|
|
|
More "Retrospective" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the first time he had found leisure to fish, though from the very outset of his Potwell career he had promised himself abundant indulgence in the pleasures of fishing. Fishing, as the golden page of English literature testifies, is a meditative and retrospective pursuit, and the varied page of memory, disregarded so long for sake of the teeming duties I have already enumerated, began to unfold itself to Mr. Polly's consideration. A speculation about Uncle Jim died for want of material, and gave place to a reckoning of the years and months that had ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... reveni, repasxi. Retract malkonfesi. Retreat (place) rifugxejo. Retreat foriri, remarsxi. Retribution repago. Retrieve trovi, gajni, re—. Retrograde malprogresi. Retrospect retrospekto. Retrospective retrospektiva. Return (give back) redoni. Return (come back) reveni. Return, to make a raporti. Return (report) raporto. Return, in reciproke. Reunion rekunigo. Re-unite rekunigi. Reveal malkasxi. Revel festenego. Revenge revengxo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... successors, first had and obtained and signified to the Government of the said State through the British Resident, provided further that in no case will the repeal or amendment of any laws enacted since the annexation have a retrospective effect, so as to invalidate any acts done or liabilities incurred by ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... us to a side-table, where a selection of theological works was displayed, and bid us take our choice. "Kay on the Psalms" was a possession thus acquired, and has been used by me from that time to this. Nor must this retrospective page omit some further reference to J. W. Burgon, Fellow of Oriel and Vicar of St. Mary-the-Virgin. Dean Church called him "the dear old learned Professor of Billingsgate," and certainly his method of conducting controversy savoured (as Sydney Smith said about Bishop Monk) of the apostolic ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... coarse cowhide shoes that had arrived at the last stages of usefulness. You would judge him to be from twenty-five to thirty years of age; you would note that his face was browned from exposure, that it was rather set and expressionless but in no way repulsive. His eyes, dark and retrospective, were his most redeeming feature, yet betrayed little of their owner's character. Mr. Judkins could make nothing of the fellow, beyond the fact that he was doubtless a "tramp" and on that account most unwelcome ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... a retrospective glance at the numerous changes of costume which we have endeavoured to describe in this hurried sketch, we shall find that amongst European nations, during the Middle Ages, there was but one common standard of fashion, which varied from time to time according to the particular custom of each ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... retrospective view of the route from Tripoli to Mourzuk, via Mizdah, I am inclined to divide the country, for convenience sake, into a ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... butcher; and the Seigneur d'Esneval gave sworn testimony that when a friend of the dead butcher publicly called the accomplice in the crime "a murderer," that accomplice would have been delivered up to justice if the principal had not carried the Fierte. The retrospective action of the pardon on the principal also extended to his accomplices, who began life afresh just as he did. And this extension was solemnly confirmed at the inquiry, from which I have just quoted. There is no doubt, however, that so excessive a "prolongation" of the powers of pardon cannot have ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... virtuoso in love. And so it certainly looks, albeit the difference might perhaps appear a little less conspicuous if he had lived to a ripe old age and dressed up his recollections of youth in an autobiographical romance. He did not lack the data of experience, but without the charm of the retrospective poetic treatment his early love-affairs are not profoundly interesting. In the midst of his troubles it came over him that marriage might be the right thing for him; and so, one day in June, 1784, he offered himself to Frau von Wolzogen for a son-in-law. Nothing came of the suggestion; it was only ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the title of "Dictator of Sicily, in the name of Victor Emmanuel," Garibaldi attacked and occupied Palermo, and having established his ascendency in the island, invaded the Neapolitan territory on the mainland. The Sardinian Government, for diplomatic reasons, disavowed the expedition, but gave a retrospective assent to it ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... which for a short period, however, was deferred. Individual genius has a cycle of its own, and moves only in that path, or by the powers influencing it. Genius has been properly defined 'prospective', talent on the contrary 'retrospective': genius is creative, and lives much in the future, and in its passage or progress may make use of the labours ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... then those of perception by the intermediary of the thoughts of a living person; and the deceased is perceived through a mental representation. The experiment, for this reason, is valueless as evidence of the reality of retrospective psychometry and consequently of the recording ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Every thinker is retrospective. The learned member of the legislature, at Westminster or at Washington, speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and the now invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes; the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or conversation, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... early, though," said Ewbert, with a gentle sigh, in which her sympathetic penetration detected a retrospective exhaustion. ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... speak in the church-bells on Sunday morning, and breathe not only in the soft salt air, but in the perfume of every gentle, old-fashioned rose that blooms behind the high garden walls of falling mellow-tinted plaster: Kings Port the retrospective, Kings Port the belated, who from her pensive porticoes looks over her two rivers to the marshes and the trees beyond, the live-oaks, veiled in gray moss, brooding with memories! Were she my city, how ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... Goldsmith. I accepted his beautiful work as ignorantly as I did my other blessings. I was concerned in getting at the Greeks and Romans, and I did not know through what nimble air and by what lovely ways I was led to them. Some retrospective perception of this came long afterward when I read his essays, and after I knew all of his poetry, and later yet when I read the 'Vicar of Wakefield'; but for the present my eyes were holden, as the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... thinking and talking school all the time; education is in the atmosphere. The real teacher is, to use a popular phrase, a "live wire." Something new is undertaken every day. He is a man of initiative and push, and withal he is a man of sincerity and tact. While he is retrospective and circumspective he is also prospective—he is a ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... flickered into the shadow, stood for a moment retrospective at the door, and then closed it on us; and once more we were in that murmurous mystery of darkness into which we ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... found leisure not only to revise his former writings, which were thirty volumes written with his own hand, but, what most pleased him, he was enabled to write a manual, which he called Vade Mecum, and which contained a retrospective view of his life, since he noted in that volume the most remarkable occurrences which happened to him. It is not probable that such a MS. could have been destroyed but by accident; and it might, perhaps, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... restoration of the Austrians, there came a tranquillity to Milan which was not the apathy it seemed. It was now impossible for literary patriotism to be openly militant, as it had been in Alfieri and Foscolo, but it took on the retrospective phase of Romance, and devoted itself to the celebration of the past glories of Italy. In this way it still fulfilled its educative and regenerative mission. It dwelt on the victories which Italians had won in other days over their oppressors, and it tacitly ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... man; and, though not of a retrospective turn, he made the best effort he could to send his mind back into the past. "I remember thinking it happiness to dance with the contadinas at a village feast; to taste the new, sweet wine at vintage-time, and ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... rood-loft still remain, together with a piscina in the chancel. It is said that the upper part of the pulpit was at one time used as a font. The old font, restored, for many years formed part of the wall of the churchyard. The road continues up the long tongue of Okeford Hill with wide retrospective views. At the summit a by-way turns to the right along the ridge, which gradually increases in height until it reaches its summit three miles away at Bulbarrow Hill (902 feet) just above Rawlsbury Camp. The magnificent view up Blackmore Vale and northwestwards toward Yeovil is worth the journey ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... Hugh Capet, 240 years after the extinction of the race of Lothaire. Then, for 240 years your ancestors had already had a right to the throne before the Salic law was invented. Now, everyone knows that the law cannot have any retrospective effect." ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... I figured out on shipboard. But, as is so frequently the case with the most pleasing things in life, I found the anticipation rather outshone the realisation. Already I detect myself, in a retrospective mood, hankering for the savoury ragouts we used to get in peasant homes in obscure French villages, and for the meals they gave us at the regimental messes of our own forces, where the cooking was the home sort and ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb
... took me to task for want of candour. 'That ain't worthy of a guv'nor like you,' he said. 'Why make any concealments? Why not treat me open?' I gave him my most solemn honour that I was utterly at a loss to guess what he was talking about, on which he put me through a sort of retrospective catechism, broken by reminders to the horse. 'You don't rec'lect goin' easy over the bridge for to see the shipping? Nor yet the little narrer court right-hand side of the road, with an iron post under an arch and parties hollerin' murder at the far end? Nor yet the way you held ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... without immodesty; which is worth all the strong lines against the harlot's profession, with which both parts of this play are offensively crowded. A satirist is always to be suspected, who, to make vice odious, dwells upon all its acts and minutest circumstances with a sort of relish and retrospective fondness. But so near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions, which in his unregenerate state served ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... they first shoot the arrow and then fix the target, nations ascribe to themselves purposes of which they were originally unconscious. First comes the tingling consciousness of achievement and power, then a glamour of retrospective legend to explain and justify it. Thus it is that that great struggle for sea-power to which Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, and France all contributed maritime genius and boundless courage, becomes transformed under the half-accidental success of one nation into an almost ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... years old, and I can no longer look forward for future earthly happiness. All my joys are now retrospective, and in the long vista of years that I constantly look back upon, there is no time that affords me more pleasure than that when I was in the Treasury of the United States. The fact that I was instrumental in introducing women to employment in the offices of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... choice of the Lombard school that attitude of aggression which others assumed under a weaker, if not a milder, despotism at Florence. The utmost allowed the Milanese poets was the expression of a retrospective patriotism, which celebrated the glories of Italy's past, which deplored her errors, and which denounced her crimes, and thus contributed to keep the sense of nationality alive. Under such governments as endured in Piedmont until 1848, in Lombardy until 1859, in Venetia until 1866, literature must ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... "Sacrifice and burnt offerings Thou wouldst not" (Ps. xl, 6), and on Jesus' own explanation of his death, that He offered himself in testimony to the Truth—that is, that the Eternal Life will no more exercise a retrospective vengeance upon us for our past misunderstanding of It, than would electricity or any other force. We may explain the modus operandi of the great offering in any of these ways, for the Scripture presents it in all of them—but the great thing ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... relations. Such laws are frequently urged by men, having causes pending, who dare not boldly ask that a law should be made for their particular case, but who do not hesitate to impose upon the legislature by plausible arguments the adoption of some general rule, which by a retrospective construction, will have the same operation. It is a most monstrous practice, which lawyers are bound by the true spirit of their oath of office, and by a comprehensive view of their duty to the Constitution and ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... pleasant to me that I can take a retrospective view of the past and note the many changes that have taken place within my recollection. Many sad changes have taken place within the past fifty years. Dynasties have arisen, lived and have had their day; ...
— The Dismal Swamp and Lake Drummond, Early recollections - Vivid portrayal of Amusing Scenes • Robert Arnold
... the public places. His carnality and hers, so startling in their later developments, showed now in fact but as the engaging force of youth, since youth, however unpromising its antecedents, can never have sinned irretrievably. Yet to curious retrospective minds not long afterwards, these graceful follies would seem tragic or allegoric, with an undercurrent of infernal irony throughout. Charles and his two brothers, keeping the gates of a mimic paradise in the court of ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... youths of twenty were liable to serve for five years either on land or sea; and the contingent required was filled by the drawing of lots. Deep and strong resentment was felt throughout the country, the more so that the law was made retrospective to all who had reached the age of twenty in the three preceding years. The battalions thus raised were treated as French troops, and were sent to take part in distant campaigns—in Spain and in Russia. Of the 15,000 men who marched ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... not the man to indulge in retrospective fancy. The girl was naught to him, and there was no sense of remorse in his soul for the terrible wrongs which he had inflicted on her. All that he thought of now was the wallet which contained the fortune. That which would forever compensate him for the ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... principles. There was not the faintest suggestion of jollity in the appearance of the four motionless, prostrate figures against the wall. Seasickness had triumphed over philosophy! Prospective and retrospective reverie of a decidedly gloomy character was our only occupation. I remember speculating curiously upon the probability of Noah's having ever been seasick; wondering how the sea-going qualities of the Ark would compare with those of our brig, and whether she had our brig's uncomfortable ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... themselves with cards, books, and music. The exception was Leslie, who, having changed out of his dress clothes into a comfortable suit of blue serge, was down in the waist of the ship, smoking a gloomily retrospective pipe. The ship's reckoning, that day, had placed her, at noon, in Latitude 32 degrees 10 minutes North, and Longitude 26 degrees 55 minutes West; she was therefore about midway between the parallels ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Thackeray's difference, his peculiar mark, the distinction of his genius. He is a painter of life, a novelist whose matter is all blended and harmonized together—people, action, background—in a long retrospective vision. Not for him, on the whole, is the detached action, the rounded figure, the scenic rendering of a story; as surely as Dickens tended towards the theatre, with its clear-cut isolation of events and episodes, its underlining of the personal and the individual in men and women, so Thackeray ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... Market Club, Boston, Mass., February 16, 1899. William B. Plunkett, President of the Club, said in introducing the President of the United States: "Not the Home Market Club, not the city of Boston, not Massachusetts only, but all New England give you greeting of welcome, Mr. President. In our retrospective of the year past we would give full meed of honor and praise to the President who so nobly met and so faithfully discharged the grave responsibilities of that great office, and thanksgiving to the Divine ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... from King David (whom Heaven long preserve!) and from his household much civility; and here, with capital fare, over a fire of wood,—never use anthracite in a close room,—will find, if he has been as observant as he ought, much to amuse and gratify him in a retrospective glance over a journey of some hundred miles, performed with little fatigue or inconvenience, between the chief cities of quaker Pennsylvania and ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... Wellington and Lord Lyndhurst pointed out the grave consideration and the careful examination which many of its enactments would require. Lord Lyndhurst especially called the attention of the house to the tendency of those provisions which had a retrospective operation. After the bill, therefore, had been read a second time, it was referred, with the acquiescence of ministers, to a select committee, which committee made various amendments upon the bill, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... with retrospective jealousy, Schumann's widow, in editing these letters, would have received a pang from many other passages revealing Schumann's fondness for the fair sex. He allowed no good-looking woman to pass him ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... watched the king as he engaged in the aimless drawing. His meditation grew retrospective, and his thoughts ran back to the days when he first befriended this lonely prince, who had come to England to learn the language and manners of the chill islanders. He had been handsome enough in those days, this Leopold of Osia, gay and eager, possessing ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... baron the dangers that attended such propagandism, and he, already smarting from commercial disappointment, issued an edict, in 1550, declaring it a capital offence to embrace Christianity. The edict was not retrospective. About one hundred and fifty converts whom Xavier, aided by Anjiro, had won during his two years' sojourn, were not molested, but Xavier himself passed on to the island of Hirado, where he was received by salvos of artillery from Portuguese vessels lying in harbour. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... anywhere for the winter. At the same time I have been reckoning upon meeting Englishmen in Constantinople who, having travelled extensively in Asia, could further enlighten me regarding the best route to India. As I house my bicycle and am shown to my room I take a retrospective glance across Europe and America, and feel almost as if I have arrived at the half-way house of my journey. The distance from Liverpool to Constantinople is fully 2,500 miles, which brings the wheeling distance ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... be variously interpreted, and to attempt to analyse the motives of a double-minded man is always a hazardous experiment; but a comparison of date, the character of Clement himself, the circumstances in which he was placed, and the retrospective evidence from after events, points almost necessarily to but one interpretation. It is scarcely disputable that, frightened at the reception of Anne Boleyn in France, the pope found it necessary to pretend for a ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... (J.B. Inglis) distinguishes in his Preface between these contemporary writers, and considers R. de Bury to be the undoubted author of this work passing under his name. In corroboration of his opinion, Mr. Inglis refers to the Biographical and Retrospective Miscellany; and, in order to prove that the work was finished in the author's lifetime, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... pleasantly written, about the collecting and preserving of books. It is not my intention here to add to this department of modern literature. But I shall select from among my volumes some which seem less known in detail to modern readers than they should be, and I shall give brief "retrospective reviews" of these as though they were new discoveries. In other cases, where the personal history of a well-known book seems worth detaching from our critical estimate of it, that shall be the subject of my lucubration. Perhaps it may ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... the shadow of the yawning pit, which has but lately permitted you to enter and will quite as readily permit you to go out, leaves you indifferent. To recognize the use of this opening you would have to reflect a little, to recall the past; but this tiny retrospective calculation is beyond your powers. So the trapper, returning a few days later, will find a rich booty, ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... view altogether of the retrospective; but a sketch true to life, as life was there. It was not all like that. A good deal of ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... against Jacques Ferrand, being very indignant at the recital of his having drugged Louise—a recital it was found necessary to make, in order that she should be on her guard against the hypocritical attempts of the monster. Some retrospective words concerning ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... These retrospective visions of Sue only made Jude the more miserable that he was unable to woo her, and he left the cottage of his aunt that day with a heavy heart. He would fain have glanced into the school to see the room in which Sue's little figure ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... the memory of Tom Gray continue to haunt her? Grace gave her shoulders an impatient twitch. How foolish she was to allow herself to grow retrospective over Tom. She had deliberately sent him away because she did not, nor never could, love him. Still she wished that the memory of him would not intrude upon her thoughts so constantly. "It's only because he's associated with the good times the Eight Originals ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... very long and ended in a point; his nose was broad, with sensitive nostrils that marked every breath he drew. As for his eyes, which instantly attracted attention, they were brown and gentle as a girl's but had that retrospective expression that suggests far-away thoughts or an utter lack of interest in one's surroundings. They never looked at but through one. The effect of Carg's eyes ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... Statue, in consequence of the inconvenience which the public sustained from the innumerable quantity of edicts of the Statue at present in force, had last night consolidated them all into this single act, which, to render its operation still more simple, was gifted with a retrospective power for the last ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... Barnes, a retrospective smile overspreading his good-natured face; "when I was a lad in Devonshire the manager announced the performance in the town market-place. I rang a cow-bell to attract attention and he talked to the people: Ding-a-ling!—'Good people, to-night ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... the people who inhabited what is now Minnesota were subject to a great many different governmental jurisdictions. This, however, did not in any way concern them, as they did not, as a general thing, know or care anything about such matters; but as it may be interesting to the retrospective explorer to be informed on the subject, I will briefly present it. Minnesota has two sources of parentage. The part of it lying west of the Mississippi was part of the Louisiana purchase, made by President Jefferson from Napoleon Bonaparte ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... preoccupations, a flight to the life they always dreamed of living. Once or twice, now that this new life had actually drawn its magic circle about them, she had asked herself if she had done right; but hitherto such conjectures had been no more than the retrospective excursions of an active fancy. Now, for the first time, it startled her a little to find how little she knew of the material foundation on which her happiness ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... soldiers on the table, because he can understand this by means of his own experience, in his own nursery. It is an appeal to conditions to which he is accustomed and for which no exercise of the imagination is needed, unless we take the effect of memory to be, according to Queyrat, retrospective imagination. ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... from the rest, have independently devised means for the interchange of thoughts and ideas. Their grammatical rules are so widely different from all our European forms that it forces the mind to a retrospective ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... pieces. Our "Notes" are, for the most part, from new books, and a similar object is explained in our "Selector." We could hardly place "Sleeping in Church" under "Manners and Customs," and sleep altogether is rather prospective, (in dreaming,) than "Retrospective."—Yet reader, here it is—a still subject—but fresh, vigorous, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... and plume? But every age since the golden may be made more or less prosaic by minds that attend only to its vulgar and sordid elements, of which there was always an abundance even in Greece and Italy, the favourite realms of the retrospective optimists. To be quite fair towards the ages, a little ugliness as well as beauty must be allowed to each of them, a little implicit poetry even to those which echoed loudest with servile, pompous, and ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... in some inscrutable way, the close of the first period of Ellen Brewster's childhood. Looking back in later years, she always felt her retrospective thought strike a barrier there, beyond which her images of the past were confused. Yet it was difficult to tell why it was so, for after the first the child could, it seemed, have realized no difference in her life. Now and then she heard some of that conversation characterized at once by the confidence ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... proportion of poetry is addressed by the young to the young; only the great masters of the art are capable of divining, or think it worth while to enter into, the feelings of retrospective age. The two great poets whom we have so lately lost, Tennyson and Browning, have done this, each in his own inimitable way; the one in the Ulysses, from which I have borrowed; the other in that wonderful fragment "Childe Roland to the dark ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... realized how many times his advice would recur to me elsewhere than on the links. Retrospective worry can be absolutely eliminated from the most obsessive mind by the practice of the ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... must be that saves from suicide. For some there is great relief in talking about their miseries, but such gossips lack the profound solace of misery nursed in silent brooding. Happily, the trick with me has never been retrospective; indeed, it was never, even with regard to instant suffering, a habit so deeply rooted as to become a mastering vice. I knew my own weakness when I yielded to it; I despised myself when it brought me comfort; I could laugh scornfully, even "cupide ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... p. 89.).—B. will find a great deal about these collars in some interesting papers in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1842, vols. xvii. and xviii., conmunicated by Mr. J.G. Nicholls; and in the Second Series of the Retrospective Review, vol. i. p. 302., and vol. ii. pp. 156. 514. 518. Allow me to add a Query: Who are the persons now privileged to wear these collars? and under what circumstances, and at what dates, was such privilege reduced to its ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 37. Saturday, July 13, 1850 • Various
... character, he was pleased to direct that it should take date as near to that of general De Caen's permission to quit Mauritius, as the patent which constituted the existing Board of Admiralty would allow. A more retrospective date could be given to it only by an order of the King in council; unhappily His Majesty was then incapable of exercising his royal functions; and when the Regency was established, my proposed petition did not meet ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... bracing weather of September he commenced on it again, and wrote during the next two months that portion which we now have. On December 1 he forwarded two chapters to Ticknor & Fields, requesting to have them set up so that he could see them in print and obtain a retrospective view of his work before he proceeded further. Yet on December 15 he wrote again, saying that he had not yet found courage to attack the proofs, and that all mental exertion had become hateful to him. [Footnote: "Yesterdays with Authors," 115.] He ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... Many men, in taking retrospective glances, remember how they were devoted to women, the memory of whom calls up only a vague sort of wonder how they ever could have fallen into the state of infatuation in which they once were. The same may be said ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... "feigned issue bill" was brought into the council. It simply referred the question of illegal distillation to the jury, without assessing their claims. The right of the distillers to compensation was, however, so indisputable, and the retrospective action of the bill so liable to objection, that it was generally opposed; and, by the dissent of the lawyers, the treasurer, with all the non-official members, rejected by the council. The attorney-general, Mr. Macdowell, ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... of the ordinance and virtues of the familiar herbs, I escape from the severities of botanical science into a maze of queer fancies, well suited to those retrospective hours when we love best what we least believe. And by the pleasant suggestion of astrology I am led on to contemplate the starry heavens, which I do in the ancient pastoral way, peopling them with mythical forms and connecting them with the seasonable changes ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... lesson; and the fact that he did allow her to administer one to him in right seventeenth-century diction is established—it is not too bold to say so—by my recognition of his style in her own. I had surely caught the retrospective reflex note, heard first in his voice, recognized ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... book of life may be said to begin at the chapter where woman comes in; mine did. She came in years ago, when I was a raw undergraduate. With the sober thought of retrospective analysis, I may say she was not all my fancy painted her; indeed now that I come to think of it there was no fancy about the vermeil of her cheeks, rather an artificial reality; she had her bower in the bar ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... From the retrospective view which the narrative required, I now turn to speak of the alarm caused by the young King's march into England. Though Cromwell was personally in Scotland, he continued to govern in London through his agents, and they urged the ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... purchased by the town council of Paris, and is to be a permanent structure, its flanking salons, forty-two feet wide, being known as "Galeries de l'Art Retrospective." Its collection is to form a history of civilization, and will probably include the Egyptian, Assyrian and similar collections from the Louvre, as well as the Ethnological, which is at St. Germain. It is designed to represent in chronological ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... and to the individuals named in that tale! to persons of even as lofty names and excellences, of our own and other lands, who were mutually affected with me in admiration and regret for the virtues and the sorrows described! In sitting down now to my retrospective task, I find myself writing this, my second preface to the story of "Thaddeus of Warsaw," just thirty years from the date of its first publication. Then, I wrote when the struggle for the birthright independence ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... bridges, churches, monuments, testify to her life among this enthusiastic people. Roads and ruins, towers and aqueducts, bear her name. Proverbs exist wherein it is preserved. "For us," says Mistral, "the fair Joanna is what Mary Stuart is for the Scotch,—a mirage of retrospective love, a regret of youth, of nationality, of poetry passed away. And analogies are not lacking in the lives of the two royal, tragic enchantresses." Petrarch, speaking of her and her young husband surrounded by Hungarians, refers to them as two lambs among wolves. ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... was a wilderness of bloom, and the windows of ivy. Oldport is the only place in New England where either ivy or traditions will grow; there were, to be sure, no legends about this house that I could hear of, for the ghosts in those parts were feeble-minded and retrospective by reason of age, and perhaps scorned a mansion where nobody had ever lived; but the ivy clustered round the projecting windows as densely as if it had the sins of a ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Retrospective Review, however (Vol. I, November, 1852), has an article, 'Mrs. Behn's Dramatic Writings,' which warmly praises her comedies. The writer very justly observes that 'they exhibit a brilliance of conversation ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... "And if it had n't been for my talk with the landlord's daughter, do you know what we should have had? We should have had coffee and bread and praeterea nihil. That's what we should have had," he pronounced tragically, shaking his head in retrospective consternation at the thing escaped. "Oh, these starveling Continental breakfasts! But I threw myself upon Pia's clemency. I paid her compliments upon her hair, upon her toilet. I called her Pia mia. I said that if I had only met her earlier in life, I should have been a very different ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... retrogressive, reverse, regressive; retrospective; reluctant, averse, loath, disinclined, unwilling; dull, inapt; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... would have worn away an editor's blue pencil. He told how Steam and Steel were supposed to have crushed the Spirit of Romance out of the age. He pointed out how the modern city of stone and concrete seemed no longer to house that wayward and retrospective spirit in which the heart of the poet ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... alone. I know no spot so conducive to reflection as the deserted deck of a ship at anchor on a lovely night, and in a genial latitude. In this instance, however, my thoughts assumed more of a speculative than retrospective character, large as was the field for the indulgence of the latter. The shades of emperors and doges faded away, giving place to the more terrestrial forms of living sovereigns; and the wild shouts of the Moslem conquerors resolved themselves into the 'Vive l'Empereur' of an army ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... will be found in the collections of Hakluyt and Purchas. An article upon his travels, which were published in 1601, occurs likewise in the second volume of the Retrospective Review. The travels of the three brothers, Sir Thomas, Sir Anthony, and Master Robert Sherley, were published from the original manuscripts ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... deserved to be entitled a "thriving" family, to distinguish worthy from unworthy success. This manuscript collection might hereafter develop into a "golden book" of thriving families. The Chinese, whose customs have often much sound sense, make their honours retrospective. We might learn from them to show that respect to the parents of noteworthy children, which the contributors of such valuable assets to ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... now take a retrospective view of the whole trilogy. In the Agamemnon we have a predominance of free-will both in the plan and execution of the deed: the principal character is a great criminal, and the piece ends with the revolting impressions ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... open air. Now 70 deg. is ordinary agreeable summer heat for England; though it is many degrees higher than anything we have seen (up to the middle of July) in England this dreadful year. The illustrations are helpful, and, without being obtrusively antiquarian, have most of them a retrospective or historical interest, as well as the more obvious one which is common to illustrations. The forty short chapters of which the book consists are filled with sketches of the life our English friends lived in the mountain nook, and of the manners and daily ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... ere we commence another year, and take a retrospective glance at the past. Can we bear to do so, or will day after day, and hour after hour, rise up in judgment against us? Can we bear to bring them into debtor and creditor account,—what offsets can we make against those devoted to sin ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... part, behaving as he thought it became a man to behave in the eye of disaster. The instinctive posture of grief is a shuffling compromise between defiance and prostration; and pride feels the need of striking a worthier attitude in face of such a foe. Grancy, by nature musing and retrospective, had chosen the role of the man of action, who answers blow for blow and opposes a mailed front to the thrusts of destiny; and the completeness of the equipment testified to his inner weakness. We talked only of what we were not thinking of, ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... glad to come in out of the cold!" burst out Miss Sally, with a retrospective shudder. "Mr. Peyton, you've a bitter night for your going." She stood before the fire and ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... Basins and water-traps; He tore the walls and ripped the floors To reach the pipes beyond, And excavations in the street And 'neath the side-walk yawned; And daily as he entered up The items in his book The plumber's face wore a serene And retrospective look. And Jones would wring his hands and cry, "Woe, woe, and utter woe! Ah me! that taxes should be so high And rents should be so low!" Then he would give the Smith the house As instalment on account Of its repairs, and notes of hand For ...
— Humour of the North • Lawrence J. Burpee
... consideration our different mental and physical constitutions, is there not rather a remarkable sameness in them? It is certainly a very unusual circumstance to hear of any dream that does violence to the common experience of mankind. One class of dreams, which may be termed RETROSPECTIVE, is of frequent occurrence. These are characterized by the revival of associations long since forgotten. The faculty of Memory appears to be preternaturally exalted; the vail is withdrawn which obscured the vista of our past life; and the minutest events of childhood pass in vivid ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... vague, wild longing, he instinctively stretched out his arms, . . then on a sudden impulse turned swiftly away, in a dizzy effort to escape from the basilisk fire-gleam of those sombre, haunting eyes that plunged into his inmost soul, and there aroused such dark desires, such retrospective evil, such wild weakness as shamed the betterness of his nature! Sah-luma's clear, mocking laugh just then rang sharply through the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... good qualities. They always combine a respect for those things that are foreign, with their decided patriotism. The hospitality the stranger receives at their hands is nothing short of marvellous, and no greater insult can be inflicted than to offer to pay for accommodations. I find any retrospective glance over the days I spent among these people coloured with much pleasure when I review incidents connected with my contact with them. There is a word in the Portuguese language which holds a world of meaning ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... Sally Ann right now," and Aunt Jane pushed her glasses up on her forehead, and looked with a dreamy, retrospective gaze through the doorway and beyond, where swaying elms and maples were whispering softly to each other as the breeze touched them. "She had on her old black poke-bonnet and some black yarn mitts, and she didn't come nigh up to Job's shoulder, but Job set and listened as if he jest had ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... in nursing, and your power over a sick person," Hyacinth interjected scornfully, and then in the next moment apologised for the little spurt of retrospective jealousy. ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... pretty sharp raps at the aristocracy in general. The Day, the principal morning journal of that period, came out with a leading article the next morning, in which every party concerned and every institution was knocked about. The disgrace of the peerage, the ruin of the monarchy (with a retrospective view of the well-known case of Gyges and Candaules), the monstrosity of the crime, and the absurdity of the tribunal and the punishment, were all set forth in the terrible leading article of ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lesson passed unnoticed, and the Irish precedent has survived to darken thought, to retard democratic progress, and to pervert domestic and Imperial policy to this very day. It even had the truly extraordinary retrospective effect of obliterating from the minds of many eminent statesmen the significance of the Canadian parallel; for it is only six years ago that a Secretary of State for the Colonies penned a despatch recommending for the Transvaal ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... down upon his desk and looked steadily at a box of India-rubber bands. Almost his fingers, as he parted with the newspaper, had seemed to be shaking. His eyes were certainly set in an unusually retrospective stare. Who was this who sought to probe his past, to renew an acquaintance with a dead personality? "M" could be but one person! What did she want of him? Was it possible that, after all, a little flame of sentiment ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that permits itself to be remembered is a play that presents a distinct theme to the mind of the observer. It is ten years since I have seen Le Tartufe and six years since last I read it; and yet, since the theme is unforgetable, I could at any moment easily reconstruct the piece by retrospective imagination and summarise the action clearly in a paragraph. But on the other hand, I should at any time find it impossible to recall with sufficient clearness to summarise them, any of a dozen American plays of the usual type which I had seen within the preceding six months. ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... could scarcely see it, it had so remarkable an effect on me that in a single moment it was engraven upon my memory forever. I feel a retrospective shudder run through me when my ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... consciousness of the rectitude of his own attitude had not made him happier, there had been a certain grim pleasure in it. To the fact that he had ruined, by sheer over-righteousness, the last years of the sunny life of Sarah Austen he had been oblivious—until to-day. The strange, retrospective mood which had come over him this afternoon led his thoughts into strange paths, and he found himself wondering if, after all, it had not been in his power to make her happier. Her dryad-like face, with its sweet, elusive smile, seemed to peer at him now wistfully out of the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Album I wrote for my oldest child's birthday. It seems as if I were beginning my life as a composer anew, and there are traces of the old human here and there. They are decidedly different from 'Scenes from Childhood' which are retrospective glances by a parent, and for elders, while 'Album for the Young' contains hopes, presentments and peeps into futurity for ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... case always you will do the thing which is right. For he cannot discern independently what will make him happy; and he must decide on the spot. The use of the nexus between morality and happiness must therefore be inverted; it is not practical or prospective, but simply retrospective; and in that form it says no more than the good old rules hallowed in every cottage. But this furnishes no practical guide for moral election which a man had not, before he ever thought of this nexus. In ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... bishop's family, and the poor of the parish. The good bishop escaped. Fortunately, he that day abstained from food. The humility and temperance of that good man are strongly marked in this relation, for he partook of the same ordinary food with the most wretched pauper. By a retrospective law, Roose was sentenced to be boiled to death, which was done accordingly. In Smithfield, the arch-rebel, Wat Tyler, met with, in 1381, the reward of his treason ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Volume 12, No. 329, Saturday, August 30, 1828 • Various
... conquer difficulties, is too proud to be ashamed of his dependence on Him who appointed the planets to their courses, and is not unmindful of a sparrow's fall. How fine and delicately tender is this retrospective glance at the close of his ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... have suggested pipes, would lead us to a side-table, where a selection of theological works was displayed, and bid us take our choice. "Kay on the Psalms" was a possession thus acquired, and has been used by me from that time to this. Nor must this retrospective page omit some further reference to J. W. Burgon, Fellow of Oriel and Vicar of St. Mary-the-Virgin. Dean Church called him "the dear old learned Professor of Billingsgate," and certainly his method of conducting controversy ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... Tillie seemed fast asleep. She had slipped to the floor at the beginning of the song, and sat with her head upon her drawn-up knees, with her hands clasped above them. She made no move. The officer continued his singing, still softly, and in a retrospective mood. He was a born musician. His whole soul craved song, and the greatest deprivation to him in Alaska was the lack of music. For this reason, he kept his own banjo with him, and many an evening's entertainment had he furnished in cabin and beside camp fire, when his fine barytone mingled with ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... her retrospective appreciations came a doubt. She wondered whether, after all, her school had been right. Whether it ought to have treated them all so seriously. If she had gone to the other school she was sure she would never have heard of the Aesthetic Movement or felt ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... while this consciousness of the rectitude of his own attitude had not made him happier, there had been a certain grim pleasure in it. To the fact that he had ruined, by sheer over-righteousness, the last years of the sunny life of Sarah Austen he had been oblivious—until to-day. The strange, retrospective mood which had come over him this afternoon led his thoughts into strange paths, and he found himself wondering if, after all, it had not been in his power to make her happier. Her dryad-like face, with ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... opened by so firm a hand, took in with one retrospective glance the whole course of her life. Illumined by this flash of light, she saw her involuntary wrong-doing and burst into tears. The old priest was so deeply moved at the repentance of a being who had sinned solely through ignorance, that he left the ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... neither the one nor the other, as far as we know, was a plagiarist. This, however, does not disprove the contrary proposition, that he who begins as a thief or an iconoclast is likely to end as such. But the actuating motive has nothing to do with what we, in our retrospective analysis, are pleased to prove. Not so far forth are we willing to piddle among the knicknacks of Shakib's ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... sufferer—that every new passion should involve him in new difficulties, and subject him to a degree of mental distress which would have reduced the flesh of any man not hopelessly predisposed to fatness. As Mr. Matthew Maltboy stood by the fire, he was not taking the profitable retrospective view of his life which he should have taken, but was glancing with an expression of concern at the circumference of a showy vest pattern which cut off the ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... silence for a moment, and one after another met my roving glance with a thoughtful, self-involved and retrospective eye. ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... the ocean many times—have lived, not sojourned, on the banks of the Seine, and, as I shall never see the other side again—do not want to see it in its time of sorrow and garb of mourning—I may be forgiven a retrospective pause in this egotistic chronicle. Or, shall I not say, a word or two of affectionate retrogression, though perchance it leads me after the manner of Silas Wegg to drop into poetry and take a turn with a few ghosts into certain of their haunts, when you, dear sir, or madame, or ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... laws of exact science, so alien, I had almost said, to the experience of our lives. Yet is this true, or are such experiences only ignored and put aside without serious consideration? Are there not in the history of each of us passages which strike our retrospective thought with awe, almost with terror? Are there not in nearly every community individuals who possess a mysterious power, concerning whose origin, mode of action, and limits, we and they are alike in the dark? I refer to such organic forces ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... are then those of perception by the intermediary of the thoughts of a living person; and the deceased is perceived through a mental representation. The experiment, for this reason, is valueless as evidence of the reality of retrospective psychometry and consequently of the recording part played by ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... feet on the walk brought Jane's retrospective musings to an end. She saw Alicia a second before the latter saw her. Promptly rising, she headed Alicia off neatly as she ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... convinced he was going to die. A month or so later he moved from Baltimore, which had been his home, and began employment with the government in Washington. He had more emissions and immediately developed hysterical heart trouble, and from his retrospective account also had ideas of people influencing him. A year later (June 1905) a frank psychosis with considerable manic flavor developed. Secretary of State Hay had died, and peace negotiations between Russia and Japan were in progress. He got the idea that he was to succeed Hay (whose face ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... readily, "I remember her very well. I never forget people who are as beautiful as this lady was." His eyes gleamed with retrospective joy. "She was splendid!" he declared. "Sumptuous! No, I cannot describe her. I have not the words. And I could not photograph her with any justice, either. She was all color: brown skin, with a dull-red ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... no use in trying to be retrospective while Hippy is with us," declared Mrs. Gray when their mirth had subsided and Hippy had clambered to his feet. A long scratch ornamented one fat cheek and his hands showed the result of his fall among thorns. But his smile was as ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... I forbear to take a retrospective view of the manner in which they had been expended. Could I approve of that manner? Could I forget how short a time it was, though I had squandered my own money, since I had forfeited no atom of my independence ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... the Fellows who have received the medals of the Society, and those who have repeatedly enriched its Transactions, were distinguished by being collected into a separate and honourable list. It would also be found, perhaps, not less a future incentive than an act of retrospective justice, if the names of all those illustrious Fellows who have formerly obtained the medals, as well as of all those individuals who have been large benefactors to the Society, were recorded at the end of the list. It would be a satisfactory addition likewise to the annual list, if all those ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... are men, Mr. Van Ostend; men primarily before we are either financier or priest. Let us speak as man to man; put aside all points of view entailed by difference of training, and meet on the common ground of our manhood, I am sure the perspective and retrospective ought to be in the same line of ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... SEC. 32. Retrospective laws, punishing acts committed before the existence of such laws, and by them only declared criminal, are oppressive unjust and incompatible with liberty, wherefore no ex post facto law ought to be made. No law taxing retrospectively ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... addition to the refund of one-sixth already payable will be either one-third or one-sixth of the expenditure on out-of-work pay, depending on the amount of the trade union levy. Under special conditions the grant is to be retrospective. It is, therefore, possible for trade unions to be subsidised so far as unemployment benefit is concerned, to the extent of one-half their payments. But this scheme does nothing to assist trade unions (of which there are many) ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... was it to pounce upon me that way at school?" exclaimed Alice suddenly, throwing off her retrospective mood and smiling again. "Was it yours ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... evolution must from this point forward cease to be retrospective. Having begun at that critical moment when the month and day were first equal, we have traced the progress of events to the present hour. What we have now to say is therefore a forecast of events yet to come. So ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... why should our dull retrospective addresses, Fall damp as wet blankets on Drury Lane fire? Away with blue devils, away with distresses, And give the gay spirit ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Walter Pater (1839-1894), an Oxford graduate and teacher, who kept himself aloof from contemporary thought, produced almost a new type of serious prose, distinguished for color, ornamentation, melody, and poetic thought. Even such prosaic objects as wood and brick were to his retrospective gaze "half mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows where." His object was to charm his reader, to haunt him with vague suggestions rather than to make a logical appeal to him, or to add to his world of vivid fact, after the manner of ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... might perhaps appear a little less conspicuous if he had lived to a ripe old age and dressed up his recollections of youth in an autobiographical romance. He did not lack the data of experience, but without the charm of the retrospective poetic treatment his early love-affairs are not profoundly interesting. In the midst of his troubles it came over him that marriage might be the right thing for him; and so, one day in June, 1784, he offered himself to ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... ever said against the heiress, is obliged to confess to herself that the great "er" had had to express everything. Contempt, dislike, kindly disdain—he was always kindly—he made quite a point of that. Truly, thinks Miss Kavanagh to herself after this retrospective glance, "er" is the greatest word ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... Henry, removed from my fond care and instruction; and young as you are, you have entered upon the vast theatre of the world. Some years hence, when time shall have matured your ideas, and enabled you to take a clear, retrospective view of your steps in life, you will be able to enter into my feelings, and to judge of the anxiety which at this ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... his friend, who is rolled, like a mummy, in numberless boas and shawls:—during the process of unswathing, which was no easy job to one in a hurry, so artfully were the pins introduced, Master Tommy treats his friend Walter to a railroad retrospective review of the good things in store—recounting all the "lummy" things left yesterday;—telling about the "nobby" Christmas tree Captain de Camp gave them—though his ma' did say it was "a pretty give!"—it was stolen out of his father's garden.—My ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... dissimulate. "I scarcely know what to make of this," he said at last, without looking up; and Felix was struck with the fact that he offered no protest or contradiction. Evidently Felix had kindled a train of memories—a retrospective illumination. It was making, to Mr. Brand's astonished eyes, a very pretty blaze; his second emotion had been ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... sort of "deadlock" situation such as she loves, and in the interval, while Cyrus is gathering forces to attack Thomyris, the author, as is her fashion likewise, surrenders herself to the joys of digression. We have a great deal of retrospective history of Aryante, and at last the famous Scythian philosopher, Anacharsis, is introduced, bringing with him the rest of the Seven Ancient Sages—with whom we could dispense, but are not allowed to do so. There is a Banquet of them all at the end of the first volume of the Part; ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... satisfaction, she returned to the parlour; where the locksmith, stimulated by quietness and Toby, had become talkative, and was disposed to take a cheerful review of the occurrences of the day. But Mrs Varden, whose practical religion (as is not uncommon) was usually of the retrospective order, cut him short by declaiming on the sinfulness of such junketings, and holding that it was high time to go to bed. To bed therefore she withdrew, with an aspect as grim and gloomy as that of the Maypole's own state couch; and to bed the rest of the establishment ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... we do triumph, mother, we shall only save the family. Calyste has killed within me the holy fervor of love,—killed it by sickening me with all things. What a honey-moon was mine, in which I was made to feel on that first day the bitterness of a retrospective adultery!" ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... found no pleasure in it. The same compression of the throat, the same retrospective anguish, caused me to revolt against man's cowardice which hid under the name of civilisation the most unjust and ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... not that of a country woman. The thin, high-bridged nose, the fallen cheeks, the shadows under eyes gloomy and retrospective—these were marks of the town; above all, perhaps, that sallow greyness of the skin which ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... of Mdlle. de Cardoville at the garden-door of the house occupied by Djalma, we must cast a retrospective glance at previous events. On leaving Doctor Baleinier's, Mdlle. de Cardoville had gone to take up her residence in the Rue d'Anjou. During the last few months of her stay with her aunt, Adrienne had secretly caused this handsome dwelling ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... wasted the opportunity for such a lesson; and the fact that he did allow her to administer one to him in right seventeenth-century diction is established—it is not too bold to say so—by my recognition of his style in her own. I had surely caught the retrospective reflex note, heard first in his voice, recognized ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... From this retrospective philosophizing with the lesson that it taught, John turned to dreaming of Consuello as the one he loved. His imagination, from which he slipped the leash of worry and care, pictured for him gloriously delightful, utterly impossible scenes—Consuello ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... A retrospective survey of the progress made and of the reforms instituted in medical education in the United States is instructive. In many respects there is cause for much congratulation, while for other reasons the situation gives rise to feelings of alarm. It is pleasing to note and it augurs ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... cause to the tragical event, is set in an orderly series before us. Few are the partisans of departed tyranny; and to be a Whig on the business of a hundred years ago is very consistent with every advantage of present servility. This retrospective wisdom and historical patriotism are things of wonderful convenience, and serve admirably to reconcile the old quarrel between speculation and practice. Many a stern republican, after gorging himself ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... proved himself a genius when he created Peter Pan, for Peter symbolises man's highest wish—to become a little child and never grow up. "Genius," he says, "is the power of being a boy again at will." It is true in his case. Yet this kind of genius is retrospective; it is a regression. The genius who will help man to look forward instead of backward must not return to boyhood; he must go forward to superman. To put it psychologically, Barrie's genius comes from the unconscious, but what the world ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... him speaking of "the ancient gentleman" in a tone of reverential eulogy, quite at variance with the free comments we have just quoted. But the Rev. John Jones was probably of opinion, with Mrs. Montagu, whose contemporary and retrospective letters are also set in a different key, that "the interests of religion were connected with the character of a man so distinguished for piety as Dr. Young." At all events, a subsequent quasi-official statement weighs nothing as evidence against ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... contemporaries of every generation, and, besides, Mercy Vint's puritan character is an exceptional phase of the life of the time. It is admirable to see in this fiction, as we often see in the world, how wise and refined religion makes an ignorant and lowly-bred person. As a retrospective study, Griffith Gaunt cannot be placed below Henry Esmond. As a study of passions and principles that do not change with civilizations, it is even more excellent. Griffith Gaunt himself is the most perfect figure in the book, because the plot does not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... with Major Caspar Dabney until you have summered and wintered him. But the Dabneys of Deer Trace—this was the old name of the estate, and it obtains to this day among the Paradise Valley folk—figure so largely in Thomas Jefferson's boyhood and youth as to be well-nigh elemental in these retrospective glimpses. ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... said, the meddling of untrained amateurs with the details of psychic phenomena, and felt that the rule should be made retrospective. An amendment was carried to add Julius Caesar and Richard III. to the motion for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... the attempted assassination of Mademoiselle under the extraordinary conditions which we have detailed and which our visit to the chateau was to enable us to ascertain with yet greater precision. I have not hesitated to furnish the reader with all these retrospective details, known to me through my business relations with Monsieur Robert Darzac. On crossing the threshold of The Yellow Room he was as well posted ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... him or even return the pressure of their hands, for he was feeling all the old intoxicating joy of discovery at breaking into new lands. He even felt a mischievous elation that all this secret pageant, this retrospective wonder that was life, should be his to watch and enjoy, while all around thought ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... this meager outline, condensed from notes made from year to year, in no way satisfies the writer, but has been given by the earnest solicitations of friends, who wished that the steady progress of the cause might be marked in this retrospective hour. There is much that should have been embodied in this sketch of the past, especially the resolutions which have marked varying phases of the work, and which seemed like a divine inspiration in their comprehensive grasp ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... them we find the sum of all religion. They make the highway along which man may return, without danger of erring, to the order and happiness that were lost far back in the ages now but dimly seen in retrospective vision. No lion is found in this way, nor any ravenous beast; but the redeemed of the Lord may walk there, and return with songs and ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... ordinary agreeable summer heat for England; though it is many degrees higher than anything we have seen (up to the middle of July) in England this dreadful year. The illustrations are helpful, and, without being obtrusively antiquarian, have most of them a retrospective or historical interest, as well as the more obvious one which is common to illustrations. The forty short chapters of which the book consists are filled with sketches of the life our English friends lived in the mountain nook, and of the manners and daily lives ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... doubt that Mrs. Stowe was wholly possessed by her theme, rapt away like a prophet in a vision, and that, in her feeling at the time, it was written through her quite as much as by her. This idea grew upon her mind in the retrospective light of the tremendous stir the story made in the world, so that in her later years she came to regard herself as a providential instrument, and frankly to declare that she did not write the book; "God ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... If Mr. Podmore, hitherto the prosecuting attorney of the S. P. R., so far as physical phenomena are concerned becomes converted also, we may indeed sit up and look around us. Getting a good health bill from "Science," Eusapia will then throw retrospective credit on Home and Stainton Moses, Florence Cook (Prof. Crookes' medium), and all similar wonder-workers. The balance of presumptions will be changed in favor of genuineness being possible at least in all reports of this particularly crass and ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... things that are foreign, with their decided patriotism. The hospitality the stranger receives at their hands is nothing short of marvellous, and no greater insult can be inflicted than to offer to pay for accommodations. I find any retrospective glance over the days I spent among these people coloured with much pleasure when I review incidents connected with my contact with them. There is a word in the Portuguese language which holds a world of meaning for anyone who has been in that land so richly bestowed with the ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... they to attempt the recovery of taxes for the past, and make them equal to the present; and that he who is content with a moderate victory is always most successful; for those who would more than conquer, commonly lose." With such words as these he calmed the disturbance, and this retrospective equalization was ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... could not, in a few disjointed phrases describe to you the strange emotions of my friend. It would take pages and pages to make you understand the tenderness, both present and at the same time retrospective, for the dead through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... last thought was for her and her babies; she told herself over and over again that her tears were all for him. After this the autumn began to hurry on, and the snow fell capriciously, days of biting cold giving place to retrospective glances at summer. The last of the vegetables were taken out of the garden and buried in the cellar; and a few tons of coal—dear almost as diamonds—were brought out to provide against the severest weather. Ordinarily buffalo chips were the fuel. Catherine was alarmed at ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... the Rhine, while Massena, as a reward for the victory of Zurich, was made Commander-in-Chief in Italy, and while Brune was at the head of the army of Batavia, Bonaparte, whose soul was in the camps, consoled himself for his temporary inactivity by a retrospective glance on his past triumphs. He was unwilling that Fame should for a moment cease to blazon his name. Accordingly, as soon as he was established at the head of the Government, he caused accounts of his Egyptian expedition to be from time to time published ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... gladness or hope for the shadow at once to copy this gesture, and, flashing it back to the remotest, tiniest ruins of early childhood even, to extract unexpected treasure from all this wreckage. They know that they have retrospective action on all bygone deeds; and that the dead themselves will annul their verdicts in order to judge afresh a past that to-day has transfigured and endowed with ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... perform those acts which have been called miraculous, it is not only improbable, but impossible likewise, that they should have been done by men whose knowledge and experience were considerably less than our own. It has seemed to me, in fact, that this question of the retrospective possibility of miracles is more important to us Rationalists, and, for the matter of that, to Christians also, than the question of their prospective possibility, with which Professor Huxley's article mainly deals. Perhaps the Professor ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... no more for the moment; the paradox of this retrospective gratitude was too absorbing. What! Sir Asher was thankful because over three thousand years ago his ancestors had obtained—not without hard fighting for it—a land which had already been lost again for eighteen ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is merely retrospective: an Idea, or, if you like, a Principle, carries knowledge within itself, and is prospective. Polonius is a man of maxims. Whilst he is descanting on matters of past experience, as in that excellent ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... oeconomy as produced a very important general result. It was probably in the ensuing parliament that a conference being held between the two houses respecting a bill for making the patrimonial estates of accountants liable for their arrears to the queen, and the commons desiring that it might not be retrospective, the lord treasurer pithily said; "My lords, if you had lost your purse by the way, would you look back or forwards to find it? The queen hath lost ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... crossed swords; but this is not in the least essential to the action; the play might have been to all intents and purposes the same had they never heard of each other until after the rise of the curtain. In Twelfth Night there is a semblance of a retrospective exposition in the scene between Viola and the Captain; but it is of the simplest nature, and conveys no information beyond what, at a later period, would have been imparted ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... causes, by figurative modes of expression which were common in Oriental nations, by the tendency of the human mind to embellish or exaggerate surprising facts, or invent supernatural causes for what it is unable to explain, by the retrospective imagination which seeks to dignify the distant past with a supernatural halo. The early annals of all nations are strewn with pretended miracles which no one will now maintain, and Milman shows in a powerful ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Alexander the Great was divided, at his death, among his generals; but, before relating their history, it is necessary to take a brief retrospective glance at the affairs of Greece. Three years after Alexander had quitted Europe the Spartans made a vigorous effort to throw off the Macedonian yoke. They were joined by most of the Peloponnesian states; but though they met with some success at first, they were finally defeated ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... harsh; his features stern and terrible. His cruel and criminal character we already know. Yet it is but just here to recall that much of the horror and odium which has accumulated on his memory is posthumous and retrospective. Some of his cotemporaries were no better in their private lives than he was; but then they had no part in bringing in the Normans. Talents both for peace and war he certainly had, and there was still a feeling of attachment, or at least of regret, cherished towards him among ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... in the chair took no notice. There was a retrospective light in his dark eyes. He tapped upon the table again ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... phenomena: at the end of a hundred and twenty years, the legal year had gained a whole month on the actual year, and the 1st of Thot anticipated the heliacal rising of Sothis by thirty days, instead of coinciding with it as it ought. The astronomers of the Graeco-Roman period, after a retrospective examination of all the past history of their country, discovered a very ingenious theory for obviating this unfortunate discrepancy. If the omission of six hours annually entailed the loss of one day every four years, the time would come, after three hundred ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... by sorrow shaded, Drops the solitary tear, O'er remember'd joys, now faded, To young love and rapture dear. E'en the retrospective feeling, Leaves a momentary thrill; All the wounds of sorrow healing, For my ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 570, October 13, 1832 • Various
... taking retrospective glances, remember how they were devoted to women, the memory of whom calls up only a vague sort of wonder how they ever could have fallen into the state of infatuation in which they once were. The same may be said of many women. Heart-breaking separations have taken place ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... formerly belonged to them, and had been detached in the course of ages. And the parliaments of Lorraine, Alsace, and Franche Comte were directed to ascertain what places there were, what fragments under feudal tenure, to which that retrospective principle applied. They were called chambers, or courts, of reunion, and they enumerated certain small districts, which the French troops accordingly occupied. All this was futile skirmishing. The real object was Strasburg. Alsace was French, but Strasburg, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... heart of Robinette as she looked, that part of her blood which her English mother had given her. This scene, so indescribably English as hardly to be imaginable in another land, had been painted for her again and again by her mother with all the retrospective romance of an exile's touch. She knew it, but she did not know if she could ever love it, beautiful ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... from whom they were to derive great immediate honour, which for a short period, however, was deferred. Individual genius has a cycle of its own, and moves only in that path, or by the powers influencing it. Genius has been properly defined 'prospective', talent on the contrary 'retrospective': genius is creative, and lives much in the future, and in its passage or progress may make use of ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... stranger to the ways of Barrow, had been obliged to hold with her, the reading of the will—all these had combined to keep her in a state of mental and physical alertness which had mercifully precluded retrospective thought. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... practice that I contemplate purchasing at Budmouth—hardly more than twenty miles off. Forgive my saying that it will be far better if nobody there knows where you come from, nor anything about your parents. Your beauty and knowledge and manners will carry you anywhere if you are not hampered by such retrospective criticism." ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... 16, 1899. William B. Plunkett, President of the Club, said in introducing the President of the United States: "Not the Home Market Club, not the city of Boston, not Massachusetts only, but all New England give you greeting of welcome, Mr. President. In our retrospective of the year past we would give full meed of honor and praise to the President who so nobly met and so faithfully discharged the grave responsibilities of that great office, and thanksgiving to the Divine Providence that sustained him. In such hands, under such guidance, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... till the garden was a wilderness of bloom, and the windows of ivy. Oldport is the only place in New England where either ivy or traditions will grow; there were, to be sure, no legends about this house that I could hear of, for the ghosts in those parts were feeble-minded and retrospective by reason of age, and perhaps scorned a mansion where nobody had ever lived; but the ivy clustered round the projecting windows as densely as if it had the sins of ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... addressed to the Minister of Marine the following remonstrance against the before-mentioned regulation of the Admiralty Court, that vessels captured within a certain distance of the shore should not be prize to the captor; this regulation being evidently intended as retrospective, with a view of nullifying the captures ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... memory of Mr. Cox's services, the governor deemed it a tribute justly due to him to give his name to this grand and extraordinary pass, and he accordingly called it Cox's Pass. Having descended into the valley at the bottom of this pass, the retrospective view of the overhanging mountain ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... quitted the room, Elizabeth felt how improbable it was that they should ever see each other again on such terms of cordiality as had marked their several meetings in Derbyshire; and as she threw a retrospective glance over the whole of their acquaintance, so full of contradictions and varieties, sighed at the perverseness of those feelings which would now have promoted its continuance, and would formerly have ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... on a peculiar softness. And so it passed from horny hand to horny hand—the pasted photograph of a woman, the clinging kind that such men fancy, with a babe at the breast. Those who had not yet seen the wonder were keen with curiosity; those who had became silent and retrospective. They could face the pinch of famine, the grip of scurvy, or the quick death by field or flood; but the pictured semblance of a stranger woman and child made women and children of ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... representatives of two orders of men. Or we may fall back on the statement "Sacrifice and burnt offerings Thou wouldst not" (Ps. xl, 6), and on Jesus' own explanation of his death, that He offered himself in testimony to the Truth—that is, that the Eternal Life will no more exercise a retrospective vengeance upon us for our past misunderstanding of It, than would electricity or any other force. We may explain the modus operandi of the great offering in any of these ways, for the Scripture presents it in all of them—but the great thing ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... this simple tale to narrate the conversation that befel on the departure of Nora. It was chiefly of a retrospective character, with disquisitions on such abstractions as the consolations that sometimes follow on the loss of a wealthy great-aunt, the difficulties of shaving with a "tennis elbow," the unchanging quality of certain ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Christianity is assailable. What then has modern criticism accomplished on the Bible? The Biblical account of the creation it has shown to be, in its literal sense, an impossible fable. To passages thought mystical and prophetic it has assigned the homeliest, and often retrospective meanings. Everywhere at its touch what seemed supernatural has been humanized, and the divinity that hedged the records has rapidly abandoned them. And now looked at in the common daylight their whole aspect changes for us; and stories that we once accepted with a solemn ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... career had been run outside the verge of chronicles. Its early stages left few direct records. They have to be pieced together by retrospective allusions proceeding from himself or others, after he had already risen. The difficulties of his biographers are not at an end when he has mounted into the full blaze of publicity. His name thenceforth was in a multitude of mouths; yet much in his character, position, and ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... terrible hatred against Jacques Ferrand, being very indignant at the recital of his having drugged Louise—a recital it was found necessary to make, in order that she should be on her guard against the hypocritical attempts of the monster. Some retrospective words concerning the ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... the landlord's daughter, do you know what we should have had? We should have had coffee and bread and praeterea nihil. That's what we should have had," he pronounced tragically, shaking his head in retrospective consternation at the thing escaped. "Oh, these starveling Continental breakfasts! But I threw myself upon Pia's clemency. I paid her compliments upon her hair, upon her toilet. I called her Pia mia. I said that if I had only met her earlier in life, I should have been a very different ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... not until some time later that I tried to define them thus approximately by retrospective analysis. At that moment, being altogether incapable of such an effort, I could only establish in my own mind the idea of extreme decrepitude and horrible old age, which they produced ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... her most pronounced accent, "if I've got to think of 'em, I might as well talk of 'em, and I'm bound to think of 'em!" She relaxed the grasp of her knees, and lay back against the trunk of a tree, chuckling softly in retrospective triumph. "I've had such heaps of fun! I just love to carry on, and have half-a-dozen boys quarrelling over me, and hustling to get the first chance. I've had as many as ten bouquets before a ball, and I wore an eleventh, which I'd gotten for myself, and they were all clean crazed ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... his retrospective smile which was kind as though he bore no grudge against people he ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... turned about, flickered into the shadow, stood for a moment retrospective at the door, and then closed it on us; and once more we were in that murmurous mystery of darkness into which we ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... against the harlot's profession, with which both parts of this play are offensively crowded. A satirist is always to be suspected, who, to make vice odious, dwells upon all its acts and minutest circumstances with a sort of relish and retrospective fondness. But so near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions, which in his unregenerate state served ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... science which was one of the chief impediments to the progress of the ancient mind, the Stoics for the most part disdained a study which was other than the pursuit of virtue. While the Epicurean poet painted in magnificent language the perpetual progress of mankind, the Stoic was essentially retrospective, and exhausted his strength in vain efforts to restore the simplicity of a by-gone age. While, too, the school of Zeno produced many of the best and greatest men who have ever lived, it must be acknowledged that its ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... 17: The Retrospective Review, however (Vol. I, November, 1852), has an article, 'Mrs. Behn's Dramatic Writings,' which warmly praises her comedies. The writer very justly observes that 'they exhibit a brilliance of conversation in the dialogue, and a skill in arranging the plot and producing striking situations, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... again, when historical investigation has refused to afford me the means of resuscitating some remotely ancient scene, I have been obliged to take counsel of imagination and remember the saying that 'the Poet must be a retrospective Seer,' and could allow my fancy to spread her wings, while I remained her lord and knew the limits up to which I might permit her to soar. I considered it my lawful privilege to paint much that was pure invention, but nothing that was not possible ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... commencement of a dialogue between Collen and Thenot; which is described as "an Eglogue on the noble assemblies revived on Cotswold Hills by Mr. Robert Dover". An able criticism of Randolph's works, with extracts, will be found in the sixth volume of the "Retrospective Review". ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... knowed a meetin' woke ter sech a pint o' holiness. The saints jes rampaged around till it fairly sounded like the cavortin's o' the ungodly," a retrospective voice chimed in. ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... conclude, we beg our reader to accompany us to Deaker Hall the residence of M'Clutchy's father, the squire. This man was far advanced in years, but appeared to have been possessed of a constitution which sustains sensuality, or perhaps that retrospective spirit which gloats over its polluted recollections, on the very verge of the grave. In the case before us, old age sharpened the inclination to vice in proportion as it diminished the power of being vicious, and presented an instance ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... indulged in a retrospective look, for some quarter of a minute, as if this allusion to his lady's excellences had naturally led his mind to the peaceful village of Dotheboys near Greta Bridge in Yorkshire; and then looked at Ralph, as if waiting ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... comedy has been adapted, and am therefore free to treat the play itself on what I take to be its merits. It may be that the adapter assumed in us a little previous knowledge of the history of Helen's love affair, or that at least there was an obscurity about her past that wanted clearing up by retrospective illumination; but that is my only possible criticism; and I heartily congratulate the Vaudeville management on having at last discovered a play that promises to reward ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... result. It was probably in the ensuing parliament that a conference being held between the two houses respecting a bill for making the patrimonial estates of accountants liable for their arrears to the queen, and the commons desiring that it might not be retrospective, the lord treasurer pithily said; "My lords, if you had lost your purse by the way, would you look back or forwards to find it? The queen hath lost ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... those who view this scene. In order to perpetuate the memory of Mr. Cox's services, the governor deemed it a tribute justly due to him to give his name to this grand and extraordinary pass, and he accordingly called it Cox's Pass. Having descended into the valley at the bottom of this pass, the retrospective view of the overhanging mountain is ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... February 16, 1899. William B. Plunkett, President of the Club, said in introducing the President of the United States: "Not the Home Market Club, not the city of Boston, not Massachusetts only, but all New England give you greeting of welcome, Mr. President. In our retrospective of the year past we would give full meed of honor and praise to the President who so nobly met and so faithfully discharged the grave responsibilities of that great office, and thanksgiving to the Divine Providence that sustained ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... and civil officers rewarded or favoured by Napoleon the First will not only be discarded, but disgraced, and perhaps punished, by a Louis XVIII. Any person who would be imprudent enough to attempt to prove the impossibility, as well as the absurdity, of these impolitic and retrospective measures, would be instantly taken up and shot as an emissary of ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... and that was "The Greek Soldier." It was the story of a young Greek, a glorious Athenian, who had fought through the Greek war of independence against the Turks, and then come to America and published the narrative of his adventures. They fired my boy with a retrospective longing to have been present at the Battle of Navarino, when the allied ships of the English, French, and Russians destroyed the Turkish fleet; but it seemed to him that he could not have borne to have ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... We know that he never wasted the opportunity for such a lesson; and the fact that he did allow her to administer one to him in right seventeenth-century diction is established—it is not too bold to say so—by my recognition of his style in her own. I had surely caught the retrospective reflex note, heard first in his ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... imagined, for a single session, (and that an initial one), he had had enough. I should have expected him to spend the remainder of his day, a full man, in thankful tranquillity, in agreeable retrospective rumination. But no. Indulgence, it soon appeared, had but whetted his appetite. After a quarter-hour of walking about the garden, during which his jumble of sensations and impressions,—her soft-glowing eyes, her soft-drooping hair, under her wine-red ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... will be variously interpreted, and to attempt to analyse the motives of a double-minded man is always a hazardous experiment; but a comparison of date, the character of Clement himself, the circumstances in which he was placed, and the retrospective evidence from after events, points almost necessarily to but one interpretation. It is scarcely disputable that, frightened at the reception of Anne Boleyn in France, the pope found it necessary to pretend for a time an altered disposition ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... office for his bundle of old newspapers. These he reads carefully, and sometimes what he reads inspires him to write something for our paper on the future of the Queen City, though much oftener his articles are retrospective. He is the president of the Old Settlers' Society, and once or twice a year he brings in an obituary which he has written for the family of some of ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... to be the finding of his friend, who is rolled, like a mummy, in numberless boas and shawls:—during the process of unswathing, which was no easy job to one in a hurry, so artfully were the pins introduced, Master Tommy treats his friend Walter to a railroad retrospective review of the good things in store—recounting all the "lummy" things left yesterday;—telling about the "nobby" Christmas tree Captain de Camp gave them—though his ma' did say it was "a pretty give!"—it ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... the one nor the other, as far as we know, was a plagiarist. This, however, does not disprove the contrary proposition, that he who begins as a thief or an iconoclast is likely to end as such. But the actuating motive has nothing to do with what we, in our retrospective analysis, are pleased to prove. Not so far forth are we willing to piddle among the knicknacks of Shakib's Histoire ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... tires of gazing on the beautiful bay with its numerous islands,—a charming picture, with the blue and symmetrical range of Gouldsboro' hills for background. From a point not far back of the house, the eye ranges from the head of Frenchman's Bay out to the broad ocean; while a retrospective view takes in the wild mountainous region of the interior ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... the English tongue. In the Twelfth Book Michael is guilty of a graver lapse where he mentions baptism without explanation or apology. On the other hand, Raphael, who had a pleasanter occasion and more time for his retrospective summary, explains the military manoeuvring of angels by what Adam had already seen of the flight of birds, and after describing the great war in Heaven and the fierce hosting of the opposed forces, ventures, at a later point in his story, to illustrate the flowing together ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... had ever encountered. His hair was grizzled and hung low on his neck; his chin was very long and ended in a point; his nose was broad, with sensitive nostrils that marked every breath he drew. As for his eyes, which instantly attracted attention, they were brown and gentle as a girl's but had that retrospective expression that suggests far-away thoughts or an utter lack of interest in one's surroundings. They never looked at but through one. The effect of Carg's eyes was ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... will say, may prevent this; but nations have no gratitude, they only know their interest, and nothing retrospective is any motive for action. We need not search into remote periods for proofs of this, see Holland, Spain, Russia, &c. during the latter part of the last war. ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... career, rode the whirlwind and directed the storm of German socialism. Bismarck himself confesses to having received in private audience Lassalle, one certainly of the most capable men of modern Germany, and to whom as its first author, a retrospective inquiry would trace back the present formidable, closely ruled organization of socialist operatives of Germany. The first minister of the Prussian crown was closeted once—people say more than once, but that does not matter—with ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... happier, there had been a certain grim pleasure in it. To the fact that he had ruined, by sheer over-righteousness, the last years of the sunny life of Sarah Austen he had been oblivious—until to-day. The strange, retrospective mood which had come over him this afternoon led his thoughts into strange paths, and he found himself wondering if, after all, it had not been in his power to make her happier. Her dryad-like face, with its sweet, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... revolting to the laws of exact science, so alien, I had almost said, to the experience of our lives. Yet is this true, or are such experiences only ignored and put aside without serious consideration? Are there not in the history of each of us passages which strike our retrospective thought with awe, almost with terror? Are there not in nearly every community individuals who possess a mysterious power, concerning whose origin, mode of action, and limits, we and they are alike in the dark? I refer to such organic ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... mines of the Cape, where one may see all the details of this prosperous exploitation by means of photographs and specimens. The art bronzes, the objects of jewelry, of goldsmith's work, and of morocco work, the music boxes, Trouve's and Aboilard's electric jewelry, and the retrospective art collections especially attracted the attention of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... Numerous retrospective notices by himself and others exist of this period; but none of his really boyish letters have been preserved. The exquisite Essay intitled, "Christ's Hospital five and thirty years ago", by Lamb, is principally ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... who get invitations to these parties," a famous actor declared, "are the most elusive chaps on earth. Half London is dying to know what really goes on there, and yet, if by any chance one comes across a prospective or retrospective guest, he is as dumb about it as though it were some Masonic function. We've got you this time, Baler, though. We'll put you under the inquisition ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "Dictator of Sicily, in the name of Victor Emmanuel," Garibaldi attacked and occupied Palermo, and having established his ascendency in the island, invaded the Neapolitan territory on the mainland. The Sardinian Government, for diplomatic reasons, disavowed the expedition, but gave a retrospective assent to it later ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... possible for a man ever to thoroughly understand a woman?" he asked, with a retrospective slowness, directed, I was sure, towards that empty-headed ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... various intervals a retrospective view of life, and of the characters they have met with, seems to be a natural feeling of human nature; and every one is disposed at times to recall to memory many circumstances and many individuals which suggest abundant subjects for ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... augment the retrospective sensation of fatigue which seizes you as you regard these stones—too heavy for human strength—which are massed here in mountains. One almost seems to participate in the efforts, the exhaustions and the sweating ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... great question before us, I would first ask: How are we now situated? For more than two and a half years we have fought for our just rights, and what do we see if we take a retrospective view? Are we making progress, or are we gradually going down the precipice? I have been in correspondence with my officers in all parts of the country, and have received information from them as to the condition of affairs, but I must tell you that from all that information there is nothing ...
— The Peace Negotiations - Between the Governments of the South African Republic and - the Orange Free State, etc.... • J. D. Kestell
... sessions usually conclude, we beg our reader to accompany us to Deaker Hall the residence of M'Clutchy's father, the squire. This man was far advanced in years, but appeared to have been possessed of a constitution which sustains sensuality, or perhaps that retrospective spirit which gloats over its polluted recollections, on the very verge of the grave. In the case before us, old age sharpened the inclination to vice in proportion as it diminished the power of being vicious, and presented an instance of a man, at the close of a long life, ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... never a sign of life, human or animal! Yet, stay; what was that dark film, like a tiny cloud, that came sweeping down toward them from far up the lake? Dick, the practical, was the first to catch sight of it, for Phil was standing like one in a trance gazing at the scene with a retrospective look in his eyes that seemed to say his thoughts were far away. As Dick watched the approaching cloud-like film it resolved itself into a flock of wild ducks, making, as it seemed, directly for the patch of rushes near which the two were standing, and, with the momentous question of supper ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... public sustained from the innumerable quantity of edicts of the Statue at present in force, had last night consolidated them all into this single act, which, to render its operation still more simple, was gifted with a retrospective power ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... out—beyond all bounds," replied Shefford, sadly. He seemed retrospective for a moment, unaware of the trader's keen and sympathetic glance, and then he caught himself. "I want to see some wild life. Do you know the country ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... going to die. A month or so later he moved from Baltimore, which had been his home, and began employment with the government in Washington. He had more emissions and immediately developed hysterical heart trouble, and from his retrospective account also had ideas of people influencing him. A year later (June 1905) a frank psychosis with considerable manic flavor developed. Secretary of State Hay had died, and peace negotiations between Russia and Japan were in progress. He got the idea that he was to succeed Hay (whose ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... apricots," he enumerated. "And if it had n't been for my talk with the landlord's daughter, do you know what we should have had? We should have had coffee and bread and praeterea nihil. That's what we should have had," he pronounced tragically, shaking his head in retrospective consternation at the thing escaped. "Oh, these starveling Continental breakfasts! But I threw myself upon Pia's clemency. I paid her compliments upon her hair, upon her toilet. I called her Pia mia. I said that if I had only met her earlier in life, I should have been a very different person. ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... fall back on the statement "Sacrifice and burnt offerings Thou wouldst not" (Ps. xl, 6), and on Jesus' own explanation of his death, that He offered himself in testimony to the Truth—that is, that the Eternal Life will no more exercise a retrospective vengeance upon us for our past misunderstanding of It, than would electricity or any other force. We may explain the modus operandi of the great offering in any of these ways, for the Scripture presents it in ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... includes the sending of the elephant to Rome (1514) and the marriages of the princesses. It is barely possible that it was written after the victory, in which case the words na partida would be retrospective and the date given in the 1st edition was not a slip. Parts of the play suit 1514 better than 1513. Trist[a]o da Cunha's special mission (cf. lines 195-6) to the Pope (with Garcia de Resende for secretary) left early in 1514 and entered Rome on March 12. One of the objects of ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... foreign mercenaries. By the law of 1811 all youths of twenty were liable to serve for five years either on land or sea; and the contingent required was filled by the drawing of lots. Deep and strong resentment was felt throughout the country, the more so that the law was made retrospective to all who had reached the age of twenty in the three preceding years. The battalions thus raised were treated as French troops, and were sent to take part in distant campaigns—in Spain and in Russia. Of the 15,000 ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... and happy times it is instructive to take a retrospective glance at the days of our forefathers of the nineteenth century, and to meditate upon the political struggles and events of the past hundred years, that by so doing we may gain a clear insight into the causes which have led to the present wonderful developments. We, in the year of ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... it; for, in spite of the enormity of the supposed offence, the vision of her remarkable appearance when John raised her veil before the glass was too much for her risibles as it grew more and more retrospective. For she was one of those happy mortals who cannot help seeing a joke, even when it points ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... retorto. Retouch (revise) korekti. Retrace reveni, repasxi. Retract malkonfesi. Retreat (place) rifugxejo. Retreat foriri, remarsxi. Retribution repago. Retrieve trovi, gajni, re—. Retrograde malprogresi. Retrospect retrospekto. Retrospective retrospektiva. Return (give back) redoni. Return (come back) reveni. Return, to make a raporti. Return (report) raporto. Return, in reciproke. Reunion rekunigo. Re-unite rekunigi. Reveal malkasxi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... almost savage bitterness of his humor many mad impulses took hold of him. The opportunities of the highways presented themselves with singular force of temptation; he thought seriously of insurrection in Galilee; even the sea, ordinarily a retrospective horror to him, stretched itself map-like before his fancy, laced and interlaced with lines of passage crowded with imperial plunder and imperial travellers; but the better judgment matured in calmer hours was happily too firmly fixed to be supplanted by ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... it is not only improbable, but impossible likewise, that they should have been done by men whose knowledge and experience were considerably less than our own. It has seemed to me, in fact, that this question of the retrospective possibility of miracles is more important to us Rationalists, and, for the matter of that, to Christians also, than the question of their prospective possibility, with which Professor Huxley's article mainly deals. Perhaps the ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... wrote of them: "The first thing in the Album I wrote for my oldest child's birthday. It seems as if I were beginning my life as a composer anew, and there are traces of the old human here and there. They are decidedly different from 'Scenes from Childhood' which are retrospective glances by a parent, and for elders, while 'Album for the Young' contains hopes, presentments and peeps into ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... Commissioners and Receiver of Public Moneys, I was required and gave a qualified bond for $100,000 for the faithful performance of the trust, and with Register Raleigh proceeded and discharged the duties thereto. Harrison's term ended a career of twelve years in the land office. If in retrospective moments amid the many beneficent things you might have done, but left undone, you catch here and there glimpses of unselfish ambition or benefit you have conferred, it does much to abate regret, for the recollection to me is a source ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... origin of species, then, being at present the most admissible one, and the retrospective survey of such species showing convergence, as time recedes, to more simplified or generalised organisations, the result to which the suggested train of thought inevitably leads is very analogous in each instance. If to kosmos or the mundane system have ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... retrograde, retrogressive, reverse, regressive; retrospective; reluctant, averse, loath, disinclined, unwilling; dull, inapt; late, tardy, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... vivid intellect, which he originally, and still lingeringly, appreciated in condescension, as a singular accomplishment, thrilling at times, now and then assailably feminine. But, after her consent to a proposal that caused him retrospective worldly shudders, and her composed recognition of the madness, a character capable of holding him in some awe was real majesty, and it rose to the clear heights, with her mental attributes for satellites. His tendency to despise women was wholesomely checked by the experience to justify him in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fled afore a little un," said Joseph. "I could allays face a little un." He spoke with a retrospective tone. His lordship eyed him askance with a twinkle of rich enjoyment, and took snuff with infinite relish, as if he took Joseph's mental flavor with it and found it delightful. "Mother Duke could strike a sort of a fear into a man," ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... a preceding letter about "Gladstone, Gore, and Co." turned out to be prophetic as well as retrospective. Mr. Gladstone published this autumn in "Good Words" his "Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture," containing an attack upon Huxley's position as taken up in ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... orphaned infancy—so pale, thin, and sickly, so disliked, avoided, and neglected! At this remembrance her penitent heart melted in remorseful tenderness. The advent of her own children had shown to Hannah by retrospective action all the cruelty and hardness of heart she had once felt and shown ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... western side. Thinking of that morning's journey, it has sometimes seemed to me that there was something ridiculous in my position; a man, armed to the teeth, but wholly unable to fight, and equally so to run away, traversing a dangerous wilderness, on a sick horse. But these thoughts were retrospective, for at the time I was in too grave a mood to entertain a very lively sense ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... wisest monarch made a fool? Know, God and Nature only are the same: In man, the judgment shoots at flying game, A bird of passage! gone as soon as found, Now in the moon, perhaps, now under ground. In vain the sage, with retrospective eye, Would from the apparent what conclude the why, Infer the motive from the deed, and show, That what we chanced was what we meant to do. Behold! if fortune or a mistress frowns, Some plunge in business, others shave their crowns: To ease the soul of ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... shifts, and, as in the screen play, that retrospective distant picture brings one back to an earlier vision, so from the distance we now see ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... always deprecated, he said, the meddling of untrained amateurs with the details of psychic phenomena, and felt that the rule should be made retrospective. An amendment was carried to add Julius Caesar and Richard III. to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... conduct than a mean action, for which the poor victim herself, encumbered with a child, and not I, had really to pay the penalty, in spite of certain pecuniary aid that was given. There, that's the retrospective trouble that I am always unearthing; and you may hardly believe that though so many years have elapsed, and it is all gone by and done with, and she must be getting on for an old woman now, as I am for an old man, it really often destroys ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... the individual senator who moved, or perhaps supported, the decree which led to the forbidden jurisdiction, was made liable to the penalties of the law.[595] The operation of the enactment was made retrospective, or was perhaps conceived by its very nature to cover the past abuses which had called it into being; for in a sense it created no new crime, but simply restated the principle of the appeal in a form suited to the proceedings against which it wished to ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... Sir Robert Peel will support the proposal, will do all that he can to prevent it from being considered as indicative of hostile or altered feeling towards France, and will assume for the increase in question any degree of responsibility present or retrospective which ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... said Joey, a retrospective light in his eye. "He first joined us as a sleight-o'-hand man in the side-show. That cussed little brother of 'is got a job taking tickets. Dick 'ad been in jail a couple of times and he decided to turn over a new leaf. He'd 'a' been all ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... sort will be for ever hid from thine eyes: remember if forty years have passed thee, I say, I would have thee remember, that thy spring is gone, thy summer almost spent! Have then, therefore, a very serious retrospective view of thy past, and, (if it please God) a fixed resolution to amend thy prolonged life: then being now arrived almost on ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... take a retrospective view of this our noble theme, and our interest will be the more strengthened thereon. All the world knows that a convent stood in this neighbourhood, and the present market was the garden, unde ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... of M. Yriarte's statement, Burchard is silent on the subject, for the excellent reason that there is no diary for the period under consideration. Burchard's narrative is interrupted on the death of Innocent VIII, on July 12, and not resumed until December 2, when it is not retrospective. ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... directly to the subject in hand (viz., the colored musical artists of New Orleans), I first quote from a paper prepared by a cultured gentleman of that city, himself a fine musician, the following retrospective comment on some ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... an instinctive subjugation struggling against a passionate desire for fellowship. She had denied herself to me, taken herself away; that much I could endure; but now came this blazing fact that showed her as it seemed in the most material and conclusive way—overcome. I had storms of retrospective passion at the thoroughness of her surrender.... Yes, and that's in everyone of us,—in everyone. I wonder if in all decent law-abiding London there lives a single healthy adult man who has not at times longed to ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... abuse, it might answer some purpose. But this can make no part of my plan. I mean to proceed by bill; and I cannot stop for such an inquiry. I know some gentlemen may blame me. It is with great submission to better judgments that I recommend it to consideration, that a critical retrospective examination of the pension list, upon the principle of merit, can never serve for my basis. It cannot answer, according to my plan, any effectual purpose of economy, or of future, permanent reformation. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the works of Cotton Mather I shall examine, in this scrutiny of his retrospective opinions and position, relating to the witchcraft prosecutions, is the Magnalia, printed at London, in 1702. He had become wise enough, at that time, not to commit himself ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... young, vigorous, and hearty settler, glorying in his privilege to struggle, achieve, and conquer difficulties, is too proud to be ashamed of his dependence on Him who appointed the planets to their courses, and is not unmindful of a sparrow's fall. How fine and delicately tender is this retrospective glance at the close of his monthly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... described as almost gigantic; his voice loud and harsh; his features stern and terrible. His cruel and criminal character we already know. Yet it is but just here to recall that much of the horror and odium which has accumulated on his memory is posthumous and retrospective. Some of his cotemporaries were no better in their private lives than he was; but then they had no part in bringing in the Normans. Talents both for peace and war he certainly had, and there was still a feeling of attachment, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... nothing "cheekie" in anything you have done. Your letters have naturally given me much pleasure, for it seems to me you are a pretty good young fellow, as young fellows go; and if I add that you remind me of myself, you need not accuse me of retrospective vanity. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have otherwise had to compensation." To ascertain this fact a "feigned issue bill" was brought into the council. It simply referred the question of illegal distillation to the jury, without assessing their claims. The right of the distillers to compensation was, however, so indisputable, and the retrospective action of the bill so liable to objection, that it was generally opposed; and, by the dissent of the lawyers, the treasurer, with all the non-official members, rejected by the council. The attorney-general, ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... latitude 40 south, and nearly in the longitude of Greenwich, as far as I can remember, that these quiet rites of Almayer's and Nina's resurrection were taking place. In the prolonged silence it occurred to me that there was a good deal of retrospective writing in the story as far as it went. Was it intelligible in its action, I asked myself, as if already the story-teller were being born into the body of a seaman. But I heard on deck the whistle of ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... Government price. So much weight has from time to time been attached to these considerations that Congress have passed laws giving actual settlers on the public lands a right of preemption to the tracts occupied by them at the minimum price. These laws have in all instances been retrospective in their operation, but in a few years after their passage crowds of new settlers have been found on the public lands for similar reasons and under like expectations, who have been indulged with the same privilege. This course of legislation ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... those enquiries, would most respectfully take a retrospective view of the object for which the Convention was first associated, and the causes which ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The learned member of the legislature, at Westminister,[571] or at Washington, speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and the now invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes, the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... first time he had found leisure to fish, though from the very outset of his Potwell career he had promised himself abundant indulgence in the pleasures of fishing. Fishing, as the golden page of English literature testifies, is a meditative and retrospective pursuit, and the varied page of memory, disregarded so long for sake of the teeming duties I have already enumerated, began to unfold itself to Mr. Polly's consideration. A speculation about Uncle Jim died for want of material, and gave place to a reckoning of the years and months that had passed ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... Harvey, a retrospective grin appearing on his lips. "Gee! I wish I'd thought to put a couple——But, excuse me, I can't talk without my ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... tin soldiers on the table, because he can understand this by means of his own experience, in his own nursery. It is an appeal to conditions to which he is accustomed and for which no exercise of the imagination is needed, unless we take the effect of memory to be, according to Queyrat, retrospective imagination. ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... of to-day with the Japan of, say, thirty or forty years ago will, I think, impatiently sweep aside some of the absurd theories to which I have referred, psychological and otherwise. The unprejudiced man, letting his mind indulge in retrospect, and comparing that retrospective view with the present actuality, will, I believe, have no difficulty in determining that though Japan is and must remain an Oriental nation, what she has acquired of recent years is neither veneer or ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... of pledges which I feel assured would conduce neither to your happiness, nor to mine. Let us embalm the past and bury it tenderly; raising no mound to trip our friendly feet in years to come. The serenity of our future might be marred by retrospective gleams of the beautiful ring that once enclosed two lives; hence, I have ordered the diamonds reset in the form of a four-leaved clover, which will be sent to dear ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and find it wanting. But this does not in the least alter the matter. The people who inveigh the most fiercely against the pretensions of blue blood are generally, the world over, the ones who are devoured by the most ardent retrospective ambitions for grandfathers and grandmothers; and the Americans who cry out loudest against the hollow vanity of the European aristocracy are generally those who have genealogical trees and coats-of-arms of authenticity more or less ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... Taking a retrospective view of this singular venture in journalism, one day, the explanation of the whole matter came to my understanding in the light of a revelation, and was ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... They always combine a respect for those things that are foreign, with their decided patriotism. The hospitality the stranger receives at their hands is nothing short of marvellous, and no greater insult can be inflicted than to offer to pay for accommodations. I find any retrospective glance over the days I spent among these people coloured with much pleasure when I review incidents connected with my contact with them. There is a word in the Portuguese language which holds a world of meaning for anyone who has been ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... had slipped to the floor at the beginning of the song, and sat with her head upon her drawn-up knees, with her hands clasped above them. She made no move. The officer continued his singing, still softly, and in a retrospective mood. He was a born musician. His whole soul craved song, and the greatest deprivation to him in Alaska was the lack of music. For this reason, he kept his own banjo with him, and many an evening's entertainment ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... before us—for in the wonderful reality of her thoughts and descriptions, she seems accountable for all done in her name—with principles you must approve in the main, and yet with language and manners that offend you in every particular. Even in that chef-d'oeuvre of brilliant retrospective sketching, the description of her early life, it is the childhood and not the child that interests you. The little Jane, with her sharp eyes and dogmatic speeches, is a being you neither could fondle nor love. There is a hardness in her infantine earnestness, and a spiteful precocity in her reasoning, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... of it may be noted. It, when referring to something that precedes, may be called "retrospective;" but when to something that follows, "prospective." In "Avoid indiscriminate charity: it is a crime," "it" is retrospective.[6] In "It is a crime to ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... theme had all the desired effect upon Peregrine, who not only considered it as a piece of unmannerly abuse leveled against his own conduct, but also a retrospective insult on the memory of his grandfather, who, as he had been informed, was in his lifetime more noted for his ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... stretching and tension of healthy muscles, the deep draughts of out-of-door air, the excitement of rivalry, the comradeship of cooperative endeavor, the ABANDON of effort, the glow of achievement, contribute much in immediate and retrospective pleasure to the worth ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... equal force that they ought not to be at liberty to substitute a paper medium in the place of coin. Had every State a right to regulate the value of its coin, there might be as many different currencies as States, and thus the intercourse among them would be impeded; retrospective alterations in its value might be made, and thus the citizens of other States be injured, and animosities be kindled among the States themselves. The subjects of foreign powers might suffer from the same cause, and hence the Union be discredited and embroiled by the indiscretion of a single ...
— The Federalist Papers
... reasons would be required why the children deserved to be entitled a "thriving" family, to distinguish worthy from unworthy success. This manuscript collection might hereafter develop into a "golden book" of thriving families. The Chinese, whose customs have often much sound sense, make their honours retrospective. We might learn from them to show that respect to the parents of noteworthy children, which the contributors of such valuable assets to the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... be found in the collections of Hakluyt and Purchas. An article upon his travels, which were published in 1601, occurs likewise in the second volume of the Retrospective Review. The travels of the three brothers, Sir Thomas, Sir Anthony, and Master Robert Sherley, were published from the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... At the retrospective sight of all that merry, noisy little world, of all those fat, cheerful nurses, careless and laughing as they were, of those mothers each so tenderly expansive in contemplation of her child, so happy in its health and strength, so joyous and so proud ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... behind the scenes no one could tell. I raised my hat with the profoundest deference as the carriage containing the two ladies dashed by; I knew not which was the cleverest hypocrite of the two, therefore I did equal honor to both. I was in a meditative and retrospective mood, and when I reached the Toledo the distracting noises, the cries of the flower-girls, and venders of chestnuts and confetti, the nasal singing of the street-rhymers, the yells of punchinello, and the answering laughter of the populace, were all beyond my endurance. To gratify ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... guv'nor like you,' he said. 'Why make any concealments? Why not treat me open?' I gave him my most solemn honour that I was utterly at a loss to guess what he was talking about, on which he put me through a sort of retrospective catechism, broken by reminders to the horse. 'You don't rec'lect goin' easy over the bridge for to see the shipping? Nor yet the little narrer court right-hand side of the road, with an iron post under an arch and parties hollerin' murder at the far end? Nor yet the way ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... endowed with perfections such as none of his successors matched. On the other hand, the Golden Age of Judaism, as Kenan said, was thrown forward into the future. That on the whole Judaism has taken the prospective rather than the retrospective view, is the sole justification for the modern conception of the Messianic Age which is fast becoming predominant in the Synagogue. The Synagogue does not share ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... in taking retrospective glances, remember how they were devoted to women, the memory of whom calls up only a vague sort of wonder how they ever could have fallen into the state of infatuation in which they once were. The same may be said of many women. Heart-breaking separations ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticisms. The foregoing generations beheld God and Nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... a gay and laughing girl, and set all the place alight with her witcheries; she invented entertainments for their guests, games and revels for the villagers, and was the spirit of all. In one of their retrospective hours, Osmonde had told her of the thoughts he had dreamed on, as they had ridden homeward from the encampment of the gipsies—of his fancies of the comrade she would make for a man who lived a roving life. ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... The Retrospective Review, however (Vol. I, November, 1852), has an article, 'Mrs. Behn's Dramatic Writings,' which warmly praises her comedies. The writer very justly observes that 'they exhibit a brilliance of conversation ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... available on Internet. MICHELSON summarized this section on interpretation and analysis by noting that: 1) increasing numbers of humanities scholars in the library community are recognizing the importance to the advancement of scholarship of retrospective conversion of source materials in the arts and humanities; and 2) there is a growing realization that making the sources available on research and education networks maximizes their usefulness for the analysis performed by ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... numbers of what were deemed miracles may be explained by natural causes, by figurative modes of expression which were common in Oriental nations, by the tendency of the human mind to embellish or exaggerate surprising facts, or invent supernatural causes for what it is unable to explain, by the retrospective imagination which seeks to dignify the distant past with a supernatural halo. The early annals of all nations are strewn with pretended miracles which no one will now maintain, and Milman shows in a powerful passage how the idea of the miraculous has been steadily contracting and receding; how ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... received the command of the armies of the Rhine, while Massena, as a reward for the victory of Zurich, was made Commander-in-Chief in Italy, and while Brune was at the head of the army of Batavia, Bonaparte, whose soul was in the camps, consoled himself for his temporary inactivity by a retrospective glance on his past triumphs. He was unwilling that Fame should for a moment cease to blazon his name. Accordingly, as soon as he was established at the head of the Government, he caused accounts of his Egyptian expedition to be from time to time published in the Moniteur. He frequently ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... of the earth-moon evolution must from this point forward cease to be retrospective. Having begun at that critical moment when the month and day were first equal, we have traced the progress of events to the present hour. What we have now to say is therefore a forecast of events yet to come. So far as we can tell, no agent is likely to interfere ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... been the premarital shortcomings of my wardrobe as respects things unseen. No matter how well a bachelor may appear dressed, there is no telling what he conceals upon his person. I feel sure that the retrospective discovery of a ravelling would somehow displease Georgiana as a feature of our courtship. Nature is very stringent here, very guarded, truly universal. Invariably the young men of my day grow lavish in the use of unguents when they are preparing for natural selection; and I flatter ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen
... she is!' suddenly exclaimed Avice, whose attention had wandered somewhat from his retrospective discourse. She was looking from the window towards the cliffs, where, upon the open ground quite near at hand, a slender female form was seen rambling along. 'She is out for a walk,' Avice continued. 'I wonder if she is going to call here this afternoon? She is living ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... stream, O Nimrod of the waters, since you alone have the prestige of success. We will wander quietly in the woods, build a fire, fry the potatoes, and await your return with the fish." They go to the woods. I hang my prospective trout on my retrospective cod, and march river-ward. Halicarnassus, according to the old saw, "leaves this world, and climbs a tree," and, with jackknife, cord, and perseverance, manufactures a fishing-rod, which he courteously offers to me, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... those of perception by the intermediary of the thoughts of a living person; and the deceased is perceived through a mental representation. The experiment, for this reason, is valueless as evidence of the reality of retrospective psychometry and consequently of the recording part ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... are taken from St. Luke's Annual Report of 1851, containing a retrospective sketch of its history, for the use of which we are indebted to the present superintendent, Dr. Mickley. Statistics of recovery are given for different periods, but the fallacies attending such comparisons are so great that I have not cited ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... more for the moment; the paradox of this retrospective gratitude was too absorbing. What! Sir Asher was thankful because over three thousand years ago his ancestors had obtained—not without hard fighting for it—a land which had already been lost again for eighteen centuries. ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... life than the dingy foolery of the Corso. I walked down by the back streets to the steps mounting to the Capitol—that long inclined plane, rather, broken at every two paces, which is the unfailing disappointment, I believe, of tourists primed for retrospective raptures. Certainly the Capitol seen from this side isn't commanding. The hill is so low, the ascent so narrow, Michael Angelo's architecture in the quadrangle at the top so meagre, the whole place somehow ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... on the eve of a quiet chat went to her own room. It was in the gloaming and the girl enjoyed that hour more than words can tell. Her thoughts were happy ones. All was now bright and fair, and if at times she took a retrospective glance at the unhappy past it gave her more cause to be thankful. It always brought up a quotation from a sermon which she heard in a church ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... rising from the plain, he had stood unshaken by the surges or the winds. With that serenity of mind which arises from the consolations of a conscience void of offence toward God and man, he took a retrospective view; and with the eagerness of a prisoner about to be released from his cell, to breathe the free air of heaven and repose in peace in the bosom of his home, he approached the hour when he should bid adieu to the incessant labor and turmoil of political life. To his long-tried and dearly-loved ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... books, and a similar object is explained in our "Selector." We could hardly place "Sleeping in Church" under "Manners and Customs," and sleep altogether is rather prospective, (in dreaming,) than "Retrospective."—Yet reader, here it is—a still subject—but fresh, vigorous, and written ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... year 1843, two complete novels, viz. Honorine, and The Muse of the County, and a portion of an historical study on Catherine de Medici. This last work, to which the Calvinist Martyr belongs, was undertaken with the idea of composing, as he said, a retrospective history of France treated clairvoyantly, and, as the fragment shows, with his peculiar bias towards despotism. In the experiment made with Catherine de Medici, he started out thinking to justify and rehabilitate her memory. Instead, he found ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... the walk brought Jane's retrospective musings to an end. She saw Alicia a second before the latter saw her. Promptly rising, she headed Alicia off neatly as ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... Dabneys of Deer Trace—this was the old name of the estate, and it obtains to this day among the Paradise Valley folk—figure so largely in Thomas Jefferson's boyhood and youth as to be well-nigh elemental in these retrospective glimpses. ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... treating it as an admirable prop to war, the consequences and application will bring dismay. For here you have the pivot of a social revolution such as the world has never yet seen. It cannot only remain a question of Belgium, or Serbia, or Alsace-Lorraine. It will inevitably be retrospective and prospective. It cannot be limited to the possessions of Germany or Austria or Turkey. It will not pass over India, South Africa, and Egypt. All empires have been extended by conquest of unwilling ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... her age changeable as her mood. No longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing the cud of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a modest substance in the funds. A score of years are blown away. He is young Leopold. There, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then is seen, precociously manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house in Clanbrassil street to the high school, his booksatchel on ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... landscape, a place with a fine ancient fragment of castle, a place of lovely walks, a place possessing staid old houses richly fitted with old Honduras mahogany, which has grown so dark with time that it seems to have got something of a retrospective mirror-quality into itself, and to show the visitor, in the depth of its grain, through all its polish, the hue of the wretched slaves who groaned long ago under old Lancaster merchants. And Mr. ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... arm-chair as he spoke, apparently about to deliver himself to the calm delights of a retrospective reverie. But he was not destined to enjoy it. At that moment a whiff of stifling smoke, quite choking in its intensity, forced itself under the door. In another moment the matter was soon explained. With a wild rush the butler burst into ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 27, 1890 • Various
... Montaigne—we know the man better perhaps by this less presentation. If we would stop and trust heavily on the harvest of originality, he shows us that this plant—this part of the garden—is but a relative thing. It is dependent also on the richness that ages have put into the soil. "Every thinker is retrospective." ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... that Mrs. Stowe was wholly possessed by her theme, rapt away like a prophet in a vision, and that, in her feeling at the time, it was written through her quite as much as by her. This idea grew upon her mind in the retrospective light of the tremendous stir the story made in the world, so that in her later years she came to regard herself as a providential instrument, and frankly to declare that she did not write the book; "God wrote it." In her own account, when she reached the death of Uncle Tom, "the whole vital ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... a day long to be remembered, and Marjorie lived it for all that lay within her energetic young body and mind. Only the one flaw that marred its perfection and left her sober-eyed and retrospective when the eventful holiday was ended. She felt that one word of commendation from Mary would have been worth more than all the praise she had received from admiring friends. But Mary was as stony and implacable as ever, giving no sign of the ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... must be to you two, so happy in each other, to travel through the lovely summer days together, filling your minds and storing your memories with beautiful things of art and nature, which will be an intellectual treasure in common, and a fountain of delightful retrospective sympathy.... ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... forth a gesture of gladness or hope for the shadow at once to copy this gesture, and, flashing it back to the remotest, tiniest ruins of early childhood even, to extract unexpected treasure from all this wreckage. They know that they have retrospective action on all bygone deeds; and that the dead themselves will annul their verdicts in order to judge afresh a past that to-day has transfigured and endowed with ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... and, indeed, I have not myself been wholly free from apprehension of possible embarras, should we, at this period, visit London; for though M. d'Arblay not only could stand, but would court, all personal scrutiny, whether retrospective or actual, I see daily the extreme susceptibility which attends his very nice notions of honour, and how quickly and deeply his spirit is wounded by whatever he regards as injustice. Incapable, too, of ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... intimated, by a retrospective shake of the head, that he should never forget it—as indeed it was not likely he would, so long as it continued to be ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... secret, because his assistance, in the furtherance of plans which were always requiring, from little immaterial circumstances, some slight alterations, was found necessary; and it must here suffice those to know, who shall, after my destruction do me the melancholy favour of perusing this retrospective record, that some months after Antonia had taken the veil, I succeeded in restoring her to the arms of her lover, witnessed their private nuptials, visited them in their new residence, a villa in a secluded spot far from Padua, and received ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various
... ocean many times—have lived, not sojourned, on the banks of the Seine, and, as I shall never see the other side again—do not want to see it in its time of sorrow and garb of mourning—I may be forgiven a retrospective pause in this egotistic chronicle. Or, shall I not say, a word or two of affectionate retrogression, though perchance it leads me after the manner of Silas Wegg to drop into poetry and take a turn with a few ghosts into ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... shrill voices, through which yet ran a subtle harmony of mirth. Laughing faces nodded and uplifted like flowers in the merry romping throngs in the middle of the room, while the sober ones against the walls watched with grave, elderly, retrospective eyes. ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... those who have repeatedly enriched its Transactions, were distinguished by being collected into a separate and honourable list. It would also be found, perhaps, not less a future incentive than an act of retrospective justice, if the names of all those illustrious Fellows who have formerly obtained the medals, as well as of all those individuals who have been large benefactors to the Society, were recorded at the end of the list. It would ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... sins of the past was in itself deemed worthy of God,[282] the asserted specific result of baptism remained still very uncertain, and the hard tasks which it imposed, might seem more important than the merely retrospective gifts which it proffered.[283] Under such circumstances the rite could not fail to lead believers about to be baptized, to attribute value here to the mysterious as such.[284] But that always creates a state of things which not only facilitates, but positively prepares for the introduction of new ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... again. He had been led on by pure enthusiasm in his subject, and had really forgotten what bearing this retrospective survey had on his listener. He had found occasion for saying the same thing more than once before, and was not distinctly aware that he had ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... of a household," said Bridgie, with relish. There were few days when Captain Victor was not treated to a history of accidents and contretemps on his return home, but unlike most husbands he rather anticipated than dreaded the recital, for Bridgie so evidently enjoyed it herself, taking a keen retrospective joy over ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... statement, so far as it is true, is the flattest of all possible truisms; for no mortal ever maintained that there ever was a period in which all men were either good artists or good judges of art. But when we pass from the positive to the comparative degree of historic or retrospective criticism, we must ask whether the lecturer means to say that there have not been times when the general standard of taste and judgment, reason and perception, was so much higher than at other times and such periods may justly and accurately be defined as artistic. If he does mean to say ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... principal sufferer—that every new passion should involve him in new difficulties, and subject him to a degree of mental distress which would have reduced the flesh of any man not hopelessly predisposed to fatness. As Mr. Matthew Maltboy stood by the fire, he was not taking the profitable retrospective view of his life which he should have taken, but was glancing with an expression of concern at the circumference of a showy vest pattern which cut off the view ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... differing angles—so in writing, the attention of the reader naturally is called again and again to the same scenes. But this book is written not so much with an eye to its literary quality, as to afford the visitor to Lake Tahoe—whether contemplative, actual, or retrospective—a truthful and comprehensive account and description of the Lake and ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... do triumph, mother, we shall only save the family. Calyste has killed within me the holy fervor of love,—killed it by sickening me with all things. What a honey-moon was mine, in which I was made to feel on that first day the bitterness of a retrospective adultery!" ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... silent work, they could not help throwing a short retrospective glance on the former Observers ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... fellah has misread the Act—as usual. He thinks it's retrospective, and that he needn't pay past debts. They may make trouble, but I fancy your Bank will ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
