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More "Pensive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he never was afraid; His country's weal, his country's laws obeyed; A pensive calm reigned on his noble brow, While in his eye you read the ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... exhibition which had been announced in so singular a preamble; and the squire, having previously insisted on every gentleman tossing off a half-pint bumper, adjourned the whole party to the library, where they were not a little surprised to discover Mr Cranium seated, in a pensive attitude, at a large table, decorated with ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... silvery day, fair, mild, pensive, with light shadows and a capricious sun. There had been a storm of rain the night before, and it was as if Nature had repented of her wildness, and sought forgiveness by all sorts of winsome arts, insinuating invitations, soft caresses, ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... monuments of brave men, and such as had well deserv'd of the publick, erected by the Romans even in their highways; since doubtless, such noble and agreeable objects would exceedingly divert, entertain, and take off the minds and discourses of melancholy people, and pensive travellers, who having nothing but the dull and enclosed ways to cast their eyes on, are but ill conversation to themselves, and others, and instead of celebrating, censure their superiors. It is by a curious person, and industrious friend of mine, observ'd, that the ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... had all glutted themselves with the murder of the poor man, and that they ought to be used like murderers. Upon these words, away ran eight of my men, with the boatswain and his crew, to complete their bloody work; and I, seeing it quite out of my power to restrain them, came away pensive and sad; for I could not bear the sight, much less the horrible noise and cries of the poor wretches ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... him, You Who have so many worshippers! At least, he is a monstrous clever fellow," said Jurgen: and boldly he said it, in the highest court of Heaven, and before the pensive face of the God ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... 4. Gladly stoop the pensive willows Those bright river-ripples o'er, Thanking for its cooling water, Telling how they thirst ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... and a tall lady in black, with plain linen collar and wristbands, rose to receive him. They confronted each other. Time and trouble had left their trace, but there were the glorious eyes, and jet black hair, and the face, worn and pensive, but still beautiful. It was the woman he ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... and fresh as morning rose, But somewhat sad and solemne eke in sight, As if some pensive ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... well-grown well-made men, strong and agile, the countenance pleasing, rather square of mould, eyebrows straight and thick, nose well cut and short, chin firm and resolute-looking, and the complexion very dark in Raymond, Frank, and the absent Miles. Frank's eyes were soft, brown, rather pensive, and absent in expression; but Raymond's were much deeper and darker, and had a steadfast gravity, that made him be viewed as formidable, especially as he had lost all the youthful glow of colouring that mantled in his ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sleeping Venus seemed Dudu ... But she was pensive more than melancholy ... The strangest thing was, beauteous, she was holy. Unconscious, albeit turned of quick seventeen. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... came to see Ernest Churchouse upon the matter of the marriage. She found him pensive and a little weary. According to his custom he indulged in ideas before approaching the subject just then uppermost in all ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... to a better understanding of that man if his likeness is impressed upon our memory. The portrait made by his friend Giotto, shows him as a young man perhaps of twenty to twenty-five years, with a face noble, beardless, strong, intelligent and pensive—a face which would not lead one to suspect an appreciation of humor. Yet writers find two distinct forms of that quality—a playfulness in his eclogues and a grotesqueness in certain of his assignments to punishments in Hell. Contrasting with this picture of his early life ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... never made a pig for I," sobbed the little maid, with her head dolefully inclined to her left shoulder, and her oval face pulled to a doubly pensive length. "I axed my vather to let me get him a posy, and a said I might. And I got un some vine Bloody Warriors, and a heap of Boy's Love off our big bush, that smelled beautiful. And vather says a can have some water-blobs off our pond when they blows. But Tommy Green met I as a ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... a man of his own age, and hearing things that were very pleasant to hear about his latest work, and yet, as he leaned back in his chair and looked across at Katharine Normaine, whose own expression was a little pensive, he sighed. It was a great deal—he told himself it was nearly everything—to have what he had now in the line of effort which he loved and had chosen. It was not so good as the work itself, of course, but the recognition was grateful. And as his eyes dwelt again upon the distinction ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... were they going to start out as robbers at that late day? Maurice and Jean, too, were deeply interested in those details about an enemy whom the girl had seen, and whom they had not succeeded in setting eyes on in their whole month's campaigning, while Honore, pensive and with dry, parched lips, was conscious only of the sound of her voice; he could think of nothing save her and the misfortune that ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... all had excruciating headaches. Their legs dangled, and they did not seem to be able to stand on them. Only the Indian—Miguel—seemed to have any strength left. He was a nasty-looking individual, always sulky and pensive as if under some great weight upon his conscience. Miguel and I walked in front, he with a big knife opening the way in the forest for the others to ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... King; and long within his breast His pensive counsels balanced to and fro: He grieved the land he freed should be oppress'd, And he less for ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... the Latin poet satirizes that wickedness which Jeremiah mourned over. Horace's satire, however, is not entirely applicable to conditions in England; "he never saw that with the view of his eye which his pensive translator cannot but overview with the languish of his soul." Moreover Horace's style is capable of improvement, an improvement which Drant is quite ready to provide. "His eloquence is sometimes too sharp, and therefore I have blunted it, and sometimes too ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... most eventful period in French history. The storms of 1789 consigned his father to the guillotine, his mother and brothers to imprisonment, and himself and sister to poverty and exile. There are few romances more replete with pensive interest than the wanderings of Louis Philippe to escape the bloodhounds of the Revolution far away amidst the ices of Northern Europe, to the huts of the Laplanders, and again through the almost unbroken wilds ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... night we had Charlotte, Lily, and Ruth Swain into supper. Charlotte resembles a Swede in appearance. Lily, the second, is a good-looking girl with rather a long, pensive face. Ruth is very dark but has a fine face. She is backward in learning and very diffident. All three are very capable girls; they cut out and make their own clothes, and can turn their hand to most things in the house ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... Apollodorus is to be credited. On looking over that album, the majority of the faces are distinctly those of Aaronites, and most favourable specimens of the family, too There are melting black orbs curtained with pensive lashes, luxuriant black hair, regular features, and straight, delicately chiselled noses. These Jewesses generally wear handkerchiefs disposed in curving folds over their heads, and are as fond of loudly-tinted raiment and the gauds of trinketry as their sisters who parade the ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... of a boy who threw a fork at his brother and put his eye out. But he didn't mean to, and the brother forgave him, and he never did so any more," observed Jill, in a pensive tone, wishing to show that she felt all the dangers of impatience, but ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... live woman. She supported herself by writing for the newspapers articles of a morally utilitarian character—for instance a winter's series, published every Saturday, "Hints on Health and Culture," or again, "Receipts for the Parlor and the Kitchen." She also contributed poetry of a pensive cast, and chatty special correspondence flavored with personal allusion. She was one of the pioneers in modern society journalism, which at this time, however, was comparatively veiled and delicate in its methods. Besides, she was a woman of tireless energy, with theories on many subjects ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... out into the center of the track, and his eyes were turned westward, toward the bend round the great hill. They were pensive eyes, almost regretful, and somehow his whole face had changed from its look of daring to match them. The exhilaration had gone out of it; the command, even the determination had merged into something like weakness. His ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... little encouragement to a sentimental view of life. Its writers had too much to do, and too much besides to think about, for undue occupation with pensive remembrances or imaginative forecastings. They bid us remember as a stimulus to thanksgiving and a ground of hope. They bid us look forward, but not along the low levels of earth and its changes. One great future is to draw all our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... look. Nor has Volpatte changed, with his leggings, his shouldered blanket, and his face of a Mongolian tatooed with dirt; nor Tirette, although he has been worried for some time by blood-red streaks in his eyes—for some unknown and mysterious reason. Farfadet keeps himself aloof, in pensive expectation. When the post is being given out he awakes from his reverie to go so far, and then retires into himself. His clerkly hands indite numerous and careful postcards. He does not know of Eudoxie's end. Lamuse said no more to any one of the ultimate ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... there is a spire On which Sir Knight first bids the Squire The Fiddle, and its spoils, the case,[9] In manner of a trophy, place. That done, they ope the trapdoor gate, And let Crowdero down thereat; Crowdero making doleful face, Like hermit poor in pensive place. To dungeon they the wretch commit, And the survivor of his feet, But the other that had broke the peace And head of knighthood, they release, Though a delinquent false and forged, Yet b'ing a stranger, he's enlarged, While his comrade that did not hurt Is clapp'd up fast in prison ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... of over-bookishness, was full of humour, extraordinarily affectionate, and extremely natural. There is moreover a great deal of interest in this skit on poor Mrs. Coleridge: for "lingos" of the kind, though in her case they may have helped to disgust her husband with his "pensive Sara," were in her time and afterwards by no means uncommon, especially—physiologists must say why—with the female sex. The present writer, near the middle of the nineteenth century, knew a lady of family, position and ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... pecuniary difficulties. George Vertue, the eminent engraver, in one of his commonplace-books, now preserved in the British Museum,[62] thus feelingly refers to the embarrassed circumstances of the Earl:—'My good Lord, lately growing heavy and pensive in his affairs, which for some late years have mortify'd his mind.... This lately manifestly appeared in his change of complexion; his face fallen less; his colour and eyes turned yellow to a great degree; his stomach wasted and gone; and a dead weight ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... lament in a pensive and apologetic sort of way, "Yes, I have a great weakness for fine books." The very presence of this mis-called weakness, however, is unmistakable proof of great mental strength, and those who suffer from it may find ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... which is the reason that the most brilliant display of them soothes the observer, instead of exciting him. And I know not whether it be more a moral effect or a physical one, operating merely on the eye; but it is a pensive gayety, which causes a sigh often, and never a smile. We never fancy, for instance, that these gayly-clad trees might be changed into young damsels in holiday attire, and betake themselves to dancing on the plain. If ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... beautiful, and the love which the pensive tenant of the villa disdained, the Pharaoh would willingly have purchased at a great price. In exchange for the priest's daughter he would have given Twea, Taia, Amense, Hont-Reche, his Asiatic captives, ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... when busy crowds retire To take their evening rest, The hermit trimm'd his little fire, And cheer'd his pensive guest: ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... showers And purple all the ground with vernal flowers. Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine, The white pink, and the pansy freak'd with jet, The glowing violet, The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears: Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffodillies fill their cups with tears To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. For so to interpose ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... it? How long before—?" She started to ask, how long before she was married, but caught herself. "What did he look like? He must have been good-looking, or you would not be so pensive." ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... he sought the lonely maid, Who plied her labors in the silvan shade; Her locks loose rolling mantle deep her breast, And wave luxuriant round her slender waist, Gay wreaths of flowers her pensive brows adorn, And her white raiment mocks the light of morn. Her busy hand sustains a bending bough, Where cotton clusters spread their robes of snow, From opening pods unbinds the fleecy store, And culls her ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... always been a haunting suggestiveness to me about the expression Rue du Temps Perdu—the Street of Lost Time. Down this shadowy vista we all come to peer with tear-dimmed eyes sooner or later. Usually this pensive retrospection is the premonitory sign that one is nearing the last milestone before the downhill side of life begins. But to some this yearning backward glance comes early; they feel its compelling power while still in the vigor of middle life. Why this is so it is not easy to say, but imaginative, ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... general vanish like the morning mist before the sun; whereas, if you quail before it, it is sure to become more imminent. I have fervent hope that the words of my mouth sank deep into the hearts of some of my auditors, as I observed many of them depart musing and pensive. I occasionally distributed tracts amongst them; for although they themselves were unable to turn them to much account, I thought that by their means they might become of service at some future time, and fall into the hands of others, to whom they might be ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... bent and grey, Whose pensive lips speak only when they pray Doth sad November pass ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... profile, dimly lighted by the flickering oil lamp; a very perfect profile, he thought; a forehead that was neither too high nor too low, a small aquiline nose, a short upper lip, and the prettiest mouth and chin in the world. It was just a shade too pensive now, the poor little mouth, he thought pityingly; and be wondered what it was like when it smiled. And then he began to arrange his lines for winning the smile he wanted so much to see from those thoughtful lips. It was, of course, for the gratification of the idlest, most vagabond curiosity that ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... plaintive chants in the world than the recitation of the Psalms by the "Sons of the Covenant" on Sabbath afternoons amid the gathering shadows of twilight. Esther often stood in the passage to hear it, morbidly fascinated, tears of pensive pleasure in her eyes. Even the little jargon story-book which Moses Ansell read out that night to his Kinder, after tea-supper, by the light of the one candle, was prefaced with a note of pathos. "These stories ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Clanwilliam, who Agar said was the quickest man he had ever known; Luttrell said he and Rogers were 'the quick and the dead.' Looking over the 'Report of the Woods and Forests and the Cost of the Palaces,' somebody said 'the pensive' (meaning the public: see Rejected Addresses) must pay; Luttrell said 'the public was the pensive and the ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... said, puzzled me. He had not the pensive air of one who has seen better days. He was more than cheerful in his present life: he was full of spirits; and yet it was plain that he had been brought up for something different. I asked him once to tell ...
— In Madeira Place - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... powers, became absorbed in that weary watching; long before she died, she was childish, and only conscious of one wish—to sit in that long high window, and watch the road, along which he might come. She was as faithful as Evangeline, if pensive and inglorious. ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... from the castle joined Benefico, he declared to them in what manner their deliverance was effected; and, as a general shout of joy resounded through the neighbouring mountains, Fidus, lifting up his eyes, beheld in the midst of the multitude, standing in a pensive posture, the fair disconsolate. Her tender heart was at the instant overflowing in soft tears, caused by a kind participation of their present transport, yet mixed with the deep sad impression of a grief her bosom was full fraught with. Her face, at first, was almost hid by her white handkerchief, ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... reflect that there are only a few planks between you and the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, it makes you feel sort of pensive." ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... catch glimpses of grouse cropping heather buds, of whirring flocks of partridges, of the sooty coot and the speckled teal, of the fisher herons, of the green-crested lapwing, of clamoring craiks among fields of flowering clover, of robins cheering the pensive autumn, of lintwhites chanting among the buds, of the mavis singing drowsy ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... the remnants of thy splendour past Shall pilgrims, pensive, but unwearied throng; Long shall the voyager, with th' Ionian blast, Hail the bright clime of battle and of song; Long shall thy annals and immortal tongue Fill with thy fame the youth of many a shore; Boast ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... not gay," Felix admitted. "They are sober; they are even severe. They are of a pensive cast; they take things hard. I think there is something the matter with them; they have some melancholy memory or some depressing expectation. It 's not the epicurean temperament. My uncle, Mr. Wentworth, is a ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... with the skins of seals, the strong teak-wood sideboard, and the heavy round table, upon which stood a quaint Dutch spirit bottle and a couple of horn drinking cups. He looked at the several pictures of ships battling with terrible storms, and at the pensive porcupine in its dusty glass case, and then at the array of firearms and harpoons above the door of the press bed. My dog Selta lay sound asleep upon a large polar-bear skin before the fire. Had he approached her and looked up the wide chimney he might have seen there the remains ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... appeared painful. She is ever cheerful, though I sometimes wish she would be more lively, and cannot help fancying, notwithstanding her melancholy as a child was remarkable, that her sufferings, both bodily and mental, the last eighteen months have made her the very pensive character she is. I had hoped before that unfortunate affair she was becoming as animated and light-hearted as my Emmeline, but as that cannot be, I endeavoured to be thankful for the health and quiet, and, I trust, happiness she now enjoys. We receive, every opportunity, from Edward very satisfactory ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... Clement groan; and yet that canal journey had a pensive joy about it, as we sat beside our sleeping brother and conversed freely and fearlessly, as we had never been able to do for ten minutes together in all the long years that we had loved one another. There ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reason for anxiety. The circumstances, owing to the number of the royal retinue, were unfavourable, yet, as the story of the pot of gold had been told by Ruthven, the plot could not be abandoned. James even 'chaffed' Gowrie about being so pensive and distrait, and about his neglect of some little points of Scottish etiquette. Finally he sent Gowrie into the hall, with the grace-cup for the gentlemen, and then called the Master. He sent Gowrie, apparently, ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... past' of wasted opportunities and neglected duty. But the sudden transition to the sharp, short command and broken sentences of the last verse is to be accounted for by the sudden appearance of the flashing lights of the band led by Judas, somewhere near at hand, in the valley. The mood of pensive reflection gives place to rapid decision. He summons them to arise, not for flight, but that He may go out to meet the traitor. Escape would have been easy. There was time to reach some sheltering fold of the hill in the darkness; ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... a tapestried stool, a young girl with long, fair hair hanging in plaits over her neck, was embroidering an altar-cloth. There was a pensive expression in her eyes, and it was easy to see that, while her agile fingers worked, her ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... Ned Marshall had mounted and ridden happily away in the dusk, Sally came back with me from the door, and stood, silent and pensive, for a moment, while ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... cast a hurried glance round that strange assembly, if by chance her eye might rest upon some dear familiar face; but she saw not the kind but grave face of Hector, nor met the bright sparkling eyes of her cousin Louis, nor the soft, subdued, pensive features of the Indian girl, her adopted sister. She stood alone among those wild, gloomy-looking men; some turned away their eyes as if they would not meet her woe-stricken countenance, lest they should be moved to pity her sad condition. No wonder that, ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... intently and assumed a serious air. After that for the whole day I did not speak a single word to her... In the evening, she was pensive; this morning, at the well, more pensive still. When I went up to her, she was listening absent-mindedly to Grushnitski, who was apparently falling into raptures about Nature, but, so soon as she perceived me, she began to laugh—at a most inopportune moment—pretending not to notice ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... often weary of these complainings, and turned for relief to the placidity and cheerfulness of her mother's mind. Here she found repose—a soothing, calm, and holy submission. Still the gloom of her father's spirit cast a pensive shade over her own feelings, and infused a tone of melancholy and an air of unnatural reflection into her character. By nature, Jane was endowed with a soul of unusual delicacy. From early childhood, all that is beautiful or sublime in nature, in literature, in character, had charms ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... not help remarking the strong contrast between them. He, with his sallow, delicately-shaped features—the thin mouth and long straight nose, of that form I have heard called the "melancholy nose," which usually indicates a feeble, pensive, and hypochondriac temperament; while his daughter—But I ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... object of beauty, notoriously compelled to be of the fair sex in his tactics, and must practise the arts and whims of nymphs to preserve himself: and no doubt it was the case with the famous Captain Baskelett, in whose mind sweet ladies held the place that the pensive politician gives to the masses, dreadful in their hatred, almost as dreadful in their affection. But an heiress is a distinct species among women; he hungered for the heiress; his elevation to Parliament made him regard her as both the ornament and the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bark him away, but only dreams of barking, in his cozy kennel. Close by are the windows of the mansion, glowing with light. There beat the philanthropic hearts; there smiles the pale, pensive lady; there beams the aspiring face of her son; and there sits the Judge, with his feet on the rug, pleasantly contemplating the good his speech will do, and thinking quite as much, perhaps, of the fame it will bring him,—happily unconscious alike of his neighbor's malicious ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... me plain 'C', or picture, if you like, in place of your sounder, a blonde, fairy-like girl talking to you, with pensive cheeks ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... father was very loath to grant this boon, but he let me go sometimes, perhaps to get a sample of my conduct. I don't remember ever doing anything at these times which could have displeased him; I was particularly careful about it, since I saw him sad, pensive, and afflicted owing to the misfortune which had befallen him, and soon be began to accord me his confidence, which I was most anxious ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... what she would see: the fine, cross upper lip lifted backwards by the moustache, the small grizzled brown moustache, turned up, that made it look crosser. The narrow, pensive lower lip, thrust out by its light jaw. His nose—quite a young nose—that wouldn't be Roman, wouldn't be Sutcliffe; it looked out over your head, tilted itself up to sniff the world, obstinate, alert. His eyes, young too, bright and dark, sheltered, safe from age under the low straight eyebrows. ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... within my bosom's core The thought—as hitherward I strayed; And pensive 'mid the waving store, I mused, of autumn's yellow glade:— These gifts of nature's bounteous reign,— The teeming earth, and golden grain, Yon elms, among whose leaves entwine The tendrils of the clustering vine;— ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... stockholder in the New-York Tribune. Mr. GREELEY conceives some of his most brilliant editorial articles while churning the mercurial milk of the Chappaqua farm into butter; or vexing the gracious grain with the flying flail; or listening to the pensive murmurings of the plaintive pigs, and the whispered cadences of the kindly cattle. RICHARD GRANT WHITE can't write, it is said, until a towel moistened with Cologne water is applied to his nostrils. Sometimes, however, he varies the monotony of this method by riding several miles in a Third Avenue ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... it is that you find such people so fickle and uncertain in their spirits; Now on the mount, then in the valleys; now in the sunshine, then in the shade; now warm, then frozen; now bonny and blithe, then in a moment pensive and sad; as thinking of a portion nowhere but in hell. This will cause smiting on the breast; nor can I imagine that the Publican was as yet farther than thus far in the Christian's progress, since yet he was smiting upon ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... works being produced under such prosaic conditions. One buyer—a most worthy man, to be sure, and a true friend of Rossetti’s, but full of that British superstition about the saving grace of clothes which is so wonderful a revelation to the pensive foreigner—had to be humoured in his craze against the nude. After having painted a beautiful partly-draped Gretchen (which, we may remark in passing, had no relation, as Mr. W. M. Rossetti supposes, to the Marguerite alluded ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Mariana, is very fair, her face not so finely rounded, but has a gayer expression than her sisters', whose countenances, except when the conversation has something of mirth in it, may be said to be rather pensive. Their persons are elegant, and their manners pleasing and lady-like, such as would be fascinating in any country. They possess very considerable powers of conversation, and their minds seem to be more instructed than those of the Greek women in ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... who still rule 40 Our spirits from their urns. 'Twas such a night! 'Tis strange that I recall it at this time; But I have found our thoughts take wildest flight Even at the moment when they should array Themselves in pensive order. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... lean for that," responded Theron, with a pensive smile. "I WAS going to ask, you know, for an increase of salary, or an extra allowance. I don't see how I can go on as it is. The sum fixed by the last Quarterly Conference of the old year, and which I am getting now, is ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... remember is that I was content not, for the time, to open the question, and that contentment must have sprung from the sense of his perpetually striking show of cleverness. He was too clever for a bad governess, for a parson's daughter, to spoil; and the strangest if not the brightest thread in the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the impression I might have got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was under some influence operating in his small intellectual life ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... sulks, a luxury that even a black boy may become bloated on. Tom does not tolerate that frame of mind in others. The attentions of "divinest melancholy" he likes to monopolise for himself, and when Jimmy becomes pensive without just cause, Tom's mood swerves to paternal and active indignation—which is ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... upon the green, New weary sleep below; And still the pensive spring returns, And ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... kitchen-drudge or a soft-eyed maiden? a prudent housewife or a thoughtful heartsweet? 'a special breeder' (POPE) or a trusted bosomer? Cattle and machinery are for this labor-saving. The true end of woman is feminity. Therefore, if she is any brighter and heartsomer for playing in the fields, any more pensive and sober for meditating there, who shall deny her God's free air ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... for centuries civilization in a greater or less degree has exercised sway, arises from the contemplation of the various monuments of by-gone days, some slowly mouldering into dust, others still proudly defying the assaults of the great destroyer. The mind dwells upon them with a species of pensive delight, and that peculiar charm which their association with the fictions and annals of times past inspires. It would seem, that France should be especially rich in the relics of that feudalism of which for a long time it was the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... neighbours, was natural enough; and if now and then a doubt, a fear, had crossed his mind and rendered him more touched than he liked to own by Vernon's remarks, it had vanished upon perceiving that Lucretia never seemed a shade more pensive in Mainwaring's absence. The listlessness and the melancholy which are apt to accompany love, especially where unpropitiously placed, were not visible on the surface of this strong nature. In truth, once assured that Mainwaring returned ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that of idleness, and taste no scenes But such as art contrives, possess ye still Your element; there only ye can shine, There only minds like yours can do no harm. Our groves were planted to console at noon The pensive wanderer in their shades. At eve The moonbeam, sliding softly in between The sleeping leaves, is all the light they wish, Birds warbling all the music. We can spare The splendour of your lamps, they but eclipse Our softer satellite. Your songs confound Our more harmonious notes. The thrush departs ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... Half-an-hour later Esther came into the study with her mistress's tea. She brought over the wicker table, and as she set it by her mistress's knees the shadows about the bookcase and the light of the lamp upon the book and the pensive content on Miss Rice's face impelled her to think of her own troubles, the hardship, the passion, the despair of her life compared with this tranquil existence. Never had she felt more certain that misfortune was inherent in her life. She remembered all the trouble she had had, ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... sad and pensive face, almost the dearest face in the world to him; and he gazed into it with penetrating and loving eyes. Would it not be best to tell the child the secret this grave covered, here, by the grave itself? Better for her ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... the placid Avon, which the centuries have invested with their pensive and resistless charm, and over which genius has cast its enchanting spell, an impassable gulf seems fixed between the Shakespeare of Stratford and the Shakespeare of London. They appear like two entirely different and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... forth, where the cold dew of heaven Lay on the humbler graves around, what time The pale moon gazed upon the turfy mounds, Pensive, as though like me, in lonely muse, Twere brooding on the dead inhumed beneath. There while with him, the holy man of Uz, O'er human destiny I sympathised, Counting the long, long periods prophecy Decrees to roll, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... pensive, having but one only boy with him, suddenly there appeared his spirit Mephistophiles in likeness of a very man, from whom issued most horrible fiery flames, insomuch that the boy was afraid, but being hardened by his master, ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... heartily,—laughter in which he was joined by all the assembled maidens, including the gentle, pensive-eyed Niphrata. Standing erect in his glistening princely attire, with one hand resting familiarly on Theos's arm, and the sparkle of mirth lighting up his handsome features, he formed the greatest contrast imaginable to the little shrunken old personage, who, clinging convulsively to his staff, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Alephane; but what passed between them, and whether it was some divine apparition, or merely a man of flesh and blood, was never discovered, for he seems to have kept his mother in ignorance of the whole affair. From that time onward his conduct changed. He grew pensive, mild, and charitable. He entered, as youthful acolyte, a neighbouring Convent of Salacian monks, and quickly distinguished himself for piety and the gift of miracles. In the short space of three years, or thereabouts, he had healed eight lepers, caused the clouds to rain, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... couldst thou wish Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down With patriarchs of the infant world—with kings, The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good, Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past, All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,—the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between; The venerable woods—rivers that move In majesty, and the complaining brooks That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste,— Are but ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... autumnal day, When o'er the woods the northern tempest beat— The spoils of autumn rustling at our feet, And Nature wept to see her own decay. The pliant poplar bent beneath the blast; The moveless oak stood warring with the storm, Which bow'd the pensive willow's weaker form; And naught gave token that thy love would last, Save the mute eloquence of forcing tears; Save the low pleading of thy ardent sighs, The fervent gazing of thy glowing eyes; A firm assurance, spite of all my fears, That, as the sunshine ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... one of the glasses and emptied it. Ramballe emptied his too, again pressed Pierre's hand, and leaned his elbows on the table in a pensive attitude. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... thinking alone in his own room, with Oscar lying across the rug at his feet, his mind refused to be quieted. One picture after another presented itself to his imagination: the proud-souled enthusiast longing for the wild winter nights and the dark Atlantic seas; the pensive maiden, shuddering to hear the fierce story of Maclean of Lochbuy; the spoiled child, teasing her mamma and petting her canary; the wronged and weeping woman, her frame shaken with sobs, her hands clasped in despair; the artful and demure coquette, ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... their poetical and literary merits. Much as we admire "his wit, his festive merriment, and inimitable satires, and the ingenious imagery, and the elaborate melody and finish of every period of his prose"—we are disposed to think him pre-eminently successful in delineating the plaintive and pensive woes of deep and settled ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 12, No. 349, Supplement to Volume 12. • Various
... evening," said he to himself; and so he did. Emma stood at the window, beside a stand of magnificent plants, whose blossoms filled the room with fragrance. The lamps had not been lighted, and the moonlight fell like a halo of glory around her, as she stood in sad reverie that cast a pensive shade over her face, usually so brilliant in its beauty. So absorbed was she, that she did not hear the door open, and was unconscious of Saville's presence till he was ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... woman, and she ended by finding pretexts for daily excursions past the Clematis House, always arrayed in the most fetching street costumes. When on the third day she encountered Justin, that gentleman responded gallantly to her pensive tender reproach. His was no Jericho heart, to demand a seven-day siege. He had found Persis Dale unexpectedly interesting, but Annabel was unexpectedly pretty, and a liking for pickles does not ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... began to love the little girls, and after a time they became the pets of the establishment. While the locks of the other children were cut close to the head, Isabel still possessed her long and flowing tresses. Day by day her exquisite beauty deepened into health again, and the pensive cast which grief had given to her features rendered them ideal as ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... Poppy felt all right; but presently she grew rather pale, and began to look rather pensive. She stopped running, and walked slower and slower, while her eyes got dizzy, and her hands ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... in that instant, and presently observed Madam de Cleves's condition; he came up to her, and told her softly, he had that respect for her, he durst not ask what it was made her more pensive than usual. The voice of the Duke de Nemours brought her to herself again, and looking at him, without having heard what he had said to her, full of her own thoughts, and afraid lest her husband should see him with her, "For God's sake," says ...
— The Princess of Cleves • Madame de La Fayette
... with so frolic and hearty a laughter given me your applause, that in truth as many of you as I behold on every side of me seem to me no less than Homer's gods drunk with nectar and nepenthe; whereas before, you sat as lumpish and pensive as if you had come from consulting an oracle. And as it usually happens when the sun begins to show his beams, or when after a sharp winter the spring breathes afresh on the earth, all things immediately get a new face, new ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... faint, he had cut a hole in the ice, had put in his hook again and again, and yet again, and coming home had delighted the waiting family with an unexpected breakfast. The good parson made no rebuke, nodded pensive, and drove straightway ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... suffering. Each season brings its moods—Spring is hopeful; Summer luxurious; Autumn contented; and then comes that strange time when our thoughts run on solemn things. Can it be that we associate the long decline of the year with the dark closing of life? Surely not—for a boy or girl feels the same pensive, dreary mood, and no one who remembers childhood can fail to think of the wild inarticulate thoughts that passed through the immature brain. Nay, our souls are from God; they are bestowed by the Supreme, and they were from the beginning, and cannot ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... exposure of his daily wanderings. His cheek-bones, a trifle high, asserted their place above the softly concave cheeks. His mouth was closed and the lips were slightly compressed; the chin small, gracefully turned, not weak,—not strong. His eyes were abstracted, deep, pensive. His dress told much. The fine plaits of his shirt had sprung apart and been neatly sewed together again. His coat was a little faulty in the set of the collar, as if the person who had taken the garment apart and turned the ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... sad; here come the children leaping from the boat; they've "caught few fish," but a great deal of sunshine, (judging from their happy faces.) God bless the little voyagers, all; the laughing Agnes, the pensive Emma, the dove-eyed, tender-hearted Mary, the rosy Bell, the fearless Harry. In the green pastures by the still waters, may the ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... arrived at the proper age to undertake the ceremony of the Ke-ig-uish-im-o-win, or fast, to see what kind of a spirit would be his guide and guardian through life. Wunzh, for this was his name, had been an obedient boy from his infancy, and was of a pensive, thoughtful, and mild disposition, so that he was beloved by the whole family. As soon as the first indications of spring appeared, they built him the customary little lodge at a retired spot, some distance from their own, ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... filled with tears as she gazed at the face in the miniature. It was the portrait of a woman of about thirty—a face of exquisite refinement, of calm and pensive beauty. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... down among grapevines covered with ripe clusters, they heard a woman's voice which called, or rather sang in pensive notes: ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... she stood there in the open with pensive eyes following the movements of scurrying, toddling legs, many of them encased in the minutest of buckskin, chap-like pantaloons and the tiniest of beaded moccasins. It was a sight that yielded her a tenderness of ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... while the war was proceeding without, and these troubles within, Niccolo Barbadoro desirous of inducing him to consent to the ruin of Cosmo, waited upon him at his house; and finding him alone in his study, and very pensive, endeavored, with the best reasons he could advance, to persuade him to agree with Rinaldo on Cosmo's expulsion. Niccolo da Uzzano replied as follows: "It would be better for thee and thy house, as well as for our republic, if thou and those who follow thee in ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... these deep solitudes and awful cells, Where heav'nly pensive contemplation dwells, ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... off, leaving a pensive Bertram Wooster standing motionless in the shadows. It seemed to me that it was hard to know what ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... long pensive. The day was too bright and fine for him to be sorrowful or reflective for any length of time; so, after staying by the side of Fritz for a short while on the shore, sharing his thoughts about the ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... heaven again, the light it got from heaven. When the ten lepers were cleansed, and one returned to lavish love on his healer, that healer, while he enjoyed the single penitent's devotion, permitted a sigh to escape his lips, articulated in the sad pensive question, "Where are the nine?" I love the Lord for uttering that complaint. It proves to me that he counts it no intrusion when we burst in upon him with our glad thanksgiving. In the bold in-bursting of this woman; in her premeditated anointing, and unpremeditated tears, the Lord ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... nor that of those beings divine, But each and the whole—an essence of all the Nine; With tentative foot she neared to my halting-place, A pensive smile on her sweet, small, ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... practical, energetic community, remarkable for its activity in affairs of state and religion, but by no means given to dreaming, this fair flower of American genius rose up unexpectedly enough, breaking the cold New England sod for the emission of a light and fragrance as pure and pensive as that of the arbutus in our woods, in spring. The flower, however, sprang from seed that rooted in the old colonial life of the sternly imaginative pilgrims and Puritans. Thrusting itself up into view through ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... death. They hover in silvery thin expanse, they sail laughingly white with a golden rim, they stand at rest in yellow, red, and bluish tints; they creep up slowly and darkly threatening like murderers, they rush with a headlong roar like mad horsemen, they hang sad and pensive at equal heights like melancholy hermits. They have the forms of blessed isles and the forms of blessing angels; they are like threatening hands, fluttering sails, a flight of cranes. They float between God's heaven and the poor earth as fair symbols ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... I se you sadde and hevy more than nous deux, mais pource que uous uoy pensive et ...
— An Introductorie for to Lerne to Read, To Pronounce, and to Speke French Trewly • Anonymous
... an apparently endless endeavor to sate the insatiable. However, all things must come to an end; so, eventually, did Mulcahy's Gargantuan meal. As he paid the prescribed fee of two shillings, I thought Stopforth looked pensive. ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... flocks, and grac'd the plain, She lack'd no pleasure, and she felt no pain. She view'd our motions when we toss'd the ball, And smil'd to see us take, or ward, a fall; 'Till once our leader chanc'd the nymph to spy, And drank in poison from her lovely eye. Now pensive grown, he shunn'd the long-lov'd plains, His darling pleasures, and his favour'd swains, Sigh'd in her absence, sigh'd when she was near, Now big with hope, and now dismay'd with fear; At length with falt'ring tongue ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... the "camp" for the more ambitious "cabin," but his cabin, was "a rough, rough log one," made of unhewn timber, and without floor, door or window. In this "rough, rough," abode, his lanky, lean- visaged, awkward and somewhat pensive though strong, hearty and patient son Abraham had a "rough, rough" life, and underwent experiences which, if they were not calculated to form a Pitt or a Turgot, were calculated to season an American politician, and make him a winner in the tough struggle for ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... student treads The sylvan haunts, exultingly leaps forth To hail the coming of the genial spring, Shedding around from her green lap the buds, In winter's rugged casket long enshrined, To form the chaplet of the infant year.— Young pensive moralist!—'tis sweet to muse On beauties which escape the vulgar eye, To talk with Nature 'mid her woodland paths, And hear an answering voice in every breeze.— You court her beauties with a lover's zeal; You hear her voice, ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... harmless chine, to wear The factious gown, and tire his client's ear And purse with endless noise. Trophies of war, Old rusty armour, with an honour'd scar, And wheels of captiv'd chariots, with a piece Of some torn British galley, and to these The ensign too, and last of all the train The pensive pris'ner loaden with his chain, Are thought true Roman honours; these the Greek And rude barbarians equally do seek. Thus air, and empty fame, are held a prize Beyond fair virtue; for all virtue dies ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... been obliterated by succeeding circumstances. The green pastures along which he had so often bounded in the exultation of health, and youthful freedom—the woods, under whose refreshing shade he had first indulged that pensive melancholy, which afterwards made a strong feature of his character—the wild walks of the mountains, the river, on whose waves he had floated, and the distant plains, which seemed boundless as his early hopes—were ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... With this wrangled fitfully the cracked clarionet of some peevish brother. Ever and anon some vast nostril, punctually thundering, hurled forth the relentless growl of the bassoon,—a very mountain of sound, which crushed all before it, and made the shuddering timbers crack and reel. A pensive flute vainly poured, in swift recurring gushes, its rhythmic oil upon the roaring billows. From some melodious swain came a freakish fiddling, which leaped and danced like mad, now here, now there, like an audible will-o'-the-wisp. A dolorous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... her great loss, then of her supreme regret, at which point he would make his plea. But Jane would give him no help at all. Silent she sat looking into the fire, all the vivacity and brilliance of the past hour gone, and in its place a gentle, pensive sadness. The firelight fell on her face, so changed from what it had been in those pre-war days, now so long ago, yet so familiar and so dear. To-morrow at this hour he would be far down the line with his battalion, off for the war. What lay beyond that ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... an interview with Mary not long after her arrival, and it is one of the most striking instances of the strange ascendency which Mary's extraordinary beauty and grace, and the pensive charm of her demeanor, exercised over all that came within her influence, that even John Knox, whom nothing else could soften or subdue, found his rough and indomitable energy half forsaking him in the presence of his gentle queen. She expostulated with him. He half apologized. Nothing had ever ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... much for those who value highly the concentrated presentment of passion, who appraise men and women by their susceptibility to it, and art and poetry as they afford the spectacle of it. Breaking from time to time into the pensive spectacle of their daily toil, their occupations near to nature, come those great elementary feelings, lifting and solemnizing their language and giving it a natural music. The great, distinguishing passion came to Michael ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... his rough features softening with a pensive cast, "I rekullec jess zif 'twar yes'dy, that rainy mornin wen we fellers set orf long with Squire Woodbridge fer Bennington. Thar wuz me, 'n Perez, an Reub, an Abe Konkapot, 'n lessee, yew ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... ethereal; But with a motion inconceivable Departed and was there. Before the throne Of Ades, first he hailed the long-sought queen, Stolen with violent hands from grassy fields And delicate airs of sunlit Sicily, Pensive, gold-haired, but innocent-eyed no more As when she laughing plucked the daffodils, But grave as on fulfilling a strange doom. And low at Ades' feet, wrapped in grim murk And darkness thick, the three gray women sat, Loose-robed and chapleted ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... of his pensive turn of mind, and his cheerfulness of temper, appeared in a little story which he himself told to Mr. Langton, when they were walking in his garden: 'Here (said he) I had put a handsome sun-dial, with this inscription, Eheu fugaces![206] which (speaking ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... Durazzo sat opposite the king, at a separate table among his brothers. Little by little his look grew fixed, his brow pensive. He was fancying that Andre might have supped in this very hall on the eve of his tragic end, and he thought how all concerned in that death had either died in torment or were now languishing in prison; the queen, an exile and a fugitive, was begging pity from strangers: he alone was free. ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... friar, bent and grey, Whose pensive lips speak only when they pray Doth sad November ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... about to visit. She replied that she was well, prepared for this, and felt that she had the necessary, courage, and she hoped to find in this last visit some amelioration of the bitter sorrow she endured. While speaking thus, her sad and beautiful countenance was calm and pensive. We then started, M. Cretu giving his arm to his cousin. The duchess's carriage followed at a distance, empty; ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... his countrymen, he is a poet, a dramatist, a novelist, and a writer of fiction. He was elected to the French Academy in 1884. Smooth shaven, of placid figure, with pensive eyes, the hair brushed back regularly, the head of an artist, Coppee can be seen any day looking over the display of the Parisian secondhand booksellers on the Quai Malaquais; at home on the writing-desk, a page of carefully prepared manuscript, yet sometimes covered by cigarette-ashes; ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... virgins; and when the priest chanted, "Your spouse approaches; come forth and meet him," she approached the altar singing, "I follow with my whole heart;" and, accompanied by two nuns already professed, she knelt before the bishop. She seemed very lovely, with an unusually sweet, gentle, and pensive countenance. She did not look particularly or deeply affected; but when she sung her responses, there was something exceedingly mournful in the soft, tremulous, and timid tones of her voice. The bishop now exhorted ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... of the waterfalls and is a sort of merman. You never see more than half his body. He is very, very old, his hair and beard are long and white, and his face is always pale and pensive. He carries a harp and plays to amuse the spirits in the waterfall. A statue of Ole Bull has recently been erected in his native city of Bergen. He stands upon a pedestal which rises from a fountain, and the water flows over the head and shoulders ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... were cut short, and during the rest of the time that the "Eliza" was rounding the stormy cape he and Tubbs and Crashford were in a decidedly pensive mood. At last the circumnavigation was accomplished, and in tranquil water the boat cruised along under the sheltered shore of the island. The sail was lowered, oars were put out, the invalids sat up, ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... instinct, a sort of sub-conscious intuition, that never led him astray. And then there were those baffling, inexplicable premonitions that on three occasions had intervened to prevent some great disaster. The thought of these made her very pensive, and now that the vicar had set her mind at rest upon the abstract theory of invisible protectors she felt that she could harbour speculations about them without danger to her soul's welfare. That the power at work could scarcely emanate from the devil ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... to me, buried in scientific speculations and denied hitherto all female acquaintances, like a beam of light through a sky not at all dark, but gray and pensive and sometimes almost irksome. Miss Katharine Dodan was gentle, pretty, and unaffectedly enthusiastic. Her interest in all equipment of our laboratories was boundless. When I found myself alone with her at the big telescope adjusting everything with—oh! such exquisite precision—and ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... guile, and unpractised in the deceits of the world. Her complexion was of a delicate white, without any other colour than that which occasionally mantled upon her cheek when called forth by the sensibility of her feelings, or diffused by the influence of some passing emotion. So lovely and yet so pensive was her countenance that but for the rapturous expression of her large dark eyes, partially revealed through their long silken fringes, and the profusion of sable ringlets which floated with unrestrained luxuriance over her exquisitely turned neck and shoulders, ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... celebrated Italian poet, has been described by Boccacio, as of a middle stature, of a pensive and melancholy expression in his countenance. He was courteous and civil, and his way of living extremely temperate. He is said to have been a very absent man, of which instances have been recorded; once meeting with a book in an apothecary's, which he had been long looking ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 352, January 17, 1829 • Various
... upon the Great Stone Face. He spent his childhood in the log-cottage where he was born, and was dutiful to his mother, and helpful to her in many things, assisting her much with his little hands, and more with his loving heart. In this manner, from a happy yet often pensive child, he grew up to be a mild, quiet, unobtrusive boy, and sunbrowned with labor in the fields, but with more intelligence brightening his aspect than is seen in many lads who have been taught at famous schools. Yet Ernest had had no ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... case should befall him, he will then, perhaps, as I have often done, when standing in pensive recollection at little Jane's grave, make an application of these lines, which are inscribed on a grave-stone erected in ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... off, and Fabian remained alone and pensive. This Golden Valley, of whose possession he had dreamt at that time when his heart nourished sweet hopes, was now near to him. What had been a dream was now a reality, and still he was more unhappy than at the time when hopeful love caused him to scoff at poverty. It is thus that happiness flies ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... There was a pensive look in Mr. Ryder's eyes as he took the floor and adjusted his eyeglasses. He began by speaking of woman as the gift of Heaven to man, and after some general observations on the relations of the sexes he said: "But perhaps the quality which most distinguishes ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... is the pensive parents' thought, How blest the lot of fondlings, early taught; Joy strings her hours on pleasure's golden twine, And fancy forms it to an endless line. But ah! the charm must cease, or soon or late, When chicks and misses rise to woman's state; The little tyrant grows in turn ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... unfit, poor child, to take the burden of a mother's place; Miles, with his proud, overbearing look, a boy who had had especial claims on her care and guidance; Joan, beautiful and daring, ignorant of nothing so much as of her own ignorance; Pat, of the pensive face and reckless spirit; and last but not least, Pixie, her baby—dear, naughty, loyal little Pixie, whom she must leave to the tender mercies of children little older than herself! The dim eyes brightened, the thin hand stretched out and gripped ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Rama's spouse to bring. Then by Sampati's counsel led, Brave Hanuman, who mocked at dread, Sprang at one wild tremendous leap Two hundred leagues, across the deep. To Lanka's[32] town he urged his way, Where Ravan held his royal sway. There pensive 'neath Asoka boughs He found poor Sita, Rama's spouse. He gave the hapless girl a ring, A token from her lord and King. A pledge from her fair hand he bore; Then battered down the garden door. Five captains of the host he slew, Seven sons of councillors o'erthrew; ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... Midian march'd adown the hills." Thus near one border coasting, still we heard The sins of gluttony, with woe erewhile Reguerdon'd. Then along the lonely path, Once more at large, full thousand paces on We travel'd, each contemplative and mute. "Why pensive journey thus ye three alone?" Thus suddenly a voice exclaim'd: whereat I shook, as doth a scar'd and paltry beast; Then rais'd my head to look from whence it came. Was ne'er, in furnace, glass, or metal seen So bright and glowing ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... I do for a living—when I'm not thinking, or drinking, or prowling, or making love, or pretending I'm trying to be a sculptor without either the money or the morals for a model. See? And I do those hearts afire and those pensive angel guardians with the palm of peace. Damned well I do 'em and damned cheap! I'm a ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... honourably in the army, and he has himself made great pecuniary sacrifices; but this has not secured him from numerous domiciliary visits and vexations of all kinds. The whole family are at intervals a little pensive, and Mons. de told us, at a moment when the ladies were absent, that the taking of Valenciennes had occasioned a violent fermentation at Paris, and that he had serious apprehensions for those who ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... marvelling greatly. The middle one entered next, and like the first he found the Child seemingly of his own age; so he also went forth again and marvelled greatly. Lastly, the eldest went in, and as it had befallen the other two, so it befell him. And he went forth very pensive. And when the three had rejoined one another, each told what he had seen; and then they all marvelled the more. So they agreed to go in all three together, and on doing so they beheld the Child with the appearance of its actual age, to wit, some thirteen days.[NOTE 2] Then they adored, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... night in his home when first she came into his life in full sway, the man now imagined he saw creeping from under the flower petals and from behind the tall trees, the tiny inhabitants of Jinnie's fairyland. Then he turned his eyes toward her, and as he watched the lithe young figure, the pensive face lost and rapt in the lullaby, Theodore came to the greatest decision of his life. He couldn't live without Jinnie Grandoken! No matter if she was the niece of a cobbler, no matter who her antecedents were—she was born into the world for him, and all that ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... effusions of poetry; but it retards the progress of the plot; it dissipates and diffuses our sympathies; the interest we should take in the fate and prospects of Manuel and Caesar, is expended on the fate and prospects of man. For beautiful and touching delineations of life; for pensive and pathetic reflections, sentiments, and images, conveyed in language simple but nervous and emphatic, this tragedy stands high in the rank of modern compositions. There is in it a breath of young tenderness and ardour, mingled impressively with the feelings of gray-haired experience, whose recollections ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... eldest son, who had now arrived at the proper age to undertake the ceremony of the Ke-ig-uish-im-o-win, or fast, to see what kind of a spirit would be his guide and guardian through life. Wunzh, for this was his name, had been an obedient boy from his infancy, and was of a pensive, thoughtful, and mild disposition, so that he was beloved by the whole family. As soon as the first indications of spring appeared, they built him the customary little lodge at a retired spot, some distance from their own, where he would not be ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... footsteps—growing lighter—ceasing. He looked around. The grass on the bank of the stream trembled and a tremulous path of its shivering, silver-grey tops ran from the water to the beginning of the thicket. And yet there was not a breath of wind. Somebody kind passed there. He looked pensive while the tremor died out in a quick tremble under his eyes; and the grass stood high, unstirring, with drooping heads in the warm ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... Amine returned to the seat, and for some time remained silent and in a pensive attitude. Philip also had his own thoughts, and did not open his lips. ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... were able to look the approaching separation in the face more manfully, and Edward strove hard to quell the melancholy feeling which had lately arisen in his mind on account of the constant foreboding that Ferdinand expressed of his own early death. "No," thought Edward, "his pensive turn of mind and his wild imagination cause him to reproach himself without a cause for my sorrow and his own departure. Oh, no, Ferdinand will not die early—he will not die before me. Providence will not leave ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... little while Poppy felt all right; but presently she grew rather pale, and began to look rather pensive. She stopped running, and walked slower and slower, while her eyes got dizzy, and her hands and ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... we came in sight of two villages of the Yezidees, the reputed worshippers of the devil. Large and luxuriant olive-groves, with their rich green foliage, and fruit just ripening in the autumnal sun, imparted such a cheerful aspect to the scene as soon dispelled whatever of pensive melancholy had gathered around me, while treading upon the dust of departed greatness. Several white sepulchres of Yezidee sheiks attracted attention as I approached the villages. They were in the form of fluted cones or pyramids, standing upon quadrangular ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... drank long and lazily, while over Frank stole thoughts in harmony with the peaceful scene,—thoughts of Rena, young and beautiful, her friendly smile, her pensive dark eyes. He would soon see her now, and if she had any cause for fear or unhappiness, he would place himself at her service—for a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime, ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... no conversation—only tedious words. The little party was just commonplace and dull—boring. Yet Sir William, the self-made man, was a study. And the young, Oxford-like Major, with his English diffidence and his one dark, pensive, baffled eye was only waiting to be earnest, ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... considerable number of them were in company, scarcely a day passed without some overtures being made for contests of this kind, and it was often very unpleasant to me to see the object of the contest sitting in pensive silence watching her fate, while her husband and his rival were contending for his prize. I have, indeed, not only felt pity for those poor wretched victims, but the utmost indignation, when I have seen them won, perhaps by a man whom they mortally hated. On these occasions, their grief ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... with a rich golden light, and rising out of the bright blue waters. Not an exclamation escaped me. I felt like a man, who has achieved a great object. I was full of calm exultation, but the strange incident of the morning made me serious and pensive. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... gladsome maiden, raised her head and called his name: He was deep-eyed, light and slender, shy of mien and slight of frame. Like a laughing brook she skipped to and fro along the strand; He was grave, like nodding fern-leaf, gently by the breezes fanned, Which in silence, Pensive silence, Grows ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... on the Hill, a portion of the city which he had not seen before. He viewed with surprise the many fine residences and other evidences of opulence which this part of the city contained. He passed on in a pensive mood until he reached the summit of the hill, which commanded a fine view of the entire city. Here he turned to cast a farewell glance over the town ruled over by the most generous mayor that it had ever been his privilege to meet. As he beheld before him ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... round, bald head, and wore the fuzzy green hat with the bow at the back. I think he wore the bow there purposely—it simplified matters so when you were trying to decide which side of his head his face grew on. He heaved a pensive sigh out of his system and remarked upon the clearness of ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... likeness flashed upon Lynde suddenly, as it had done in the grove the previous day, that it now had the power to startle him. At the present moment it did not even seriously annoy him. In an idle, pensive way he noted the coincidence of the man leading the mule. The man was Morton and the mule was Mary! Lynde smiled to himself at the reflection that Mary would probably not accept the analogy with very good ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... dragged itself out in silence. Mrs. Travers sat pensive and idle with her fan on her knees. D'Alcacer, who thought the incident should have been treated in a conciliatory spirit, attempted to communicate his view to his host, but that gentleman, purposely misunderstanding his motive, ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... had passed the afternoon in my yacht, idly and slowly sailing over the bay, availing myself of what little wind there was. Guido's absence (he had gone to Rome on a visit of some weeks' duration) rendered me somewhat of a solitary, and as my light craft ran into harbor, I found myself in a pensive, half-uncertain mood, which brought with it its own depression. The few sailors who manned my vessel dispersed right and left as soon as they were landed—each to his own favorite haunts of pleasure or dissipation—but I was ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... down Into this Deep; and in the general fall I also: at which time this powerful key Into my hands was given, with charge to keep These gates for ever shut, which none can pass Without my opening. Pensive here I sat Alone; but long I sat not, till my womb, Pregnant by thee, and now excessive grown, Prodigious motion felt and rueful throes. At last this odious offspring whom thou seest, Thine own begotten, breaking violent ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... were utterly unlike the Lincoln of other days.... I confess that I was so pained that I could almost have shed tears.... By and by, when I knew him better, his face was often full of mirth and enjoyment; and even when he was pensive or gloomy, his features were lighted up very much as a clouded alabaster vase might be softly illuminated ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... the North that night. On the next evening he was back in his room, where his sword was hanging against the wall. He was dressing for dinner, tying his white tie into a very careful bow. And at the same time he was indulging in a pensive soliloquy. ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... animal spirits," Zack was liable, at certain times and seasons, to fall from the heights of exhilaration to the depths of despair, without stopping for a moment, by the way, at any intermediate stages of moderate cheerfulness, pensive depression, or tearful gloom. After he had parted from his mother, he presented himself again at Mr. Blyth's house, in such a prostrate condition of mind, and talked of his delinquencies and their effect on his father's spirits, with such vehement bitterness ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... houses before which they passed; but suddenly, as if driven by a determining thought, when turning the corner of a street he examined his wife, who appeared to be cold in spite of the fur-lined pelisse in which she was wrapped. He thought she seemed pensive, and perhaps she really was so. Of all communicable things, reflection and gravity are ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... the more you'll oblige me: but your doubts will only beget cause of doubts. And with this ambiguous saying, he saluted me with a more formal manner, if I may so say, than before, and lent me his hand; and so we walked toward the house, side by side, he seeming very thoughtful and pensive, as if he had already repented him of ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... had more wit; was more lively and amusing. He loved hunting and fishing; played well at chess and draughts; and sang a good song. His face was always smiling and joyous; his brow never wore the cloud of care, the pensive earnest expression of refined thought which was so apparent in his cousin. Godfrey made the room glad with his gay hearty laugh. He was the life and soul of the convivial board, and prince of good fellows. A woman must be happy with such a handsome good-natured husband, and the ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... more touching poem in all literature than that one in which the pensive and moral Schiller portrays the struggle of an ingenuous youth who would find the source of moral purification in the moral law; who would seek the power that can transform him, in the mere imperatives of his conscience, and the mere struggling ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... exclaimed I, as I went on deck to breathe a little fresh air, having lighted my cigar in the steward's berth as I ascended. The first objects which attracted my attention, were a young gentleman and lady, the former standing by the latter, who was sitting in a pensive position, with her elbow leaning on the gunnel. She was in deep ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... of joy as she trudged back to the Women's Laager beside a husband who pushed a perambulator containing a small boy, who had waked up hungry and wanted supper; the Colonel and Captain Bingo Wrynche had been summoned back to Staff Headquarters, and a pensive little black-eyed lady in tailor-made alpaca and a big grey hat, who was sitting on a tree-stump knocking red ants out of her white umbrella, as those three figures moved out of the shadows of the trees, jumped up and ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... and the Cap'n was pensive, his thoughts apparently active, but not concerned in any ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... with a long peace after twenty years of fighting; and during the next generation a milder tone prevailed. For an interval we had only second-rate artists in verse. The fiery enthusiasts, the despisers of respectability, were succeeded by poets who were decently emotional, pensive in thought, tame or affected in style, domestic in theme, with feeble echoes of the true romantic note in Mrs. Hemans and others. Next, in the fulness of time, came Tennyson and Browning, to raise the level of English poetry by their deeper views of life, their ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... table and looking into the mother's face with pensive eyes, he continued in an even, ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... half hour Sir Walter Ralegh arrived with his keeper, Mr. Blount. I assure you, Sir, his poor servants, to the number of 140 goodly men, and all the mariners, came to him with shouts of joy; I never saw a man more troubled to quiet them. But his heart is broken, as he is extremely pensive, unless he is busied, in which he can toil terribly. The meeting between him and Sir John Gilbert was with tears on Sir John's part. But he, finding it is known that he has a keeper, whenever he is saluted with ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... scarcely to know of her own existence; there was about her a simplicity to which he had felt himself rise only in the presence of the spirit about some lonely mountain-top or in the heart of deep woods. Her gaze was not vacant, not listless, but the pensive look of a sensitive child, and Clayton let himself fancy that there was in it an unconscious love of the beauty before her, and of its spiritual suggestiveness a slumbering sense, perhaps easily awakened. Perhaps he ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... on unreceiving soils. When he was at length compelled to see and acknowledge the true state of the morals and intellect of his contemporaries, his disappointment was severe, and his mind, always thoughtful, became pensive and sad:—for to love and sympathize with mankind was a necessity ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... make his Court to one Part, and rally the other Part of the Company: Then he would vary the Usage he gave them, according as he saw them bear kind or sharp Language. He had the Knack to raise up a pensive Temper, and mortifie an impertinently gay one, with the most agreeable Skill imaginable. There are a thousand things which crowd into my Memory, which make me too much concerned to tell on about him. Hamlet holding up the Skull which the Grave-digger threw to him, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... wuz dretful pensive, and soft actin' that night, she seemed real tickled to see us, and to get where we wuz. She haint over and above suited with the boardin' place where she is, I think. I don't believe they have very good food, though she won't complain, bein' as they are relations on her own side. And then she is ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... my life. This expression has been so often used it does not seem to mean much; but when I say it, I mean all the filial heart is capable of feeling. I was poor in fortune, but in her goodness rich. I was a lonely child, but sad and pensive as she was, she was a fountain of social joy to me. Then, she was so ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... all foes, listen to me, O monarch, as I recite the (history of the) burning of the house of lac and the escape of the Pandavas. The wicked Duryodhana, beholding Bhimasena surpass (everybody) in strength and Arjuna highly accomplished in arms became pensive and sad. Then Karna, the offspring of the Sun, and Sakuni, the son of Suvala, endeavoured by various means to compass the death of the Pandavas. The Pandavas too counteracted all those contrivances one after another, and in obedience to the counsels of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... girl about more than was necessary, and spurred on her horse, saying to her people, "Ho there! Don't let him kill her." But when the seneschal's lady arrived close to them, she turned her horse's head quickly and the sight she beheld prevented her from hunting. She came back pensive, and then the lantern of her intelligence opened, and received a bright light, which made a thousand things clear, such as church and other pictures, fables, and lays of the troubadours, or the domestic arrangements of birds; suddenly ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... his own position in after days, when I had reached my sixteenth year, and visited him upon terms of friendship as close as can ever have existed between a boy and a man already gray headed. Him and his noiseless parsonage, the pensive abode for sixty years of religious revery and anchoritish self-denial, I have described farther on. In some limited sense he belongs to our literature, for he was, in fact, the introducer of Swedenborg to this country; as being ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... his story is told though less complicate and beautiful than the Spencerian, is equally ancient; and favorable to a pensive melody, is also ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... day of April planting. To bring in a basket, however scanty, of those odds and ends and range them side by side on the kitchen table affords a gratification that is not entirely material, I believe, for there is a sort of pensive sadness in it that I have been told is related ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... The Indian again became pensive, sometimes casting a glance over the vast prospect, and sometimes pulling up pieces of the turf which grew at ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... festoons of tobacco smoke, the wiry tinkle of a mandolin distantly heard, sudden clatter subsiding again into a general humming quiet, the happy sense of solitude in multitude, these are the partial ingredients of that feeling no alumnus ever forgets. In his pensive citadel, my friend J—— would be sitting, with his pipe (one of those new "class pipes" with inlaid silver numerals, which appear among every college generation toward Christmas time of freshman year). In his lap would ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... vast our throng. Three hundred wretches here, denied all light, In crowded quarters pass the infernal night. Some for a bed their tattered vestments join, And some on chest, and some on floors recline; Shut from the blessings of the evening air Pensive we lay with mingled corpses there: Meagre and wan, and scorched with heat below, We looked like ghosts ere death had made us so: How could we else, where heat and hunger joined Thus to debase the body and the mind? Where cruel thirst the parching ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... daisies sprinkle the walks of Cowper, if we take his Task for a companion through the lanes of Weston! Under the thick hedges of Horton, darkening either bank of the field in the September moonlight, Il Penseroso is still more pensive. And whoever would feel at his heart the deep pathos of Collins's lamentation for Thomson, must murmur it to himself, as he glides upon the stealing wave, by the breezy lawns and elms ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... Bruce reached Baden Mrs. Molineux was away on a visit; and this disappointed Admiral Bruce, who had counted on her assistance to manage and comfort Bella. Bella needed the latter very much. A glance at her pale, pensive, lovely face was enough to show that sorrow was rooted at her heart. She was subjected to no restraint, but kept the house of her own accord, thinking, as persons of her age are apt to do, that her whole history must be written in her face. ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... the bosom. I had never seen her look so becoming. She was then thirty-seven or-eight years of age, as I have since learned (for that was then a carefully guarded secret), but did not look near so much; and her expression, intensely absorbed, had the pensive sweetness of a day in autumn ere the golden leaf yet flutters ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... valiantly. He is a melancholy lad. But we must not blame him for that; dreamers can be just as brave as those who never dream at all. His little brother Etienne, the tiniest mite in the regiment, looks pensive. He is ambitious; he would like to be a general officer right away, and ...
— Child Life In Town And Country - 1909 • Anatole France
... friend, my heart grew pensive when I saw The flower, for thee so sweetly set apart, By one whose passionless though tender heart Is worthy to bestow, as angels are, By an unheeding hand conveyed away, To close, in unsoothed night, the ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... leader had moved out into the center of the track, and his eyes were turned westward, toward the bend round the great hill. They were pensive eyes, almost regretful, and somehow his whole face had changed from its look of daring to match them. The exhilaration had gone out of it; the command, even the determination had merged into something like weakness. His look ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... this kind. I told him yes, but through the hands of a lord of the bedchamber, or some state officer, or a minister. He seemed pensive, but ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... considerable distance behind me, thinking that I bit always to keep close be the river syde, I went about a mile wrong. The fellow thinking I was in the right way he strikes in the right; I begines to look behind me. I cannot get my eye upon him; stands a long tym under a shade very pensive. First I saw some sheirers (for in France it was harvest then, being only the beginning of July wt the Scots) at their dinner. I imagined that the fellow might have sit doune wt them to take scare.[92] After waiting a long tyme I began to steep ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... and thoughtful young lady to appear, whose pensive manner would indicate a nature softened and receptive. While her bearing was not what he anticipated, it was somewhat akin, and showed, he thought, that the truth ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... that you find such people so fickle and uncertain in their spirits; now on the mount, then in the valleys; now in the sunshine, then in the shade: now warm, then frozen; now bonny and blithe, then in a moment pensive and sad, as thinking of a portion nowhere but in hell. This will cause smiting on the breast; nor can I imagine that the Publican was as yet farther than thus far in ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet, and in light dishes for a supper-party. Stronger than all, there was the regard for a friend's moral improvement, sometimes called her soul, which was likely to be benefited by remarks tending to gloom, uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring at the furniture and a manner implying that the speaker would not tell what was on her mind, from regard to the feelings of her hearer. On the whole, one might say that an ardent charity was at work setting the virtuous mind to ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... his wonder at the apparent ease of his rescue, had sought information. But little enough had been forthcoming. Leslie Standing had only smiled in his pensive fashion. ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... portrait shows us a broad, good-natured, ruddy face, in which we see marks of talent when we know that it is Holbein's. But in spite of its strength, its bronze, and its beard, it has a somewhat sad and subdued air; and its heavy-lidded, pensive eyes look deprecatingly at a Frau Holbein in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... trembling, fearing Garry's wrath, Some feared the coming of the foe, and some Had vague forebodings, and were brooding dumb, And longed to greet the huntsmen. Mothers laid Their babes to sleep, and many a gentle maid Sighed for her lover in that lone stockade; And one who sat apart, with pensive eye, Thus sang to ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... returned to New-York. His first business was to seek Montraville, and endeavour to convince him that what had happened would ultimately tend to his happiness: he found him in his apartment, solitary, pensive, and ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... you gobbling up your food as usual?" his wife asked him at dinner. "What are you so pensive about? Brooding over your amours? Pining for your Marfa? I know all about it, Mohammedan! Kind friends have opened my eyes! O-o-o! ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... is a joy to straighten out one's limbs, And leap elastic from the level counter, Leaving the petty grievances of earth, The breaking thread, the din of clashing shears, And all the needles that do wound the spirit, For such a pensive hour of soothing silence. Kind Nature, shuffling in her loose undress, Lays bare her shady bosom;—I can feel With all around me;—I can hail the flowers That sprig earth's mantle,—and yon quiet ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... offering to him, the highest wonder of the world. In solitude did the heavenly heart unfold to a flowery chalice of almighty love, bent towards the holy countenance of the father, and resting on the happily-expectant bosom of the lovely pensive mother. With divine ardour did the prophetic eye of the blooming child look forth into the days of the future, towards his beloved, the offspring of the race of God, careless for his day's earthly destiny. The most child-like spirits, wondrously seized with a deep, heart-felt love, collected soon ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... new attendant were thus occupied, another actor crept upon the scene, and mingled among the group of English yeomen, about a score of whom, respecting the unusually pensive posture and close occupation of their Sovereign, were, contrary to their wont, keeping a silent guard in front of his tent. It was not, however, more vigilant than usual. Some were playing at games of hazard with small pebbles, others spoke together in whispers of the approaching day of ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... the scout powers that be, of judging stalking photographs preliminary to awarding the Audubon prize offered by the historical society in his home town. Perhaps he was under the influence of a little pensive regret that the season was coming to an end and wished to have this lonely parting with his beloved hills and trees. It is of no consequence. About all he actually did was to kick a stick along before him and pause now and again to examine ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... She felt that she was looking at nothing and yet was aware of the whole room like a picture in a dream. Fear left her. The human forms all round her lost their power. They grew suffused and dim.... The pensive swing of the music changed to urgency and emphasis.... It came nearer and nearer. It did not come from the candlelit corner where the piano was.... It came from everywhere. It carried her out of the house, out of ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... every part of it, that such as have eyes to see cannot be long without discovering. It is very pale, and the large, half-closed eyelids have a certain drooping melancholy weight about them, which interested me very much. I understood not why. The lips, too, are singularly pensive in their mode of falling down at the sides, although there is no want of richness and vigor in their central fullness of curve. The upper lip, from the nose downward, is separated by a very deep line, which gives a sort of leonine firmness of expression to all ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... Johnnie dutifully, those changeful eyes of hers full of pensive, denied desire, as they swept the dainty gowns of the women before her. "I do—you're right. I wouldn't think of spending my money for a dress-body like that when I'm mighty near as barefoot as a rabbit this ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... Chariots and horses are emblems of flight; but if sleep were descending upon the hero of the prophetic age, twilight would more appropriately have drawn her soft veil over nature, birds would have begun their vespers, clouds would have put on their changing, pensive colors, while cadences of music, breathed by the winds, would have shed lethargic influences into the scene. Inspiration does not trifle with us by really meaning such a preparation for a sleep of ages, and yet informing us, in ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... plumy eucalyptus-trees, the budding figs and mulberries, gave it a semi-tropical touch and along the highway we encountered fragments of the leisurely, dishevelled, dignified East: grotesque camels, pensive donkeys carrying incredible loads, flocks of fat-tailed sheep and lop-eared goats, bronzed peasants in flowing garments, and white-robed ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... the strong contrast between them. He, with his sallow, delicately-shaped features—the thin mouth and long straight nose, of that form I have heard called the "melancholy nose," which usually indicates a feeble, pensive, and hypochondriac temperament; while his daughter—But ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... In this pensive temper they came back to Tetherdown. The Colonel's servant was waiting for him with letters, and he was seen no more that night. Harry did not know till afterwards that Mr. Waverton, as well as letters, was taken ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... flax, she smiled, as though some pleasing thought had touched her mind. Her smile had the effect of sudden sunshine in the dark room where she sat and span,—it was radiant and mirthful as the smile of a happy child. Yet her dark blue eyes remained pensive and earnest, and the smile soon faded, leaving her fair face absorbed and almost dreamy. The whirr-whirring of the wheel grew less and less rapid,—it slackened,—it stopped altogether,—and, as though startled by some unexpected ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... in his journal, "the modern taste in costume, architecture, etc., has got the mastery; in Ghent there is a struggle; but in Bruges old images are still paramount, and an air of monastic life among the quiet goings-on of a thinly-peopled city is inexpressibly soothing. A pensive grace seems to be cast over all, even the very children." This estimate, after the lapse of considerably more than half a century, still, on ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... acted with great spirit and valor as long as there was any prospect of success; but he began to lose his usual fire and animation, and was observed to pace the walls of Baza with a pensive air, casting many a wistful look toward the Christian camp, and sinking into profound reveries and cogitations. The veteran alcayde, Mohammed Ibn Hassan, noticed these desponding moods, and endeavored to rally the spirits of the prince. "The rainy season is at hand," would ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... The little, delicate, pensive looking child, clad in deep mourning, attracted universal interest. The children gathered round her and examined her as they would a wax doll. There was something about her so different from themselves, so different from every body else they had seen, that they looked ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... mother came running up stairs, and in the heat of passion locked me into my old cell, where I remained in close confinement for some days. But William could not dispense with my company; accordingly I was sent for. I found him very pale and pensive; however, I faithfully told him, that the imaginations of the thoughts of the heart are only evil, and that continually. He said he lately began to feel that; he had tried to make it better, but could not. Upon this a stranger entered the room, and I was hid at ...
— The Village in the Mountains; Conversion of Peter Bayssiere; and History of a Bible • Anonymous
... in the very lowest baseness of his character.—It is poor Olivia speaks. "Thus each day I grew more pensive, and he more insolent, till at last the monster had the assurance to offer me to a young baronet of his acquaintance." This scene is not fit for picture; it is seemingly nothing but successful villany, and of too gay a cast to be pathetic. The chapter from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... Ouvre au Soleil son palais enchante; Rappelle-toi, lorsque la nuit pensive Passe en revant sous son voile argente; A l'appel du plaisir lorsque ton sein palpite, Aux doux songes du soir lorsque l'ombre t'invite. Ecoute au fond des bois Murmurer ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... transformed, sprang from the wood into the dusty thoroughfare. He had travelled on for about an hour, meeting but few other passengers, when he heard to the right a loud shrill young voice, "Help! help! I will not go; I tell you, I will not!" Just before him stood, by a high five-barred gate, a pensive gray cob attached to a neat-looking gig. The bridle was loose on the cob's neck. The animal was evidently accustomed to stand quietly when ordered to do so, and glad of ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... unaccustomed influences. I have been dragged about by an impertinent locomotive; I have been induced to dine heavily; I have absorbed champagne, perhaps to the limit of my measure. These are not my ordinary ways: I am naturally thoughtful, studious and pensive. The Past, gentlemen, is for me an unfaded morning-glory, whose closed cup I can coax open at pleasure, and read within its tube legends written in dusted gold. But the Present to the true philosopher is also—In fact, I never was so much amused in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... Caesar Borgia, the intrepid adventurer, the stealthy and indefatigable plunderer, has followed him, discovered his traces, pursued them as I have done, raised the stone, and descending before me, has left me nothing." He remained motionless and pensive, his eyes fixed on the gloomy aperture that was open ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... interval, therefore, Raymonde singled out her victim. Cynthia was standing slightly apart from her Form, consuming thick bread and butter with an air of pensive melancholy, and twisting a pet bracelet that adorned her wrist. ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... I met him in the Strand one night. He seemed sad and pensive. Then, when he grasped my hand ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... He retired pensive from this interview, and, flinging himself at his desk, attempted wreaking his thoughts upon expression, to borrow the language of one of his brother bards, in a passionate ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... hands are hard," replied the poet, gaily exhibiting his swarthy palms; "they have tugged at other than the cordage of a lyre. I, who used to burden the passing clouds with many a pensive sentiment, now ask of them what weather they predict. I, who was wont to give a thousand utterances to the winds of heaven, enquire from what point of the compass they are blowing. I, who could never behold the ocean without lapsing into dreamy emotions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... I exclaimed, while he held it so that the pensive beauty of the face gleamed in soft relief among bright blue enamel and sparkling gems. "The very thing that I must know—that I would give my life to know—that I have ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... chases the bright day, And this our darkness makes for others dawn, Pensive I look upon the cruel stars Which framed me of such pliant passionate earth, And curse the day that e'er I saw the sun, Which makes me native ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... her head, like Genevieve in the ballad, to look me in the face, her eyes filled with tears—crystal, happy drops, which dimmed not their brightness. But her face was pale, with a pensive pallor like that of the Gloire de Dijon rose; only now excitement had suffused her cheeks with the tints of that same rose—that red so unlike the bloom on other faces in vanished days; so tender and delicate and precious above all tints ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... details of the glazier and the painter and the plasterer. The mind was evidently neither braced for resistance nor resigned to despair, as behooves one smitten by the foreknowledge of the certainty of the excess of the expenditures over the estimates. Only with pensive, listless melancholy, void of any intention, his eyes traversed the long rows of open doors, riven by rude hands from their locks, swinging helplessly to and fro in the wind, and giving to the deserted and desolate old place a spurious air of motion and life. Many of the shutters ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... death-stone, changes were to be remarked; and in the channeled lettering, the moss began to renew itself in jewels of green. By an afterthought that was a stroke of art, she had turned up over her head the back of the kerchief; so that it now framed becomingly her vivacious and yet pensive face. Her feet were gathered under her on the one side, and she leaned on her bare arm, which showed out strong and round, tapered to a slim wrist, and shimmered ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... petals of her daffodils with a pensive finger. "Well, really, you know, I'd quite made up my mind to pretend at first... Women never like to come directly to the point. I thought up a silly excuse—begging for an orphan asylum, to be exact. But I can see that wouldn't go here... And I don't believe you're ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... having seen any more of his letters, but from knowing more have been received; which, instead of having been shewn me, have, if I do not mistake, thrown Sir Arthur into some of the most serious reflections he ever experienced. I never knew him so grave, thoughtful, and pensive, as he has ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... tints hitherto red extinguish their tremulous glow—softly there flared up, dusted purple in the sunset's sheen, the peak of Kara Dagh. Vice versa, the foam of the rivulet now blushed to red, and, seemingly, assuaged its vehemence—flowed with a deeper, a more pensive, note; while similarly the forest hushed its voice, and appeared to stoop towards the water while emitting ever more powerful, intoxicating odours to mingle with the resinous, cloyingly sweet perfume ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... her. She would always remember that kiss too, and all too late she remembered to become indignant. But, no one being about, she laughed low to herself and hurried back to the house, her eyes downcast and pensive. She had known many men and lovers in her time, but never a one ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... great buds swelled; among the pensive woods The spirits of first flowers awoke and flung From buried faces the close fitting hoods, And listened to your piping till they fell, The frail spring-beauty with her perfumed bell, The wind-flower, and the ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... are foolish things, and must be looked after, but girls can take care of themselves." Irving, however, in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, has sufficient leisure to make this observation and to stop to listen to "the pensive whistle of the quail," or to admire "great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... forgive," she said. "Don't you know that though the man always takes the blame, it's always the girl's fault. A man can't get himself into trouble by just sitting still and looking pensive, but a girl can. From the moment Evelyn sat on that bench under the cedar she had only one thought. It was to see if she ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... barber at Rome, could imitate to a nicety almost every word it heard. Some trumpets happened one day to be sounded before the shop, and for a day or two afterwards the magpie was quite mute, and seemed pensive and melancholy. All who knew it were greatly surprised at its silence; and it was supposed that the sound of the trumpets had so stunned it, as to deprive it at once of both voice and hearing. It soon appeared, however, that this was far ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... his festive merriment, and inimitable satires, and the ingenious imagery, and the elaborate melody and finish of every period of his prose"—we are disposed to think him pre-eminently successful in delineating the plaintive and pensive woes of deep and settled ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 12, No. 349, Supplement to Volume 12. • Various
... ironically. When the game was over the doctor, who had hitherto seemed anxious and pensive, turned to Savinien with the air of a man who fulfills ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... their place they put on you like anythink." He flung all his worldly possessions into the empty bed-place, gauged with another shrewd look the risks of the proceeding, then leaped up to the Finn, who stood pensive and dull.—"I'll teach you to swell around," he yelled. "I'll plug your eyes for you, you blooming square-head." Most of the men were now in their bunks and the two had the forecastle clear to themselves. The development of the destitute ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... chamber of which we shall presently speak; and on the newel-post of this staircase stands one of the curiosities of St. Hospital—a pelican carved in oak, vulning its breast to feed its young. Brother Copas, lifting a pensive eye from his plate, rested it on this bird, as ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... face; this laugh disconcerted him more than words; he spoke no more—he sat pensive. He was sorry he had come to this place, where everybody knew his goddess; yet nobody admired, nobody loved, and, alas! ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... Tuscan flower-girls delight to cheer Each pensive exile with thy scented leaves, Fit largess of a clime to fancy dear, Which a new blandishment from ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... time with a little veiled, pensive note of melancholy, lost on the others but which she herself found very touching. "There, you see you're so used to it, you don't even know what I'm ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... is to say, a place to kneel on. A great bustle and much preparation seemed to be going on within the convent, and veiled figures were flitting about, whispering, arranging, &c. Sometimes a skinny old dame would come close to the grating, and, lifting up her veil, bestow upon the pensive public a generous view of a very haughty and very wrinkled visage of some seventy years standing, and beckon into the church for the major-domo of the convent (an excellent and profitable situation, by the way), or for padre this or that. Some of the holy ladies recognized ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... she now found herself surrounded. She cast a hurried glance round that strange assembly, if by chance her eye might rest upon some dear familiar face, but she saw not the kind but grave face of Hector, nor met the bright sparkling eye of her cousin Louis, nor the soft, subdued, pensive features of the Indian girl, her adopted sister—she stood alone among those wild gloomy-looking men; some turned away their eyes as if they would not meet her woe-stricken countenance, lest they should be moved to pity her sad condition; no wonder that, overcome by the sense of ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... unsmiling, through it all until they stepped from the boat. Then he said, "It is really refreshing to see you in such good spirits. I had always understood that even the happiest fiancee was somewhat pensive and melancholy as the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
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