly intervention at the act of birth everywhere, her claim upon the nursling, among tame and wild creatures equally, among men as among gods, nay! among the stars (upon ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... misery to experience another. He wandered about all day through a vast and trackless wood, where his flesh was continually torn by thorns and brambles. He grew hungry, but could find no food in this dreary solitude. At length he was ready to die with fatigue, and lay down in despair in a large cavern ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... still after the door had closed, and to keep him company in his solitude back swarmed all those dreary thoughts that Bob's cheery presence had for the time being banished; with a rush they came to ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... made, the student recreates himself with the contemplation of his conquest, and forbears another incursion, till the new-acquired truth has become familiar, and his curiosity calls upon him for fresh gratifications. Whether the time of intermission is spent in company, or in solitude, in necessary business, or in voluntary levities, the understanding is equally abstracted from the object of inquiry; but, perhaps, if it be detained by occupations less pleasing, it returns again to study with greater alacrity than when it is glutted with ideal pleasures, and surfeited with ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
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