"Brooding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and when he had given them all his reasons for thinking so, his hearers were of the same opinion; but Mr Proctor continued very doubtful and perplexed, clear though the story was. He sat silent, brooding over the new mystery, while the ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... time that the boats had turned, the whole scene had become involved in a murky twilight, through the gloom of which the brig, still with every stitch of canvas set, could with difficulty be made out. Still, although it seemed to me that the brooding squall might burst upon us at any moment, the atmosphere maintained its ominous condition of stagnation until the boats had reached within some four cables' lengths—or somewhat less than half-a-mile—of us; when, as I was intently watching their progress, I saw the sky suddenly ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... the aged Bishop eddied the brooding silence within the Cathedral. Without waiting for a reply he turned again to his table and took up a paper ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... enjoyable if the artist had taken less pains. To study her more ambitious tales is like an attempt to master some new system of psychology. The metaphysical power, the originality of conception, the long brooding over anomalies and objections—these are all there: but the rapid improvisation and easy invention are not there. Such qualities would indeed be wholly out of place in philosophy, but they are the essence ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... hear the Nameless, and descend Into the Temple-cave of thine own self, There, brooding by the central altar, thou May'st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice, By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise; For knowledge is the swallow on the lake, That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there But never yet hath dipt into ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... by the brooding silence that seemed to envelop the place, and tortured by tragic thoughts in which her father occupied a prominent position—almost crazed by the memory of what had happened during the preceding twenty-four hours—she fled across the patio ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... like the troubled sea which cannot rest.' But if I trust, my soul will become like the glassy ocean when all the storms sleep, and 'birds of peace sit brooding on the charmed wave.' 'Peace I leave with you.' 'Let not your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... amid His angels high, Spreads over all in brooding joy; On great wings borne, entranced they lie, And all is bliss ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... continually producing the same things which other people say or write. Whenever, after producing something which gives me perfect satisfaction, and which has cost me perhaps days and nights of brooding, I chance to take up a book for the sake of a little relaxation, a book which I never saw before, I am sure to find in it something more or less resembling some part of what I have been just composing. ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... attentively, and for two or three minutes was lost in thought, while some purpose of importance seemed to have gathered and sit brooding upon his countenance. He held up his finger towards his satellite, Cristal Nixon, who replied to his signal with a prompt nod; and with one or two of the attendants approached Fairford in such a manner as to make him apprehensive ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... some one, and I don't see why Grascour should not have as good a chance as another." Anderson had stalked away, brooding over the injustice of his position, and declaring to himself that this Belgian should never be allowed to ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... the camps of both that he destroyed in one night by casting firebrands into them! At last, not at three miles distance, but by a close siege, he shook the very gates of Carthage itself. And thus he succeeded in drawing off Hannibal when he was still clinging to and brooding over Italy. There was no more remarkable day, during the whole course of the Roman Empire, than that on which those two generals, the greatest of all that ever lived, whether before or after them, the one the conqueror of Italy, and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... "Still brooding on all the possible relations of his old friend to the life and the love that he has left, the poet now compares him to some genius of lowly birth, who should leave his obscure home to rise to the highest office of state, and should sometimes in the midst of his greatness, remember, as in a ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... as she was by jealousy and angry will, was the sheer longing for human help that must always be felt by the lonely and the weak. Confession, judgment, direction—it was on these tremendous things that her inner mind was brooding all the time that she sat talking to Father Benecke of the Jewish influence in Bavaria, or the last number of the ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his mind does not incline to zeal, exertion, perseverance and struggle, and he has not succeeded in his religious life' (has not broken through the bonds). And, continuing, Buddha says that just as a hen might sit carefully brooding over her well-watched eggs, and might content herself with the wish, 'O that this egg would let out the chick,' but all the time there is no need of this torment, for the chicks will hatch if she keeps watch and ward over them, so a man, if he does not think what is to be, but keeps watch and ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... sighed among the leaves, like rustling silk. The far-off drowsy drum of a grouse intruded on the vast stillness. The silence of the birds betokened a message. That mysterious breathing, that beautiful life of the woods lay hushed, locked in a waiting, brooding silence. Far away among the somber trees, where the shade deepened into impenetrable gloom, lay a menace, ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... and the watch below turned out, too restless to sleep, and all through those hours of darkness the sailors walked the decks in groups, again and again staring up at the foretopmast cross-trees, where the mysterious bulk of blackness sate, squatted, or hung motionless, like some brooding fiend, or incarnation of ill-luck, sinking by force of meditation its curses not loud, but deep, into the bottom ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... had eaten, drunk his coffee, and rested for a while, he was not so lively and talkative as on the previous day. He had been brooding and speculating ever since last summer, when the motor traffic started, and did I think it would be a good idea for him to hire three grown men, too, and build a much ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... on the verge of tumbling headlong, clinging on—how, it was impossible to guess, and flung here and there on patches of green carpet glued on to the steep hill-sides; while other peaks towered higher still, like vast calcined hay-cocks, with doubtfully dead craters still brooding internal fires, and trailing smoky clouds which, as they blew off, really seemed to be coming out ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... irritated, Ellen became at length very ready to take offence, and nowise disposed to pass it over or smooth it away. She seldom showed this in words, it is true, but it rankled in her mind. Listless and brooding, she sat day after day, comparing the present with the past, wishing vain wishes, indulging bootless regrets, and looking upon her aunt and grandmother with an eye of more settled aversion. The only other person she ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... yell of anguish as the ball cut through the midst of the pirates, a tremendous crash that followed almost instantly the report of the cannon, a sort of brooding hush, then a thunderous reverberation compared with which all other noises of the night ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... quite worth your while. The house presents only a casual side to the street—one fancies it does not take much interest in its upstart neighbors—but imagination makes us believe that it regards with brooding tenderness the lovely tidal river which winds away through the marshes to the sea. Interesting as the house is for its architectural features and for its delightful location—despite the nearness of the passing train—yet it is on neither of these ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... effect were observed by the colonists as days of fasting, prayer, and humiliation. All business was laid aside, the shops were closed, the churches opened, and the church-bells tolled as on some funeral occasion; and between praying at church, and fasting at home, and brooding over their grievances, the good people were very miserable indeed. Although they suffered great inconvenience from their observance of the non-importation agreement, yet they bore it patiently and cheerfully, ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... woman had the habit of sitting till late at night with the black chicken in her lap. The friendliness the visit was meant to show was by no means returned by Mrs. Kruse, who sat in her overheated room quietly brooding away the time. So when Effi perceived that her coming was felt as a disturbance rather than a pleasure she went away, staying merely long enough to ask whether there was anything the invalid would like to have. But all offers ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... where we were billeted reminded me strongly of my home in Donegal with its fields and dusky evenings and its spirit of brooding quiet. Nothing will persuade me, except perhaps the Censor, that it is not the home of Marie Claire, it so fits in with the ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... Now it so happens that what he would cure her of is incurable, being, in fact, eternal, divine—simple human love. So, to his pious and cynical admonitions she answers with strange inconsistency. Long brooding over his taunts will sometimes make her, to whom he is always the divinity, actually believe, despite her reiteration, that she had sinned out of obedience to him, that she really is a polluted creature, guilty of the unutterable crime ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... the same time; her different tendencies appear consecutively, not simultaneously, in exact accordance with her impulses. For Mary Stuart was never quiet an instant: even in her prison she shared in the movement of the world; her brain never ceased working; she was brooding over her circumstances, her distress and her hope, how to escape the one and realise the other: sometimes indeed there came a moment of resignation, but only soon to pass away again. She throws all her thoughts ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... not love Godfrey, but his conversation amused her, and helped to divert her mind from brooding over unpleasant thoughts. She received him with kindness, for his situation claimed her sympathy, and she did all in her power to reconcile him to the change which had taken place in his circumstances. ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... with much show of special regard, and never was soft and tender with her. But, on the other hand, he did not now love her the less because she opposed his wishes. He was a constant, undemonstrative man, given rather to brooding than to thinking; harder in his words than in his thoughts, with more of heart than others believed, or than he himself knew; but, above all, he was a man who having once desired a thing would ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering. There was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... consummation of what opium can do for human nature. I, whose disease it was to meditate too much and to observe too little, and who upon my first entrance at college was nearly falling into a deep melancholy, from brooding too much on the sufferings which I had witnessed in London, was sufficiently aware of the tendencies of my own thoughts to do all I could to counteract them. I was, indeed, like a person who, according to the old legend, had entered the cave of Trophonius; ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... fell a prey to melancholy brooding for a few brief moments, then resolutely cast the mood off his spirit. He was little given to morbid reflections. Men whose lives are daily liable to forfeit rarely are. It was characteristic of him ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... retired to Germany, was spent in industry, if not in peace and quietness. He could not fail to be cast down by the utter failure of his English partnership, and the loss of the fruits of his ingenious labours. But instead of brooding over his troubles, he determined to break away from them, and begin the world anew. He was only forty-three when he left England, and he might yet be able to establish himself prosperously in life. He had his own head and ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... silenced an adversary; and sometimes they have been applied on more solemn, and even tragical occasions. When Rinaldo degli Albizzi was banished by the vigorous conduct of Cosmo de' Medici, Machiavel tells us the expelled man sent Cosmo a menace, in a proverb, La gallina covava! "The hen is brooding!" said of one meditating vengeance. The undaunted Cosmo replied by another, that "There was no ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the right thing, forgot and hastened back, suffered all the various desperations of the eleventh hour, and turned homeward, dropping their parcels with that undimmed good-will that once a year makes gracious the universal human face. This brotherhood swam and beamed before the cow-puncher's brooding eyes, and in his ears the greeting of the season sang. Children escaped from their mothers and ran chirping behind the counters to touch and meddle in places forbidden. Friends dashed against each other with rabbits and magic lanterns, greeted in haste, and were gone, amid ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... disagreeable phases of mountain life were gone; so was the pedestal from which he had descended to make a closer study of the people. For he felt now that he had gone among them with an unconscious condescension; his interest seemed now to have been little more than curiosity-a pastime to escape brooding over his own change of fortune. And with Easter-ah, how painfully clear his mental vision had grown! Was it the tragedy of wasting possibilities that had drawn him to her-to help her-or was it his own ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... man. He happened to visit King William III of England, and was very much offended because during the interview, the king occupied a comfortable arm chair, while the elector, being simply a count, was given a chair to sit in which was straight-backed and had no arms. Brooding over this insult, as it seemed to him, he went home and decided that he too should be called a king. The question was, what should his title be. He could not call himself "King of Brandenburg," for Brandenburg was part of the Empire, and the emperor ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... I will go and confess the wrong, so that I shall dare to look up to the dear Lord again," then he saw the little kid under the knife before him and it all began over again in his mind from the beginning; so that with thinking and brooding, and the weight he carried, he was very tired by night, and crept home in the streaming rain as if he didn't ...
— Moni the Goat-Boy • Johanna Spyri et al
... struggled against her influence, and risen in the world in defiance of her power. To explain the danger which now awaited them, we must return to their old family enemy, Sir Robert Percy. Master of Percy-hall, and of all that wealth could give, he could not enjoy his prosperity, but was continually brooding on plans ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... freedom,—could walk without support, though with slow, uncertain, uneven steps; his articulation was now hardly impaired, though he never spoke except in answer to questions, and then with evident unwillingness. He took little or no notice of what passed around him, but ever seemed brooding over his own misfortunes,—that is, if his mind retained any activity, of which it ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... Brooding much upon the question, a rare frown came to the face of Jimmy Grayson, and stayed there so long that his followers noticed it, and wondered much. They decided that it was the revolt within the party, and did not disturb him, but his wife, ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... pleasant shade, and he had thrown his sombrero on a chair. I noted how his high brow was bronzed by the sun and there were golden lights in his broad beard. There was something massive and imposing in the man as he sat there in brooding thought. ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... as white as the girl's, beads of sweat on her brow, paralyzed by her utter inability to render aid—a new sensation to Mrs. Kildare. Maternity as she had known it was a thing of awe, of dread, a great brooding shadow that had for its reverse the most exquisite happiness God allows to the earth-born. But maternity as it came to Mag Henderson! None of the preparations here that women love to make, no little white-hung ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... curiously impersonal and incomparably direct touch that is peculiar to Greek, as in the verses by Antipater of Sidon,[7] that by some delicate magic crowd into a few words the fugitive splendour of the waning year, the warm lingering days and sharp nights of autumn, and the brooding pause before the rigours of winter, and make the whole masque of the seasons a pageant and metaphor of the lapse of life itself. Or a later art finds in the harsh moralisation of ancient legends the substance of sermons on the emptiness of pleasure and the fragility of loveliness; and the ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... Homer, and Dante, and Shakspeare, and Milton, in search of subjects worthy of his hand; he loved to grapple with whatever he thought too weighty for others; and assembling round him the dim shapes which imagination readily called forth, he sat brooding over the chaos, and tried to bring the whole into order and beauty. His coloring is like his design; original; it has a kind of supernatural hue, which harmonizes with many of his subjects—the spirits of the other world and the ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... relief, a joyful moment; yet on that very day, and on the next before he rode away, I, even I who had been unjustly and cruelly struck with a horsewhip, felt my little heart heavy in me when I saw the change in his face—the dark, still, brooding look, and knew that the thought of his fall and the loss of his home was exceedingly bitter to him. Doubtless my mother noticed it, too, and shed a few compassionate tears for the poor man, once more homeless on the great plain. But he could not be kept after that insane outbreak. To strike ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... beautiful, mournful, and full of the most touching expression—the drooping head and the supporting hand are unrivalled in the arts. Opposite is the monument of the nephew. The attitude of Lorenzo is marked by such a cast of deep melancholy brooding as to have acquired for it the title of "il pensiero." Beneath are the personifications of Evening and Dawn. Twilight is represented by a superb manly figure, reclining and looking down; the breadth of chest and the fine balance of the sunk shoulder are masterly, while the right limb, which ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... Richard's expedition are variously stated by different authors. That usually assigned by the English—a desire to divert his mind from brooding over the loss of his wife, "the good Queen Anne," seems wholly insufficient. He had announced his intention a year before her death; he had called together, before the Queen fell ill, the Parliament at Westminster, which readily voted him "a ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... The brooding heat culminated at last in an evening of furious storm, and Muriel speedily left the dinner-table to watch the magnificent spectacle of vivid and almost continuous lightning over the sea. It was a wonder that always drew her. She did not feel the nervous ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... ransom would come, when the Indians discovered that the castle set their expedients and artifices at defiance. Deerslayer, however, treated these passing suggestions as the ill-digested fancies of girls, making his own arrangements as steadily, and brooding over the future as seriously, as if they had never fallen ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... the man only through his music have thought of him as wholly a dreamer and a recluse, a poet brooding in detachment, and unfriendly to the pedestrian and homely things of the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was overflowingly human, notably full-blooded. On his "farm" (as he called it) at Peterboro he lived, when he was not composing, ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... fact, only the statement of a logical necessity. How could any human being enter into a loving communion with that great Friend whose love is always brooding over our race, who is seeking to do us good and not evil all the days of our lives, who is kind even to the unthankful and the evil,—and not be a lover of his fellow men and a servant ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... man's breast lay, concealed by his external calm, those memories and aspirations which are as strong as passions. In his earlier years, when he had been put to hard shifts for existence, he had found no leisure for close and brooding reflection upon that spoliation of just rights—that calumny upon his mother's name, which had first brought the Night into his Morning. His resentment towards the Beauforts, it is true, had ever been an intense but ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... was the night, Wherein the Prince of light His reign of Peace upon the earth began: The winds with wonder whist Smoothly the waters kist, Whispering new joys to the mild ocean, Who now hath quite forgot to rave, While birds of calm sit brooding on the ...
— Christmas Sunshine • Various
... trees, unharmed as yet by scathing fire or biting axe. Proudly they lifted their crests to the wind and the sun, while down below, their great boles were wrapped in perpetual shade and calm. Life, mysterious life, lurked within those brooding depths, and well did the friendly trees keep the many secrets of the ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... one not easily to be forgotten. It led us through a sublime waste, a wilderness of mountains and pine forests, over which the spirit of loneliness and silence seemed brooding. Above and below little could be seen but the same dark green foliage. It overspread the valleys, and the mountains were clothed with it from the black rocks that crowned their summits to the impetuous streams that circled round ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... country, won by the sword, held by the sword, in spite of all that ignorant demagogues in England may say, Fred Daleham felt all the more keenly the disappointment of his inability to follow the career that he would have chosen. However, he was a healthy-minded young man, not given to brooding and vain regrets. ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... were." Leila rose, her brooding face lighting suddenly. "You have a most forgiving heart, Beauty. As for myself, a few sound bumps will do them no harm. Make no mistake. Those of the Sans who are presentable," she smiled broadly, "will ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... altogether impossible that a character of this kind can have been combined with the generous although mistaken enthusiasm which the theory attributes to him.[1] But, on the other hand, the passion of avarice may easily have been nourished by brooding with disappointment on Messianic visions; and the theory of De Quincey may supply important hints for unravelling the mystery of ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... startled by the feeling she showed. Evidently he had touched one of the few sore places in this pure heart. It was as though her memory of her father had in it elements of almost intolerable pathos, as though the child's brooding love and loyalty were in perpetual protest even now after this lapse of years against the verdict which an over-scrupulous, despondent soul had pronounced upon itself. Did she feel that he had gone uncomforted out of life—even by her—even by religion? ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... air was still and brooding; across the sky scudded ragged masses of clouds, advanced guard of the storm that was mustering along the horizon; everywhere there was a feeling that foreboded snow. In the sky, few stars were visible, and those glimmered with a cold, wan light; at the zenith a solitary planet burned steadfastly. ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... the hopes it held: With smoke and brooding vapors intercurled, As the thick roofs and walls close-paralleled Shut out the fair horizons of ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... consult me who stood brooding and majestic, that is if I can be majestic. I whispered ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... brooding over these fancies, someone, breathless with haste, ran up to his room, and again a note was thrust underneath the door. He seized ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... fatal September morning that ominous warning was ringing in his ears again and again. Down in the bottom of his brooding heart he knew, and well knew, that had he obeyed, as he should have obeyed, Warren's orders, this catastrophe could not have occurred, and that he more than any other man on earth was responsible for the death of these gallant fellows, who, whether ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... daughters, even more miserable, had not been permitted to escape to starvation. We found at Grahovo the body of which those we had seen were the fringe,—a mass of despairing, melancholy humanity, brooding over the misery to come, homeless, foodless, and the guests of a people only less poor than themselves, the hospitable hovels of the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... submitted my conscience to a yoke; and in secret truth my will had no such autocratic power. Long contemplation of a shadow, earnest study for the welfare of that shadow, sympathy with the wounded sensibilities of that shadow under accumulated wrongs, these bitter experiences, nursed by brooding thought, had gradually frozen that shadow into a rigor of reality far denser than the material realities of brass or granite. Who builds the most durable dwellings? asks the laborer in "Hamlet;" and the answer ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Brooding over her wrongs, Dinewan walked away, vowing she would be revenged. But how? That was the question which she and her mate failed to answer for some time. At length the Dinewan mother thought of a plan and prepared at once to execute ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... infinite felicity, inconsistent with the state even of the unfallen, for the angels who rejoice over repentance cannot but feel an uncomprehended pain as they try and try again in vain, whether they may not warm hard hearts with the brooding of their kind wings. So that we have not to banish from the ideal countenance the evidences of sorrow, nor of past suffering, nor even of past and conquered sin, but only the immediate operation of any evil, or the immediate coldness and hollowness ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... throughout shut his nephew, not merely from his heart, but also from his confidence, at first out of sheer neglect, and afterwards, as the lad grew towards manhood, from deliberate intent. For, by continually brooding over his embittered life, he had at last impregnated his weak nature with the savage cynicism which embraced even his one comrade; and the child he had originally chosen as a solace for his loneliness, became in the end the victim of a heartless experiment. ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... unheralded. He does not prophesy their course, he does not forecast the weather even for twenty-four hours; the atmosphere becomes slowly, slowly, but with occasional lifts and reliefs, of such a brooding breathlessness, of such a deepening density, that you feel the wild passion-storm nearer and nearer at hand, till it bursts at last; and then you are astonished that you had not foreseen it yourself ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... from a mental breakdown to flee to the country or wilderness and there live the life of a recluse, and from my father's last letter it was evident that he had had a nervous breakdown from anxiety and brooding over the loss of my mother, to whom he evidently was devotedly attached. It might, therefore, be possible that this strange, wild man himself was my father, an unpleasant possibility. At any rate, I felt that I could not rest, at least until ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... myself and brooding away in the city." The lad's bright, clear eyes looked frankly into the captain's as he continued. "I have been making a fool of myself, Captain. Got into some mischief with a crowd of fellows at school. Of course, I got caught and ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... CLAIRE: (in her brooding way) Anything is important enough for that—if it's important at all. (to the vine) I thought you were out, but you're—going ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... better chance to serve the country, than we now possess. Far along in the horizon, they discern mild skies and halcyon seas, while fogs and darkness and mists blind other sons of humanity from beholding all this bright vision. It was not so that we accomplished our last great victory, by simply brooding over a glorious Whig future. We succeeded in 1840, but not without an effort; and I know that nothing but union, cordial, sympathetic, fraternal union, can prevent the party that achieved that success from renewed prostration. It is not,—I would say it in ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... putting others in their places. It seems but common justice to leave a successor free to act by instruments of his own choice. If my respect for him did not permit me to ascribe the whole blame to the influence of others, it left something for friendship to forgive, and after brooding over it for some little time, and not always resisting the expression of it, I forgave it cordially, and returned to the same state of esteem and respect for him which had so long subsisted. Having come into life a little ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... by the payment of heavy fines, and before long gave them back their lands. The king's victory was so complete that neither of the earls could forgive it. In 1295, Gloucester died, without opportunity of revenge; but Hereford lived on, brooding over his wrongs, and in later years signally avenged the trial at Abergavenny. Meanwhile the conqueror of the principality had shown unmistakably that the liberties of the march were an anachronism, since the marchers ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... filled with lectures, classes, interviews, and reunions with old friends. Beneath a hollow smile and a life of ceaseless activity, a stream of black brooding polluted the inner river of bliss which for so many years had meandered under the sands of ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... born and bred as she had been, to voluntarily open up a correspondence with a man who was as yet little more than a mere acquaintance; but, all the same, he chafed under that silence and spent many a wakeful hour at night brooding ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... Bermondsey, in Blackwall and Oxford Street, were gathered bundles of hilarity, lingering near the scenes of their recent splendours. A thousand sounds, now of revelry, now of complaint, disturbed the brooding calm of the sky. A thousand impromptu concerts were given, and a thousand insults grew precociously to blows. A thousand old friendships were shattered, and a thousand new vows of eternal comradeship ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... during most of his life, but he did so in full consciousness of the background of doom. He trifled because he knew, if he did not trifle, he would go mad with thinking about Heaven and Hell. He sought in the infinitesimal a cure for the disease of brooding on the infinite. His distractions were those not of too light, but of too grave, a mind. If he picnicked with the ladies, it was in order to divert his thoughts from the wrath to come. He was gay, but on the ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... was greeted with loud applause by a court in which McMurdo saw many familiar faces. Brothers of the lodge smiled and waved. But there were others who sat with compressed lips and brooding eyes as the men filed out of the dock. One of them, a little, dark-bearded, resolute fellow, put the thoughts of himself and comrades into words as the ex-prisoners ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... went wild when he turned it out to play. It played with Mrs. Eldred's proportions till it became tormented with visions of shapeless and ungovernable size. He saw her figure looming in the doorway, brooding over his table and his bed, rolling through space to inconceivable confines which it burst. For though this mass moved slowly, it was never still. When it stood it quivered. Worse than anything, when it ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... Beneath my feet My nestlings call: And down I fall Unerring, true, Through heaven's blue; And haste to fill Each noisy bill. My brooding breast Stills their unrest. Sweet, sweet, Their quick hearts beat, Safe in the nest: Ah, sweet, sweet, sweet! ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... As it is, we are keenly affected by the struggles of maternal tenderness in the midst of her preparations for the cruel deed. Moreover, she announces her deadly purpose much too soon and too distinctly, instead of brooding awhile over the first confused, dark suggestion of it. When she does put it in execution, her thirst of revenge on Jason might, we should have thought, have been sufficiently slaked by the horrible death of his young wife and her father; and the new motive, namely, that Jason, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... whatever utility these elements may have in allaying the restless irritability of nervous and excitable patients, always produce serious evils upon those consumptive invalids of a melancholy turn of mind, or whose spirit is broken by hope deferred. Brooding over their melancholy condition, in a foreign land, away from the comforts of home, without the solace and cheering influence of friends and relations, they soon break down and perish.' M. Carriere and Sir James Clark consider the climate of Rome adapted only ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... Grace sat there brooding over her life problems with a new thought in her mind. She dimly realized that a woman must have a genuine message herself before she tries to give it to the world. And alas, her message was sadly deficient, she found. ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... evening, the distant hills, when Valentine sauntered forth, were of an intense solid blue, gloomy and pure, behind them lay wedges of cloud edged with gold, all appeared still, unchanging, and there was a warm balmy scent of clover and country crops brooding over ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... Carrier sat brooding on his hearth, now cold and dark, other and fiercer thoughts began to rise within him, as an angry wind comes rising in the night. The Stranger was beneath his outraged roof. Three steps would take him to his chamber door. One blow would ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... long Her brooding thoughts would pry; She could not think that he must soon— That he must ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... comprehending what was new to him than at a happier period. A stranger founding his judgment upon these circumstances would have said that the dulness of the child's intellect widely contradicted the promise of his features, but the secret was in the direction of Ilbrahim's thoughts, which were brooding within him when they should naturally have been wandering abroad. An attempt of Dorothy to revive his former sportiveness was the single occasion on which his quiet demeanor yielded to a violent display ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... five years and four months old; he died after a sickness of between two and three days. Mr. Kelly was a kind and excellent husband, and affectionate father. He doted on his child; and the loss so preyed upon his spirits, that it produced a brooding melancholy, which he predicted would eventually cause his death. After this time, General Samuel Houston, of Texas, made him very advantageous and liberal offers if he would establish himself in that State. He left Boston for the purpose, but was detained in Philadelphia by the sickness ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... cast so strangely with the rude people of the mountain wilderness, the companionship of such a spirit and mind was a necessity. Unconsciously Sammy had supplied the one thing lacking, and by her demands upon his thought had kept the shepherd from mental stagnation and morbid brooding. Day after day she had grown into his life—his intellectual and spiritual child, and though she had dropped the rude speech of the native, she persisted still in calling him by his backwoods title, ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... that he had got an armful, and that his heart was touched by the ecstasy; and sang again: "Oh, Barto, Barto! my boot is sadly worn. The toe is seen," etc., half-way down the stanzas. Without his knowing it, and before he had quitted the court, he had sunk into songless gloom, brooding on the scenes of the night. However free he might be in body, his imagination was captive to Barto Rizzo. He was no luckier than a bird, for whom the cage is open that it may feel the more keenly with its little taste of liberty that it is tied ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Sancho opened his eyes and raised his head, which he had been holding down, brooding over his unlucky excursion; and looking at the pilgrim he recognised in him that same Ricote he met the day he quitted his government, and felt satisfied that this was his daughter. She being now unbound embraced her father, mingling ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... were journeying on toward their destination, Pocahontas, at Werewocomoco, was daily with her father, watching him with alert ears and eyes, for she saw that the old ruler was brooding over some matter of grave import, and she drew her own inference. Only when planning to wage war on an alien tribe or plotting against the Jamestown settlers did he so mope and muse and fail to respond ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... them; for we had frequently made fires to apprize them of our approach, yet none appeared in return as answers. This disappointment, as might be expected, served to increase the ill-humour of the Leader and party, the brooding of which (agreeably to Indian custom) was liberally discharged on me, in bitter reproach for having led them from their families, and exposed them to dangers and hardships, which but for my influence, they said, they might have spared themselves. Nevertheless, ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... immunity from danger on payment of a tax. Thus men cease protecting themselves, and so in the course of time lose the ability to protect themselves, because the faculty of courage has atrophied through disuse. Brooding apprehension and crouching fear are the properties of civilized men—men who are protected by the State. The joy of reveling in life is not possible in cities. Bolts and bars, locks and keys, soldiers ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... see Uncle Arthur in the morning," he answered quickly, uncovering his brooding thoughts. "It won't do any good, perhaps, but I will try it. I have never asked him for a cent for myself, and I won't now. He may help Corinne this time, now that Garry is dead. There must be some outside money due Garry that he has not been able ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... so, at last, she consented and agreed that, for the present at least, she would receive the widow's money, but only until she could resume her place on the boards of the theater. But the deed of gift drove the brooding shadows out of the heart and eyes ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... gray-gloomed giant of Wade's mind, the morbid and brooding spell, had gained its long-encroaching ascendancy. He had again found the man to whom he must tell his story. Tragic and irrevocable decree! It was his life that forced him, his crime, his remorse, ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... you marrying so well, Peter," she finished with a backward motion of her head toward the room where the parlour set, banished long ago from the town house, symbolized for Ellen the brooding ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... of forty seconds that seemed as many minutes a thunder-brooding tension hung in the stillness of the room—then without haste or excitement Rick Joyce took off his hat and dropped it to the floor. After it he flung his mask, and when he had crossed the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... Bible begins with the account of the Priestly Code of the creation of the world. In the beginning is chaos; darkness, water, brooding spirit, which engenders life, and fertilises the dead mass. The primal stuff contains in itself all beings, as yet undistinguished: from it proceeds step by step the ordered world; by a process of unmixing, first of all by separating out the great ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... the purpose of changing the meaning to correspond with a modification in the characters for which they stand. The first movement sets before us five themes illustrative of the most prominent traits in the complex nature of Faust; the three most important being (a) typical of brooding, speculative inquiry, (b) the longing of love, (c) the enthusiasm ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... of most of her chums, and decidedly to the envy of one. Lorna, who had settled herself by her side on the steps, was not pleased to be deserted. She could never quite forgive Irene for having so many friends. The brooding cloud that had temporarily dispersed settled down again. When the girls got up to explore the temple she marched glumly away by herself. All the beauty and wonder and loveliness of the scene was lost upon her; ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... would return to Pevensey as a chapman, selling at no price or profit, till they suffered him to sleep in the empty room, where he would plumb and grope, and steal away a few bars. The great store of it still remained, and by long brooding he had come to look on it as his own. Yet when we thought how we should lift and convey it, we saw no way. This was before the Word of the Lord had come to me. A walled fortress possessed by Normans; in the midst a forty-foot tide-well out of which to remove ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... the presence of the Queen, believing that every eye which rested on her produced some baneful result; while her very attendants were dismissed from her presence when they had terminated their duties, and she thus remained hour after hour in solitude, brooding over the sickly fancies of her disordered brain. The sight of her husband's murderer had, however, instantly and for ever restored the healthful tone of her mind. She did not weep, for she had already exhausted all her tears; she asked no mercy, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... hardly speak; and as he lay there impassive, Miriam's hatred of his silent white face increased. She had too much self-control to express herself; but at times she was almost on the point of breaking out, of storming at him, and asking him whether he had no pity for her. One night, as she sat brooding at the window, and her trouble seemed almost too much for her, and she thought she must give way under it, a barrel organ stopped and began playing a melody from an opera by Verdi. The lovely air ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... drink—which with industry they could easily do. All this might not make them cheerful; but they would certainly be less a prey to melancholy while engaged in some active industry, than if they remained brooding over their fate. ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... the revolution who fell into their hands. These examples had unquestionably some influence in unbridling the revengeful passions of the royalists, and letting loose the spirit of slaughter which was brooding in their bosoms. The disposition to retaliate to the full extent of their power, if not to commit original injury, was equally strong in the opposite party. When fort Granby surrendered, the militia attached to the legion ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... so to speak, ever since she had anything to confide. She could not tell the old mother her doubts and cares; the would-be sisters seemed every day more strange to her. And she had misgivings and fears which she dared not acknowledge to herself, though she was always secretly brooding ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... came," said Ivan, as though brooding, and not hearing Alyosha's exclamation. "I knew he had ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Holding the same idea as the then obscure sect of the Rosicrucians, some of whom he had perhaps encountered in his travels in Germany, he imagined that, by means of the philosopher's stone, he could summon these kindly spirits at his will. By dint of continually brooding upon the subject, his imagination became so diseased, that he at last persuaded himself that an angel appeared to him, and promised to be his friend and companion as long as he lived. He relates that, one day, in November 1582, while he was ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... a mighty rage for the stroke that had been given his father. But he let no tear fall from his eyes and he sat very still, brooding in his heart evil for the wooers. Odysseus, after a while, lifted his head ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum
... him and, taking up the bottle, refilled their glasses. Then, catching the dull, brooding eye of Mr. Stobell as that plain-spoken man sat in a brown study trying to separate the serious from the jocular, he drank success to their search. He was about to give vent to further pleasantries when he was stopped by the mysterious ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs |
