"Retrospection" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... safely commenced, and that she was leaving, not only her worries, but her very identity behind her—Lady Ingleby had leaned back with closed eyes in a corner of her reserved compartment, and given herself up to quiet retrospection. ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... nonsense, of course. But for his dropping into the office and casually picking up the thread of his acquaintance with Kitty, Molly—the memory of her—would have gone on dimming. Actions, tremendous and world-wide, had set his vision toward the future; he had been too busy to waste time in retrospection and introspection. Thus, instead of a gently rising and falling tide, healthily recurrent, a flood of mixed longings that was swirling him into uncertain depths. Those emeralds had bobbed up just in time. The chase would serve to pull him out ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... leaping as straight as I did with Anna to what we thought the inevitable. I based no calculation on all Mrs. Harbottle had gone back to, just as I had based no calculation on her ten years' companionship in arms when I kept her from the three o'clock train. This last was a retrospection in which Anna naturally could not join me; she never knew, poor dear, how fortunate as to its moment was the campaign she deplored, and nothing to this day can have disturbed her conviction that the bond she was at such magnificent pains to strengthen, ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... generously relieves? Your greatest Uneasiness, said he, arose from the Narrowness of your Circumstances; but mine proceeds from an internal, and much deeper Cause. Pray, Sir, said the Fisherman, has Orcan robb'd you of your Wife? This Interrogatory put Zadig in a Moment upon a Retrospection of all his past Adventures. He recollected the whole Series of his Misfortunes; commencing from that of the Eunuch and the Huntsman, to his Arrival at the Free-booter's Castle. Alas! said he, to the Fisherman, Orcan, 'tis true, deserves severely to be punish'd: But for the Generality, we find, ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... have tried to persuade them that they must be lonely, but they know better than that. Old men love a great deal of quiet and of gentle meandering retrospection; and David and Sandy have each of them forty years' history to tell the other. Then they are both very fond of young ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... Janus, since thou hast a brace, To my lady once be kind; Give her half thy face behind. God of Time, if you be wise, Look not with your future eyes; What imports thy forward sight? Well, if you could lose it quite. Can you take delight in viewing This poor Isle's[2] approaching ruin, When thy retrospection vast Sees the glorious ages past? Happy nation, were we blind, Or had only eyes behind! Drown your morals, madam cries, I'll have none but forward eyes; Prudes decay'd about may tack, Strain their necks with looking back. Give me time when coming on; Who regards him when he's ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... monopolise all the respectable offices of the government, all the functions of emolument, dignity, and power, themselves." "How can they expect pardon of God, if they withhold oblivion from their repentant fellow creatures." "Retrospection should not be pushed beyond the period of arrival, but then subsequent good behaviour should be subject to the severest tests. The re-convicted offender, branded with the lasting impressions of infamy, should be rendered ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... they? Each little tribe is a book unread before, and full to the brim of fascination. When they are confronted with the picture of an elephant in a current magazine, they are all excitement. The book is carried eagerly to the old man sunning himself down in the anchored oomiak. Animation, retrospection, agitation chase from his seamed face all traces of drowsiness. "We used to know it." "Our fathers have told us." "This land-whale with its tail in front once lived in the land of the Innuit." We are now the ones to become excited. ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... never was released, Who never once let out his beast, But kept, through all the seasons' round, Silence unbroken and profound. No Prophecy, with ear applied To key-hole of the future, tried Successfully to catch a hint Of what he'd do nor when begin 't; As sternly did his past defy Mild Retrospection's backward eye. Though all admired his silent ways, The women loudest were in praise: For ladies love those men the most Who never, never, never boast— Who ne'er disclose their aims and ends To naughty, ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... retrospection has coloured my view too darkly when I say that my brief experience in Fleet Street made me feel that the Daily Gazette party, the supporters of "The Destroyers" (as naval folk had named the Government of the day) ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... pathos—a kind of tender retrospection in Anne Valery's manner as she touched the brown curls and smoothed the neat dress, which—riding hat and skirt having been laid aside or tucked up—made a pretty mountain-maiden out of Nathanael's wife. Agatha never could understand the peculiar fondness with which ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... clever craftsman who made fagottos of extraordinary size; Doppelmaier, who chronicles in these eulogistic terms, wrote nearly two centuries after the supposed invention of the fagotto, the value of which was realized later by retrospection. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... fiercely, turning upon her, and astounding Mrs. Knoxwell by the sudden burst of angry words; for she had not spoken for more than an hour, in which the blacksmith's wife had administered occasional appropriate sentences of stinging condolence and well-meant retrospection. "I ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... 'Tis a fragrant retrospection—for the loving thoughts that start Into being are like perfume from the blossom of the heart; And to dream the old dreams over is a luxury divine— When my truant fancy wanders with that old ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... imagination improvising its creations from local and temporal things, instead of speaking from a sublime stand-point and linking series of facts with processions of ideas. Sources of history, guides of philosophical retrospection, they may come some time to be; yet one cannot check a feeling of pity for the future historian who, in searching the "Pickwick Papers" for antiquities, finds himself bothered and confused by all the undisciplined witches ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... into two groups, of three each. The first to include (1) Progressive retrospection, viz., a gradually acquired power to look backward in time towards the origin of things; (2) Progressive foresight, or power of prophecy; (3) Gradual extinction of desires and attachments ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... grandfather was, I cannot inform the reader, nor is it, perhaps, of much consequence. My father was a man who invariably looked forward, and hated anything like retrospection: he never mentioned either his father or his mother; perhaps he was not personally acquainted with them. All I could collect from him at intervals was, that he served in a collier from South Shields, and that a few months after his apprenticeship was out, he ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... been a haunting suggestiveness to me about the expression Rue du Temps Perdu—the Street of Lost Time. Down this shadowy vista we all come to peer with tear-dimmed eyes sooner or later. Usually this pensive retrospection is the premonitory sign that one is nearing the last milestone before the downhill side of life begins. But to some this yearning backward glance comes early; they feel its compelling power while still in the vigor of middle life. Why ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... Run As you go through Life Two Sunsets Unrest Artist's life Nothing but Stones Inevitable The Ocean of Song "It might have been" Momus, God of Laughter I Dream The Sonnet The Past A Dream Uselessness Will Winter Rain Life Burdened Let them go Five Kisses Retrospection Helena Nothing Remains Comrades What Gain? To the West The Land of Content Warning After the Battles are over And they are dumb Night All for me Into Space Through Dim Eyes The Punished Half Fledged The Year The Unattained In the crowd Life and I Guerdon Snowed Under "Leudemanns-on-the-river" ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... been a fool to give way to retrospection. He was no exception to the general rule; most men mismanaged their careers—more or less. Still, he was bound to confess that he had done so rather more than less. Oh well, he would settle down to his fate. As for that other girl in the Yukon miner's dress, who would keep intruding ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... thought of a watcher in the poor forsaken woman. You may easily imagine that a double interest was attached by her to the ways and companionships of those with whom she had been acquainted in the days which, when present, she had considered hardly-worked and monotonous, but which now in retrospection seemed so happy and unclouded. Accordingly, she had, as we have seen, known where to meet with John Barton on that unfortunate night, which had only produced irritation in him, and a month's imprisonment to her. She had also observed that he ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... night is a form of retrospection, or else it is a form of impulsive exclamation, direct from the blood, and unbalanced. Because the active physical consciousness of the night is the blood-consciousness, the most elemental form of consciousness. Vision is perhaps our ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... form of the new illusion we wake to is seen in the exclamation that so often follows retrospection: "Oh, what a fool I was!" As a rule, nothing can be more conceited than this use of the past tense. A few people, perhaps, can look back complacently upon "a well-spent life" (wherein all the years have been laid out to advantage, and every hour has been made ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... it developed. And "Do you remember——?" she in turn was asking later. It was to seem to him in retrospection that neither for the next half-hour began a sentence without this formula. It was as if they sought to use it as a master-word wherewith to reanimate the happinesses and sorrows of their common past, and as if they found the charm was potent to awaken the thin, powerless ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... financial schemes as intended to strengthen the general government, centralize power, and make the treasury the controlling lever of public affairs, the chief of which, with almost autocratic puissance, might direct everything to suit his own political views. With this impression, retrospection made him angry and resentful. He regarded the manner in which Hamilton had procured his aid in effecting the measure of assumption as a snare by which he had been entrapped, and he characterized the measure itself as a fiscal manoeuvre, to which ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... to our centenary. Unluckily, the last quarter is the most difficult. But sursum corda! When I look back and about me, I am astonished to have got so far. The great pleasure of advancing years is retrospection. One sees such groups and groups of pleasant people. The prospective eyes of youth see nothing so real or charming. I fancy I am sitting with you on a flowery bank of heather in the Highlands, about August 15th, talking of these things. ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... Sheeta's great rage, his frantic efforts to free himself from the entangling strands, his uncanny screams that were part hate, part anger, part terror. He smiled in retrospection at the discomfiture of his enemy, and in anticipation of another day as he added an extra ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... puzzled, and his ardent feelings chilled. He loved, admired, almost worshipped the beautiful girl from whom consent had been extorted, and her quiet, cold manner, troubled his sorely. Glimpses of the real truth dawned into his mind. He let his thoughts go back, and went over again, in retrospection, every particular of their intercourse—dwelling minutely upon her words, looks, manner and emotions at the time he first pressed his suit upon her. The result was far from satisfactory. She had ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... with remorse for her tardiness and appalled and heart-wrung. The foot of the berth was by the door. There old Joy stood silently weeping. At its head knelt her mother in prayer and on it lay her playmate brother peacefully gasping out his life. A flash of retrospection told her he must have had the malady long before he had confessed it and that something—something earlier than her singing—yes, and later—not twins nor Gilmores nor river—oh, something, what was it?—had kept her—these ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... of thoughts half indignant, half self-compassionate, came reproach and a great wave of tenderness filial. She saw, as with a sudden gift of retrospection, her mother's long battle with inadequacy, and how it had aged her; saw, too, that the battle had been fought unselfishly, since she knew her mother's declaration that she could contentedly "go back to nothing" was no mere petulant boast. ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... all the more open to healthy innovation for being thus firmly rooted in the ground of prescription. The public mind received what was new the more freely because it loved the old. So that hope and anticipation walked with the bolder pace, inasmuch as memory and retrospection were still their cherished companions. In a word, men's tenacity of the past gave them the larger and brighter vision of the future. Because they had no mind to forsake the law of their fathers, or to follow the leading of "sages undevoutly free," therefore ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... infliction of mental or bodily exertion, I had known the exalted destiny of creation in the effort to be useful. Like an exile turning to take a last glance at the blue outlines of his native land, I, too, have lingered to look back; yet the pleasant retrospection of three happy months is at an end; and I now dream of its delight as one who feels that, in the swift transition of existence, such peace of mind can never ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... conference, by thanking Antony for putting Dec'imus Brutus to death; who, being abandoned by his army, had been taken, as he was endeavouring to escape into Macedo'nia, and was beheaded by Antony's soldiers. 3. They then entered upon the business that lay before them, without any retrospection to the past. ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... friends imagine me to be the same man whom they knew as Gilbert Pollingray a month back? I see the change, I feel the change; but I have no retrospection, no remorse, no looking forward, no feeling: none for others, very little, for myself. I am told that I am losing fluency as a dinner-table talker. There is now more savour to me in a silvery laugh ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ugly baby. It can bear a little depreciation now, because it can look forward to the time when it will far outdo its successful rival. And the pretty baby's glory is soon over. It becomes only a memory which rather irritates than soothes. For after all, retrospection is not so pleasant ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... pleasures which friendship and kindness possess the highest powers of bestowing. Easy, gay, and airy, she only rose to happiness, and only retired to rest; and not merely heightened was her present enjoyment by her past disappointment, but, carrying her retrospection to her earliest remembrance, she still found her actual situation more peculiarly adapted to her taste and temper, than any she had ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... went by, this touch of reserve wore off, and was succeeded by her usual frankness or gaiety. In her eyes appeared, at times, a new thoughtfulness, but for no longer period than the quick passing of a summer cloud over a sunny meadow. This half-light of brief conjecture or vague retrospection only mellowed the depths of her gaze, and Barnes alone ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... to assume that one effect has been common with us as a result of this effort at retrospection, and that it has been to leave us more than ever amazed at the stupendous change which one brief century has made in the material ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... the old gentleman, with an air of retrospection, "I don't recall nothin' of the sort in Wolfville. We're too much in a huddle, anyway; thar ain't room for no sech fracas, no how. Now the nearest we-alls comes to anythin' of the kind is when the new dance- ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... farther account of the subject, which I am about to treat, such a retrospection of the circumstances and situation of the settlement, at the conclusion of my former Narrative, as shall lay its state before the reader, seems necessary, in order to connect the ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause; simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory and adopt my own early idea, as my heir ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... sounded a trifle shaky, but it was a laugh nevertheless. Something in Elfreda's brusque tones acted as an antidote to her retrospection. She had been more or less ghost-ridden ever since her return to Overton. She now resolved to shake off that pleasantly melancholy sensation and "be up and doing with a ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... the most cruel—the mind feeding on itself with the rapacity of a cormorant, when the conscience quickens its activity and feeds its longings. Happily for Adrienne, she had too many positive cares, to be enabled to waste many minutes either in retrospection, or in endeavors to conjecture the future. Far—far more happily for herself, her conscience was clear, for never had a purer mind, or a gentler spirit dwelt in female breast. Still she could blame her own oversight, and it was days before her self-upbraidings, for thus trifling with what she conceived ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... watched lengthening tree-shadows creep across the reddish-brown carpeting of straw, and in the long nights when sleeplessness betrayed her into the clutches of torturing retrospection, she waited and longed for the pearly lustre that paved the east for the rosy feet of dawn; listened to the beating of Nature's heart in the solemn roar of the Falls two miles away, in the strophe and anti-strophe ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... then went away to a co-educational boarding school. Here for the first time I became happy. A girl of my own age, of fine character and noticeable refinement, fell in love with me and caused me to reciprocate. On retrospection I believe this to have been a genuine and beautiful love on both sides. After a few months, however, our relation, at my initiative and against my friend's will, became a physical one. We expressed our affection by mutual caresses, close embraces and lying ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the literature of the stage. All these great names are written in the book of death. All that part of old Boston to which I have referred—the scene equally of Gilbert's birth and youth and first successes and of his tender retrospection—has been swept away or entirely changed. Gone is the old Federal Street Theatre. Gone that quaint English alley with the cosey tobacconist's shop which he used to frequent. Gone the hospitable Stackpole where many a ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... spending his last hours at the University in the dust and ashes of self-condemnation and regretful retrospection No farewell orgie celebrated his leave-taking. Only one of his friends was invited to his room that night and he no denizen of "Rowdy Row," but the quiet, irreproachable librarian. To this gentle guest The Dreamer confided his past sins ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... orders to burn houses, but did not however appear to wish to carry them rigourously into effect. It is believed he burnt but two; one was the house of Lieut. Dickson, who was with Marion; the other belonged to Nathaniel Dwight, of Waccamaw neck. Upon a retrospection, Col. Watson's character appears in a favourable point of view; and, as far as was consistent with orders, his ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... old man's health. Write, do write to me now and then; we are now old acquaintance, and perhaps few people have lived so much and so long together, with less cause of complaint on either side. The retrospection of this is very pleasant, and I hope we shall never think on each ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... morbid retrospection. I think I can say at this time there was, with the exception of certain Indian nabobs, hardly a wealthy man left in the world who did not owe in some way the retention of his riches to me. I controlled more than half the steel industry; I owned outright ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland. I made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts; but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee. Blank and dreary on retrospection I call them: they were not so to me then. They were the eyry of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy. I wrote then—but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... any better use to which the Passover anniversary can be put than to retrospection? "And when your children shall say unto you, What mean you by this service? ye shall say, It is the sacrifice of the Lord's passover, when he smote the Egyptians, and delivered our houses." So the old story is told again, being thus kept ever green in memory; and, in telling ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... away a marauding hen, she sallied out upon the waste near the wagon. It then became evident that the traveler had seen her, and was not averse to her interest in his movements, although he had not changed his attitude of savage retrospection. An occasional ejaculation of suppressed passion, as if the memory of some past conflict was too much for him, escaped him even in this peaceful occupation. As this possibly caused the young girl to still hover timidly in the distance, ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... towering piles, the strange, black, desolate pathways that are the world to-day. The figure that one discerns in the compositions beginning with the "Dwarf Suite," Opus 16, is one that we all have known intimately a space. These pieces are not youth seen through the golden haze of retrospection. They are the expression of groping, fumbling youth as it feels and as it feels, itself to be. They are music young in all its excess, its violence, its sharp griefs and sharper joys, its unreflecting, trembling strength. The spring ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... was in the bow of a big tug, heading down stream, having left orders that he must not be disturbed. As the green landscape slid by he gave himself over to retrospection, and his mind wandered comfortably back through all the stages of the past years. Surveying the folk of St. Marys, he concluded that only Filmer and Bowers had been active supporters from the start. He would remember that. Came a voice at his elbow. ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... vices of his own youthful days with shame and sorrow; and which, instead of conceding to young people to be wild and thoughtless, as a privilege belonging to their age and circumstances, prompts him to warn them against what had proved to himself matter of such bitter retrospection! Thus, throughout the whole of life, some means or other are devised for stifling the voice of conscience. "We cry peace while there is no peace;" and both to ourselves and others that complacency is furnished, which ought only to proceed ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... I have a moment's time to regard my inner self in the mirror of consciousness. No mental analysis now; no long hours of retrospection, no tete-a-tete interviews with my soul. At times I felt as if I had lost my identity. I was a slave of the genie Gold, releasing it from its prison in the frozen bowels of the earth. I was an automaton turning a crank in the frozen stillness ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... era presents a great contrast to that of the age of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. No longer do we find men engaged in the processes of positive, constructive thought, but we have presented to our view an age of retrospection, of literary criticism, and, to a great extent, of intellectual exhaustion. Men live amid the ruins of the systems constructed by their ancestors, and each one attempts to form for himself, out of the scattered ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... mine to her—several thousands, the history of a whole human life—and gave them back to me when she was upwards of seventy and I of sixty years old; they are the principal aid to my memory in my present task of retrospection. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... bitter! Every paltry hind seems but to breathe to mock you. Slow, indeed, is such a mind to credit that the never-failing resource can at least be wanting. But so it is. Like a dried-up fountain, the perennial flow and bright fertility have ceased, and ceased for ever. Then comes the madness of retrospection. ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... proper state of mind, to return good for evil, without either boasting of their lenity, or enumerating their wrongs, the best way of inducing an oblivion of the past, is to avoid such intercourse as may revive painful retrospection. It is impossible for those who have minds capable of appreciating the delicacies of friendship, to re-unite the bonds of esteem and confidence, when they have been violently rent asunder by cunning or treachery. Beside, Barton admitted ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... all the seeds away, Betty snuggled into one of the comfortable reed chairs and gave herself up to her own thoughts. Since leaving Washington, the novelty and excitement of the trip had thoroughly occupied her mind, and there had been little time for retrospection. ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... begun to give him her full attention. She had a feeling that she had seen the man somewhere before, but where and under what circumstances she could not recall. It was no moment for retrospection and ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... estate, and the finest chateaux soon pall on those who possess nothing but the sight of them. The beauties of nature seem rather squalid compared to the representation of them at the opera. Paris, by retrospection, shines from all its facets. Unless some particular interest attaches us, as it did in Blondet's case, to scenes honored by the steps and lighted by the eyes of a certain person, one would envy the birds their wings and long to get back to the endless, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... strange, with Barwood's habits of retrospection and continual casting about for the rare and curious, if the subject matter of his conversation with the old painter at Gruyere's had not taken some hold upon his imagination. But to explain the rapidity ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... Railway Mail Service. This young man was Theodore N. Vail. His energy and enterprise so impressed Hubbard that he immediately asked Vail to become General Manager of the company which he was then forming to exploit the telephone. Viewed from the retrospection of forty years this offer certainly looks like one of the greatest prizes in American business. What it signified at that time, however, is apparent from the fact that the office paid a salary of $3500 a year and that for the ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... in such haste, he had stood up to such a strain, covered so much ground in the last twenty-four hours, that he wanted to think how it had all come about. Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the cool fragrance of the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy retrospection. ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... the blacksmith exchanged looks on hearing the old soldier give utterance to this singular retrospection of the past. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... from their veins the very life blood she gave to them. To drive you and them mad with the expected horror of such visitations—to make your nights hideous—your days but so many hours of melancholy retrospection. Oh, you know not the world of terror, on the awful brink of which you stand, when you talk of making ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... to make a dash for the outside world, fighting his way through if necessary. Looking back over the ground, he wondered how he could have been deceived at all by the unconventional American. In the clear light of retrospection he now saw how impossible it was for her to have been the princess. Every act, every word, every look should have told him the truth. Every flaw in her masquerading now presented itself to him and he ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... this occasion to a scene so fraught with harrowing memories, was explicable only by the supposition that its painful surroundings were in consonance with the bitter and despondent mood in which she found herself; and, in the gloom that this retrospection shed over her countenance, her features seemed to grow wan and angular. For several days she had been sorely disquieted by the realization of Miss Jane's rapidly failing strength; and the probability of her death, which a year ago would have been entirely ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... morning, or rather late in the next day, after his night's work, he was no longer able to tell himself that the world was all right with him. Who does not know that sudden thoughtfulness at waking, that first matutinal retrospection, and prospection, into things as they have been and are to be; and the lowness of heart, the blankness of hope which follows the first remembrance of some folly lately done, some word ill-spoken, some money misspent,—or perhaps a cigar too much, or a glass of brandy and soda-water which he ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... travelled over, loses in review all the rugged and wearisome annoyances that rendered it scarcely bearable in the journey. But it is hardly worth while to speculate upon the causes of an absurdity which a little candid retrospection will do more to dissipate than whole folios of philosophy. We can easily understand a man who sighs that he was not born a thousand years hence instead of twenty or thirty years ago, but that any one should encourage a regret that his lot ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... sex, to apply for assistance and protection to one who will feel for the indignity that has been shown her. How will his generous nature shudder, when he hears that she is on the point of being dragged to a loathsome dungeon, for want of the paltry sum of fifty pounds! Retrospection may convince the man of her heart, that her soul is superior to mercenary considerations; else, she would not now be reduced so low in the power of her enemies: she scarcely knows what she writes—her heart bleeds—her brain ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... points, as it were, in her life, and she always would have, no matter how long she lived. She came to places where she stopped mentally, for retrospection and forethought, wherefrom she could seem to obtain a view of that which lay behind, and of the path which was set for her feet in advance. She saw the tracked and the trackless. Once, going with Abby Atkins and Floretta in search of early spring flowers, Ellen had lingered and let them go ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... peaceful, with the yellow autumnal sun shining upon its moss-grown roof, with no sound to break the deep silence, save the low, continuous warbling of a solitary mockingbird which, perched upon an overhanging bough, seemed to review its past joys in low, sweet notes of retrospection. ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... when disconnected from the ultimate test of the conduct it inspired. The serene and soothing touch of history also aroused old enthusiasms, although some of their manifestations were such as one smiles over more easily in retrospection than at the moment. I fancy that it was no smiling matter to several people in our party, whom I induced to walk for three miles in the hot sunshine beating down upon the Roman Campagna, that we might enter the Eternal City on foot ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... de Bourbon, Duchess de, no longer guided by La Rochefoucauld, she loses herself in aimless projects and compromises herself in intrigues without result, 3; the most ill-treated of all the political women of the Fronde, 36; a retrospection of her career during the Fronde, 36; though no longer the brilliant Bellona of Stenay, she does not dream of separating her fate from that of Conde, 38; her conversion to be dated from her sojourn in the convent ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... and music and the sunlight had a living value—were no longer mere reminders of past enjoyment. There was something now to live for which stirred him continually to anticipation. He lived in that, not in retrospection; the difference is considerable to any so old as he. The pleasures of the table, never of much consequence to one naturally abstemious, had lost all value. He ate little, without knowing what he ate; and every day grew thinner and more worn to look at. He was again a 'threadpaper'; ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... never wholly satisfied; there is always some hidden barb. The child wears the mother's skirts enviously while the mother mourns her youth. Expectation leads us to the dividing line of life, and from there retrospection carries us to the end. Experience teaches us that fire burns and that water quenches; beyond this we ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... however, be borne in mind that this thrilling dramatic effect is fully experienced only in retrospection, or when there is knowledge of what ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Retrospection—he could not break the crowding spell of it, twist mentally as he would; and the counter-thought was dimly suicidal. The sea there; a few strides would carry him to the end of the bridge, and then—oblivion. And the girl would not permit him to enact ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... from years of living among arid pleasures, the ability to conserve every happiness that she chanced upon to its last drop. Claire's invitation to be one of a distinguished group fed her vanity long after her daughter had outworn the delights of retrospection. The memory of this incident filled Mrs. Robson's thoughts, her dreams, her conversation. Gradually, as the days dragged by, bit by bit, she gleaned detached details of what had transpired, weaving them into a vivid whole, for ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... moods of retrospection Milly would say: "However I didn't get into trouble as a girl, with no mother, and such an easy, unsuspecting father, I don't know. Think of it, my dear, out almost every night, dances, rides, picnics, theatres. Perhaps ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... antipathies symbolized by the battered scabbard before him, his course of love would run smoothly. It was just at this point that the trouble between them arose. She was looking back; he, forward. He could not enter into her sad and bitter retrospection, feeling that this was morbid and worse than useless. Remembering how cruelly she and her kindred had suffered, he made great allowances for her, and had often tried to soften the bitterness in her heart by reminding her that he, too, had lost kindred and property. ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... believed it founded in truth. Let us advert to his own words in that very preface. "Among the inquiries to which the ardour of criticism has naturally given occasion, none is more obscure in itself, or more worthy of rational curiosity, than a retrospection of the progress of this mighty genius in the construction of his work; a view of the fabrick gradually rising, perhaps from small beginnings, till its foundation rests in the centre, and its turrets sparkle in the skies; ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... painful to me, in many ways, to recall the dreary years I passed in bondage. I would gladly forget them if I could. Yet the retrospection is not altogether without solace; for with those gloomy recollections come tender memories of my good old grandmother, like light, fleecy clouds floating over a ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... last paragraphs of a book, and for a book's people only, to look back upon an ordered and proportionate progression to what one has become; in life the thing arrives with scantier dignity; and one appears, in retrospection, less to have marched toward any goal than always to have jumped and scrambled from one stepping-stone to another because, however momentarily, "just this or that poor impulse seemed the sole work ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... designs, not only would the liberties of that age have been sacrificed, but those also of succeeding periods. May the Protestants of this kingdom never be forgetful of the glorious Arm by which our salvation from papal thraldom and error was alone effected! It is generally allowed that a retrospection into the transactions of past ages is as a glass, in which the clearest view of future events may be obtained: for, by comparing things together, we shall arrive at this conclusion, that men of the same principles will always, either directly or indirectly, aim ...
— Guy Fawkes - or A Complete History Of The Gunpowder Treason, A.D. 1605 • Thomas Lathbury
... remember well that I dashed up the Strand, and dashed down a singular little shed, from which emanated the steam of tea, and a sharp, querulous scream of "All hot—all hot! a penny a pint." I see, now, by the dim light of retrospection, a vision of an old woman in the kennel, and a pewter pot of mysterious ingredients precipitated into a greengrocer's shop, "te virides inter lauros," as Vincent would have said. On we went, faster and faster, as the rattle rung in our ears, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... personal reminiscences, which are published under the title of "Retrospection and Introspection," much is told of herself in detail that can only be touched upon ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... past] paleontology, paleography, paleology^; paleozoology; palaetiology^, archaeology; paleogeography; paleoecology; paleobotany; paleoclimatoogy; archaism, antiquarianism, medievalism, Pre-Raphaelitism; paleography. retrospect, retrospection, looking back, memory &c 505. laudator temporis acti [Lat.]; medievalist, Pre-Raphaelite; antiquary, antiquarian; archmologist &c; Oldbuck, Dryasdust. ancestry &c (paternity) 166. V. be past &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... contrary, retrospection makes for hollow eyes, and introspection is tinged with bitterness. Keep your face to the future if you would have your ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... and likely to surprise us more in the end. Everything has been found untenable. Theories and systems are shaken by the great upheaval. Civilization has become a question instead of a postulate. All human thought is undergoing a process of retrospection, drawn by a desire to find a new and stable beginning. Take down Spencer and Comte or Lecky and Kidd from your bookshelf and try to settle down to a contented contemplation of the sociological tenets of the past. You will fail, for you will feel that this is a new world with burning ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... briefly hinted at her family sorrow; she was not one at any time to dwell upon her feelings, nor to indulge in morbid retrospection, but it was true that the loss of that dearly loved son and brother had clouded the bright home atmosphere. Mrs. Lambert had borne her trouble meekly, and had striven to comfort her husband who had ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... geranium-tub. We did not interrogate him. There was something numbing to me in the thought of this quiet ordinary little man telling us in a quiet matter-of-fact tone that love had nearly killed him. We had no comment worthy of the fact. He looked across the valley for a moment as though lost in retrospection. ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... seems to have been, at least among us, the author of a species of composition that may be denominated local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection, ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... in his eyes betokening an effort of retrospection, withdrew the key from the lock and entered the garage, Gatton and I following. There was a sky window to light the place, so that when Bolton reclosed the door we could see well enough. His movements were as follows: Relocking the door ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... very beautiful, Antipas with melancholy retrospection reflected; and he fancied her more luminous than the twelve signs of the zodiac, lounging nonchalantly in a palanquin that a white elephant with swaying tail balanced on his painted back. And even as she returned, with a child perhaps, to the griffons of the fabulous ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... away with the vain retrospection, The bond of affection no longer endures. Too late you may droop o'er the fond recollection, And sigh for the friend ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... surround yon rustic cot, While yet I linger here, Adieu! you are not now forgot, To retrospection dear. Streamlet[5] along whose rippling surge, My youthful limbs were wont to urge At noontide heat their pliant course; Plunging with ardour from the shore, Thy springs will lave these limbs no more, Deprived of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... accuse me of having shown too much fondness—of having dwelt with a too loving tenderness in my retrospection of the middle ages. But in the course of my studies I have found much to admire. In parchment annals coeval with the times of which they speak, my eyes have traversed over many consecutive pages with increasing interest ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... tone of calm wonder and infantile trust, which will allow all the innate principles within—all God-bestowed graces which have been bruised and bowed by the tempest, to blossom gently upwards again, in "the clear shining after rain"—a breathing time in life—not too much retrospection or self-examination—keep that for the healthy and vigorous hours of the mind—but a silent basking in the light of God's presence—a time for faith, more than for labour; for general and unexpressed, more than ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... of Waverley. These introductions, written before the final inroad had been made on his powers by the united strength of physical and moral misfortune, animated at once by the last glow of those powers, and by the indefinable charm of a fond retrospection, displaying every faculty in autumn luxuriance, are so delightful that they sometimes seem to be the very cream and essence of his literary work in prose. Indeed, I have always wondered why they have not been published separately as a History of the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... leave Graustark," she said dreamily, after a long period of silent retrospection. "I've had the happiest ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... afterward in dreary retrospection how he had survived that first troublous year after his daughter's elopement, when he was so lonely, so heavy-hearted at home, so harried and angered abroad. His comforts, it is true, were amply insured: a widowed sister had come to preside ...
— His "Day In Court" - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... an insult, so obviously and obtrusively offered, to the new knightships and lordships of King James's venal chivalry and parasitic nobility, may naturally have encouraged the satirist to repeat his stroke next year—and must have astounded his retrospection, when he found himself in prison, and under threat of worse than imprisonment, together with his unoffending associates in an admirable and inoffensive comedy. It is impossible to suppose that he would not have come forward to assume the ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... pleadings, and my heart-breaking cries, as the golden calf was to the indignant denunciations of Moses. I was hurried prematurely into society, thrown into a maelstrom of gaiety that whirled me as though I were a dancing dervish, and left me apparently no leisure for retrospection or regret, or for the indulgence of the rosy dream that lay like a lovely morning cloud above and behind me. My clothing was costly and tasteful; I was exhibited at Saratoga, Long Branch, and Newport, those popular human expositions, where wealth and fashion ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the desire burnt itself out between two puffs of his cigar. Ten years ago, perhaps, this particular brand of amusement might have urged him successfully. But not now; he was done with tomfool nights. Indeed, his dissipations had been whimsical rather than banal; and retrospection never aroused a furtive sense ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... Egyptians, looking back on the past with a melancholy retrospection, confessed that "never had the valley been more flourishing or happier than under Amasis; never had the river shown itself more beneficent to the soil, nor the soil more fertile for mankind, and the inhabitated ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... from which material has been most freely drawn are as follows: Bernard's "Retrospection of the Stage"; Dr. Burney's various histories of music; Chorley's "Thirty Years' Musical Recollections"; Dibdin's "Complete History of the English Stage"; Ebers's "Seven Years of the King's Theatre"; ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... poetry. He had never touched so high a strain before, but he reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing mastery and confidence. In Venice, in Rome, in Athens, through the Holy Land, his retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional crescendo that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain, the ageless contemplation of the Sphinx. We cannot forego a paragraph or two ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... sot there lost in wistful retrospection of the view from our back door where there wuz but one object in front of me, and that wuz a plain barn with no cupolas or minarets, or towers or domes on it. No, jest a plain barn with a slidin' door enriched and bejeweled when open only by the form of my beloved pardner. And ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... philosophy was proof against her power. It would be pleasant to have that sensation again . . . no one else could give it to her in its fulness; and she could not bear to mar her mood of luxurious retrospection by an act of definite refusal. She took up her pen and wrote hastily: "TOMORROW AT FOUR;" murmuring to herself, as she slipped the sheet into its envelope: "I can easily put him off when ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... later—what were left of them by time and death and the disposition to rove. They were young and gay, then; they are patriarchal and grave, now; and they do not get excited any more. They talk of the Past. They live in it. Their life is a dream, a retrospection. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Sleepers,—if we could sleep back through the past, and awake a million ages before our own epoch, in the midst of the earliest geologic times,—there is no reason to believe that sea, or sky, or the aspect of the land would warn us of the marvellous retrospection. ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... which is beyond my reach." 'Tis often a true thing that when we sit within our dark and dismal chamber without comfort, hope or happy retrospection, there stands upon the threshold a joyous phenomenon of which we have never so much as dreamt as being in existence; and this had come to Constance. If the Duke loved her, what would it matter if Cedric did love Katherine? She could ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... world I bid farewell, My mind to retrospection give, Remote as hermit in his cell, For wisdom and wise friends I'll live." "Is Thursday's worldling, Friday's sage? Too good such news," I bantering spoke. "How oft you've vowed to turn the page, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... they might buy paper and goose-quills, or because they could not get anything to eat. Antiquity scowled sulkily out of its grave to see itself outdone; while even Posterity stood mute, gazing in gaping ecstasy of retrospection on the ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old." Here is retrospection on the part of the prophet. He thinks of all the oppressions of Israel, and recalls how God's interests have been bound up with theirs. He was not their adversary; He was their sympathetic, loving friend. He suffered with ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... Jerome, but remained standing. He stood still, and stared, with that curious retrospection into which the mind can often be diverted from even its intensest channels, at the cases of leather-bound books and the grimy medicine-bottles, green and brown with the sediments of old doses, which had so impressed him in his childhood. He saw, with an acute throb of memory, ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... my memory, I call to life again the domestic history of the six weeks. It looks, on retrospection, miserably dull and empty of incident. I wonder when I contemplate it now, how we got through that weary interval—how we bore that forced inaction, ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... never saw other tears from this King,—though in private I do not warrant him; his sensibilities, little as you would think it, being very lively and intense. "To work, however!" This King can shake away such things; and is not given overmuch to retrospection on the unalterable Past. "Like dewdrops from the lion's mane" (as is figuratively said); the lion swiftly rampant again! There was manifold swift ordering, considering and determining, at Nimburg, that day; and towards ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... gone to his room after luncheon to get some belated letters off his conscience; and when he had left her she had continued to sit in the same place, her hands crossed on her knees, her head slightly bent, in an attitude of brooding retrospection. As she looked back at her past life, it seemed to her to have consisted of one ceaseless effort to pack into each hour enough to fill out its slack folds; but now each moment was like a miser's bag stretched to ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... would have been continually reminded of what the Chisholm family expected of them; but the past seldom counts for much in the new and changeful West, where men look forward to the future. Indeed, there is something in its atmosphere which banishes regret and retrospection; and when Evelyn looked back at all, she felt inclined to wonder why she had once been so troubled by the man's satisfaction with her company. She decided that this could not have been the result of any aversion for him, and that it was merely an instinctive revolt against the part her parents ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... occasions in the lives of men which they are not inclined to dwell upon or even to speak about; which they preserve jealously, as secrets in their own hearts, selfishly indisposed to acquaint others with them lest some of the magic of the actual moment, reinduced by retrospection, may be lost in the telling. But I could not recite the history of my experiences in St. Petersburg at that time without uncovering my innermost soul, as it was affected and influenced by Zara de Echeveria, whose charm of manner, whose redundant ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... "I brought all this to bear," and to feel happy in the noble trust he placed in our self-belief that he might venture to show that kind courage without which we could never have been united. All this retrospection is expressed by his penetrating eyes it every visit. He rarely alights ; but I frequently enter the phaeton, and take a conversation in an airing. And when he comes without his precious Amelia, he indulges my Alex ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... A retrospection of this sort rarely brings much subject of exultation, when made with the rigid sincerity of secret impartiality: so much stronger is our reason than our virtue, so much higher our sense of duty ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... marvel, which vindicates, as a beautiful wonder, the statuary's art from the more Protean rivalry of pictorial skill. If we call to mind even a few of the sculptured creations which are "a joy forever," even to retrospection,—haunting by their pure individuality the temple of memory, permanently enshrined in heartfelt admiration as illustrations of what is noble in man and woman, significant in history, powerful in expression, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... the author's work, RETROSPECTION AND INTROSPEC- TION, may be found a biographical sketch, narrating experiences which led her, in the year 1866, to the dis- vii:27 covery of the system that she denominated Christian Science. As early as 1862 she began to write down and give to friends the results ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... a confused and mingled sympathy with some great political truths, which were at the bottom of every boy's heart, but nowhere else; and with the personal achievements and distinction of the chieftains of the party; when all this hubbub had subsided, and retrospection, in the course of a year, had exercised its moralising influence over the more thoughtful part of the nation, inquiries, at first faint and unpretending, and confined indeed for a long period to limited, though inquisitive, circles, began gently to ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... serenity; from that moment I ceased to enjoy a pure unadulterated happiness, and on a retrospection of the pleasure of my childhood, I yet feel they ended here. We continue at Bossey some months after this event, but were like our first parents in the Garden of Eden after they had lost their innocence; in appearance our situation was the same, in ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Modern is not usually understood to begin where the Ancient ended but to stand only for the comparatively Recent. For example, in History, the ill-defined period called the Middle and Dark Ages makes a considerable hiatus before, in the process of retrospection, we get back to a civilization which (in Europe at least) we ordinarily regard as Ancient. Again, in History, we distinguish commonly two provinces within the undoubted area of the Ancient, the Prehistoric and the Historic, the first comprising all the time to which human memory, as ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... eighteenth-century forerunners had essayed in vain. He possessed the true enchanter's wand, the historic imagination. With this in his hand, he raised the dead past to life, made it once more conceivable, made it even actual. Before Scott no genius of the highest order had lent itself wholly or mainly to retrospection. He is the middle point and the culmination of English romanticism. His name is, all in all, the most important on our list. "Towards him all the lines of the romantic revival converge." [2] The popular ballad, the Gothic ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... some years rush on; she sits in retrospection, that tally stick in hand; and thought, first hovering, would always start for her from when, returned to her career, the thing at frightful pace began to go; and then, from there, away! from scene to scene (the notches cut by reckoning ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... said Mr. Slick, "where there is nothin' to be gained, and harm done, by this retrospection, as you call it, why I think lookin' a-head is ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... eighty-two summers and his feeble body was racked by a painful malady. Yet he kept his face towards the morning. About a hundred of his letters, written after this time, have been preserved. These letters show no retrospection, no looking backward. They never mention "the good old times." As long as he lived, Franklin looked forward. His interest in the mechanical arts and in scientific progress seems never to have abated. He writes ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... propped his back against a pillar, and continued smoking carefully and economically to save his fragments of Virginia leaf, deeply absorbed in retrospection. ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... Dead, the negative justification of the soul or ghost (Lepsius "Alteste Texte des Todtenbuchs"). We have borrowed competitive examination from the Chinese; and, in these morbid days of weak introspection and retrospection, we might learn wisdom from the sturdy old Khemites. When he sings "Abjure the Why and seek the How," he refers to the old Scholastic difference of the Demonstratio propter quid (why is a thing?), as opposed to Demonstratio quia (i.e. that a thing is). The ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... skill. But my mind was made up. 'Billy,' says I to myself, 'you must let up, you've made a record; it's a long one and an honorable one. Now you must retire. Your life henceforth shall be reminiscent and its declining years shall be hallowed by the refulgent rays of retrospection.' To that resolution I have adhered steadily. People tell me that I am as young as ever; but no, they can't fool me, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... reason, I have confined my statements of theory as to method, to those which reflect my own experience; my "rules" were drawn from introspection and retrospection, at the urging of others, long after the instinctive method ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... look back on it all with the eye of fond retrospection, and contrast it with the horrifying situation into which we, all unwittingly and all unsuspectingly, were so shortly to be plunged, our sojourn in England is to me as ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... to offer excuses. From the advantage of retrospection, you can say what you want about slipshod detective work. The point remains that I'd covered the area more than cursorily and had not encountered anything ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... There was no time to think, the remainder of that evening, she was so tired she had to sleep, while her mother did not awaken her until she barely had time to dress, breakfast and reach school. There was nothing in the new life to remind her of the old. It seemed as if there never came a minute for retrospection, but her mother appeared on the scene with more work, or some ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter |
