"Solitary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I pause and blush. For it strikes me as so intimately characteristic of our whole relation—in that earlier stage, at least—that I should have written all this on the subject of Heber Pogson without making one solitary mention of his wife. She existed. Was permanently in evidences—or wasn't it, rather, in eclipse?—as a shadowy parasitic entity perambulating the hinterland of his domestic life. She must have ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... at the settlement, and rode back by moonlight. We put our horses away, and entered the house. It was then half-past ten o'clock, and we found Christopher Burley in solitary possession of the sitting room, hugging the stove closely and reading an old newspaper. Every one else, he informed us, had turned in for the night, Captain Rudstone having left only a few ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... people. In every language the country, comprising the provinces of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Friesland, Gelderland, Overyssel and Groningen, has, from the close of the sixteenth century to our own day, been currently spoken of as Holland, and the people (with the solitary exception of ourselves) as 'Hollanders[1].' It is only rarely that the terms the Republic of the United Provinces, or of the United Netherlands, and in later times the Kingdom of the Netherlands, are found outside official ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... solitary swallow flies Across the sea, rough autumn-tempest tossed, Poor bird, shall it be lost? 20 Dropped down into this uncongenial sea, With no kind eyes To watch it while it dies, Unguessed, uncared for, free: Set free at last, The short pang past, In sleep, in ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... and devotion, which the whole population of Dauphiny, the Lyonese, and Burgundy, emulated each other in displaying?"—"It is possible, that Bonaparte may have been well received in some places; but a few solitary acclamations do not express the wishes of a whole nation; and, had it not been for the army, he would never have re-entered the Tuileries."—"It is certain, that, if Napoleon had had the army against him, he could never have dethroned Louis XVIII. with ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... sovereign, Charlemagne is one of the most impressive figures in history. His seven feet of stature clad in shining steel, his masterful grasp of the forces of his time, his splendid intelligence, instinct even then with the modern spirit, all combine to elevate him in solitary grandeur. ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... we shall understand that great crime of David's, if we suppose it, with some theologians, to have been merely a sudden and solitary fall, from which he recovered by repentance, and became for the time to come as good a man as he had ever been. Such a theory, however well it may fit certain theological systems, does not fit the facts of human life, or, as I hold, the teaching ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... procrastinate. The curtains before the French windows were closely drawn. The hearth had been swept in their absence; the fire glowed more companionably than ever. About the table, where the coffee waited, a solitary lamp shed a golden blur. It was heavily shaded with yellow silk, so that most of its light escaped their faces ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... golden light, lulled by the lapping of the water, fascinated him from the first moment, making him forget his love for the human form. For some time his enthusiasm for the nude was calmed. He worshiped the old palaces, the solitary canals, the lagoon with its green, motionless waiter, the soul of a majestic past, which seemed to breathe in the solemn old age of the dead, eternally ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... course, proved the solitary exception; as usual, he exposed himself recklessly and rode the middle of the streets, regardless of those sudden explosions of dust beneath his horse's feet or those unexpected showers of ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... along with two crotched roots, hobbled a dwarf without legs; another stalked before, one arm fixed in the air, like a lightning rod; a third, more active than any, seal-like, flirted a pair of flippers, and went skipping along; a fourth hopped on a solitary pin, at every bound, spinning round like a top, to gaze; while still another, furnished with feelers or fins, rolled himself up in a ball, bowling ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... decided that they should start at eight o'clock the next morning, so they were all assembled in the kitchen by that hour; but the diligence, roofed with snow, stood solitary in the middle of the courtyard without horses or driver. The latter was sought for in vain either in the stables or the coachhouse. The men of the party then resolved to beat the country round for him, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... he also realized that now his punishment would be most terrible—first for the disobedience, then for the attempted murder. So in an instant he made up his mind to run away; he would escape to the jungle and become a wild elephant once more—even if he had to be a solitary wanderer ...
— The Wonders of the Jungle, Book Two • Prince Sarath Ghosh
... with Lord Radstock to the Millbank Penitentiary, where by appointment we were met by Mr. Wilbraham Bootle. We had the pleasure of taking with us Alicia and Captain Beaufort. Solitary confinement for the worst offences: solitary confinement in darkness at first. There are many young offenders; the governors say they are horrid plagues, for they are not allowed to flog them, and they are little influenced by darkness and solitary confinement: oldish men much afraid of it. ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... that daughter now? And if she still possessed the little brown German Bible, had she learned to love and prize its words as her mother had done her English Bible? Then carefully locking up her treasured book and portraits, she went downstairs, to wait in solitary grandeur for her husband's coming into ...
— Little Frida - A Tale of the Black Forest • Anonymous
... development. Even so it is not the sole condition. The modern State is a vast and complex organism. The individual voter feels himself lost among the millions. He is imperfectly acquainted with the devious issues and large problems of the day, and is sensible how little his solitary vote can affect their decision. What he needs to give him support and direction is organization with his neighbours and fellow workers. He can understand, for example, the affairs of his trade union, ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... sure that I was properly entitled to this corner. But I was a high favourite; not an officer, and scarce a private, in the castle would have turned me back, except upon a thing of moment; and whenever I desired to be solitary, I was suffered to sit here behind my piece of cannon unmolested. The cliff went down before me almost sheer, but mantled with a thicket of climbing trees; from farther down, an outwork raised its turret; and across ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are tucked away against the feet of the surrounding hills. The broad plain itself is without sign of human dwelling, except that near each focus of the ellipse there is a pile of shattered ruins with a crumbling, solitary tower, where a shepherd sits piping to his ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... scarcely describe the sensations with which I first saw the solitary lodge of an Indian hunter, on the shore of the Mississippi. In my childhood I had read with thrilling interest, the tales of border warfare; but I had not learned to hate an Indian with mortal hatred. I verily believe they have souls. People may ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... negro with us, an old and faithful vassal, who at the present moment is enjoying solitary confinement in another part of the fortress. We reached the castle grounds, where a group of Spanish 'militares' were seated. We gave them the 'Buenas tardes:' they returned our salute, and their chief, who was no less a personage than the commandant of the Morro, offered us ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... the wretchednesses of the great that they have no approved friends. Kings are the most solitary ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... he came to the ale-house where he intended to get his pennyworth of tobacco. For the first time a thought of self-denial entered his mind, as he stood by the door, with his hand in his pocket, feeling for his solitary copper. ...
— The Last Penny and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... their lives upon the river as the Tzigani lived in the fields and hedges, seemed to Marsa like the very spectres of her race. More than the musicians with embroidered vests did the poor prisoners of the solitary barge recall to her the great ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... which reference is also made, was written several years subsequently, and as may be gathered from its tone, under circumstances of peculiar loneliness. It was while a solitary occupant of his lodgings, a stranger in a foreign city, that he felt the inspiration of precious memories, and improved his lonely hours by this exquisite production. 'I am alone,' he writes, 'in my chamber; but these themes have taken such hold upon me that I can not sleep. The room in which I ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... look at them, and ducked again into my place. It was strange indeed to see this valley, which had lain so solitary in the hour of dawn, bristling with arms and dotted with the ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... over by the tent-lines, entering the names of the stragglers in his notebook. I could see a solitary figure issue furtively from a tent and slink round the bottom of the parade ground in order to join us from behind and escape observation. I wished him success and followed his movements with interest. But just as he was darting into the ranks, one of our Sergeants caught sight of ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... of the book which for so long has been read and studied and cherished as one of the Church's most treasured possessions, the "Imitation of Christ," remained for a long time unknown; and this is by no means a solitary instance. The interest in literary fame is mostly a modern thing. Besides in these old times people worked in a different sort of way from now. We must remember that the art of song went hand in ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... Russian political offenders of the most dangerous class are confined first in the Schluesselberg prison, situated on a small island in Lake Ladoga near the effluence of the Neva. There they languish in solitary confinement or are transferred to far-off Sakhalin, whose very name is taboo in St. Petersburg.[914] During our Civil War, one of the Dry Tortugas, lying a hundred miles west of the southern point of Florida and at that time ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... suddenly with a murmuring, yet so sharp a confidence; a confidence that in broad daylight, or in complete solitude, might have seemed impossible. All sorts of things must steal out in that persuasive, that peopled yet solitary, twilight. ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... a cavalry regiment for four years, when he was stationed with his regiment in North Finland. It fell to the turn of our friend to bring home the horses on a Whitsunday, while his jolly comrades off duty went singing to enjoy themselves at the inns. Suddenly the solitary groom was seized with such a fit of home-sickness as he had never known before. Tears filled his eyes, and charming pictures of home floated before his vision. Now, too, he remembered his sleeping friend in the wood, and his speech. Everything ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... Together they rambled along the banks of the Po, climbed the hills in springtime looking for the first flowers, made collections of butterflies, and caught the sunlight in their hearts as it streamed across the valleys as the shadows lengthened. On these solitary little journeys they usually carried a copy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and seated on a rock the old man would read to the boy lying on the grass at his feet. In a year or two the boy did the reading, and would expound the words of the Saint as he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... or so, they reached a solitary hut, partially in ruins. Le Duc here produced five bundles from behind a heap of rubbish, covered ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... Geraldine from Coleridge's "Christabel" that stood before him in this infidel lady. A magnificent witch she was, like the Lady Geraldine; having the same superb beauty; the same power of throwing spells over the ordinary gazer; and yet at intervals unmasking to some solitary, unfascinated spectator the same dull blink of a snaky eye; and revealing, through the most fugitive of gleams, a traitress couchant beneath what else to all others seemed the form of a lady, armed with incomparable ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... by man. Two pythons were observed coiled together among the branches of a large tree, and were both shot. The larger of the two, a female, was ten feet long. They are harmless, and said to be good eating. The Makololo having set fire to the grass where they were cutting wood, a solitary buffalo rushed out of the conflagration, and made a furious charge at an active young fellow named Mantlanyane. Never did his fleet limbs serve him better than during the few seconds of his fearful flight before the maddened animal. When he reached the bank, and sprang into the river, ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... Spaniards there was in the forest at Lake Peten a solitary native town, founded nearly a century previous to their time by a Maya prince of Itza, who, with a portion of his people, fled from Yucatan to that lonely region to escape from the disorder and bloodshed of a civil war. This was the civil war which destroyed Mayapan, and broke up the Maya kingdom ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... of taking a six thousand foot ridge at a flying leap. She had splendid nerves, but this was her first aerial voyage, and it was also the first time that she had ever been brought so closely face to face with the awful grandeur of Nature in her own secret and solitary places. ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... they romp together, they eat the beloved shortly after the wedding; by day, they scour the country, they track the game on the short-pile, grassy carpet, they take their fill of the joys of the sun. That is much better than solitary meditation at the bottom of a well. And so it is not rare to see young mothers dragging their bag of eggs, or even already carrying their family, and ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... day when Mr. Arthur, attired in a new hat, a new blue frock-coat and blue handkerchief, in a new fancy waistcoat, new boots, and new shirt-studs (presented by the Right Honourable the Countess Dowager of Rockminster), made his appearance at a solitary breakfast-table, in Clavering Park, where he could scarce eat a single morsel of food. Two letters were laid by his worship's plate; and he chose to open the first, which was in a round clerk-like hand, in preference to the second more ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... (1596-1650). A child of delicate health, born at La Haye, near Tours, he became, under Jesuit teachers, a precocious student both in languages and science. But truth, not erudition, was the demand and the necessity of his mind. Solitary investigations in mathematics were for a time succeeded by the life of a soldier in the Netherlands and Holland. The stream of thought was flowing, however, underground. Suddenly it emerged to light. In 1619, when the young volunteer was in winter quarters at Neuburg, on the Danube, on a memorable ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... wherefore casting mine eyes upon her somewhat stedfastly, I beheld my nurse Philosophy, in whose house I had remained from my youth, and I said: "O Mistress of all virtues, for what cause art thou come from heaven into this our solitary banishment? Art thou come to bear me company in being ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... that woke China from her dream of solitary grandeur was the war with England, which broke out in 1839 and was closed three years later by the Treaty of Nanking. It was not, however, all that was needed to effect that object. It made the giant rub her eyes ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... it without wanting to go to it—to take solitary walks over it, to be one of the spots on it as the sheep are. It seems as if, lying there under the blue sky or the low grey clouds with all the world held at bay by mere space and stillness, they must feel something we know nothing of. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... this he would ascend after sitting alone on the doorstep of the mill in this lonely, foresaken neighborhood, until nine o'clock of an evening; and here, amid the odor of machinery wafted up from the floor below, by the light of a single tallow candle, he would conclude his solitary day, reading his German paper, folding his hands and thinking, kneeling by an open window in the shadow of the night to say his prayers, and silently stretching himself to rest. Long were the days, dreary the prospect. Still he lifted his hands in utmost faith to ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... imply scrupulousness like that of Pharisaic times, nor necessarily suggest a late date for the book. Probably there had been some kind of religious consecration of the food to Babylonian gods, and Daniel, in his solitary faithfulness, was carrying out the same principles which Paul afterwards laid down for Corinthian Christians as to partaking of things offered to idols. Similar difficulties are sure to emerge in analogous cases, and do so, on ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... tears, their day and night groans, their cries and prayers, and solitary carriages, put all the carnal family out of order.[1] Hence you have them brow-beaten by some, contemned by others, yea, and their company fled from and deserted by others. But mark the text, 'A broken and a contrite heart, O God, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... cried Denys, "not to have seen why that old fool rails so on the poor things! One day, out of the millions of women he blackens, one did prefer some other man to him: for which solitary piece of bad taste, and ten to one 'twas good taste, he doth bespatter creation's fairer half, thereby proving what? le ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... and cloud-like, piled against the sky. The road, as is almost invariable in this district, keeps to the highest line of ridges, winding much, and following the dimplings of the earthy hills. Here and there a solitary castello, rusty with old age, and turned into a farm, juts into picturesqueness from some point of vantage on a mound surrounded with green tillage. But soon the dull and intolerable creta, ash-grey earth, without a vestige of vegetation, furrowed by rain, and desolately breaking into ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... spring, about four months after the day of the transformation scene in Audrey's drawing-room, Ted Haviland was lying on his back sunning himself on the leads. There are many lovelier places even in London than the leads of No. 12 Devon Street, Pimlico, but none more favourable to high and solitary thinking. Here the roar of traffic is subdued to a murmur hardly greater than the stir of country woods on a warm spring morning—a murmur less obtrusive, because more monotonous. It is the place of all others for one absorbed in metaphysical speculation, or cultivating the gift of detachment. ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... rusty black silk, very taciturn, with large, steady, alarmed eyes, that seemed to look in your face, to read what you might have seen in the dark rooms and passages through which you had passed, was in charge of it, with a solitary "maid-of-all-work" under her command. My poor friend had taken lodgings in this house, on account of their extraordinary cheapness. He had occupied them for nearly a year without the slightest disturbance, and was the only tenant, under rent, in the house. He ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... island, and the ground left to the choice of the settler, she avoided those spots which were most fertile and most favorable to commerce: seeking some nook of the mountain, some secret asylum where she might live solitary and unknown, she bent her way from the town towards these rocks, where she might conceal herself from observation. All sensitive and suffering creatures, from a sort of common instinct, fly for refuge amidst their pains ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... solitary breakfast, no longer actively anxious concerning Nick, but still by no means easy. She was firmly convinced that he was running risks in the city, and she longed to have ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... and its sorrows, sun and shadow—but what matters it? We have shared them together. The year which is commencing cannot bring with it any sorrows that by remaining united we shall not be able to support?' Most of us breakfasted this morning—the New Year's breakfast, usually so gay—alone and solitary; a few smoky logs our only companions. There are sorrows which no philosophy can console. On other days one may forget them, but on New Year's-day our isolation comes home to us, and, do what we may, we are sad and silent. Where are they now? What are they doing now? is ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... a solitary horseman might have been seen at West 209th Street, clothed in a little brief authority, and looking out to the west as he petulantly spoke in the Tammany dialect, then in the language of the blank-verse Indian. He began, "Another ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... to leave one's country is always sufficiently painful; but to be torn from it in chains, doomed to exile in a horrible climate, to linger days, and hours, and years, in solitary dungeons, is a fate so appalling as to defy language to convey the remotest ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... buy it," said my host; "its Just the place for a solitary-minded devil like you. And it would be rather worth while to own the most romantic house in Brittany. The present people are dead broke, and it's going for a ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... in the mere sound of them that thrilled, that made a music in the girl's ears. She drew a long breath, and suddenly, as he raised his eyes, he saw her as a white vision, lit up, Rembrandt-like, in the darkness, by the solitary light—the lines of her young form, the delicate softness of cheek and brow, the ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the shoulders, and a heartrending smile, and by insensibly exciting his feelings. In a word, she triumphed over the last remaining doubts, which might still have mingled with the affectionate pity with which that poor, solitary heart, which, so full of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... remembered the advice of the sorceress, and reproached myself bitterly for neglecting it. This solitary and fatal duel seemed to me like an assassination. Nantes and its environs became insupportable to me, for every day I heard of the murder of Caradec. It is true that no one suspected me, but the secret voice ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... The country was laid waste; it was wrapped in the silence of the grave. Tears rolled down his cheeks and he said to his wife, Pyrrha, "Beloved, solitary companion of my life, as far as I can see through all the surrounding country, I can discover no living creature. We two must people the earth; all the rest have been drowned by the flood. But even we ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... on the lower slopes of Monsieur Joseph's meadow a chilly damp rose from the undrained ground. As far as one could tell, not a human being moved in the woods; the feet of Monsieur d'Ombre's messenger had passed up the lane out of hearing; all was solitary and silent about the quaint turreted house with its many shuttered windows and dark guards lying silent, stretched on the sand. Only one of these rose and shook himself and followed ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... solitary devotee of the village. Whenever she had been to communion, she would hang about the parsonage, well knowing that La Teuse always kept a couple of loaves for her from her last baking. At times she was even able to carry off a rabbit or a fowl ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... at his solitary breakfast. He had grown expert in the daily preparation of bacon, eggs, cornbread, and coffee; but that is a poor feast which is denied the sauce of companionship, and he dallied with his spoon, while he stared gloomily ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... to remind me of the beneficent work of the Masonic Order. I mention it most gladly, as it was the sole recognition on the part of any of our foes of our claims to human kinship. The churches of all denominations—except the solitary Catholic priest, Father Hamilton, —ignored us as wholly as if we were dumb beasts. Lay humanitarians were equally indifferent, and the only interest manifested by any Rebel in the welfare of any prisoner was by the Masonic brotherhood. The Rebel Masons interested ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... soothingly, and so unobtrusively that the company could not guess, and did not like to ask, whether or not it had been designed by their entertainer. They inclined on the whole to think it some wonderful peasant-music peculiar to that wild neighbourhood, turning, as it did now and then, to a solitary reed-note, like a bird's, while it wandered into the distance. It wandered quite away at last, as darkness with a bolder lamplight came on, and made way for another sort of entertainment. An odd, rapid, phantasmal glitter, advancing ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... impression at awakening, but she was not entirely obtuse to the morning, to the chirp of a robin, the cluck of the hens, the creak of a hay-wagon, and the sweet smell of cattle. When she arose she looked down a slope of fields so far away that they seemed smooth as a lawn. Solitary, majestic trees cast long shadows over a hilly pasture of crisp grass worn to inviting paths by the cropping cattle. Beyond the valley was a range of the Berkshires with ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... to me quite enough," I said again; "and if you had the housekeeping to do, and the bills to pay, you would think a solitary half-crown quite ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... and by the two dim waxlights in tin sconces, that cast a pallid light on the painted pillars, and a brown shadow farther up, against which were silhouetted the figures of the men, who sat in even rows around Father Letheby's confessional. Now and again a solitary penitent darkened the light of the candles, as he moved up to the altar rails to read his penance or thanksgiving; or the quick figure of a child darted rapidly past me into the thicker darkness without. Hardly a sound broke the stillness, only now and then there was a ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... ahead, round the point of rocks above the fort, and disappeared; leaving the fur-trader, as they found him, smoking his pipe, with his hands in his pockets, and leaning against the door-post of his once-again silent and solitary home. ...
— Away in the Wilderness • R.M. Ballantyne
... inducements which conspire to make London the happiest place at present she can be in. The joyful occasion of the journey; the gaiety of the whole party, opposed to the dull life she must lead, if left here with a solitary old woman for her sole companion, while she so well knows the cheerfulness and felicity enjoyed by the rest of the family,-are circumstances that seem to merit your consideration. Mrs. Mirvan desires me to assure you that one ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... hand holding a book, the other outstretched in benediction. Upon the outstretched hand a rosary had been hung with appropriate effect. Some mystic letters appeared in the muslin that draped the ceiling, which, being interpreted, proved to be the initials of the solitary member of the altar guild, and of such of her family as she ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... necessary labour. Or let us take the case of the iron industry of the modern world. This industry, in its vast modern developments, depends entirely on the discovery made in England of a method by which iron might be smelted with coal in place of wood. The completed discovery was due to a succession of solitary men, beginning with Dud Dudley in the reign of James I., and ending a century later with Darby of Coalbrookdale. Practically these heroic men had all their contemporaries against them. Public opinion attacked them through private persecution and violence. The apathy and vacillation of ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... it were done at all it must be done at once while there were many about. If he waited until things were quiet his solitary figure would be sure to ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... be said, however, that the intimate proximity to this lady—a large, dark-eyed, white faced, sweetly fragrant southern woman—did really exist; but existed only in Kolya's imagination, in those sad, tragic and timid minutes of solitary sexual enjoyments, through which pass if not a hundred percent of all men, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... to be sure, when Jimmie's behaviour was in nice accord with his dreadful appearance—as when I chanced to observe him late the second afternoon of my arrival. Solitary in front of the bunk house, he rapidly drew and snapped his side arms at an imaginary foe some paces in front of him. They would be simultaneously withdrawn from their holsters, fired from the hip and replaced, the performer snarling viciously the while. ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... panic-stricken droves. These streets were huge canyons formed by towering black buildings, echoing with the clang of car gongs and the shouts of drivers; the people who swarmed in them were as busy as ants—all hurrying breathlessly, never stopping to look at anything nor at each other. The solitary trampish-looking foreigner, with water-soaked clothing and haggard face and anxious eyes, was as much alone as he hurried past them, as much unheeded and as lost, as if he had been a thousand miles ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... prison window in the twilight, this solitary burial on the shore, in the sand, moved Murat more deeply than his own fate. Great tears filled his eyes and fell silently down the leonine face. At that moment General Nunziante came in and surprised him with ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MURAT—1815 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... to argue with her. But while Val wheeled and turned in the wide cross, before they took their upward bend under the climbing beechwood, Lawrence glanced over his shoulder and saw Mrs. Clowes still standing by the gate of Wanhope, solitary, a wan gleam of sunlight striking down over her gold embroideries and ivory coat, a russet leaf or two whirling slowly round her drooping head: like a butterfly in winter, ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... of the temperate zone. There are gigantic, rolling, bare backs whose only covering is the carpet of grass periodically green and brown. There are long, rambling, skeleton ranges with here and there pine forests gradually creeping up the sides to the crests. There are solitary volcanoes, now extinct, standing like things purposely let alone when nature humbled the surrounding earth. There are sculptured lime rocks, cities of them, with gray hovels and mansions ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... Campagna. The great Aqueduct of old Rome lay like a monstrous caterpillar across the moonlit landscape, and their road led them under one of its huge arches, and past the circle of crumbling bricks which marks the old arena. At last Burger stopped at a solitary wooden cow-house, and he drew a key from his pocket. "Surely your catacomb is not inside a house!" ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sound was to be heard save the muttered thunder of the avalanche, the roaring of the cataracts which poured forth from the melting glaciers and made courses for themselves through heaps of rough stones; and now and again the harsh and discordant scream of a solitary vulture that with outspread wings circled slowly aloft, piercing into the valleys with its keen eye in search of prey. Into these wild and lonely regions Walter had to climb in order to reach the lofty crag whereon ...
— Harper's Young People, November 11, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... to be a solitary 'maiden-rose' or a Princess Ziska, who shall say? And human or inhuman, whatever composition she is made of, you may make yourself positively certain that Denzil Murray is just now doing his best to persuade her to be a Highland chatelaine in the future. Heavens, ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... creeping of light green over the gentle slopes and unending marshes, and a trickling of light green down around each tue, or little mound of earth covered with moss and tiny berry plants. Ptarmigans roam about in solitary pairs, murmuring when any one comes too near their nests; gnats and horseflies buzz through the air; and cows, with tails set straight up, scamper friskily about, trying ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud
... immediately preceding the thirteenth, is revealed by the assertion of Carlyle that "in Dante ten silent centuries found a voice." To state what history now regards as fact, it must be said that while Dante by his giant personality and sublime poetic genius could alone ennoble any epoch he was not "a solitary phenomenon of his time but a worthy culmination of the literary movement which, beginning shortly before 1200, produced down to 1300 such a mass of undying literature" that subsequent generations have found in it their model and inspiration and have never quite equalled its ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... many times I have heard it, and the many thoughts its harmless music has given me. Sometimes, in the twilight, when I have felt a little solitary and down-hearted, John—before baby was here to keep me company and make the house gay—when I have thought how lonely you would be if I should die; how lonely I should be if I could know that you had lost me, ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... he had read somewhere that Don Galaor, the brother of the valiant Amadis of Gaul, never commended himself to any particular lady, yet he was a brave and most illustrious knight errant. All that Don Quixote replied to this argument was: "Sir, one solitary swallow does not make summer!" and offered, as if in confidence, his conviction that this very knight had been very deeply ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... alone, as always. She sighed as she remembered how lonely she had been all her life. Except Alden, there had never been anyone to whom she could talk freely. Even at school, the other children had, by common consent, avoided the solitary, silent child who sat apart, always, in brown gingham or brown alpaca, and taking refuge in the fierce pride that ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... compare the Fornander stories of Halemano, Hinaikamalama, Kalanimanuia, Nihoalaki, Kaulanapokii, Pamano. The character of accomplished sorceress belongs especially to the helpful sister, a woman of the Malio or Kahalaomapuana type, whose art depends upon a life of solitary virginity. She knows spells, she can see what is going on at a distance, and she can restore the dead to life. In the older stories she generally appears in bird form. In more human tales she wins her brother's wishes by strategy. This is particularly true of ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... eleven o'clock, as I was indulging myself in a solitary ramble over Blackfriars-bridge, I espied your well-known barouche, which I followed, and observed to stop at the Elephant and Castle! Heighday! said I, this is a metamorphosis indeed! John Bull has returned to nature at last. He prefers ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... of London are so rich in architectural antiquities as the "considerable village" of Islington. Canonbury-house, of which a solitary tower remains, is said to have been the country-residence of the Priors of St. Bartholomew, and to have been rebuilt early in the 16th century. Highbury belonged also to the Priory. The existing relics are chiefly of the Elizabethan age. The lodge, represented in the cut, belonged ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... far as the beginners are concerned, but would to heaven that those not within the shadow of this shameful death would take warning from those who are. There are no social or periodical drunkards in this sort of intoxication. The vice is not only solitary, unsocial and utterly selfish, but incessant ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... note, as they swept past the rock and through the passage, that the battery no longer frowned down upon the bay. In its place there appeared a yawning fire-blackened chasm; and the shipyard was thickly strewed with masses and fragments of rock of all sizes; both whale-boats were swamped; and a solitary gun, with a fragment of its carriage still attached, lay half in and half out of the water. The timbers of the dismembered cradle still floated huddled together like a ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... first a very great influence upon my imagination. The chapels which I have spoken of are always solitary, and stand by themselves amid the desolate moors or barren rocks. The wind whistling amid the heather and the stunted vegetation thrilled me with terror, and I often used to take to my heels, thinking that the spirits of the past were pursuing me. At other times I would look through ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... place where there was gold—I met a woman whom I loved. She was what is technically known as a bad woman. She ran away with another man. I tracked them to Texas, and in a mining camp there I shot the man. I wanted to take the woman back, but she refused. That has been my solitary love affair; and I shall never love any woman again as I loved her. I think that is all that I have to tell you. And now—will you marry ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... perfections. Our virtues and our perfections are the results of our temperament modified. Has God a temperament like ours? Our good qualities are our habits relative to the beings in whose society we live. God, according to you, is a solitary being. God has no one like Him; He does not live in society; He has no need of any one; He enjoys a happiness which nothing can alter. Admit, then, upon your own principles, that God can not possess what we call ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... lover's mutilated body; and the monks bore it away to the church at Waltham, where it was buried. Some time later a rumor was spread abroad that Harold was wounded, and carried to a neighboring castle, perhaps Dover, whence he went to the abbey of St. John, at Chester, where he lived a long while in a solitary cell, and where William the Conqueror's second son, Henry I., the third Norman king of England, one day went to see him and had an interview with him. But this legend, in which there is nothing chronologically impossible, rests on no sound basis of evidence, and is ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... The solitary being who remained behind was thus thrown upon his own resources, and his efforts to maintain the unequal contest unaided, were so feeble and ineffectual, that the Company might be said to hold a monopoly of the fur-trade at this period; but thereafter ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... himself when he had fancied that a man might make a cell of a solitary room in silent surroundings; the religious jog-trot in a provincial atmosphere had no resemblance to the life of a monastery. There was no illusion ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... seemed disembodied ghosts. He could scarcely remember the look of them. His mind plunged lower and lower. Their marriage seemed of no importance to him. All things had turned to ghosts; the whole mass of the world was insubstantial vapor, surrounding the solitary spark in his mind, whose burning point he could remember, for it burnt no more. He had once cherished a belief, and Katharine had embodied this belief, and she did so no longer. He did not blame her; he blamed nothing, nobody; he saw the truth. He saw the ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... nineteenth century have destroyed entirely their one solitary utility. It is their business to be flaunting and arrogant; but they flaunt unobtrusively, and their attempts at arrogance are depressing. Their chief duty hitherto has been the development of variety, vivacity, and fulness of life; oligarchy was the world's first experiment in liberty. But now ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... here in one of the dells, Kit came across the solitary hut of a mountaineer by the name of Kin Cade. They took a mutual liking to each other. As Kit could at any day, with his rifle bring in food enough to last a week, the question of board did not come into consideration. It was in the latter ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... replace in a prim row as many of the plants as they could get in, and a day or two later the eye would be caught by a square of brown earth, broken by a row of sorry-looking dead or dying plants standing conspicuous and solitary against the wild, untrained vegetation round about, while a later search would perhaps reveal, under the tangled litter in the path, one of the best dinner-knives, covered with rust, and other lost treasures, such as a trowel, scissors, and ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... sloped steeply down on either side, the thick mist made an early twilight, we could only see the spot where we set our feet, while all the surroundings were lost in grey fog, so that we felt as though we were walking in a void, far above all the world. At nightfall we arrived at a solitary hut—the home of our companions. After having repaired the broken roof, my boys succeeded in lighting a fire, though how they did it is a mystery, as matches and everything else were soaked. Soon tea and rice were boiling, while I tried to dry my instruments, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... as mad as any of them, but his madness did not take the form of suicide or religion but of alcohol. He had always taken liquor when he wanted it, as all Norwegians do, but after his first year of solitary life he settled down to it steadily. He exhausted whisky after a while, and went to alcohol, because its effects were speedier and surer. He was a big man and with a terrible amount of resistant force, and it took a great deal of alcohol even to move ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... religious thinker of the sixteenth century who opposed himself to the narrowest views of those who claimed to be the guardians of orthodoxy was remorselessly maligned. If he was the leader of a party, there were hundreds to maintain his honour against calumny. If he was a solitary searcher after truth, there was nothing but his single life and work to set against the host of his defamers. Of Vanini's two books, one was written to prove the existence of a God, yet here is Mr. Budgell calling him ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... in every form, they wandered over rivers and lakes and through virgin forests, and "blazed" a track, as it were, for the future pioneer. They were the first to lift the {176} veil of mystery that hung, until they came, on many a solitary river and forest. The posts they raised by the side of the western lakes and rivers, were so many videttes of that army of colonisers who have built up great commonwealths in that vast country, where the bushranger ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... that I caught a glimpse of some such oddity. I hasten to add that there had been other things I couldn't help believing, or at least imagining; and as I never felt I was really clear about these, so, as to the point I here touch on, I give her memory the benefit of the doubt. Stricken and solitary, highly accomplished and now, in her deep mourning, her maturer grace and her uncomplaining sorrow, incontestably handsome, she presented herself as leading a life of singular dignity and beauty. I had at first found a way to persuade myself that I should soon get ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... expired? Are the eight hundred millions of our race upon whom the light of Christianity has not shone unvisited by the common Father of our race? Has the universal Father left his "own offspring" without a single native power of recognizing the existence of the Divine Parent, and abandoned them to solitary and dreary orphanage? Could not he who gave to matter its properties and laws,—the properties and laws through whose operation he is working out his own purposes in the realm of nature,—could not ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... (oxycoccos), the Marsh Whortleberry, or Cranberry, or Fenberry—from growing in fens—is found in peat bogs, chiefly in the North. This is a low plant with straggling wiry stems, and solitary terminal bright red flowers, of which the segments are bent back in a singular manner. Its fruit likewise makes excellent tarts, and forms a considerable article of commerce at Langtown, on the borders of Cumberland. The fruit stalks are crooked at the top, ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... furiously ugly daughters, who for the last fifteen years had lived a nomadic life in divers boarding-houses, fondly clinging to the hope that, amongst so many strange bachelors, husbands for these two solitary ones must ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... Beara festival." Much has been said about the Beara or floating lamp, but I have never yet seen a correct description. Moore mentions that Lalla Rookh saw a solitary Hindoo girl bring her lamp to the river. D.L.R. says the same, whereas the Beara festival is a Moslem feast that takes place once a year in the monsoons, when thousands of females offer their vows to the ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... left her, sat in solitary consideration for some twenty minutes, and then called for her chief confidant, Lotta Luxa. With many expressions of awe, and with much denunciation of her niece's iniquity, she told to Lotta what she had heard, speaking of Nina as one who was ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... a curious shock, an hour after we had left the dock, that a turn in my solitary walk on deck brought me face to face with ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... work of the French, and occupy the extremity of one of the islands. They contain the only trees I have seen at Venice:—a few rows of dwarfish unhappy-looking shrubs, parched by the sea breezes, and are little frequented. We found here a solitary gentleman, who was sauntering up and down with his hands in his pockets, and a look at once stupid and disconsolate. Sometimes he paused, looked vacantly over the waters, whistled, yawned, and turned ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... and glasses at due intervals, and small loaves of a peculiar white bread, made with oil, and more like knots of flour than bread. The view from its balcony is not cheerful: a narrow street, with a solitary brick church and barren campanile on the other side of it; and some coventual buildings, with a few crimson remnants of fresco about their windows; and, between them and the street, a ditch with some slow ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... formerly a fellow of Jesus College, was distinguished, by many innocent singularities, uncommon shyness, and stammering of speech, but when he used bad words he could talk fluently. In one of his solitary rambles a countryman met him and inquired the road. "Tu—u—rn," says Neville, "to—to—to—" and so on for a minute or two; at last he burst out, "Confound it, man! you'll get there ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... Sir Walter to catalogue and to picture . . . that most miserable procession" ("Callista: a Sketch of the Third Century," 1855; chapter, "Christianos ad Leones"). It is curious to compare this tale of the early martyrs, Newman's solitary essay in historical romance, with "Hypatia." It has the intellectual refinement of everything that came from its author's pen; and it has strong passages like the one describing the invasion of the locusts. But, upon the whole, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... sympathetic curiosity of my family, I tell it over and over, to an imaginary hearer. That hearer is as present to me, always has been, as Stevenson's "friend of the children" who takes the part of the enemy in their solitary games of war. His criticism (though he is a most composite double-sexed creature who should not have a designating personal pronoun) is all-revealing. For talking it out instantly brings to light the weak spots in one's recollection. "What was it the ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... admonishingly at the little dunce as she spoke; but a defiant pout of the rosy lips was the only answer vouchsafed to the friendly warning, and the next moment an absurdly glaring error brought down on Winnie the righteous indignation of her irritated teacher, and resulted in solitary confinement during recess. ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... waited for him near an hour, and then ate my half of the sandwiches and boiled eggs, smoked a solitary pipe, and fell into a light sleep at the foot of the biggest birch tree, an old and trusty friend of mine. It seemed like a very slight sound that roused me: the snapping of a dry twig in the thicket, or a gentle ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... a "purely learned" work. His pretentiousness was simply colossal, and there is nothing surprising in his wearing the mask even en famille (the letter we have just quoted from is, as we have said, to his sister); he wore it during his solitary fifteen-hours sessions in his study. But the same letter contains another passage, of a very different sort, which is in ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... Perhaps it was the result of the ample supplies of canned provisions which the two men had lavished unsparingly upon him. His face was less cadaverous; the deep searing furrows were less pronounced. Altogether there was a marked improvement in this solitary dweller in the wild. Now he was discussing the prospects of the weather, whilst he partook liberally of the ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... to an idle halt near Cleopatra's needle, and leaning against the Embankment wall, looked across the river to the warehouses opposite, which, in the evening mist, had the look of stark cliffs guarded by a solitary watchful lion. The smaller of the two young men took off his soft hat and set it beside him so that he could let the wind brush through his thick red hair. He held himself very straight, his slender body ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... been alight all day, and no procession of gloomy things, advancing from whithersoever, could have added much to the volume of the crowding darkness, or have appreciably increased its density. In the darkness the cold gathered, and the frost began to take a harder grip of everything,—of desolate, solitary pumps in tiny and squalid back yards, of pipes that crawled like liver-coloured snakes over the unpresentable sides of houses, of pools thick with orange-brown mud, and vagrant bushes creaking above the grimy earth in places that ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... clusters, and the ploughed fields stood bare and brown in the autumnal sun—when the fig trees lost their leaves, and their white branches took on that peculiarly gaunt appearance which characterises them as soon as the wintry winds begin to blow—a solitary traveller plodded wearily across the Lombardy plains, asking, as he went, for the road that would lead him to the village and monastery of ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... bring the business to an end, it was because they could no longer remain separate and solitary. Each night, the drowned man visited them, insomnia stretched them on beds of live coal and turned them over with fiery tongs. The state of enervation in which they lived, nightly increased the fever of their ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... quite alone to-day in Italy, and far off, as if she had no duties, no ties, as if she were one of those solitary, drifting, middle-aged women who vaguely haunt the beaten tracks of foreign lands. It was sultry in this path away from the sea. She was sharply conscious of the change of climate, the inland sensation, the falling away of the freedom from her, the freedom that seems to exhale from wave and ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... possible, because he was of great assistance to us. He could do more with the prisoners than we could, being one of them. Whenever we had trouble with an inmate, his first punishment was Benoix. He did not often need a second. It is many years since the whipping-post, or the standing-irons, or solitary confinement, have been used in this place, as perhaps you know. Many of our prison reforms may be traced to Benoix' influence, though he will never get the credit of them. He said once, 'What is the use of making men desperate? What you want is to make them ashamed. And that comes from inside.' ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... bright point shone out; under a swinging electric lamp Rupert was preparing his machine to go out, a solitary figure in the expanse of wavering shadows ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... the solitary defence against cold and storm, stood in the corner, and before its rusty hearth a rickety chair and an overturned soap box were suggestively placed. But perhaps what told an observer more about Willie Spence than did anything else was a bunch of rarely beautiful sabbatia blooming in a pickle ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... his solitary tea, and sat down again to consider the point. But the point would not be considered alone. He began to feel more strongly what he had had several hints of already, that there was a curiously close connexion ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... Levi, who asserted that, in these hymns, we had the remains of the earliest, and oldest, Indian dramatic creations, the beginning of the Indian Drama; and that the fragments could only be satisfactorily interpreted from the point of view that they were intended to be spoken, not by a solitary reciter, but by two ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston |
