Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Foreboding   /fɔrbˈoʊdɪŋ/   Listen
Foreboding

noun
1.
A feeling of evil to come.  Synonyms: boding, premonition, presentiment.  "The lawyer had a presentiment that the judge would dismiss the case"
2.
An unfavorable omen.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Foreboding" Quotes from Famous Books



... trembled. He looked about at the familiar surroundings, and everything seemed suddenly strange and unreal to him. He looked again at the letter in his hand, turning it curiously. A strange feeling of oppression and ominous foreboding possessed him as though the bright spring sky were all at once overcast with heavy and menacing storm-clouds. What was it? "Buenos Aires,—Susan Wakefield?" Where had he seen that combination before? What was it that made the name of the Argentine city in connection with Auntie Sue's ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright

... she isn't like her father," said Charlotte with foreboding, as she aired and swept the southeast spare room for their expected guest. They had three spare rooms at the Grange, but the aunts had selected the southeast one for their niece because it was done in white, "and white seems the ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... and I was left with a leaden foreboding of grewsome things in store. I knew what manner of man Ukridge was when he relaxed and became chummy. Friendships of years' standing had ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse

... long time I could not make up my mind to open the second note... What could it be that she was writing to me?... My soul was agitated by a painful foreboding. ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov

... his foreboding, by recurring to the theme by which her thoughts seemed most constantly engrossed, although, when she pleased, no one could ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott

... genius which produced at once the wildest, tenderest, most original and most purely imaginative poems of modern times. Byron's "Hours of Idleness" would never find a reader except from an intrepid and indefatigable curiosity. In Wordsworth's first preludings there is but a dim foreboding of the creator of an era. From Southey's early poems, a safer augury might have been drawn. They show the patient investigator, the close student of history, and the unwearied explorer of the beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... marched, and there was wailing among the women of the People of the Axe. Only Zinita did not wail, but stood by in wrath, foreboding evil; nor would she bid her lord farewell, yet when he ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard

... quite simple creed, consistent with the simplicity of the man who uttered it. It amounted to no more than this: that to die decently was worth a good many years of life. So that he uttered it without melancholy or any sign of foreboding. Even so, however, he had a fear that perhaps his friend might place another interpretation upon the words, and he looked quickly into his face. He only saw again, however, that puzzling look of envy in ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason

... her stand like that he felt as a man might when told to flog his fellow-creature. To gain time he asked her what she did with herself all day. The little model evidently tried to tell herself that her foreboding had ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... company were disconcerted. Consternation fell on all present; and erelong they made their excuses, and left the house. Thus the prisoner was left alone with her husband; but, meantime, curiosity had been excited by her strange conduct, and some of the servants, with foreboding hearts, listened at the door of the dining-room. What did they hear, gentlemen? A furious quarrel, in which, however, the deceased was comparatively passive, and the prisoner again threatened his life, with vehemence. Her passion, it is clear, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various

... of a poet, but he felt no inclination to communicate the feelings which the place and hour aroused in him to any of his companions; and it was in a silence which had in it something dimly foreboding that the party drew ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce

... in Archangel made peace in our strange war no nearer. It was dark foreboding of the winter campaign that filled the thoughts of the doughboy on duty or lying in the hospital in Archangel that day. Out on the various fronts the American soldiers grimly understood that they must hold on where they were for the sake of their comrades on other distant but nevertheless ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore

... not many minutes over our frugal breakfast of bread-and-milk, and then we set out together, for he gave me permission to go with him, until we came within sight of the factory and the cottage. We walked quickly and in foreboding silence. He told me, as soon as he saw the place, that I might stay on the spot where he left me, till the church-clock struck eight; and then, if he had not returned to me, I must go back to the village, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton

... He saw that if the Southern States must secede, the quicker they did so the better. If the North cared to recall them, a vigorous policy would react more promptly upon the Republicans. He did not go into this movement with foreboding or half-heartedness. There was no mawkish sentiment—no melancholy in his make-up. His convictions mastered him, and his energy moved him to redoubled effort. On the 22d of December he sent his famous telegram to his "fellow-citizens of Georgia." He recited that his resolutions ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall

... friends had reached Bodego and spent the night there. She had not learned anything more terrible that I had said about her, and at breakfast told Mrs. Stein that she had had a dream foreboding trouble, and would not continue the journey to the Stein home. The widow coaxed and insisted that she go the few remaining miles to see her children. Then she waxed indignant and let slip the fact that she considered it an outrage that ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton

... David's quick eye had caught a glimpse of a face staring at him through the cracks in the simple forest building. It was Doeg, the Edomite, Saul's savage herdsman, who David felt sure had recognised him. A chill of foreboding crept over David and made him at once demand arms from the peaceful priest. There were none to give except Goliath's sword, which David had taken from the giant when he killed him, and which had been there at Nob, wrapped in a cloth, ever since. ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... the boat at Dover with some foreboding. She had read and had been told of the rigours of the Channel passage and her experience was equal to the descriptions. Had it not been for the presence of Babette, the maid so wisely provided by her aunt, her journey might have ended at Calais, or even before. She had a horror of the water ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin

... toward the middle of May Stephen was announced; and with a sudden sense of foreboding she hastened down ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... least, it would put Frank Corson, unknown intern, into the spotlight for a while. This was pretty vague thinking but it made a kind of sense and Frank settled for it in lieu of trying to analyze the strange compulsion, the odd foreboding deep within him. ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman

... how much the dyspepsia of our predecessors had to with the prevalence of presentimentalism? I agree with you, that a better diet has a good deal to do with the decline of the dark foreboding among us. What I can't understand is, how a gross and reckless feeder, like Rulledge here, doesn't go about like ancestral voices prophesying all sorts ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... beginner in opium-eating the hazardous path he is treading, and of awakening in the confirmed victim of the habit the hope that he may be released from the frightful thraldom which has so long held him, infirm in body, imbecile in will, despairing in the present, and full of direful foreboding for the future. ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day

... do nothing for these suffering people? To let them be ruined and driven out was not only bad policy, but worse strategy. He knew that Burgoyne must regard these settlements with foreboding, as the home of a hostile and brave yeomanry, whose presence was a constant threat to him. To maintain them, then, was an act of simplest wisdom. Schuyler could ill spare a single soldier, yet it was necessary to do something, and ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake

... have proceeded under any conceivable circumstances, just as the world turns round with earthquakes rending its crust and volcanoes consuming its vitals, yet her voice was pitched to a lower and more foreboding key than common, and the still frequent chidings of her children were tempered by something like the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... after mile along the beach, the Quaker woman far behind the others with her baby in her arms, carrying it, as she thought, to its death. Overhead, flocks of dark-winged grakles swooped across the lowering sky, uttering from time to time their harsh, foreboding cry; shoreward, as far as the eye could see, the sand stretched in interminable yellow ridges, blackened here and there by tufts of dead palmetto-trees; while on the other side the sea had wrapped itself in a threatening silence and darkness. A line of white foam crept ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various

... with so much difficulty a century or two ago, all going back to the original woodland from which they were won. What would the old farmers say to see the fate of their worthy bequest to the younger generation? They would wag their heads sorrowfully, with sad foreboding. ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... he had been reduced to a nullity, and escaped attention all this time: he sat in gloomy silence, and watched with chilled and foreboding heart the strange turn events had taken, and were taking; events which he, and no other man, had ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade

... began to appear among the gods foreboding fear. Indra's favourite thunderbolt blazed up in a fright. Meteors with flames and smoke, loosened from the welkin, shot down during the day. And the weapons of the Vasus, the Rudras, the Adityas, the Sabhyas, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)

... of whisky and was lifting it for a squirt of soda when all at once I saw Fear; not apprehension, not foreboding, but FEAR—the glass fell from my hand and my fingers sagged on the handle of the syphon. I saw my reflection in a long glass, and my face was bleached to an unhealthy ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips

... words Margaret had so lightly spoken over the tea-cup. "I see a big black cloud, and it entirely surrounds you." Why did those words come to her now? she asked herself, and why should she have that strange foreboding of impending trouble? So strong was this impression that she was inclined to hurry after Jasper and give him warning. She did nothing of the kind, however, but during the remainder of the evening she was quieter than usual and took little ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody

... will know less and less of Joanna herself, but there are paths trodden to the shrines of solitude the world over,—the world cannot forget them, try as it may; the feet of the young find them out because of curiosity and dim foreboding; while the old bring hearts full of remembrance. This plain anchorite had been one of those whom sorrow made too lonely to brave the sight of men, too timid to front the simple world she knew, yet valiant enough to live alone with her poor insistent ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett

... you, at the same time, see that they care for me properly at Hanwell Asylum ... the best by all accounts: yet I feel so sure of you, so safe and confident in you! If any of it had been my work, my own ... distrust and foreboding had pursued me from the beginning; but all is yours—you crust me round with gold and jewelry like the wood of a sceptre; and why should you transfer your own work? Wood enough to choose from in the first instance, but the choice once made!... So I rest on ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... Giraumont and Gawtrey, who appeared talking together, very amicably. The younger novice of that night, equally silent, seated towards the bottom of the table, was not less watchful than Birnie. An uneasy, undefinable foreboding had come over him since the entrance of Monsieur Giraumont; this had been increased by the manner of Mr. Gawtrey. His faculty of observation, which was very acute, had detected something false in the chief's blandness to their guest—something dangerous ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... and blissful tones, and finally flowed into a regular dithyramb. It was a song of jubilee, a sigh of innocence and happiness; she sang of God and the stars, of happy love, and of reuniting; of blossom, fragrance, and fanning zephyrs; and in unconscious, foreboding pain, she sang of the sorrows of love, ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... this is foreboding the very worst," interrupted Herman Mordaunt, dashing a tear from his eye, "and is making a very short separation, a more ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper

... stand. But, alas! there was not a stick of timber left. Every particle of the material had been removed. It seemed that some great disappointment threatened them at the moment of their happiness. They hurried on in silent foreboding to the castle, but ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston

... Better had it been if Scundoo, their own shaman, were undisgraced. For he had ever a gentler way, and he had been known to drive forth two devils from a man who afterward begat seven healthy children. But Klok-No-Ton! They shuddered with dire foreboding at thought of him, and each one felt himself the centre of accusing eyes, and looked accusingly upon his fellows—each one and all, save Sime, and Sime was a scoffer whose evil end was destined with a certitude his successes ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London

... which threatened the foundations of the modern world. He himself was all unconscious of this fact. And yet this big reality was the secret of the electric tension which strangled men into silence and threw over the scene the sense of ominous foreboding. ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon

... these words of her father meant, and a gloomy foreboding, a terror which she was unable to explain to herself, filled ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach

... foreboding, perplexity, apprehension, disturbance, fretfulness, solicitude, care, dread, fretting, trouble, concern, fear, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... so Mme de Langeais hoped to see the Marquis de Montriveau again; but he contented himself with sending his card every morning to the Hotel de Langeais. The Duchess could not help shuddering each time that the card was brought in, and a dim foreboding crossed her mind, but the thought was vague as a presentiment of disaster. When her eyes fell on the name, it seemed to her that she felt the touch of the implacable man's strong hand in her hair; sometimes the words seemed ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... son, the god of day, To make him proof against the burning ray, His temples with celestial ointment wet, Of sovereign virtue to repel the heat; Then fixed the beaming circle on his head, And fetched a deep, foreboding sigh, and said, 'Take this at least, this last advice, my son: Keep a stiff rein, and move but gently on: The coursers of themselves will run too fast, 150 Your art must be to moderate their haste. Drive them not on directly through the skies, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville

... the clamor and goading And dim from the stress of the years, And hallowed by pain and foreboding And ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various

... disturbed Elizabeth, and she had found it impossible to sleep for hours, and when she rose the next morning she felt unusually weary and depressed. A strange foreboding—a sense of separation and loss—seemed to oppress her, and no efforts on her part could enable her to maintain her wonted cheerfulness. Her dejection was so evident that David noticed it at last, and when Mr. Carlyon had put on his old mackintosh and gone out for a blow on the parade, he ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... so that by mutilated rumours they came at last to know the awful facts of the fate of Sedan, the fall of the Empire, the siege of Paris. It did not alter their daily lives; it was still too far off and too impalpable. But a foreboding, a dread, an unspeakable woe settled down on them. Already their lands and cattle had been harassed to yield provision for the army and large towns; already their best horses had been taken for the siege-trains and the forage-waggons; already their ploughshares were perforce idle, and their children ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various

... Dear Mamma: My foreboding about steering was on the last day nearly verified by an accident which was more deplorable than culpable the effects of which would have been ruinous had not the presence of mind of No. 7 in the boat rescued us ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler

... last long," said Wilkin to the monk, in a tone of foreboding seriousness, which found an echo in ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... Constitutionally he was a nervous and pessimistic man with a fixed belief in the conspiracy of events, banded for the undoing of him and his. Blind or dubious conditions racked his soul, but real danger found him not only prepared, but even eager. Now his face was a picture of foreboding. ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams

... found necessary to muffle the stable knocker. At half-past, or thereabouts, he was heard talking to himself about the horse and Topping's family, and to add some incoherent expressions which are supposed to have been either a foreboding of his approaching dissolution or some wishes relative to the disposal of his little property, consisting chiefly of half-pence which he had buried in different parts of the garden. On the clock striking twelve ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens

... door and came in with a bundle of letters and papers which he put down before him and withdrew. A grim foreboding settled on him. Something seemed to whisper from the mute heap that here lay the revelation—here was the missing communication from Irene of which her father had spoken. A bare glance at the bundle was enough, for he recognized the pale-blue envelope belonging to Irene's favorite ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben

... when forced to admit the truth whereof her foreboding glass had given her only too true warning, that with her beauty her reign had ended, and the days of her love were over? What does a seaman do in a storm if mast and rudder are carried away? He ships a jurymast, and steers as he best can with an oar. What happens if your roof falls in a tempest? ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Joab, and one that fills me with foreboding, as well as with pity. What agonies may not these poor people be doomed to suffer, when the ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty

... dunes, along narrow, winding, sandy roads, seeing no sign of habitation anywhere; we went up hill and down dale; the wind drove the sand into our faces; at every step our feet sank in it, and the country grew more and more desolate, gloomy, and foreboding. ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis

... existence grew stronger and stronger in him. If he expected the end of the world, it was due to dim remembrances from the far-distant past of the German people, which still hovered over the soul of the new reformer. Yet it was likewise a prophetic foreboding of the near future. It was not the end of the world that was in preparation, but ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... was amazing. His reckless air of enjoyment had departed. He was still smoking, but he was all alert, like a cat ready to spring. Mr. Parker, too, was interested. I saw him whisper something in Mr. Moss' ear and I felt a cold foreboding of ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... the key in his drawer, a most extraordinary thing. Risler could not resist. He opened the drawer, moved the papers, and searched for his letter. It was not there. Sigismond must have put it away even more carefully, perhaps with a foreboding of what actually happened. In his heart Risler was not sorry for his disappointment; for he well knew that, had he found the letter, it would have been the end of the resigned and busy life which he imposed upon himself with ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet

... wife, who religiously attested its accuracy. You will meet with similar stories, implicitly believed, in every society you go into, varying in their circumstances—a ghost being sometimes put in the place of a dream, and sometimes a vague but strong mental impression, a foreboding only. But the common point exists in all, that all intimation of the death of an absent acquaintance has been in one or another way insinuated into the mind of his friend about the time the event really took place. Instances of this kind, it will be found, are far too numerous to permit one ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various

... sound of the cry, half human, half beast-like, that she had called "her friends." It had sounded to me like the cry of a wolf, or a cat-man, anything but human. But people can make odd sounds, and imitate beasts. Still it had been an eerie sound that gave me a foreboding, added to her warning words. What kind of people were these, who wore leather and jewels and used bows that might have come ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell

... silent, clinging to him; she had stopped struggling. Her eyes were closed and he kissed her fiercely on the lips again and again. Presently he was frightened, and a chill of terror and foreboding stole ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs

... seemed to press heavily upon the young Naba. Though wearing no diadem, his brow soon became furrowed, as if by its weight, and his air was one of constant preoccupation. His change of manner puzzled me. His mind appeared overshadowed by some gloomy foreboding, the nature of which I could by no amount of cautious questioning elicit. During each day he attended assiduously without relaxation to affairs of state, and when night drew on and the inmates of the great luxurious ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... absence of sounds save those made by themselves, the lack of hostile presence, not even a single warrior or Frenchman being visible, filled him with foreboding. It was just this way, when he marched with Braddock, only the empty forest, and ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler

... was present in the father's mind; no thought of the murder had yet entered it in connection with his boy; and to hear so emphatic an echo to his foreboding was more than his fretted nerves could stand. In the same breath he pounced on Thrush for a pessimist—apologised—and humbly entreated him to take ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung

... and a general air of bluff hospitality—as if he had just been blown by some fresh strong wind across his tobacco fields—the lawyer experienced a relief so great that the breath he drew seemed a fit measure of his earlier foreboding. For Fletcher outwardly was but the common type of farmer, after all, with a trifle more intelligence, perhaps, than is met with in the average Southerner of his class. "A plain man but honest, sir," was what one expected him to utter ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... hoped to do; "I am leaving for Warsaw, and shall be back in a fortnight. I hope then to have you here. Still, if that is too long I should be glad to have you return to Paris where you are needed. You know that I have to depend on events." The unhappy Josephine already had a foreboding of his devotion to a great ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand

... horse," as her husband frequently complimented her, walking as fast as she was talking and, with Bonny Angel in her arms, Goober Glory did her best to keep a similar pace. But this was impossible. Not only were her feet heavy beneath the burden she bore, but her heart ached with foreboding. With Bonny Angel ill, how was the search for grandpa to go on? How to look for the little one's own people? Yet how terrible that they must be left in their grief while she could do nothing ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond

... mystery. If she did not invent a new shudder, as Hugo said of Baudelaire, she gave at least a new turn to the old-fashioned ghost story. She creates in her readers a feeling of impending danger, suspense, foreboding. There is a sense of unearthly presences in these vast, empty rooms; the silence itself is ominous; echoes sound like footfalls, ghostly shadows lurk in dark corners, whispers come from behind the arras, as it stirs ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... color / were borne unto the strand, And all their trusty armor / was ready brought to hand. They bade their horses bring them: / they would at last depart. —Thereat did fairest women / weep with sad foreboding heart. ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler

... they had less than usual for breakfast; a kind of atonement to which Mrs. Downs sometimes treated her family. Pete sighed. The greetings for a merry Christmas were of doubtful value to him. He was of a foreboding nature and experience had taught him to be prepared for disappointment in the matter of presents. He went to church and noticed carefully the style of type in the hymn books; he came home and took down all his books ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various

... dear, dear father, spent with age, I lost: Ease of my cares, and solace of my pain, Sav'd thro' a thousand toils, but sav'd in vain The prophet, who my future woes reveal'd, Yet this, the greatest and the worst, conceal'd; And dire Celaeno, whose foreboding skill Denounc'd all else, was silent of the ill. This my last labor was. Some friendly god From thence convey'd us to ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil

... Wilde. As silently every eye sought the devoted man, and on many countenances the look of doubt settled at once into one of conviction, when they saw that he wore no cravat; and to many ears the heart-broken moan of the wretched husband and father, which a moment before seemed only the foreboding of over-sensitive innocence, now sounded like the voice of self-accusing guilt. So great is the power of imagination ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... minuteness, alike without difference and without fellowship, as solitary as similar—not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground; that those comfortless and unhonoured dwellings are the signs of a great and spreading spirit of popular discontent; that they mark the time when every ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... creed, Firm to thy Master, by as fond a grasp Of faith as Luther, with his free-born mind Clung to Emmanuel,—doth thy soul remain. But yet around Thee scowls a fierce array Of Foes and Falsehoods; must'ring each their powers, Triumphantly. And well may thoughtful Hearts Heave with foreboding swell and heavy fears, To mark, how mad opinion doth infect Thy children; how thine apostolic claims And love maternal are regarded now, By creedless Vanity, or careless Vice. For time there was, when peerless Hooker wrote, And deep-soul'd Bacon taught ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... this great office with a full sense of the arduous responsibilities which it entailed upon him, and said good-bye to his friends with words which showed that he had a foreboding that he might never see them again—words which proved unhappily to be too true. He went to the discharge of his duties in India in that spirit of modesty which was always characteristic of him. "I succeeded," he said, "to a great man (Lord ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot

... silver and gold, but with a solemn retinue, all hidden under dingy umbrella hats and swathed in rain- cloaks. To see the throne occupied by a human shape so obscured by its habiliments gave all beholders an uncanny feeling in which foreboding deepened into alarm. The appearance of the whole audience, still more of the Imperial retinue, was one to cause all beholders to interpret the garb of the spectators as ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... face and said, "Edward, it is home where the heart is, and it seems to me we should not spurn a present for a future good. This life is short and uncertain, and I feel a gloomy foreboding when I think of your departure, I have been so accustomed to seeing you every day, to leaning on your arm in every walk, and going so constantly with you everywhere, that I shall miss you sadly when you are away; but," she continued, smiling through her tears, "I ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna

... falling anywhere." Rodebush, foreboding in his eyes, walked over to the main observation plate and scanned the heavens. "However, it's not as bad as I was afraid it might be. I can still recognize a few of the constellations, even though they are all pretty badly distorted. That means that we can't be more ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith

... was as yellow as the saints which Revera paints; his eyes were sunk deep in their orbits, and his heavy eyebrows, which were nearly always knit in a frown, added to the brilliant glare of his death-foreboding eyes. ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal

... came no reply, and Hagar was thinking seriously of making a visit to Meriden, when one rainy autumnal night, nearly a year after Hester's marriage, there came another letter sealed with black. With a sad foreboding Hagar opened it, and read that Mr. Hamilton had failed; that his house and farm were sold, and that he, overwhelmed with mortification both at his failure and the opposition of his friends to his last marriage, had died suddenly, leaving Hester ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes

... King!" she said, and went into her oratory to pray: and there was need of prayer, for the Minstrel's foreboding was no idle one. Ere London knew it the Plague was at her gates; yet the King, undeterred, came to spend Christmas at Westminster; but Martin was not in his train. Men's mirth waxed hot by reason of the terror they would not recognise. ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless

... But suddenly everything was changed. In the middle of April, Gavrilov fell ill, and died in the arms of Kolosov, who never left his room for an instant, and went nowhere for a whole week afterwards. We were all grieved for poor Gavrilov; the pale, silent lad seemed to have had a foreboding of his end. I too grieved sincerely for him, but my heart ached with expectation of something.... One ever memorable evening ... I was alone, lying on the sofa, gazing idly at the ceiling ... some one rapidly opened the door of my room and stood still in the doorway; I raised my head; ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... been recognised, {113} and has been described under the words "presentiment" or "foreboding." These words, however, refer, on the one hand, only to an unknowable in the future, separated from us by space, and not to one that is actually present; on the other hand, they denote only the faint, dull, indefinite echo returned by consciousness to an invariably distinct ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler

... her window a long-drawn cry. She recognized it—the high-keyed, monotonous cry of a man who often hurried past with a bundle of newspapers under his arm. Now it startled her. It filled her with foreboding. ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates

... odd note of prescience in her voice. It was so pronounced that the sense of foreboding ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... help them. His faith was not a mystery kept apart for special occasions, but a daily and hourly influence vivifying his words and directing his actions. And no man could have enjoyed himself more than this true saint and interpreter of God to man. His religion was not one of gloom and foreboding, but a cheerful and delightful habit of mind and soul. Tantum religio potuit suadere bonorum. Mr. RUSSELL has done his work with great skill and perfect sympathy, and has produced a book that does honour ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various

... a shock, but not utterly as a surprise. For days the boy had felt a kind of foreboding that something of this sort would happen. Yet he did not at once give way to his disappointment nor accept without ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene

... freedom. As they stood there, the conviction had come upon her that they had come to the last battle-field, that this journey which Jim now must take would decide all, would give them perfect peace or lifelong pain. The shadow of battle was over them, but he had no foreboding, no premonition; he had never been so full ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker

... not alone in this shadow of deep darkness. Givenchy, Festubert, Neuve-Chapelle, Ypres, Hooge, the Somme—to mention alone the battles in which up to that time the Canadian Corps had been engaged—all ended in failure; and to a sensitive and foreboding mind there were sounds and signs that it would be given to this generation to hear the pillars and fabric of Empire come crashing into the abysm of chaos. He was not at the Somme in that October of 1916, but those who returned ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae

... new discovery of the joy of living. And yet, my friend and I confessed to each other, there was a tinge of sadness, an inexplicable regret mingled with our joy. Was it the thought of how few human eyes had even seen that lovely vision? Was it the dim foreboding that we might never see it again? Who can explain the secret pathos of Nature's loveliness? It is a touch of melancholy inherited from our mother Eve. It is an unconscious memory of the lost Paradise. It is the sense that even if ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke

... But a dark foreboding dwelt in me with relentless certainty. I knew that calamity threatened, my dreams betokened it and it became daily clearer what form this calamity would take. The glad promise had a diabolically mocking sound, the subtle perceptive faculty of my insensible ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... hindrance—yet his manner hinted at something in reserve. Though he quivered under Irene's outspoken incredulity, his aspect was that of a man whose schemes have been foiled by sheer ill-luck. A rogue unmasked will grovel: von Kerber was defiant. For the moment, Mrs. Haxton was struck dumb with foreboding. Mr. Fenshawe's. dejected air showed that a deadly blow had been dealt to the project to which she had devoted all her resources since the beginning of the march. She, too, had begun to doubt. Here, in the desert, the buried treasure ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy

... its changeful aspects. It would afford an adequate test of its comprehensiveness to note how rarely a mind in general sympathy with the author could come to its perusal without alighting upon something that would be in harmony with its mood. To traverse the work through its aspiration and foreboding, joy, grief, remorse, despair, and final resignation, would involve a task too long and difficult to be attempted here. Two sonnets only need be quoted as at once indicative of the range of thought and feeling covered, and of the sequent ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... us little rest. We found a thin stratus over the sky this morning, foreboding ill. The wind came, as usual with a rush, just after lunch. At first there was much drift—now the drift has gone but the gusts run up ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott

... coarse white tablecloths and with dishes of nicked stoneware, white, indeed, but shabbily so. But Susan's young eyes were not critical. To her it all seemed fine, with the rich flavor of adventure. A more experienced traveler might have been filled with gloomy foreboding by the quality of the odor from the cooking. She found it delightful and sympathized with the unrestrained eagerness of the homely country faces about her, with the children beating their spoons on their empty plates. The colored waiters ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... be so most sincerely," Bathurst said; "but one never can say. I can hardly bring myself to believe that they will attack the officers, much less injure women and children. Still, I have a most uneasy foreboding of evil." ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty

... on earth knew with what sore foreboding and misery he let her go. It was something that Mrs. Rayner could not help remarking,—his unconquerable aversion to every mention of the army and of his own slight experience on the frontier. He would ...
— The Deserter • Charles King

... Dunn flashed into the doorway and shouted something incoherent, and as suddenly disappeared, and Hughie Reid's wife came to the window and waved frantically. Christina ran forward, filled with foreboding. She darted up the steps and stopped amazed in the doorway. The kitchen was full of people, it seemed, all moving about and talking wildly. Mr. Sinclair was there and Dr. McGarry and a half dozen women, and the Aunties were running about laughing and crying, and it seemed as if every ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith

... not want to talk about Arthur Chicksands. There was in her a queer foreboding sense about him. She did not in the least expect him to fall in love with her; yet there was a dim, intermittent fear in her lest he might become too important to her, together with a sharp shrinking from the news, which of course might come ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Kate Peyton had told herself again and again, during those hours of anxious calculation in which she had tried to cast Dick's horoscope; but not in her moments of most fantastic foreboding had she figured so cruel a test of her courage. If her prayers for him had taken precise shape, she might have asked that he should be spared the spectacular, the dramatic appeal to his will-power: that his temptations should slip by him in a dull disguise. She had secured him against all ordinary ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton

... multitude of words over that chamber; if you have no picture of it in your mind already, my reader, you are reading an unskilled writer, and if in that picture it appear a wholesome room, tidy and well kept up, if it appear a place in which a stranger might sleep without some faint foreboding of disaster, then I am wasting your time, and will waste no more of it with bits of "descriptive writing" about that dim, high room, whose blackness towered before Rodriguez in the night. He entered and shut the door, as many had done before him; but for all his youth he ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany

... them, told upon their spirits. Once they ran away, but hunger forced them to return; even the scanty fare at the camp was better than the slow starvation of the bush. The overseer, too, was afflicted with low spirits, and impressed by the forbidding character of their surroundings. Poor fellow, some foreboding of his ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc

... said Bracy, without heeding the foreboding remarks of his companion. "They're getting well on. Ah! ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn

... down to the canoe and begged hard to go with him, but the old sailor was firm in his refusal and Walter watched him paddle out of sight with a dim foreboding of evil at ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... all night for him, that Saint in heaven Ill-honoured upon earth. Within their church Meantime the monks the 'Dies Irae' sang, The yellow tapers ranged as round a corse, And Penitential Psalms in order due. Their rite was for the living: ere the time They sang the obsequies of sentenced men, Foreboding wrath to come. Sad Fancy heard The flames up-rushing o'er their convent home, The ruin of their church late-built, the wreck It might be of their Order. Fierce they knew That Mercian royal House! Against their King They hurled no ban: venial they ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... he uses an ancient ecclesiastical style, the Plagal, a mode that obtained centuries before Palestrina. Harsh and strident, inharmonious, are the tones, which in the opening Adagio typify the dread, the foreboding and dismay, that can be supposed to have been felt by the Son of God when the time came to give up a beatific state and enter on the actualities of earthly existence. The sin of the world is already being borne in anticipation. ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer

... might withhold him from again testing the forbearance of the protecting power. But those who possessed keener insight or who knew Jugurtha better, must have foreseen the probable result of the impunity which had been granted; they must have presaged, with anxious foreboding or with patient cynicism, the final disappearance of Adherbal from the scene and a fresh request for the settlement of the Numidian question, which would have become less complex when there was but one candidate for the throne. The ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... fungus, seemed to thrive in the pall-like depth of the social darkness and depression. She circled from house to house, and swooped down upon the inmates, flapping and croaking the old story of woe and foreboding; or, what was welcome in comparison, some new tale of further entanglement for Ray. Judging from that righteous lady's conversation, there seemed no doubt that she and the Omnipotent Judge had settled it between them just when he was to be hanged. She was one of the first ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King

... and brought her eyes to a level with his own. Again the light of foreboding, of unrevealed shadows flashed at him out of her smile. She understood something not clear in his own head; nor in hers. He grasped her hand as she passed and with a dolorous grimace of his heart felt it unresponsive ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... stretching along the eastern horizon and throwing an indistinct light upon the face of the deep, which combines with the boundlessness and unknown depth of the sea around, and gives one a feeling of loneliness, of dread, and of melancholy foreboding, which nothing else in nature can. This gradually passes away as the light grows brighter, and when the sun comes up, the ordinary monotonous sea ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... sick, but my spirits were good, and my mind foreboding good from the event of being a prisoner in London. Their Lordships' orders were: "To confine me a close prisoner; to be locked up every night; to be in the custody of two wardens, who were not to suffer me to be out of their sight one moment, day or ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly

... came on, and many another night, and many a new day,— till Maya, grown a girl, looked onward to the life before her with strange foreboding, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... such a quarter could not be resisted, and Lochiel prepared to accompany young Scothouse to Borodale. Lochiel's reluctance to assent was not, however, overcome: his mind misgave him. He knew well the state of his country, and he took this first step with an ominous foreboding of the issue. He left his home, determined not to take arms. On his way to Borodale he called at the house of his brother, John Cameron of Fassefern, who came out and inquired what had brought him from home at that early hour? ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson

... posthumous influence of heavy old Samuel Franklyn might be an inadequate solution did not occur to me. By "getting the place straight again," his widow, of course, meant forgetting the glamour of fear and foreboding his depressing creed had temporarily forced upon her; and Frances, delicately minded being, did not speak of it because it was the influence of the man her friend had loved. I felt lighter; a load was lifted ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood

... to the king, and when it was cut up the ring was found in its stomach, and restored to Polycrates. Upon this Amasis renounced his friendship, declaring that, as the gods threw back his offering, something dreadful was before him. The foreboding came sadly true, for the Persian satrap, or governor, of Sardis, being envious of Polycrates, declared that the Ionian was under the Great King's displeasure, and invited him to Sardis to clear himself. Polycrates set off, but ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge

... confident, from familiar acquaintance with the spot, was not wont to be there. As it was lying on the pebbly beach, partly in the chequered shade of a beech-tree, and partly in the water, I was totally at a loss to imagine what it might be, but had a strong foreboding that it was a human body. A little lower down there was a shallow, through which I passed; and on reaching the spot, I must acknowledge that I was equally horrified to find that the object of my anxiety was a freshly-killed ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.

... With the foreboding that this would be the last act of his political life, Cavour started on the mission which he had almost no choice but to assume, in spite of his extreme repugnance for the role of diplomatist. A few days ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... perception that he could not pierce. What had come over Vesta to change her so completely in this little while? He believed she was entering the shadow of some slow-growing illness, which bore down her spirits in an uninterpreted foreboding of evil ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden

... of foreboding—a wild, mad anxiety, filled his being. What had happened? Why might he not land? Then for the first time that fact of Vasili's vanishment came into his mind. Was there something sinister in it? Had he scented any danger to his Queen, and gone to see? A whirlwind ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn

... his monetary future and his literary success, which were scarcely justified by the facts. Although always gentle and gay with his own family circle, the little strain of worry showed itself repeatedly in his correspondence with his friends and caused them a keen foreboding of evil, so unlike was it to the old, sunny, cheery spirit with which he had fought bad health, and gained for himself so high a place in the world of letters and so warm a niche in the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black

... A vague foreboding of the truth flitted through his brain; men wiser in love and affairs of the affections than our young Methodist minister have been self-deceived, and although he sternly put her image away he dimly avowed to himself that she was already occupying ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison

... in New York left him with nothing more than a feeling of foreboding and oppression. The expected exhilaration of returning to the city of his birth did not materialize. So used to open spaces was he, to distances and the circle of horizons, that he knew he no longer belonged to the city with its Himalayan gorges and canons, whose torrents ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath

... had not been able to throw off entirely the foreboding of calamity that she had voiced at the time Bob left home. Every morning she awoke with a heavy heart, like one bearing a great weight of sorrow. Before going about her daily duties she would pray ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace

... Margery, her husband, and Ruth, were sitting quietly engaged in reading in the living room they heard the sound of the returning car. All three were distinctly conscious of an involuntary breath of relief which permeated the room. Nobody had said a word but every one of them had been filled with foreboding. ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper

... presentar present, offer, show. presente adj. present. presente m. present. prestar lend, give, add, ascribe. presumir presume, imagine, dare. presuroso, -a prompt, quick, light. prevenirse prepare. previsin f. foresight, foreboding, presentiment. primavera f. spring. primero, -a first, former. prncipe m. prince. prisa f. haste. proceloso, -a tempestuous. procurar procure, obtain, secure. prodigio m. prodigy, marvel. prodigioso, ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup

... world and life, but, even as I write, something like a foreboding shudder comes over me. I think of your home and your father and the straitness of the law under which you live, and I wonder whether after all the ghost of that fierce theology is yet laid. Can it be that this law which darkened my boyhood shall arise again and claim ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More

... to tell that dream so bright and brief, Of joy unchequered by a dread of grief? What need to tell how all such dreams must fade, Before the slow, foreboding, dreaded shade, That floated nearer, until pomp and pride, Pleasure and wealth, were summoned to her side. To bid, at least, the noisy hours forget, And clamour down the whispers of regret. Still Angela strove to dream, and strove in vain; Awakened once, she could not ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter

... captain on the imprudence of sending the boat ashore in such weather; but they could not move his obstinacy. The boat's crew pulled away from the ship; alas! we were never to see her again; and we already had a foreboding of her fate. The next day the wind seemed to moderate, and we approached very near the coast. The entrance of the river, which we plainly distinguished with the naked eye, appeared but a confused and agitated sea: the waves, impelled by a wind from the offing, broke upon ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere

... them drive away, she was filled with distress, and as there was maternal anxiety in the mother's breast, so was there foreboding of evil in the ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt

... girls had been given already and many times repeated. We drove off in high spirits; and the old folks stood looking after us. Happening to cast a glance to the upper windows of the house, I saw Halstead's face, with so black a frown on it, that I experienced a sudden foreboding. ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... hum of confusion while the hungry sought the barbecue pits. Dade, his face settled into gloomy foreboding in spite of certain heartening circumstances, went slowly away to his room; where Jack, refusing to take any interest in the sports, lay sprawled upon the bed with a cigarette gone cold between his lips and his eyes ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower

... country and faith, from honour and God. There is no triumph in the greatness of the love thus displayed; no rejoicing in prospect of the outward fulfilment of the love thus made possible; no room for any emotion but the dark chill foreboding of a separation thus begun, wider than all distance, and more profound and hopeless than death. The separation of aims no longer single, of souls no longer one; of his life falling, though for her sake, from its best and highest, and therefore ceasing, inevitably ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown

... made me jump!" Boyne said at length, moving toward her with a sudden, half-exasperated laugh. The shadow of apprehension was on his face again, not now a look of fixed foreboding, but a shifting vigilance of lips and eyes that gave her the sense of his feeling himself ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... pass before them lay, And moving nations on the margin stray, Thick swarming, venturous; sail and oar they ply, Climb on the surge and o'er the billows fly. As when autumnal storms awake their force. The storks foreboding tempt their southern course; From all the fields collecting throngs arise, Mount on the wing and crowd along the skies: Thus, to his eye, from bleak Tartaria's shore, Thro isles and seas, the gathering people pour, Change their ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow



Words linked to "Foreboding" :   prophetical, portent, shadow, omen, presage, forebode, prodigy, prognostic, dread, prognostication, apprehension, apprehensiveness, boding, prophetic



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com