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More "Brooding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this, there grew up within my mind, a great and overwhelming distress of uneasiness, that left me, but to drop me into an uncomfortable brooding. I felt that I must fight against it; and, presently, hoping to distract my thoughts, I turned to the window, and looked up toward the North, in search of the nebulous whiteness, which, still, I believed to be the far and misty glowing of the universe we had ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... or a phrase—they do not know how cruel it is—or give a look—they do not know how cold it is—and are gone without a second thought about it; but it sinks into the woman's heart and rankles there. For the instant it is like a mortal blow, it hurts so, and in the brooding spirit it is exaggerated into a hopeless disaster. The wound will heal with a kind word, with kisses. Yes, but never, never without a little scar. But woe to the woman's love when she becomes ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... you," he burst out. "It's a thing I've never told any one else. But you fellows have been so white to me, to say nothing of one of you having risked his life for mine, that I'm going to take a chance. Perhaps it will be a relief anyway. Brooding over it so long and not confiding in any one, I've been afraid some time I might ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... confidence, had a design upon his life, he enjoyed no peace. He did not believe himself safe any where; but all things, by day as well as by night, the citizen as well as the foreigner, were suspected by him; and the blackest terrors sat for ever brooding over his mind. He never got a wink of sleep, except by stealth; and often changed his bed in a manner unbecoming his rank. Starting sometimes from his slumbers, he would snatch his sword, and utter loud cries; so strongly was he haunted by ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... This indicates a confusion in the minds of the Egyptian dragomans with the two brooding birds of Osiris, Isis and Nephthys, considered as Zarait, that is to say, as two birds of a different species, according to the different traditions either ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... beyond the trench, there was a sudden noise of ripping canvas, an agonised shout, and the heavy crash of a body encountering china. Then—silence. The sap parties heard only the oil-can; Percy FitzPercy for a wonder was not brooding over his invention, and there was no one who knew that close beside them in an odoriferous underground abode the Brigadier-General lay completely stunned, with his head in a metal soup tureen and his rather extensive set of uppers ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... tedious; it being a slow train, which plods on without haste and without rest. At about ten o'clock we reached Birkenhead, and there crossed the familiar and detestable Mersey, which, as usual, had a cloudy sky brooding over it. Mrs. Blodgett received me most hospitably, but was impelled, by an overflow of guests, to put me into a little back room, looking into the court, and formerly occupied by my predecessor, General Armstrong. . . . . She expressed a hope that I might not ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... young and much moved companion, he made a sign to a youth who was straying about the fields, to approach. This young warrior was made the bearer of an order to lead the captives to the hill, after which the two chiefs stalked to and fro in silence, each brooding over what had passed, in a humor that was suited to his particular character ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... Mr. Delaplaine sat brooding on the deck. The righteous anger kindled by the conduct of his brother-in-law, and his grief for the poor stricken women, sobbing in the cabin, combined together to throw him into the most dolorous state of mind, which was aggravated by the knowledge ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... initiative and resources for both work and play, there is going to be a great need of proper guidance, companionship, and comradeship, unless a great many are to be overtaken by some madness like Bolshevism or in a lesser degree—constant and brooding dissatisfaction. The American Legion post, with its leaders, is going to fill a great need here. It will be some place to go where a man can meet his fellows of the better type, and, not only indulge in the pleasure of discussing ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... as his own. More had seen in Wolsey's fall an opening for the realization of those schemes of religious and even of political reform on which the scholars of the New Learning had long been brooding. The substitution of the Lords of the Council for the autocratic rule of the Cardinal-minister, the break-up of the great mass of powers which had been gathered into a single hand, the summons of a Parliament, the ecclesiastical reforms which it at once sanctioned, were measures ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... swish of the paddles, was brooding and full of menace. Paul, so sensitive to circumstance, felt as if it were a sullen sky, out of which would suddenly come a blazing flash of lightning. But to Henry the greatest anxiety was the narrowing ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... wheeling across the sky above. Paimpol was always quiet on these long May evenings, even on Sundays; the lasses, who had not a single lad to make love to them, sauntered along, in couples or three together, brooding of their ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... is Hope's fair star extinguish'd quite In rayless night; And, Sion, as thy fortunes I bewail, Harsh sounds my voice, as of the birds that sail The stormy dark. Let but that star be mine, And through the tempest tremulously shine; So, when the brooding clouds have overpast, Rejoicing, with the dawn, may come at last, Even as an instrument, whose lively sound Makes the warm blood in every bosom bound, And whose triumphant notes are given Freely in songs of ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... details was, to her, a comfort, knowing his sympathy and the affection there had been between him and her father; nor had they parted in such absolute brightness, as to make them unprepared for such a meeting as the present. The cloud of suspense was brooding lower and lower over the May family, and the need of faith and submission was as great with them as with the young orphan herself. Norman said little, but that little was so deep and fervent, that after a time Meta could not help saying, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... his. Most of the books are dispersed, but the catalogue remains, not merely as a record of rareties and bibliographical details dear to the collector's heart, but as a token of taste. Just as there is, so Wordsworth reminds us, 'a spirit in the woods,' so is there still, brooding over and haunting the pages of the 'Rowfant Catalogue,' the spirit of true connoisseurship. In the slender lists of Locker's 'Works' this book must always have ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... after mine," he exclaims to officious infantrymen; "it is artillery that takes fortresses: infantry gives its help." The drudgery of the last weeks now yields fruitful results: his methodical mind, brooding over the chaos before him, flashes back to this or that detail in some coast fort or magazine: his energy hustles on the leisurely Provencaux, and in a few days he has a respectable park of artillery—fourteen cannon, four ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... steamy cloud to be at once licked up and absorbed by the heat from a snatching flame below. It was exactly a year and a day since her husband's death, and she had packed herself away in his own corner of the settle, her hands clasped across her knees, and her red-brown eyes brooding on the nearer embers. She was not definitely speculating on her future, nor had she any heart for retracing the dull and gentle past. She had simply relaxed hold on her mind; and so, escaping her, ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... within the range of practical politics. For fifteen or twenty years, Germany was, as Bismarck said, "sated"; but with the coming of the youthful, pushful, self-assertive Kaiser, her aggressive instincts re-awakened and she fell to brooding over the idea that her incomparable physical and spiritual energies were cabin'd, cribb'd, confined. The rapid growth of her population reinforced this idea, and the increase of her wealth, as was natural, only made her greedy for more. The result was that she gave her soul over in fatal ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... Brooding uncertainty had flooded the sparkle out of her eyes. She was statue-like in her stillness, her breaths impalpable in their softness. But the points of her knuckles were ghostly, sharp spots on her tightly clenched hands. All that Westerling could tell was that she was thinking, ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... active life; and live well too—by providing plenty to eat and plenty to drink—which with industry they could easily do. All this might not make them cheerful; but they would certainly be less a prey to melancholy while engaged in some active industry, than if they remained brooding ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... counsel and fine manners versed in all arts and sciences and accomplishments; and the King loved him with exceeding love and cherished him by reason of his proficiency in eloquence and rhetoric and the art of government and for that which Allah had given him of compassion and brooding care[FN58] with his lieges for he was a King just in his Kingship and a protector of his peoples, constant in beneficence to great and small and giving them that which befitted them of good governance and bounty ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... This continued brooding was not without its effect upon the girl, and slowly but surely destroyed her sense of proportion. No longer was the education and civilization of the Indians the uppermost thought in her mind. With Lapierre, she came to regard the crushing of MacNair's power ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... girl was wearing her heart out in brooding over the coming marriage. Jasper Wilde refused to be bought off, and Bernardine herself declared that it must take ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... Ted was brooding over the appearance of Farnsworth, and the startling events which followed, and particularly the crime at Rodeo, of which the young fellow ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... with Cap'n Cod and Winn, fascinated by the novelty of drifting down the great river at night. The lights that twinkled here and there along the shores earlier in the evening had disappeared, and the whole world seemed asleep. The brooding stillness was only broken by the distant hooting of owls, or the musical complainings of the swift waters as they chafed impatiently against some ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... Sunday, broke bright and clear. Contrary to his usual habit, the Brigade Major took a stroll in the garden before breakfast. The first object which caught his eye, as he came down the back-door steps, was the figure of the Staff Captain, brooding pensively over a large crater, close to the hedge. ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... adieu to pleasure, With her giddy, fleeting train; And her song of joyous measure, I may never raise again. Yet the chilling gloom of sadness, Waving o'er me, brooding ill, Emits one ray of gladness, For my hopes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 570, October 13, 1832 • Various
... towards him; and all conspired to sustain his father's confidence that, in his person, the family name would rival the proudest and most splendid in Italy's illustrious past.' His bewitching personality, his rollicking gaiety, his brooding thoughtfulness, his dauntless courage and his courtly ways swept all men off their feet; he had but to lead and they instinctively followed; he commanded and they unquestionably obeyed. He was nick-named the Flower of Assisi. He loved to be happy and to ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... inconceivable while there existed strife and suffering in nature. Nowhere could there be found refuge; drawing near unto the divine, this pain only became wider, more intense, almost insufferable, feeling and assimilating the vastness of divine sorrow brooding over the unreclaimed deep. This pity, this consciousness of pain, not her own, filling her own, filling her life, marked her out from everyone he knew. She seemed to him as one consecrated. Then this lover in his mystic passion passed in the contemplation of his well-beloved ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... brooding over the Susquehanna, and the autumn leaves were being tinged with red. The struggle of the year 1778 seemed over and Brant decided to spend the winter at Niagara. Accordingly he set out with a band of warriors from his entrenched ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... 'You have been brooding over your own wrongs, which your distorted fancy has painted as perhaps the most insufferable in the whole circle of existence! How could you be so blind? Look at the mass of evil, by which you are surrounded! What is its origin? Ignorance. Ignorance is the source of all evil; and there ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... quiet afternoon of Saturday, the peace of the approaching Sabbath seemed already brooding over the little dwelling, peace had not lent her hand to the building of the home. Every foot of land, every shingle, every nail, had been wrung from the reluctant sea. Every voyage had contributed something. ...
— Eli - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... him merely another phase of duty. He had no real appetite; he would have preferred to sit brooding at ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... tinder. The fish were baked over the fire thus kindled. Though the outside was smoked, the inside was sweet and palatable, and neither was disposed to be fastidious. The preparation of the meal took considerable time, but they had abundance of that, and occupation prevented their brooding ...
— Brave and Bold • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... of waste, through which nature and fortune may deal on occasion with those whose faculty for application is all and only in their imagination and their sensibility. There may be during those bewildered and brooding years so little for them to "show" that I liken the individual dunce—as he so often must appear—to some commercial traveller who has lost the key to his packed case of samples and can but pass for a fool while other ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... wake the woods. Councils of war, they call them, these revels; but they end ever the same, with Sir John borne off to bed too drunk to curse the slaves who shoulder his fat bulk, and Walter Butler, sullen, stunned by wine, a brooding thing of malice carved in stone; and father roaring his same old songs, and beating time with his long pipe till the stem snaps, and he throws ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... while he still retained his work of coloring and preparing the patterns for use in the weaving of the famous Ardsley carpets. He looked a far stronger, healthier lad than of old, and his disposition to think upon the dark side of things had now no time to develop, for activity effectually prevents brooding. ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... beautiful creature, long, slender, glossy, with white belly and black-tipped ears and tail. She did not resemble the heavy, grim-faced brute that always hung in the air of my dreams. A low, brooding menacing murmur, that was not a snarl nor a growl, came from her. She watched the dogs with bright, steady eyes, and never so much as ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... "the free queen of the air," living at her own wild will, suddenly fettered and brooding on her nest, and covering her helpless young with her tender wings—we see some faint image of the Divine tenderness. In the ceaseless toil of both the parent birds from morning till night to fill the little gaping throats we begin to feel the duty ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... Conscience. The possessor of the stones held this attitude for three or four minutes. Then he rolled up the cotton wool, jammed it into the pouch, which he hung to his neck by a thong, and sprang to his feet. No more of this brooding; it was sapping his vitality; and he was not yet at his ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... cannot sympathize with me. Mr. Musgrave never makes his now daily appearance—he comes, as I jubilantly notice, as regularly as the postman—until late in the afternoon. All day, therefore, I must refrain myself and be silent. And I am never one for brooding with private dumbness over my woes. I much prefer to air them by expression and complaint. About noon it strikes me that, faute de mieux, I will go and see Mrs. Huntley, tell her suddenly that Roger is not coming ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... nothing else than the deep heart of God Himself. This river rose in the House of the Lord, and amidst the mysteries of the Divine Presence; it took its rise, one might say, from beneath the Mercy-seat where the brooding Cherubim sat in silence and poured itself into a world that had not asked for it, that did not expect it, that in many of its members did not desire it and would not have it. The river that rose in the secret place of God symbolises for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... was restored to strength, of course these cares ceased. But now the new instincts of motherhood absorbed her, and, brooding over the rosy child that was her own, caressing its waking, or hanging above its sleep, she scarce noted that her husband's absences from home grew more and more frequent, that strange visitors ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... in the rear kitchen was set alight; the wooden table in the center was spread with cloth and cutlery; and they sat down opposite each other, utterly alone ... no boarding—house flutter and gossip and noise, no unpleasant jarring personalities, no wholesale cookery. All was quiet and peace—a brooding, tinkling silence. They both smiled and smiled, their eyes moist, and the food tasted so good. Blessed bread that they broke together, the cup that they shared between them! The moment became sacred, human, ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... future honourable grand-children. He was, from these fanciful causes, unusually affable and indulgent to Maria; spoke so kindly always that she was all but dissolving thrice a-day; and, from his constant reveries about the countess, appeared perpetually to be brooding over dear Maria's soon approaching loss. Poor girl! more than once she had determined to give it all up, and make her father happy by serving him still in single blessedness: but then, how could she break dear Henry's heart, as well as her own? No, no: they should live very near to Finsbury ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... on the top step and resumed his brooding, his head sunk on his arms, which were folded on his knees. He felt a deep sense of injury, and his sorrow for himself was acute. He was only half conscious of his sufferings, but they were dully insistent, above the deadening ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... sober reflection of manhood, even in minds capable of sober reflection. The Civil War, be it noted, did not depose the insolent Britisher from his bad eminence in the schoolboy imagination. The Confederates were, after all, Americans, though misguided Americans; and the fostering, the brooding upon, intestine rancours was felt by teachers and pupils alike to be impossible. But there is in the juvenile mind at any given moment a certain amount of abstract combativeness, let us call it, which must find an outlet somewhere. Hatred is a natural function ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... time he descended the well-known path. He must have crossed the brook KEDRON—that brook which had so oft before murmured in His ear during night-seasons of deep sorrow—He must have passed by GETHSEMANE—the thick Olives pendant with dew, the shadows of early day still brooding over them. Their gloomy vistas must have recalled terrible hours, when the sod underneath was moistened with "great drops of blood." Can we dare to imagine His sensations and feelings when passing now? ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... and I went together to THE CLUB, where we found Mr. Burke, Mr. Garrick, and some other members, and amongst them our friend Goldsmith, who sat silently brooding over Johnson's reprimand to him after dinner. Johnson perceived this, and said aside to some of us, 'I'll make Goldsmith forgive me;' and then called to him in a loud voice, 'Dr. Goldsmith,—something ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... some resistless river. In this one it advances with the diffusive and straggling movement of a summer cloud. The drift and meaning of the piece, accordingly, do not stand boldly out. That astute thinker, Ulrici, for instance, after much brooding upon it, ties his mental legs in a hard knot and says that Shakespeare intended, in this piece, to illustrate that man is not the master of his own destiny. There must be liberal scope for conjecture when a philosopher can make such ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... (the "derashot") and explain them in a rationalistic manner so as to remove what appears on the surface to be offensive to sound reason. But instead of proceeding at once to the performance of this cherished object of his philosophic ambition, he kept it in his bosom, brooding over it during a life of intense literary and practical activity, until it was in the end matured and brought to fruition in a manner quite different from that at first intended. The book explanatory of the Rabbinic ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... put to the question by the great council of Amphictyons? Had they not been smothered in onions by the terrible men of Pyquag? In the midst of this consternation and perplexity, when horror, like a mighty nightmare, sat brooding upon the little, fat, plethoric city of New Amsterdam, the ears of the multitude were suddenly startled by the distant sound of a trumpet;—it approached—it grew louder and louder—and now it resounded at the city gate. The public could not be mistaken in ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... Mary was determined that this one shouldn't be spoiled by Walter Blythe's silly blather about Pipers and Germans and such like absurd things. They left Walter standing alone on the rock steps, looking out over the beauty of Four Winds with brooding eyes that saw ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... saturnine, brooding way the warmth of April sunshine and the stirring greenery of awakening life now beginning to soften the brown austerity of the dead winter earth. Beside her kitchen wall the pink cones of rhubarb were showing, and the fat buds of the lilacs, which clustered ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... only true creed by which a man should shape his existence. But it must not be supposed that books brought repose to the mind and heart of Marmaduke Lovel. He was a disappointed man, a discontented man, a man given to brooding over the failure of his life, inclined to cherish vengeful feelings against his fellow-men on account of that failure. Books to him were very much what they might have been to some fiery-tempered ambitious soldier of fortune buried alive in a prison, without hope of release,—some ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... I am constantly discovering that, however original I may wish to be, I am continually producing the same things which other people say or write. Whenever, after producing something which gives me perfect satisfaction, and which has cost me perhaps days and nights of brooding, I chance to take up a book for the sake of a little relaxation, a book which I never saw before, I am sure to find in it something more or less resembling some part of what I have been just composing. You will easily conceive ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... The brooding Hen is no more assiduous, but she is also a heating-apparatus and, with the gentle warmth of her body, awakens the germs to life. For the Spider, the heat of the sun suffices; and this alone keeps me from saying that ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... moment; it will run better thus:—"The Honourable Augustus Bouverie no sooner perceived himself alone, than he felt the dark shades of melancholy ascending and brooding over his mind, and enveloping his throbbing heart in their—their adamantine chains. Yielding to the overwhelming force, he thus exclaimed, 'Such is life—we require but one flower, and we are offered noisome ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... friendship of Jesus is perfect. Its touch is always gentle and full of healing. Its helpfulness is always wise. Its tenderness is like the warmth of a heavenly summer, brooding over the life which accepts it. All the love of God pours forth in the friendship of Jesus. To be his beloved is to be held in the clasp of the everlasting arms. "I and my Father are one," said Jesus; his friendship, therefore, is the friendship of the Father. Those who accept ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... improvement in their condition. Both were impatient of the pinchings of poverty. Neither was constitutionally disposed to work hard and patiently for an honest competence. The celebrated "Female Pills" formed the philosopher's stone which released them from this condition of chafing discontent and brooding unrest. From what source a knowledge of the ingredients requisite for the composition of a pill for such a diabolical purpose was derived, or whether, indeed, the pill was effective or diabolical at all, remains a mystery, inasmuch as none ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... in his study, brooding over the great problem that would be solved before long, when a man dressed in black silently entered the room. Looking on Chan with a kindly smile which seemed to find its way instantly to his heart, he ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... the refuse of sugar canes. Around lay negroes, some asleep, and others muttering to each other in an under-tone. Here and there sat one perfectly silent, wrapped in his own reflections, and apparently brooding over some gloomy plan. The oxen paced slowly round the pole, which directed the movement of the cylinders; the animals alternately disappearing in the obscure background, and returning to the point where the glare of the fire, falling full upon them, lighted them ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... last they made the slope a place of prayer, Where marvellous thoughts from God came sweeping down. They left their churches crumbling in the sun, They met on that soft hill, one brotherhood; One strength and valor only, one delight, One laughing, brooding genius, great and good. Now many gray-haired prodigals come home, The place out-flames the cities of the land, And twice-born Brahmans reach us from afar, With subtle eyes prepared to understand. Higher and higher burns the eastern ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... the ruck of Fastolfe's frantic battle-corps and tore through it like a hurricane, leaving a causeway of the dead stretching far behind; no tarrying, no slacking rein, but on! on! on! far yonder in the distance lay our prey—Talbot and his host looming vast and dark like a storm-cloud brooding on the sea! Down we swooped upon them, glooming all the air with a quivering pall of dead leaves flung up by the whirlwind of our flight. In another moment we should have struck them as world strikes world when disorbited constellations ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... asked whom he intended to consult, and there was some talk on physicians, but the subject was turned off by Mr. Sandbrook bending down to point out to little Owen a beautiful carving of a brooding dove on her nest, which formed the central bracket of the ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... changed too. They had been the background to his exploits. They had become brooding, mysterious partners whose purpose with him he had not fathomed. The things that ran across his path, the quaint furry hares and scurrying pheasants had ceased to be objects on which he could vent his strength and cunning. They were live ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... "Hearing that his sire had been slain, king Dhritarashtra of Kuru's race filled with anxiety and grief, obtained no peace of mind. And while he, of Kuru's race, was thus continually brooding over that sorrow, Gavalgana's son of pure soul once more came to him. Then, O monarch, Dhritarashtra, the son of Amvika, addressed Sanjaya, who had that night come back from the camp to the city called after the elephant. With a heart rendered exceedingly cheerless in ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... have been the case had there been a mother among the elders of the house, for mothers have a way of understanding these things. But to Emmy Lou "mother" had come to mean but a memory which faded as it came, a vague consciousness of encircling arms, of a brooding tender face, of yearning eyes; and it was only because they told her that Emmy Lou remembered how mother had gone away South, one winter, to get well. That they afterward told her it was heaven, in nowise confused Emmy ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... Tristram was playing upon his harp and singing before King Mark, and the King sat brooding upon these things as he gazed at Tristram. And Sir Tristram, as he ofttimes did nowadays, sang of the Lady Belle Isoult, and of how her face was like to a rose for fairness, and of how her soul was like to a nightingale in that it uplifted the spirit of whosoever was near her even though ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... I'm not alive?" tolled the bell. "I sit all day in my little wooden temple, brooding over ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... firm dignity in the attitude of Aristides in the Museum of Naples,—from the delicate lines which teach how grace can chasten nudity in the Goddess of the Tribune at Florence, to the embodied melancholy of Hamlet in the brooding Lorenzo of the Medici Chapel,—from the stone despair, the frozen tears, as it were, of all bereaved maternity, in the very bend of Niobe's body and yearning gesture, to the abandon gleaming from every muscle of the Dancing Faun,—from the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Dante, of Cincinnatus, of Caesar, of Scipio, lose nothing of their pomp or their lustre in his hands, and when he begins and continues a strain of panegyric on such subjects, we indeed sit down with him to a banquet of rich praise, brooding ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... heart of that father relented, or whether, weary of brooding over his disappointed hopes of a worldly sort, his pride saw prospect of indulgence in another direction, we leave it for subsequent events to determine. The kind parson was successful, and Elizabeth was soon ordered ...
— Elizabeth: The Disinherited Daugheter • E. Ben Ez-er
... grandfather Emmons was," the men said in the store. Barney could dimly remember that old figure bent over almost on all-fours like a dog; its wretched, grizzled face turned towards the earth with a brooding sternness of contemplation. He wondered miserably where his grandfather's old cane was, when he should be strong enough in his pain-locked muscles to leave his rocking-chair and crawl about in the spring sunshine. It used to be in the garret of the old house. He thought that he would ask ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... captive's cage[257][it] What thoughts will there be thine, While brooding in thy prisoned rage? But one—"The world was mine!" Unless, like he of Babylon,[258] All sense is with thy sceptre gone,[259] Life will not long confine That spirit poured so widely forth— So long obeyed—so ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... he might have said to Ruth in the days when the opportunity was his. For a moment he even thought of Mr. Jarvis at the music-hall alone, the welcoming lights, the pleasant warmth, the music, the cheerful throngs of people. Better anything, he told himself, than this brooding! A sudden almost reckless impulse called him back again into the streets, only to pass away the same moment with the vision of Ruth's pale face by his side, her eyes alternately gazing down the lighted way and seeking his, her fingers grasping his hand. His head sank forward ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... general prospects of his business for the season, or from indulging in any of the various light conversational diversions whereby barbers, Fulton street tailors, and other depressed gymnasts, are occasionally and wholesomely relieved from the misery of brooding over their ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... along, suddenly he saw a man in black standing right in his path, about fifty yards distant, in a field of some growing barley or wheat. The gloomy stranger was standing stock-still; one outstretched arm, with weird intimation pointing towards the deceased Squire's abode. To the brooding soul of the now desolate Israel, so strange a sight roused a supernatural suspicion. His conscience morbidly reproaching him for the terrors he had bred in making his escape from the house, he seemed to see in the fixed gesture of the stranger something more than ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... tracts of fertility and sunshine, the possessors of opulence, splendor, and luxury, with a deep, settled, systematic aversion; with a disposition to contemplate in any other light than that of a calamity an extensive downfall of the favorites of fortune, when a brooding imagination figures such a thing as possible; and with but very slight monitions from conscience of the iniquity of the most tumultuary accomplishment of such a catastrophe. In a word, so far from considering their own welfare as identified with the stability of the existing social order, they consider ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... full, however unjustly awarded to him. I must suffer for my ignorance of legal technicalities. Mortifying as this is it is better, perhaps, to suffer it with a good grace and even with cheerfulness, if possible, rather than endure the wear and tear of the spirits which a brooding over the gross fraud occasions. An opportunity of setting ourselves right in regard to him may be not far off in the future. Till then let us stifle at least all outward expressions of disgust or indignation ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... uncreased, and only for the lack of boots and pistol he might have passed for a man of the range. The bartender who served him looked at him with rather puzzled and frequent sidelong turning of the eyes as he stood brooding over the untasted liquor, as if he sought to place him in memory, or to classify him among the drift of men who came in varying moods to his mahogany altar to pay their ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... was not mistaken. The shape of the nest, like a pine-cone, its color and texture, and the lining, which showed through, made him smile. He heard the hiss of the brooding bird ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... they were obliged to wait until rooms were free. In this interval, brooding over the melancholy absence of a friend or relative in whom she could confide, her morbid dread of the future decided her on completing the parallel between herself and that other lost creature of whom she had read. Sydney opened communication ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... Naples fully deserved its world-wide reputation for beauty on this bright spring afternoon. Across its waters rose hill upon hill, the sombre giant Vesuvius brooding like some dark monster over the ruined countryside at its base, the lovelier, more hopeful snow-crowned peaks behind rising like a fairy army beneath whose beneficent gaze the ogre was—for the ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... later he stood on the veranda gazing out at the streaming cattle as they moved toward the wide home pastures, under the practised hands of the ranchmen. It was a sight to inspire any cattleman, and, for a moment, the brooding eyes of the master of it all lit with a flash of their former appreciation. But the change was fleeting. The blue depths clouded again. The question once more flashed through his brain—what—what was ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... at the door of the barn, brooding over all he had seen and discovered, he felt that there were but two courses open to him. He must either, in his own phraseology, "get out or go on." And by that he meant he must either renounce all his affection for his ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... the anniversary of poor Miss Cameron's death! How strange!" "It certainly appeared so to me at first," he rejoined. "But when my mind reverted to it afterwards, I thought it exceedingly probable that his own knowledge of the fact had itself hastened his end, for he had no doubt been long brooding over it, and maybe desired that his death should occur that particular day and hour. In his enfeebled condition, such a desire would have great physical effect; I have known several similar cases. But however ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... of Miss Williams, the misery of that poor girl, and the doubt of what his designs might once have been on herself, preyed altogether so much on her spirits, that she could not bring herself to speak of what she felt even to Elinor; and, brooding over her sorrows in silence, gave more pain to her sister than could have been communicated by the most open and most frequent ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... from this illness, however—or rather seemed to be recovered—her spirits were quite gone; and she was always crying, often talking of death and dying, and brooding over sad things. When the family physician who attended her was told how it was, he advised that she should go to school, and mix with other children, and he recommended ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... of the next day in brooding over his anger and humiliation. He reproached himself for not having given a slap in the face to Cisy. As for the Marechale, he swore not to see her again. Others as good-looking could be easily found; and, as money would be required in order to possess these women, he ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... well. Sullen, brooding hatred had gained possession of her and of Long Robin. As Esther and some of the tribe had learned to forgive Trevlyn for the sake of Wyvern, those twain and a few others had come to hate Wyvern for ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the human struggle of all kinds, gave it diversity and detail; but its life was the American spirit, the epic action of a people taking primitive possession, battling with its various foes, making its world. Irving, more brooding and reminiscent, gave legend to the landscape, transformed rudeness with humour and brought elements of picturesqueness into play; and in him, in whom the new race was more mature, was first shown that nostalgia for the past, which ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of a well-made and powerful woman. In her countenance might be read a peculiar blending of sternness and benignity, each evidently softened down by an expression of melancholy—perhaps of suffering—as if some secret care lay brooding at her heart. The inside of the hovel itself had every mark of poverty and destitution about it. Two or three stools, a pot or two, one miserable standing bed, and a smaller one gathered up under a rug in the corner, were almost ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... that brooding stillness, Napoleon entered upon the last phase of his greatness, his brief Reign ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... and this had only seen the summer of twenty. But a precious odor breathed from the casks, and the corroding capsules confessed the mighty powers that lurked within. Inhaling this odor, you seemed to see the Original White Hermit himself, brooding over his tiny principality of barren rock, and performing miracles with the aid of the imported carboy and the indigenous rill. As the evening gloomed, and twilight fell among the crags, a faint snicker spread upon the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... coloured a pale red, which he allowed to flop down on to the floor. The man was motionless except that he violently wagged his left big toe. And all the time he made a continuous cooing, purring noise, like that of a brooding hen. ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... of suffering. Nor let devices of this sort be deemed unworthy of a place even among duties; for they are often essential means to ends of high importance. They assert and maintain the rightful supremacy of the mind over the body; they supersede that morbid brooding upon painful experiences which generates either melancholy or querulousness; and they leave in the moral nature an unobstructed entrance to all soothing ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... Mona Macdonald sat at breakfast in a room at Stillyside. She was plainly and neatly dressed; and with her sat a figure more lady-like, and still in her teens, attired simply, but with negligent taste. Both seemed abstracted, and, as they silently sipped their tea, appeared to be brooding over some recent, sad subject of conversation. The weather, too, without, was as sombre as the mood within. A canopy of cold, grey clouds covered the sky; the air was chilly, and the wind swayed the trees to and ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... was quiet. She rode ahead, hardly noticing the scenery, with her head dropped on her chest. At luncheon she took a sardine sandwich and withdrew to a tree, underneath which she sat, a lonely and brooding figure. ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... its effects as character. As types of character, the lineaments of the face were explored by the later Greek Art as profoundly as the rest of the body. But the statue is sightless,—its eyes do not meet ours, but seem forever brooding over a world into which the present and its interests do not enter. To the Greek this was no defect; but to us the omission seems to affect the most vital point of all, since our conception of the soul involves its eternity, that is, that it lives always ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... beneath skies unfamiliar, with small light from the stars, without chart, without pilot, the port to which we are bound being one as yet unvisited by mortal man—or woman! Heavy mist, and dark cloud, and threatening storm appear to us brooding over that doubtful sea. But something of prophetic vision is required of us. We are told that all perils which seem to threaten the first stages of our course are entirely illusive—that they will vanish as we approach—that we shall soon arrive in halcyon waters, and regions ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... unmarred by dissipation, or brutal or degrading passions. For, though Tarzan of the Apes was a killer of men and of beasts, he killed as the hunter kills, dispassionately, except on those rare occasions when he had killed for hate—though not the brooding, malevolent hate which marks the features of its ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Although I shared his secret, I could not lighten the burden of his superstition. His wound had entirely healed, but as his leg was still weak and he still continued to limp a little, he could not resume his place in the circus. Between brooding over his superstition and worrying about his accident, he grew very despondent. The climax of his hopelessness was reached when the doctor told him at last that he would never be able to vault again. The fracture had been a severe one, the bone having protruded ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... it must be remembered that he took delight in what would to many men be a weariness of the flesh. The obviously sincere belief, however, in his own happiness proves at least one thing. He was thoroughly contented with his own position. He was never brooding over vexations, or dreaming of what might have been. Could he have been asked by Providence at any time, Where shall I place you? his answer would almost always have been, Here. He gives, indeed, admirable reasons for being satisfied. He had superabundant health and strength, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... saying to himself. "I hain't afeerd o' nothin' nor nobody;" but he lay brooding until his head throbbed, until darkness filled the narrow gorge, and the strip of dark blue up through the trees was pointed with faint stars. He was troubled when he rose, and climbed on Rome's horse and rode homeward—so troubled that he turned finally and started ...
— The Last Stetson • John Fox Jr.
... a peculiar complexion to the profligacy, the jealousy, and the vengeance of the Italians. I shall have occasion elsewhere to maintain that in their literature at least the Italians were not a highly imaginative race; nor were they subject to those highly wrought conditions of the brooding fancy, termed by the northern nations Melancholy, which Duerer has personified in his celebrated etching, and Burton has described in his Anatomy. But in their love and hatred, their lust and their cruelty, the Italians required an intellectual ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... at heart, and soon took his departure, brooding deeply over that which Nika had advanced. True, he was the first in the land, but could he interfere? He would try. Chios was a noble fellow, and would lay down his life rather than be guilty of a mean act. There must be some great mystery behind it all. What could it be? Chios the generous, truthful, ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... ever known it to drag before. They no longer sat and talked of the White Squaw, and speculated as to her identity, and the phenomenon of her birth, and her mission with regard to her tribe. Somehow the outspoken enthusiasm of Nick had subsided into silent brooding; and Ralph needed no longer the encouragement of his younger brother to urge him to think of the strange white creature. Each had taken the subject to himself, and nursed and fostered ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... grandfather was as silent at home as elsewhere as to the ill that his enemy meditated toward him, so silent that even hopeful grannie grew first doubtful and then anxious, fearing more than she would have feared any outburst of bitterness, this silent brooding over evils that might be drawing near. She dropped a cheerful word now and then as to the certainty that they would never be left in their old age to anxiety and trouble; but though he usually assented to her words, it ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... fact, been brooding over some affair of the heart. A day in advance he therefore gave proper injunctions to Pei Ming. "As I shall be going out of doors to-morrow at daybreak," he said, "you'd better get ready two horses and wait at the back door! No one else ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... Kari, who of late had been sad-faced and brooding, and who did not eat with us, entered and whispered to me that my Master of Lading from the docks prayed to see me at once on a matter which would brook no delay. Making excuse to Blanche and the company, I went out to ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... day has been all confusion and wretchedness. How can I write about it?—and yet, I must write. Anything is better than brooding over ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... I was always brooding over this idea of the daemonic with which my mind was filled. I recorded my thoughts on the subject in my first long essay (lost, for that matter), On the Daemonic, as it Reveals Itself ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... even to think of the extra twirl that turned an n into an m, without first removing any knick-knacks that might be about. Nevertheless, he now proposed a third set-to, and Grizel acquiesced, though she thought it but another of his inventions to keep her from brooding. ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... sentimental. She had had her longings and dreams, and an abundance of those great vague heartaches which only sentimental people can have. She had gone through with the whole—the sweet hopes, the yearning expectancy, the vague anxiety, the brooding doubt, the slow giving up—the reluctant acceptance of her fading life. Her romance died hard. Very gradually, and with many a protest, the woman of heartaches and sentiment glided into the practical and commonplace ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... minutes before six I opened the gate at the Sloman cottage. It was so late in September that the morning was a little hazy and uncertain. And yet the air was warm and soft—a perfect reflex, I thought, of Bessie last night—an electric softness under a brooding cloud. ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... not a little; I foresaw the brooding storm, and armed myself with resolution for the occasion; but Narcissa, being at stake, I was far from being resigned. I could have renounced every other comfort of life with some degree of fortitude, but the prospect of losing her disabled ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... concealment, and possibly as a congenial sentry over the interior associations. Since then the place had become the clergyman's almost daily resort. Pacing the contracted floor, sitting moodily in the chair,—many a brooding hour had gone over his barrenly busy head, and written its darkening record in his book of life. Here had been schemed that plan of revenge, whose insanity the insane schemer could not perceive. Nor could he understand that mightier ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Saturday night following the election Harboro came home and found a letter waiting for him on the table in the hall. He found also a disquieted Sylvia, who looked at him with brooding and a question ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... the hushed bigness of that land the man walked with his thoughts—brooding, perhaps, over whatever it was that had so strangely placed him there—dreaming, it may be, over that which might have been, or that which yet might be—viewing with questioning, wondering, half-fearful eyes the mighty, untamed scenes that met his eye on every hand. ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... suspicion by the children not as a nurse, but as a playmate. Weeks passed. The four played together with a greater harmony than the three had ever attained. Day after day the Reverend Orme sat waiting in his study and brooding. The dreaded call never came. He began to distrust ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... impelled partly by the hostility to slavery which in him was a master passion. He was a man personally upright and kindly, of only moderate interest and capacity for the ordinary practical affairs of life, given to brooding on public events and ideal causes, and viewing them with a fanatic's narrowness and a fanatic's absorption. He was a belated Puritan, and his natural place would have been with Cromwell's Ironsides. His ideas were largely influenced ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... district, as in all others where slavery sits brooding, (I have frequently heard this admitted, even by those who are its warmest advocates:) there is an air of ruin and decay abroad, which is inseparable from the system. The barns and outhouses are mouldering away; ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... and valleys, and away in the distance to the west showed the white town and castle of Elmina and the nine-mile road thither, skirting the surf-bound seashore, only broken on its level way by the mouth of the Sweet River. Over all was the brooding silence of the noonday heat, broken only by the dulled thunder of ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... motives for Richard's expedition are variously stated by different authors. That usually assigned by the English—a desire to divert his mind from brooding over the loss of his wife, "the good Queen Anne," seems wholly insufficient. He had announced his intention a year before her death; he had called together, before the Queen fell ill, the Parliament at Westminster, which readily ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... her silent brooding Tommy talked incessantly. He had passed from the subject of the doctor and Joyce Meredith to Bobby Smart who had obtained a transfer to a distant station on the railway, and was rejoiced that he would soon see the last of Mrs. Fox with whom he was ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... boats, and the birds twittered in the leafy trees and the lobelias and calceolarias were woven into wonderful patterns by the gardeners. Then she would throw herself down on the thick grass and look up in mystic rapture at the brooding blue sky and forget to read the book she had brought with her, while the other children chased one another about in savage delight. Only once on a Saturday afternoon when her father was not with them, did she get Dutch Debby to ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... there originates the whole universe of things, sentient and non-sentient. The next soka (tapasa kiyate, &c.) states particulars about this origination of the universe from Brahman. 'Brahman swells through brooding'; through brooding, i.e. thought—in agreement with a later text, 'brooding consists of thought'—Brahman swells, i.e. through thought in the form of an intention, viz. 'may I become many,' Brahman becomes ready for creation. From it there ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... to a swarm of birds, with jarring cries Descend on me my swarming memories; Light mid the yellow leaves, that shake and sigh, Of the bowed alder—that is even I!— Brooding its shadow in the violet Unprofitable river of Regret. They settle screaming—Then the evil sound, By the moist wind's impatient hushing drowned, Dies by degrees, till nothing more is heard Save the ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... my punishment now," he replied, with darkly brooding glance. "There's a good old man and two women, my sisters, waitin' for me down the slope. If I could reach home I'd try to live straight, but it's a long and dangerous trail between here ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... the rocks, and to fill the sails of one or two tiny vessels speeding toward the coast of Spain. There is just enough sun to warm the water in the pools to a point that makes bathing the most desirable mid-day pastime, and over land and sea a solemn sense of peace is brooding. From where the tents are set no other human habitation is in sight. A great spur of rock, with the green and scarlet of cactus sprawling over it at will, shuts off lighthouse and telegraph station, while the towering hills above hide ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... cling to it, we live by it. So many buildings have tumbled about our ears, so many foundations were nothing but running sand; a whole galaxy of truths turned out to be lies. Now we must prepare that which is solid and indestructible. Perhaps some great and wise spirit brooding over our world, learned with the experience of aeons, of human attempts and mistakes, smiles at the deadly earnestness of the intention to reconstruct. I do not care. We have reached a pass when all life and all hope are centred in this faith: the faith that we can make ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... doubt, but very still, save when a weary sigh or a groan told of suffering. Among the beds, which stood in a row, each with its head against the wall, one was pointed out on which a living skeleton lay. The face was very very pale, and it seemed as if the angel of death were already brooding over it. Yet, though so changed, there was no mistaking the aspect and the once powerful frame of ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... which sometimes follows a night of insomnia I was awakened by the laughter and shouts of children. When I looked out I saw brooding above the hollow a still gray day, in whose light the woodlands of the park were all in sombre brown, and the trout stream between its sedgy ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... exciting days there were many little moving distractions about to keep one from brooding o'ermuch on thoughts of lacking provender. I boast not, but merely utter a verity, when I state that every time I shook myself I shifted the center of population. Where we had been the lesser wild life of midcontinental Europe abounded. In the matter of a distinction which had come ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... from a return of the poison? Or would the earth be uninhabitable from the mephitic products of universal decay? Or, finally, might our awful situation prey upon and unbalance our minds? A group of insane folk upon a dead world! My mind was brooding upon this last dreadful idea when some slight noise caused me to look down upon the road beneath me. The old cab horse was coming ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... perused and re-perused the despatches of the Queen, and were brooding in no little despondency over their contents, Longinus re-entering ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... skies, have held, still hold, their secrets; but they do not seek for yours. The terrific temples, the hot, mysterious tombs, odorous of the dead desires of men, crouching in and under the immeasurable sands, will muck you with their brooding silence, with their dim and sombre repose. The brown children of the Nile, the toilers who sing their antique songs by the shadoof and the sakieh, the dragomans, the smiling goblin merchants, the Bedouins who lead your camel into the pale recesses of the dunes—these will not trouble ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... life at Bologna, Cardan seems to have lived comparatively alone, and to have spent his weary leisure in brooding over his sorrows. He began his long rambling epilogue to the De Libris Propriis, and, almost on the threshold, pours out his sorrow afresh over Gian Battista's unhappy fate. After affirming that Death must necessarily come as a friend ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... occasionally, but never hunted. The sportsman's tastes were not his, nor were his social tastes demonstrative. Possibly they may have been restrained in some measure by his mother's strictness of religious principles. He was neither morose nor brooding,—not a dreamer of destiny. He yearned for no star. No instinct of his future achievements made him peculiar among his companions or caused him to hold himself aloof. He exhibited nothing of the young Napoleon's distemper of gnawing pride. He was just an ordinary American ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... her first rush of sustaining compassion. Gone was her fear for her father and her tenderness to him. Only this numb coldness, this dumb, helpless certainty of a destiny about to be accomplished.... Only this hopeless, useless brooding upon that strange ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... into effect were observed by the colonists as days of fasting, prayer, and humiliation. All business was laid aside, the shops were closed, the churches opened, and the church-bells tolled as on some funeral occasion; and between praying at church, and fasting at home, and brooding over their grievances, the good people were very miserable indeed. Although they suffered great inconvenience from their observance of the non-importation agreement, yet they bore it patiently and cheerfully, like men who felt that their cause was just and right. But the sudden ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... conscious of an intense curiosity concerning Errington, quite apart from the personal episodes which had linked them together. The man of mystery invariably exerts a peculiar fascination over the feminine mind. Hence the unmerited popularity not infrequently enjoyed by the dark, saturnine, brooding individual whose conversation savours of the ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... heart, she sat for hours brooding over what would happen if Roland was arrested. The assizes held twice a year at Riversborough had been to her, as to many people of her position, an occasion of pleasurable excitement. The judges' lodgings were in the next house to the Old ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... Jacob Jones, who made himself quite unhappy for some weeks, brooding over the matter. He never once dreamed of the real cause of his not having had an equal share in his young friend's good fortune. He had not the most distant idea that his employer felt nearly as much regard for him as ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... assumed modesty—do you sit down like a sage and criticise my explanation of the readings, and whatever idle babble you say has come into my head? Have you come full of envy, and dejected because nothing is sent you from home; and while the discussion is going on, do you sit brooding on nothing but how your father or your brother are disposed towards you:—"What are they saying about me there? at this moment they imagine I am making progress and saying, He will return perfectly omniscient! ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... observance have been sufficiently dwelt upon in our histories; the effect upon character has been less considered, but the elevation of one day out of the tyranny of work, the resolute facing of eternal mysteries, and the withdrawal into a half-brooding, half-active state of mind must have had a powerful effect upon the imagination and conscience. The meeting-house was no holy building, but the Sabbath day was a holy day, and was the most comprehensive symbol of the Puritan faith. It was what the altar is in the ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... cause of death; but, after all, it is conceivable that the facts may be explained in a straightforward manner. As to your own sensations, when you went to see the house, I would suggest that they were due to a vivid imagination; you must have been brooding, in a semi-conscious way, over what you had heard. I don't exactly see what more can be said or done in the matter; you evidently think there is a mystery of some kind, but Herbert is dead; where then ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... on her lap, and threw her head back with her own birdlike gesture. One would have said that she was calling the spirit of song, which might descend on rainbow wings, and fold her in his arms. The old man drew the bow softly, and the fiddle gave out a low, brooding note,—a note ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards
... continuous benches. It was a long time since she had done anything so vague, so wasteful. There were a dozen things which, as she was staying over in New York, she ought to do; but she forgot them, or, if she thought of them, felt that they were now of no moment. She remained in her place an hour, brooding, tremulous, turning over and over certain thoughts. It seemed to her that she was face to face with a crisis of her destiny, and that she must not shrink from seeing it exactly as it was. Before she rose to return to Tenth Street she had made up her mind that there was no menace ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... came to a handsome cage, than which there was no goodlier there, and in it a culver, that is to Say, a wood-pigeon, the bird renowned among the birds as the singer of love-longing, with a collar of jewels about its neck, wonder-goodly of ordinance. He considered it awhile and seeing it mazed and brooding in its cage, shed tears ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... and observation! what a wholesome hatred for meanness and knavery! what a vast sympathy! what a cheerfulness! what a manly relish of life! what a love of human kind! what a poet is here!—watching, meditating, brooding, creating! What multitudes of truths has that man left behind him! What generations he has taught to laugh wisely and fairly! What scholars he has formed and accustomed to the exercise of thoughtful humour and the manly ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lay, concealed by his external calm, those memories and aspirations which are as strong as passions. In his earlier years, when he had been put to hard shifts for existence, he had found no leisure for close and brooding reflection upon that spoliation of just rights—that calumny upon his mother's name, which had first brought the Night into his Morning. His resentment towards the Beauforts, it is true, had ever been an intense but a fitful and irregular passion. It was exactly ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... feared, was only sentimental, and not really under a sense of sin. "Is it possible, think you, for a person to be conceited of his miseries? May there not be a deep leaven of pride in telling how desolate and how unfeeling we are?—in brooding over our unearthly pains?—in our being excluded from the unsympathetic world?—in our being the invalids of Christ's hospital?" He had himself been taught by the Spirit that it is more humbling for us to take what grace offers, than to bewail ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... Ancient Mariner" was planned, to pay for the expenses of the holiday, and was begun by Wordsworth and Coleridge together, though there is actually very little of Wordsworth's work in it, and the spirit of it, the air of mystery and the sense of brooding elemental forces with which its simplest lines are somehow invested, belongs to Coleridge alone, and to that strange genius of his, which only twice or thrice in his life—in "Christabel," "The Ancient Mariner," and "Kubla Khan"—produced poetry of ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... usually united, filling the sky, not racing along in threatening ranks suggesting energy of an overbearing destructive kind, but forming a bland, mild, laving bath. The cloudless days are calm, pearl-gray, and brooding in tone, inclining to rest and peace; the islands seem to drowse and float on the glassy water, and in the woods scarce ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... then Peregrine could see that he ate nothing. He was very gentle in his demeanour to the servants, very courteous and attentive to Mrs. Orme, very kind to his grandson. But yet his mind was heavy;—brooding over some sorrow that oppressed it. On the following morning it was the same, and the grandson knew that he could look to his grandfather for no assistance ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... silently brooding upon that which has brought such black shadow over their hearts. Then ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... gone by and Caleb, with fury in his heart, sat brooding in the office attached to the warehouse that he had hired. At that moment he had but one desire—to kill his successful rival, Marcus. Marcus had escaped and returned to Rome; of that there could be no doubt. He, one of the wealthiest of its patricians, had furnished the vast sum which ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... have been simply London that was behind it. Maggie was ready to attribute anything to the influence of that tremendous power, but her own final impression was that the people in this house had for too long a time been brooding over something. "It would do my aunts a lot of good to move somewhere else," she said to herself. "As Aunt Anne loves the country so much I can't think why she doesn't live there." There were many things that she was to learn before the ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... Clarence, brooding over the situation like a Providence, was glad to see that already the new move had weakened the invaders' power. The day after the announcement in the press of the approaching debut of the other generals, the leader of the army of Monaco had hurried to the agents to secure an engagement ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... army with banners," indeed, was Kheyr-ed-Din in this eventful summer: things had gone badly with the crescent flag, the Padishah was unapproachable in his palace, brooding perchance on that "might have been" had he not sold his honour and the life of his only friend to gratify the malice of a she-devil; those in attendance on the Sultan trembled, for the humour of the despot ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... they still loved me and treated me good-humoredly, but there's no denying that fashion is a great power in society. I began to regard my mysterious visitor with admiration, for besides enjoying his intelligence, I began to perceive that he was brooding over some plan in his heart, and was preparing himself perhaps for a great deed. Perhaps he liked my not showing curiosity about his secret, not seeking to discover it by direct question nor by insinuation. But I noticed at last, that he seemed to show ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... For the deep design I handle, For my double plot I come Raging to this simple home, Now to work the greatest scandal Ever seen. Here, brooding o'er him, This wild lover mad with ire, I will fan his jealous fire, I will place myself before him, Catch his eye, and then as fleeing, In invisible gloom array me. [He affects to come in, and being seen by LELIUS muffles himself in his cloak, and ...
— The Wonder-Working Magician • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... pursue the topic lest she should speak more plainly. On arriving home he was glad to see her go to her room and shut the door. It grieved him to think that she might be brooding in silence, but even that was better than speech. As Uncle Sim and Cousin Amy Dawes were coming to Sunday-night supper, the evening would be safe; and to avoid being face to face with her in the ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... and keeping still. She seemed sad—or not well perhaps. Her eyes were heavy. But she was very carefully made up, and very well dressed, though simply: and sitting there, full-bosomed, rather sad, remote-seeming, she suggested to Aaron a modern Cleopatra brooding, Anthony-less. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... even now brooding over the element necessary for the perpetuation of a free and United Germany. He reads his Bible and prepares ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... up the sky The pale moon went with misty eye; And in the west a brooding cloud— Departed day's wind-lifted shroud— Waved slowly in the depths of blue, While now and then a world looked through The broken edge, as from above Steals down a seraph's glance of love, Through sorrow's ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... only the slightest labor to occupy her hands and mind, gave her idle time—fertile soil for the raising of a dark crop of morbid thoughts. She brooded much, and, brooding, became restless, unhappy, and she could not conceal it from Bonbright when he came home eagerly for his dinner, ready to take up with boyish hope the absurd game he had invented. She allowed herself to think of Dulac; indeed, she forced herself ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... suffering. Among the beds, which stood in a row, each with its head against the wall, one was pointed out on which a living skeleton lay. The face was very very pale, and it seemed as if the angel of death were already brooding over it. Yet, though so changed, there was no mistaking the aspect and the once powerful frame ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... entirely an idea which had promised to be the nucleus of an excellent plot. And, lastly, passing through the hall but an instant before, he had met Violet, carrying the coffee and the evening post to the study, and she had given him two long envelopes addressed in his own handwriting. He was brooding over these, preparatory to opening them, at the very moment ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Mary Raymond. Her babyish face looked white and wan in the clear morning light. For hours after her door had closed upon Marjorie and her mother she had sat on the edge of her bed in her pretty blue party frock, brooding on her wrongs. When she had finally prepared for sleep, it was only to toss and turn in her bed, wide-awake and resentful. At daylight she had risen listlessly, then fixing upon a certain plan of action, ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... injustice. But these are discussions unsuited to the moment. I am doubly your countryman in this strait, and all the past is no more than the rough liberties which friends take with each other. Captain Ludlow, there is danger brooding in that dark ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... the hut where my companions were sitting, most of them with their heads sunk between their knees, brooding on our misfortune, except Andrew, who stood with his arms folded, meditating on our future plans, and asking assistance whence alone assistance could ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... of others that he was stupid, and helped him with his work so that he had to think how much stronger she was. She evidently wished to take away from him all rights as master of the house. Sometimes she pretended to be very lively, to distract him and to prevent him from brooding. He had not done anything to carry out his plan, but she did not believe that he had ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... Ustane were sitting round a fire in the cave just before bedtime, when suddenly the woman, who had been brooding in silence, rose, and laid her hand upon Leo's golden curls, and addressed him. Even now, when I shut my eyes, I can see her proud, imperial form, clothed alternately in dense shadow and the red flickering of ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... settled and bound up to the bad work of an assault upon the Christians. To what extent it was in his mind to go, I could not judge; for his language was ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory. But that the darkest designs were harbored by him, over which he was brooding with a mind naturally superstitious, but now almost in a state of exasperation, from the ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... that he took delight in what would to many men be a weariness of the flesh. The obviously sincere belief, however, in his own happiness proves at least one thing. He was thoroughly contented with his own position. He was never brooding over vexations, or dreaming of what might have been. Could he have been asked by Providence at any time, Where shall I place you? his answer would almost always have been, Here. He gives, indeed, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... did he risk life daily—for her only did he sit hour after hour in that lone cave brooding over plans, and forming schemes ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... itself until an event in the outward life called it forth like a rising ghost from the abyss of his silences. His friends had no suspicion that in his real self, beneath the thick disguise of his external sunniness, he was forever brooding, questioning, analyzing, searching after the hearts of things both within ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... entirely a selfish one. He had no authority whatever for his belief, yet believe he did, that, firmly and tenderly as he loved, he was loved, and of the two fates his was not the harder. But a man, a man, too, in the stir of the world, has not the time for brooding over the untoward events of his destiny that a woman has; his tender memories are forever jostled by cent. per cent.; he meets too many faces to keep the one in constant and unchanging perpetuity sacredly before his thought. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... Parliamentary Committee, commissioners' reports, testimony of shipowners and captains; calculated tables of tides, sets of currents, prevailing winds; results of surveys hydrographical; all the mass of facts he had been accumulating and brooding over for eighteen long months. But the weight of it closed his lips, and when he opened them again it was to say, "Yes, that ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... where some of the enlisted men were grouped upon the ground. The black blur made by the wagon stockade and a tent or so was visible against the lighter line of the waterway of the Platte. Night came down, brooding with its million stars. I could hear the voices of the wolves calling here and there. It was a scene wild and appealing. I was indeed, it seemed to me, in a strange new world, where all was young, where everything ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... to Nance, and she, turning and curtseying in the doorway, proceeded to conduct their guest up the broad winding staircase of the tower. He followed with a very brooding face. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hoyden of twelve wayward, untrained years. Slight, straight, strong, full-blooded, she had dreamed her life away in wilful wandering through her dark and sombre kingdom until she was one with it in all its moods; mischievous, secretive, brooding; full of great and awful visions, steeped body and soul in wood-lore. Her home was out of doors, the cabin of Elspeth her port of call for talking and eating. She had not known, she had scarcely seen, a child of her own age until Bles Alwyn had fled from her dancing in ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... seeing that the growth of this good is the only sure and certain sign of the coming of the Lord. So, then, the Angel of the Advent is thus calling us. The future before you is big with social and religious issues, and the Spirit of Christ is brooding over it, and you and such as you are to be His chosen instruments in ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... possible, the body was buried at the close of the day, in an inclosure which had been set apart as a family burying-ground; and when again the night shadows fell Hagar Warren sat in her silent room, brooding over her grief, and looking oft at the plain pine cradle where lay the little motherless child, her granddaughter. Occasionally, too, her eye wandered towards the mahogany crib, where another infant slept. Perfect quiet seemed necessary for Mrs. Miller, and Madam Conway had ordered her baby ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... admiration of most of her chums, and decidedly to the envy of one. Lorna, who had settled herself by her side on the steps, was not pleased to be deserted. She could never quite forgive Irene for having so many friends. The brooding cloud that had temporarily dispersed settled down again. When the girls got up to explore the temple she marched glumly away by herself. All the beauty and wonder and loveliness of the scene was lost upon her; for the sake of a foolish fit ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... mounting the hill, which ascends from the gate, I took my time; for the afternoon, though cloudy, was very sultry, and not a breeze stirred to refresh the atmosphere. No inhabitant of Brussels need wander far to search for solitude; let him but move half a league from his own city and he will find her brooding still and blank over the wide fields, so drear though so fertile, spread out treeless and trackless round the capital of Brabant. Having gained the summit of the hill, and having stood and looked long over the cultured but lifeless ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... reply, but sat like an old gypsy, crouched low, with brooding face. She, too, was wordless. She had made the curious mistake of looking to Bailey for justification. She had felt that he would understand and pity her, and his accusing eyes hurt her sorely. "If I could only speak? If I could only find words to tell him my thought, he would at least not despise ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... state all the morning, our men silent and brooding; Black smoked cigar after cigar with a dogged assumption of indifference; the German came to us often with his desperate gestures and his woe-begone face. It was well on in the afternoon before the position changed in any way, and I had gone down with the Captain ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... by Captain C. W. R. Knight. This English book, large and flat, shows with the aid of the camera, the merlin pursuing her quarry, young tawny owls in a disused magpie's nest, female noctules and their young, the male kestrel brooding, and a male buzzard that has just brought a rabbit to the younglings in the nest. Plenty of other pictures like these! The chapters deal with the buzzards of the Doone country, the lady's hawk, woodpeckers, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... peculiar to Greek, as in the verses by Antipater of Sidon,[7] that by some delicate magic crowd into a few words the fugitive splendour of the waning year, the warm lingering days and sharp nights of autumn, and the brooding pause before the rigours of winter, and make the whole masque of the seasons a pageant and metaphor of the lapse of life itself. Or a later art finds in the harsh moralisation of ancient legends the substance of sermons on the emptiness of pleasure and the fragility of ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... another instinct, which is usually dominant over all others. At the proper season these birds seem all day long to be impressed with the desire to migrate; their habits change; they become restless, are noisy and congregate in flocks. Whilst the mother-bird is feeding, or brooding over her nestlings, the maternal instinct is probably stronger than the migratory; but the instinct which is the more persistent gains the victory, and at last, at a moment when her young ones are not in sight, she takes flight and deserts ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... Bending was oblivious to the power of the Great God Ammon; Bending was very fond of money and appreciated the things it could achieve. He simply didn't appreciate the over-all power of Ammon. At the moment, he was brooding darkly over the very fact of existence of Power Utilities, and trying to figure out a suitable rejoinder to their ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Thames watermen—for there were Thames watermen at that time—in some unknown rat-hole by the river, down lanes and alleys on the other side of the Strand. As to any other person to meet him or obstruct him, Lyons Inn was dreaming, drunk, maudlin, moody, betting, brooding over bill-discounting or renewing—asleep or awake, minding its own affairs. Mr. Testator took his coal-scuttle in one hand, his candle and key in the other, and descended to the dismallest underground dens ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... notions. I nearly go mad, sometimes," Jim confessed. "I get to brooding—I know how rotten it is!" He fell silent, staring into the fire. "Happy?" he asked presently, glancing down at her as she rested quietly in ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... the books are dispersed, but the catalogue remains, not merely as a record of rareties and bibliographical details dear to the collector's heart, but as a token of taste. Just as there is, so Wordsworth reminds us, 'a spirit in the woods,' so is there still, brooding over and haunting the pages of the 'Rowfant Catalogue,' the spirit of true connoisseurship. In the slender lists of Locker's 'Works' this book must always ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... brightness in-doors, for out-of-doors, even to their uninstructed eyes, there was a gloomy brooding appearance of discontent. Mr. Hale had his own acquaintances among the working men, and was depressed with their earnestly told tales of suffering and long-endurance. They would have scorned to speak of ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... . . . And yet To me, when nights are weird and wet, Without those comrades there at tryst Creeping slowly, creeping sadly, That lone lane does not exist. There they seem brooding on their pain, And will, ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... day of Gabriel's service passed off much the same as the first, and so it went for almost a week; but the boy saw day by day that Brother Stephen's chain became more and more unbearable to him, and that he had long fits of brooding, when he looked so miserable and unhappy that Gabriel's ...
— Gabriel and the Hour Book • Evaleen Stein
... birds' eggs. But if our correspondents are careful to take only one or two from each nest, and to always leave more than half, as we have already begged them to do, the mother-bird will not suffer. If we could believe for a moment that our little friends would be so cruel as to disturb the brooding mother, and rob her nest of all its eggs, we would never publish another letter requesting an exchange of these pretty natural curiosities. The nesting season is now over in all the Northern States, but when it returns, we trust ...
— Harper's Young People, October 19, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... about ten o'clock at night. Dark, heavy clouds hung overhead like a mournful pall. A brooding darkness and ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... fancy upon which were reared still wilder fancies. Often he made up tales in which always he figured as the hero and the assistant as the heroine. While Manuel bemoaned the harshness of fate, Roberto, the blond student, gave himself up likewise to melancholy, brooding upon the Baroness's daughter. The student was forced to endure jests especially from Celia, who, according to certain evil tongues, was trying to rouse him from his habitual frigidity. But Roberto ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... was nowhere to be found. I searched all over the Taraha and in the garden, and finally found her in the Premalia cuddled close to Suhinie. "She has told me all about it," said Suhinie, who was nursing another edition of difficult infancy; and she looked down on the curly head with eyes of brooding affection, like a tender turtle-dove upon her nestling. Then the roguish brown eyes smiled up at me with an expression of perfect confidence that I would understand and sympathise with the desire to share the troubles of this ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... La bel Napoli!" She collected travel folders and often talked in their terms. In her mind she always said "brooding Vesuvius"; "blue Mediterranean"; "azure coasts"; ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... Baxter. I don't blush every time the mail arrives and a letter is handed me. And you seem to have no objection to dreamy brown eyes yourself. I've seen the way you looked at Phil Gordon. Now Phil's eyes haven't got enough snap in them for me—they're altogether too brooding to suit me. I think that young Mexican's eyes ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... for having aided in the union of Corsica with France. He should have followed her fortunes and have succumbed only with her." Throughout his youth he is at heart anti-French, morose, "bitter, liking very few and very little liked, brooding over resentment," like a vanquished man, always moody and compelled to work against the grain. At Brienne, he keeps aloof from his comrades, takes no part in their sports, shuts himself in the library, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... one night by casting firebrands into them! At last, not at three miles distance, but by a close siege, he shook the very gates of Carthage itself. And thus he succeeded in drawing off Hannibal when he was still clinging to and brooding over Italy. There was no more remarkable day, during the whole course of the Roman Empire, than that on which those two generals, the greatest of all that ever lived, whether before or after them, the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... "You are brooding over them. Spike, I'll tell you something which will console you a little before you start out on your ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... I suppose there are brooding lovers of knowledge in this world who are fonder of their own than of any other company. But most people can only think half thoughts and need other people to complete them. It is amusing enough to knock a ball against a wall, and a wonderful help in the perfection of strokes, ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... of epileptic tendencies—as McPherson himself admits—had taken his benefactor's death terribly to heart, and had brooded over it day and night. Is there any reason to doubt that in such an unbalanced nature, this brooding, coupled by fever, should have produced a delirium in which he believed he heard ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... an autumn evening was abroad. It marched along the roads, stole over the meadows, and sat brooding in the forest; the shimmering waterways ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... reveries, which are the crown and consummation of what opium can do for human nature. I, whose disease it was to meditate too much and to observe too little, and who upon my first entrance at college was nearly falling into a deep melancholy, from brooding too much on the sufferings which I had witnessed in London, was sufficiently aware of the tendencies of my own thoughts to do all I could to counteract them. I was, indeed, like a person who, according to the old legend, had entered the cave ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... almost infantile blitheness left her face. The sadness which is inherent in the Irish countenance spread over it, like sudden mist over a landscape. The ancient brooding aspect of the Celts ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... the same idea as the then obscure sect of the Rosicrucians, some of whom he had perhaps encountered in his travels in Germany, he imagined that, by means of the philosopher's stone, he could summon these kindly spirits at his will. By dint of continually brooding upon the subject, his imagination became so diseased, that he at last persuaded himself that an angel appeared to him, and promised to be his friend and companion as long as he lived. He relates that, one day, in November 1582, while ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... bold labour plough the faithless main; Some rougher storms in princes' courts sustain. Some swell up their slight sails with popular fame, Charmed with the foolish whistlings of a name. Some their vain wealth to earth again commit; With endless cares some brooding o'er it sit. Country and friends are by some wretches sold, To lie on Tyrian beds and drink in gold; No price too high for profit can be shown; Not brother's blood, nor hazards of their own. Around the world in search of it they roam; It makes e'en their Antipodes their ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... sidewalk, and the pork roast all had their origin in Ma Werner's tireless energy, in Ma Werner's thrift; in her patience and unremitting toil, her nimble fingers and bent back, her shapeless figure and unbounded and unexpressed (verbally, that is) love for her children. Pa Werner—sullen, lazy, brooding, tyrannical—she soothed and mollified for the children's sake, or shouted down with a shrewish outburst, as the occasion required. An expert stone-mason by trade, Pa Werner could be depended on only when he was not drinking, or when he was not on strike, or when he had not ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... what appears on the surface to be offensive to sound reason. But instead of proceeding at once to the performance of this cherished object of his philosophic ambition, he kept it in his bosom, brooding over it during a life of intense literary and practical activity, until it was in the end matured and brought to fruition in a manner quite different from that at first intended. The book explanatory of ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... If the largest goat-sucker chance to cry near the white man's door, sorrow and grief will soon be inside: and they expect to see the master waste away with a slow consuming sickness. If it be heard close to the negro's or Indian's hut, from that night misfortune sits brooding over it: and they await the ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... to notice that this same clear insight other blind men in the Evangelist's story are also represented as having had. Blindness has its compensations. It leads to a certain steadfast brooding upon thoughts, free from disturbing influences. Seeing Jesus did not produce faith; not seeing Him seems to have helped it. It left imagination to work undisturbed, and He was all the loftier to these blind men, because the conceptions ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... remember her singing his "There is a flower on the road, decaying in the dust, Passers-by treading upon it," his "Summer and Winter," and his "Rachael is bemoaning her children." I vividly recall these brooding airs as she used to sing them, for I have inherited her musical memory and her passionate love for melody, though not her voice. I cannot sing myself, but some tunes give me thrills of pleasure, keen and terrible as ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... explain the danger which now awaited them, we must return to their old family enemy, Sir Robert Percy. Master of Percy-hall, and of all that wealth could give, he could not enjoy his prosperity, but was continually brooding on plans of ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... it is to be happy. And so as the night, in deepening, brightened, Lilian and I wandered by the starry lake. Conscious of no evil in ourselves, how secure we felt from evil! A few days more—a few days more, and we two should be as one! And that thought we uttered in many forms of words, brooding over it in the long intervals ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... seemed to encompass me—a silence of my own creating. I fancied that even the angry elements avoided me as I passed; that there was nothing, nothing in all the wide universe but myself and a dark brooding horror called Vengeance. All suddenly, the mists of my mind cleared; I moved no longer in a deaf, blind stupor. A flash of lightning danced vividly before my eyes, followed by a crashing peal of thunder, ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... her strong but tender note. Over a deserted field a turkey buzzard hovered low, and alighted on a stake in the fence, standing a moment with outstretched, vibrating wings till he was sure of his hold. A soft, warm, brooding day. Roads becoming dry in many places, and looking so good after the mud and the snow. I walk up beyond the boundary and over Meridian Hill. To move along the drying road and feel the delicious warmth is enough. The cattle low long and loud, and look wistfully into the distance. ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... Hutchinson still made attempts at negociation, but they were all vain; nothing could induce her to change her purpose. Irritated by studied insults abroad; incensed by threats of ministerial vengeance; brooding over the wrongs she had endured from one who had promised before the altar of God to love and cherish her through life; and, above all, assured of the popular support, she pursued her way; and she reached the shores of England on the 6th of June. Although government ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... all huddled and hidden, (Oh, the eternity it seems!) Brooding desolate and bed-ridden, Living only ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... it is said, that the first awakening thought of those who die is of the tremendous happening that has come upon them. So it was with Sandy. For a while he lay quite still, with his hands folded, and a strange awful brooding, almost as though of fear, breathlessly wrapping his heart roundabout. But it was not for a long time that he lay thus, for suddenly, like a second flash of lightning in the gathering darkness of a cloud, the thought shot ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... some extent, if Reynolds had not appeared and simplified the painter's credit to a point where he made no further search for unsympathetic models. Fate, weaving the destiny of two O'Neills, would have changed her loom. As it was, sick with brooding and pity for himself, Kenny abandoned all pretense of labor and rushed on blindly to his fate. The spring was in his blood. What form of midsummer madness lay ahead of him depended now upon the hairtrigger of impulse. A wind, a sketch, the perfume of a flower, and he would ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... invariable reply. He was always writing—or if not writing, reading; or brooding listlessly over the fire. And so he ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... on the Wolfsberg, it seemed to me that I could distinguish a muttering as of voices full of hate, like men talking low on their beds the secret things of evil and treason. I discerned discontent and rebellion rumbling and brooding over the city that clear, keen ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... demi-ENGLANDS, far-away isles of home, Where the old speech is native, and the old flag Floats, and the old irresistible call, The watch-word of so many ages of years, Makes men in love With toil for the race, and pain, and peril, and death! Tears, and the dread, tremendous dirge Of her brooding battleships, and hosts Processional, with trailing arms; the plaint— Measured, enormous, terrible—of her guns; The slow, heart-breaking throb Of bells; the trouble of drums; the blare Of mourning trumpets; the discomforting pomp Of silent crowds, black streets, ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... read a bit, and tried to reconcile a new German symphony to her ear as well as to her judgment, which told her it was too learned not to be harmonious, though it sounded very discordant. But all these efforts ended in a sigh of despondency, and in brooding on innocent delights forbidden, and a prospect which, to her youth and inexperience, seemed a ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... Yet again, said He, observe and look; so they gave heed, and perceived that the hen did walk in a fourfold method towards her chickens. 1. She had a common call, and that she hath all day long. 2. She had a special call, and that she had but sometimes. 3. She had a brooding note. And 4. She had an outcry ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... were known to the performers, and over the same they were brooding that dismal rainy afternoon, awaiting ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... mystical revolutionaries are forerunners of mutations that are brooding in the race—which may brood for centuries and perhaps never burst forth. For there are millions of latent possibilities in nature, for one realised in the time allotted to our humanity. And it is perhaps this obscure sentiment of what might be, but will not come to pass, which sometimes ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... the world; and next step, moody, the light of his eye withdrawn, as if seeing things that were invisible; his shut mouth like a child's, so impressionable, so innocent, so sad; he was now all within, as before he was all without; hence his brooding look. As the snow blattered in his face, he muttered, "How it raves and drifts! On-ding o' snaw,—ay, that's the word,—on-ding—" He was now at his own door, "Castle Street, No. 39." He opened the door and went straight to his den; that wondrous workshop, where ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... This idea still presented itself to her mind fitfully and vaguely, like a dream; yet from that dream, which always ended in a sigh, Julie awoke to greater wretchedness, to keener consciousness of the latent anguish brooding ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... tombs and the two seated Medici are from his hand. Of the two finished or practically finished tombs—to my mind as finished as they should be—that of Lorenzo is the finer. The presentment of Lorenzo in armour brooding and planning is more splendid than that of Giuliano; while the old man, whose head anticipates everything that is considered most original in Rodin's work, is among the best of Michelangelo's statuary. Much speculation ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... to define. Certainly they were not connected with any sense of having failed to do justice to his subject. Kendal felt an exulting mastery over it which was the most intoxicating sensation his work had ever brought him. He had, as he painted, a silent, brooding triumph in his manipulation, in his control. He gave himself up to the delight of his insight, the power of his reproduction, and to the intense satisfaction of knowing that out of the two there grew something of more than usually keen intrinsic interest within the wide creed of his art. He worked ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... no little attentions such as masculine gallantry delights to offer. Between these passionate moments there were long intervals of commonplace, of gaiety, of brooding melancholy, during which, except that I detected her eyes so full of melancholy fire, following me, at times I might have been as nothing to her. Except in these brief periods of mysterious excitement her ways were girlish; and there was always a languor ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... extent that his soldier-servant, who was much attached to him, and was allowed considerable freedom of speech in consequence of his value and fidelity, thought fit to remonstrate. He attributed his master's lowness of spirits entirely to his brooding over the accident, and said one morning when he had brushed the ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... work of making the house into an Italian villa kept Beatrice from brooding too much over her embonpoint. She enjoyed the endless conferences with the decorators, drapers, artists, and who-nots, with Gay's suave, flattering little self always at her elbow, his tactful remarks about So-and-so being altogether ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass me, a butcher boy in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on a bicycle, children going to school, and suddenly they become vague and unreal, and I hurry again with the artilleryman through the hot, brooding silence. Of a night I see the black powder darkening the silent streets, and the contorted bodies shrouded in that layer; they rise upon me tattered and dog-bitten. They gibber and grow fiercer, paler, uglier, mad distortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold and ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... a street light from time to time; they were stationed at wide intervals in that neighborhood. Soon, however, she reached the factories, when all mystery and awe, and vague terrors of what beside herself might be near unrevealed beneath the mighty brooding of the night, were over. She was, as it were, in the mid-current of the conditions of her own life and times, and the material force of it swept away all symbolisms and unstable drift, and left only the bare rocks and shores of existence. Always when the child had been taken by one of her elders ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... she thought of it the more did it seem to her to be wicked that just because we loved him and did not wish to part with him, Ralph should be cheated of his birthright. All night long she lay awake brooding, and before ever the dawn broke she had settled in her mind that she herself would speak to the Englishmen, telling them the truth, come what might of her words, for Suzanne, my daughter, was a determined girl with an upright heart. ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... the sudden change in their condition. * * * The thoughts of home, of parents, brothers, sisters, and friends, would crowd upon their minds, and brooding on what they had been, and what they were, their desire for home became a madness. The dismal and disgusting scene around; the wretched objects continually in sight; and 'hope deferred which maketh the heart sick', produced a state of melancholy that ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... into a fit of brooding melancholy that would last him for a day or two, and which Mildred would find it quite impossible to dispel. Indeed, when he got in that way, she soon discovered that the only thing to do was to leave him alone. He was suffering acutely, there was no doubt about that, and when ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... taken care of, if not by others, then by himself; for the old man had saved him from drowning; had also saved him from an awful death on a March day when he fell into a great hole and was knocked insensible in the drifting snow; had saved him from brooding on himself—the beginning of madness— by compelling him to think for another. And sometimes, as he had looked at the old man, his imagination had caught the spirit of the legend of the Indians, and he had cried out, "O soul, come back and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a bird to-night That flies to its nest in the soft twilight, And sings in its brooding bliss; Ah! I so low, and he so high, What could he find to love? I cry, Did ever love stoop so low ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... mistress's breast,— Thou that takest thy colder rest, Now, in the breathless and pulseless ground, Close, but untenderly, folded round,— Ever, by thy drifted mound, Sleep, the Mystery, be found Most mysterious, most profound! And through her enchanted air, Lighter than petals fair, Brooding Peace sink downward there; And the blasted willow make Haunt perpetual, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... tree-architecture—to which those moss-grown balusters, termes, statues, fountains, are really but accessories. Only, as I gaze upon those windless afternoons, I find myself always saying to myself involuntarily, "The evening will be a wet one." The storm is always brooding through the massy splendour of the trees, above those sun-dried glades or lawns, where delicate children may be trusted thinly clad; and the secular trees themselves will hardly ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... the letter had been despatched, sat brooding over it in deep regret mixed with deeper anger. She was preparing for herself an awful tragedy. She must be severed for ever from her daughter, and so severed with the opinion of all her neighbours against ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... this kind of pondering is a process with which the ancients could have been but imperfectly acquainted. They, for the most part, found the exercise of fantasy more pleasant than careful observation, and subsequent brooding over facts. Hence it is, that when those whose education has been derived from the ancients speak of 'the reason of man,' they are apt to omit from their conception of reason one of its most ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... all sorts of things," said Aleck, who felt that he must do something to keep his companion from brooding over his position. ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... for them, and for all men after them, two mighty songs, —one, of the Menis,* Mens, passion, or zeal, of Athena, breathed into a mortal whose name is "Ache of heart," and whose short life is only the incarnate brooding and burst of storm; and the other is of the foresight and fortitude of Athena, maintained by her in the heart of a mortal whose name is given to him from a longer grief, Odysseus, the full of sorrow, the much ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... Wildeve had been brooding ever since they started on the mean estimation in which he was held by his wife's friends; and it cut his heart severely. As the minutes passed he had gradually drifted into a revengeful intention without knowing the precise moment ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... strife she had endured; she had no strength to open her eyes, but moved her lips to thank him for his pains. At first she turned her head from side to side, seeking a cool place on the pillow; later she fell into a heavy, drugged sleep. He watched her till it was nearly light, brooding over her unconscious face. No thoughts of a king were his, I think; but once more he lapped them in that young girl's bosom, and let them sway, ebb and flow, ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... constitutionally disposed to work hard and patiently for an honest competence. The celebrated "Female Pills" formed the philosopher's stone which released them from this condition of chafing discontent and brooding unrest. From what source a knowledge of the ingredients requisite for the composition of a pill for such a diabolical purpose was derived, or whether, indeed, the pill was effective or diabolical at all, remains ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... black; nor were his features altered or sunk: not in one year's space, by any sorrow, could his athletic strength be quelled or his vigorous prime blighted. But in his countenance I saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding—that reminded me of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished, might look ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... degrading passions. For, though Tarzan of the Apes was a killer of men and of beasts, he killed as the hunter kills, dispassionately, except on those rare occasions when he had killed for hate—though not the brooding, malevolent hate which marks the features of ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... selfish brute," he said, whilst the ghost of a smile once more lit up the whole of his face. "Dear soul, I must have forgotten your sweet presence, thus brooding over my own troubles, whilst your loving heart has a graver burden—God help me!—than it can possibly bear. Listen, my beloved, for I don't know how many minutes longer they intend to give us, and I have not yet spoken to you ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... only half understood. He had straightway learnt the first three verses for a surprise. He crooned them now, his head flung back a little, his gaze intent on a gossamer film that floated just above the pine tops—'still as a brooding dove.'... ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... and studied the brooding features of the giant. "He's doing some thinking," he decided. "When he gets the thing figured out, in six months or a year, and savvies it was a put-up job from the start, somebody'll ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... loved, Not she at least, nor conscious of a bar Between them, nor by plight or broken ring Bound, but an immemorial intimacy, Wander'd at will, but oft accompanied By Averill: his, a brother's love, that hung With wings of brooding shelter o'er her peace, Might have been other, save for Leolin's— Who knows? but so they wander'd, hour by hour Gather'd the blossom that rebloom'd, and drank The magic cup ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... that the ill-reputed rooms would one day harbour a portion of the Vatican Library, so greatly enriched by himself. Nothing but sinister memories and vague alarms presented themselves to his imagination. The atmosphere, heavy and brooding from the long exclusion of the outer air, seemed to weigh upon him with the density of matter, and to afford the stuff out of which phantasmal bodies perpetually took shape and, as he half persuaded himself, substance. Creeping and tottering between bowl and cord, shielding ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... to have escaped as families; parents whose daughters, even more miserable, had not been permitted to escape to starvation. We found at Grahovo the body of which those we had seen were the fringe,—a mass of despairing, melancholy humanity, brooding over the misery to come, homeless, foodless, and the guests of a people only less poor than themselves, the hospitable hovels of the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... instant when the battle in Space seemed to be over and the Gens of Dalis were prisoners, the thought waves were no more, and a brooding silence took their place. Dalis, the Sarkas knew, possessed the power to mask his thoughts, for it was a power possessed in common by all the scientists of Earth. But the common people of his Gens did not posses that power. However, for the moment Sarka had forgotten an all important ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... maintained this view. "Chap started for Sunk Creek three weeks ago. Trapper he was; old like, with a red shirt. One of his horses come into the round-up Toosday. Man ain't been heard from." He ate in silence for a while, evidently brooding in his childlike mind. Then he said, querulously, "I'd sooner trust one of them Indians than ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... own personal observation. On no occasion do we remember that we ever saw a smile sit upon his countenance, and as to a laugh, it appeared to be an act which he dreaded to commit. He seemed always to be brooding over some great and commanding idea, which absorbed the whole of his mind, and which he felt a consciousness within him, that he had not the ability to carry into execution, at the same time that he feared to let a word escape him, which could give a clue to the subject, which ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... raised to his lips the birch-bark trumpet which he had fashioned. The next moment the brooding silence of the night was startled by a harsh roar. The Hermit chuckled softly. "If there is a moose within a mile he can't help ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... unredeemed tragedy, which had never had even the poor excuse of a passing infatuation behind it He had never loved Annette, and she was fast growing into a terror and an aversion. And now all this tomfoolery of telepathic communion, this wilful brooding over an absent woman, this summoning of her features to mind, this recalling of her tones, this yearning in which his own soul seemed to beat its mortal bars in the strife to draw her spirit near, made a clean end of the platonic theory so far as ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... her bedroom the smile left Kitty's face. A brooding frown wrinkled the smooth forehead. It was there when Celeste came in; it remained there after Celeste departed; and it vanished only under the soft, dispelling fingers ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... observation! what a wholesome hatred for meanness and knavery! what a vast sympathy! what a cheerfulness! what a manly relish of life! what a love of human kind! what a poet is here!—watching, meditating, brooding, creating! What multitudes of truths has that man left behind him! What generations he has taught to laugh wisely and fairly! What scholars he has formed and accustomed to the exercise of thoughtful humour and the manly play of wit! ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... all. Ah! here, where yet a ray of glory lingers, Let a light shine unto all generous souls, And be Italia's hope! Unto these stones Oft came Vittorio[8] for inspiration, Wroth to his country's gods. Dumbly he roved Where Arno is most lonely, anxiously Brooding upon the heavens and the fields; Then when no living aspect could console, Here rested the Austere, upon his face Death's pallor and the deathless light of hope. Here with these great he dwells for evermore, His dust yet quick with love of country. Yes, A god speaks to ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... the habit of frequently entering into the quiet of his own soul, and who, instead of brooding over himself, transforms and orders those experiences he has had in life, will gain much. For he will perceive that his thoughts and feelings become richer, if through memory he establishes a relationship between the different experiences of life. ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... steps. Peter was not slow to follow. The key was applied, and they emerged into the churchyard. The grassy mounds were bathed in the moonbeams, and the two yew-trees, throwing their black jagged shadows over the grave hills, looked like evil spirits brooding over ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... find them; for we had frequently made fires to apprize them of our approach, yet none appeared in return as answers. This disappointment, as might be expected, served to increase the ill-humour of the Leader and party, the brooding of which (agreeably to Indian custom) was liberally discharged on me, in bitter reproach for having led them from their families, and exposed them to dangers and hardships, which but for my influence, they said, they might have spared themselves. Nevertheless, they still ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... host, as it drew around the doomed city. Their chief had his own heavy burden. He seems to have gone apart to meditate on what his next step was to be. Absorbed in thought, he lifts up his eyes mechanically, as brooding men will, not expecting to see anything, and is startled by the silent figure of 'a man with a sword drawn' in his hand, close beside him. There is nothing supernatural in his appearance; and the immediate ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... thrice had made overtures of peace which had been violently rejected. Llyn had fought fair at least, even if he had struck hard, but the life of the Wolf had been as treacherous as it was bloody. And day by day and year by year, as Daurn's strength began to fail and brooding took the place of action, the bitterness of his hatred grew, and out of this at last the ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... was moonlight as well as starlight, and in its silvery radiance his features, always pale, had the frigid whiteness of marble. The wide-open eyes that stared upward to the stars, were larger, darker than in daylight, and more full of brooding; the white brow, with its crown of dark ringlets ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... and brooding away in the city." The lad's bright, clear eyes looked frankly into the captain's as he continued. "I have been making a fool of myself, Captain. Got into some mischief with a crowd of fellows at school. Of course, I got caught and ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... end of June, as she was sitting in her lovely drawing-room in her house in Mayfair, in front of her tea-table, on which the tea stood untasted, brooding over the question which unceasingly tormented her, she cried ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... don't blame 'em!" she added chokingly. "Look at the impudent jobs we get sent out on! Quarantined upstairs for weeks at a time with their inflammable, diphtheritic bridegrooms—while they sit down stairs—brooding over their wedding teaspoons! Hiked off indefinitely to Atlantic City with their gouty bachelor uncles! Hearing their own innocent little sisters' blood-curdling deathbed deliriums! Snatching their own new-born babies away from their breasts and showing ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... ominous and brooding to Ned. The day was bright, and the flag of no quarter burned a spot of blood-red against the blue sky. Ned saw Mexican officers occasionally on the roofs of the higher buildings, but he took little notice of them. He felt instinctively ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... sauvage—cocon chauvage, as Hoka mispronounced it. With people so nice and so touchy, it was scarce to be supposed that our company of greenhorns should not blunder into offences. Hoka, on one of his visits, fell suddenly in a brooding silence, and presently after left the ship with cold formality. When he took me back into favour, he adroitly and pointedly explained the nature of my offence: I had asked him to sell cocoa- nuts; and in Hoka's view articles of food were things ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... having trimmed my bludgeon to a nicety, I laid it by, and sat brooding, the knife betwixt my knees; now a beam of sun falling athwart the leaves lit upon the broad blade of the knife and made of it a glory. And beholding this and the hand that grasped it, I took pleasure to heed how strong and sinewy were my fingers and how the muscles bulged beneath the ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... her no more; but learned sometime afterwards that her health failed, then of the giving away of her mental powers, and still later of her death, at Napa City; caused primarily by shock, and brooding over the misfortunes she had met on the bank ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... possessed themselves more and more of the Indian's mind, he began to fancy himself the victim of some incantation, with which he naturally connected the Recluse as the cause; and, finally, by continual brooding on the subject, both his appetite and sleep deserted him. His moodiness at length attracted the attention of Peena. Ohquamehud was lying on the floor of her hut, his head resting on his hand, and he had been for ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... Houlbreque went off with his whip under his arm, brooding over his own thoughts, and lifting up one after the other his heavy wooden shoes daubed with clay. Certainly he desired to marry Celeste Levesque. He wanted her with her child, because it was the woman he required. He could not say why: but he knew it, he was sure of it. He had ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... through the noisy streets, and look indifferently at what they see for the first and last time in their lives. The tattered drovers walk after them, their heads drooping too. They are bored.... Now and then some drover starts out of his brooding, remembers that there are cattle in front of him intrusted to his charge, and to show that he is doing his duty brings a stick down full swing on a bullock's back. The bullock staggers with the pain, runs forward a dozen paces, and looks about him ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... was turned toward Juniper Bend, and the eyes were fixed, as it were, on a still more distant object—a dark, brooding, inscrutable look. ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... days he was, occasionally, visited by seasons of spiritual gloom and depression, which, no doubt, were chiefly, if not solely, the result of physical causes. It was an error that grew readily out of the brooding introspection and self-anatomy which marked the religious habit of the times. The close connection between physical causes and morbid or abnormal conditions of the spiritual life, was not as well understood then as it is now. Many things were ascribed to Satanic ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... Arrow-Maker. At the right, the house of RAIN WIND, and behind all a spring under a clump of dwarf oaks. A little trail runs between stones to connect the Arrow-Maker with the rest of the campody, and beyond it the valley rises gently to the Sierra foothills, brooding under the spring haze. A little to the fore of SIMWA'S house lies a great heap of blankets, baskets, and camp utensils, displayed to the best advantage, the wedding dower of the Chief's daughter. By her father's house BRIGHT WATER is being dressed for ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... her own. Now it so happens that what he would cure her of is incurable, being, in fact, eternal, divine—simple human love. So, to his pious and cynical admonitions she answers with strange inconsistency. Long brooding over his taunts will sometimes make her, to whom he is always the divinity, actually believe, despite her reiteration, that she had sinned out of obedience to him, that she really is a polluted creature, guilty of the ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... pass, are we as immortal as the universe and the Might that made it, whatever that may be? That was his problem, the same which perplexes every high and thinking soul, and at this impressionable period of his life it scarcely ever left him. There he would sit with brooding eyes and bent brow seeking the answer, ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... year rolled over the Cabbage Patch, and it was nearing Christmas again. The void left in Mrs. Wiggs's heart by Jim's death could never be filled, but time was beginning to soften her grief, and the necessity for steady employment kept her from brooding ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... her mistress shared with her the sense of freedom and buoyancy which an open country and fair landscape must naturally inspire in those to whom life is a daily and abounding vigorous delight, not a mere sickly brooding over the past, or a morbid anticipation of the future. The woods surrounding Abbot's Manor were by no means depressing,—they were not dark silent vistas of solemn pine, leading into deeper and deeper gloom, but cheery and picturesque clumps of elm and beech ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... good sort, and spoke of her among themselves as "the old girl" and "Joanna God-dam." But none of them thought of turning from Ellen to her sister—she was too weather-beaten for them, too big and bouncing—over-ripe. Ellen, pale as a flower, with wide lips like rose-leaves and narrow, brooding eyes, with her languor, and faint suggestions of the exotic, all the mystery with which fate had chosen to veil the common secret which was Ellen Alce.... She could now have the luxury of pitying her sister, of seeing herself possessed of what her tyrant Joanna ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... his return home—in fact, until his friend's arrival, Tom was thoroughly beaten down and wretched, notwithstanding his efforts to look hopefully forward, and keep up his spirits. His usual occupations were utterly distasteful to him; and, instead of occupying himself, he sat brooding over his late misfortune, and hopelessly puzzling his head as to what he could do to set matters right. The conviction in which he always landed was that there was nothing to be done, and that he was a desolate ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... music of Arabia In my heart, when out of dreams I still in the thin clear mirk of dawn Descry her gliding streams; Hear her strange lutes on the green banks Ring loud with the grief and delight Of the dim-silked, dark-haired musicians, In the brooding silence of night. ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... then. "If no one in the house here talked to her, someone from outside must have done it. Listen, Bessie. She wouldn't go off that way just from brooding, would she, just from ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the Farm - Or, Bessie King's New Chum • Jane L. Stewart
... an interesting kind of tobacco. It was evening now and they talked over the fight, made jokes about their luckier shots, smoked their new tobacco and sang; altogether it was the jolliest evening they'd had. But Shard alone on the quarter-deck paced to and fro pondering, brooding and wondering. He had chopped off Bad Jack's wounded hand and given him a hook out of store, for captain does doctor upon these occasions and Shard, who was ready for most things, kept half a dozen or so of neat new limbs, and of course a chopper. ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... took his pipe from his bosom and began playing. As before, he played mechanically and took no more than five or six notes; as though the pipe had come into his hands for the first time, the sounds floated from it uncertainly, with no regularity, not blending into a tune, but to Meliton, brooding on the destruction of the world, there was a sound in it of something very depressing and revolting which he would much rather not have heard. The highest, shrillest notes, which quivered and broke, seemed to be weeping disconsolately, as though the pipe ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the words the girls acted out with gestures the dancing ghosts, the brooding forest, the rubbing sticks and the leaping fire. So they proceeded through the strange measures, ending up in a close circle around the fire, all making the hand sign of fire together. Gladys began to be stirred with a desire to sit in ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... these days, Mother," said the Doctor with a teasing smile as he handed her a quart cup of oats from the bin. "Oh, I know what you're talking about," answered Mother, as she scattered a little grain in front of each nest and prepared to leave in peace and quiet the brooding mothers. "It's this woman's rights and wrongs question. I've been so busy doctoring Providence Road pains and trying to make a good, proper husband outen you for some nice girl, what some other woman have been putting licks on to get ready for you, that ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... arrived at the club, however, his angry feelings had subsided, and his native generosity and sense of justice had got the uppermost. He found Goldsmith in company with Burke, Garrick, and other members, but sitting silent and apart, "brooding," as Boswell says, "over the reprimand he had received." Johnson's good heart yearned toward him; and knowing his placable nature, "I'll make Goldsmith forgive me," whispered he; then, with a loud voice, "Dr. Goldsmith," said he, "something passed to-day where you and I ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... the horn-fixt lead drops sheer from the hand of the islesman, Fatal to ravenous fish, plung'd she to the depth of the ocean: Where in a cavern'd recess, the abode of the sisterly Sea-nymphs, Thetis the goddess appear'd, in the midst of them sitting dejected; For she was ruefully brooding the fate of her glorious offspring, Doom'd to a Phrygian grave, far off from the land of his fathers. Near to her standing anon, thus summon'd her wind-footed Iris: "Thetis, arise! thou art called by Zeus whose decrees are eternal." But she was instantly answer'd by Thetis the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... rickety seat of his rattling open buggy, and bowed forward as his wont was, his rounded shoulders bringing his chin well over the dashboard. As he passed down the long sandy street, toward the corner where his own house stood, the brooding group of loafers, waiting in Hackett's store for the distribution of the mail, watched him through the open door, and from under the boughs of the weatherbeaten poplar before it. Hackett had been cutting a pound of cheese out ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... he'll be sorry for it all," I said to myself; and I was brooding over the past again, when Esau uttered a low chuckle, which made ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... companion, he made a sign to a youth who was straying about the fields, to approach. This young warrior was made the bearer of an order to lead the captives to the hill, after which the two chiefs stalked to and fro in silence, each brooding over what had passed, in a humor that was suited to his particular character and more ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... thing you came," said Ivan, as though brooding, and not hearing Alyosha's exclamation. "I knew he ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... reapers in the fields, heard their shearing songs that are sung for cheer, but somehow in this land are all imbued with melancholy. Loud, loud against that sorrow of the brooding glen rose up in her remembrance the thoughtless clamour of the lowland world, and she shivered, as one who looks from the window of a well-warmed room upon a night of storm. Her father put an arm about her waist. "Is it not homely?" said he, dreading her reply. "I can bear it—with ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... anyhow. However he had fallen into the fat man's hands, this was the secret of the latter's power. While I pondered gloomily, the sitting (so to call it) came to an end. Perhaps my unwelcome appearance somewhat contracted it. My grandfather lapsed into his chair, his chin on his chest, brooding. Excitement died in him almost visibly, like the flickering down of a spent fire. Instead of eighty, he looked a hundred and eighty, and his face was ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... aloof, and oft Lies perdue in a nook or gloomy cave, Prompt to enchant some inadvertent wretch With his unhallowed touch. So (poets sing) Grimalkin, to domestic vermin sworn An everlasting foe, with watchful eye Lies nightly brooding o'er a chinky gap, Protending her fell claws, to thoughtless mice Sure ruin. So her disembowelled web Arachne, in a hall or kitchen, spreads Obvious to vagrant flies: she secret stands Within her woven cell; the humming prey, Regardless of their fate, rush on the toils Inextricable, nor will ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... one last hope," said Miss Gardine. "Ze doctair has said if my brother could once remember zat last year he might be cured entierement. It is brooding on zat subject that brought on his insanity: he needs a shock. Now, if you will go with me when I visit him, and show him suddenly ze star buttons—who knows?—all may come back to him. I have told ze doctair all ze story, and he thinks ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... miles. The mist sprinkled her hair with dew-drops. It looked quite white. Her eyes were deep and brooding and ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... rural exodus takes our people, for the most part, not into Irish or even into British towns, but into those of the United States. What is migration in other countries is emigration with us, and the mind of the country, brooding over the dreary statistics of this perennial drain, naturally and longingly turns to schemes for the rehabilitation of rural life—the only ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... think of the nations immersed in a gross mental lethargy; passively witnessing the gradual extinction of arts and sciences which Greece and Rome had splendidly inaugurated; allowing libraries and monuments of antique civilisation to crumble into dust; while they trembled under a dull and brooding terror of coming judgment, shrank from natural enjoyment as from deadly sin, or yielded themselves with brutal eagerness to the satisfaction of vulgar appetites. Preoccupation with the other world in this long period weakens man's hold upon the ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... wife's garden, Anthony's agents reported him either mad or deeply scheming. They kept after him, offering much more than the land was worth. Doyle began by being pugnacious, but in the end he took to brooding. ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Grayson took over the command of his destroyer when its captain was killed on his bridge. An electrified crew saw the strange, brooding youngster perform prodigies of skill and courage, and responded to them. In one week of desultory action the battered destroyer had accounted for seven Soviet destroyers ...
— The Adventurer • Cyril M. Kornbluth
... that Malebolge Pool, that it all lay there with its gloomy circles, with its alti guai, and that he himself should see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we went thither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into 'mystic unfathomable song'; and this his Divine Comedy, the most remarkable of all modern Books, is ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... any reason for its having been in the possession of "Smith." Average Jones had studied and restudied the columns, both reading matter and advertising, until he knew them almost by heart. During the period of waiting for his order to be brought he was brooding over the problem, when he felt a hand-pressure on his shoulder and turned to confront Mr. Thomas Colvin McIntyre, solemn of countenance and groomed with a supernal modesty of elegance, as befitted a rising young ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Douglas, brought back suddenly to the present, realised that this wonderful afternoon was at an end. The stopping of the carriage seemed to him, in a sense, symbolical. The interlude was over. He must go back to his brooding land ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... aside the veil of the future, was Edith Symmes, who sat almost directly before it. To the left of her was Marcia, pale and sad, and close beside her Horace Penfield. Heavens! He jumped impatiently to his feet. He was simply getting into a morbid muddle sitting here brooding over this matter. He must have action, action of some kind, and obeying a sudden impulse, he decided to ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... wounded. On the ninth, having gained the summit of a lofty mountain, to their infinite delight they came in view of the great Southern ocean, and saw beneath them the glittering spires of Panama, and the shipping in the harbor. The despondency which had been brooding over them for several days, was now lighted up by the most extravagant demonstrations of joy. They leaped, and sang, and threw up their hats, and blew their trumpets, and beat their arms, as though ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was greeted with loud applause by a court in which McMurdo saw many familiar faces. Brothers of the lodge smiled and waved. But there were others who sat with compressed lips and brooding eyes as the men filed out of the dock. One of them, a little, dark-bearded, resolute fellow, put the thoughts of himself and comrades into words as ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... anything in his power to serve him, but for whom he cares almost nothing. At the same time he himself loves a woman to such distraction that he counts himself crowned with love's best crown while sacrificing his soul, his body, his peace, and his fame in brooding on his love, while she could calmly decree that he should roast at a slow fire if it would compass her frivolously ambitious designs. Thus his indifference to his friend is avenged by the indifference the ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... thousands of them have thrown themselves naked on the spears of their enemy, to become an example of sacrificial revolt. And can any of us wonder that when even this tragic seeding of the martyrs proved unfruitful, many of the Russian youth, brooding over the irremediable wrongs of their people, were driven to insanity and suicide? And, if all that was possible, would it be surprising if it also happened that at least one flaming rebel should ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... In the first place I had been long accustomed to subsist on a very small quantity of water, and secondly I had always kept my mind occupied and amused instead of giving way to desponding or gloomy thoughts. When we halted and the others laid wearily down, brooding over their melancholy situation, I employed myself in writing up my journal, which was most scrupulously kept; and this duty being concluded I had recourse to a small New Testament, my companion throughout all my wanderings, ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... is has its compensating balm. Then the brave man, as our German cousins say, possesses the world, whereas the melancholy man does not even possess his own share of it. Exercise, or continued employment of some kind, will make a man cheerful; but sitting at home, brooding and thinking, or doing little, will bring gloom. The reaction of this feeling is wonderful. It arises from a sense of duty done, and it also enables us to do our duty. Cheerful people live long in our memory. We remember joy more readily than sorrow, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... termination to these midnight joys of Alexander, and for a season he felt obliged to assume more pacific habits, and to solace himself with the society of that "phoenix of Portugal," who had so long sat brooding on his domestic hearth. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... a confusion in the minds of the Egyptian dragomans with the two brooding birds of Osiris, Isis and Nephthys, considered as Zarait, that is to say, as two birds of a different species, according to the different traditions ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... no centre for a literature to gather round. Such national pride as exists in English-speaking Ireland dates from the days of Grattan and Flood. And Irish national aspirations still bear the impress of their origin amid that period of political turmoil, than which nothing is more hostile to the brooding care of literary workmanship, the long labour and the slow result. Irishmen have always shown a strong disinclination to pure literature. The roll of Irish novelists is more than half made up of women's names; Miss Edgeworth, ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... wisdom; unto me Its voice hath come, a passionate augury! Methinks the very aspect of the world Changed to the mystic music of its hope. For, lo! about the deepening heavenly cope The stormy cloudland banners all are furled, And softly borne above Are brooding pinions of invisible love, Distilling balm of rest and tender thought From fairy realms, by fairy witchery wrought O'er the hushed ocean steal celestial gleams Divine as light that haunts a poet's dreams; ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... but usually sheered off before he had gone far. Of shrugs and winks he offered plenty, enough to keep the youngster tantalized almost beyond endurance. Nor was it possible to force his confidence, for he was of a surly, taciturn disposition, given to brooding suspicions. ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... his habit as he lived"; but I have nowhere found a real intimate of Lincoln. I nowhere get the impression in my narrative or reminiscence that the writer had in fact penetrated to the heart of his mystery, or that any man could penetrate to the heart of it. That brooding spirit had no real familiars. I get the impression that it never spoke out in complete self-revelation, and that it could not reveal itself complete to any one. It was a very lonely spirit that looked out from underneath those shaggy brows, and comprehended ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all temples th' upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for thou know'st; thou from the first Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread, Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast Abyss, And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That, to the height of this great argument, I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men. ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... Bill figures that she will give him up now, and gives a quick, hunted look around as Florence closes the weapon and lays it on the table, fully convinced that she has been lied to. She stands looking down at the weapon, her face brooding. Suspense. What will she ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... begun when Kari, who of late had been sad-faced and brooding, and who did not eat with us, entered and whispered to me that my Master of Lading from the docks prayed to see me at once on a matter which would brook no delay. Making excuse to Blanche and the company, I went out to see him in ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... of diplomacy being triumphantly executed, Harry embraced his fond parent with the utmost affection, and retired to his own apartments, where he stretched himself on his ottoman, and lay brooding silently, sighing for the day which was to bring the fair Miss Amory under his paternal roof, and devising a hundred ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... published in a magazine, they have been carefully excerpted from the book. The mellow music of his tones, the self-restraint and meditative attitude, are pleasant to the reader after the turbid utterances and twisted language of Carlyle; we may compare the stirring rebellious spirit brooding over the folly of mankind with the man who takes humanity as he finds it, and is content to make the best of a world in which he sees not much, beyond art and nature and a few old friends, to interest him. Upon the whole, we may place Carlyle and ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... drawn her attention and stimulated her curiosity. She had longed to be pale, but the pallor she was achieving by millinery work in a stuffy room was not the marble whiteness which she had desired. Only in the sliding window could she see her face ideally transfigured. There it had the brooding dimness of strange poetic romance. You couldn't know about that girl, she thought. You'd want to know about her. You'd wonder all the time about her, as though she had a secret.... The reflection became curiously distorted. ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... in the foregoing views (which may have been materially modified by their channel) I do not accept them as a finality. That a brooding spiritual power has to do with all development and progress I do not doubt. But this power is not necessarily a monotonous and universal influence like gravitation or caloric. There is no reason to forbid special acts of the creative spiritual energy, for we observe to-day the production ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... with only the slightest labor to occupy her hands and mind, gave her idle time—fertile soil for the raising of a dark crop of morbid thoughts. She brooded much, and, brooding, became restless, unhappy, and she could not conceal it from Bonbright when he came home eagerly for his dinner, ready to take up with boyish hope the absurd game he had invented. She allowed herself to think of Dulac; indeed, she forced herself to ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... sunset. A boatload of peasants rowing close in shore; a red-shirted solitary figure straying along the water's edge; tiny sea-gulls darting and dipping in the waves around the steamer; a vista up some wide-mouthed affluent; and a great peaceful stillness brooding over all,—such were the happenings, too small for incidents, which accorded perfectly with the character of the Volga. For the Volga cannot be compared with the Rhine or the Hudson in castles or scenery. It has, instead, a grand, placid charm ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... house, and John Keats goes into his room and sits down, brooding, brooding. "O," he says, "that something fortunate had ever happened to me or my brothers! Then I might hope—but despair is forced upon me as a habit." And he is only too well aware, that although he is naturally "the very soul of courage and manliness," this habit of despair ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... galloping along side by side over the rolling plain. We were all silent, Reuben meditating upon his new corslet, as I could see from his frequent glances at it; while Saxon, with his eyes half closed, was brooding over some matter of his own. For my own part, my thoughts ran upon the ignominy of the old soldier's designs upon the gold chest, and the additional shame which rose from the knowledge that our host had in some way divined his intention. No good could come of ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Pauline's room, for Poussette gallantly led her to the apartment vacated by Mme. Poussette, but the two friends were constantly together, and Ringfield at first rejoiced in the advent of the gay Cordova, as it intimated a sensible enjoyment of life on Pauline's part in place of moping and brooding, and as it also appeared to keep Edmund Crabbe off the premises. But these two good ends were gained at the expense of a third, for the constant and animated, even tender attentions of the host were altogether too obvious, although at first no complaint ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... power, brooding with crushing weight over life on this wintry, surf-beat, iron-bound coast, which lies in twilight for nine months, and for three of these altogether loses the sun, creates a terror of darkness in the mind, yet the ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... Jacoby and Mr. Philip Stanhope were the Whips. Mr. Stanhope was not much in evidence. But on the day Mr. Jacoby accepted the appointment he locked up his hat and patrolled the Lobby with an air of sagacity and an appearance of brooding over State secrets, which at once raised the new party into a position ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... told of suffering. Among the beds, which stood in a row, each with its head against the wall, one was pointed out on which a living skeleton lay. The face was very very pale, and it seemed as if the angel of death were already brooding over it. Yet, though so changed, there was no mistaking the aspect and the once powerful frame of ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... evening than they had been in the morning, and as the darkness of the November night closed around the lonely bark, gaunt shadowy forms, Disease and Famine and Death, seemed shaping themselves among the clouds and brooding menacingly over the Forlorn Hope, as its soldiers ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... country, won by the sword, held by the sword, in spite of all that ignorant demagogues in England may say, Fred Daleham felt all the more keenly the disappointment of his inability to follow the career that he would have chosen. However, he was a healthy-minded young man, not given to brooding ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... held King William's commission now, and had not stood by the right side, should take the opportunity of his absence to seduce his wife! It was a hideous and incredible idea, some mad mistake which could be easily explained. Dundee, throwing off his black and brooding burden of thought, would touch his horse with the spur and gallop for a mile in gayety of heart and then ride on his way, singing some Cavalier song, till Grimond, who kept away from his master those days and ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... deck of a ship see the beauty of the city that they have left behind, better than when they were pressing through its narrow streets. And though the view of the receding houses from the far-off waters may be an illusion, our view of the past, if we see God brooding over it all, and working in it all, is no illusion. The meannesses are hidden, the narrow places are invisible, all the pain and suffering is quieted, and we are able to behold more truly than when we were in the midst of them, the bearing, the purpose, and the blessedness alike of our ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... away with dignity when a man with a hoarse voice and a watery eye is comparing you to your disadvantage with a parsnip, and George did not come anywhere near achieving the feat. But he extricated himself somehow, and went home brooding. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... queen knew her own, and stoutly battled for its protection. She further increased their prospects by laying three others. After that the king made up his mind that she was a most remarkable bird, and went away pleasure-seeking; but the queen settled to brooding, a picture of joyous faith ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... a lodger in her house who was satisfied to order a mutton chop and a potato day after day. It was no wonder then that she grew more reticent and dark-browed and sullen every day, and that she went about the house like a person perpetually brooding over some dark secret. Some awful midnight crime, perhaps—some beautiful and unhappy young heiress, left in her charge, and smothered with a pillow for yellow gold, still haunting her in Quebec Street. So might one have imagined; but it would ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... studied the low brooding sky, the dying world, listened to the wailing, mourning winds, the sighing of the grasses and it too said wearily, "Yes—what's the ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... together in silence. He always respected her moods, and saw clearly enough that some inward trouble was weighing upon her. There was nothing to be said in such cases, for Elsie could never talk of her griefs. An hour, or a day, or a week of brooding, with perhaps a sudden flash of violence: this was the way in which the impressions which make other women weep, and tell their griefs by word or letter, showed their effects in her mind ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... president, but it merely corroborated the foregoing. Driscoll, in sole charge of his own defence, insisted that her deposition be read, but Lopez would permit no such waste of time. He was brooding on Monsieur Eloin usurping his own place near the Emperor, and he wanted to finish the present business so ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... Always she was with her father, it seemed; and the old man, garrulous enough when alone, was invariably silent and moody in his daughter's company. One might almost have said he hated her, from the sneering impatient looks he cast at her from time to time. As for Lydia, she was all love and brooding tenderness for the man who had ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... for all men after them, two mighty songs, —one, of the Menis,* Mens, passion, or zeal, of Athena, breathed into a mortal whose name is "Ache of heart," and whose short life is only the incarnate brooding and burst of storm; and the other is of the foresight and fortitude of Athena, maintained by her in the heart of a mortal whose name is given to him from a longer grief, Odysseus, the full of sorrow, the much ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... o' war the young soldier is weary, Ye wha in battle ha'e witness'd his flame; Remember his daring when danger was near ye, Forgive ye the sigh that he heaves for his hame. Past perils he heeds not, nor dangers yet coming, Frae dark-brooding terror his young heart is free; But it pants for the place whar in youth he was roaming; He turns to the north wi' ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... clean-handed, wet-haired, murmuring low-voiced courtesies,—"Pass me the gravy, please," "I wouldn't be carin' fer any, thank you,"—and lifting to the faces of waiting girls now and again their strange, young, brooding eyes, bold, laughing, and afraid, hungry, pathetic, arrogant, as the eyes of young men are, tameless and untamable, but full of the pathos of the untamed. Joan's heart shook a little under their looks, but when Pierre lifted his eyes to her, ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Henri away and sat down beside the divan to watch with a feeling of weariness that was not bodily. The great tent was very still, a pregnant silence seemed to hang in the air, a brooding hush that strained Saint Hubert's already overstrained nerves. He had need of all his calm, and he gripped himself resolutely. For a time Ahmed Ben Hassan lay motionless, and then, as the day crept on and ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... accepted without suspicion by the children not as a nurse, but as a playmate. Weeks passed. The four played together with a greater harmony than the three had ever attained. Day after day the Reverend Orme sat waiting in his study and brooding. The dreaded call never came. He began ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... singers, pretending to be in such furies of passion, yet modulating every note with the cunning of a carver in ivory, seems to me so preposterous! For surely song springs from a brooding over past feeling,—I do not mean lost ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... the bed and wondered, whilst his friend sat beside him, lost in brooding. Each man was ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... grief which had been brooding over her troubled mind all day, broke suddenly in a tempest of weeping. She could have given no reason for her distress; but all at once, on the eve of that day which was to give a new colour to her life, panic seized her, and she trembled at the ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... of it by daybreak, their ponies travelling heavily, fetlock deep, but could advance no further. With the first tint of rose in the east the brooding storm burst upon them in wild desert fury, the fierce wind buffeting them back, lashing their faces with sharp grit until they were unable to bear the pain. The flying sand smote them in clouds, driven ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... purposes. To linger there among the rocks seemed to be the only delight left to her in life,—except that intense delight which a mother has in loving her child. She herself read but little, and never put a hand upon the piano. But she had a faculty of sitting and thinking, of brooding over her own past years and dreaming of her daughter's future life, which never deserted her. With her the days were doubtless very sad, but it cannot truly be said that ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... the dim sanctuary was helpful to such self-communing. He relished being alone again, and after an hour's brooding had recovered at all events a decent balance of thought, a ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... about, which never would have been the case had there been a mother among the elders, for mothers have a way of understanding these things. But to Emmy Lou "mother" had come to mean but a memory which faded as it came, a vague consciousness of encircling arms, of a brooding, tender face, of yearning eyes; and it was only because they told her that Emmy Lou remembered how mother had gone away South, one winter, to get well. That they afterward told her it was Heaven, in no wise confused Emmy Lou, because, ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... Sydney they found Goody still at the "Grosvenor," seemingly quite happy. At first he had been feeble and despondent, but he knew a large number of people, whose visits kept him from brooding and, on his daughter's return, she found him quite a Society man in his old-fashioned way. Hil asked him to come out to Blue Gums, but he preferred the hotel, so both she and May left him there, perfectly content. Hil found an accumulation of letters and invitations ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... the North where the bonnie broom grows, Where winding through green meadows the silver Maine flows, Every lark as it soars and sings that sweet spot knows; For the mate for whom it sings, Till the clear blue heaven rings, Is brooding on its nest mid the daisies in the grass; And that psalmist sweet, the thrush, And the linnet in the bush, Tell the children all their secrets ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... of Jesus is perfect. Its touch is always gentle and full of healing. Its helpfulness is always wise. Its tenderness is like the warmth of a heavenly summer, brooding over the life which accepts it. All the love of God pours forth in the friendship of Jesus. To be his beloved is to be held in the clasp of the everlasting arms. "I and my Father are one," said ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... away with her friends as the Countess sat brooding over the new hopes that had been opened to her. At first, she could not tear her mind away from the position which she herself would occupy as soon as her daughter should have been married and taken away from her. The young Earl would not want his mother-in-law,—a mother-in-law ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... events, and others like them, and all occurring in the rapid months of that momentous year, smote like hammers on the door of Ibsen's brain, till it quivered with enthusiasm and excitement. The old brooding languor was at an end, and with surprising clearness and firmness he saw his pathway cut out before him as a poet and as a man. The old clouds vanished, and though the social difficulties which hemmed in his career were as gross ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... adjutant, and never will I forgive him for having aided in the union of Corsica with France. He should have followed her fortunes and have succumbed only with her." Throughout his youth he is at heart anti-French, morose, "bitter, liking very few and very little liked, brooding over resentment," like a vanquished man, always moody and compelled to work against the grain. At Brienne, he keeps aloof from his comrades, takes no part in their sports, shuts himself in the library, and opens himself up only to Bourrienne in explosions of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... my mother never slept, but sat all through it in her nursing chair, brooding over I know not what. As I left her when I went to my bed, so I found her when I came from it at dawn. I can remember well pushing the door ajar to see her face glimmering white in the twilight of the May morning, as she sat, her large eyes fixed ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... a certain stage in every sorrow when it rejects sympathy. Purdee, always taciturn, grave, uncommunicative, was, invested with an austere aloofness, and was hardly to be approached as he sat, silent and absent, brooding over the fire at his own home. When roused by some circumstance of the domestic routine, and it became apparent that his mood was not sullenness or anger, but simple and complete introversion, it added a dignity and suggested ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... time I felt a thrill of anticipation shoot through my veins. Why, I could not say. Her tone was peculiar, and she spoke in a sort of brooding way as though she were weighing something in her own mind; but then her manner had been peculiar throughout. Whatever it was that aroused my suspicion, I determined henceforth to keep a very sharp eye upon ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... be left alone to worry herself ill, brooding over the whole affair, is about the worst thing that could happen to her just now. It was only a play-baby spill, but it seems the worst accident that the world ever knew to her. She's got to be roused! I'll sit up here and see that she rests ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the waiter and was rather brooding than eating. He looked up eagerly, however, when Sweetwater entered, ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... and the affection there had been between him and her father; nor had they parted in such absolute brightness, as to make them unprepared for such a meeting as the present. The cloud of suspense was brooding lower and lower over the May family, and the need of faith and submission was as great with them as with the young orphan herself. Norman said little, but that little was so deep and fervent, that after a time Meta could not help saying, when Ethel was seen in the ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... to him. As soon as he had got settled down to his own new mode of life in the Holloway lodgings, he began to look about for a fit place for the homeless girl—a place, he thought to himself, which must combine several special advantages; plenty of work—she wanted that to take her mind off brooding; good, honest, upright people; and above all, no religion. Ronald recognised that last undoubted requirement as of absolutely paramount importance. 'She'll stand any amount of talk or anything else from me,' he ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... with his tongue Like a pug dog's hung out; The unicorn with twisted horn, Brooding upon ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... they had been subjected to; and so, at last, she consented and agreed that, for the present at least, she would receive the widow's money, but only until she could resume her place on the boards of the theater. But the deed of gift drove the brooding shadows out of the heart and ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... the wood he turned, but all in vain The women waited his return, till they Grey weary.. for in pain and wrath he lay In a close thicket, brooding o'er his shame, And panting ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... still in a frantic mood. She wanted to escape brooding, at all costs. She ran back to where Jim waited at the ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... of the Storm Country," with the same wild background, with its half-gypsy life of the squatters—tempestuous, passionate, brooding. Tess learns the "secret" of her birth and finds happiness and love through her boundless ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... voice ceased Amory realized that there were other things in the room besides people... over and around the figure crouched on the bed there hung an aura, gossamer as a moonbeam, tainted as stale, weak wine, yet a horror, diffusively brooding already over the three of them... and over by the window among the stirring curtains stood something else, featureless and indistinguishable, yet strangely familiar.... Simultaneously two great cases presented themselves ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... had been brooding over this matter of the Sicilian's view of Hermione's proceedings, the spirit moved him to go down on foot to Marechiaro to see if there were any letters for him at the post. It was now June 7th. In four days would come ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... portcullis was raised—the drawbridge spanned the moat—no guard was there to bar his way. The sunlight flooded the green valley, stretching lazily below him in the soft warmth of a mellow autumn morning. Behind him he had left the brooding shadows of the grim old fortress—the cold, cruel, depressing stronghold of intrigue, treason, ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... deep in a very slough of despond when suddenly things began to happen. I might have known that Sanstead House would never permit solitary brooding on Life for long. It was a place of incident, not of ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... She was still brooding over it when a fresh incident occurred, which served not only to confirm her suspicions in this regard, but to deepen and intensify the vague horror with which her husband's presence ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... tender note. Over a deserted field a turkey buzzard hovered low, and alighted on a stake in the fence, standing a moment with outstretched, vibrating wings till he was sure of his hold. A soft, warm, brooding day. Roads becoming dry in many places, and looking so good after the mud and the snow. I walk up beyond the boundary and over Meridian Hill. To move along the drying road and feel the delicious warmth is enough. The cattle low long and loud, and look wistfully into the distance. ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... her turn into a snake like magic in a fairy story. More than that, for days he would be odd and silent, and when he thought no one was looking at him, he would sit with his face in his hands, thinking and brooding and afraid. ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... There is one page in Fervaal at the beginning of Act II which calls up misty mountain tops covered with pine forests; there is another page in L'Etranger where one sees strange lights glimmering on the sea while a storm is brooding.[164] I should like to see M. d'Indy give himself up freely, in spite of all theories, to this descriptive lyricism, in which he so excels; or I wish at least he would seek inspiration in a subject where both his religious beliefs and his imagination could find satisfaction: a subject such ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... the purpose of raising the siege of Cambray. But honours and success are followed by envy. The King beheld this accession of glory to his brother with great dissatisfaction. He had been for seven months, while my brother and I were together in Gascony, brooding over his malice, and produced the strangest invention that can be imagined. He pretended to believe (what the King my husband can easily prove to be false) that I instigated him to go to war that I might ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the girl was wearing her heart out in brooding over the coming marriage. Jasper Wilde refused to be bought off, and Bernardine herself declared that it must take ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... look-outs on the mastheads of the Surprise; and he kept that post until his provisions failed. Then, as the Hermione would not come out to him, he determined to go into the Hermione. Hamilton was a silent, much-meditating man, not apt to share his counsels with anybody. In the cells of his brooding and solitary brain he prepared, down to the minutest details, his plan for a dash at the Hermione—a ship, it must be remembered, not only more than double his own in strength, but lying moored head and stern in a strongly fortified port, under the fire of batteries ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... gardens, breathing the scent of love's own roses mingled with the keen salt air that blew in from the sea of liberty. A fresh, new blessed life was opening before her. The clogging vapors of the past were rolling away at last. The unreasoning instinctive rebellion, bred of ennui and brooding dissatisfaction with the conditions of her existence and the people about her, had by a curious series of accidents been hastened to its acutest development; thought had at last fermented into active resolution, and the anticipation of action flooded her soul with ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... still brooding all the way up Fleet Street, and even to my own door; until I saw James standing there; and at the sight of him I knew that ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... I walked along with bent head brooding over the incredible thing that had happened, my companion's shapely legs gave out, and with a sigh of fatigue he suggested we should take a skiff amongst the many lying about upon the margins and sail towards the ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... members of the party, however, the indignation aroused by these secret blows was deep. Giscon, who was continually brooding over the tyranny and corruption which were ruining his country, was one of the leaders of this section of the party; with him were other spirits as ardent as himself. They met in a house in a quiet street in the lower town, and there discussed all sorts of ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... came out overhead, and the Southern Cross leaned down; seen from the river over the twin towers of the cathedral, seen from the cathedral brooding over the native quarter, seen in Paradise Street not at all, and not in any way missed by the inhabitants, whose eyes were not upon the stars; seen again in the Cantonment, over the massed trees of the park, and seen remarkably well from ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... proceed in his road to the temple of Hymen. We know that it is ungenerous, ignoble, almost unprecedented, to doubt the faith, the constancy, of a male paragon; yet, somehow, as the papers occasionally give us a sample of such infidelity; as we have sometimes seen a solitary female brooding over her woes in silence, and, with the seemliness of feminine decorum shrinking from the discovery of its cause, or which the grave has revealed for the first time, we cannot but wish that either the watchfulness of the parent, or a sense of self-preservation in ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... the wagon, but Madame Ladoinski possessed neither the energy nor the curiosity to glance out at them. She could think of nothing but her dead husband and her little orphaned boy. But suddenly as she sat brooding over her great loss she heard, 'Forward, lancers!' uttered in Polish. Believing that it was her husband's voice she had heard, she sprang up and looked out at the troop trotting ahead. But she could not recognise her husband among the lancers, and she turned ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore
... shone down upon two heads close together at a wide-open window. The one was dark and the other red. And the same young moon audaciously winked at the whispered confidences exchanged in the brooding quiet of ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... up eagerly. "Ah, that is what I have been brooding over this long time; until I was ashamed of myself and ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... admit Mary Raymond. Her babyish face looked white and wan in the clear morning light. For hours after her door had closed upon Marjorie and her mother she had sat on the edge of her bed in her pretty blue party frock, brooding on her wrongs. When she had finally prepared for sleep, it was only to toss and turn in her bed, wide-awake and resentful. At daylight she had risen listlessly, then fixing upon a certain plan of action, had bathed, put on a simple house gown and knocked ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... His soul's most perfect bliss to gratify. Wherefore, to make atonement, in some sort, For this one wrong he deemed that he had done The woman—this one crossing of her will— He knelt him down under the brooding shade Of a huge oak, and vowed 'fore heaven a vow: To wit, that Lucia never afterward Should in his hearing utter forth a wish For aught of earthly but himself would see That wish fulfilled, if such fulfilment were An end that mortal ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... afford steering way, swept majestically down stream, borne by the force of the current, which veered from bank to bank. We were moving scarcely swifter than from eight to ten miles an hour, and the monotonous voice of the man casting the lead line arose continuous through the brooding silence. The only other perceptible sounds were the exhaust of the steam pipes and the splash of running water. Thockmorton had told me we were already approaching the mouth of the Illinois, and I lingered against the rail, straining my eyes through the gloom hoping to gain a distant ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... possessed such extraordinary control over his feelings, expressed the most perfect cordiality. Morrel only then recollected the letter he had received from the viscount, in which, without assigning any reason, he begged him to go to the opera, but he understood that something terrible was brooding. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... some one, and I don't see why Grascour should not have as good a chance as another." Anderson had stalked away, brooding over the injustice of his position, and declaring to himself that this Belgian should never be allowed to marry ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... the Arrow-Maker. At the right, the house of RAIN WIND, and behind all a spring under a clump of dwarf oaks. A little trail runs between stones to connect the Arrow-Maker with the rest of the campody, and beyond it the valley rises gently to the Sierra foothills, brooding under the spring haze. A little to the fore of SIMWA'S house lies a great heap of blankets, baskets, and camp utensils, displayed to the best advantage, the wedding dower of the Chief's daughter. By her father's house BRIGHT WATER is being ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... to Bracy the most oppressive that he had ever encountered in facing danger. For the solemnity of the night in the great mountains was brooding over them, out of which at any moment death, in the shape of a keen knife, might descend. There was not a breath of air, but an icy chill dropped down from above, making the snow crystals turn sharp and crisp, crackling softly at the slightest movement. But the frosty air ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... no key. I went out to the men again, bewildered. The dawn had come, a pink and rosy dawn that promised another stifling day. It revealed the disarray of the deck—he basins, the old mahogany amputating-case with its lock plate of bone, the stained and reddened towels; and it showed the brooding and overcast ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... obliged to take a taxicab. As our driver threaded his way slowly and carefully through the thronged streets it gave us a splendid chance to see some of the enthusiasm. I think it did Margaret Ashton good, too, to get out, instead of brooding over the events of the past few days, as she had seen them. Her heightened colour made her more ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... in the following article sets forth the ends which Germany is striving to accomplish in the war, is the George Bernard Shaw of Germany. He is considered the leading German editor and an expert in Germany on foreign politics. As editor and proprietor of Die Zukunft, his fiery, brooding spirit and keen insight and wit, coupled with powers of satire and caricature, made him a solitary and striking independent figure in the German press years before the other newspapers of Germany ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... taunted and reviled, And threatened by this crawling scum of men? Oh, who shall urge the coming of that day When he in majesty shall clothe himself And stand before the astounded world its King?' Long brooding over this inflamed his soul, And, ever rash in schemes as wild in thought, At last he said, 'No longer will I bear This ignominy heaped upon my Lord. No man hath power to harm the Almighty One. Ay, let men's hands be lifted, then at once, Effulgent like the sun, swift like the sword, The jagged ...
— A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem - First Century • W. W. Story
... encounter, Mansana might very well have gone to visit the princess at her palace, but he still hesitated, perhaps with the secret hope that she might make one more advance towards him. The kind of self-brooding vanity, which he had so long cherished in secret, can be carried to absurd extremes, and is apt to be at once too retiring and too exacting. His shy reserve forbade him to call upon her, in spite of her express invitation, and yet he was audacious ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... her wishes she persisted in her purpose. The more she watched him the more she was convinced he loved in secret. If he loved in secret of course he loved beneath him. He went about the place all sombre and sullen and brooding. At last, with the rashness of an angry woman, she threatened to bring the young lady of her choice—who, by the way, seems to have been no shrinking blossom—to stay in the house. A stormy scene was the result. He threatened that if she did so he would leave the ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... come to gather ourselves together for an effort, we may sound the trumpet as loud and long as we please; the great barons of the mind will not rally to the standard, but sit, each one, at home, warming his hands over his own fire and brooding on ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tempest beats the restless seas, The wind blows loud, fierce from the skies; Sweet, sylph-like Una clasps the shell, Peace brooding ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... of his forefathers, would take Roland out of those gloomy reveries into which he still fell at times. And, thirdly, for us young people, ought not Blanche to find companions in children of her own sex and age? Already in those large black eyes there was something melancholy and brooding, as there is in the eyes of all children who live only with their elders. And for Pisistratus, with his altered prospects, and the one great gnawing memory at his heart,—which he tried to conceal from himself, but which a mother (and a mother who ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the easy-opinioned Shorty, exactly as if he had always maintained this view. "Chap started for Sunk Creek three weeks ago. Trapper he was; old like, with a red shirt. One of his horses come into the round-up Toosday. Man ain't been heard from." He ate in silence for a while, evidently brooding in his childlike mind. Then he said, querulously, "I'd sooner trust one of them Indians than ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... the result of many breeds or strains. The consequence is almost as great diversity of character within gallinaceous limits as exists in the families that care for them. For instance, one hen is a good, persistent layer; another is a patient, brooding mother; a third is fickle, and leaves her nest so often and for such long intervals that the eggs become chilled, and incubation ceases. Some are tame and tractable, others as wild as hawks, and others still are not of much account ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... the Storm Country," with the same wild background, with its half-gypsy life of the squatters—tempestuous, passionate, brooding. Tess learns the "secret" of her birth and finds happiness and love through her boundless ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... thousand memories spring In the auld kirk-yard, Though time's death-brooding wing Shade the auld kirk-yard. The light of many a hearth, Its music and its mirth, Sleep in the deep dark earth Of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... hovers the shadow of the police. One seems to breathe dark suspicion and mistrust in the very air. The people in the civil walks of life all look like whipped curs. They wear the expression of people brooding over some deep sorrow. The crape of dead liberty seems to be hanging on every door-knob. Nobody seems capable of smiling; one would think the shadow of some great calamity is hanging gloomily over the city. Nihilism and discontent run riot in the cities of the Caucasus; government spies ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... and thinned since her arrival; there was an anxious fold between her brows, and her mouth drooped at the corners. If her old friends—Sister Rose of the convent, for instance—had seen her, they could hardly have recognized this spiritless, brooding maiden for the joyous ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... She sat down and gazed lovingly at her handsome eldest-born, in whom her dead husband lived as in his prime. "'Twill be of Isabella," she thought, with a stir in her breast, rejoiced to think that the brooding eyes of the scholar had opened at last to the beauty and goodness of the highborn heiress ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... seared the sweet breath Of the greenwood with low-brooding vapors of death; O'er the flowers and the corn we were borne like a blast, And away to the fore-front of battle we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... that I have watched for your return more anxiously than she has, Conniston. And the curious part of it is she seemed to have no interest in the matter at all until six months ago. Sometimes I am afraid that brooding over her father's death has unsettled her a little. A mighty pretty girl, Conniston. A mighty pretty girl, indeed! And her brother is a skunk. Pst! You ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... several of the cavaliers, and especially on Hernando de Soto, who was on terms of more familiarity with him than Pizarro. De Soto reported Atahuallpa's demands to his leader; but the latter evaded a direct reply. He did not disclose the dark purposes over which his mind was brooding.12 Not long afterward he caused the notary to prepare an instrument, in which he fully acquitted the Inca of further obligation in respect to the ransom. This he commanded to be publicly proclaimed in the camp, while at the same time he openly declared that the safety of the Spaniards ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... wife drove down the Park. Saton followed her eyes, noticing her slight start, and gazed after them with brooding face. ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... however, one does not know how, the secret of her double life came out. No doubt long brooding over these voices, long intercourse with such celestial visitors, and the mission continually pressed upon her—meaningless to the child at first, a thing only to shed terrified tears over and wonder at—ripened her intelligence so that ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... at night. Dark, heavy clouds hung overhead like a mournful pall. A brooding darkness ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... said against him, dear. And it grieves me to see you making yourself unhappy over such useless brooding. What does it matter, after all—our knowing nothing about ourselves, who we are, or where we came from? We are happy, everybody is ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... eye Along the Grecian gallery, And brooding on my heavy ill, I met a statue standing still. Still in marble stone stood he, And stedfastly he looked at me. "Well met," I thought the look would say, "We both were fashioned far away; We neither knew, when we were young, These Londoners ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... its hands with satisfaction. The satisfaction increased when various dependents living at Kerfol were induced to say—with apparent sincerity—that during the year or two preceding his death their master had once more grown uncertain and irascible, and subject to the fits of brooding silence which his household had learned to dread before his second marriage. This seemed to show that things had not been going well at Kerfol; though no one could be found to say that there had been any signs of open disagreement between husband ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... that presently the child turned up his rosy face, and seeing the brooding look, it was plain he had the sense of being somehow left behind. He put up his hand to her cheek, and rubbed ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... modesty—do you sit down like a sage and criticise my explanation of the readings, and whatever idle babble you say has come into my head? Have you come full of envy, and dejected because nothing is sent you from home; and while the discussion is going on, do you sit brooding on nothing but how your father or your brother are disposed towards you:—"What are they saying about me there? at this moment they imagine I am making progress and saying, He will return perfectly omniscient! I wish I could become omniscient before I return; but ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... ridiculous. From that first moment Kells had wanted her; he had tried to persuade Roberts to leave her, and, failing, had killed him; he had rid himself of the other two men—and now Joan knew she had heard shots back there. Kells's intention loomed out of all his dark brooding, and it stood clear now to her, dastardly, worse than captivity, or torture, or death—the worst fate that could befall ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... the cabin stove and brooded, a broken-hearted, dispirited counterpart of what he had been at the Christmas time. It was the man's nature to be silent in seasons of misfortune. During the previous year, when luck had been so against him, this characteristic of silent brooding had shown itself markedly, but then he did not remain in the house and neglect his work as he did now. He seemed to have lost all heart and all ambition. He scarcely troubled to feed the dogs, and the few tasks that he did perform were evidently irksome and unpleasant ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... After that the only immediate danger was from the wind that sometimes blows down in sudden gusts from between the mountain-tops. It would have needed only half a sea to swamp us. But the Dead Sea was living up to its reputation, quiet, inert, like a mercury mirror for the stars—a brooding place ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... his lamp, but the flaring name illuminated only a little space in the brooding, hovering blackness ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... He was brooding in this chair, with his eyes cast down upon the ground, when Mrs Gamp came in to tell him that the little room was ready. Not being quite sure of her reception after interfering in the quarrel, Mrs Gamp, as a means of interesting and propitiating her patron, affected ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... iron-founder was looking up into the eyes of beguiling when he said this, and, being a mere man, he wondered what made them flash and then grow suddenly fathomless and brooding. ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... like a man possessed by a devil who will not leave him; and I have always observed, that the devil most obstinate to be expelled is a secret. I knew you were a Corsican. I knew you were gloomy, and always brooding over some old history of the vendetta; and I overlooked that in Italy, because in Italy those things are thought nothing of. But in France they are considered in very bad taste; there are gendarmes who occupy themselves with such affairs, judges who condemn, and scaffolds ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Francis I., how strong and tender is the mother's attitude, as she stoops to lift her child from his cradle; in the Chair Madonna, how protecting is the capacious embrace with which she gathers him to herself in brooding love. No technical artistic education is necessary for the appreciation of such pictures. All who have known a mother's love look and understand, and look again and ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... took to brooding on the gray car which shadowed him from Waterloo to Fortescue Square, and again from the square to his own abode. If it held some member of the Embassy staff, why had no more been heard of it? And what had Winter and Furneaux meant by hinting that far wider ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... quaestor to the consul Orestes. It is said that he kept quiet when Tiberius was killed, and intended to steer clear of politics. But one of those splendid bursts of oratory, with which he had already electrified the people, remains to show over what he was for ever brooding. 'They slew him,' he cried, 'these scoundrels slew Tiberius, my noble brother! Ah, they are all of one pattern.' He said this in advocating the Lex Papiria, which proposed to make the re-election of a tribune legal. But ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... promise of what was to be a man fit for all offices of active rural life, and to be, in mature age, the selectman, the deacon, the representative, the colonel. As for Septimius, let him alone a moment or two, and then they would see him, with his head bent down, brooding, brooding, his eyes fixed on some chip, some stone, some common plant, any commonest thing, as if it were the clew and index to some mystery; and when, by chance startled out of these meditations, he lifted his eyes, there would be ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... oft Lies perdu in a nook or gloomy cave, Prompt to enchant some inadvertent wretch With his unhallowed touch. So, (poets sing) Grimalkin, to domestic vermin sworn An everlasting foe, with watchful eye Lies nightly brooding o'er a chinky gap, Portending her fell claws, to thoughtless mice Sure ruin. So her disembowell'd web Arachne, in a hall or kitchen, spreads Obvious to vagrant flies: she secret stands Within her woven cell: the humming prey, Regardless of their fate, rush on the toils Inextricable, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... such scenes as this. Under different conditions he would have enjoyed this ride immensely. But now—with his mind a seething bitter chaos consequent upon his companion's incomprehensible behavior towards him, he rode in a sort of brooding reverie. Yorke was equally morose. Not a word had fallen from their lips since they ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... and iridescent, in the magic web of his verse. One thought, however, perpetually haunts him; under all his music of laughter or of passion, it is easy to hear one dominating note. It is the thought of mortality. The whining, leering, brooding creature can never for a moment forget that awful Shadow. He sees it in all its aspects—as a subject for mockery, for penitence, for resignation, for despair. He sees it as the melancholy, inevitable end of all that is beautiful, all ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... and the moonlit camp, with its anxious generals, its weary soldiers, its fearful machinery of destruction, all strewn along the bank of the great river, remained plunged in silence, as if brooding over the chances of the morrow and the failures of the past. And hardly four miles away another army—twice as numerous, equally confident, equally brave—were waiting impatiently for the morning and the final settlement of the ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... troubled sea of primeval manuscript, where Mr. Rickman sat with his head in his hands, brooding over the face of the waters. He had once profanely said that God's world was a chaos he had got to work on. Now it was his world that was chaos. A tempestuous chaos, where things to be weltered in the wreck of things that were. Rickman's ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... tongue, Belying the foul heart! Who was it urged Friendly to tyrants that accurst decree, Whose influence brooding o'er this hallow'd hall, Has chill'd each tongue to silence. Who destroy'd The freedom of debate, and carried through The fatal law, that doom'd the delegates, Unheard before their equals, to the bar Where cruelty sat throned, and murder reign'd With her Dumas coequal? Say—thou man Of mighty ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... care; Brooding on hours misspent, To see the spectre of Despair Come to our lonely tent; Like Brutus, 'midst his slumbering host, Summoned to ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... wonder!' said the hen, 'you have nothing to do, and so you sit brooding over such fancies. Lay eggs, or purr, and you'll ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... (Academy, 5th November): "Wanting a general term for such customs," writes Dr. Tylor, "and finding statements in books that this male lying-in lasted on till modern times, in the south of France, and was there called couvade, that is brooding or hatching (couver), I adopted this word for the set of customs, and it has since become established in English." The discussion was carried on in The Academy, 12th and 19th November, 10th and 17th December; Mr. A.L. Mayhew wrote (12th November): "There ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... thus brooding over projects of vengeance, Commander de Jars kept his word, and about a month after the interview above related he sent word to Quennebert that the Chevalier de Moranges had left Perregaud's completely recovered from his wound. But the nearly fatal result of the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... he handed her a quart cup of oats from the bin. "Oh, I know what you're talking about," answered Mother, as she scattered a little grain in front of each nest and prepared to leave in peace and quiet the brooding mothers. "It's this woman's rights and wrongs question. I've been so busy doctoring Providence Road pains and trying to make a good, proper husband outen you for some nice girl, what some other woman have been putting licks on to get ready for you, that I've been too pushed to think ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... across her flung, That name most dear forever on his tongue. As with soft accents round her neck he clings, And cheek to cheek her lulling song she sings, How blest to feel the beating of his heart, Breathe his sweet breath, and kiss for kiss impart, Watch o'er his slumbers, like the brooding dove, And if she can, ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... "Still brooding, Albinik! Everything favors our projects. The Roman general is no longer suspicious; your skill this morning will decide him to accept your services; and to-morrow, mayhap, you will pilot ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... order to be near the water. See, here in the corner are drops of candle grease and the remains of a fire. On the day of the Mathers's picnic he doubtless saw the party pass through and recognized Colonel Gaylord. It brought to his mind the thrashing he had received. While he was still brooding over the matter, the Colonel came back alone, and it flashed into the fellow's mind that this was his chance. He may have been afraid at first or he may have hesitated through kindlier motives. At any rate he did ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... said Miss Gardine. "Ze doctair has said if my brother could once remember zat last year he might be cured entierement. It is brooding on zat subject that brought on his insanity: he needs a shock. Now, if you will go with me when I visit him, and show him suddenly ze star buttons—who knows?—all may come back to him. I have told ze doctair all ze story, and he thinks it a plan ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... domesticated women!" he thought, and shortly afterwards departed, brooding, to the ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... from which we ought to be debarred when the adverse moment has arrived; so that, when trade was prospering, when all was sunshiny, a man might condescend to occupy his spare hours in something else than in a melancholy brooding over the state of the country—that, when returns were rapid, and profits ready, one might deign to cultivate one's faculties, and become acquainted with what the mind of Europe was conceiving or executing; ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... negligently: but never again, perhaps, was he to show so much over-rapturing joy in the world's loveliness, such Bacchic abandon to the ideal beauty which the true poet sees glowing upon the forlornest height and brooding in the shadow-haunted hollows of the hills. The Browning who might have been is here: henceforth the Browning we know and love stands unique among all the lords of song. But sometimes do we not turn longingly, wonderingly at least, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Brooke has called "the ten fallow years in the life of Tennyson." But fallow years are not all fallow. The dark brooding night is as necessary for our life as the garish day. Great crops of wheat that feed the nations grow only where the winter's snow covers all as with a garment. And ever behind the mystery of sleep, and beneath the silence of the snow, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... position at the west end of the chapel and looking upwards, we see in the first compartment God dividing light from darkness; in the second, creating the sun and the moon and the solid earth; in the third, animating the ocean with His brooding influence; in the fourth, creating Adam; in the fifth, creating Eve. The sixth represents the temptation of our first parents and their expulsion from Paradise. The seventh shows Noah's sacrifice before entering the ark; the eighth depicts the ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... was disproportionate to that small ship. It had on but dungarees and a singlet, and the singlet, because of the length of the figure, was concave at the stomach, where, having nothing to rest upon, it was corrugated through the weight of a head made brooding by a heavy black beard. Hairy wrists were thrust deeply into the pockets to hold up the trousers. The dome of its head was as bald and polished as yellow metal. The steward introduced me to the Chief Engineer. "Yon's a dirty ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... rising among the fertile fields or daisy-dotted pastures; the great circles of standing stones, starred everywhere, in the valleys or upon the uplands, along the rough sides of heather-covered hills. They have everywhere the same aspect of august mystery, the same brooding presence, like sentinels of another world. It is impossible not to feel their overshadowing majesty. Everywhere they follow the same designs in large simplicity; inspired by the same purpose, and with the same tireless ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... left the court, and succeeded in getting an old sailor to row him to the rock. Twilight was brooding over the valley of the Rhine when the boat approached the gigantic cliff; the departing sun had long sunk below the mountains, and now night was creeping on in silence; the evening star was twinkling in the ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... and extremely tedious; it being a slow train, which plods on without haste and without rest. At about ten o'clock we reached Birkenhead, and there crossed the familiar and detestable Mersey, which, as usual, had a cloudy sky brooding over it. Mrs. Blodgett received me most hospitably, but was impelled, by an overflow of guests, to put me into a little back room, looking into the court, and formerly occupied by my predecessor, General Armstrong. . . . . She expressed a hope that ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... though with a thousand clinging fingers, and growled and sputtered, and then seemed to quit it for a moment and whisper around the oak boards like invisible conspirators taking counsel in a closet. A scholar on that water nursing his sallow face in the trough of his hand would have fallen a-brooding on the grim boatman crossing to the shore that none may leave, or the old woman of the Sanza, poling her ghostly, everlasting raft; and had he listened, he could have heard the baying of the three-mouthed hound arousing the wardens of the Vedic Underworld to ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... a dream she made her progress, riding through the wonderful stillness of the vast wild land, an ocean on which each littlest sound was afloat, so that each was given its true value almost like a musical tone. An awful, beautiful silence this, brooding back of every sound; nothing in such a place gives forth mere senseless noise; the ripple of frogs in marsh and spring branch fall upon the sense as sweet as bird-songs. The clamour of little falls, the solemn suggestion of wind in the pines, the sweet ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... spoken of in a low voice, and with finger pointing to the forehead? There was something ridiculous, as well as repugnant, in such a thought; but it kept possession of Amy's mind. She was brooding upon it when her mother came ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... the wind doth blow, And coughing drowns the parson's saw, And birds sit brooding in the snow, And Marian's nose looks red and raw: When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl— Then nightly sings the staring owl Tuwhoo! Tuwhit! Tuwhoo! A merry note! While greasy Joan doth ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Cambray. But honours and success are followed by envy. The King beheld this accession of glory to his brother with great dissatisfaction. He had been for seven months, while my brother and I were together in Gascony, brooding over his malice, and produced the strangest invention that can be imagined. He pretended to believe (what the King my husband can easily prove to be false) that I instigated him to go to war that I might procure for my brother the credit of making peace. This is not at all probable when it is considered ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... his whip under his arm, brooding over his own thoughts and lifting up one after the other his heavy wooden shoes daubed with clay. Certainly he desired to marry Celeste Levesque. He wanted her with her child because she was the wife he wanted. He could not say why, but he knew it, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... be diverting these children as brooding over real and imaginary woes. It cannot be wrong. If papa could only look in upon us now as he ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... few characters that Strauss could not paint, in those days, so, too, there seemed few situations, few atmospheres, to which he could not do justice. A couple of measures, the sinister palpitation of the timpani and the violas, the brooding of the wood-wind, the dull flickering of the flutes, the laboring breath of the strings, and we are lying on the death-bed, exhausted and gasping for air, weighed by the wrecks of hopes, awaiting the cruel blows on the heart that will end everything. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... epileptic tendencies—as McPherson himself admits—had taken his benefactor's death terribly to heart, and had brooded over it day and night. Is there any reason to doubt that in such an unbalanced nature, this brooding, coupled by fever, should have produced a delirium in which he believed he heard ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... determined to kill her. He started for Manoa at dawn, and proceeded as far as Mahinauli, in mid-valley, where he rested under a hala (Pandanus odoratissimus) tree that grew in the grove of wiliwili (Erythrina monosperma). He sat there some time, brooding over the fancied injury to himself, and nursing his wrath. Upon resuming his walk he broke off and carried along with him a bunch of hala nuts. It was quite noon when he reached Kahaiamano and presented himself before the house of Kahalaopuna. The latter had just ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... burden and sorrow of earth, brooding in dim solicitude over the far times and men yet to be, we cannot recklessly utter a word calculated to lessen the hopes of man, pathetic creature, who weeps into the world and faints out of it. It is our faith not knowledge that the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... they were glad of the exertion, for it kept them from brooding over the troubles of their situation, and a troublesome situation ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... banks, where the road had been worn down at the crest of the volcano's rim; then at once, far below, in a circle of silent trees with here and there a vague shore of marshy land, I saw the Pond of Venus: some miles of brooding water, darkened by the dark slopes around it. Its darkness recalled the dark time before the dawn of our ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... into deep slumber. The fowls had ended by perching on her body; she was buried beneath a wave of living plumage. Hens were brooding over her feet; geese stretched their soft downy necks over her legs. The pig lay against her left side, while on the right, the goat poked its bearded head under her arm. The pigeons were roosting and nestling all over her, on her hands, her waist, and her shoulders. And there ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... from his mind, the questions unanswered and perhaps unanswerable. In spite of the apparent bleakness of the future, he had no desire to die, and there was, psychologically, the possibility that too much brooding of that kind would evoke a subconscious reaction that could slow him down or cause a wrong decision at a vital moment. A feeling of futility could operate to bring on his death in spite of his conscious determination to win the ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... not been put to the question by the great council of Amphictyons? Had they not been smothered in onions by the terrible men of Pyquag? In the midst of this consternation and perplexity, when horror, like a mighty nightmare, sat brooding upon the little, fat, plethoric city of New Amsterdam, the ears of the multitude were suddenly startled by the distant sound of a trumpet;—it approached—it grew louder and louder—and now it resounded at the city gate. The public could not be mistaken in the ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... several reasons why the reaction should be especially sharp in Russia. The Slav peoples that form the great bulk of her population are notoriously sensitive. Shut up for nearly half the year by the rigours of winter, they naturally develop habits of brooding introspection or coarse animalism—witness the plaintive strains of their folk-songs, the pessimism that haunts their literature, and the dram-drinking habits of the peasantry. The Muscovite temperament and the Muscovite climate naturally lead to idealist ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... where my companions were sitting, most of them with their heads sunk between their knees, brooding on our misfortune, except Andrew, who stood with his arms folded, meditating on our future plans, and asking assistance whence alone ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... martyr, the epithets "close" and "deceitful" this reticence earned her. Her time was spent in writing endless, scrawly letters to Evelyn, which covered days; in sitting moodily at the top of the fir tree which she climbed in defiance of her length of petticoat glaring at sunsets, and brooding on dead delights; in taking long, solitary, evening walks, by choice on the heel of a thunderstorm, when the red earth was riddled by creeklets of running water; till Mother, haunted by a lively fear of encounters with "swags" or Chinamen, put ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... inside of a booth of boughs, leaves, and birch-bark, that had been hastily constructed for his accommodation. He was a great, rugged, north-country man, of immense physical power—as most chiefs were in those days. He seemed to be brooding over his sorrows at the time ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... us. Not that prosperity follows righteousness, not that poverty attends wickedness, in worldly measure, but that life is the gift of a right will is her message; how we, striving for eternal life, may best meet the chances and the bitter fates of mortal existence, is her brooding care; ideal characters, or those ideal in some trait or phase, in the midst of a hostile environment, are her fixed study. So far is idealism from ignoring the actual state of man that it most affirms ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... her now, his head in his hands, brooding, sullen, the implacable vein in his forehead swollen with triumph, something brutish and hard dimming his ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... genial heroism in which she was armoured, and it was characteristic of her, as well as of her race, that, while she sat now in the midst of encircling battlefields, with her eyes on the walk over which she had seen the blood of the wounded drip when they were lifted into her door, she should be brooding not over the tremendous tragedies through which she had passed, but over the lesson in physical geography she must teach in the morning. Her lips moved gently, and a listener, had there been one, might have heard her murmur: "The four great alluvial ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... so," he said, "you are doing very wisely to come out once more among your friends. You can accomplish no good by brooding at home. It is better to live one's normal life—even when it is not easy to do it. I say ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... Edward suffered them to redeem themselves from captivity by the payment of heavy fines, and before long gave them back their lands. The king's victory was so complete that neither of the earls could forgive it. In 1295, Gloucester died, without opportunity of revenge; but Hereford lived on, brooding over his wrongs, and in later years signally avenged the trial at Abergavenny. Meanwhile the conqueror of the principality had shown unmistakably that the liberties of the march were an anachronism, since the marchers had no longer the work of defending English ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... the rest were talking, as if brooding over something; at length he exclaimed, "I say, Rogers, I'll not have you call me old Higson—they were ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... as silent at home as elsewhere as to the ill that his enemy meditated toward him, so silent that even hopeful grannie grew first doubtful and then anxious, fearing more than she would have feared any outburst of bitterness, this silent brooding over evils that might be drawing near. She dropped a cheerful word now and then as to the certainty that they would never be left in their old age to anxiety and trouble; but though he usually assented to her words, it was ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... master were congratulating themselves on the pleasing prospect of fine weather and a full moon, to light them through Endeavour's dangerous straits, the unhappy and deluded Christian was, in all probability, brooding over his wrongs, and meditating on the criminal act he was to perpetrate the following morning; for he has himself stated, that he had just fallen asleep about half after three in the morning, and was ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... their ancient honors. He was baffled in his unnatural revenge by the premature death of his son, and passed the remainder of his days in his deserted and dilapidated halls, a gloomy misanthrope, brooding amidst the scenes ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... little man, with his pale face and his cold, grey eyes, was riding to the hunt every morning, silent and brooding, all of them following in his train, in the hope that some word would escape him. And then, when the humour seized him, he would throw a hundred square miles to that man, or tear as much off the other, round off one kingdom by a river, or cut off another by a chain of mountains. That was how he ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Langton presently adjourned to the club, where they found Burke, Garrick, and Goldsmith, the latter still brooding over his sharp reprimand at Dilly's. Johnson, magnanimous as a lion, at once said aside to Boswell, "I'll make Goldsmith forgive me." Then calling to the poet, in a loud voice he said, "Dr. Goldsmith, something passed to-day where you and I ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... to "ride the circuit," read books while travelling in his buggy, told funny stories to his fellow-lawyers in the tavern, chatted familiarly with his neighbors around the stove in the store and at the post-office, had his hours of melancholy brooding as of old, and became more and more widely known and trusted and beloved among the people of his State for his ability as a lawyer and politician, for the uprightness of his character and the overflowing spring of sympathetic kindness ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... those good people laughing at over there? There's no sign of brooding melancholy down in your corner," shouted Mme. Verdurin. "You don't suppose I find it very amusing to be stuck up here by myself on the stool of repentance," she went on peevishly, like ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... begins with the account of the Priestly Code of the creation of the world. In the beginning is chaos; darkness, water, brooding spirit, which engenders life, and fertilises the dead mass. The primal stuff contains in itself all beings, as yet undistinguished: from it proceeds step by step the ordered world; by a process of unmixing, first of all by separating out the great elements. ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... America at the time when the revocation of the Edict of Nantes rendered France no safe dwelling-place for those who had no hinges to their knees. A stern, silent man, this d'Arthenay, like most of his race: holding in scorn the things of earthly life, brooding over grievances, given to dwelling much on heaven and hell, as became his time and class. Leaving castle and lands and all earthly ties behind them, he and his wife came out of Sodom, as they expressed it, and turned not their faces, looking steadfastly forward to the wilderness ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... instantaneously did all dreariness and heaviness of the earth's spirit flit away before one smile of the beneficent sun! This proves that all gloom is but a dream and a shadow, and that cheerfulness is the real truth. It requires many clouds, long brooding over us, to make us sad, but one gleam of sunshine always suffices to cheer up the landscape. The banks of the river actually laughed when the sunshine fell upon them; and the river itself was alive and ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... conclusion, or, at least, have spoken less confidently. [FOOTNOTE: Schumann, who in 1839 attempted to give a history of Liszt's development (in the "Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik"), remarked that when Liszt, on the one hand, was brooding over the most gloomy fancies, and indifferent, nay, even blase, and, on the other hand, laughing and madly daring, indulged in the most extravagant virtuoso tricks, "the sight of Chopin, it seems, first brought him ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the election Harboro came home and found a letter waiting for him on the table in the hall. He found also a disquieted Sylvia, who looked at him with brooding and ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... and not really under a sense of sin. "Is it possible, think you, for a person to be conceited of his miseries? May there not be a deep leaven of pride in telling how desolate and how unfeeling we are?—in brooding over our unearthly pains?—in our being excluded from the unsympathetic world?—in our being the invalids of Christ's hospital?" He had himself been taught by the Spirit that it is more humbling for us to take what grace offers, than to bewail ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... his work, and a botanical student of no mean order. No comrade helped him pass away an evening in the chimney-corner, pipe in hand and good cheer in the mug. This isolation was not accidental, it was Hermann's own selection. He was a man of brooding moods, and there was no laughter in his withered heart, though the false sound of it crossed his lips at ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... sprawled inside its high, electric-wired fences, and the flood of fading light brushed the town with beauty. The rows of tin shacks which housed its dives, the clustered, nondescript hovels, the merchants' grim strongholds of steel—all merged into a glowing mirage, a scene far alien to the brooding swamp and savage jungle in whose breast it lay. Here and there several space-ships reared their sunset-gilded flanks, glittering high-lights in the final glorious burst ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... paused again and sat brooding, his eyes looking out into space. Muller respected his suffering and sat in equal silence, until Graumann raised his eyes to his again. "Then came the evening of the ...
— The Case of the Registered Letter • Augusta Groner
... have cost a hundred thousand pounds, and all with absolute belief in his own power to realise these splendid visions. Yet every now and then in the very rush of his projects there came a sudden cloud of fear—his jaw fell—he looked apprehensively behind him—became darkly brooding—muttered something about that hideous charge hanging over him—a conspiracy hatched by men who should have been his friends—the probability of a great trial in Westminster Hall; and then he ran on again about builders and architects—Whistler, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... came out with eulogy for any man his status was settled for good and all. Margaret plunged once more into her treasures of early schooldays. Floss and Elinor made merry over some verses Margaret had handed up with a blush. Helen apparently lapsed into a brooding abstraction. And presently Dorothy excused herself, and kissing Margaret good-bye, ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... exploded with a thunderous crump twenty yards or so beyond the trench, there was a sudden noise of ripping canvas, an agonised shout, and the heavy crash of a body encountering china. Then—silence. The sap parties heard only the oil-can; Percy FitzPercy for a wonder was not brooding over his invention, and there was no one who knew that close beside them in an odoriferous underground abode the Brigadier-General lay completely stunned, with his head in a metal soup tureen and his rather extensive set of uppers in a disused tin ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... illusive creature, unused to men, she was troubled by questions, fearful of the sound of her own voice. Yet in repose, as she watched the lights and shadows, she was serene, unconscious; her dark, quiet glance was dreamy and sad, and in it was the sombre, brooding strength of ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... breaking of the Bella Donna's mast. It was as though, having wreaked its fury and executed all the damage possible short of absolute destruction, it was satisfied. With the same suddenness with which it had arisen it sank away, leaving a sulky, sunless sky brooding above a sullen sea still heaving restlessly with the ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... sat there, brooding upon the fickleness of womankind, as many another has done before me, and many will ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... expects you to ask for her, and has been told that you have done so and has herself dictated the refusal. You are credulous and despondent, and you are not strong. Besides, you sit here all day long, brooding and doing nothing but expecting to die, and hoping that she will shed a tear when she hears of your untimely end. Is that what you ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... stormy with her thought, she suddenly became conscious that she was looking directly into other eyes as darkling as her own. They were those of a man on the wrong side of the barrier. He had a troubled, brooding face, and, as their gaze met, each of them started slightly and turned away with the sense of having unconsciously intruded ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... we ask if these mystic influences of light and of darkness still retain their power. Can we doubt it? We have Milton's Melancholy, "of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born"—"where brooding darkness spreads his jealous wings." All this no mere refurbishing of classical lore, but the outcome of deep sympathy with the poets of the prime. And the same is true of his buoyant lines that describe the breaking ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... lines of brooding recollection. Immediately Amelia was aware that those years had been bitter to him, and that the fruit of them was stale and dry. She cut by instinct ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... of life were blowing snell, And on his brow sat brooding care, Thy seraph smile would quick dispel The darkest gloom of black despair. Sure Heaven hath granted thee to us, And chose thee from the dwellers there; And sent thee from celestial bliss, To shew what ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... mastery which corresponded to a pre-Greek condition of mankind: belief in witchcraft in connection with all and everything, bloody sacrifices, superstitious fear of demoniacal punishments, despair in one's self, ecstatic brooding and hallucination, man's self become the arena of good and evil spirits and ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... only member of that illustrious company who can profitably be compared with Burke in strength and impressiveness of personality, in a large sensibility at once serious and genial, in brooding care for all the fulness of human life. This striking pair were the two complements of a single noble and solid type, holding tenaciously, in a century of dissolvent speculation, to the best ideas of a society that was slowly passing. They were powerless to hinder ...
— Burke • John Morley
... arises from an excess, not from a defect, of sensibility; but finding that he has gone a little too far, he lets his praise slide into equivocal description, and, with some parting epigram, he relapses into silence. The portraits thus drawn are never wanting in piquancy nor in fidelity. Brooding over his injuries and his desertions, Hazlitt has pondered almost with the eagerness of a lover upon the qualities of his intimates. Suspicion, unjust it may be, has given keenness to his investigation. He has interpreted in his own fashion every mood and gesture. He has watched his friends ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... lit his pipe, smoked it out, refilled it and was in the act of refilling it, when Harvey Bradley came in—as has been made known in another place. While the man sat smoking and alone in the cabin, he fell to brooding over the troubles at the mills. Thus it came to pass that his feelings were so bitter at the time the superintendent entered that he kept back every hint that the absent men were engaged in the most "honest" ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... herself upon the edge of the reading-table, one foot swinging idly. She watched him with a brooding, insolent amusement. ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... satiric song: in the second it is more sensibly continuous; in the third it is all but utterly eclipsed; in the fourth it is but very rarely intercepted for a very brief interval in the dark divine service of a darker Commination Day: in the fifth it predominates generally over the sullen and brooding atmosphere with the fierce imperious glare of a "bloody sun" like that which the wasting shipmen watched at noon "in a hot and copper sky." There is here no more to say of a poem inspired at once by the triune Furies of Ezekiel, ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... mother's house, and John Keats goes into his room and sits down, brooding, brooding. "O," he says, "that something fortunate had ever happened to me or my brothers! Then I might hope—but despair is forced upon me as a habit." And he is only too well aware, that although ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... While he was brooding over these fancies, someone, breathless with haste, ran up to his room, and again a note was thrust underneath the door. He seized it quickly, ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... in this state all the morning, our men silent and brooding; Black smoked cigar after cigar with a dogged assumption of indifference; the German came to us often with his desperate gestures and his woe-begone face. It was well on in the afternoon before the position changed in any way, and I had gone down with the Captain to ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... almost every subject, he had never yet spoken to her one word of disapprobation still she knew that he had inspired her with fear. She made some attempts to begin the subject, which he did not notice, for he was still brooding over the unpleasant sensation which her words had occasioned; but at last ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... That would be impossible. But I can ask you, Senorita, to have faith—faith that it will all turn out better, if you will only trust me. When you feel stronger—then come to me. Tell me your fears—or not— whichever does you the most good. Only keep your mind from brooding. Face it all as you know your father would have ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... and had little leisure to observe the course of affairs, or to be in Madame's society, I should have given warning,—foolishly enough,—for there was not a tangible thing of which I had to complain. But a shapeless suspicion which for some days had been brooding in my mind was taking form, too dim for me to dare to recognize it, but real enough to make me feel a miserable fascination to the house while little Jacques still lived, a magnetic, uncomfortable necessity for my ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... that first moment Kells had wanted her; he had tried to persuade Roberts to leave her, and, failing, had killed him; he had rid himself of the other two men—and now Joan knew she had heard shots back there. Kells's intention loomed out of all his dark brooding, and it stood clear now to her, dastardly, worse than captivity, or torture, or death—the worst fate ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... on—how, it was impossible to guess, and flung here and there on patches of green carpet glued on to the steep hill-sides; while other peaks towered higher still, like vast calcined hay-cocks, with doubtfully dead craters still brooding internal fires, and trailing smoky clouds which, as they blew off, really seemed to be coming out of ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... forgive him for having aided in the union of Corsica with France. He should have followed her fortunes and have succumbed only with her." Throughout his youth he is at heart anti-French, morose, "bitter, liking very few and very little liked, brooding over resentment," like a vanquished man, always moody and compelled to work against the grain. At Brienne, he keeps aloof from his comrades, takes no part in their sports, shuts himself in the library, and opens himself up only to Bourrienne in explosions of hatred: "I will do you Frenchmen ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... in prayer, her spirit rapt above, She meets with God, Who bendeth, brooding low, In vast compassion humanward, and so, There comes upon her life the power of Love: Rising—behold! with pinions like a dove, An angel with a rod where row on row Of chaliced lilies spill supernal glow,— Which all her thought to wonder mute ...
— The Angel of Thought and Other Poems - Impressions from Old Masters • Ethel Allen Murphy
... seemed laboriously gathered from the tears of tortured experience, had become an obsession. She was silent, brooding over it; but she herself was there, larger, less puzzling and negative than hitherto,—an awakening force. The man lost his anchor of convention and traditional reasoning. He felt with her an excitement, a thirst for this ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... leant for awhile against the wall, brooding over the ill-luck which seemed to attend me in this, as in so many previous adventures. Nor was the low voice of conscience, suggesting that such failures arose from mismanagement rather than from ill-luck, ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... back and the conversation, cut short in that direction, languished and died. Later in the evening, after Anthony had been gone for hours, on the point of separating for the night, Mr Smith remarked suddenly to his daughter after a long period of brooding: ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... child an example in losing control of himself. The position often assumed by school children when before authority, of hands held stiffly at the side, head drooped, and roving eye, does not mean control: it means a crushed spirit, hypocrisy, or brooding anarchy. The mother or teacher who obtains obedience by clapping her hands, pointing her finger, distorting her face, is copying in her own home the attitudes of caste in India, of serfdom in Russia, the discipline of the prison the ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... date of the pamphlet be the true date; if the Doctrine and Discipline was in the hands of the public on August 1 if Milton was brooding over this seething agony of passion all through July, with the young bride, to whom he had been barely wedded a month, in the house where he was writing, then the only apology for this outrage upon the charities, not to say decencies, of home is that which is ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... his articulation was now hardly impaired, though he never spoke except in answer to questions, and then with evident unwillingness. He took little or no notice of what passed around him, but ever seemed brooding over his own misfortunes,—that is, if his mind retained any activity, of which it was not easy ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... a brooding, ominous, baleful sort of a day, when shapes were distorted in the mists and all sounds were magnified in queer fashion and the echoes played pranks with distances ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... in fixed certainty of scientific shape; he no more doubted of that Malebolge Pool, that it all lay there with its gloomy circles, with its alti guai, and that he himself should see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we went thither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into 'mystic unfathomable song'; and this his Divine Comedy, the most remarkable of all modern Books, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... round the room till his eyes rested on a portrait-drawing which hung on the wall opposite the window, through which the sun poured. It was the face of a girl with beautiful bronzed hair, and full, fine, beautifully modelled face, with brown eyes deep and brooding, which seemed to have time and space behind them—not before them. The lips were delicate and full, and had the look suggesting a smile which the inward thought has stayed. It was like one of the Titian women—like a Titian ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... I lie all huddled and hidden, (Oh, the eternity it seems!) Brooding desolate and bed-ridden, Living ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... anticipation. Their glowing fires seemed to have become extinguished. There was no warmth in them. There was little life in their darkly brooding watchfulness. Never was a contrast so deeply marked between two watchers of the same object. The man was cold, his expression hard. It was an expression before which even his habitual smile had been forced to flee. ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... when the great lake was bright and busy with boats, and the birds twittered in the leafy trees and the lobelias and calceolarias were woven into wonderful patterns by the gardeners. Then she would throw herself down on the thick grass and look up in mystic rapture at the brooding blue sky and forget to read the book she had brought with her, while the other children chased one another about in savage delight. Only once on a Saturday afternoon when her father was not with them, did she get Dutch Debby to break through ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... through the distant woods were the brooding birds, but they arose before we were near and sailed splendidly overhead in a sweeping, wide-fronted rank. As nearly as I could number them, there were 120, but evidently some were elsewhere, as this would not allow a ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... wandering through all branches of science, silly brooding at the burning oil-lamp! In your wildness you see with four eyes—a horrible setback and disregard for everything decent. And in the pursuit of this senseless and purposeless learning you think ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... world. The building up of this new civilisation had absorbed the intellectual force of a thousand years; it had monopolised thought and every form of energy. The reward was great. For the first time in the annals of the world the questionings of brooding intelligence were fully answered, the anguish of the tortured soul was stilled. The purpose of the universe, the destiny of man, were comprehended and interpreted, good and evil being finally known. ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... pale, or rather livid, with open mouth, and hair stuck together with cold sweat, he stood apart, brooding. But the cure who had suddenly arrived on the scene, ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... swallows wheeling across the sky above. Paimpol was always quiet on these long May evenings, even on Sundays; the lasses, who had not a single lad to make love to them, sauntered along, in couples or three together, brooding of their ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... of what he had been at the Christmas time. It was the man's nature to be silent in seasons of misfortune. During the previous year, when luck had been so against him, this characteristic of silent brooding had shown itself markedly, but then he did not remain in the house and neglect his work as he did now. He seemed to have lost all heart and all ambition. He scarcely troubled to feed the dogs, and the few tasks that he did perform ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... picture was a new event in the lives of these men, and had to be pondered over devoutly, and for long periods often, as in the case of Ryder. Work was for him nine-tenths reflection and meditation and poetic brooding, and he put down his sensations on canvas with great difficulty in the manner of a labourer. It seems obvious that his first drafts were always vivid with the life intended for them, but no one could possibly have suffered with the idea of how to complete a picture more than he. His lack ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... lifted and fluttered feebly for a second or two, pointing now this way, and anon in some other direction, showing that, away up aloft there, and as yet too high to reach and stir the surface of the sea, the air currents were awakening under the brooding influence of the coming storm. These movements occurred at first at long intervals, and were of the most evanescent character; but the intervals rapidly shortened, and within an hour of the occurrence of the first manifestation of atmospheric movement it had increased to such an extent ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... dare to try to signal to them, and neither did Elzbieta. He took his seat in the prisoners' pen and sat gazing at them in helpless agony. He saw that Ona was not with them, and was full of foreboding as to what that might mean. He spent half an hour brooding over this—and then suddenly he straightened up and the blood rushed into his face. A man had come in—Jurgis could not see his features for the bandages that swathed him, but he knew the burly figure. It was Connor! A trembling seized him, and his limbs bent as if for a spring. Then suddenly he ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... though there had been any one else to speak to, he would have preferred to speak to himself. Speaking to himself he spoke to a man within five years of fifty either way, who had turned grey too soon, like a neglected fire; a man of pondering habit, brooding carriage of the head, and suppressed internal voice; a man with many indications on him of having ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... being equal) display this type. It may be that such a writer can regard it analytically, can see what are the elements which make it up; it may be that the deeper reverence felt for it by the idealist is precisely that which draws him toward exaggeration—that his fancy, brooding with closed eyes upon the "thing enskied and sainted," thus becomes inclined to mawkishness . . . it may be, I say, but at the bottom of my heart I do not feel that that is the explanation. One with which I am better satisfied emerges from a line ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... For storied rose, and sweet poetic morn, For sound of bird, and brook, and murmuring bees, For luckless fancies of illusion born, What time in dark we dwelt and framed our lore? Woe, woe, if then regretful we should mourn "What wisdom left we on that human shore!" For brooding kindness can a charm beget, Not duly won, and from Heaven's parapet These terrene colours shine with starry gleam— But this is all a fable and a dream; A fable, for this axiom it brings, Immortal loves must love immortal things; Dream is it, for uncurbed it took ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... Cottage, a letter of introduction in his hand, and a feeling of hero-worship in his heart, he was ushered into the presence of the great romancer, who advanced "carrying his head with a heavy forward droop" and with pondering pace. His look was "somber and brooding—the look of a man who had dealt faithfully and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil which forever attracted ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... house, darkened the lights, and everything sank into silence, broken only now and then by the call of a night bird in the shrubbery, or the whistle of a far-away locomotive. The full moon sailed high in the deep blue heaven, brooding over the sleeping world in its mystery, its beauty, its ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... course, below his line of vision; but at a distance of some hundred yards or so—a distance which varied hugely with the rising and falling of the tide—he caught sight of the waves, and felt himself strangely drawn to them. Whether leaden and menacing under the drift of rain and the brooding of gray clouds, or green-glinting under the sheen of too rare sunshine, he loved them and found them always absorbing. The sky, too, was worth watching, especially when white fleeces chased each other across ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... latch; The gloomy lantern, and the dim blue match, The black disguise, the warning whistle shrill, And ear still busy on its nightly watch, Were not for me, brought up in nothing ill; Besides, on griefs so fresh my thoughts were brooding still. ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... and complete purification of all defilements of evil that come after. For thus the Saviour commanded a man to be born again of water and of the spirit, and be restored to his first dignity, to wit, by supplication and by calling on the Saving Name, the Holy Spirit brooding on the water. We are baptized, then, according to the word of the Lord, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and thus the grace of the Holy Ghost dwelleth in the soul of the baptized, illuminating and making it God-like and renewing that which was made ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... a while brooding. "Well, I take my risk of it," he cried. "I believe it's treason to my sovereign—I believe there is an infamous punishment for such a crime—and yet I'm hanged if I can give ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... violent passions, or even indulged in violent and exciting exercises, may form a very good idea. It is a delirious intoxication, a temporary madness that absorbs every thought and every energy. And can we wonder at the kris-bearing, untaught, brooding Malay preferring such a death, looked upon as almost honourable to the cold-blooded details of suicide, if he wishes to escape from overwhelming troubles, or the merciless of the hangman and the disgrace of a public execution, when he has taken the ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Miss Caldegard had never seen a humming bird, and therefore found herself brooding on the blueness of all the blue things in her experience, from willow-pattern china to the waters of the Mediterranean, instead of considering the answer which she must give to Randal ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... were live things like himself. The girl, curled up at his side like a cat, paid little attention to the marvel of the flames. Her big, dark eyes, wild and furtive under the dark, tangled masses of her hair, kept wandering back and forth between the man's brooding face and the obscure black thickets which filled the valley behind him. The dancing flames she did not understand, but she understood the ponderous crashing, and growls, and savage cries which came from those black thickets and slopes of tumbled rocks. The man being absorbed in ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... rid of the practical for the sake of the aesthetic, but must take up the practical into the aesthetic. For this reason architecture has achieved its greatest successes where its uses have been most largely and freely emotional, most closely akin to the brooding spirit of ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... quietly, as Mr. Upton had said. It was a buckskin, fat and hearty from long resting. Nothing could be more docile than the pensive lower lip, and the meek curve of the neck; nothing could be more contradictory than the light of its eye; a brooding, baleful ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... put to flight! How great were the camps of both that he destroyed in one night by casting firebrands into them! At last, not at three miles distance, but by a close siege, he shook the very gates of Carthage itself. And thus he succeeded in drawing off Hannibal when he was still clinging to and brooding over Italy. There was no more remarkable day, during the whole course of the Roman Empire, than that on which those two generals, the greatest of all that ever lived, whether before or after them, the one the conqueror ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... thought-form of the same nature is already hovering round the thinker, under certain circumstances a new thought on the same subject, instead of creating a new form, coalesces with and strengthens, the old one, so that by long brooding over the same subject a man may sometimes create a thought-form of tremendous power. If the thought be a wicked one, such a thought-form may become a veritable evil influence, lasting perhaps for many years, and having for a time all the ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... Galors," he said. "A slim girl, somewhat under the common size of the country, and overburdened with a curtain of black hair; and a sullen, brooding girl who says little, and that nakedly and askance; and in a pale face two ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... vivacious or sunny disposition—always a little in shadow, as it seems to me now, given to brooding and to dwelling upon the more serious aspects of life. How little she knew of all that has been done and thought in the world! and yet the burden of it all was, in a way, laid upon her. The seriousness of Revolutionary times, out of which came her father and mother, was no doubt reflected ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... antique clock in the corner of the hall. It struck eight. The slow beats of the bell echoed chillily in the hushed apartment. The hour awakened the consciousness of the brooding man. At eight o'clock Mr. Bonnithorne was appointed to be there to make ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... underlying principles of electricity that made telegraphy possible, and he had an unflagging desire and belief in his own ability to improve the apparatus he handled daily. The whole intellectual atmosphere of Boston was favorable to the development of the brooding genius in this shy, awkward, studious youth, utterly indifferent to clothes and personal appearance, but ready to spend his last dollar on books and scientific paraphernalia. It is matter of record that he did once buy a new suit for thirty dollars in Boston, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... following the election Harboro came home and found a letter waiting for him on the table in the hall. He found also a disquieted Sylvia, who looked at him with brooding and a question in ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... about good St. Francis, whose heart overflowed with love to every living creature—mankind, animals, birds, and flowers, and whose whole life was given up to their service—Miss Sherman hugged close her little jealous grievance and, brooding over it, gave no thought to the associations of the place they had just visited, or to the glorious Italian landscape through which ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... fish, plung'd she to the depth of the ocean: Where in a cavern'd recess, the abode of the sisterly Sea-nymphs, Thetis the goddess appear'd, in the midst of them sitting dejected; For she was ruefully brooding the fate of her glorious offspring, Doom'd to a Phrygian grave, far off from the land of his fathers. Near to her standing anon, thus summon'd her wind-footed Iris: "Thetis, arise! thou art called by Zeus whose decrees are eternal." ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... twilight, brooding. Winter had come round again, gripping the world with icy fingers, and she shivered a little as she crouched in front of ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... set on their left. But it was in the eastern sky that the greater splendour was; for the low rays streaming across lit up some stormy clouds that were brooding behind the mountain and turned their gloomy ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... thou blest! For dearly, Asra! love I thee! This brooding warmth across my breast, This depth of tranquil bliss—ah, me! Fount, tree and shed are gone, I know not whither, But in one quiet room ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... went off with his whip under his arm, brooding over his own thoughts, and lifting up one after the other his heavy wooden shoes daubed with clay. Certainly he desired to marry Celeste Levesque. He wanted her with her child, because it was the woman he required. He ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... praise the Life of Light! Who from the brooding night Draws out the morning holy, calm, and grand; Veils up the moon, Sends out the sun, To glad the ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... led away into the gathering darkness, and the square brick blocks stood in blue silhouette against a champagne sky. He became conscious of a strange yearning for this young metropolis; a sort of parental brooding over a boisterous, lovable, wayward youth. It was his city; no one could claim it more than he. And it was a good city to look upon, and to mingle in, ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... nature to gall. There was no moment during the day in which Lady Chandos did not picture her husband with her rival; she drove herself almost mad with the pictures she made in her own mind. All the cruel pain, the sullen brooding, the hot anguish, the desolation, the jealousy seemed to surge over her heart and soul like the waves of a deadly sea. If she saw her husband silent and abstracted, she said he was thinking of Madame Vanira; if she saw him laugh and light of heart she said he ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... explained that it would not be safe; for that if the slaves were allowed books and knowledge, they would soon not be content with their condition, and would be banding together to make themselves free. I knew all this, and I had been brooding over it; and now when the powerful hand of the overseer came in to hinder the little bit of good and comfort I was trying to give the people, my heart was set on fire with a sense of sorrow and wrong that, as I said, no child ought ever ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... In brooding on the ways of Fate Long hours he daily wasted, His food remained upon his plate, 'Twas scarcely touched or tasted: He said the bitter things of love, All lovers, save a few, say, And learned by heart the verses of ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... Indians know where to find them, for we had frequently made fires to apprise them of our approach yet none appeared in return as answers. This disappointment as might be expected served to increase the ill-humour of the Leader and party, the brooding of which (agreeably to Indian custom) was liberally discharged on me, in bitter reproach for having led them from their families and exposed them to dangers and hardships which, but for my influence, they said they might ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... apostrophe apparently hit home, for David never returned to Mme. Lebrun's house, and was no well-wisher of hers in later times. But on this occasion she had not only told the truth to an individual, she had touched upon the secret sore of the nation and the time; and vast classes were already brooding in silence over the absurd, vain, and empty regret at being "neither Duke nor Marquis." The Revolution was at hand, and the days rapidly approaching when all such pleasant assemblies as those held by Mme. Lebrun would become forever impossible. At some of these, the crowd of intimates, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... quickly through the plantation, and gave his horse to a boy who waited in front of the door. In the kitchen he found Madge brooding over the fire, with her elbows on her knees, and without raising her head ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... But how have I wandered into the deeper fairyland of the soul, while as yet I only float towards the fairy palace of Fairy Land! The moon, which is the lovelier memory or reflex of the down-gone sun, the joyous day seen in the faint mirror of the brooding night, ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... particular lasses, Rufus was wont to trudge back to his hermitage and draw his mantle of solitude about him once more. He had never walked with any lass. Whether from shyness or surliness, he had held consistently aloof from such frivolous pastimes. If a girl ever cast a saucy look his way the brooding blue eyes never seemed aware of it. In speech with womenkind he was always slow and half-reluctant. That his great bull-like physique could by any means be an object of admiration was a possibility that he never seemed ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... train of battered flat-cars, piled with sluice-props and roughly hewn sleepers, was moving slowly off into the brooding forest gloom, when I came in sight of the track; but I developed a gratifying and unexpected burst of speed, shouting all the while. The train stopped; I swung myself aboard the last car, where a pleasant young fellow was sitting ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... out from the dining-room; her husband with the look on his face that denoted he had been well listened to; Squire Trusham laughing as a man does who has no sense of humour; Gordy having a curly, slightly asphyxiated air; and the boy his pale, brooding look, as though he had lost touch with his surroundings. He wavered towards her, seemed to lose himself, went and sat down by the old governess. Was it because he did not dare to come up to her, or only because he saw the old ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was probably brooding over the subject of the encroachments of the English, and the waning power of the Indians. This was the inevitable result of the idle, vagabond life of the Indians, and of the industry and energy of the colonists. ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... between them, and none of sentiment. Strange had, indeed, throughout shut his nephew, not merely from his heart, but also from his confidence, at first out of sheer neglect, and afterwards, as the lad grew towards manhood, from deliberate intent. For, by continually brooding over his embittered life, he had at last impregnated his weak nature with the savage cynicism which embraced even his one comrade; and the child he had originally chosen as a solace for his loneliness, became in the end the victim of a heartless experiment. Strange's ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... steps along the passage of this gulf brought them to a door, which, even seen by torchlight, would have appeared so exactly similar in colour and material to the rude walls on either side as to have deceived any unsuspecting eye, and which, in the customary darkness brooding over it, might have remained for centuries undiscovered. Touching a secret latch, the door opened, and the robbers were in the secure precincts of the "Red Cave." It may be remembered that among the early studies of our exemplary ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... she held it eagerly to her breast,—to the right side. We could see her eyes bright with a surprising tenderness and joy, bending over this bundle of clothes. She held it as a woman holds her sucking child; opening out her night-gown impatiently, and holding it close, and brooding over it, and murmuring foolish little words, as over one whom his mother comforteth, and who sucks and is satisfied. It was pitiful and strange to see her wasted dying look, keen ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... sufficient living in the past—nay, even put by a bit, if the truth of Hannah's savings-bank deposits were known. But every fluctuation in their small profits tried them sorely—tried Hannah especially, whose temper was of the brooding and grasping order. The certainty of Mr. Gurney's cheques made them very soon the most cheerful facts in the farm life. On two days in the year—the 20th of June and the 20th of December—Reuben might be sure of finding his wife in a good temper, and he had long shrewdly suspected, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... asked, 'are you going to your governess?' and the curious, grave, and anxious look that accompanied the question, disturbed me; and there was something odd and cold in the tone as if a remembrance had suddenly chilled her. The accent remained in my ear, and the sharp brooding look was fixed before me as I glided up the broad dark stairs to Madame ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... has a message for the man struggling with the battle of life, in the example of One who has fought that fight before, who knows its every trial and sorrow, and who has come gloriously through them all. It has a message for the sinner, brooding anxiously over his guilty past, conscious only of his own defilement and unworthiness in the sight of an all-holy God, as it assures him of mercy and free forgiveness, of sin blotted out in the blood of Christ. It has a message for ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... sunny day went by, And night came brooding o'er the seas; A thick cloud swathed the distant sky, And hollow murmurs filled the breeze. The white gull screaming, left the rock, And seaward bent its glancing wing, While heavy waves, with measured shock, Made the dun cliff with echoes ring. How changed the scene! The glassy ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... she remained morosely indifferent. It was clear that either she suspected me of being in search of the secrets of one of her gods, or of being boldly inquisitive about her traffic with Time, or else she was darkly absorbed with brooding upon the deed. ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... of Lorenzo must ever rank as one of the world's masterpieces. The Italians call it "Il Pensiero." The sullen strength of the attitude gives one a vague ominous impulse to get away. Some one has said that it fulfils Milton's conception of Satan brooding over his plans for the ruin ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... ward. Though late the hour Beltane sat wakeful, chin on fist, beside a glimmering watch-fire, oft turning his glance towards the massy, weather-beaten tower, bethinking him of the noble lady Abbess, of her strange looks and words, and so fell to brooding thought. High overhead the moon rode, obscured by flying clouds, a wild wrack up-whirling from the south: at fitful intervals was a wind that moaned drearily 'mid the gloom of distant woods, a desolate sound that sobbed ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... farmers came out of the church and invited me into the vestry, where all the heads of the parish were assembled, as he informed me, with the vicar in the chair. I followed him into the vestry room, where I found them all in solemn, sober, deliberation, brooding over their disappointment, in not having obtained the names of any of the labourers of the parish. One of them shortly addressed me, inveighing against this disloyalty and disaffection, and he informed me, that they had just came to an unanimous resolution to pay the fine, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... Booth. The man's heart is big enough to take in the world. He has made the strongest distinct impact upon human hearts of any man living. This is a man of the Lincoln type. Like Lincoln he has the saving grace of humour, and sense of proportion. There is something of the mother-heart in these brooding lovers of their kind. There is the constraining love that yearns over darkness and cold and empty hearts. Big hearts ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... there is none," replied his young wife, "the stillness is actually awful—not a leaf moves, nor a breeze stirs. It seems too, more than twilight darkness; as if a heavy storm were brooding." ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... watched her with the same sidewise attention, but his face was brooding, his half-veiled eyes were red and threatening. What would happen in the nighttime as the stage pursued its lonely way across the bleak prairie? Since Red Kimball meant to appeal to the law in his revenge against Brick, there was no danger of his transgressing it openly. But in the darkness with ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... the anxious hours by her bedside or pacing the corridor outside. Two days later he was stooping to kiss an infant presented to him on a cushion of cramoisi velvet. His happiness was crowned at last, and life spread before him a prospect of many such years. But tragedy was already brooding over this scene of pleasure, although none, least of all the King, seemed to see the shadow ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... that her revery might come true. We all too remember Tolstoi's reminiscences when, having been flogged by his tutor, he slunk off to the attic, weeping and broken-hearted, and finally after a long brooding resolved to run away and become a soldier, and this he did in fancy, becoming corporal, lieutenant, captain, colonel. Finally came a great battle where he led a desperate charge that was crowned with victory, and when all was over and he stood tottering, leaning ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... irresponsibility: it is youth that can delight in its own excess of shade, and can even dispense with sunshine—hugging to its heart the memory of its own often self-created distresses and conjuring up and, with self-satisfaction, brooding over the pain and imagined horrors of a lifetime. Maturity and age kindly bring their own relief—rendering this kind of ministry to itself no longer desirable, even were it possible. The Master of Ballantrae indeed marks the crisis. It shows, and effectively shows, the other side of ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... firmly resolved to see her mistress' face no more. She would stay a few days at Amy's and Chloe's, and then go farther. She would have taken up her abode altogether with them, as Mr. Lisle advised, only that she and those amiable women had not been the best of friends. Kizzie had been too solitary and brooding to form a pleasant companion. At the last moment she might again have hesitated had she not already sent her parcels ahead of her ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... where the first birds build—these teach our windows the quiet and the opportunity of the "home town," among the "home people." To those who have such a bond to cherish I commend the little real home towns, their kindly, brooding companionship, their doors to an efficiency as intimate as that of fairy fingers. If there were shrines to these things, we would seek them. The urgency ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... two great traditions of womanhood. One presents the Madonna brooding over the mystery of motherhood; the other, more confusedly, tells of the acolyte, the priestess, the clairvoyante of the unknown gods. This latter exists complete in herself, a personality as definite and as significant as ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... billeted reminded me strongly of my home in Donegal with its fields and dusky evenings and its spirit of brooding quiet. Nothing will persuade me, except perhaps the Censor, that it is not the home of Marie Claire, it so fits in with the description ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... world; where the body remains to guide itself as best it may, with little more than the mechanism of animal life. It is like death, without death's quiet privilege,—its freedom from mortal care. Worst of all, when the actual duties are comprised in such petty details as now vexed the brooding soul of the old gentlewoman. As the animosity of fate would have it, there was a great influx of custom in the course of the afternoon. Hepzibah blundered to and fro about her small place of business, committing the most unheard-of errors: now stringing ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... seemed to have revived under the holiday influence, was staggering under the weight of his parcels. The Christmas presents had already accumulated to a considerable mound on the couch. Margaret was brooding over them and trying not to look greedy. She was still very much of a child herself in relation to ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... the whole, and the Inca demanded his freedom. De Soto, who was his chief friend among the Spaniards, told Pizarro of his demand, but could get from him no direct reply. His treacherous mind was brooding deeply over ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... Martindale,' said Percy, reading a second time the lines to which she alluded. 'They do recall the evening scene; Mount Vesuvius and its brooding cloud, and the trails of phosphoric light upon the sea. I mark these for approval. But have you anything to say for this ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... way to blame any one but herself," said Alick, "and, in fact, our showing her the woodcut deception was a preparation for the rest of it. But I have said very little to her about all that matter. She required to be led away rather than back to it. Brooding over it is fatal work, and yet her spirits are too much weakened and shattered to bear over-amusement. That is the reason that I thought you would be so very welcome to-morrow. She has seen no one yet but Lady Temple, and shrinks ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reveries into which he still fell at times. And, thirdly, for us young people, ought not Blanche to find companions in children of her own sex and age? Already in those large black eyes there was something melancholy and brooding, as there is in the eyes of all children who live only with their elders. And for Pisistratus, with his altered prospects, and the one great gnawing memory at his heart,—which he tried to conceal from himself, but which a mother (and a mother who had loved) saw at a glance,—what could ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... music of Arabia In my heart, when out of dreams I still in the thin clear mirk of dawn Descry her gliding streams; Hear her strange lutes on the green banks Ring loud with the grief and delight Of the dim-silked, dark-haired Musicians In the brooding silence of night. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... you two are thinking about," said Mrs. Vervain, and a faint blush tinged the cheek of the priest as she thus paired him off with her daughter. "You are thinking about what happened the other day; and you had better forget it. There is no use brooding over these matters. Dear me! if I had stopped to brood over every little unpleasant thing that happened, I wonder where I should be now? By the way, where were you all day yesterday, ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... delirium at sea was likewise popularly ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... great part of the fact that it cannot be escaped,—like Fate. "Siegmund!" she calls him, with firm voice, "look upon me! I am that one whom in short space you must follow!" Siegmund lifts his eyes from the sleeping face upon which they have been fondly brooding, and beholds the shining apparition. "Who are you, tell me, appearing to me, so beautiful and grave?" "Only those about to die can see my face. He who beholds me must depart from the light of life. On the field of battle I appear to ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... which are the crown and consummation of what opium can do for human nature. I, whose disease it was to meditate too much and to observe too little, and who upon my first entrance at college was nearly falling into a deep melancholy, from brooding too much on the sufferings which I had witnessed in London, was sufficiently aware of the tendencies of my own thoughts to do all I could to counteract them. I was, indeed, like a person who, according to the old legend, had entered the cave of Trophonius; and the remedies I ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... glory lingers, Let a light shine unto all generous souls, And be Italia's hope! Unto these stones Oft came Vittorio[8] for inspiration, Wroth to his country's gods. Dumbly he roved Where Arno is most lonely, anxiously Brooding upon the heavens and the fields; Then when no living aspect could console, Here rested the Austere, upon his face Death's pallor and the deathless light of hope. Here with these great he dwells for evermore, His dust yet quick with love of country. Yes, A god speaks ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... ground at the huge stone head, outlining the stern mouth, the resolute, bearded jaw. Helplessly, Weaver returned the stare of that remorseless, brooding face: the ...
— The Worshippers • Damon Francis Knight
... Potter cut him off, and paced the floor, virulently brooding. "And so Talbot Potter's company is to be made up of actors engaged to suit the personal whims of L. Smith Packer's father, old Mister Packer of Baptist Ridge, near ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... day old Tubal Cain Sat brooding o'er his woe; And his hand forbore to smite the ore, And his furnace smouldered low. But he rose at last with a cheerful face, And a bright courageous eye, And bared his strong right arm for work, While the quick ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... a prey to melancholy brooding for a few brief moments, then resolutely cast the mood off his spirit. He was little given to morbid reflections. Men whose lives are daily liable to forfeit rarely are. It was characteristic of him that, in this supreme hour of peril, his chief distress was over the injury wrought on the ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... took it for a good omen. Umbopa was a cheerful savage, in a dignified sort of way, when he was not suffering from one of his fits of brooding, and he had a wonderful knack of keeping up our spirits. We all ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... might strive, but all they would see was the oily swell of the Dogger Bank, and the great plowed field of Biscay Bay, and the smash of foam against the Hebrides. Never would a space in the watery horizon open and show him a threshold of beauty with quiet, brooding face.... And when he came home, either late or early, or on time to the moment, it was, "Och, is it yourself?" And the only interruption to the house was the little more trouble he caused. And his gifts were treated tepidly, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... to pass, was totally unequal to endure the strain under which the masculine intellect of Anne Hutchinson had reeled. She was pursued by her pastor, who repeatedly commanded her to come to church and explain her absence from communion. [Footnote: Besse, ii. 235.] The miserable creature, brooding over her blighted life and the torments of her friends, became possessed with the delusion that it was her duty to testify against the barbarity of flogging naked women; so she herself went in among them naked ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... completely destroying the royal stock, putting to death the king's friends, real or supposed, and disturbing with war the peace which might encourage discontent, in order that the populace might be engrossed with novelties and divert its mind from brooding over the slaughter of the king. (66) At last, however, the people reflected that it had accomplished nothing for the good of the country beyond violating the rights of the lawful king and changing everything for the worse. (67) It therefore decided to retrace its steps as soon as possible, and ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part IV] • Benedict de Spinoza
... shaking, tearing, etc. From this original meaning the word has enlarged until now it means to tease, to trouble, to harass with importunity or with care or anxiety. In other words it is undue care, needless anxiety, unnecessary brooding, ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... sitting opposite her now, his head in his hands, brooding, sullen, the implacable vein in his forehead swollen with triumph, something brutish and hard dimming his ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... shouts of laughter over it. Cecil was a fine shot, quite as fond of the pastime as his uncle, and always in favour with him while sport stalked the land. He was in gallant spirits, and Rosamund, brooding over Nevil's fortunes, and sitting much alone, as she did when there were guests in the house, gave way to her previous apprehensions. She touched on them to Mr. Stukely Culbrett, her husband's old friend, one of those happy men who enjoy perceptions without opinions, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... countenances and hues were very varied, according to the part of the African coast from which they came; some were soot-black, having a certain ferocity of aspect that indicated strong and fierce passions, like men who were darkly brooding over some deep-felt wrongs, and meditating revenge. When any one was ordered, he came forward with a sullen indifference, threw his arms over his head, stamped with his feet, shouted to show the soundness of his lungs, ran up and down the room, and was treated exactly like a horse ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... and the other turned Round through the vast profundity obscure; And said, 'Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds; This be thy just circumference, O World!' Thus God the Heaven created, thus the Earth, Matter unformed and void. Darkness profound Covered the abyss; but on the watery calm His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread, And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth, Throughout the fluid mass; but downward purged The black, tartareous, cold, infernal dregs, Adverse to life; then founded, then conglobed Like things to like; the rest to several ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... Harfagar refused the gift of rest; His country's cares lay brooding in his breast: And many a gloomy pang his heart assail'd, But fortitude at each assault prevail'd. So stands in British woods a broad-bough'd oak, That braved three centuries every stormy stroke; While howling winds the scatter'd forest rend, He rears his aged trunk, and scorns to bend; ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... like a watchful hen-mother was apparently seeing nothing, and yet all the time was tenderly brooding over the little chick whom she hoped was soon about to take flight from the parent nest, saw at a glance that her chick looked nothing at all beside that superior chicken of Mrs. Meadowsweet's. For Matty's little nose was ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... with looking up. Yet again, said He, observe and look; so they gave heed, and perceived that the hen did walk in a fourfold method towards her chickens. 1. She had a common call, and that she hath all day long. 2. She had a special call, and that she had but sometimes. 3. She had a brooding note. And 4. She ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... flocks, uniting to form a numerous host. Even upon our own shores their nesting places are often occupied by many hundred pairs, whilst further north they congregate in countless multitudes. They literally cover the rocks on which their nests are placed, the brooding parents ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [June, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... She had slept without a dream and woke wonderingly to the shadows of dancing leaves upon the white canvas above her. It was a long time since she had slept in a tent—a lifetime. She felt very drowsy and stupid. The brooding sense of fatality which had made her return so dreamlike still numbed her senses. She had come back to the mountain, as she had known she must come. And, curiously enough, in returning she had freed herself. In coming back to what she had hated and feared she had faced a bogie. It would trouble ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... shunned the presence of the Queen, believing that every eye which rested on her produced some baneful result; while her very attendants were dismissed from her presence when they had terminated their duties, and she thus remained hour after hour in solitude, brooding over the sickly fancies of her disordered brain. The sight of her husband's murderer had, however, instantly and for ever restored the healthful tone of her mind. She did not weep, for she had already ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... air with an intoxicating flavor and reflect their inverted gracefulness in the calm waters of the lake.... The mountains sloping up from either side are delineated in the mirroring surface and form an archway for the snow-capped and broken pinnacle that towers above the others like a sentinel brooding in his frosty and eternal isolation.... Far off in the distance I can see the black and white walls of the KATUN GLACIER and know that, throughout this region, gold and silver, as well as lead and copper, most certainly abound.... In our unending tramp today I have discovered many evidences ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... childish there was something purely womanly in the compassion with which she thought of Anstice; and on one occasion when a fit of melancholy had overcome him unexpectedly in her presence, he was startled, not to say dismayed, to notice something of this half-tender, half-impersonal pity in the soft, brooding glance of her eyes as they rested on him for ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... of Wild Life in the Tree Tops, by Captain C. W. R. Knight. This English book, large and flat, shows with the aid of the camera, the merlin pursuing her quarry, young tawny owls in a disused magpie's nest, female noctules and their young, the male kestrel brooding, and a male buzzard that has just brought a rabbit to the younglings in the nest. Plenty of other pictures like these! The chapters deal with the buzzards of the Doone country, the lady's hawk, woodpeckers, brown owls, sparrow-hawks, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... succeeded morning and noon followed noon, with always the same soft breeze stirring the orchard, always the clear yellow sunlight burning and dazzling her eyes, always the unvarying monotony of bleating sheep and lowing herds and at evening the hoot of owls. The brooding tenderness of the sky she did not see. The throbbing of the great, quiet southern stars stirred her only with a sense of helpless loneliness that was all but unendurable. And still, from who knows what source, she ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... talking and drooped in his saddle. Duane kept the horses going, however, and the slow hours wore away. Duane thought the quiet night would never break to dawn, that there was no end to the melancholy, brooding plain. But at length a grayness blotted out the stars and mantled the level of mesquite ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... the old vicious circle. Feuds, racial, religious, and agrarian, rent Ireland asunder. Disputes about land have ever sunk deep into the brooding imagination of the Celt; and the memories of holdings absorbed, or of tithes pitilessly exacted in lean years, now flashed forth in many a deed of incendiarism or outrage. To Camden there appeared to be only ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... persons who love brooding over their own sensations, though I cannot endure such persons myself. And so, after the first transport of heartfelt joy, I promptly began to give myself up to all sorts of reflections. When I had got half a mile from the house of the retired lieutenant, I flung ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... and peered all around. Kurt observed that there was a dark side entrance to this hotel. Presently Neuman returned to the desk and said something to old Dorn, who shook his head emphatically, and then threw himself into a chair, in a brooding posture that Kurt knew well. He had seen it so often that he knew it had to do with money. His father was refusing demands of some kind. Neuman again left the office, this time with the proprietor. They were absent some ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... is even now brooding over the element necessary for the perpetuation of a free and United Germany. He reads his Bible and prepares for ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... about with gold and turquoise and emerald. David brought Ralph nigh to his seat, but spake not. The mighty lord was sitting with his head drooping, and his arm hanging over his knee, with a heavy countenance as though he were brooding matters which pleased him naught. But in a while he sat up with a start, and turned about and saw David standing there with Ralph, and spake at once like a man waking up: "He that sold thee to me said that ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
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