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More "Brooding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... like to give you something worth your acquaintance, Miss Schlegel, in memory of your kindness to me during my lonely fortnight. It has so happened that I have been left alone, and you have stopped me from brooding. I am too ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... had the virus in his blood, and could not help being wretched when his country was invaded, and fighting, and he not in it. He would feel that he was dishonoring the traditions of his race, and untrue to the memory of his fathers. However, that schoolboy brooding over the situation was mighty miserable. When my parents realized my feelings, they, at last, gave up their opposition, and I went into the army ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... does not know how, the secret of her double life came out. No doubt long brooding over these voices, long intercourse with such celestial visitors, and the mission continually pressed upon her—meaningless to the child at first, a thing only to shed terrified tears over and wonder at—ripened her intelligence so that she came at last to perceive ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... The night-watchman sat brooding darkly over life and its troubles. A shooting corn on the little toe of his left foot, and a touch of liver, due, he was convinced, to the unlawful cellar work of the landlord of the Queen's Head, had induced in him a vein of profound depression. A discarded boot stood by his side, ...
— Sailor's Knots (Entire Collection) • W.W. Jacobs
... Timour! in his captive's cage[257][it] What thoughts will there be thine, While brooding in thy prisoned rage? But one—"The world was mine!" Unless, like he of Babylon,[258] All sense is with thy sceptre gone,[259] Life will not long confine That spirit poured so widely forth— So ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... sat bemused, her brows knit, her brooding glance seeming to study the fine Spanish point that edged the tablecloth. At last his lordship broke ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... sprung up between Richard and one William Durgin, a school-mate. This Durgin was a sallow, brooding boy, a year older than himself. The two lads were antipodal in disposition, intelligence, and social standing; for though Richard went poorly clad, the reflection of his cousin's wealth gilded him. Durgin was the son of a washerwoman. An intimacy between the two would perhaps ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... silver-gray, not black. The sky above was brilliant with the gleam of a thousand stars, the moon was shining behind some silvery clouds, the great masses of foliage in the park were just stirred with the whisper of the night, and sweetest odors came from heliotrope and mignonnette; the brooding silence of the summer night ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... nearly go mad, sometimes," Jim confessed. "I get to brooding—I know how rotten it is!" He fell silent, staring into the fire. "Happy?" he asked presently, glancing down at her as she rested quietly ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... gave me a perfectly groundless hope. If they burst through the defence Hilda von Einem and her prophet and all our enemies would be overwhelmed in the deluge. And that blessed chance depended very much on old Peter, now brooding like a pigeon ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... seems to have come to Goethe in his earliest manhood. He was brooding over it at the same time with Goetz von Berlichingen. Faust justly stands at the head of all Goethe's works. Founded on a well-known popular tale, indebted for its interest and pathos to incidents of universal experience, it ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... was a tone in my father's voice, as he uttered these simple words, partly to himself, that rebuked me. Yes, he did manage to live, but how? Witness his pale face, wasted form, subdued aspect, brooding silence, and ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... lasting memory in my mind of the cold and rigid form of Miss Oliver standing up in Madame's triangular parlor, submitting to the mechanical touches of the modiste with an outward composure, but with a brooding horror in her eyes that bespoke an ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... individuals of successive generations, but the very structure of the individuals themselves. It is by the study of heredity that we shall learn to understand the individual. For instance, experimental breeding of the fowl reveals the existence of the brooding instinct as a definite unit, which enters, or does not enter, into the composition of the individual, and which is quite distinct from the capacity to produce eggs. Here is a definite distinction suggested, for the case of the fowl, between two really distinct things which, for several years past, ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... deep silence in the room, and the trembling women in the adjoining chamber hung upon this silence with beating hearts, well aware what a storm of passion was brooding within it. ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... she makes it come out right to a penny. She has been treasurer of the Boston Band of Benevolence, of the Saturday Morning Sloyd Circle, of the Club for the Reception of Russian Refugees, and of the Society for the Brooding of Buddhism; but none of these organisations carries on its existence by means of pounds, shillings, and pence, or Salemina's resignation would have been requested long ago. However, we are not disposed to be captious; we are too glad to get rid of the bill. If our united thirds make four or ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... cold-shouldered the band, abjured the shrine, and avoided the lady. Then, while still morose and brooding, my trouble at its height, a cousin—in the third degree—rich, middle-aged, and conveniently restless, invited me to be his travelling companion. We had taken trips together before. This one promised fields of wider adventure—nothing less than the quartering of ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... at Belvoir Castle, but with classes lying between these two extremes. He had come to feel more and more the fascination of analysing human character and motives among his equals. He had a singularly retentive memory, and the habit of noting and brooding over incidents—specially of "life's little ironies"—wherever he encountered them. He does not seem to have possessed much originating power. When, a few years later, his friend Mrs. Leadbeater inquired of him whether the characters ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... he had not had an iron constitution, and thirteen years behind him of healthy out-door life, with plenty of sleep and exercise and good food, he could not have stood it. As it was, the hard work was good for him, for it kept him from brooding over himself, and his own hopeless love of the little girl who was far ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... with a gay, triumphant peal as she tripped out of the room; but as she sat in her own chamber, brooding, she muttered: "Dare I defy him? Will anything stop ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... have found some arid waste for this factory? Can't you see how Nature cries out against this outrage? Can't you see that she has dedicated this country to seed-time and harvest,—these verdant fields, deep woods and brooding streams?" ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... the Englishmen. This troubled her conscience sorely, for the more she thought of it the more did it seem to her to be wicked that just because we loved him and did not wish to part with him, Ralph should be cheated of his birthright. All night long she lay awake brooding, and before ever the dawn broke she had settled in her mind that she herself would speak to the Englishmen, telling them the truth, come what might of her words, for Suzanne, my daughter, was a determined girl with an upright heart. Now feeling ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... them does not tend to lower our moral temperature and to lessen the rebound of our energy, is another matter. At all events, every one must welcome a postscript in which a blast on the bugle of war seemed to have wakened the poet from his dark brooding to the sense of a ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... now," he replied, with darkly brooding glance. "There's a good old man and two women, my sisters, waitin' for me down the slope. If I could reach home I'd try to live straight, but it's a long and dangerous trail between ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... sacred day of the year. Before sunrise, a great, dark blue cloud in the east made me suppose it was to be a dismal day; but I was quite mistaken, for it has been uncommonly beautiful. Peace has seemed brooding "with turtle wing" over the world, and no one stirs, as if all men obeyed the command of the elements, which was, "Be still, as we are." I intended to make a fine bowl of chocolate for my husband's dinner, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... was in her dressing-room, where she wrote at night, on the rare occasions now when she was left free for composition. Beginning to dwell on THE MAN OF TWO MINDS, she glanced at the woman likewise divided, if not similarly; and she sat brooding. She did not accuse her marriage of being the first fatal step: her error was the step into Society without the wherewithal to support her position there. Girls of her kind, airing their wings above the sphere of their birth, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to Carthon with them," Jay said moodily. Forth watched the tall man stare at the mountain; wondered what lay behind the contained gestures and the brooding. ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... simple enough. The man was mentally unbalanced, the result of brooding over his own failure in art. He had stolen the picture, possessed with the idea that by study of it he should discover the secret of its power. He had made copies of the picture and sold them in order to supply himself with the necessities ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... O patriot tongue, Belying the foul heart! Who was it urged Friendly to tyrants that accurst decree, Whose influence brooding o'er this hallow'd hall, Has chill'd each tongue to silence. Who destroy'd The freedom of debate, and carried through The fatal law, that doom'd the delegates, Unheard before their equals, to the bar Where cruelty sat throned, and murder reign'd With her ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... prosperity, from which we ought to be debarred when the adverse moment has arrived; so that, when trade was prospering, when all was sunshiny, a man might condescend to occupy his spare hours in something else than in a melancholy brooding over the state of the country—that, when returns were rapid, and profits ready, one might deign to cultivate one's faculties, and become acquainted with what the mind of Europe was conceiving or executing; but these were delights to be reserved only for those chosen hours. Now that, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... soar Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all temples th' upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for thou know'st; thou from the first Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread, Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast Abyss, And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That, to the height of this great argument, I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men. Say first—for ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... had been worse than the first, and many men had gone; but the smacksmen, by a special mercy, have no time for morbid brooding. They will risk their lives with the most incredible dauntlessness to save a comrade. The Albert Medal is, I make bold to say, deserved by a score of men in the North Sea every year. The fellows will talk with grave pity about Jim or Jack, who were lost twenty years ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... banners," indeed, was Kheyr-ed-Din in this eventful summer: things had gone badly with the crescent flag, the Padishah was unapproachable in his palace, brooding perchance on that "might have been" had he not sold his honor and the life of his only friend to gratify the malice of a she-devil; those in attendance on the Sultan trembled, for the humor of the ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... much of late, a continual sadness seemed to have fallen on his spirit, the old pucker on his forehead was seldom absent now, he was irritable and ready to take offence, and if not spoken to, would remain silently brooding in ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... exaggeration of language Italy sanctions, pampered by caresses, and honoured by homage on every side, little knew by what dreary torpor of heart and mind that joyous ecstasy they witnessed had been preceded, nor by what a bound her emotions had sprung from the depths of brooding melancholy to this paroxysm of delight; nor could the worn-out and wearied followers of pleasure comprehend the intense enjoyment produced by sights and sounds which in their case no fancy idealised, no soaring imagination had lifted to ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... period of bitter brooding I rebelled, and took the matter up with the Commander-in-Chief. I argued, "As I am not only doing a man's work on a boy's pay but actually superintending the stock and tools, I am entitled to certain individual rights in the choice ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... districts are poorly policed and the ears of the farmer working in the field are always alert for the sound of the bell or the horn calling for help, perhaps from his own home. Occasionally, in spite of all precautions some human animal, inflamed by brooding upon the unattainable, leaves a victim outraged and dead, or worse than dead. Granted that such a crime occurs in a district only once in ten, or even in twenty years; that is enough. Rural folks have long memories, and in the back of ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... Hoka mispronounced it. With people so nice and so touchy, it was scarce to be supposed that our company of greenhorns should not blunder into offences. Hoka, on one of his visits, fell suddenly in a brooding silence, and presently after left the ship with cold formality. When he took me back into favour, he adroitly and pointedly explained the nature of my offence: I had asked him to sell cocoa- nuts; ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the air was; but a thousand times as much could never tell how clear our spirits were. Nobody made any "demonstration," or cut any frolicsome capers, or even said any thing exuberant. The steadfast brooding breed of England, which despises antics, was present in us all, and strengthened by a soil whose native growth is peril, chance, and marvel. And so we nodded at one another, and I ran over and courtesied to Uncle Sam, and he took ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... brooding away in the city." The lad's bright, clear eyes looked frankly into the captain's as he continued. "I have been making a fool of myself, Captain. Got into some mischief with a crowd of fellows at school. Of course, I got caught ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... piblokto—a form of hysteria. I have never known a child to have piblokto; but some one among the adult Eskimos would have an attack every day or two, and one day there were five cases. The immediate cause of this affection is hard to trace, though sometimes it seems to be the result of a brooding over absent or dead relatives, or a fear of the future. The manifestations of this disorder are ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... tenderly in both his own, and so held it for a space, brooding, marveling at its perfection. And inevitably he bent and touched it with his lips, as if their ardent contact would warm it ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... Manderson opened a corner of his heart to. But what I was going to say was this. Some months ago the old man began to get like I never knew him before—gloomy and sullen, just as if he was everlastingly brooding over something bad, something that he couldn't fix. This went on without any break; it was the same down town as it was up home, he acted just as if there was something lying heavy on his mind. But ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... and much moved companion, he made a sign to a youth who was straying about the fields, to approach. This young warrior was made the bearer of an order to lead the captives to the hill, after which the two chiefs stalked to and fro in silence, each brooding over what had passed, in a humor that was suited to his particular character and more ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... of him Mr. Ransom felt that inner recoil which we all experience at the prospect of an immediate and definite termination of a long brooding doubt. In another instant and with one word this uncultured and hitherto unknown man would settle for him the greatest question of his life. And he did not feel prepared for it. He had an impulse almost of flight, ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... and of shelter and brooding peace—was strong upon me while we sat rocking in the failing light. I have never since made harbour—never since come of a sudden from the toil and the frothy rage of the sea by night or day, but ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... arms in the Scottish ranks; and, in one instance, opposed to the regiment from which I had been so ignominiously expelled. Never did revenge glow like a living fire in the heart of man as it did in mine; for the effect of my long brooding in solitude had been to inspire me with a detestation, not merely for those who had been most rancorous in their enmity, but for every thing that wore the uniform, from the commanding officer down to the meanest private. Every blow that I dealt, every life that I sacrificed, ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... by the fireside brooding, Sad upon your ears Whirlwinds of the earth intruding Sound in ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... she gave in. She was a gray-eyed, strong-featured, middle-aged woman, large-boned and fairly stout. But the long journey and hardship had told on her, so that she was hollow-cheeked and gaunt, and like all the women in the company she wore an expression of brooding, never-ceasing anxiety. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... the paper. The house was very quiet, for Small Porges was deep in the vexatious rules of the Multiplication Table, and something he called "Jogafrey," Anthea was out, as usual, and Miss Priscilla was busied with her numerous household duties. Thus the brooding silence was unbroken save for the occasional murmur of a voice, the jingle of the housekeeping keys, and the quick, light tap, tap, of ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... St. Cecily whom, with mystic and almost mediaeval passion, he had before adored. But a priest separates them, and Melchior goes mad. An old doctor, who makes a study of insanity, determines to try and cure him, and induces the girl to appear to him, disguised as St. Cecily herself, while he sits brooding at the organ. Thinking her at first to be indeed the Saint he had worshipped, Melchior falls in ecstasy at her feet, but soon discovering the trick kills her in a sudden paroxysm of madness. The horror of the act restores his reason; but, with the return of sanity, the dreams and visions ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... elephant at large. He was addicted to minding his own business, and never paid the slightest attention to any occupants of cage or enclosure. He was quite unaware of the hostility which he had aroused in the perverse and brooding heart ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... sigh or a groan told of suffering. Among the beds, which stood in a row, each with its head against the wall, one was pointed out on which a living skeleton lay. The face was very very pale, and it seemed as if the angel of death were already brooding over it. Yet, though so changed, there was no mistaking the aspect and the once powerful ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... upon the land, and, brooding in it, my elbow on the warm iron girder of the footbridge (it is a forty-shilling fine to cross by any other means), I perceived, as never before, how the consequences of our acts run eternal through time ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... to see the want of hope in the old man's face as he moved about brooding over his troubles. Odysseus was uncertain whether he should throw his arms about his father's neck and clasp him to his heart and kiss him, or whether it were better to ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... that it was a delusion, Holmes. I assure you that I have never in my life seen anything more clearly. As far as I could judge, the figure was that of a tall, thin man. He stood with his legs a little separated, his arms folded, his head bowed, as if he were brooding over that enormous wilderness of peat and granite which lay before him. He might have been the very spirit of that terrible place. It was not the convict. This man was far from the place where the latter had disappeared. Besides, he was a much taller man. With a cry ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... after all. It was necessary to use a petard to lay bare the treasure, and no one had the necessary skill. When the American consented to lost time and defeat the cyclone threw another spoil in his way. The East like the West Indies is the brooding-place of storms, which in gyratory coils, like a lasso thrown wide and large, go twisting north by west. It caught a French frigate in the loop, and flung her poor bones on the coral reefs, and the hungry sand absorbed her. It is a peculiarity of those ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... into the sitting-room which they shared the subaltern found his comrade lying lazily in a long chair and attired in the same cool costume. The outer doors and windows of the bungalow were still closed against the brooding heat outside. Inside the house the temperature was little cooler despite the punkah ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... one had drawn it to with faltering hand; and I stand and wait and gaze at that gate and the sand of the garden path—wonder and rapture in my heart. All that I behold seems new and different; over all a breath of some glad, brooding mystery, and already I catch the swift rustle of steps, and I stand intent and alert as a bird with wings folded ready to take flight anew, and my heart burns and shudders in joyous dread before ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... valley, which was not deserted like this vale of the Aston, but inhabited: full, that is, of Catalans, who would soon make us forget the inhuman loneliness of the heights, for by this time we were both convinced, though still neither of us said it to the other, that there was an evil brooding ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... go at that—'her mere presence'—" rejoined Bundy. But Solon protested, defending the lady's activities. He became sensitive to any mention of her name, and fell to brooding. He believed her to be a model woman, and little Roscoe to ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... them with looking up. Yet again, said He, observe and look; so they gave heed, and perceived that the hen did walk in a fourfold method towards her chickens. 1. She had a common call, and that she hath all day long. 2. She had a special call, and that she had but sometimes. 3. She had a brooding note. And 4. She had ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... these women who added to the social gifts of their race a character that had risen superior to many storms, hearts that were mellowed and purified by premature sorrow, and intellects that had taken a deeper and more serious tone from long brooding over the great problems of their time. But only a glance is permitted us here. Most of them have been drawn in living colors by Saint-Beuve, from whom I gather here and there a ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... provide was at the service of those who had sustained hurt in the public contention. But for all that I left with a feeling of relief. Grim sights and grimmer suggestions were at every corner. Beneath a verandah a dozen wounded officers, profusely swathed in bandages, clustered in a silent brooding group. Nurses waited quietly by shut doors that none might disturb more serious cases. Doctors hurried with solemn faces from one building to another. Here and there men pushed stretchers on rubber-tyred wheels about the paths, stretchers ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... taut, indefinable something in the air that kept the desire for sleep from both; in the brooding darkness they were alert, watchful, expectant. The tobacco-loving Pendleton afterwards recalled with surprise that not once did he think of the weed. But when the queer, mysterious night sounds began to come—those creakings of loose planks, strainings of unseen timbers ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... salutation, or hasty communication of anticipated ruin before the sun goes down. Here two or three are gathered on one side, whispering and watching that they are not overheard; there a solitary, with his arms folded and his hat slouched, brooding over departed affluence. Mechanics, thrown out of employment, are pacing up and down with the air of famished wolves. The violent shock has been communicated, like that of electricity, through the country to a distance of hundreds of miles. Canals, railroads, and ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... and the coming storm might cause her to hesitate and postpone the marriage. All morning he sat brooding by his window, watching the swaying branches of the trees in the Square—and though he knew at best that he was a fool—confidently expecting the miracle of a message. As the hour of noon approached, despair slowly settled over ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... in the world's work? Men go out to-day to face a life shadowed by vast industrial, commercial, and social problems. Life has grown complicated, involved, hard to understand, difficult to deal with. Tension, conflict, subtlety, surprise, and amid it all, or over it all, a vast brooding weariness that ever and again turns the heart sick. Oh the pains and the perils of the going out! There are elements of danger in modern life that threaten all the world's toilers, whatever their work may be and wherever they may have to do ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea of Thought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead. Monsters uncouth and wild, arise in premature, imperfect resurrection; the several parts and ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... from a defect, of sensibility; but finding that he has gone a little too far, he lets his praise slide into equivocal description, and, with some parting epigram, he relapses into silence. The portraits thus drawn are never wanting in piquancy nor in fidelity. Brooding over his injuries and his desertions, Hazlitt has pondered almost with the eagerness of a lover upon the qualities of his intimates. Suspicion, unjust it may be, has given keenness to his investigation. He has interpreted in his own fashion every mood and gesture. He has watched his ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... bank of clouds and the mountains darkened. Although it lies in the very centre of the Mediterranean, Corsica is a gloomy land, and the summits of her high mountains are more often covered than clear. It is a land of silence and brooding quiet. The women are seldom gay; the men, in their heavy clothes of dark corduroy, have little to say for themselves. Some of them were standing now in the shadow of the great trees, smoking their pipes in silence, and looking with a studied indifference at nothing. Each was ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... of his ship all this while, began first to murmur, and then to leave him: six of them deserted in one night. In other respects events occurred ominous of evil for the termination of the enterprise. To occupy the attention of his companions, and prevent them from brooding on apprehended ills, as well as to guard them against a surprise by any hostile natives, he set them on erecting a fort upon an eminence, at a place four days' journey distant from Lake Peoria; which, when finished, he named Breakheart ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... that the girl was wearing her heart out in brooding over the coming marriage. Jasper Wilde refused to be bought off, and Bernardine herself declared that it must take place. She, ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... jokes in the darkness, so that I laughed and nearly dropped my end of the box (I saw him in the days to come doing heroic and untiring work in the operating theatre), and with another young surgeon whose keen, grave face lighted up marvellously when an ironical smile caught fire in his brooding eyes, and with other men in this hospital and ambulance column who will be remembered in Belgium as fine and fearless men. With the superintendent of the commissariat department—an Italian lady with a pretty sense of humour ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... fire listening and brooding—humming a little tune meanwhile to assure her of the blitheness of ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... the fire, the glow of which fell full upon his face, revealing every feature like carving. His nose was hooked slightly, and to Dick it now looked like the beak of an eagle. The somber eyes, too, expressed brooding and mastery alike. ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... rising over a new-made world, alive with summer glory and thrilling with bird-songs. The air, later in the day, would be warm. But, at sunrise, it was sharp and bracing. The mystic wonder and the hush of dawn were still brooding over the earth. The hard white road stretched out, like a winding river, between banks of dew-gleaming verdure. The mountain-tops were glowing with the touch of the sun. In the deeper valleys floated ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... favour asked. In the drowsy afternoon Helen coaxed her father into her room and dropped the shades and ordered him to sleep, telling him that he looked like a ghost of his former rugged beauty. Then she sank down listlessly upon the doorstep, brooding, her eyes wandering through the green fields of Desert Valley. Her musings were disturbed by the clatter of shod hoofs across the rugged plateau; she looked up quickly, her eyes brightening. Then she saw that it was ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... so," he said, "you are doing very wisely to come out once more among your friends. You can accomplish no good by brooding at home. It is better to live one's normal life—even when it is not easy to do it. ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... ruck of Fastolfe's frantic battle-corps and tore through it like a hurricane, leaving a causeway of the dead stretching far behind; no tarrying, no slacking rein, but on! on! on! far yonder in the distance lay our prey—Talbot and his host looming vast and dark like a storm-cloud brooding on the sea! Down we swooped upon them, glooming all the air with a quivering pall of dead leaves flung up by the whirlwind of our flight. In another moment we should have struck them as world strikes world when disorbited constellations crash into the Milky way, ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... it. Perhaps 'twill then be no more the sin he thought it. For Jamie's nature, like that of spiny plants, was sensitive, delicate within, as his outer side was bent and rough; and he fancied it, first, a selfishness; then, as his lonely fancy got to brooding on it, an actual sin. James Bowdoin's unlucky laugh had taught him how it seemed to others; and was not inordinate affection, to the manifest injury of the object loved, a sin? Jamie felt it so; and he had the Prayer Book's authority therefor. "Inordinate and sinful ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... them at His will, and the sun breaking forth smilingly and scattering the clouds, made us feel that the storm had but refreshed the parched earth and cleared the sultry atmosphere. Not so with the storm which has been brooding in the hearts of a handful of ambitious men, and which has burst forth at last, its bolts directed by no wise or merciful power, and by the hands of selfish and designing ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... accessible only in small boats over a sea that is never even tolerably smooth. This expedition we all dread a little—at least, I judge so from my own case—but we say nothing of it. While thus gloomily brooding over our plight, smoke was sighted on the horizon; we ascended the hill to watch it. A steamer, doubtless, bound for a sunnier clime, for no clime can be less sunny than ours of the past fortnight.... It was a steamer, a small Government steamer, making ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... our general word for the essence of wine and beer and such things comes from a people which has made particular war upon them. I suppose that some aged Moslem chieftain sat one day at the opening of his tent and, brooding with black brows and cursing in his black beard over wine as the symbol of Christianity, racked his brains for some word ugly enough to express his racial and religious antipathy, and suddenly spat ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... confounded, retraced his path, brooding over some more cunning stratagem to ensure his prey. He had passed the bridge, and, on attempting to remount his steed, his attention was directed to a cloud of dust, and a pale flash of arms in the evening light. Two horsemen drew nigh—their steeds studded ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... soul, That sees astonish'd, and astonish'd sings! Ye, too, ye winds! that now begin to blow With boisterous sweep, I raise my voice to you. Where are your stores, ye powerful beings, say, Where your aerial magazines reserved To swell the brooding terrors of the storm? In what far distant region of the sky, Hush'd in deep silence, sleep ye ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... Santee! up the sky The pale moon went with misty eye; And in the west a brooding cloud— Departed day's wind-lifted shroud— Waved slowly in the depths of blue, While now and then a world looked through The broken edge, as from above Steals down a seraph's glance of love, Through sorrow's cloud and mortal air, On breaking ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... to study. She sat in a deep armchair, her books unopened on her lap, looking out upon the sunny garden, and brooding drearily over the past, wondering sadly whether, if Maud were never, never found, she could ever feel happy again! And if happiness did come to her, and Maud had not come back, how terrible that would be, for it would mean that she had ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... at the time. But that was six months ago. And now here was the Tessie who sat on the back porch, evenings, surveying the sunset. A listless, lackadaisical, brooding Tessie. Little point to going downtown Saturday nights now. There was no familiar, beloved figure to follow you swiftly as you turned off Elm Street, homeward bound. If she went downtown now, she saw only those Saturday-night family groups which are familiar to every small ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... thing the woman did. At times, when she saw that she had safely plunged me into a black despondent brooding by these means, she would call the attention of the children to it, and would show them the difference between herself and me. 'Hush! Poor Miss Wade is not well. Don't make a noise, my dears, her head aches. Come and comfort her. Come and ask her if she is better; come and ask ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... "She's leading a lonely life. Her heart is broken, and she believes herself, as every other young girl does, to be without a future. Therefore, she's brooding over it. One never knows in such cases when a girl may fling all prudence to the winds," he said. "If she did, then nothing could ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... absolutely useless. But the case is not only none the worse for this; it is all the better. When we are trying to prove that such transmission exists, we want to keep clear, if we can, of emotional complications. If P is brooding over A's approaching death, and sees a figure of A, then, even if the hour coincides, we cannot help a suspicion that the brooding may have produced the figure. But few, I think, will explain the following incident as a mere outcome ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... snow-surface unpressed by the foot of any man. About him towered icy peaks unnamed and uncharted. No hunter's camp-smoke, rising in the still air of the valleys, ever caught his eye. He, alone, moved through the brooding quiet of the untravelled wastes; nor was he oppressed by the solitude. He loved it all, the day's toil, the bickering wolf-dogs, the making of the camp in the long twilight, the leaping stars overhead, and the flaming pageant of ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... which finally led him to that fate, which was the just reward of an hypocritical and malignant heart, filled with gloomy and ferocious passions—He seemed rather to be an instrument of Hell, than a minister of Heaven, for his mind was perpetually brooding over sanguinary schemes and plans of rapine, while he assumed the sacred vestments of a servant ...
— An Impartial Narrative of the Most Important Engagements Which Took Place Between His Majesty's Forces and the Rebels, During the Irish Rebellion, 1798. • John Jones
... didn't drop that lamp and set the whole place alight. The head on the pillow turned and I saw a face looking up at me which seemed to me to have more malignancy and wickedness than ever I had dreamed of in a nightmare. It was the flush of red over the cheekbones, and the brooding eyes full of loathing of me, and of everything else, that impressed me. I'll never forget my start as, instead of the chubby face of an infant, my eyes fell upon this creature. I took the mother into the next room. 'What is it?' I asked. 'A girl of sixteen,' said she, and then throwing up ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... quite amused at his unwarranted choler, and while he stumped indignantly up and down I fell to dwelling upon the romance of the fog. And romantic it certainly was—the fog, like the grey shadow of infinite mystery, brooding over the whirling speck of earth; and men, mere motes of light and sparkle, cursed with an insane relish for work, riding their steeds of wood and steel through the heart of the mystery, groping their way blindly through the Unseen, and clamouring and clanging in confident ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... The next weeks were no doubt a severe strain upon Dunning's nerves: the intangible barrier which had seemed to rise about him on the day when he received the paper, gradually developed into a brooding blackness that cut him off from the means of escape to which one might have thought he might resort. No one was at hand who was likely to suggest them to him, and he seemed robbed of all initiative. He waited with inexpressible anxiety as May, June, and ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... ox-carts laden with gay, curious Spanish ladies from surrounding ranches, piquant eager senoritas with vivacious gestures of small hands and fluttering fans; senoras plump and placid, slower in their movements and with brooding eyes. They wore their laciest mantillas, silkiest gowns and daintiest footwear to impress the alien invader. And, beside their equipages, like outriders in the cortege of a queen, caballeros and vaqueros sat ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... also the compliments of most of the others present. Tom Wychecombe, however, formed an exception, and instead of manifesting any disposition to submit to this summary disposal of his claims, he was brooding over the means of maintaining them. Detecting by the countenances of the upper servants that they were effectually bribed by his promise to pay the late baronet's legacies, he felt tolerably confident of support from that quarter. He well knew that possession was nine points of the law, and his thoughts ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... have never had much use for plays of this sort. There are slough serious experiences in life without searching for recreation in the sorrows of others, which are, after all, only the expression of the imagination of some brooding dramatist. Some abnormal characters find pleasure in misery. I have heard some women say that "they enjoyed a good cry so much," and that "crying dramas were just grand." But I have been unable to discover anything ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... hard thing that they should return light—that when one went out a hunting, he did not like to return without killing something. "What," he said, "did we come here for? Was it not to kill?" At this Kewaynokwut wavered, who had promised safety, and did not interpose his authority to check the brooding evil, although he took no part in it. Whitehead, Okwaykun, and Wamitegosh, who were in the rear of the party, leveled their arms and fired, killing on the spot the three men, who were immediately scalped. The wildest fury was ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... favoured with your much-valued letter, and I am happy to find that you are so much with my mother, because that sort of variety has a tendency to occupy the mind, and to keep it from brooding too much upon one subject. Sensibility and tenderness are certainly two of the most interesting and pleasing qualities of the mind. These qualities are also none of the least of the many endearingments ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Pyramids, lifting their unnumbered stones to the clear and wonderful skies, have held, still hold, their secrets; but they do not seek for yours. The terrific temples, the hot, mysterious tombs, odorous of the dead desires of men, crouching in and under the immeasurable sands, will muck you with their brooding silence, with their dim and sombre repose. The brown children of the Nile, the toilers who sing their antique songs by the shadoof and the sakieh, the dragomans, the smiling goblin merchants, the Bedouins who lead your camel into the pale recesses of the dunes—these ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... I remained brooding over the altered state of my affairs, with no thought arising to cheer me. I felt so hopeless that I did not even take stock of the biscuits, or rather the crumbs that were left. I guessed roughly by the size of the little heap that it might sustain life—keeping ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... She—herself no more than a slip of a girl at that time—remembered him as a queerly silent young man—insignificant in physique and manner. He had escorted her once to a Venus festival; in a strange, brooding, humble, yet dignified fashion, he had spoken of love. She had laughed, and soon forgot the incident. But Tarrano had not forgotten. The daughter of the great Dr. Brende had fired his youthful imagination. Who knows what dreams even then—born of the genius as yet merely latent—were ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... honors, if military glory were still in possession of another. Other accomplishments might more easily be connived at, but the talents of a great general were truly imperial. Tortured with such anxious thoughts, and brooding over them in secret, [128] a certain indication of some malignant intention, be judged it most prudent for the present to suspend his rancor, tilt the first burst of glory and the affections of the army should remit: for Agricola still possessed ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... Joshua is the Captain of the Lord's host, as was typified to the first one, in that strange scene outside the walls of Jericho, where the earthly commander, sunk in thought, was brooding upon the hard nut which he had to crack, when suddenly he lifted up his eyes, and beheld a man with a drawn sword. With the instinctive alertness of his profession and character, his immediate question was, 'Art ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... fair, but Barbara's eyes were not lifted to dwell on its beauty; they were brooding on the face of the man she had loved, and—had she ever hated him? Did she hate him now? She did not hear a sound or a step, till a shadow fell across the sunlight, and a man stood on the threshold of the long French window, which was ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... only lay dormant for the time. It was still there gnawing at her heart. She knew the danger of the fits Elia was subject to and a brooding thought clung to her that one day one of these would prove fatal. The least emotion, the least temper, fear, excitement, brought them on. This one—it was the worst she had known. Supposing he had died—she ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... with a problem finds the solution instantaneously bursting upon him in the midst of untoward circumstances. The most insignificant trifle may finally turn the lock which opens to the glorious revelation after prolonged brooding. The daily practice may make men ready for the shock which leaps ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... itself, and the whole spirit in which Sophocles has treated it, belong not to the fifth century but to that terrible and romantic past from which the fifth century poets usually drew their material. The atmosphere of brooding dread, the pollution, the curses; the "insane and beastlike cruelty," as an ancient Greek commentator calls it, of piercing the exposed child's feet in order to ensure its death and yet avoid having actually ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... yet he skirted the cause of the quarrel with perfect tact: "The misinterpretation of a few careless and kindly words, said in passing, and repeated, with garbling additions, to a man who was not himself.... The brooding of a mind most unhappily beset with alcohol.... A blow resented by a too devoted but ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... he wore a scarf about his waist, a shabby jacket of velveteen on his back; his trousers were short to the knees, old and spotted; his boots were worn at the heel and patched. It wasn't Velasco—it was a gypsey, a tattered, beggarly ragamuffin, with dark, brooding eyes and a laugh on his lips, a laugh that was like a twist ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... a little remorseful just then, but he made one more attempt to maintain his high ground. 'I don't know that I should have thought so much of the joke itself,' he said, 'but you carried it on so long; you saw her brooding over it and getting worse and worse, and yet you never said a word to undeceive ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... possessors of opulence, splendor, and luxury, with a deep, settled, systematic aversion; with a disposition to contemplate in any other light than that of a calamity an extensive downfall of the favorites of fortune, when a brooding imagination figures such a thing as possible; and with but very slight monitions from conscience of the iniquity of the most tumultuary accomplishment of such a catastrophe. In a word, so far from considering their own welfare as identified with the stability ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... reconstruction. It is a blessed word: we cling to it, we live by it. So many buildings have tumbled about our ears, so many foundations were nothing but running sand; a whole galaxy of truths turned out to be lies. Now we must prepare that which is solid and indestructible. Perhaps some great and wise spirit brooding over our world, learned with the experience of aeons, of human attempts and mistakes, smiles at the deadly earnestness of the intention to reconstruct. I do not care. We have reached a pass when all life and all hope are centred in this faith: the faith that we can make anew and good ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... and Caleb, with fury in his heart, sat brooding in the office attached to the warehouse that he had hired. At that moment he had but one desire—to kill his successful rival, Marcus. Marcus had escaped and returned to Rome; of that there could be no doubt. ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... dream she made her progress, riding through the wonderful stillness of the vast wild land, an ocean on which each littlest sound was afloat, so that each was given its true value almost like a musical tone. An awful, beautiful silence this, brooding back of every sound; nothing in such a place gives forth mere senseless noise; the ripple of frogs in marsh and spring branch fall upon the sense as sweet as bird-songs. The clamour of little falls, ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... presently became slower for a more concentrated brooding upon this slanderous old man who took advantage of his position to poison his daughter's mind against the only one of her suitors who cared in the highest way. And upon this there came an infinitesimal consolation in the midst ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... in banishment living. Ah, and she also herself, the best of her sisters, is driven Out of her native land; but her own misfortunes forgetting, Others she seeks to console, and, though helpless, is also most helpful. Great are the woes and distress which over the earth's face are brooding, But may happiness not be evoked from out of this sorrow? May not I, in the arms of my bride, the wife I have chosen, Even rejoice at the war, as you ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... subdue. Often on the return home from some little expedition on which it had been practicable to take him, sitting on Lightfoot's shoulder, or on the still stronger arm of old One-Ear, his silent, somewhat brooding grandfather, the little brown boy made the woods ring with shrill bird calls, or the mimicry of animals, and ever his laughter filled the spaces in between these sounds. Other children flocked around the merry youngster, ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... At the right, the house of RAIN WIND, and behind all a spring under a clump of dwarf oaks. A little trail runs between stones to connect the Arrow-Maker with the rest of the campody, and beyond it the valley rises gently to the Sierra foothills, brooding under the spring haze. A little to the fore of SIMWA'S house lies a great heap of blankets, baskets, and camp utensils, displayed to the best advantage, the wedding dower of the Chief's daughter. By her father's house BRIGHT ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... Hemphill was faring. His reply was only half satisfactory. He reported the young man as doing very well, and being well; he was growing fat, and that did not improve his looks; and he was getting more and more taciturn and self-absorbed. "Why was he taciturn?" Olive asked herself. "Was he brooding and melancholy?" She did not know anything about the fat, and what might be its primal cause; but her mind was not set ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... reveries, which are the crown and consummation of what opium can do for human nature. I, whose disease it was to meditate too much and to observe too little, and who upon my first entrance at college was nearly falling into a deep melancholy, from brooding too much on the sufferings which I had witnessed in London, was sufficiently aware of the tendencies of my own thoughts to do all I could to counteract them. I was, indeed, like a person who, according ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... heave of the scarcely visible swell, lifted and fluttered feebly for a second or two, pointing now this way, and anon in some other direction, showing that, away up aloft there, and as yet too high to reach and stir the surface of the sea, the air currents were awakening under the brooding influence of the coming storm. These movements occurred at first at long intervals, and were of the most evanescent character; but the intervals rapidly shortened, and within an hour of the occurrence of the first manifestation ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... went out into the damp of the morning, Into the smudge that the witch spread over woodland and meadow, Into the fleecy gray pall brooding on hillside and valley. Laughing and scoffing, he strode into that hideous vapor; Just as he said he would do, just as he bantered and threatened, Ere they could fasten the door, Peter had gone and done it! Wasting his time over books, you see, ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... death. At this rate, before he dared to stretch out a hand to gather for himself the happiness ready to bloom for him, he would be dead! She thought she saw that the man, lonely, sensitive, to a fault, was passing his days in brooding melancholy, in unmerited self-reproach. He had had more than enough of sadness in his life. For an idea, a stupid convention of other folks' manufacture, and not worth respecting, he should have no more. He should not be allowed ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... offering. Therefore other passages also whose purport it is to intimate that an all-knowing Lord is the cause of the world are to be quoted here, as, for instance, Mu. Up. I, 1, 9, 'From him who perceives all and who knows all, whose brooding consists of knowledge, from him is born that Brahman, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... I saw a quality of wistfulness in his eyes. A gentle little fellow, this Mars man. Queer and brooding, with strange thoughts not to be fathomed. He added as though to himself: "I ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... of spectres, so that all the quiet experiences of life, friendship, love, nature, art, become big with uneasy speculations and surmises; from the rampart-platform by the sea until the peal of ordnance is shot off, as the poor bodies are carried out, every moment brings with it some shocking or brooding experience. Hamlet is not strong enough to close his eyes to these things; if for a moment he attempts this, some tragic thought plucks at his shoulder, and bids the awakened sleeper look out into the struggling light. Neither is he strong enough to face the situation with resolution and ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had just heard, he fell into a state of sadness, of inexpressible despondency. There is in a life of opulence without employment this terrible disadvantage: nothing turns its attention, nothing protects the mind from brooding on its sorrows, on itself. Never being compelled to occupy itself with the necessities of the future, or the labors of each day, it remains entirely a prey to great mental afflictions. Being able to possess all that gold can procure, it desires or regrets ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... had confessed to her husband she had been sincere; but hers was a simple and easy going nature, and exaltation could not be long sustained. After excitement she returned rapidly to a passive and unimaginative level; and now, quietly brooding, she could not do otherwise than justify herself for all that ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... climax of trouble that had been brooding sullenly for a week. In annual town-meeting Smyrna and Vienna had voted to change over the inter-urban highway so that it would skirt Rattledown Hill instead of climbing straight over it, as the fathers had laid ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... the leaf found Etterick very full of people, and new dwellers in Glenavelin. The invitations were of old standing, but Lewis found their fulfilment a pleasant trick of Fortune's. To keep a bustling household in good spirits leaves small room for brooding, and he was famous for his hospitality. The partridges were plentiful that year, and a rainless autumn had come on the heels of a fine summer. So life went pleasantly with all, and the master of the place cloaked a very sick heart under ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... a wide red roof that seemed to hover in the whitewashed walls and green shutters; while white smoke from an old gray-rock, mud-daubed chimney melted away among the tree-tops into the lavender of the coming day. It looked like a great brooding white hen setting in a nest of radiant woods, and I felt like a little cold chicken as Sam led the way through the low, wide door for me to creep under the sheltering wings. In about two seconds we were all sheltered in complete comfort. At a huge fire that was a great glow of oak coals old ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... not to be pacified; and presently she went away to pour their tea, and he followed and sat down in an armchair near the fire, brooding ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... tongue of rich golden flame was seen waving and quivering in the heart of the midnight, away up on the extreme summit! In a few minutes the streets were packed with people, gazing with hardly an uttered word, at the one brilliant mote in the brooding world of darkness. It flicked like a candle-flame, and looked no larger; but with such a background it was wonderfully bright, small as it was. It was the flag!—though no one suspected it at first, it seemed so like a supernatural visitor of some kind—a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hubbub he seemed to have been lost within himself. No doubt, they were bitter thoughts that possessed him and at such times one is verily unmindful of things about him. Nor did this knight seem mindful of the words spoken by Sir Percival for he made no answer and lost none of his brooding air. ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... the hand That wields it strongest: that by virtue alone And justice monarchs sway the hearts of men: For there hath God implanted love of these, And hatred of oppression; which, unseen And noiseless though it work; yet in the end, Even like the viewless elements of the storm, Brooding in silence, will in thunder burst! So let the nations learn, that not in wealth; Nor in the grosser pleasures of the sense; Nor in the glare of conquest; nor the pomp Of vassal kings, and tributary lands; Do happiness and lasting power ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... known that he was devoured by a wolf or panther, and suffered no more, what an occasion of joy it had been! what relief to sorrow, what an end to disappointments, compared with this dreary and brooding uncertainty, which preyed upon her nature like a never-dying worm! How precious must have been the faith which could mitigate a sorrow like that, and introduce the suffering heart to seasons of ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... sugar-cane and some old faithful servants, managed to make both ends meet, and to support the establishment in a certain air of elegance and comfort to which they had been accustomed. They were of a proud and haughty race—the brother a disdainful and imperious gentleman, smarting and brooding over the reverses of his family, and rarely visiting his neighbors. His sisters—and they were twins—were trustful, happy girls, and Josephine had been my ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... him strains which only spirits know, And make him captive with the silk-soft chain Of twinned-wings brooding round him, and bestow Kisses of Paradise, as pure as rain; My gems, my moonlight-pearls, ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... with right good will upon the viands, he scarce opened his lips the while, and we in our turn grew silent, for we feared that he had heard the news of some disaster to the French arms, which he was brooding over in ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... doctrine of opposites which appears in the Phaedo, and which has come up again and again in philosophy. We shall find something like it in the Sankhya-karika of the Hindoos. The Duad, with the Monad brooding behind it, is the fundamental principle of ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... trees, brooding with averted eyes, he was suddenly faced by the Seigneur of Rozel, who also was shaken from his discretion and the best interests of the two fugitives he was bound to protect, by a late offence against his own dignity. A seed of rancour had been sown in his mind which ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to no matter what else is done, because lack of intelligent care in early life will be reflected in poor performance when the chicks reach maturity. One can seldom, if ever, offset the mistakes of brooding time by the ...
— Pratt's Practical Pointers on the Care of Livestock and Poultry • Pratt Food Co.
... into tiny pieces, stepped into the parlour and threw them into the grate. He stood for a moment gazing into the glowing coals in brooding anger. Slowly he became conscious of music. Some one was playing an old-fashioned Southern melody, and the tenderest voice accompanied the piano. He walked to ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... simply had to shelve his worries, and baby her out of her own. He adored her, and therefore he never questioned her ingenuousness; he didn't see that by monopolizing his thoughts, and turning them entirely upon herself, she prevented him from wasting his energy in futile brooding, even if he had ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... to lose us," Berrington said. "I am going to give up soldiering altogether. I have only carried it on for the last few years, because I needed something to keep me from brooding over my troubles. I am going to settle down on ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... mysterious paradises of inconceivable green freshness and supernaturally beautiful flowers, fairy fastnesses of fragrance and hidden castles of the dew. In such hours the Well at the World's End seems no mere poet's dream. It awaits us yonder in the forest glade, amid the brooding solitudes of silent fern, and the gate of the Earthly Paradise is surely there in yonder vale hidden among the ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... good deal over this painful yet intangible episode. Was the pain all of his own creating? or had it been produced by something external? And he got the answer that brooding always gives—it was both. He was morbid, and had been so since his visit to Cadover—quicker to register discomfort than joy. But, none the less, Ansell was definitely brutal, and Agnes definitely jealous. Brutality he ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... Mademoiselle Mariposa drew aside the veil of the future, was Edith Symmes, who sat almost directly before it. To the left of her was Marcia, pale and sad, and close beside her Horace Penfield. Heavens! He jumped impatiently to his feet. He was simply getting into a morbid muddle sitting here brooding over this matter. He must have action, action of some kind, and obeying a sudden impulse, he decided to ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... from the Renaults through my great-grandfather—a face which in repose was a trifle worn, not handsome, but clearly cut, though not otherwise remarkable. It was, I believed, neither an evil nor a sullen brooding face, nor yet a face in which virtue molds each pleasing feature so that its goodness is patent to ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... the most revolting conclusions on the everlasting theme, that even for the stone wall you are yourself somehow to blame, though again it is as clear as day you are not to blame in the least, and therefore grinding your teeth in silent impotence to sink into luxurious inertia, brooding on the fact that there is no one even for you to feel vindictive against, that you have not, and perhaps never will have, an object for your spite, that it is a sleight of hand, a bit of juggling, a card-sharper's trick, that ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... begin to assemble in flocks, uniting to form a numerous host. Even upon our own shores their nesting places are often occupied by many hundred pairs, whilst further north they congregate in countless multitudes. They literally cover the rocks on which their nests are placed, the brooding ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [June, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... mountain wilderness, the companionship of such a spirit and mind was a necessity. Unconsciously Sammy had supplied the one thing lacking, and by her demands upon his thought had kept the shepherd from mental stagnation and morbid brooding. Day after day she had grown into his life—his intellectual and spiritual child, and though she had dropped the rude speech of the native, she persisted still in calling him by his backwoods title, "Dad." But the ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... little gentle sister inside. The old man was very much affected; so, of course, was his daughter; nor was Jos without feeling. In that long absence of ten years, the most selfish will think about home and early ties. Distance sanctifies both. Long brooding over those lost pleasures exaggerates their charm and sweetness. Jos was unaffectedly glad to see and shake the hand of his father, between whom and himself there had been a coolness—glad to see his little sister, whom he remembered ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of all existence In sullen jangle are together hurled, Who, then, the changeless orders of creation Divides, and kindles into rhythmic dance? Who brings the One to join the general ordination, Where it may throb in grandest consonance? Who bids the storm to passion stir the bosom? In brooding souls the sunset burn above? Who scatters every fairest April blossom Along the shining path of Love? Who braids the noteless leaves to crowns, requiting Desert with fame, in Action's every field? Who makes Olympus sure, ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... life when we have no relish for its enjoyments; to be goaded to labour when the heart is ready to break, and the vexed spirit implores for rest only to weep in silence: but is not labour better than the rest we covet? and are not those petty, tormenting cares less hurtful than a continual brooding over the great affliction that oppresses us? Besides, we cannot have cares, and anxieties, and toil, without hope—if it be but the hope of fulfilling our joyless task, accomplishing some needful ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... long and melancholy on the strand where he had been left by his companion, brooding deeply on the temper which his ungovernable ally had just discovered. Already had his fair fame been tarnished by one horrid scene, and in circumstances fearfully resembling those under which he now found himself. As he mused he ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... leaned forward to take her, Randy was aware of the change in her. In the old days Mary had been a gay little thing, with an impertinent tongue. She was not gay now. She was a Madonna, tender-eyed, brooding over her child. ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... tuned themselves to fit in with this. The few savage customs which had intruded themselves among the quaint rites and mysticism of these peoples had failed to inculcate a genuine warlike ardour or lust for blood. Their dreamily brooding natures revolted against the strain of prolonged strife. What measure of violent resistance was to be expected from the dwellers on the ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... Pelleas et Melisande, like persons "whispering about a closed room," This drama—at once his most typical, moving, and beautiful performance—swims in an atmosphere of portent and bodement; here, as Pater noted in the work of a wholly different order of artist, "the storm is always brooding;" here, too, "in a sudden tremor of an aged voice, in the tacit observance of a day," we become "aware suddenly of the great stream of human tears falling always through the shadows of the world." Mystery and sorrow—these are its keynotes; separately or in consonance, they are sounded from ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... evergreens, where he had wished to lay his other Ella, they buried the little girl, and then Howard Hastings was, indeed, alone in the world—alone in his great house, which seemed doubly desolate now that all were gone. For many weeks he did not go to Locust Grove, but remained in his quiet rooms, brooding over his grief, and going often to the little grave beneath the evergreens. There, once, al the hour of sunset, he found Eugenia Deane planting flowers above his sleeping child! She had marveled much that ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... and water, the sun or the moon, a star, a buffalo, or a snake—any one of them, will become the subject of his thoughts, and when he sleeps, he naturally dreams of that object which he has been brooding over. ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... forgetting their toil, they were forgetting themselves. The cook approached to hear, and stood by, beaming with the inward consciousness of his faith, like a conceited saint unable to forget his glorious reward; Donkin, solitary and brooding over his wrongs on the forecastle-head, moved closer to catch the drift of the discussion below him; he turned his sallow face to the sea, and his thin nostrils moved, sniffing the breeze, as he lounged negligently by the rail. In the glow ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... delicate cheeks, so vivid the hazel of the wide black-fringed eyes. A touch of something heavy and undecided in the lower part of the face made it perhaps less than beautiful. But any man who fell in love with her would see in this defect only the hesitancy of first youth, with its brooding prophecy of passion, of things dormant and powerful. Face and form were rich—quite unconsciously—in that magic of sex which belongs to only a minority of women, but that, a minority drawn from all ranks and occupations. ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... carved choir-stalls black with age and use, its choir balustrade and pulpit of translucent alabaster, and its dim old altar-piece by Tintoretto, the town boasts the Loggia or council chambers, the palace of the Venetian governors, the noble mansion of the Arnieri, and, brooding over all, a towering campanile, five centuries old. The Lion of St. Mark, which appears on several of the public buildings, holds beneath its paw a closed instead of an open book—symbolizing, so I was told, the islanders' dissatisfaction with ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... by gracious Heaven design'd, At once the source and glory of mankind! 'Tis this can toil, and grief, and pain assuage, Secure our youth, and dignify our age; 'Tis this fair fame and guiltless pleasure brings, And shakes rich plenty from its brooding wings; Gilds duty's roughest path with friendship's ray, And strews with roses ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... respects apart from his stern contemporaries of the Commonwealth as from those who debased literature in the age of the Restoration, yet belongs rather to the older than the newer period. In the midst of evil men and the gloom of evil days the brooding thought of a great poetical work was at length matured, and the Christian epic, chanted at first when there were few disposed to hear, became an enduring monument of genius, learning, and art. His early poems alone would indicate his superiority to all the poets of the period, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... but utterly eclipsed; in the fourth it is but very rarely intercepted for a very brief interval in the dark divine service of a darker Commination Day: in the fifth it predominates generally over the sullen and brooding atmosphere with the fierce imperious glare of a "bloody sun" like that which the wasting shipmen watched at noon "in a hot and copper sky." There is here no more to say of a poem inspired at once by the triune Furies of Ezekiel, ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Lady, his mare, Richard could not help brooding—rather than pondering—over what the old woman had said. Not that for a moment he contemplated as a possibility the acceptance of the witch's offer. To come himself into any such close relations with her as that ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... was deep silence in the room, and the trembling women in the adjoining chamber hung upon this silence with beating hearts, well aware what a storm of passion was brooding within it. ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... rescued from imminent danger, and success beyond their expectations had met the others, it was a silent party. A blanket of depression seemed to rest upon it, which the good stories of Yesler and the genial nonsense of his man, Chinn, were unable to lift. Three of them, at least, were brooding over what the morning had brought forth, and trying to realize what it ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... the note I would strike in the great book I have been brooding for years, "Bums I Have Known." It has been my felicity to have known more bums, I think, than any living man. But I fear I shall never get that book written. And this is a pity. It is a pity because this book would be of great value in the years to come. With our modern ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... and re-perused the despatches of the Queen, and were brooding in no little despondency over their contents, ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... fancy that all our vast complex life once existed as a peaceful unit in the mind of God. But as God, brooding in the abyss, meditated upon Himself, various thoughts separated themselves and revolved within the atmosphere of His mind, at first unconscious of themselves or each other. Presently, desire of ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... intensity with the sorrows of her race. She wrote one novel, Reuben Sachs, and two volumes of poetry—the more distinctive of the two being half-pathetically and half-ironically entitled A Minor Poet (1884). After several years of brooding introspection, she committed suicide in 1889 ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... any social purpose, as Mrs. Pinney, to whom a guest in that lonely place was a rare treat, found to her sorrow, though indeed she could not blame him for being poor company. He passed hours, locked in his room, brooding over Mary's picture. The rest of the day he spent wandering about the place, smiling and talking to himself like an imbecile, as he dreamed of the happiness so soon to crown his trials. If he could have put himself in communication with Mary by telegraph during this period ...
— At Pinney's Ranch - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... streams talk hoarsely to themselves in grassy channels, when the road is full of pools, one is weary, unstrung and dissatisfied, faint of purpose, tired of labour, desiring neither activity nor rest; the soul sits brooding, like the black crows that I see in the leafless wood beneath me, perched silent and draggled on the tree-tops, just waiting for the sun and the dry keen airs to return; but to-day it is not so; I am full of a quiet ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that did; nothing more, indeed, than the fact that she found her husband brooding in front of the fire, and that the smile with which he greeted her was a little too quick and bright and mechanical, and that it soon faded out. The Rodney of her memories had never done things like that. If you found him sitting in a ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... this the act that prompted the happy idea of writing the epic of Aeneas? Vergil was then living at Naples, and we can picture the poet fevered with the new impulse, sailing away from his lectures across the fair bay for a day's brooding. Could one find a more fitting place than Venus's shrine at Sorrento for the ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... it is probable—is in the library of Trinity College, and may be seen by the curious. The spirits of these venerable men still haunt the scenes of their studious youth, and with their mighty shadows brooding over us, what is the value ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... extent that his soldier-servant, who was much attached to him, and was allowed considerable freedom of speech in consequence of his value and fidelity, thought fit to remonstrate. He attributed his master's lowness of spirits entirely to his brooding over the accident, and said one morning when he had brushed the ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... distress might be so great that he would not be responsible for what he was doing. Happily this morbid idea has been dissipated by the arrival of the letter, and I have great hopes now that she will rouse herself, and will shake off the state of silent brooding which has been causing me so much anxiety. It was but this morning that we received the letter, and already she looks brighter and more like herself than she has done since you brought us ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... antics of the singers, pretending to be in such furies of passion, yet modulating every note with the cunning of a carver in ivory, seems to me so preposterous! For surely song springs from a brooding over past feeling,—I do not mean lost ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... turned toward Juniper Bend, and the eyes were fixed, as it were, on a still more distant object—a dark, brooding, ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... knocked at the door of the Wayside Cottage, a letter of introduction in his hand, and a feeling of hero-worship in his heart, he was ushered into the presence of the great romancer, who advanced "carrying his head with a heavy forward droop" and with pondering pace. His look was "somber and brooding—the look of a man who had dealt faithfully and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil which forever attracted ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... glass of wine drove him practically insane, and a debauch was sure to follow. Indulgence was stimulated, also, by the nervous strain and worry induced by uncertain livelihood and privation, the frequent fits of depression, and by constant brooding. Sometimes he fought his weakness successfully for several years, but always it ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... pause, during which Lydia looked at the fire dreamily, and he looked at Lydia. The girl's face grew more and more absent and brooding. ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... picture that formed in my mind was not of Joan, but that other woman unknown to history—her mother, who after Joan had left the village and rumours of her battles and banquets drifted back, must have sat there staring into the blazing logs, her peasant's hands folded in her lap, brooding, wondering, hoping, fearing—fearing as the mothers of soldiers have throughout ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... gathered a tolerably clear notion of the poor poet's state of body and mind; as a self-indulgent, unmethodical person, whose ill-temper was owing partly to perpetual brooding over his own thoughts, and partly to dyspepsia, brought on by his own effeminacy—in both cases, not a thing to be pitied or excused by the hearty and valiant Doctor. And Tom's original contempt for Vavasour took ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... yet over; the air had again become close and suffocating. Courtland remained brooding in his chair. Whether he could accept Champney's news as true or not, he felt that he must end this suspense at once. A half-guilty consciousness that he was thinking more of it in reference to his own passion than his duty to the company did not render his meditations less unpleasant. Yet ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... much bodily, perhaps, as in spirit." Justine Brent drew her brows together, and stared moodily at the thin brown hands interwoven between Mrs. Dressel's plump fingers. Seated thus, with hollowed shoulders and brooding head, she might have figured a young sibyl bowed above some mystery of fate; but the next moment her face, inclining toward her friend's, cast off its shadows and resumed the look ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... of the details of the work carried on in the Central Hindu College, observing and asking questions, noting the good feeling between teachers and students, so different from his own school experiences in Southern India. He appears to have been brooding over the question, and has, in this booklet, held up the educational ideals which appear to him to be necessary for the improvement of ...
— Education as Service • J. Krishnamurti
... and nature are such that they are not easily led while brooding over unadjusted wrongs. This is especially so regarding their lands. Matters arising from the construction and operation of railroads across some of the reservations, and claims of title and right of occupancy set up by white persons to some of the best land within other reservations ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... mother put her little son aside and looked at her brother with brooding eyes. A little later she said with apparent irrelevance, "Jehiel, as soon as you're a man grown, I'll help you to get off. You shall be a sailor, if you like, and go around the world, and bring back coral ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... with never a favour asked. In the drowsy afternoon Helen coaxed her father into her room and dropped the shades and ordered him to sleep, telling him that he looked like a ghost of his former rugged beauty. Then she sank down listlessly upon the doorstep, brooding, her eyes wandering through the green fields of Desert Valley. Her musings were disturbed by the clatter of shod hoofs across the rugged plateau; she looked up quickly, her eyes brightening. Then she saw that it was John Carr returning, and into her look there came an expression much resembling ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... of the sky; the golden lights on the bare peaks and the lilac veils in the far ravines; the silky rustle of a canyon swallow as he shot downward in the sweep of the wind; the fragrance of cedar, the flowers of the spear-pointed mescal; the brooding silence, the ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... and sat thinking, or rather brooding, sullenly. Then she put on her bonnet and cloak and started out, taking the road that ran past Honham Castle. She had not gone a hundred yards before she found herself face to face with Edward Cossey himself. He was coming out of a gunsmith's ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... unbroken blue distance of the Mediterranean, trembling into soft ribbons of silver where the wind rippled its surface, yellowing into a fluid gold towards the path of the lowering sun, deepening, again, into a brooding turquoise along the flat rim of the sea to the southward where the twin tranquilities of ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... me to arrange a place for her where she could rest at ease, but Sally returned to my side and stayed there. She was an enigma to-day—pale, brooding, silent—and she never looked at me except when my face was ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... looking out of a window, Benvenuto's shop being under the palace of the Cardinal, he took his gun and pointed it upon the Cardinal. The Cardinal, however, had been warned, and presently withdrew. Benvenuto, in order that his intention might escape notice, aimed at a pigeon which was brooding high up in a hole of the palace, and hit it exactly in the head-a feat one would have thought incredible. Now let your Holiness do what you think best about him; I have discharged my duty by saying what I have. It might even come into his head, imagining that he had been wrongly ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... Out of the brooding darkness was born the first timid blush of the morn. It sprang to life along the serried edge of the Medicine Bow, a broadening band of blood-red light. For one instant it seemed that some titan breath had blown at ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... were filled with lectures, classes, interviews, and reunions with old friends. Beneath a hollow smile and a life of ceaseless activity, a stream of black brooding polluted the inner river of bliss which for so many years had meandered under the sands of ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... the air the rock its summit shrouds In brooding tempests, and in rolling clouds; Loud storms around, and mists eternal rise, Beat its bleak brow, and intercept the skies. When all the broad expansion, bright with day, Glows with the autumnal or the summer ray, The summer and the autumn glow in vain, The sky for ever lowers, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... acknowledged, but did not recognize. Albeit constrained to admit that this was the first occasion of their ever being on their way to the dinner-table of a person of quality, they could refuse to look the admission in the face. A peculiar lightness of heart beset them; for brooding ambition is richer in that first realizing step it takes, insignificant though it seem, than in any subsequent achievement. I fear to say that the hearts of the ladies boiled, because visages so sedate, and voices so monotonously indifferent, would witness ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was gone now; tired without reason, she plodded on along the road in her little white shoes, head bent, brown eyes brooding, striving to fix her wandering thoughts on Duane Mallett to fight down the threatening murmurs of ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... on a thin hand, and certainly there was nothing sordid, nothing mean, in the eyes which looked so kindly at his companion. It was not perhaps a strong face, nor yet quite a weak one; rather it indicated an over-sensitive, brooding nature. "You will not always be a Candy Man," he said. "I have made Miss Bentley's acquaintance recently. ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... far this was admitted by any of the men. She was considering how she should carry off the situation. She was determined to have her experience. Now, at this eleventh hour, she was not to be baulked. Her face was flushed as with battle, her eye was brooding ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... for it all," I said to myself; and I was brooding over the past again, when Esau uttered a low chuckle, which made me turn to ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... can hardly see von Bissing pass in his automobile, as it is, without wishing I had a bomb. But there it is. It is no business of mine. As I can't get away, as you won't let us go out of the country—Switzerland, Holland—and as I don't want to go mad by brooding, find something for me to do that will occupy my thoughts: and yet not implicate me with the Germans. Can't I go and help every day in your hospitals? If you'll continue your kindness to mother—and believe me"—she broke off—"I do appreciate what you have done ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... table, still silent and morose; and though he fell with right good will upon the viands, he scarce opened his lips the while, and we in our turn grew silent, for we feared that he had heard the news of some disaster to the French arms, which he was brooding over in ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... was one not easily to be forgotten. It led us through a sublime waste, a wilderness of mountains and pine forests, over which the spirit of loneliness and silence seemed brooding. Above and below little could be seen but the same dark green foliage. It overspread the valleys, and the mountains were clothed with it from the black rocks that crowned their summits to the impetuous streams that circled round their base. Scenery like this, it might seem, could have ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... this debate with Cox to show how local prejudices obscured the problem then involved. The people of Ohio were divided on parallel lines, for Cox and I agreed on Kansas, but he was for Douglas and I for Lincoln, while the south was brooding over secession, if either Lincoln ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... turned and glanced at Mallett, who was re-reading Brent's election address with brooding ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... the lovely, peaceful, healing days passed, that bitter and contracted heart had to expand somewhat. Gradually the ferocity faded, leaving in its room an anxious and brooding wonder. God knows what thoughts passed through that somber mind in those long hours, when, concentrated upon himself, he must have faced the problem of his future and, like one before an impassable stone wall, had to fall back, baffled. He could be sure of only one thing: that never again ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... them to redeem themselves from captivity by the payment of heavy fines, and before long gave them back their lands. The king's victory was so complete that neither of the earls could forgive it. In 1295, Gloucester died, without opportunity of revenge; but Hereford lived on, brooding over his wrongs, and in later years signally avenged the trial at Abergavenny. Meanwhile the conqueror of the principality had shown unmistakably that the liberties of the march were an anachronism, since the marchers ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... subject, but usually sheered off before he had gone far. Of shrugs and winks he offered plenty, enough to keep the youngster tantalized almost beyond endurance. Nor was it possible to force his confidence, for he was of a surly, taciturn disposition, given to brooding suspicions. ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... to reach the most revolting conclusions on the everlasting theme, that even for the stone wall you are yourself somehow to blame, though again it is as clear as day you are not to blame in the least, and therefore grinding your teeth in silent impotence to sink into luxurious inertia, brooding on the fact that there is no one even for you to feel vindictive against, that you have not, and perhaps never will have, an object for your spite, that it is a sleight of hand, a bit of juggling, a card-sharper's ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... caught from the brooding rocks, and moulded in the substance of the rocks, still it climbs, instructed by the winds, the ocean's tidal rhythm, and the tumultuous transports of the human voice, its raptures, sorrows, or despairs, to the newer wonder, the numbered cadences of poetry, the ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... great house, darkened the lights, and everything sank into silence, broken only now and then by the call of a night bird in the shrubbery, or the whistle of a far-away locomotive. The full moon sailed high in the deep blue heaven, brooding over the sleeping world in its mystery, its beauty, its joy ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... at which a woman with a small boy in a sailor suit had seated themselves. The woman was engrossed with the bill of fare, but the child's attention seemed riveted upon the Sausage Chappie. He was drinking him in with wide eyes. He seemed to be brooding on him. ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... putting him again in a strong emotional mood. For many weeks he lived alone at Astura, on the edge of the Pomptine marshes, out of reach of all friends, forbidding even his young wife and her mother to come near him; brooding, as it would seem, on the survival of the godlike element in his daughter. These sad meditations took a practical form which at first astonishes us, but is not hard to understand when we have to come to know Cicero well, and to follow the tendencies ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... that brooding stillness, Napoleon entered upon the last phase of his greatness, his brief ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... ask the boys to dance. At another a crowd of girls were lined up wearing different ribbons, and the boys marched along until each one found the girl wearing a ribbon to match the one he wore. That was his partner. It was interesting to see the eager, mischievous, brooding eyes of these girls as they watched and waited. Just as interesting was it to see this boy's face when he found his partner was ugly, and that boy swell with pride when he found he had picked a "winner." It was all adventure for both boys and girls. But ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... tendencies appear consecutively, not simultaneously, in exact accordance with her impulses. For Mary Stuart was never quiet an instant: even in her prison she shared in the movement of the world; her brain never ceased working; she was brooding over her circumstances, her distress and her hope, how to escape the one and realise the other: sometimes indeed there came a moment of resignation, but only soon to pass away again. She throws all her thoughts into her letters which, even if ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... in the desert ways, and we won them fair and square; We built so well as the swift years fled that life was a laughing thing; And the joys that come as the crowns of life, the joys that are sweet and fair, Build close their nests by the brooding eaves where the rose-vines ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... equal in power and splendour? Who would not wish to share his good fortune, as consort to tarry beside him, whom the greatest of heroes so devotedly serves?" Isolde, but half heeding, has fallen again to her miserable brooding. Brangaene's last words find their way to her brain and produce an image there which she stares at with gloomy and tragic eyes. As before, unconscious in her perturbation that she is doing it, she voices her inmost thoughts audibly, ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... Brooding, he forgot the cold. Suddenly the wave wetted his feet—the tide was flowing; a gust passed through his hair—the north wind was rising. He shivered. There came over him, from head to foot, the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... too—the wood so damp and still and so secret, in the remote morning air. Morning, with rain in the sky, and the forest subtly brooding, and me feeling no bigger than a pea-bug between the roots of my fir. The trees seem so much bigger than me, so much stronger in life, prowling silent around. I seem to feel them moving and thinking and prowling, and they overwhelm me. Ah, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... glad to win an angel apiece so easily. He sent them out, and instantly dismissing the subject with contempt, sat brooding ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... there on the Wolfsberg, it seemed to me that I could distinguish a muttering as of voices full of hate, like men talking low on their beds the secret things of evil and treason. I discerned discontent and rebellion rumbling and brooding over the city that clear, keen night ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... increase with his opposition, he thought it necessary to strengthen himself by new devices. He extorted hostages and a new oath of fidelity from his barons. He raised a great army, to divert the thoughts of his subjects from brooding too much on their distracted condition. This army he transported into Ireland; and as it happened to his father in a similar dispute with the Pope, whilst he was dubious of his hereditary kingdom, he subdued Ireland. At this time he is said to have established the English ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... trees, For storied rose, and sweet poetic morn, For sound of bird, and brook, and murmuring bees, For luckless fancies of illusion born, What time in dark we dwelt and framed our lore? Woe, woe, if then regretful we should mourn "What wisdom left we on that human shore!" For brooding kindness can a charm beget, Not duly won, and from Heaven's parapet These terrene colours shine with starry gleam— But this is all a fable and a dream; A fable, for this axiom it brings, Immortal loves must love immortal things; Dream is it, for uncurbed it ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... and brooding away in the city." The lad's bright, clear eyes looked frankly into the captain's as he continued. "I have been making a fool of myself, Captain. Got into some mischief with a crowd of fellows at school. Of course, I got ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... its figure is sculptured, and the many old legends in which it plays a conspicuous part? What else was the belief of our pagan fathers, that within a dark cave in the bowels of the earth there sat a great scaly dragon, brooding on gold? What else was the fabled garden of the Hesperides, where the trees, guarded by a fierce and formidable serpent, bore apples of gold? What else was the tragic story of a father and his sons dying by the bites ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... Christian, whose life has been dark with brooding cares that would not lift themselves, and on whom chilling rains of sorrow have fallen at intervals through all his years, death is but the clearing-up shower; and just behind it are the songs of angels, and the ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... thoroughly trained set of children. If a hawk, or even a big robin, went sailing over head, how quickly they scampered, and hid themselves at their mother's note of warning! and how meekly they all trotted roost-ward at the first sound of her brooding-call! I wish all little folks were as ready to go to bed at the ...
— The Nursery, March 1873, Vol. XIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest People • Various
... of the Storm Country," with the same wild background, with its half-gypsy life of the squatters—tempestuous, passionate, brooding. Tess learns the "secret" of her birth and finds happiness and love through her boundless faith ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... to him, 'Go ahead and do it,' could I? As it was he went off, shaking his head. And what idea he kept brooding over, after that, who knows? One can't see inside of another man's brain. But sometimes, when I heard ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... was now brooding over the Susquehanna, and the autumn leaves were being tinged with red. The struggle of the year 1778 seemed over and Brant decided to spend the winter at Niagara. Accordingly he set out with a band of warriors from his entrenched position at Unadilla and ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... Mother went on. "And you've been brooding and brooding till it seems far worse than ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... fame, upon the whole, rests on a different basis. The lovely dreamy mind of Novalis was cut off in the full promise of its spring; it only just awoke from the blissful visions of its childhood, to breathe forth a few lyrical murmurs about the mysteries it had been brooding over, and then fell asleep again. Upon Tieck, therefore, the character of German poetry in the age following those of Goethe and Schiller will mainly depend: and never did Norwegian or Icelandic spring burst forth more suddenly than the youth of Ludwig Tieck. I know not in the whole history of literature, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... two from each nest, and to always leave more than half, as we have already begged them to do, the mother-bird will not suffer. If we could believe for a moment that our little friends would be so cruel as to disturb the brooding mother, and rob her nest of all its eggs, we would never publish another letter requesting an exchange of these pretty natural curiosities. The nesting season is now over in all the Northern States, but when it returns, we trust the young egg ...
— Harper's Young People, October 19, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... silence! O'er the brooding hill The last faint whisper of the zephyr dies; Meadows and trees and lanes are hushed and still, A shroud of mist on the slow river lies; And the tall sentry poplars silent keep Their lonely vigil ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... lighted his lamp, but the flaring name illuminated only a little space in the brooding, hovering blackness ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... sultry night. A storm was brooding between heaven and earth. The moon was not yet up, and it was so dark that they had to feel their way along the wall, glad of the protection of a fence of thick ivy on the outer side. Looking down into ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... here and there Tossed their splinters in the air; The very trees were stripped and bare; The barns that once held yellow grain Were heaped with harvests of the slain; The cattle bellowed on the plain, The turkeys screamed with might and main, And brooding barn-fowl left their rest With strange shells bursting in ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... paradises of inconceivable green freshness and supernaturally beautiful flowers, fairy fastnesses of fragrance and hidden castles of the dew. In such hours the Well at the World's End seems no mere poet's dream. It awaits us yonder in the forest glade, amid the brooding solitudes of silent fern, and the gate of the Earthly Paradise is surely there in yonder vale hidden among ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... kept that post until his provisions failed. Then, as the Hermione would not come out to him, he determined to go into the Hermione. Hamilton was a silent, much-meditating man, not apt to share his counsels with anybody. In the cells of his brooding and solitary brain he prepared, down to the minutest details, his plan for a dash at the Hermione—a ship, it must be remembered, not only more than double his own in strength, but lying moored head and stern in a strongly fortified port, under the fire of batteries mounting nearly 200 guns, and ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... climbed up into the loft and put down a rackful of hay; I let the cows out into the pasture and set up the bars. And then I stood by the gate and looked up into the clear June sky. No man, I think, can remain long silent under the stars, with the brooding, mysterious night around about him, without feeling, poignantly, how little he understands anything, how inconsequential his actions are, ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... in a primitive country, had brought plenty of wool, which the women spun into cloth from which to make garments. At that time there were no readymade clothes. Everything had to be made at home. This kept the women busy almost all day, and kept them from brooding over their trials ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller
... married some one else for money, but had married him for love, he and she would have been happy (which they wouldn't have been), and that she has a tenderness for him still (whereas her toughness is a proverb). Brooding over the fire, with his dried little head in his dried little hands, and his dried little elbows on his dried little knees, Twemlow is melancholy. 'No Adorable to bear me company here!' thinks he. 'No Adorable at the club! A waste, a waste, a waste, my Twemlow!' And so drops asleep, and ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... in every sorrow when it rejects sympathy. Purdee, always taciturn, grave, uncommunicative, was, invested with an austere aloofness, and was hardly to be approached as he sat, silent and absent, brooding over the fire at his own home. When roused by some circumstance of the domestic routine, and it became apparent that his mood was not sullenness or anger, but simple and complete introversion, it added a dignity ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... evening after Michael's departure, she was seated in his room, brooding, when suddenly she heard a peculiar knocking ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... exhilarating was the silence and loneliness, the feeling that ourselves only, of all the world, were in that beautiful mysterious place. Had I had prayers to say, I should have said them, sure that some sort of a God was brooding on the waters and suspicious perhaps, at the back of my mind, that where the black cliffs upreared themselves, there ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... made nest, With the fond trust of brooding bird, I find no all-embracing word To say how deeply I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... darken, until, by the time that the boats had turned, the whole scene had become involved in a murky twilight, through the gloom of which the brig, still with every stitch of canvas set, could with difficulty be made out. Still, although it seemed to me that the brooding squall might burst upon us at any moment, the atmosphere maintained its ominous condition of stagnation until the boats had reached within some four cables' lengths—or somewhat less than half-a-mile—of us; when, as I was intently watching their progress, ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... Still, Rhodocleia, brooding on the dead, Still singing of the meads of asphodel, Lands desolate of delight? Say, hast thou dreamed of, or remembered, The shores where shadows dwell, Nor know the sun, nor ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... Mrs. Gammit that there was also an abundance of bears. From the garden, at length, he had ventured to the yard and the barn. In a half-barrel, in a corner of the shed, he had stumbled upon the ill-fated white top-knot hen, faithfully brooding her eggs. Undeterred by her heroic scolding, and by the trifling annoyance of her feathers sticking in his teeth, he had made a very pleasant meal of her. And still he had heard nothing from Mrs. Gammit, who, for all her indignation, could not depart from her custom of sound sleeping. ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... come. My distress deepened to despair when on the following day Cardillac talked about nothing else but the magnificent ornaments which he had seen before his eyes during the night. I could only interpret that as having reference to your jewellery, and I was certain that he was brooding over some fresh murderous onslaught which he had assuredly determined to put into execution during the coming night. I must save you, even if it cost Cardillac's own life. So soon as he had locked himself in his own room after evening prayers, according to his wont, I climbed out of a ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... the Cabbage Patch, and it was nearing Christmas again. The void left in Mrs. Wiggs's heart by Jim's death could never be filled, but time was beginning to soften her grief, and the necessity for steady employment kept her from brooding over her trouble. ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... heavens. The ruddy daylight was deepening to that warmth of color which belongs to day's old age. The forest shadows appeared to deepen, those dark forests so far below him in the valleys. Here, where he was racing along at a high level, all was bright, the air was joyous. Below him lay the brooding stillness where lurked a hundred unknown dangers. There were only about fifteen more miles of this broken solitude, and beyond that stretched a world of waving, gracious grassland right on to the prairie ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... conclusion of Jacob Jones, who made himself quite unhappy for some weeks, brooding over the matter. He never once dreamed of the real cause of his not having had an equal share in his young friend's good fortune. He had not the most distant idea that his employer felt nearly as much regard for him as for his nephew, and would have promoted his interests as quickly, ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... sat brooding, his eyes looking out into space. Muller respected his suffering and sat in equal silence, until Graumann raised his eyes to his again. "Then came the evening of ...
— The Case of the Registered Letter • Augusta Groner
... knew Montfort? If she had not known Montfort, what would she have been even at this present? She recalled the hours of anguish, the long days of bitter mortification, the dull, the wearisome, the cheerless, hopeless, uneventful hours that were her lot when lying on her solitary sofa at Pisa, brooding over the romance of Armine and all its passion; the catastrophe of Ducie, and all its baseness. And now there was not a moment without kindness, without sympathy, without considerate attention and innocent ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... was, and earnest as he felt to become different to what he had been in olden time, he could not shake off from his mind the sad memory of the past. His mind was continually brooding upon poor little Dobbin's death, and upon the share which he had in it. For now he knew all the truth. He had seen old Leonard, and sat with him for many hours; and at his earnest request the old ...
— The One Moss-Rose • P. B. Power
... here I lie all huddled and hidden, (Oh, the eternity it seems!) Brooding desolate and bed-ridden, Living ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... men was comparatively a trifle; pikes, bullets, and conflagrations are comparatively a trifle. Their real tyranny was the tyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and demoralised human spirit. Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved and reverenced, for it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial, madness can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because they were fanatics, ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... creates a new thought-form; but if a thought-form of the same nature is already hovering round the thinker, under certain circumstances a new thought on the same subject, instead of creating a new form, coalesces with and strengthens, the old one, so that by long brooding over the same subject a man may sometimes create a thought-form of tremendous power. If the thought be a wicked one, such a thought-form may become a veritable evil influence, lasting perhaps for many years, and having for a time all the appearance ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... in fact, been brooding over some affair of the heart. A day in advance he therefore gave proper injunctions to Pei Ming. "As I shall be going out of doors to-morrow at daybreak," he said, "you'd better get ready two horses and wait at the back door! No one else need follow as an ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... black background of the cloud. It really seemed as if Nature held her breath in anticipating terror. Higher and higher rose the cloud—fiercer and fiercer flashed the lightning, sterner and sterner came the peals of the solemn thunder. Still Nature held her breath, still fear deep and brooding reigned. The wild tint still was spread over all things—the pines and hemlocks near at hand seeming blanched with affright beneath it. Suddenly a darkness smote the air—a mighty rush was heard—the trees seemed ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... rousing up from his brooding, and he saw Wunpost turning guiltily away. "Ah, I knew it!" he burst out; "I misdoubted it all the time, but you thought you could keep it from me. But when I came down from Panamint, to see where the waterspout had struck, and found it tearing in from Woodpecker Canyon, ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... That day Roger Hapgood got no farther than the bar-room at the front of the house. There he sat in one of the rickety chairs, brooding, sullen, and silent, smoking cigarettes, drinking high-balls, and cursing the whole God-forsaken West. And ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... time I felt a thrill of anticipation shoot through my veins. Why, I could not say. Her tone was peculiar, and she spoke in a sort of brooding way as though she were weighing something in her own mind; but then her manner had been peculiar throughout. Whatever it was that aroused my suspicion, I determined henceforth to keep a very sharp eye upon her ladyship. ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... Thornfield, the seat of her wealthy neighbour, Mr. Rochester, how shall your Catherine's trembling pen unfold the mysteries by which she finds herself surrounded! No sooner had I entered this battlemented mansion than a cold chill struck through me, as with a sense of some brooding terror. All, indeed, was elegance, all splendour! The arches were hung with Tyrian-dyed curtains. The ornaments on the pale Parian mantelpiece were of red Bohemian glass. Everywhere were crimson couches and sofas. The ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... applies to myself, for I am certain I would not have recuperated so soon had it not been that I was relieved from a great deal of care and worry by my confidence in him, while I have had enough to employ my mind to keep me from brooding sorrow. I am now confident the doctor gave me the best possible advice when he said, 'You had better not give ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... Black are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea of Thought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead. Monsters uncouth and wild, arise in premature, imperfect resurrection; the several parts and shapes of different ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... a watchful hen-mother was apparently seeing nothing, and yet all the time was tenderly brooding over the little chick whom she hoped was soon about to take flight from the parent nest, saw at a glance that her chick looked nothing at all beside that superior chicken of Mrs. Meadowsweet's. For Matty's little nose was sadly burnt, and one lock of her thin limp hair was flying not too picturesquely ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... the attitude of Napoleon, the same which he retained throughout the whole of this retreat. It was grave, silent, and resigned; suffering much less in body than others, but much more in mind, and brooding over his misfortunes. At that moment General Charpentier sent him from Smolensk a convoy of provisions. Bessieres wished to take possession of them, but the Emperor instantly had them forwarded ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... abandoned all that. She began to be absorbed in dress, and that, too, she gave up. She did, for a time, undertake her daughter's education, but she got tired of that too, and handed her over to a governess. She ended by spending her whole time in sentimental brooding and tender melancholy. The birth of Elena Nikolaevna had ruined her health, and she could never have another child. Nikolai Artemyevitch used to hint at this fact in justification of his intimacy with Augustina Christianovna. Her husband's ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... sold his outfit except the few belongings he cherished, and boarded a west-bound stage. Once on the way he recovered from his brooding mood and gradually awakened to the fact that he was riding to a new country, a new adventure—the biggest of his life—in which he must make amends to his mother, and to Lucy. Quite naturally he included Lucy in the ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... during his absence they had been regulating their lives by his minute instructions, and depending upon him for guidance after he should return. But what if he should never return? And why hadn't he come already? These thoughts were too much for them. Judie sat in her corner brooding over her trouble, and crying a little now and then. Joe was simply frightened, and his eyes grew bigger and rounder than ever. Tom was sustained in part by the thought that the burden of responsibility was now on him, and so he suppressed all manifestations ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston
... of him. Her eyes were deep pools of sapphire. She was smiling gently and brooding above something which nestled in her arms. He called to her softly; she paid him no attention. Far below the ridge, in obedience to his commands, the animals were still shouting. Was it because of them that ...
— Christmas Outside of Eden • Coningsby Dawson
... let it go at that—'her mere presence'—" rejoined Bundy. But Solon protested, defending the lady's activities. He became sensitive to any mention of her name, and fell to brooding. He believed her to be a model woman, and little Roscoe ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... story only made the place more interesting. But now I said to myself that I wished I had never spoken so lightly. Perhaps the ghost had brought me bad luck. I felt as if the murder must have happened on just such a still, brooding, damp night as this. Maybe it was the anniversary, if ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... embittered every moment. His love increasing with the passage of time rendered his position hateful in the extreme. The feeling within that he had talent which only required opportunity stung him like a scorpion. The days went by, and everything remained the same. Continual brooding and bitterness of spirit went near to drive ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... that she took a lively interest in this bit of Shanghai but a step out of the Occident, for her face had lost its heavy brooding and she asked him many questions. It was an hour before Masters' name was mentioned, and then ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... she held it eagerly to her breast,—to the right side. We could see her eyes bright with a surprising tenderness and joy, bending over this bundle of clothes. She held it as a woman holds her sucking child; opening out her night-gown impatiently, and holding it close, and brooding over it, and murmuring foolish little words, as over one whom his mother comforteth, and who sucks and is satisfied. It was pitiful and strange to see her wasted dying look, keen and ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... daughter's presence distressed and irritated her, and by the doctor's advice Nesta had gone to her as little as possible, while taking every care to guard her and see to her comfort. All day long she sat brooding—and only Esther Mawson, now for some time in her full confidence, knew that her brooding was rapidly developing into a monomania. Mrs. Mallathorpe, indeed, had but one thought in her mind—the eventual circumventing of Pratt, and the ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... Tom gathered a tolerably clear notion of the poor poet's state of body and mind; as a self-indulgent, unmethodical person, whose ill-temper was owing partly to perpetual brooding over his own thoughts, and partly to dyspepsia, brought on by his own effeminacy—in both cases, not a thing to be pitied or excused by the hearty and valiant Doctor. And Tom's original contempt for Vavasour took a darker form, perhaps ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... I'm really uncertain, yet, as to the best attitude." Imogen was listening to this with some gravity of gaze. "Do take that last position we decided upon, Imogen. And do you, Mary, take the place of the faltering old Oedipus for a moment. Look down, Imogen; yes, a strong, brooding ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... afford steering way, swept majestically down stream, borne by the force of the current, which veered from bank to bank. We were moving scarcely swifter than from eight to ten miles an hour, and the monotonous voice of the man casting the lead line arose continuous through the brooding silence. The only other perceptible sounds were the exhaust of the steam pipes and the splash of running water. Thockmorton had told me we were already approaching the mouth of the Illinois, and I lingered against the rail, straining my eyes ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... over each other in a quiet ecstasy of harmony; mellow as the song of the hermit-thrush, but much softer, as if he feared lest any should hear but her to whom he sang. Those who know the music of the rose-breasted grosbeak (not his robin-like song of spring, but the exquisitely soft warble to his brooding mate) may multiply its sweetness indefinitely, and so form an idea of what the pine-grosbeak's song ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... with some hesitation and difficulty, "you will probably wish to get away for a change. I therefore advise you to go up for the winter examination at the Staff College. There is no doubt about your getting through. The work will prevent you from brooding over your thoughts, and afterwards there will be Berlin and entire change of surroundings. All that ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... continued employment of some kind, will make a man cheerful; but sitting at home, brooding and thinking, or doing little, will bring gloom. The reaction of this feeling is wonderful. It arises from a sense of duty done, and it also enables us to do ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... opportunity was his. For a moment he even thought of Mr. Jarvis at the music-hall alone, the welcoming lights, the pleasant warmth, the music, the cheerful throngs of people. Better anything, he told himself, than this brooding! A sudden almost reckless impulse called him back again into the streets, only to pass away the same moment with the vision of Ruth's pale face by his side, her eyes alternately gazing down the lighted way and seeking his, her fingers ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... open-minded excitement of the scientist. The others were alert and preoccupied in turn, but there was an element of reserve in their attitude. Their eyes kept going off into space, fixing there until their look became one brooding question. They avoided conversation. They avoided ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... arts and sciences and accomplishments; and the King loved him with exceeding love and cherished him by reason of his proficiency in eloquence and rhetoric and the art of government and for that which Allah had given him of compassion and brooding care[FN58] with his lieges for he was a King just in his Kingship and a protector of his peoples, constant in beneficence to great and small and giving them that which befitted them of good governance and bounty and protection and security and a lightener ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... the Negro has been interested rather in expression than in action; interested in life itself rather than in its reconstruction or reformation. The Negro is, by natural disposition, neither an intellectual nor an idealist like the Jew, nor a brooding introspective like the East Indian, nor a pioneer and frontiersman like the Anglo-Saxon. He is primarily an artist, loving life for its own sake. His metier is expression rather than action. The Negro is, so to speak, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... of the immaculate, long childhood days. Walking side by side in the reverent dimness, intensely conscious of each other, they had that mysterious sensation of having done this before, of living a second time. The world was transfigured; they were aware of measureless rapture brooding close about them in the twilight of which they were a part—a rapture, a sense of enchantment, that people are only conscious of as children or when they are ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... set me brooding o'er the desert drear, Where broodeth darkness as the deepest night. From many a mosque there comes the call to prayer; I hear no voice that calls on Christ for light. But still I wait For the messenger of Christ, ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... to the work at hand, but should rather increase it. Upon leaving his office, the brain worker should cultivate the habit of forgetting all about his business, except in so far as he believes that some particular point needs special attention out of office hours. The habit of brooding over business is detrimental to efficiency and is also suicidal to ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... Austrian Kaiser lived a little while longer, the prolongation of his life would have been most disastrous both for Austria and Hungary. I believe after the death of Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo and after a year of war the German Emperor and autocracy were brooding over a plan according to which, on the death of Francis Joseph, the successor should be allowed to rule only as King or Grand-Duke of Austria, the title of Emperor of Austria to disappear and German Princes to be placed upon the thrones of Hungary and of a new kingdom of Bohemia. ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... Dickerson came out with eulogy for any man his status was settled for good and all. Margaret plunged once more into her treasures of early schooldays. Floss and Elinor made merry over some verses Margaret had handed up with a blush. Helen apparently lapsed into a brooding abstraction. And presently Dorothy excused herself, and kissing Margaret good-bye, ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... in the gloomy room in Lincoln's Inn, and in spite of heart-sickness he worked on stolidly and well. The evenings were his worst time, when he went back to the empty house at Cheyne Walk and sat on the balcony brooding over his troubles, until the light faded and an eerie darkness crept ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... I am! (She goes to the wide seat, and sits down, brooding. The Gypsy steals in, and crouches on the dais beside the wide seat.) A good queen, and ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... irresponsibility: it is youth that can delight in its own excess of shade, and can even dispense with sunshine—hugging to its heart the memory of its own often self-created distresses and conjuring up and, with self-satisfaction, brooding over the pain and imagined horrors of a lifetime. Maturity and age kindly bring their own relief—rendering this kind of ministry to itself no longer desirable, even were it possible. The Master of Ballantrae indeed marks the crisis. It shows, and effectively shows, the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... a man to be remembered for a long time, that major. I can see him now, in my mind's eye, sitting there, brooding, staring out toward Lens and the German lines. And I think that if I were choosing a figure for some great sculptor to immortalize, to typify and represent the superb, the majestic imperturbability of the British Empire in time of stress ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... this, the minister himself drew up a chair and sat down. The question was daring, but the whole way and manner of the man were so quiet and gentle, so sympathizing and firm at once, that it would have lured a bird off its nest; much more the brooding reserve from a heart it is not nursing but killing. Diana looked at him, met the wise, kind, grave eye she had learned long ago to trust,—and broke down. All of a sudden; she had not dreamed she was in any ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... fix, and I'm going to give you one more chance to get us out of it. Don't try to think with your head, let your feet think for you, and maybe they'll carry you to the right gulch. If they don't—" Folsom scanned the brooding heavens and his lips compressed. "We're in for a storm and—we'll never weather it. Take one look while there's light to see by, then turn your feet loose and pray that they lead you right, for if they don't, by God, ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... Aware that the sentences were poison, she summoned her constitutional antagonism to the mad step proposed, so far nullifying the virus as to make her shrink from the madness. Even then her soul cried out to her husband, Who drives me to read? or rather, to brood upon what she read. The brooding ensued, was the thirst of her malady. The best antidote she could hit on was the writer's face. Yet it expressed him, his fire and his courage—gifts she respected in him, found wanting in herself. Read by Lord Ormont, this letter would mean ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... generally less interesting objects than the women; their countenances and hues were very varied, according to the part of the African coast from which they came; some were soot-black, having a certain ferocity of aspect that indicated strong and fierce passions, like men who were darkly brooding over some deep-felt wrongs, and meditating revenge. When any one was ordered, he came forward with a sullen indifference, threw his arms over his head, stamped with his feet, shouted to show the soundness of his lungs, ran up and down the room, and was treated exactly like a horse put through ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... shoulder and thrust her from the hut, tumbling her over the ledge. Marie rose, groaning with pain, being severely bruised. The cup of her indignation, which had long been full, was now overflowing. She slowly returned to her home in Guayave, brooding over schemes of revenge, and formed the determination to betray her husband into the hands of justice. She called upon Dr. Duncan, a rich planter and a magistrate, and offered to guide him to the spot where Jack Shadow, the daring ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... his race, he contemplates revenge. All his idle hours are spent brooding over plans to frustrate the designs of his rival—in short, to put him out of ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... weep. Over and over again she told herself that nothing should part her from the boys, that she would devote her life to repair as far as possible the injury she had done them. And Ada, would she also suffer for her (Katherine's) sins? But while brooding constantly on these miserable thoughts she kept a brave front, quiet and steady, though Miss Payne saw that her composure hid a ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... had the good sense to restrain criticism within strict limits, and corrected style rather than matter. He was a writer, an essayist with no slight leaven of the poet, and had learnt early that the everyday world held naught in common with the brooding of the soul. ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... hardly commit a worse sacrilege, and that some time he would surely be called to account for it. But here he checked himself suddenly, not daring to go further. One would have no peace of mind left if one went on brooding over such things in this fashion. He realized the enormity of what he had done. He had tried to be sorry for it. It was perhaps the worst thing he had ever done, but now he had reached the lowest point. He would take ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... of the day he spoke little; and I could tell from his expression and general air of dejection that he was still brooding over the incident. The following morning—we stayed the night in a wayside inn—Kniaz informed me that the route we had intended taking to Skaravoski—the town I meant to make the head quarters for my daily excursions—was ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... again was restless. Social life had no appeal for her. There was something much more genuine in Russia or even in Europe—something much more alive, much less artificial. Her aunt Martha Wadsworth tried to interest her in other things, take her mind off the brooding dissatisfaction ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... suppose you can't understand how a fellow falls so deep in love on such short acquaintance, but I have been brooding over this for months—there's nothing hasty or ill-considered about it, I can assure you. I am terribly hard hit, sir; it means ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... was leaning forward, her eyes brooding over the black outlines, her ears sensuously absorbing the gurgle of the currents. A big market boat from Palestrina winged past them, sliding over the oily water. Several silent figures were standing in ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... find so useful where laundries are but a name. Again Lone stopped and bent to examine it as Swan spread it out in his hands. A few tiny grains of sandstone rattled out, and in the centre was a small blood spot. Swan looked up straight into Lone's dark, brooding eyes. ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... the climax of trouble that had been brooding sullenly for a week. In annual town-meeting Smyrna and Vienna had voted to change over the inter-urban highway so that it would skirt Rattledown Hill instead of climbing straight over it, as the fathers had laid it out in the old days for the sake of directness; forgetting ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... no more! Glegg, take a flag of truce, And bear to Hull this summons to surrender. Tell him Tecumseh and his force are here— A host of warriors brooding on their wrongs, Who, should resistance flush them to revenge, Would burst from my control like wind-borne fire, And match on earth the miseries of hell. But, should he yield, his safety is assured. Tell him Tecumseh's word is pledged to this, Who, ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... page boy, whose passion for the lady who has just become Mrs. Garnet has for many months been a byword in the servants' hall). Huh! (To himself bitterly.) Tike care, tike care, lest some day you drive me too far. [Is left brooding darkly. ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... at the shed. He was a brooding, unsociable sort of man, and it didn't make any difference to the chaps whether he had a union ticket or not. It was pretty well known in the shed—there were three or four chaps from the district he was reared in—that he'd done five years hard for burglary. ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... Martindale,' said Percy, reading a second time the lines to which she alluded. 'They do recall the evening scene; Mount Vesuvius and its brooding cloud, and the trails of phosphoric light upon the sea. I mark these for approval. But have you anything to say for ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of this deluge of barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no nearer his enemy, and, what was worse, no nearer a living. As he paced the Thames embankment, bitterly biting a cheap cigar and brooding on the advance of Anarchy, there was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage or so solitary as he. Indeed, he always felt that Government stood alone and desperate, with its back to the wall. He was too quixotic to have ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... the want of hope in the old man's face as he moved about brooding over his troubles. Odysseus was uncertain whether he should throw his arms about his father's neck and clasp him to his heart and kiss him, or whether it were better to ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... checked his rage, and Reginald sat brooding in sullen anger on the ground. At last he started up and left the room, saying to Louis, "It's all your fault, then—you've no spirit, and you don't want me to ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... also herself, the best of her sisters, is driven Out of her native land; but her own misfortunes forgetting, Others she seeks to console, and, though helpless, is also most helpful. Great are the woes and distress which over the earth's face are brooding, But may happiness not be evoked from out of this sorrow? May not I, in the arms of my bride, the wife I have chosen, Even rejoice at the war, as ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... was not born the heir to the rank he obtained. He was but a distant relation to the head of the house which he afterwards represented. Brought up in an Italian university, he was distinguished for his learning and his eccentricities. There, too, I suppose, brooding over old wives' tales about freedom, and so forth, he contracted his carbonaro, chimerical notions for the independence of Italy. Suddenly, by three deaths, he was elevated, while yet young, to a station and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... won't," she said, more than half to herself. She sat brooding for a moment; then suddenly her mood changed. She sprang up, shook her skirts free, and seated herself at the piano. To Orde, who had also arisen, she made a quaint ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... of the pearly gateways of Paradise. On the other side rose the contorted lava mountains, their bleak heads knocking against the solid sky and stained of an inky blackness, which changed into a still more lurid tint where the local reds struggled up through the shadow that lay brooding over the desolate scene. If within the domain of nature such another region is to be found, it can only be in the heart of those awful solitudes which science has unveiled to us amid the untrodden fastnesses ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... without suspicion by the children not as a nurse, but as a playmate. Weeks passed. The four played together with a greater harmony than the three had ever attained. Day after day the Reverend Orme sat waiting in his study and brooding. The dreaded call never came. He began ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... This indicates a confusion in the minds of the Egyptian dragomans with the two brooding birds of Osiris, Isis and Nephthys, considered as Zarait, that is to say, as two birds of a different species, according to the different traditions ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... treachery, and treason. But what reward had it for the lonely, embittered, stricken man whose genius and courage had gained for it the great Northwest territory? What reward had the Republic for him who sat brooding in his house above ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... care nor pain; But now, like that same tender tree, When once rude hands its fruit profane, Ill-omen'd birds and shapes of ill Troop to its branches, crowding still,— And sorrows never known till now Have cast their shadows on my brow: A ruin is my heart become Where brooding sadness finds a home; See—those bright leaves fall, one by one, And I—my latest ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... especially at Strasburg that travellers are reminded of another "marvellous boy," who, if he did not "perish in his pride," certainly shortened his days by overreaching ambition and the brooding ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... rich prize to escape her. Her own lover, it was true, irritated her more than any man she had ever met, but at least he would afford her refuge from the bread of charity. Jessica Dearwood, an orphan, had been brought up by a distant relative. She had not been the child to win affection. Of silent, brooding nature, every thoughtless incivility had been to her an insult, a wrong. Acceptance of young Camelford seemed her only escape from a life that had become to her a martyrdom. At forty-one he would wish he had remained a bachelor; but at ...
— The Philosopher's Joke • Jerome K. Jerome
... the Carrier sat brooding on his hearth, now cold and dark, other and fiercer thoughts began to rise within him, as an angry wind comes rising in the night. The Stranger was beneath his outraged roof. Three steps would take him to his chamber-door. ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... was easy and generous, but he had never been in the habit of thinking much, and thinking, especially as it led to brooding, was not good for him. From the first, of course, he had been hurt that the office should have thought it necessary to send Bannon to supersede him, but so long as he had plenty to do and was in Bannon's company every hour of the day, he had ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... the churches, processions and promises. We saw the gray showers sail around the horizon, heard their far-off thunders, saw the lightning zigzag down through the slanting torrents, and almost saw the hills grow green under them. The only tempests we had were those we saw brooding on the brows of scowling contadini. They talked openly of a republic, they were sick of the devouring taxes, they regretted the papacy: there was certainly danger of some "scompiglio," my padrone di ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... Tussaud's; everything else to be sold for the foundation of an Asylum for Old Jokes. A knock at the door. Heaven help me!—two Interviewers! "Come in," I said, with the conventional "cheery voice." Anticipated the worst, but worse than I anticipated. HORNBLOWER and HACKING are brooding over me; assert they have been sent by the LORD MAYOR. "Thought Transference" again! Well, I should have committed suicide, and now I can be released without crime. It won't last long. If I might suggest my obsequies, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... But the captain refused to allow them off the vessel, as they had been placed in his charge by Mr. Runciman, and so they had to content themselves with gazing at Table Mountain from the deck of the ship, or rather at the tablecloth, as the brooding cloud was called, which hid the ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... an edict. There is a touch of the Teacher in this, I think. He has given Rome Peace; he is master of the world, and now has grown old. He enjoys no regal splendor, no pomp or retinue; his life is as that of any other senator, but simpler than most. And his mind is ever brooding over Rome, watchful for the ideas that may purify Roman life and raise it to ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... earn a cent, and then, If he refused to marry her . . . well, what? She saw him laughing, making a foolish joke, His grey eyes turning quickly; and the words Fled from her tongue . . . She saw him sitting silent, Brooding over his morning coffee, maybe, And tried again . . . she bit her lips, and trembled, And looked away, and said . . . 'Say Paul, boy,—listen— There's something I must tell you . . . ' There she stopped, Wondering what he'd say . . . What would he ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... in the rue de Sontay then, and the telephone was in my workroom. One night late, as I sat brooding there, the bell startled me; and ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... sudden change in the deputy's language, the King, no longer smiling, threw himself violently upon his chair of state, where he remained, brooding with a gloomy countenance upon the language which had been addressed to him. It was evident, said an eye-witness, that he was deeply offended. He changed color frequently, so that all present "could remark, from the working of his face, how much ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... with them; and after a long brooding over her ill-temper, it began to wear out, not to be conquered, but to depart of itself; she thought she might as well learn her lesson and have done with it; so by way of getting rid of the task, not of ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge
... them again, and again caressed them, parted their hair with his fingers. And as Annette would open her eyes and gaze in his, with an air of sweetest acknowledgment, his thoughts seemed contending with something fearful. He was in trouble; he saw the enemy brooding over the future; he heaved a sigh, a convulsive motion followed, a tear stealing down his cheek told ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... thing he did on finding himself alone in the fast falling night was to tiptoe to Slightly's tree, and make sure that it provided him with a passage. Then for long he remained brooding; his hat of ill omen on the sward, so that a gentle breeze which had arisen might play refreshingly through his hair. Dark as were his thoughts his blue eyes were as soft as the periwinkle. Intently he listened ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... drink—which with industry they could easily do. All this might not make them cheerful; but they would certainly be less a prey to melancholy while engaged in some active industry, than if they remained brooding over their fate. ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... Now it so happens that what he would cure her of is incurable, being, in fact, eternal, divine—simple human love. So, to his pious and cynical admonitions she answers with strange inconsistency. Long brooding over his taunts will sometimes make her, to whom he is always the divinity, actually believe, despite her reiteration, that she had sinned out of obedience to him, that she really is a polluted creature, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... he has lived with his brother, and spends his time in brooding over his grievances and bewailing his shattered illusions. He has lost none of that fluency which gained him an ephemeral literary reputation, and can speak by the hour on political and social questions to any one who will listen to him. It is extremely difficult, however, to follow ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... ............Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born In Stygian cave forlorn ............'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy! Find out some uncouth cell, ............Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings, And the night-raven sings; ............There, under ebon shades and low-browed rocks, As ragged as thy locks, ............In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell. But come, thou Goddess fair and free, In heaven yclept Euphrosyne, And by men heart-easing ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... himself as he supped alone in the parlour. The bewilderment had passed; the courage and spirit of Mary had infected his own, and the stirring strange life of the palace had distracted him from that dreadful brooding into which he had at ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... did, Craig could see nothing, for there was no light in the huge vault outside. For minutes the brooding silence was not broken, save by an occasional scraping sound made by one of the searching line of men. There was no hint of the girl who waited beside the hideous figure of the god, nor of the network that gradually closed ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... swearing, if you like. There's a tendency in our time to excess of humanitarianism—I mean a sort of lachrymose habit which really does no good. You represent it in some degree, I'm afraid—eh? Well, well, you've lived too much alone—you've got into the way of brooding; the habit of social ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... presently followed a mental calm that expelled all this confusion. The goal waxed and waned as he gazed down the great avenue with its precise rows of lamps. Far away he could discern the outline of the brooding Louvre. ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... comments, answering them as best she could. She had waited patiently until Sir Dugald's barbarous eleven o'clock supper was over, and then she had gone to her room, stirred the fire, and dropped down upon the hearth-rug to think it over. She thought over it for a long time, her handsome eyes brooding over the red coals, but after about half an hour she spoke out aloud to the silence ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... end, have you seen Gerard Van Derwater recently? I heard that he joined the diplomatic service at Washington after leaving college. I often think of him with his strange pallor, but suggestion of brooding strength. Did it ever strike you that every one respected him, and yet he really never had a close friend? It always seemed to me that he carried about with him a sense of impending tragedy. Find out what he is doing, ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... coming judgment or the coming eternity. Yet she reaps rather than sows. It lies with another to gather the money which purchaseth all things, and with her to taste the fruits of the purchase. It is the father who sows. It is he who sits in busy and brooding anxiety over his speculations, wrinkled, perhaps, by care, and sobered by years into an utter distaste for the splendors and insignificancies of fashionable life." The father sows, and he reaps in ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... represent may have been the gods of Homer, but they were the Homeric gods transformed by the creative imagination of a more reflective age, and purified by a poetic, if not a philosophic, idealism. But while AEschylus suggests "a deeply brooding mind, tinged with mysticism, grappling with dark problems of life and fate,"[2] and so was, in some ways, remote from the clarity and definition of sculptural form, Sophocles "invests the conceptions of popular religion ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... had he been conscious of so overpowering a feeling of repulsion as now. The cannibal atrocities of these human beasts, the glowering heads stuck all over the stockade,—the latest addition thereto being those of the slain Ba-gcatya,—the all-pervading influence of death brooding over this demoniacal haunt, even as the ever-present circlings of carrion birds high in mid-air—all this weighed upon his mind until he could have blown out his own brains for sheer horror ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... the election Harboro came home and found a letter waiting for him on the table in the hall. He found also a disquieted Sylvia, who looked at him with brooding and a question ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... with these two, that when they were together, Keawe's heart was stilled; but so soon as he was alone he fell into a brooding horror, and heard the flames crackle, and saw the red fire burn in the bottomless pit. The girl, indeed, had come to him wholly; her heart leapt in her side at sight of him, her hand clung to his; and she was so fashioned from the hair upon her head to the nails ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the battle which had opened the campaign, and there had been no further movement on the part of the enemy. Smith was puzzled. A strange quiet seemed to be brooding over the other camp. He could not believe that a single defeat had crushed the foe, but it was hard to think ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... undisturbed; and the moonlit camp, with its anxious generals, its weary soldiers, its fearful machinery of destruction, all strewn along the bank of the great river, remained plunged in silence, as if brooding over the chances of the morrow and the failures of the past. And hardly four miles away another army—twice as numerous, equally confident, equally brave—were waiting impatiently for the morning and the final settlement of the ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... darkness did not come to restore the drooping world. As the shades begin to gather around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we steal forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in search of those silent and brooding thoughts which are the ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... germinated in the brain of Cortes the idea of conquest. One revelation was confirmed by another, and, as the evidence of Aztec wealth multiplied the proofs of internal disaffection throughout the {136} empire stimulated the confidence of the brooding conqueror. Disloyalty among the Totonacs, treachery that only waited an opportunity in Texcoco, an ancient tradition of hate in Tlascala, and the superstition that obscured the judgment and paralyzed the action of the despotic ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... been reassuring enough at the time. But that was six months ago. And now here was the Tessie who sat on the back porch, evenings, surveying the sunset. A listless, lackadaisical, brooding Tessie. Little point to going downtown Saturday nights now. There was no familiar, beloved figure to follow you swiftly as you turned off Elm Street, homeward bound. If she went downtown now, she saw only those Saturday-night ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... gaze upon that old monarch where again the first crimson rays of dying sunlight glinted the pinnacles of the somber pines near its summit. How solemn, how still, it seemed up there. The nearer sounds about the camp seemed only to emphasize that brooding silence. It was like the silence of some vast cathedral—awful in its ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... known that writing Latin exercises would bring contentment to Susannah's heart. There was nothing in such a request to awake suspicion and antagonism, and there was much in the regular mental exercise to keep her mind from brooding on its scepticism or upon Ephraim's kindness. As a child sits down to an intricate game, she sat down, day after day, to her lesson. Soon the stimulus of knowing that the prophet had actually mastered his grammar in two weeks wrought the determination ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... the tree upon which the crows were perched Pete drew rein and sat listening to the shuffling gait of the oncoming horse. The man's lean face was dark with a brooding hatred. His eyes were fiercely alight with expectancy. A revolver lay across his thigh, the butt of it firmly grasped in a hand clutching it with ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... not much that did; nothing more, indeed, than the fact that she found her husband brooding in front of the fire, and that the smile with which he greeted her was a little too quick and bright and mechanical, and that it soon faded out. The Rodney of her memories had never done things ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... perfectly clear." Into the manner of young Mr. Stuart Farquaharson came now the hauteur of dignified rebuke. He enveloped himself in a sudden and sullen silence, brooding as he sat with his eyes fixed ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... series of reminiscences arose from those sounds. She sat behind the bookcase with her eyes fixed on a streak of light escaping from the pantry door and listened to herself and pondered. She was in a mood for brooding ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... come—and yet might not come. The bitterness came back, the self-hate. He remembered a young man and promises made, but not kept; a girl who had believed and never lost faith even when he had retreated back to the land away from everything. Long sullen silences, self-pity, brooding over the news stories that got worse and worse. And the children—one born dead—two born deaf and dumb ...
— Now We Are Three • Joe L. Hensley
... the fairest of all; at Patras, in the woeful debility of fever; and again at Athens, making acquaintance with Lady Hester Stanhope and "Abyssinian" Bruce. Through all these varied scenes his mind was brooding on the verses of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... all this. The girl's training there had vitalized her brooding dreams of producing what she worshipped, had given shape and direction to her informal efforts, had concentrated them upon charcoal and canvas. There was an enthusiasm for work in the Institute, a canonization of names, a blazing desire to imitate that tried hard to fan itself ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... shaking hands, striving to gain control of himself. In the early days of his misfortunes the necessity for straining every effort had kept him from brooding upon his losses, and finally a numbness of despair had seized him. But to-night the child's artless talk had brought back vividly the old home scene. He could see it now, as he had seen it so often in the light of a summer evening. The sparkling sea, with the tang ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... mystic," to quote Walter Pater, "has been derived from a Greek word which signifies to shut, as if one shut one's lips, brooding on what cannot be uttered; but the Platonists themselves derive it rather from the act of shutting the eyes, that one may see the more, inwardly." Of such is the counsel of St. Luis de Granada, "Imitate the sportsman who hoods the falcon that it be made subservient to his rule;" and of another ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... into poetry. But if the expression wanted magic, that which was expressed seemed an enchantment almost. The gentle spirit, with its vein of tender pessimism, in puzzled revolt against the wrongness and cruelty of a shadowy world, the brooding thought too whimsical to be bitter, the fancy too refined to be boisterously merry—all these conspired to fascinate us as we came to perceive and appreciate them beneath the rather stiff little verses. To read Miss Coleridge's ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... his shoulder toward Conward, watching the dusk settling about the foothill city. The streets led away into the gathering darkness, and the square brick blocks stood in blue silhouette against a champagne sky. He became conscious of a strange yearning for this young metropolis; a sort of parental brooding over a boisterous, lovable, wayward youth. It was his city; no one could claim it more than he. And it was a good city to look upon, and to mingle in, and to ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... the desired paper had been drawn up. The Creole was headed for the Mauritius,—and, in eight days, the sad but wiser Commissioners were brooding over the smartness of Robert Surcouf when seated in their own snug little homes. "He is a rascal," said one. "He's ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... he dexterously escaped to the sea-coast of the Euxine, from whence he passed over to the country of Bosphorus. In that sequestered region he remained many months, exposed to the hardships of exile, of solitude, and of want; his melancholy temper brooding over his misfortunes, and his mind agitated by the just apprehension, that, if any accident should discover his name, the faithless Barbarians would violate, without much scruple, the laws of hospitality. In a moment of impatience and despair, Procopius embarked in a ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Gary, brooding in his soiled tunic collar, began to mutter presently: "I once knew a man in a lighthouse down in Florida who couldn't stand it after a bit and ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... will look after the farm and the horses and cattle and poultry, the fruit-trees and lawns and flowers as I do? Do you think that all these cares are pleasures to me? No, my dear lad, but they are my duty. I wouldn't have thy father find out that I neglected even a brooding hen. No, I wouldn't. And the yacht was thy father's great pleasuring. I only went with him to double that pleasure. I don't like the sea, though I never let him know it. Oh, my dear! But there! You haven't learned ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... rich in practical wisdom, his own by original reflection, or by discreet purveyal. He had read much, he had observed much, he had experienced much. The result of all, digested in brooding thought, he put into his "Essays." These grew as he grew. He got himself transferred whole into them. Out of them, in turn, the world has been busy ever since ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... the greatest artist in style, whose words are as music to the sensitive ear; Dickens, the master painter of sorrows and joys of the common people; Thackeray, the best interpreter of human life and character; Charlotte Bronte, the brooding Celtic genius who laid bare the hearts of women; George Eliot, the greatest artist of her sex in mastery of human emotion; Ruskin, the first to teach the common people appreciation of art and architecture; ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... place; he put it therefore aside, endeavouring to lessen its effect by placing it behind a huge worm-eaten chair, over which he threw his cloak. Thus, almost in darkness, with a mind ill at ease, brooding on the events of the day, which had perhaps perilled his life, although life had now become of little value, we leave him to his melancholy and self-reproachful thoughts, and hasten to ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... an Austrian ornithologist and sportsman who told us a wonderful experience of his at Dulcigno with this very man, Marko Ivankovic. He had come to Dulcigno one night by steamer, to spend a few months in this paradise for sportsmen, and as he entered a lowly inn, a man of almost repellent aspect sat brooding gloomily, evidently lost in a fit of abstraction. This man gave no greeting to the new-comer, who sat down at the further end of the table and ordered food. Shortly afterwards the man rose and silently left the room. An hour later this same man reappeared in the doorway, cap in ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... West. Unlike Mughal art, it was a product of Hindu courts in Rajasthan and the Punjab Hills and unlike Mughal painting, its chief concern was with the varied phases of romance. Ladies would be shown brooding in their chambers as storm clouds mounted in the sky. A girl might be portrayed desperately fondling a plantain tree, gripping a pet falcon, the symbol of her lover, or hurrying through the rainy darkness intent only on reaching a longed-for tryst. A prince would appear lying on a terrace, his ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... a reward for adroitness, for treachery, and treason. But what reward had it for the lonely, embittered, stricken man whose genius and courage had gained for it the great Northwest territory? What reward had the Republic for him who sat brooding in his house above ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... with its changing objects, was reflected as a luminous movement, the alternate flash of ripples or currents, the sudden glow of the brown sail, the passage of laden barges from blackness into color, making an active response to that brooding glory. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... trip. Near by the trail hundreds of cheerful prairie dogs barked and jerked their ceaseless salutation. An ancient and untroubled scheme of life lay all around him, appealing in its freshness and its charm. Why should a man, a tall and strong man, with health upon his cheek, sit here with brooding and downcast eye, heedless of the miles slipping behind him like a ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... all lay there with its gloomy circles, with its alti guai, and that he himself should see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we went thither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into 'mystic unfathomable song'; and this his Divine Comedy, the most remarkable of all modern Books, is ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... quite ready at any moment to indulge in friendly intercourse, he seldom initiated a conversation, and Spinkie, grasping the mast and leaning against it with his head down, seemed to be either asleep or brooding over his sorrows. Only a few words were uttered now and then when Nigel asked the name of a point or peak which rose in the distance on either hand. It seemed as if the quiescence of sea and air had fallen like a soft mantle on the party and subdued ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... letter attentively, and for two or three minutes was lost in thought, while some purpose of importance seemed to have gathered and sit brooding upon his countenance. He held up his finger towards his satellite, Cristal Nixon, who replied to his signal with a prompt nod; and with one or two of the attendants approached Fairford in such a manner as to make him apprehensive they were about to ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... light of any kind to be seen. A lonely spot was this in which to spend one's days, yet the soldier in charge seemed in no wise oppressed with sense of isolation. It was his comrade, sitting moodily on a convenient rock, elbows on knees and chin deep buried in his brown and hairy hands, who seemed brooding over the ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... snowbird chattered, the meadowlark uttered her strong but tender note. Over a deserted field a turkey buzzard hovered low, and alighted on a stake in the fence, standing a moment with outstretched, vibrating wings till he was sure of his hold. A soft, warm, brooding day. Roads becoming dry in many places, and looking so good after the mud and the snow. I walk up beyond the boundary and over Meridian Hill. To move along the drying road and feel the delicious ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... of the Creation, the Fall, and the Deluge. Taking our position at the west end of the chapel and looking upwards, we see in the first compartment God dividing light from darkness; in the second, creating the sun and the moon and the solid earth; in the third, animating the ocean with His brooding influence; in the fourth, creating Adam; in the fifth, creating Eve. The sixth represents the temptation of our first parents and their expulsion from Paradise. The seventh shows Noah's sacrifice before entering the ark; the eighth depicts the Deluge, and the ninth the drunkenness of Noah. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... also was the same. How the Indo-Iranian religion was developed in India, we have seen. At first a worship of active and militant deities, it became by degrees a religion of a passive type, in which a suffering, acquiescent, and brooding humanity presented to heaven its needs and problems, and received a corresponding answer. The Aryans who remained in Iran retained their active and practical disposition. While by no means wanting in sensitiveness and flexibility of mind, they were less given to speculation ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... be, and evidently did her utmost to show her gratitude to Lettice, studying her tastes, and, as far possible, anticipating her wishes. But it was plain that she was not happy. When not making an effort to be cheerful as part of her daily duty, she would sit brooding over the past and trembling for the future; and, though she tried to conceal her hopeless moods, they ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... a good many things he had never possessed, and promised to do a lot of things of which he had no idea, Mr. Offitt asked "if any brother had anything to offer for the good of the order." This called Mr. Bott to his feet, and he made a speech, on which he had been brooding all day, against the pride of so-called science, the arrogance of unrighteous wealth, and the grovelling superstition of Christianity. The light of the kerosene lamp shone full on the decorated side of his visage, and touched it to a ferocious purpose. ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... a tactful speech, but Laura smiled. "I meant to take you out," she said. "You have been sitting here brooding since the dam went, and from what Mattawa told me, you haven't ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... destroys strength and therefore increases the trouble. Many get downhearted, discouraged, despairing—the very worst thing that can happen, doing as much harm, and in many cases more, than their former dissipation. Brooding kills; hope enlivens. Then sing with joy that the savior of knowledge has vanquished the death-dealing ignorance of the past; that the glorious strength of manhood has awakened and cast from you forever the grinning skeleton of vice. Be your ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... the Creston pool he had been subject to these brooding silences, which were as different as possible from the pauses when they ceased to speak because words were needless. At such times his face wore the expression she had seen on it when she had looked in at him from the darkness and again there came over her a sense of ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... the calm nights of August and September. To several of the older people—Dr. Ayloff, among others, as we have seen—the summer proved downright fatal, but even among the younger, few escaped either a sojourn in bed for a matter of weeks, or at the least, a brooding sense of oppression, accompanied by hateful nightmares. Gradually there formulated itself a suspicion—which grew into a conviction—that the alterations in the Cathedral had something to say in the matter. The widow of a former old verger, a pensioner of the Chapter of Southminster, was ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... his assistants, it is known that the symbolical figures on the tombs and the two seated Medici are from his hand. Of the two finished or practically finished tombs—to my mind as finished as they should be—that of Lorenzo is the finer. The presentment of Lorenzo in armour brooding and planning is more splendid than that of Giuliano; while the old man, whose head anticipates everything that is considered most original in Rodin's work, is among the best of Michelangelo's statuary. Much speculation has been indulged in as ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... wearied, from whom all virtue had gone out. Then some one, a man he liked—but still oftener a woman—would approach him, and the whole figure would wake to life—a gentle, whimsical, melancholy life, yet possessed of a strange spell and pungency. Brooding, sad and deep, seemed to me to hold his inmost mind. The fatalism and dream of those Oriental religions to which he had given so much of his scholar's mind had touched him profoundly. His poems express ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... an army with banners," indeed, was Kheyr-ed-Din in this eventful summer: things had gone badly with the crescent flag, the Padishah was unapproachable in his palace, brooding perchance on that "might have been" had he not sold his honor and the life of his only friend to gratify the malice of a she-devil; those in attendance on the Sultan trembled, for the humor of the despot ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... sand, the sour water, the scant fare. During the daylight hours he was seldom idle. At night he sat dreaming before the fire or paced to and fro in the gloom. He slept but little, and that long after Cameron had had his own rest. He was tireless, patient, brooding. ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... disappeared, as it was altogether foreign to him. Each picture was a new event in the lives of these men, and had to be pondered over devoutly, and for long periods often, as in the case of Ryder. Work was for him nine-tenths reflection and meditation and poetic brooding, and he put down his sensations on canvas with great difficulty in the manner of a labourer. It seems obvious that his first drafts were always vivid with the life intended for them, but no one could ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... listened to for a moment. Lord Hutchinson still made attempts at negociation, but they were all vain; nothing could induce her to change her purpose. Irritated by studied insults abroad; incensed by threats of ministerial vengeance; brooding over the wrongs she had endured from one who had promised before the altar of God to love and cherish her through life; and, above all, assured of the popular support, she pursued her way; and she reached the shores of England on the 6th of June. Although government ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... be allowed that these careless scraps, when combined, give a curious picture of the man who was brooding over the first chapters of The Bride of Lammermoor. One of his visitors of that month was Mr. R. Cadell, who was of course in all the secrets of the house of Constable; and observing how his host ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... at the knife in his belt. It seemed an eternity before he could draw it. A swift vision of the Great Chief's brooding eyes ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... went off, his whip under his arm, brooding over his own thoughts and lifting up one after the other his heavy wooden shoes daubed with clay. Certainly he desired to marry Celeste Levesque. He wanted her with her child because she was the wife he wanted. He could not say why, but he knew it, he was ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... yester-night— A low light on the misty lea; The stars were dim and silence grim Sat brooding on the sullen sea. ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... not only due, we may be sure, to his native genius and gifts, powerful as they were, but were partly inspired by the personal share he took in the great actions of a heroic national uprising. In the same way, the poet's brooding thoughtfulness on deep questions—-the power of the gods, their dealings with man, the dark mysteries of fate, the future life in Hades—though largely due to his turn of mind and temperament, was doubtless connected with the place where his childhood was passed. Eleusis was the centre ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... transcendence of all that we Celts and Saxons and Latins hold to be true of human motive and human act. Russia is a world apart: that is the sum and substance of the tale. In the island stories we have the same elaborate projection of the East, of its fantastic barbarism, of brooding Asia. And in the sea stories we have, perhaps for the first time in English fiction, a vast and adequate picture of the sea, the symbol at once of man's eternal striving and of his eternal impotence. Here, at last, the colossus has found its interpreter. There is in "Typhoon" and "The ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... his task. He told me that above us, deep in the bowels of these mountains, were the more refined legislative halls of Satan; while below us, at varying and terrible depths, lay scattered many a brooding station where the lowest laws ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... least, there presently followed a mental calm that expelled all this confusion. The goal waxed and waned as he gazed down the great avenue with its precise rows of lamps. Far away he could discern the outline of the brooding Louvre. ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... so much bodily, perhaps, as in spirit." Justine Brent drew her brows together, and stared moodily at the thin brown hands interwoven between Mrs. Dressel's plump fingers. Seated thus, with hollowed shoulders and brooding head, she might have figured a young sibyl bowed above some mystery of fate; but the next moment her face, inclining toward her friend's, cast off its shadows and resumed the look of a ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... a dreary walk back to the public house where he had stabled his horse; but he trudged it cheerfully, brooding with delight on Letty's beauty, and her lovely confidence in Tom Helmer—a personage whom he had begun to feel nobody ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... right, Mrs. Martindale,' said Percy, reading a second time the lines to which she alluded. 'They do recall the evening scene; Mount Vesuvius and its brooding cloud, and the trails of phosphoric light upon the sea. I mark these for approval. But have you anything to say for this Address to ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the air was the purer for the cleansing rain, while the earth shone with that peculiar lustre which follows the weeping which has endured its appointed night. The larks were at it again, singing as if their hearts would break for joy as they hovered in brooding exultation over the song of the future; for their nests beneath hoarded a wealth of larks for summers to come. Especially about the old church— half buried in the ancient trees of Lossie House, the birds that day were jubilant; their throats seemed too narrow to let out the ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... loathed Melancholy, ............Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born In Stygian cave forlorn ............'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy! Find out some uncouth cell, ............Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings, And the night-raven sings; ............There, under ebon shades and low-browed rocks, As ragged as thy locks, ............In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell. But ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... him none of them—evidently fed the boy's appreciation of all his friend had given up to come back to him; but in addition to the greater reciprocity established by that heroism he had always his little brooding theory, in which there was a frivolous gaiety too, that their long probation was drawing to a close. Morgan's conviction that the Moreens couldn't go on much longer kept pace with the unexpended impetus with which, from month to month, they ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... 1780 passed away in the Northern States, as has been related, in successive disappointments and reiterated distresses. The country was exhausted; the continental currency expiring. The army, for want of subsistence, was kept inactive and brooding over its calamities. While these disasters were openly menacing the ruin of the American cause, treachery was silently undermining it. A distinguished officer (General Arnold) engaged, for a stipulated sum of money, to betray into the hands of the British an important post committed ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... I have given Sir Guy my thoughts on the theme of Hamlet, and have told him I planned a speech wherein should be made patent Hamlet's desperate weariness of life, sickened by brooding on his ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... as would forever have turned my feet from the wrong and desolation in which they have stumbled so often—in which they have walked so swiftly. Instead of dwelling with shadows of realities the most terrible, and brooding in the cell of a maniac, I might have now communed with the pure ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... would make her choice a real one, for it would take place between poems already known to her, with regard to which therefore she was in a position to determine her own preference. Then the unavoidable brooding over it caused in the copying of the one chosen, would make it grow in her mind, and assume something of the shape it had ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... divulge not my case." When Ghanim heard her words and knew that she was a concubine of the Caliph, he drew back, for awe of the Caliphate beset him, and sat apart from her in one of the corners of the place, blaming himself and brooding over his affair and patiencing his heart bewildered for love of one he could not possess. Then he wept for excess of longing, and plained him of Fortune and her injuries, and the world and its enmities (and praise be to Him who causeth generous hearts to be troubled with ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... others, has its strength and its weakness. Such a type, like all others, is implicitly in us all. Do we not know it—the haunting hunger for the permanence of impressions that come and go, which pulsates through the book till we can scarcely keep back the tears; the brooding over the two sombre mysteries—Death and Life (and which is the darker?); the sense of fate driving life on—the fate of a temperament that restlessly longs for new impressions and intense emotions, without the vigor of action that cuts the Gordian knot of fancy and speculation with ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... time he has lived with his brother, and spends his time in brooding over his grievances and bewailing his shattered illusions. He has lost none of that fluency which gained him an ephemeral literary reputation, and can speak by the hour on political and social questions to any one who will listen to him. It is extremely difficult, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... her friends as the Countess sat brooding over the new hopes that had been opened to her. At first, she could not tear her mind away from the position which she herself would occupy as soon as her daughter should have been married and taken away from her. The young Earl ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... myself and brooding away in the city." The lad's bright, clear eyes looked frankly into the captain's as he continued. "I have been making a fool of myself, Captain. Got into some mischief with a crowd of fellows at school. Of course, I got caught and had to bear the whole blame for the silly joke we ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... was that Miss Caldegard had never seen a humming bird, and therefore found herself brooding on the blueness of all the blue things in her experience, from willow-pattern china to the waters of the Mediterranean, instead of considering the answer which she must ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... are religions of various kinds, more or less suited to the various types and races of humanity. Most of these forms of faith have been evolved from the brooding brain of Man himself, and have nothing 'divine,' in them. In the very early ages nearly all the religious creeds were mere methods for terrorising the ignorant and the weak—and some of them were so revolting, so bloodthirsty and brutal, that one cannot now read of them without a shudder ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... knew that she, like him, was alone with the catastrophe which his wickedness had sent upon her. Soon the curtain was drawn down again, and then he went once more to the house and took his old seat beside the table. He fell to brooding, and at last, exhausted, dropped to a troubled sleep. He woke with a start. Some one was in the room. He heard a step behind him. He came to his feet quickly, a wild light in his eyes. He faced ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "Brooding over love troubles which she has hitherto refused to divulge under the most grilling fusillade of rapid-fire questions shot at her by the best brains of the New York police force, Miss Mary De Forrest, a handsome brunette thirty-six inches ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... general prospects of his business for the season, or from indulging in any of the various light conversational diversions whereby barbers, Fulton street tailors, and other depressed gymnasts, are occasionally and wholesomely relieved from the misery of brooding over ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... things; recede from his position or resign as general manager. Ten times he had paused with his finger on the push-button. He simply could NOT afford to dispense with Skinner! The eleventh time, however, grown desperate from much brooding over his unhappy ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... than these men had ever known it to drag before. They no longer sat and talked of the White Squaw, and speculated as to her identity, and the phenomenon of her birth, and her mission with regard to her tribe. Somehow the outspoken enthusiasm of Nick had subsided into silent brooding; and Ralph needed no longer the encouragement of his younger brother to urge him to think of the strange white creature. Each had taken the subject to himself, and nursed and fostered it in ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... which could be put right by a few honest words and a little open dealing. Human beings so often live at cross purposes with each other, when a frank word, or a simple confession of wrong, almost a look or a gesture, would heal the division. Resentment grows through brooding over a fancied slight. Hearts harden themselves in silence, and, as time goes on, it becomes more difficult to break through the silence. Often there are strained relations among men, who, at the bottom of their hearts, ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... three days, Hansen twice visited Bullard and Quemos. On each occasion, he found the two men in trance-like conditions, ostensibly thinking through the problem that they had been assigned to solve, but more probably, Hansen guessed, brooding about the reaction of Sector Headquarters to their daily progress reports which Hansen had been relaying for them. Hansen had only sympathy for the people back at Sector Headquarters, for if these two ...
— No Moving Parts • Murray F. Yaco
... more and more to brooding in the garret; and as more questions presented themselves for solution, he became more anxious to arrive at the solution, and more uneasy as he failed in satisfying himself that he had arrived at it; so that ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... her whole body stiffened. Her soft, relaxed, yielding attitude was gone. But she remained silent, the same ominous, brooding silence that the desert had held before the storm, had Hanson but noticed. He did not. He was still pleading: "Why all the time you been keeping me on the anxious seat, I been telling ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... while Swanhild crouched upon the ground, brooding in silence. Then she rose, and, throwing up her arms, ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... flung on Molly's neck, pass'd them by, thinking only of my discomfiture, and barely rousing myself to give back a "Good-day" to those that met me on the road. Nor, till we were on the downs and Joan's cottage came in sight, did I shake the brooding off. ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... on blossoms, and seared the sweet breath Of the greenwood with low-brooding vapors of death; O'er the flowers and the corn we were borne like a blast, And away to the fore-front of battle we passed,— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... the sombre, brooding man felt interest and sympathy in the dejection that was evident in Frank's voice and countenance. "Another dupe to affection," thought he, as if in apology to himself,—"of course, a dupe; he is honest and artless—at present." He ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... remained silent now for half a dozen years, aside from the composition of a few charming songs. It is natural to suppose that he was brooding over the conception of his greatest work, which was next to see the light of day, and add one more to the great operas of the world. Such compositions are not hastily manufactured, but grow for years out of the travail of heart and brain, deep thought, high imaginings, passionate ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... I was carried over land and sea to some distant kingdom, and placed upon a triumphal car, amongst companions crowned with laurel. The darkness of gathering midnight, brooding over all the land, hid from us the mighty crowds that were weaving restlessly about our carriage as a centre—we heard them, but we saw them not. Tidings had arrived, within an hour, of a grandeur that measured itself against centuries; too full of pathos they were, too full of joy that acknowledged ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... woman, whose brooding thoughts shape the coming man. The race is never any farther advanced than the average thought of the woman. She is yet sleeping, knowing not her powers. So, not until she awakes and recognizes herself as conceiving by the ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... enough to one of her warm and impulsive temperament, for eliminating the child she cared for, but not as she cared for him. It was hard to think it; it would be harder yet to act upon it; but the longer I stood there brooding, the more I felt my conviction grow that from her and from her alone, we should yet obtain definite traces of the missing child, if only Mrs. Ocumpaugh would uphold ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... within the summer-house; she sat in the doorway, upon the step. She was not reading. She sat bowed together, her head upon her folded arms, a figure still and tragic as a sphinx or sibyl. Rand's eyes upon her roused her from her brooding. She lifted her head, saw him, and her face, which had been drawn and weary, became like the face of ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... respected. The sickly child, whose eyes were pallid and whose skin was white as a porcelain vase with a light within it, would probably not have lived in the atmosphere of a city. Country air and her mother's brooding care had kept the life in that frail body, delicate as a hot-house plant growing in a harsh and foreign climate. Though in nothing did she remind me of her mother, Madeleine seemed to have her soul, and that soul held her up. Her hair was scanty ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... to fresh places and people who had never heard of him. Just being in a train, he found, and rushing on to somewhere else was extraordinarily nerve-soothing. At Clark there would be gloom and stagnation, the heavy brooding of a storm that has burst but not moved on, a continued anger on his mother's side, naturally increasing with her inactivity, with her impotence. He was gone, and she could say and do nothing more to him. In a quarrel, thought Mr. Twist, the morning he pushed up ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... forever on his tongue. As with soft accents round her neck he clings, And cheek to cheek her lulling song she sings, How blest to feel the beating of his heart, Breathe his sweet breath, and kiss for kiss impart, Watch o'er his slumbers, like the brooding dove, And if she can, ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... of epileptic tendencies—as McPherson himself admits—had taken his benefactor's death terribly to heart, and had brooded over it day and night. Is there any reason to doubt that in such an unbalanced nature, this brooding, coupled by fever, should have produced a delirium in which he believed he heard Peter Grimm speaking ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... circumstance was the slave insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, in the month of August, 1831. The leader of the uprising was the now famous Nat Turner. Brooding over the wrongs of his race for several years, he conceived that he was the divinely appointed agent to redress them. He was cast in the mould of those rude heroes, who spring out of the sides of oppression as isolated trees will sometimes grow out of clefts in a mountain. With his ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... aerial aureole of subtle mist, a drift of liquid gold, a gush of living light, rippling from the unrisen orb, decreasing in warmth and brilliancy, paling and fading and waxing faint with infinite gradations proportioned to the increase of distance. Again, after the clear brooding sheen of day has set off the "stark strength and grandeur of rock-form contrasted with the brilliancy and sprightliness of sea," the sinking sun paints the scene with the most gorgeous of blazonings. The colours of the pale rock-skeleton ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... under certain conditions of light, Hastings is magnificent, with the craggy Castle Hill in its midst surmounted by its imposing ruin. The smoke of the town, rising and spreading, shrouds the modernity of the sea front, and the castle on its commanding height seems to be brooding over the shores of old romance. Brighton has no such ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... in the snuggery, George was worth well-nigh three hundred thousand dollars. Some of his eggs were in the basket where they were laid; some he had taken out and placed in other baskets; some in nests where various hens were brooding over them. Sound eggs they were, wherever placed; and such was the victory of which George had come ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... depends upon what one's life is, and where is the spring of it, and what it feeds upon, how one rallies from a shock of any sort. The ozone had been taken out of her atmosphere. There was nothing in all the sweet sunshine of generous days, or the rest of calm-brooding nights, to restore her, or to belong to her any more. She had nothing to breathe. She had nothing to grow to, or to put herself in rapport with. She was out of relation with all the great, ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... future honourable grand-children. He was, from these fanciful causes, unusually affable and indulgent to Maria; spoke so kindly always that she was all but dissolving thrice a-day; and, from his constant reveries about the countess, appeared perpetually to be brooding over dear Maria's soon approaching loss. Poor girl! more than once she had determined to give it all up, and make her father happy by serving him still in single blessedness: but then, how could she ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... they wouldn't be utter fools not to take their chance of being happy in the only way that was open to them, To this challenge he did not recall Susy's making any definite answer; but after another interval, in which all the world seemed framed in a sudden kiss, he heard her murmur to herself in a brooding tone: "I don't suppose it's ever been tried before; but we might—." And then and there she had laid before him the very ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... The chime of anklets, rings, and zones. You hear the song and music sound, And heavenly fragrance breathes around, There duly burn the triple fires(577) Where mounts the smoke in curling spires, And, in a dun wreath, hangs above The tall trees, like a brooding dove. Round branch and crest the vapours close Till every tree enveloped shows A hill of lazulite when clouds Hang round it with their misty shrouds. With Lakshman, lord of Raghu's line, In reverent guise thine head incline, And with fixt heart and suppliant ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... the coming event in a personal light. Even the uncertainty did not distress anyone. The attack would surely come, but whether it would come the following night or in a week's time did not seem to matter in the least. Velo had expected to see in an event like this a lot of men brooding gloomily over the possible outcome, a dismal time with last farewells, and touching letters written home. He watched the young officer beside him. He had finished his meal and had taken out a pad of paper and an indelible pencil. He wrote rapidly, but with a calm and ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... he communed thus with himself, the mysterious whispers of the night came nearer to him, in the blackness of garden trees, ancient trees of College gardens brooding alone, whispering alone through the dark hours, of that current of young life which is still flowing past them; how for hundreds of years it has always been flowing, and always passing, passing, passing so quickly to the great silent sea of death ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... of brooding silence, he went on to say that the Earl was no better or worse than the rest of the world. That men of his position had many jealous enemies, ever seeking their ruin, and that such must look first of all each to himself, or ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... raven black; nor were his features altered or sunk: not in one year's space, by any sorrow, could his athletic strength be quelled or his vigorous prime blighted. But in his countenance I saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding—that reminded me of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished, might look as looked ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... and messengers, who had begged, implored me to help him against Orcon, the eccentric planet of my own discovery, the planet which belonged to a solar system at the other end of the Universe from ours. Because of my knowledge of Orcon, with its bubbling seas, its brooding nightmares, and lastly, its queer conduct toward Earth, he had wanted to take me away from my telescopes to fight. And ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... is alleged the leading patricians are secreting. To which proceeding so far am I from being any obstruction, that on the contrary, Marcus Manlius, I exhort you to free the Roman commons from the weight of interest; and to tumble from their secreted spoil, those who lie now brooding on those public treasures. If you refuse to do this, whether because you yourself desire to be a sharer in the spoil, or because the information is unfounded, I shall order you to be carried off to prison, nor will I any longer suffer the multitude to be disquieted by you with delusive ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... of my last stay in Paris, when ill, miserable, and despairing, I sat brooding over my fate, my eye fell on the score of my "Lohengrin", totally forgotten by me. Suddenly I felt something like compassion that this music should never sound from off the death-pale paper. Two words I wrote to Liszt; his answer was the news that ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... Highness haughtily; and once more a brooding stillness fell on the company, broken only by Melac's heavy breathing, and the flutter of the Bible's pages between the Pastor's nervous fingers. Would the bride never come? this waiting was intolerable. Eberhard Ludwig stood stern ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... part in the talk since we had reached her bower. She had seated herself close to the O'Keefe. Glancing at her I had seen steal over her face that brooding, listening look that was hers whenever in that mysterious communion with the Three. It vanished; swiftly she arose; interrupted the Irishman ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... have tramped and retramped on its pavements, filled with a brooding bitterness which is no part of seventeen. Those were the days of my youth, and, looking back, I realize that something, indeed, a great deal, was missing. Youth, of course, in the abstract, is regarded as a kingship, a time of dreams, potentialities, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... British and U.S. forces, thirty-six were won by the British. Though the victories of 1812 were the direct factors that brought about a change in the national destiny of Canada, "Queenston Heights was not the culminating feat of arms." As a result of brooding over these disasters that had befallen the "Grand Army of the West," and the "national disgrace" of overwhelming defeat, the people of the United States, as a whole, independent of politics, "were now"—so write American chroniclers—"compelled to ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... hunter; nor when stoop'd to drink, Had from the rustling rice-beds heard the shaft Of the still hunter hidden in its spears; His bark canoe close-knotted in its bronze, His form as stirless as the brooding air, His dusky eyes too, fix'd, unwinking, fires; His bow-string tighten'd till it subtly sang To the long throbs, and leaping pulse that roll'd And beat within his knotted, naked breast. There came a morn. The Moon of Falling Leaves, With her twin silver blades had only hung Above the low ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... the cavern, and the grove, were no less holy than the mountain-top in the eyes of the first religionists of the East. Streams and fountains were dedicated to the Sun, and their exhalations were supposed to inspire with prophecy, and to breathe of the god. The gloom of caverns, naturally the brooding-place of awe, was deemed a fitting scene for diviner revelations—it inspired unearthly contemplation and mystic revery. Zoroaster is supposed by Porphyry (well versed in all Pagan lore, though frequently ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... children just out of school seemed to hold the road. At other times—and this was the prevailing mood—the manner was one of placid, patient, calm and smooth, unruffled hope; but back and behind all was a dynamo of energy, a brooding melancholy of unrest, and the crouching world-sorrow that would ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... I suppose there are brooding lovers of knowledge in this world who are fonder of their own than of any other company. But most people can only think half thoughts and need other people to complete them. It is amusing enough to knock a ball against a wall, and a wonderful help in the perfection of strokes, but it is far more ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... and happiness, which are scattered over this verdant mountain; the flourishing settlements which are spreading around it—the sound of Christian instruction, and scene of Christian worship, which are heard and seen in this land of brooding pagan darkness; a thousand contented freemen, united in founding a new Christian Empire, happy themselves, and the instruments of happiness to others—every object, every individual, is an argument, is demonstration of the wisdom and the goodness ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... There was a brooding death in her eyes when she sternly said to the merchant: "Send him to me at once! Send Hawke! Go! Waste ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... to have encouraged, and which finally led him to that fate, which was the just reward of an hypocritical and malignant heart, filled with gloomy and ferocious passions—He seemed rather to be an instrument of Hell, than a minister of Heaven, for his mind was perpetually brooding over sanguinary schemes and plans of rapine, while he assumed the sacred vestments of ...
— An Impartial Narrative of the Most Important Engagements Which Took Place Between His Majesty's Forces and the Rebels, During the Irish Rebellion, 1798. • John Jones
... their long levites, (a peculiar cloak then in fashion,) they carried each a sabre, suspended at the waist, the presence of which was betrayed from time to time by a slight clanking, as the horses stumbled or changed their paces. He might have further remarked a sinister pre-occupation and a brooding fierceness in the countenance of one, whose dark eyes peeped out furtively beneath two thick brows. He took but little share in the boisterous gaiety of the other three, and that little was forced; his laugh was hollow and convulsive. It ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... by the heat from a snatching flame below. It was exactly a year and a day since her husband's death, and she had packed herself away in his own corner of the settle, her hands clasped across her knees, and her red-brown eyes brooding on the nearer embers. She was not definitely speculating on her future, nor had she any heart for retracing the dull and gentle past. She had simply relaxed hold on her mind; and so, escaping her, it had gone wandering off into shadowy ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... I observed - listen to this, I pray! (and here the courier dropped his voice) - I observed my mistress sometimes brooding in a manner very strange; in a frightened manner; in an unhappy manner; with a cloudy, uncertain alarm upon her. I think that I began to notice this when I was walking up hills by the carriage side, and master had gone on in front. At any rate, I remember that it impressed ...
— To be Read at Dusk • Charles Dickens
... A haze was now brooding over the Susquehanna, and the autumn leaves were being tinged with red. The struggle of the year 1778 seemed over and Brant decided to spend the winter at Niagara. Accordingly he set out with a band of warriors from his entrenched position at Unadilla and went forward by easy stages ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... hand Joe went with shambling steps toward the place where Jim sat absorbed in his work. A brooding silence seemed to lie over the shop and even outside in the street all noises suddenly ceased. Old Joe's gait changed. As he passed behind the horse on which Jim sat, life came into his figure and he walked with a soft, cat-like tread. Joy shone in his ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... June. The rich resinous odour of the woods filled the air with delicious perfume; fire-flies were glancing like shooting stars among the dark foliage that hung over the water, and the spirit of love and peace sat brooding over the luxurious solitude, whose very silence was eloquent with praise of the great Maker. How I envied the residents of the parsonage their lovely home! How disappointed I felt, when Mrs. G—- told me that she felt it dull and lonely, that she was out of society, ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... under a fine oak, commanding a view. The green slopes below her ran westward to a wide sky steeped toward the horizon in all conceivable shades of lilac and pearl, with here and there in the upper heaven lakes of blue and towering thunder-clouds brooding over them, prophesying storm. She looked out over her domain, in which, up to a short time before, her writ, so to speak, had run, like that of a king. And now all sense of confidence, of security, was gone. There on the hillside was the ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Mary Raymond. Her babyish face looked white and wan in the clear morning light. For hours after her door had closed upon Marjorie and her mother she had sat on the edge of her bed in her pretty blue party frock, brooding on her wrongs. When she had finally prepared for sleep, it was only to toss and turn in her bed, wide-awake and resentful. At daylight she had risen listlessly, then fixing upon a certain plan of action, had bathed, put on a simple house gown and ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... half rainy too—the wood so damp and still and so secret, in the remote morning air. Morning, with rain in the sky, and the forest subtly brooding, and me feeling no bigger than a pea-bug between the roots of my fir. The trees seem so much bigger than me, so much stronger in life, prowling silent around. I seem to feel them moving and thinking and prowling, and ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... beginning of the end. He turned in panic. They couldn't be over half a mile away. In a panic of indecision he turned first east then west, then facing due south he hesitated a moment to take one last look at the clear open skies, and with a muffled prayer plunged into the brooding depths of ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... England, everything but that for which the heart yearns—affection—that which alone 'can minister to a mind diseased, can pluck from the memory its rooted sorrow, and rase out the written troubles from the brain.' That is just what Ireland needs above all things. She wants to be kept from brooding morbidly over the dismal past, and to be induced to apply herself in a cheerful spirit to the business of life. The prescriptions of state physicians cannot fully reach the root of the disease. Say that it is a sentimental malady—a delusion. What is gained by saying that, if the sentiment or the ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... placing of shelves, the exact joining of sills and casings. Often he stayed late in the evening, after the workmen with their noisy boots had gone home to supper. He sat down on a rafter or on the skeleton of the upper porch and quite lost himself in brooding, in anticipation of things that seemed as far away as ever. The dying light, the quiet stars coming out, were friendly and sympathetic. One night a bird flew in and fluttered wildly about among the partitions, shrieking with fright before it darted out into the dusk through one of the upper windows ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... sorrow is the regretting or brooding over past actions, especially in connection with the dead. Perhaps something that should have been done was neglected, or something was done that should have been left undone. Over this the sufferer broods by the hour, leading to a form of sad resignation ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... on indifferent subjects, so that it might be rather said of him that he made a cheerful noise, than that he contributed to human conversation; and Archie sat upon the other side, not heeding him, brooding over his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... alone and brooding in my chamber, Taee flew in at the open window and alighted on the couch beside me. I was always pleased with the visits of a child, in whose society, if humbled, I was less eclipsed than in that of Ana who had completed their education and matured their ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... is something brooding, obscure, tremulous, half-inarticulate, as he meditates over man, nature, and destiny: Nature, 'waking by touch alone,' and Fate, who sees and feels. In The Mother Mourns, a strange, dreary, ironical song ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... years have rolled over his head; but, in fine weather or in foul, hot or cold, wet or dry, hail, rain, or snow, he is still in his accustomed spot. Misery and want are depicted in his countenance; his form is bent by age, his head is grey with length of trial, but there he sits from day to day, brooding over the past; and thither he will continue to drag his feeble limbs, until his eyes have closed upon Scotland-yard, and upon the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding street, full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding streets diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the people there was yet some wild-beast thought of the possibility of turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white with what ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... and they were glad of the exertion, for it kept them from brooding over the troubles of their situation, and a troublesome situation it was—they ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... both that he destroyed in one night by casting firebrands into them! At last, not at three miles distance, but by a close siege, he shook the very gates of Carthage itself. And thus he succeeded in drawing off Hannibal when he was still clinging to and brooding over Italy. There was no more remarkable day, during the whole course of the Roman Empire, than that on which those two generals, the greatest of all that ever lived, whether before or after them, the one the conqueror of Italy, and the other of Spain, drew up their forces ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... solemnly. He said nothing—his gravity had returned. Now in the glare of the tropical day, with the "Bertha Millner" sitting the sea as placidly as a brooding gull, ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... drama—at once his most typical, moving, and beautiful performance—swims in an atmosphere of portent and bodement; here, as Pater noted in the work of a wholly different order of artist, "the storm is always brooding;" here, too, "in a sudden tremor of an aged voice, in the tacit observance of a day," we become "aware suddenly of the great stream of human tears falling always through the shadows of the world." Mystery ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... of his brooding pauses at the window—the window out of which never again apparently should he see Mrs. Ryves glide across the little garden with the step for which he had liked her from the first—he became aware that the rain was about to intermit and the sun to make some grudging amends. This was a sign ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... before dawn; he put his things out ready, and filled his flask. The moonlight that evening was more wonderful than ever, the mountains like great ghosts of themselves. And she was up there at the hut, among them! It was very long before he went to sleep, brooding over his injuries—intending not to sleep at all, so as to be ready to be off at three o'clock. At NINE o'clock he woke. His wrath was gone; he only felt restless and ashamed. If, instead of flying out, he had made the best of it, he could have gone with them as far as the hut, could have stayed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... from any other definite means of ascertaining what duty may chance to be, is but a bald and naked counsel. Spiritual nullity and material confusion in a society are not to be repaired by a transformation of egotism, querulous, brooding, marvelling, into egotism, active, practical, objective, not uncomplacent. The moral movements to which the instinctive impulses of humanity fallen on evil times uniformly give birth, early Christianity, for instance, or the socialism of Rousseau, may destroy a society, but they cannot save ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... the day with my head bent down on my knees, brooding over my grief. I certainly felt ripe for any desperate adventure; but nothing else would, I think, have aroused me. The Frenchmen did not like our looks, I conclude, for they kept a strict watch over us lest we should attempt ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... would be incredible that he adopted such a mere illusion, if he had not himself said it. It proves that some at least of the strange additions to history which he thus published had their birth in his own imagination brooding over the past, and are completely contradicted by the official records. [Footnote: This illusion, at least, is shown to be of later origin by his telegram to his wife of September 7. "I leave here this afternoon," he says, ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... skies, have held, still hold, their secrets; but they do not seek for yours. The terrific temples, the hot, mysterious tombs, odorous of the dead desires of men, crouching in and under the immeasurable sands, will muck you with their brooding silence, with their dim and sombre repose. The brown children of the Nile, the toilers who sing their antique songs by the shadoof and the sakieh, the dragomans, the smiling goblin merchants, the Bedouins who lead your ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... beyond. Last night, too, when he had been talking to Wherry, there had been such a creak and for the moment, he recalled vividly, there had been no wind. Then, disturbed by Dick's utter collapse, he had carelessly dismissed it. Now with his brain dangerously edged by the whiskey and his mind brooding intently over a series of mysterious and sinister adventures which had enlivened his summer, he rose and stealing catlike to the door, ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... As I lay brooding in my melancholy state, a red grosbeak, with his bright red plumage, alighted on a tree a few feet from my window. His eyes sparkled as he gazed at me with interest. He turned his head now this way and now that, apparently studying me intently, ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... brother! Brooding on fancy's eggs. God did not send The light that all day long gladdened the earth, Flashed from the snowy peak, and on the spire Transformed the weathercock into a star, That you should gloom within stone walls all day. At dawn to-morrow, take your staff, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... a winding path Through the woods, And, world weary, pause upon it. The trees bend and enclose me In brooding calm; I ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... I cold-shouldered the band, abjured the shrine, and avoided the lady. Then, while still morose and brooding, my trouble at its height, a cousin—in the third degree—rich, middle-aged, and conveniently restless, invited me to be his travelling companion. We had taken trips together before. This one promised fields of wider adventure—nothing less ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... the other hand, lets itself go with a more passive receptivity; and permits the formless, wordless brooding of the vast earthpower to work its magic upon it, in its own place and season. Not, however, in any destruction of the defining and registering functions of the intellect ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... but a similar state of things exists so often in women, no doubt due to sexual repression, and in individuals who are in a general state of normal and good health, that in these it can scarcely be called morbid. Brooding on sexual images, which the theologians termed delectatio morosa, may lead to spontaneous orgasm in either sex, even in perfectly normal persons. Hammond described as a not uncommon form of "psychic coitus," ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... his room the brooding heat that filled the house struck him as peculiarly oppressive, and a painful feeling, closely resembling shame, stole over him as he crossed the viridarium, and glanced at the grass from which—thanks ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... always regarded this religious experience as the most important part of his education; it had the effect, not only of enlarging his mind, but also of restraining his impatience, and softening a disposition that was growing hard and bitter with brooding over the disadvantages suffered by himself and his race. He greatly needed something that would help him to look beyond his bondage and encourage him to hope ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... down the Park. Saton followed her eyes, noticing her slight start, and gazed after them with brooding face. ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Not properly belonging to the flock of the head master, but to the leading section of the second, I was now weekly paraded for distinction at the supreme tribunal of the school; out of which at first grew nothing but a sunshine of approbation delightful to my heart, still brooding upon solitude. Within six weeks this had changed. The approbation indeed continued, and the public testimony of it. Neither would there, in the ordinary course, have been any painful reaction from jealousy or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... he's never mad enough to send to hospital, or drunk enough to run in, but at any minute he may flare up, brooding and sulking as he does. He resents any interest being shown in him, and the only time I took him out shooting he all but shot me ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... was gently closed; and he stood in absolute darkness, hesitating, wondering. He fancied he heard cautious feet stealing across the bare floor of the hall; but not another sound broke the oppressive brooding silence of the close, musty-smelling old house. In another moment he would have spoken, have demanded the meaning of all this, when a faint gleam of light appeared at the end of the hall, and from the lower ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... the blue veil of the spring sky, and before us lies the deep forest, brooding in wise silence. Now and then the wind whispers gently and stirs the fragrant shadows of the forest, and again does the soothing silence caress us with a motherly caress. White clouds are sailing slowly ...
— The Shield • Various
... the distant woods were the brooding birds, but they arose before we were near and sailed splendidly overhead in a sweeping, wide-fronted rank. As nearly as I could number them, there were 120, but evidently some were elsewhere, as this would not allow a pair to ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... enemy was disarmed. Sandro the passionate, the lover, the brooding devotee, was gone; so was la bella Simonetta the beloved, the be- hymned. Instead, here was a fretful painter, dashing lines and broad smudges of shade on his paper, while before him rose an exquisite, slender, swaying form, glistening carnation and silver, and, over all, the maddening glow ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... his design by Moll's displeasure, Dario replaced his scaffold before he left that day, and the next morning he came to put the last touch upon his work. Moll, being still in dudgeon, would not go near him, but sat brooding in a corner of her state room, ready, as I perceived, to fly out in passion at any one who gave her the occasion. Perceiving this, Don Sanchez prudently went forth for a walk after dinner; but I, seeing that some one must settle accounts with the painter ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... for the boat-builder. He was sitting, smoking his pipe, in the cottage porch, and reading a well-thumbed copy of "Gray's Master Mariner." He welcomed Archie with a secret delight, for he knew, by his little friend's face, that he was brooding over some fancied injury, and it gave the boat-builder pleasure to talk his little friend out ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... to himself, as he sat down to his work in the gloomy room in Lincoln's Inn, and in spite of heart-sickness he worked on stolidly and well. The evenings were his worst time, when he went back to the empty house at Cheyne Walk and sat on the balcony brooding over his troubles, until the light faded and an eerie darkness crept ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... and he could not leave his house for days. Doubtless this indignity surpassed all other outrages in the proud old chief's estimation, and we can imagine him sitting in his cabin on the highest ground in the village, looking over the magnificent landscape, brooding upon the blight which had fallen upon the beautiful home of his tribe, and harboring thoughts of revenge. Still he refrained from open resistance ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... falls like a cat on the mother grouse Brooding her young in the wind-bent weeds, Or listens to heed with a start of greed The ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... Marija sat brooding in silence for a while; then, seeing that Jurgis was interested, she went on: "That's the way they keep the girls—they let them run up debts, so they can't get away. A young girl comes from abroad, and she doesn't know a word of English, and she gets into a place ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... streamlet slid away, Singing, smiling, dimpling down To a mossy nook and brown, Under bending boughs of May; Where the nodding wind-flower grows, And the coolwort's lovely pink, Brooding o'er the brooklet's brink Dips and ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... circles whose opinions are the springs of national policy. "Our last and greatest reckoning is to be with Great Britain," said the bitter Treitschke. Sooner or later the shock was to come. Germany sat brooding over the chessboard of the world waiting for the opening which should assure ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... erotic period out of which some poets have never emerged. A soaring, speculative imagination, and an impetuous, resistless self-will, were his distinguishing characteristics. From first to last he concentrated himself within himself; brooding over his own fancies and imaginations to the comparative disregard of the incidents and impressions which suggested them; and was little susceptible of ideas originating in other minds. We behold the result. He lives alone in a world ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... think you any of those things. Come, dear, let's just talk it over sensibly, as we might talk over any other of the great crises of life. You've been brooding over it and let yourself drift into a morbid view of it. You know you have a little tendency to do that about everything that goes wrong, and you promised me that you ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... terror still waited me there; moreover, I was filled with a great desire for action. This narrow chamber stifled me, while outside was the stir of leaves, the gentle breathing of the wind, the cool murmur of the brook, with night brooding over all, deep and ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... has lived with his brother, and spends his time in brooding over his grievances and bewailing his shattered illusions. He has lost none of that fluency which gained him an ephemeral literary reputation, and can speak by the hour on political and social questions to any one who will listen to him. It is extremely difficult, however, to follow his ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... back her hair, "No, not the omen. I am not a slave to chance like that. Yet to-day,—the wise God knows wherefore,—there comes a sense of brooding fear. I have been too happy—too blessed with friendship, triumph, love. It cannot last. Clotho the Spinner will weary of making my thread of gold and twine in a darker stuff. Everything lovely must pass. What said Glaucus to Diomedes? 'Even ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... fierce eye, through the quivering smoke, was seen. 10 In sea-wolf's skin, here Mariantu stood; Gnashed his white teeth, impatient, and cried, blood! His lofty brow, with crimson feathers bound, Here, brooding death, the huge Ongolmo frowned; And, like a giant of no earthly race, To his broad shoulders heaved his ponderous mace. With lifted hatchet, as in act to fell, Here stood the young and ardent Teucapel. Like a lone cypress, stately in decay, When time has worn its summer boughs away, 20 And ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... to be with them; and after a long brooding over her ill-temper, it began to wear out, not to be conquered, but to depart of itself; she thought she might as well learn her lesson and have done with it; so by way of getting rid of the task, not of profiting by the warning it conveyed, she hurried through the two verses ending with—"Behold ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge
... their great airship, strangely dejected despite the close proximity of the life-giving water, while the sun flamed through the cloudless sky and set in a crimson flood beyond the lifeless plains. Night fell but still they sat brooding. The stars shone out in the purple heavens, but they noticed not their glory. The ship was wrapped in an awful silence. No night wind whispered its message nor warmed the cold, desolate earth, stretching ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... been put to the question by the great council of Amphictyons? Had they not been smothered in onions by the terrible men of Pyquag? In the midst of this consternation and perplexity, when horror, like a mighty nightmare, sat brooding upon the little, fat, plethoric city of New Amsterdam, the ears of the multitude were suddenly startled by the distant sound of a trumpet;—it approached—it grew louder and louder—and now it resounded at the city gate. The public ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... sect of the Rosicrucians, some of whom he had perhaps encountered in his travels in Germany, he imagined that, by means of the philosopher's stone, he could summon these kindly spirits at his will. By dint of continually brooding upon the subject, his imagination became so diseased, that he at last persuaded himself that an angel appeared to him, and promised to be his friend and companion as long as he lived. He relates that, one day, in November 1582, while he was engaged ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... his uncle to welcome his friendship with the Vicar of Meade Cantorum; but he had supposed that after a few familiar sneers he should be allowed to go his own way with nothing worse than silent disapproval brooding over his perverse choice. He was surprised by the vehemence of his uncle's opposition, and it must be added that he thoroughly enjoyed it. The experience of that Whit-sunday had been too rich not to be of enduring importance to his development ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... any crowd in Paris—to withdraw the savings of a lifetime or the capital of their business houses. There were similar crowds outside other banks, and on the faces of these people there was a look of brooding fear, as though all that they had fought and struggled for, the reward of all their petty economies and meannesses, and shifts and tricks, and denials of self-indulgences and starvings of soul might be suddenly snatched from them ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... she felt an insurmountable dread of moving—she went quickly to her own room and locked her door; but even then, shut in with her dog beside her, felt a chill sensation of horror, as if there were danger brooding ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the hermit took Some lustral water from the brook. But still on this his constant thought Kept brooding, as his home he sought; While Bharadvaja paced behind, A pupil sage of lowly mind, And in his hand a pitcher bore With pure fresh water brimming o'er. Soon as they reached their calm retreat The holy hermit took his seat; His mind from worldly cares recalled, And ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... and tore through it like a hurricane, leaving a causeway of the dead stretching far behind; no tarrying, no slacking rein, but on! on! on! far yonder in the distance lay our prey—Talbot and his host looming vast and dark like a storm-cloud brooding on the sea! Down we swooped upon them, glooming all the air with a quivering pall of dead leaves flung up by the whirlwind of our flight. In another moment we should have struck them as world strikes world when disorbited ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... seeking distraction in almonds and raisins, but now they only choked instead of consoling him, and he gave them up and sat brooding silently over his hard lot instead, with a dull, blank dejection which those only who have gone through the same thing in their boyhood will understand. To others, whose school life has been one unchequered course of excitement and success, it will be incomprehensible enough—and so much the ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... was new to him than at a happier period. A stranger founding his judgment upon these circumstances would have said that the dulness of the child's intellect widely contradicted the promise of his features, but the secret was in the direction of Ilbrahim's thoughts, which were brooding within him when they should naturally have been wandering abroad. An attempt of Dorothy to revive his former sportiveness was the single occasion on which his quiet demeanor yielded to a violent ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... three girls sitting disconsolately on the floor. "Go out and get some of this summer sunshine into your faces and voices so that you can bring it back to Elizabeth. She will need all that you can bring her, poor child; so, instead of brooding over your own feelings, think of something that you can do ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... rather Leslie did not himself know, and if the others did he'd be sure to find it out. It would make him conspicuous, maybe worry him and set him brooding over himself, so I'm trusting you to keep it secret. And, in any case, what better amusement could you have? The regular exercise in this perfect air will be as good for you girls as for ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... a street light from time to time; they were stationed at wide intervals in that neighborhood. Soon, however, she reached the factories, when all mystery and awe, and vague terrors of what beside herself might be near unrevealed beneath the mighty brooding of the night, were over. She was, as it were, in the mid-current of the conditions of her own life and times, and the material force of it swept away all symbolisms and unstable drift, and left only the bare rocks and shores ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... seasons three, Their winter halo hath a fuller ring; 170 This glory seems to rest immovably,— The others were too fleet and vanishing; When the hid tide is at its highest flow, O'er marsh and stream one breathless trance of snow With brooding fulness awes and hushes ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... up within my mind, a great and overwhelming distress of uneasiness, that left me, but to drop me into an uncomfortable brooding. I felt that I must fight against it; and, presently, hoping to distract my thoughts, I turned to the window, and looked up toward the North, in search of the nebulous whiteness, which, still, I believed to be the far and misty glowing of the universe we had left. Even as I raised ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... sisters, is driven Out of her native land; but her own misfortunes forgetting, Others she seeks to console, and, though helpless, is also most helpful. Great are the woes and distress which over the earth's face are brooding, But may happiness not be evoked from out of this sorrow? May not I, in the arms of my bride, the wife I have chosen, Even rejoice at the war, as you at ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... no time for brooding, for he was working hard at his lessons with the village Priest; and as to little Daria, she had quickly adapted ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... there in splendid uniform, as always, but somber and brooding. Prescott clearly saw danger on the man's brow, but a threat, even one unspoken, always served to arouse him, and he returned with renewed devotion to Mrs. Markham. His growing dislike for Harley was tinctured with a strain of contempt. He accused the man's vanity and selfishness, but he forgot ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... furnished her with the oddest of commentaries on his father's mien and mind. He would never, the family sighingly recognized, be nearly as handsome as Mr. Leath; but his rather charmingly unbalanced face, with its brooding forehead and petulant boyish smile, suggested to Anna what his father's countenance might have been could one have pictured its neat features disordered by a rattling breeze. She even pushed the analogy farther, and descried in her ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... over the bodies of men was comparatively a trifle; pikes, bullets, and conflagrations are comparatively a trifle. Their real tyranny was the tyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and demoralised human spirit. Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved and reverenced, for it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial, madness can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because they were fanatics, ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... genial heroism in which she was armoured, and it was characteristic of her, as well as of her race, that, while she sat now in the midst of encircling battlefields, with her eyes on the walk over which she had seen the blood of the wounded drip when they were lifted into her door, she should be brooding not over the tremendous tragedies through which she had passed, but over the lesson in physical geography she must teach in the morning. Her lips moved gently, and a listener, had there been one, might have heard her murmur: "The four great alluvial plains of Asia—those ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... that ignorant demagogues in England may say, Fred Daleham felt all the more keenly the disappointment of his inability to follow the career that he would have chosen. However, he was a healthy-minded young man, not given to brooding ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... badly with you, when that other man let you in for the bill you backed for him, and that girl you were to have married went off with someone else, what did you do to keep yourself from brooding? Because you must have done something, man, as you're ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... convent-bell, Ere Day's last smiles depart, With mellow cadence pleading fell Upon my brooding heart,— And Memory's phantoms thick and fast Their fond illusions bred, From peerless spirits of the past, And wrecks ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... influences of the hour crept into Susan's heart. What of these petty little hopes and joys and fears that fretted her like a cloud of midges day and night? How small they seemed in the wide silence of these brooding hills, with the sunlight lying warm on the murmuring ocean below, and ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... departure. The loss of dear ones should stamp their image on our hearts, and set it as in a golden glory. But it sometimes does more than that; it sometimes makes us put the present with its duties impatiently away from us. Vain regret, absorbed brooding over what is gone, a sorrow kept gaping long after it should have been healed, like a grave-mound off which desperate love has pulled turf and flowers, in the vain attempt to clasp the cold hand below—in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... external reproach, cannot condescend to notice insult, cannot so much as SEE the curiosity of bystanders; that awful carelessness of all but the troubled deeps within his own heart, and of God's spirit brooding upon their surface and searching their abysses; ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... little that has appeared in doing or in suffering to the eyes of companions; for the child who has been made happy by early thoughtfulness, and by infantine struggles with the great ideas of his origin and his destination, (ideas which settle with a deep, dove-like brooding upon the mind of childhood, more than of mature life, vexed with inroads from the noisy world,) will not manifest the workings of his spirit by much of external activity. The fallentis semita vitae, that path of noiseless life, which eludes and ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... the next scene! Heaven's wrath burst loose upon a single community. Fire, the red-winged demon with brazen throat wide opened, hangs his brooding wings upon an erstwhile happy city. Hades has climbed through the crater of Vesuvius, and leaps in fiendish waves along the land. Few the souls escaping, and God have mercy upon those who stumble through ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... hunted. The sportsman's tastes were not his, nor were his social tastes demonstrative. Possibly they may have been restrained in some measure by his mother's strictness of religious principles. He was neither morose nor brooding,—not a dreamer of destiny. He yearned for no star. No instinct of his future achievements made him peculiar among his companions or caused him to hold himself aloof. He exhibited nothing of the young Napoleon's distemper of gnawing ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... 510; principiis obstare [Lat.]; veniente occurrere morbo [Lat.]. Adj. preparing &c v.; in preparation, in course of preparation, in agitation, in embryo, in hand, in train; afoot, afloat; on foot, on the stocks, on the anvil; under consideration &c (plan) 626; brewing, batching, forthcoming, brooding; in store for, in reserve. precautionary, provident; preparative, preparatory; provisional, inchoate, under revision; preliminary &c (precedent) 62. prepared &c v.; in readiness; ready, ready to one's band, ready made, ready cut and dried: made to one's hand, handy, on the table; in gear; in ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... oppose his will; For she had ever sought it, as the rill Seeketh the valley or the ocean's breast; And ere his very wishes were expressed, She strove to trace their meaning in his eyes, Even as a seaman readeth on the skies The coming breeze, the calm, or brooding gale, Then spreads the canvas wide, or reefs the sail. Nor did he doubt that still her heart was free As the fleet mountain deer, which as a sea The wilderness surrounds; for she had grown Up as a desert flower, that he alone Had watched ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... all sorts of things," said Aleck, who felt that he must do something to keep his companion from brooding over his position. ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... The brooding instinct in me—the faint remnant of mother love, that kind Providence has left in every, good man's heart—longed to comfort her and bear her pains. But I was powerless to help her, and, after all, her suffering was wholesome. In a moment she continued, sobbing ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... case, the stillness of the vast solitude seemed unlike silence, for a low, deep murmur was ever brooding in the air, varied now and then by the soft voice of some waterfall, borne across the vasty depths by an eddy in the gentle wind. Once the bark of a wolf sounded so sharp and clear that the youth started and looked to one side, expecting ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... she found little Jean's round smiling face peering against the peat-stack at the end of the cottage awaiting her coming, for a great friendship had sprung up between these two, though they were certainly very different in character. Elsie seemed to have a brooding protective care over the little unkempt Jean, exercising a sort of guardianship of her in the new life at school. She would often come to her rescue when Jean sat pouting over a blurred slate, en which she was ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... with the account of the Priestly Code of the creation of the world. In the beginning is chaos; darkness, water, brooding spirit, which engenders life, and fertilises the dead mass. The primal stuff contains in itself all beings, as yet undistinguished: from it proceeds step by step the ordered world; by a process of unmixing, first of all by separating out the great elements. The chaotic primal gloom yields to the ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... the planters, embraced about three hours in the middle of the day; during which it was so excessively hot, in this still, brooding valley, shut out from the Trades, and only open toward the leeward side of the island, that labour in the sun was out of the question. To use a hyperbolical phrase of Shorty's, "It was 'ot enough to melt the nose ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... While he was brooding over these fancies, someone, breathless with haste, ran up to his room, and again a note was thrust underneath the door. He seized it quickly, ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... room in that same house sat, solitary as Helen, a stern, gloomy, brooding man, in whom they who had best known him from his childhood could scarcely have recognized a trace of the humane, benignant, trustful, but wayward and ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had looked into all the compartments of the carriage, the guard was waving his flag and the two men climbed hurriedly in again. The brooding silence of the superintendent infected even Mr. MacAlister, and neither spoke for several minutes. Then the superintendent ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... ten o'clock, while the sunset glow was still brooding on the harvest fields, the two farm-girls, after a last visit to the cows, slipped into the little sitting-room. Janet, who was mending her Sunday dress, greeted them with a smile and a kind word. Then she moved to the table and took ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... elegiacs and iambics well enough, but he preferred exercising himself in the rhymed Latin of the middle ages. He like history, but he loved to meditate on a land laid waste, Britain deserted by the legions, the rare pavements riven by frost, Celtic magic still brooding on the wild hills and in the black depths of the forest, the rosy marbles stained with rain, and the walls growing grey. The masters did not encourage these researches; a pure enthusiasm, they felt, should be for cricket and football, the dilettanti ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... accepted without suspicion by the children not as a nurse, but as a playmate. Weeks passed. The four played together with a greater harmony than the three had ever attained. Day after day the Reverend Orme sat waiting in his study and brooding. The dreaded call never came. He began to distrust ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... fanciful causes, unusually affable and indulgent to Maria; spoke so kindly always that she was all but dissolving thrice a-day; and, from his constant reveries about the countess, appeared perpetually to be brooding over dear Maria's soon approaching loss. Poor girl! more than once she had determined to give it all up, and make her father happy by serving him still in single blessedness: but then, how could she break dear Henry's heart, as well as her own? No, no: they ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and then, a few days later, his second son, Prince Qamas, extracted from him leave to go too; and he, also, was put to death. One son only now remained, the brave, eloquent, happy-natured Prince Almas-ruh-bakhsh. One day, when his father sat brooding over his lost children, Almas came before him and said: 'O father mine! the daughter of King Quimus has done my two brothers to death; I wish to avenge them upon her.' These words brought his father to tears. 'O light of your father!' he cried, 'I have no one left but you, and now you ask ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... always the same soft breeze stirring the orchard, always the clear yellow sunlight burning and dazzling her eyes, always the unvarying monotony of bleating sheep and lowing herds and at evening the hoot of owls. The brooding tenderness of the sky she did not see. The throbbing of the great, quiet southern stars stirred her only with a sense of helpless loneliness that was all but unendurable. And still, from who knows what source, she found strength to meet the days and her friends with ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... Providence began to falter. Was prayer, she wondered forlornly, to fail her like everything else? Suddenly, however, and when things were at their darkest, a helping hand was offered. One bitter evening, as she sat brooding in the miserable lodging where she had secured temporary shelter, she was visited by a Mrs. Buchanan, claiming her as a friend of the long distant past. The years fell back; and, with an effort, Lola recognised in the visitor a girl, ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... unscathed Of changeful cycles the great Pyramids Broad-based amid the fleeting sands, and sloped Into the slumberous summer noon; but where, Mysterious Egypt, are thine obelisks Graven with gorgeous emblems undiscerned? Thy placid Sphinxes brooding o'er the Nile? Thy shadowy Idols in the solitudes, Awful Memnonian countenances calm Looking athwart the burning flats, far off Seen by the high-necked camel on the verge Journeying southward? Where are thy monuments Piled by the strong and sunborn ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... flying home to the arbor where the nest was, and having twittered out a little vesper-song, put its head under its wing, near his mate, which sat brooding in the nest over some little eggs, and the thought stole into her heart, "Will God take care of them and not me?" and she watched the peaceful sleep of the family over her head as if it ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... the Speaker to the officers individually, were brooded over as insults. What was the intrinsic worth of this little so-called Parliament, what were its rights, that it should so treat the Army that had set it up, and one company of which could turn it out of doors in five minutes? Though brooding thus, the Army chiefs had contented themselves with rare attendance in the House or the Council, and had made no active demonstration. They were perhaps doubtful whether the spirit of submission to the Parliament ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... man's door, sorrow and grief will soon be inside: and they expect to see the master waste away with a slow consuming sickness. If it be heard close to the negro's or Indian's hut, from that night misfortune sits brooding over it: and they await the ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... filled with lectures, classes, interviews, and reunions with old friends. Beneath a hollow smile and a life of ceaseless activity, a stream of black brooding polluted the inner river of bliss which for so many years had meandered under the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... care And brooding, God would ease this pain: Him soothest thou and smoothest down Till some content ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... cruel it is—or give a look—they do not know how cold it is—and are gone without a second thought about it; but it sinks into the woman's heart and rankles there. For the instant it is like a mortal blow, it hurts so, and in the brooding spirit it is exaggerated into a hopeless disaster. The wound will heal with a kind word, with kisses. Yes, but never, never without a little scar. But woe to the woman's love when she becomes insensible to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Senses, endeavoring daily to acquire for himself some knowledge of this strange Universe where he had arrived, be his task therein what it might. Infinite was his progress; thus in some fifteen months, he could perform the miracle of—Speech! To breed a fresh Soul, is it not like brooding a fresh (celestial) Egg; wherein as yet all is formless, powerless; yet by degrees organic elements and fibres shoot through the watery albumen; and out of vague Sensation grows Thought, grows Fantasy and Force, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... was wearing her heart out in brooding over the coming marriage. Jasper Wilde refused to be bought off, and Bernardine herself declared that it must take place. She, alas! ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... good to live there among them, with the mountain at our backs and the lake at our feet, and peace breathing in every breeze or brooding silently over the place at twilight. Rain or shine, day or night, these white-throated sparrows are the sunniest, cheeriest folk to be found anywhere in the woods. I grew to understand and love the Milicete ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... that Miss Caldegard had never seen a humming bird, and therefore found herself brooding on the blueness of all the blue things in her experience, from willow-pattern china to the waters of the Mediterranean, instead of considering the answer which she must ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... to the Vatican will perhaps never be known. But as for the uneducated, easily impressed peasants of the army, it was wonderful that all, except the second army and a small part of the third, retreated with such discipline in view of what they had been brooding on before the day of Caporetto. They had such vague ideas what they were fighting for, and if the Socialists kept saying that the English paid their masters to continue with the War—how were they to know ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... of his most felicitous stories. But Maupassant did not use sexual incidents for the sake of sex feeling; for him such incidents were various symbols, flickering images, of life, incarnations of the brooding spirit of cynicism and scorn. We have already seen that to Fielding, for whom they were of less special significance on their own account, they were presented as assertions of boisterous physical eagerness, of delight in energetic life for ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... under water at the knife in his belt. It seemed an eternity before he could draw it. A swift vision of the Great Chief's brooding eyes darted ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... teaching will become known to men and he will reign the one and only king till the world itself crumbles and perishes. Then he will become one with his Father, and from that moment there will be but one God. These are the thoughts, noble Sirs, on which he is brooding, and if he go up to yon town it will be to—— Judas could not bring himself to pronounce the words "declare himself God," so blasphemous did they seem to him. And before the wayfarers could ask him, as they were minded to, ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... in the public contention. But for all that I left with a feeling of relief. Grim sights and grimmer suggestions were at every corner. Beneath a verandah a dozen wounded officers, profusely swathed in bandages, clustered in a silent brooding group. Nurses waited quietly by shut doors that none might disturb more serious cases. Doctors hurried with solemn faces from one building to another. Here and there men pushed stretchers on rubber-tyred wheels about the paths, ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... combinations to reach the most revolting conclusions on the everlasting theme, that even for the stone wall you are yourself somehow to blame, though again it is as clear as day you are not to blame in the least, and therefore grinding your teeth in silent impotence to sink into luxurious inertia, brooding on the fact that there is no one even for you to feel vindictive against, that you have not, and perhaps never will have, an object for your spite, that it is a sleight of hand, a bit of juggling, a card-sharper's trick, that it is simply a mess, no knowing what and no knowing who, but in spite of ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... carried each a sabre, suspended at the waist, the presence of which was betrayed from time to time by a slight clanking, as the horses stumbled or changed their paces. He might have further remarked a sinister pre-occupation and a brooding fierceness in the countenance of one, whose dark eyes peeped out furtively beneath two thick brows. He took but little share in the boisterous gaiety of the other three, and that little was forced; his laugh was hollow ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... party in the morning. Was the man who had been accidentally shot the night before the anarchist trader? If so, who was the person whose bones lay in the ruins? Was the infernal-machine a genuine affair, and if so, would it explode? While the Major was still brooding over his disappointment, the boys were so eager for these investigations that they quite forgot the affair of the ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... in this state, East and Tom were one evening sitting in their study. They had done their work for first lesson, and Tom was in a brown study, brooding, like a young William Tell, upon the wrongs of fags in general, and his own ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... they made their way back to town. Old man Norris did not open his mouth, but looked dejected and sad, as if he was brooding over what would happen to him when he arrived at his destination. He was plainly uneasy, and probably wished they would ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... found him in a little cell by himself, outside the common room of the gaol. He was sitting in an attitude of great dejection, and when I entered could scarcely recall me to his memory. I remember thinking that, what with his high cheek-bones, and lank black hair, and brooding eyes, and great muscular frame, Scotland could scarcely have furnished a wilder figure for the admiration of the Carolinas, or wherever he went to. I did not envy his ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... mouth; those cheeks that hold Like some harsh landscape all the summer's gold; That spirit fit for sorrow, as the sea For storms to beat on; the lone agony Those silent, patient lips too well foretold. Yes, this is he who ruled a world of men As might some prophet of the elder day— Brooding above the tempest and the fray With deep-eyed thought and more than mortal ken. A power was his beyond the touch of art Or armed ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... by a most unhappy silence. Both hearts were brooding over their slights and wrongs. Day by day Charlotte's life had grown harder to bear. Sophia's little flaunts and dissents, her astonishments and corrections, were almost as cruel as the open hatred of Julius, his silence, his lowering brows, and insolence of proprietorship. ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... thus brooding over projects of vengeance, Commander de Jars kept his word, and about a month after the interview above related he sent word to Quennebert that the Chevalier de Moranges had left Perregaud's completely recovered from his wound. But the nearly fatal result of the chevalier's last ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... right side. We could see her eyes bright with a surprising tenderness and joy, bending over this bundle of clothes. She held it as a woman holds her sucking child; opening out her night-gown impatiently, and holding it close, and brooding over it, and murmuring foolish little words, as over one whom his mother comforteth, and who sucks and is satisfied. It was pitiful and strange to see her wasted dying look, keen and ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... was a dreary affair. Uncle David was out, Aunt Nellie had a headache so was unusually quiet, and Merle, with red eyes, sat silent and brooding. Mavis tried desperately to make a little conversation, but it was impossible to maintain a monologue, and she soon dropped the futile attempt. Merle, after eating half a piece of bread and butter and declining a chocolate biscuit, begged ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... pale, or rather livid, with open mouth, and hair stuck together with cold sweat, he stood apart, brooding. But the cure who had suddenly arrived on the scene, murmured, ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... drew near the spot where the one-sided fight had taken place. He had apparently been brooding over the matter, wondering if the mate of his victim could have come upon the scene of the tragedy and sensing what had happened, was lurking thereabouts, bent on exacting a terrible revenge in payment for the untimely ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... stretching down to the creek at its foot; while beyond could be seen the sunlight gleaming on the bay. A quaint, old-fashioned place, the low roof already growing dark with age; the quiet air of ease and comfort brooding over all, making a fitting setting for the quaint, slender little lady that ruled ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... indicates a confusion in the minds of the Egyptian dragomans with the two brooding birds of Osiris, Isis and Nephthys, considered as Zarait, that is to say, as two birds of a different species, according to the different traditions ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... men there, too, sullen and silent, brooding on remedial revenge; but not many, the greater proportion of this class being away ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... them. A buckboard pulled up and two other men went in after him. A voice in sudden laughter boomed out. Saturday night had come. As Whitey Wimble had predicted, the boys were showing up and Red Creek stood ready to lose something of its brooding afternoon quiet. ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... whether in poetry or prose, he used the fewest phrases to express the most condensed meaning. When asked why he had not married, he replied that the wife he had—his art—cost him already too much trouble. He entertained few friends, and shunned society. Brooding over the sermons of Savonarola, the text of the Bible, the discourses of Plato, and the poems of Dante, he made his spirit strong in solitude by the companionship with everlasting thoughts. Therefore, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... treasure is said to lie here, buried, and never again dug up, because those who alone knew where to look had perished in defence of the Peel. Truly, if the troubled spirits of those slain ones yet wander, brooding over hidden chattels and lost penates, they are not greatly to be pitied, for a spot more beautiful, one less to be shunned if our spirits must wander, it would be hard to find in all Northumberland or in all England. ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... entertainment, he dexterously escaped to the sea-coast of the Euxine, from whence he passed over to the country of Bosphorus. In that sequestered region he remained many months, exposed to the hardships of exile, of solitude, and of want; his melancholy temper brooding over his misfortunes, and his mind agitated by the just apprehension, that, if any accident should discover his name, the faithless Barbarians would violate, without much scruple, the laws of hospitality. In a moment of impatience and despair, Procopius embarked in a merchant vessel, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... part, And, stifling outcries, moaned not loud but deep, Like the deep roaring of a wounded bull. But in this plight, prostrate and desperate, Refusing food and drink, my hero lies Amidst the mangled bodies, motionless. That he is brooding on some fell design, His wails and exclamations plainly show. But, O kind friends, 'twas to this end I came, Enter the tent and aid me if ye can; The words of ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... motionless on the tree top, brooding over the fight which he had just witnessed, until the deepening shadows warned him that it was time to seek repose. Turning on his side he laid his head on his pillow, while a soft breeze swayed the tree gently to and fro ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... age, with the cause he loved trodden under foot by men as vile as the rabble in "Comus," that the genius of Milton took refuge in the great poem on which through years of silence his imagination had been brooding. ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... lay brooding heavily upon the streets of the little town. The shops were shut, the pavements almost deserted. A few officers were sitting at a little table in front of the restaurant in the market square. Bertha glanced up at the windows of the first story of the house in which Herr and Frau Rupius lived. It ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... had not foreseen weighed upon him: the body, where Fanny was concerned, had given place to the intellect; the warmth of his feeling had been put aside for the logic of determination; and he was sick with weariness. In his customary chair, he sank into a heavy brooding lethargy, a silence, in which his ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... remained but to return as soon as possible, and spend that night at Salerno. They had seen nothing of the driver since they left him, and they accounted for this on the ground that he was still maintaining himself in his gigantic sulk, and brooding over his wrongs; and they thought that if he chose to make a fool of himself, they would allow him to do so as long as it was ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... He dispersed my brooding fit. I was sure my father was a fountain of gold, and only happened to be travelling. Besides, Heriot's love for Julia, whom none of us saw now, was an incessant distraction. She did not appear at prayers. She sat up in the gallery at church, hardly to be ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering. There was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With every kindly sympathy and affection ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... needeth not to sing Of our fathers' festive revelling:— How will the dream agree With waking hours of famished throngs, Brooding on daily deepening wrongs— ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... can acquire the habit of frequently entering into the quiet of his own soul, and who, instead of brooding over himself, transforms and orders those experiences he has had in life, will gain much. For he will perceive that his thoughts and feelings become richer, if through memory he establishes a relationship between the different experiences of life. He will ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... Selfish brooding sears the soul, Fills the mind with clouds of sorrow, Darkens all the shining goal Of the sun-illumined morrow; Wherefore should our lives be spent Daily growing blind and blinder— Let us, as the Master meant, Make the world a ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... the woods, O bull of the Bharata race, the high-souled Pandavas spent one and ten years in a miserable plight. And although deserving of happiness, those foremost of men, brooding over their circumstances, passed their days miserably, living on fruits and roots. And that royal sage, the mighty-armed Yudhishthira, reflecting that the extremity of misery that had befallen his brothers, was owing to his own fault, and remembering ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... country farmhouse, once green, rather faded now, set among leafless apple orchards. There is a brook below and a December fir wood beyond, where I've heard harps swept by the fingers of rain and wind. There is a pond nearby that will be gray and brooding now. There will be two oldish ladies in the house, one tall and thin, one short and fat; and there will be two twins, one a perfect model, the other what Mrs. Lynde calls a 'holy terror.' There will be a little room upstairs over the porch, where old dreams hang thick, and a big, fat, glorious ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... groundless hope. If they burst through the defence Hilda von Einem and her prophet and all our enemies would be overwhelmed in the deluge. And that blessed chance depended very much on old Peter, now brooding like a ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... Lord, on the other hand, who is the ruling principle in the construction of the Universe is expressly declared by scripture to be the evolver of names and forms; cp. 'Entering into them with this living Self, let me evolve names and forms' (Ch. Up. VI, 3, 2); 'Who is all-knowing, whose brooding consists of knowledge, from him is born this Brahman, name, form, and matter' (Mu. Up. I, 1, 9), &c. Hence the ether which brings about names and forms is something different from the soul for which ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... out, almost as vacuously, over the unbroken blue distance of the Mediterranean, trembling into soft ribbons of silver where the wind rippled its surface, yellowing into a fluid gold towards the path of the lowering sun, deepening, again, into a brooding turquoise along the flat rim of the sea to the southward where the twin tranquilities of sky and ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... as Manners sat brooding in his deep and lonely dungeon, he was startled by hearing the key turn slowly in the lock, and a moment later Eustace slipped into the cell and the door was closed ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... efforts are in vain; his enemies Have madly raged against him in the senate;— He was himself among them; full of wrath He left the council—brooding on revenge. ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... little checked his rage, and Reginald sat brooding in sullen anger on the ground. At last he started up and left the room, saying to Louis, "It's all your fault, then—you've no spirit, and you don't want me ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... are jealousies and jealousies. There are people who rise up quickly and kill, and there are others who turn their hot thoughts over silently in their minds as a brooding bird turns her eggs in the nest. Thus did Manuel Mazaro, and took it ill that Galahad should see a vision in the temple while he and all the brethren tarried without. Pauline had been to the Cafe des Exiles in some degree what the image of the Virgin was to their churches ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... the unfolding expanse phlegmatically. They called it the Red Basin. But to me, fresh for the sight, it beckoned with fantastic issues. Even the name breathed magic. Wizard spells hovered there; the railroad had not broken them—the cars and locomotives, entering, did not disturb the brooding vastness. A man might still ride errant into those slumberous spaces and discover for himself; might boldly awaken the realm and rule with a ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... walk the dowager stopped for a minute or so, and stood as if in deep thought, with her eyes dreamily contemplating the landscape. An intense melancholy shadowed her face, as she thus gazed with brooding eyes on the naked monotony of those wintry hills. So had she looked in many and many a winter, and it seemed to her that her life was of a piece with those bleak hills, where in the dismal winter time nothing living trod. She stood gazing at the sinking sun, a fiery ball shining at the end ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... not be responsible for what he was doing. Happily this morbid idea has been dissipated by the arrival of the letter, and I have great hopes now that she will rouse herself, and will shake off the state of silent brooding which has been causing me so much anxiety. It was but this morning that we received the letter, and already she looks brighter and more like herself than she has done since you brought us the news ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... and throwing on her wet cloak, Marie again ran up to the wall. But Le Rossignol sat down cross-legged by the fire, wise and brooding. ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... they belong to thee, These twinklings of oblivion? Thou dost love To sit in meekness, like the brooding Dove, A Captive never wishing to be free. This tiresome night, O Sleep! thou art to me A Fly, that up and down himself doth shove Upon a fretful rivulet, now above, Now on the water vex'd with mockery. I have no pain that calls for patience, no; Hence am I cross and peevish as a child: Am pleas'd ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... menace of night; Then a long, lonely, leaden mere Backed by a desolate fell, As by a spectral battlement; and then, Low-brooding, interpenetrating all, A vast, gray, listless, inexpressive sky, So beggared, so incredibly bereft Of starlight and the song of racing worlds, It might have bellied down upon the Void Where as in terror Light was beginning ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... not be listened to for a moment. Lord Hutchinson still made attempts at negociation, but they were all vain; nothing could induce her to change her purpose. Irritated by studied insults abroad; incensed by threats of ministerial vengeance; brooding over the wrongs she had endured from one who had promised before the altar of God to love and cherish her through life; and, above all, assured of the popular support, she pursued her way; and she reached the shores of England on the 6th of June. Although government had made no preparation for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... stipulation for the protection of their benefactor. He was left in the vast apartments of that deserted palace, with hardly the footsteps of a domestic servant to break its monastic stillness; and, for the first time in his eventful life, he sat, hour after hour, without movement, brooding over his despair. At last, when all was ready for his departure, he called up something of his old energy, and again stood in the presence of what remained of the Imperial Guard, which was faithful to the end. These brave men had often encircled him, like ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... those mute days when spring was in her glee, And hope was strong, we knew not why or how, And earth, the mother, dreamed with brooding brow. Musing on life, and what the hours might be, When love should ripen to maternity, Then like high flutes in silvery interchange Ye piped with voices still and sweet and strange, And ever as ye ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... its golden wings. And, when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, Its ardours of rest and of love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the depths of heaven above, With wings folded I rest, on my airy nest, As still as a brooding dove." ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... ended he sat silent and brooding for a long time. The ship forged slowly and uneasily over the waves with the heavy trader after her, and on our decks the men were silent, waiting for word from Thorleif of what was to be done. We could hear him, now and then, laughing with the crew of the other ship ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... Marguerite but once since the day of his return. The only news of her that he had received was by letter. . . . This cursed war! What an upset for happy people! Marguerite's mother was ill. She was brooding over the departure of her son, an officer, on the first day of the mobilization. Marguerite, too, was uneasy about her brother and did not think it expedient to come to the studio while her mother was ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... at the same time explained that it would not be safe; for that if the slaves were allowed books and knowledge, they would soon not be content with their condition, and would be banding together to make themselves free. I knew all this, and I had been brooding over it; and now when the powerful hand of the overseer came in to hinder the little bit of good and comfort I was trying to give the people, my heart was set on fire with a sense of sorrow and wrong that, as I said, no child ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... . . The boy had struck him particularly—a lovable, merry little fellow whose clothes, Mr. Bentley observed, were always neatly mended, betokening a mother with self-respect and character. He even spoke of Garvin: adversity, worry, the heat, constant brooding over a happier past and an uncertain future—was it surprising that the poor man's mind had become unhinged? They must make some plan for Garvin, said Mr. Bentley, get the man and his wife into the country ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a lonely, taciturn man, deeply concerned with his work, and a botanical student of no mean order. No comrade helped him pass away an evening in the chimney-corner, pipe in hand and good cheer in the mug. This isolation was not accidental, it was Hermann's own selection. He was a man of brooding moods, and there was no laughter in his withered heart, though the false sound of it crossed ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... altogether—Sissy, who had begged for her freedom with such tender pain in her voice while she pierced him so cruelly with her frightened eyes. Percival looked very stern in his sadness as he sat brooding over his fire, while from the room below came a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... felt this until he went to Winnipeg. On the whole, he had liked the struggle against physical obstacles. It was his proper job, but the struggle was stern and sometimes exhausting, and his reward was small. Now he wanted something different, and gave himself to vague and brooding discontent. ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... Our rural exodus takes our people, for the most part, not into Irish or even into British towns, but into those of the United States. What is migration in other countries is emigration with us, and the mind of the country, brooding over the dreary statistics of this perennial drain, naturally and longingly turns to schemes for the rehabilitation of rural life—the ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... loved, Not she at least, nor conscious of a bar Between them, nor by plight or broken ring Bound, but an immemorial intimacy, Wander'd at will, but oft accompanied By Averill: his, a brother's love, that hung With wings of brooding shelter o'er her peace, Might have been other, save for Leolin's— Who knows? but so they wander'd, hour by hour Gather'd the blossom that rebloom'd, and drank The magic cup ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... pay for the expenses of the holiday, and was begun by Wordsworth and Coleridge together, though there is actually very little of Wordsworth's work in it, and the spirit of it, the air of mystery and the sense of brooding elemental forces with which its simplest lines are somehow invested, belongs to Coleridge alone, and to that strange genius of his, which only twice or thrice in his life—in "Christabel," "The Ancient Mariner," and "Kubla Khan"—produced poetry of ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... Elfrida; the lovely colour, the enchanting smile, the light of her eyes—the outward sign of an intense brilliant life—would fade, and with eyes cast down she would pace the floors or the paths or sit brooding in silence ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... chin, the forehead; some feature usually shows traces of it. And when Mart Cooley turned and Whitey saw his eyes, he got his thrill. They were a hard, light, steely gray, and they looked out from lowered lids, oh, so steadily. Months of brooding in the prison had helped to harden Mart's eyes, that had needed no help in that way; brooding over imaginary wrongs, for he thought his arrest an injustice. Other men had stolen a few cows, and got away with them, but Mart was made to ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... from his bosom and began playing. As before, he played mechanically and took no more than five or six notes; as though the pipe had come into his hands for the first time, the sounds floated from it uncertainly, with no regularity, not blending into a tune, but to Meliton, brooding on the destruction of the world, there was a sound in it of something very depressing and revolting which he would much rather not have heard. The highest, shrillest notes, which quivered and broke, seemed to be weeping disconsolately, as though the pipe were sick ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... parlour of a low public-house, in the filthiest part of Little Saffron Hill; a dark and gloomy den, where a flaring gas-light burnt all day in the winter-time; and where no ray of sun ever shone in the summer: there sat, brooding over a little pewter measure and a small glass, strongly impregnated with the smell of liquor, a man in a velveteen coat, drab shorts, half-boots and stockings, whom even by that dim light no experienced agent of the ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... imagination which gave a peculiar complexion to the profligacy, the jealousy, and the vengeance of the Italians. I shall have occasion elsewhere to maintain that in their literature at least the Italians were not a highly imaginative race; nor were they subject to those highly wrought conditions of the brooding fancy, termed by the northern nations Melancholy, which Duerer has personified in his celebrated etching, and Burton has described in his Anatomy. But in their love and hatred, their lust and their cruelty, the Italians required an intellectual element which brought the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
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