"Brooding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... afford steering way, swept majestically down stream, borne by the force of the current, which veered from bank to bank. We were moving scarcely swifter than from eight to ten miles an hour, and the monotonous voice of the man casting the lead line arose continuous through the brooding silence. The only other perceptible sounds were the exhaust of the steam pipes and the splash of running water. Thockmorton had told me we were already approaching the mouth of the Illinois, and I lingered against the rail, straining my eyes through the gloom hoping to gain a distant ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... possessed such extraordinary control over his feelings, expressed the most perfect cordiality. Morrel only then recollected the letter he had received from the viscount, in which, without assigning any reason, he begged him to go to the opera, but he understood that something terrible was brooding. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... some one, and I don't see why Grascour should not have as good a chance as another." Anderson had stalked away, brooding over the injustice of his position, and declaring to himself that this Belgian should never be allowed to marry ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... the Arrow-Maker. At the right, the house of RAIN WIND, and behind all a spring under a clump of dwarf oaks. A little trail runs between stones to connect the Arrow-Maker with the rest of the campody, and beyond it the valley rises gently to the Sierra foothills, brooding under the spring haze. A little to the fore of SIMWA'S house lies a great heap of blankets, baskets, and camp utensils, displayed to the best advantage, the wedding dower of the Chief's daughter. By her father's house BRIGHT WATER is being ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... to Bracy the most oppressive that he had ever encountered in facing danger. For the solemnity of the night in the great mountains was brooding over them, out of which at any moment death, in the shape of a keen knife, might descend. There was not a breath of air, but an icy chill dropped down from above, making the snow crystals turn sharp and crisp, crackling softly at the slightest movement. But the frosty air ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... no key. I went out to the men again, bewildered. The dawn had come, a pink and rosy dawn that promised another stifling day. It revealed the disarray of the deck—he basins, the old mahogany amputating-case with its lock plate of bone, the stained and reddened towels; and it showed the brooding and overcast ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... obliged to take a taxicab. As our driver threaded his way slowly and carefully through the thronged streets it gave us a splendid chance to see some of the enthusiasm. I think it did Margaret Ashton good, too, to get out, instead of brooding over the events of the past few days, as she had seen them. Her heightened colour made her more ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... in the following article sets forth the ends which Germany is striving to accomplish in the war, is the George Bernard Shaw of Germany. He is considered the leading German editor and an expert in Germany on foreign politics. As editor and proprietor of Die Zukunft, his fiery, brooding spirit and keen insight and wit, coupled with powers of satire and caricature, made him a solitary and striking independent figure in the German press years before the other newspapers of Germany ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... taunted and reviled, And threatened by this crawling scum of men? Oh, who shall urge the coming of that day When he in majesty shall clothe himself And stand before the astounded world its King?' Long brooding over this inflamed his soul, And, ever rash in schemes as wild in thought, At last he said, 'No longer will I bear This ignominy heaped upon my Lord. No man hath power to harm the Almighty One. Ay, let men's hands be lifted, then at once, Effulgent like the sun, swift like the sword, The jagged ...
— A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem - First Century • W. W. Story
... encounter, Mansana might very well have gone to visit the princess at her palace, but he still hesitated, perhaps with the secret hope that she might make one more advance towards him. The kind of self-brooding vanity, which he had so long cherished in secret, can be carried to absurd extremes, and is apt to be at once too retiring and too exacting. His shy reserve forbade him to call upon her, in spite of her express invitation, and yet he was audacious ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... her wishes she persisted in her purpose. The more she watched him the more she was convinced he loved in secret. If he loved in secret of course he loved beneath him. He went about the place all sombre and sullen and brooding. At last, with the rashness of an angry woman, she threatened to bring the young lady of her choice—who, by the way, seems to have been no shrinking blossom—to stay in the house. A stormy scene was the result. He threatened that if she did so he would leave the ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... come to gather ourselves together for an effort, we may sound the trumpet as loud and long as we please; the great barons of the mind will not rally to the standard, but sit, each one, at home, warming his hands over his own fire and brooding on ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tempest beats the restless seas, The wind blows loud, fierce from the skies; Sweet, sylph-like Una clasps the shell, Peace brooding ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... of his forefathers, would take Roland out of those gloomy reveries into which he still fell at times. And, thirdly, for us young people, ought not Blanche to find companions in children of her own sex and age? Already in those large black eyes there was something melancholy and brooding, as there is in the eyes of all children who live only with their elders. And for Pisistratus, with his altered prospects, and the one great gnawing memory at his heart,—which he tried to conceal from himself, but which a mother (and a mother who ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the easy-opinioned Shorty, exactly as if he had always maintained this view. "Chap started for Sunk Creek three weeks ago. Trapper he was; old like, with a red shirt. One of his horses come into the round-up Toosday. Man ain't been heard from." He ate in silence for a while, evidently brooding in his childlike mind. Then he said, querulously, "I'd sooner trust one of them Indians than ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... the result of many breeds or strains. The consequence is almost as great diversity of character within gallinaceous limits as exists in the families that care for them. For instance, one hen is a good, persistent layer; another is a patient, brooding mother; a third is fickle, and leaves her nest so often and for such long intervals that the eggs become chilled, and incubation ceases. Some are tame and tractable, others as wild as hawks, and others still are not of much account ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... the Storm Country," with the same wild background, with its half-gypsy life of the squatters—tempestuous, passionate, brooding. Tess learns the "secret" of her birth and finds happiness and love through her boundless ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... thousand memories spring In the auld kirk-yard, Though time's death-brooding wing Shade the auld kirk-yard. The light of many a hearth, Its music and its mirth, Sleep in the deep dark earth Of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... hovers the shadow of the police. One seems to breathe dark suspicion and mistrust in the very air. The people in the civil walks of life all look like whipped curs. They wear the expression of people brooding over some deep sorrow. The crape of dead liberty seems to be hanging on every door-knob. Nobody seems capable of smiling; one would think the shadow of some great calamity is hanging gloomily over the city. Nihilism and discontent run riot in the cities of the Caucasus; government spies ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... and thinned since her arrival; there was an anxious fold between her brows, and her mouth drooped at the corners. If her old friends—Sister Rose of the convent, for instance—had seen her, they could hardly have recognized this spiritless, brooding maiden for the joyous ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... She sat down and gazed lovingly at her handsome eldest-born, in whom her dead husband lived as in his prime. "'Twill be of Isabella," she thought, with a stir in her breast, rejoiced to think that the brooding eyes of the scholar had opened at last to the beauty and goodness of the highborn heiress ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... seared the sweet breath Of the greenwood with low-brooding vapors of death; O'er the flowers and the corn we were borne like a blast, And away to the fore-front of battle we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... that I have watched for your return more anxiously than she has, Conniston. And the curious part of it is she seemed to have no interest in the matter at all until six months ago. Sometimes I am afraid that brooding over her father's death has unsettled her a little. A mighty pretty girl, Conniston. A mighty pretty girl, indeed! And her brother is a skunk. Pst! You ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... several of the cavaliers, and especially on Hernando de Soto, who was on terms of more familiarity with him than Pizarro. De Soto reported Atahuallpa's demands to his leader; but the latter evaded a direct reply. He did not disclose the dark purposes over which his mind was brooding.12 Not long afterward he caused the notary to prepare an instrument, in which he fully acquitted the Inca of further obligation in respect to the ransom. This he commanded to be publicly proclaimed in the camp, while at the same time he openly declared that the safety of the Spaniards ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... wife drove down the Park. Saton followed her eyes, noticing her slight start, and gazed after them with brooding face. ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... however, one does not know how, the secret of her double life came out. No doubt long brooding over these voices, long intercourse with such celestial visitors, and the mission continually pressed upon her—meaningless to the child at first, a thing only to shed terrified tears over and wonder at—ripened her intelligence so that ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... at night. Dark, heavy clouds hung overhead like a mournful pall. A brooding darkness ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... said against him, dear. And it grieves me to see you making yourself unhappy over such useless brooding. What does it matter, after all—our knowing nothing about ourselves, who we are, or where we came from? We are happy, everybody is ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... eye Along the Grecian gallery, And brooding on my heavy ill, I met a statue standing still. Still in marble stone stood he, And stedfastly he looked at me. "Well met," I thought the look would say, "We both were fashioned far away; We neither knew, when we were young, These Londoners ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... its hands with satisfaction. The satisfaction increased when various dependents living at Kerfol were induced to say—with apparent sincerity—that during the year or two preceding his death their master had once more grown uncertain and irascible, and subject to the fits of brooding silence which his household had learned to dread before his second marriage. This seemed to show that things had not been going well at Kerfol; though no one could be found to say that there had been any signs of open disagreement between husband ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... that presently the child turned up his rosy face, and seeing the brooding look, it was plain he had the sense of being somehow left behind. He put up his hand to her cheek, and rubbed ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... modesty—do you sit down like a sage and criticise my explanation of the readings, and whatever idle babble you say has come into my head? Have you come full of envy, and dejected because nothing is sent you from home; and while the discussion is going on, do you sit brooding on nothing but how your father or your brother are disposed towards you:—"What are they saying about me there? at this moment they imagine I am making progress and saying, He will return perfectly omniscient! I wish I could become omniscient before I return; but ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... ridiculous. From that first moment Kells had wanted her; he had tried to persuade Roberts to leave her, and, failing, had killed him; he had rid himself of the other two men—and now Joan knew she had heard shots back there. Kells's intention loomed out of all his dark brooding, and it stood clear now to her, dastardly, worse than captivity, or torture, or death—the worst fate that could befall ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... the cabin stove and brooded, a broken-hearted, dispirited counterpart of what he had been at the Christmas time. It was the man's nature to be silent in seasons of misfortune. During the previous year, when luck had been so against him, this characteristic of silent brooding had shown itself markedly, but then he did not remain in the house and neglect his work as he did now. He seemed to have lost all heart and all ambition. He scarcely troubled to feed the dogs, and the few tasks that he did perform were evidently irksome and unpleasant ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... After that the only immediate danger was from the wind that sometimes blows down in sudden gusts from between the mountain-tops. It would have needed only half a sea to swamp us. But the Dead Sea was living up to its reputation, quiet, inert, like a mercury mirror for the stars—a brooding place ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... did he risk life daily—for her only did he sit hour after hour in that lone cave brooding over plans, and forming schemes of ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... his lamp, but the flaring name illuminated only a little space in the brooding, hovering blackness ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... He was brooding in this chair, with his eyes cast down upon the ground, when Mrs Gamp came in to tell him that the little room was ready. Not being quite sure of her reception after interfering in the quarrel, Mrs Gamp, as a means of interesting and propitiating her patron, affected ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... iron-founder was looking up into the eyes of beguiling when he said this, and, being a mere man, he wondered what made them flash and then grow suddenly fathomless and brooding. ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... like a man possessed by a devil who will not leave him; and I have always observed, that the devil most obstinate to be expelled is a secret. I knew you were a Corsican. I knew you were gloomy, and always brooding over some old history of the vendetta; and I overlooked that in Italy, because in Italy those things are thought nothing of. But in France they are considered in very bad taste; there are gendarmes who occupy themselves with such affairs, judges who condemn, and scaffolds ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Francis I., how strong and tender is the mother's attitude, as she stoops to lift her child from his cradle; in the Chair Madonna, how protecting is the capacious embrace with which she gathers him to herself in brooding love. No technical artistic education is necessary for the appreciation of such pictures. All who have known a mother's love look and understand, and look again and ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... took to brooding on the gray car which shadowed him from Waterloo to Fortescue Square, and again from the square to his own abode. If it held some member of the Embassy staff, why had no more been heard of it? And what had Winter and Furneaux meant by hinting that far wider ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... quaestor to the consul Orestes. It is said that he kept quiet when Tiberius was killed, and intended to steer clear of politics. But one of those splendid bursts of oratory, with which he had already electrified the people, remains to show over what he was for ever brooding. 'They slew him,' he cried, 'these scoundrels slew Tiberius, my noble brother! Ah, they are all of one pattern.' He said this in advocating the Lex Papiria, which proposed to make the re-election of a tribune legal. But ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... brooding over the Susquehanna, and the autumn leaves were being tinged with red. The struggle of the year 1778 seemed over and Brant decided to spend the winter at Niagara. Accordingly he set out with a band of warriors from his entrenched position at Unadilla and went forward by easy stages ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... promise of what was to be a man fit for all offices of active rural life, and to be, in mature age, the selectman, the deacon, the representative, the colonel. As for Septimius, let him alone a moment or two, and then they would see him, with his head bent down, brooding, brooding, his eyes fixed on some chip, some stone, some common plant, any commonest thing, as if it were the clew and index to some mystery; and when, by chance startled out of these meditations, he lifted his eyes, there would be ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... oft Lies perdu in a nook or gloomy cave, Prompt to enchant some inadvertent wretch With his unhallowed touch. So, (poets sing) Grimalkin, to domestic vermin sworn An everlasting foe, with watchful eye Lies nightly brooding o'er a chinky gap, Portending her fell claws, to thoughtless mice Sure ruin. So her disembowell'd web Arachne, in a hall or kitchen, spreads Obvious to vagrant flies: she secret stands Within her woven cell: the humming prey, Regardless of their fate, rush on the toils Inextricable, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... such scenes as this. Under different conditions he would have enjoyed this ride immensely. But now—with his mind a seething bitter chaos consequent upon his companion's incomprehensible behavior towards him, he rode in a sort of brooding reverie. Yorke was equally morose. Not a word had fallen from their lips since they ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... and iridescent, in the magic web of his verse. One thought, however, perpetually haunts him; under all his music of laughter or of passion, it is easy to hear one dominating note. It is the thought of mortality. The whining, leering, brooding creature can never for a moment forget that awful Shadow. He sees it in all its aspects—as a subject for mockery, for penitence, for resignation, for despair. He sees it as the melancholy, inevitable end of all that is beautiful, all ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... and the moonlit camp, with its anxious generals, its weary soldiers, its fearful machinery of destruction, all strewn along the bank of the great river, remained plunged in silence, as if brooding over the chances of the morrow and the failures of the past. And hardly four miles away another army—twice as numerous, equally confident, equally brave—were waiting impatiently for the morning and the final settlement of the ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... troubled sea of primeval manuscript, where Mr. Rickman sat with his head in his hands, brooding over the face of the waters. He had once profanely said that God's world was a chaos he had got to work on. Now it was his world that was chaos. A tempestuous chaos, where things to be weltered in the wreck of things that were. Rickman's ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... tongue, Belying the foul heart! Who was it urged Friendly to tyrants that accurst decree, Whose influence brooding o'er this hallow'd hall, Has chill'd each tongue to silence. Who destroy'd The freedom of debate, and carried through The fatal law, that doom'd the delegates, Unheard before their equals, to the bar Where cruelty sat throned, and murder reign'd With her Dumas coequal? Say—thou man Of mighty ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... care; Brooding on hours misspent, To see the spectre of Despair Come to our lonely tent; Like Brutus, 'midst his slumbering host, Summoned to ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... wonder!' said the hen, 'you have nothing to do, and so you sit brooding over such fancies. Lay eggs, or purr, and you'll ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... (Academy, 5th November): "Wanting a general term for such customs," writes Dr. Tylor, "and finding statements in books that this male lying-in lasted on till modern times, in the south of France, and was there called couvade, that is brooding or hatching (couver), I adopted this word for the set of customs, and it has since become established in English." The discussion was carried on in The Academy, 12th and 19th November, 10th and 17th December; Mr. A.L. Mayhew wrote (12th November): "There ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... at the door of the barn, brooding over all he had seen and discovered, he felt that there were but two courses open to him. He must either, in his own phraseology, "get out or go on." And by that he meant he must either renounce all his affection for his erring brother, ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... brooding thoughts shape the coming man. The race is never any farther advanced than the average thought of the woman. She is yet sleeping, knowing not her powers. So, not until she awakes and recognizes herself as conceiving by the Holy Ghost and the mother of the incarnate God, ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... thus brooding over projects of vengeance, Commander de Jars kept his word, and about a month after the interview above related he sent word to Quennebert that the Chevalier de Moranges had left Perregaud's completely recovered from his wound. But the nearly fatal result of the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... he handed her a quart cup of oats from the bin. "Oh, I know what you're talking about," answered Mother, as she scattered a little grain in front of each nest and prepared to leave in peace and quiet the brooding mothers. "It's this woman's rights and wrongs question. I've been so busy doctoring Providence Road pains and trying to make a good, proper husband outen you for some nice girl, what some other woman have been putting licks on to get ready for you, that I've been too pushed to think ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... across her flung, That name most dear forever on his tongue. As with soft accents round her neck he clings, And cheek to cheek her lulling song she sings, How blest to feel the beating of his heart, Breathe his sweet breath, and kiss for kiss impart, Watch o'er his slumbers, like the brooding dove, And if she can, ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... "Still brooding, Albinik! Everything favors our projects. The Roman general is no longer suspicious; your skill this morning will decide him to accept your services; and to-morrow, mayhap, you will pilot ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... order to be near the water. See, here in the corner are drops of candle grease and the remains of a fire. On the day of the Mathers's picnic he doubtless saw the party pass through and recognized Colonel Gaylord. It brought to his mind the thrashing he had received. While he was still brooding over the matter, the Colonel came back alone, and it flashed into the fellow's mind that this was his chance. He may have been afraid at first or he may have hesitated through kindlier motives. At any rate he did ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... said Miss Gardine. "Ze doctair has said if my brother could once remember zat last year he might be cured entierement. It is brooding on zat subject that brought on his insanity: he needs a shock. Now, if you will go with me when I visit him, and show him suddenly ze star buttons—who knows?—all may come back to him. I have told ze doctair all ze story, and he thinks it a plan ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... domesticated women!" he thought, and shortly afterwards departed, brooding, to the ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... from which we ought to be debarred when the adverse moment has arrived; so that, when trade was prospering, when all was sunshiny, a man might condescend to occupy his spare hours in something else than in a melancholy brooding over the state of the country—that, when returns were rapid, and profits ready, one might deign to cultivate one's faculties, and become acquainted with what the mind of Europe was conceiving or executing; ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... negligently: but never again, perhaps, was he to show so much over-rapturing joy in the world's loveliness, such Bacchic abandon to the ideal beauty which the true poet sees glowing upon the forlornest height and brooding in the shadow-haunted hollows of the hills. The Browning who might have been is here: henceforth the Browning we know and love stands unique among all the lords of song. But sometimes do we not turn longingly, wonderingly at least, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... was restored to strength, of course these cares ceased. But now the new instincts of motherhood absorbed her, and, brooding over the rosy child that was her own, caressing its waking, or hanging above its sleep, she scarce noted that her husband's absences from home grew more and more frequent, that strange visitors asked for him, that he came home at midnight oftener than at dusk. Nor was it till ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Brooke has called "the ten fallow years in the life of Tennyson." But fallow years are not all fallow. The dark brooding night is as necessary for our life as the garish day. Great crops of wheat that feed the nations grow only where the winter's snow covers all as with a garment. And ever behind the mystery of sleep, and beneath the silence of the snow, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... position at the west end of the chapel and looking upwards, we see in the first compartment God dividing light from darkness; in the second, creating the sun and the moon and the solid earth; in the third, animating the ocean with His brooding influence; in the fourth, creating Adam; in the fifth, creating Eve. The sixth represents the temptation of our first parents and their expulsion from Paradise. The seventh shows Noah's sacrifice before entering the ark; the eighth depicts the ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... was disproportionate to that small ship. It had on but dungarees and a singlet, and the singlet, because of the length of the figure, was concave at the stomach, where, having nothing to rest upon, it was corrugated through the weight of a head made brooding by a heavy black beard. Hairy wrists were thrust deeply into the pockets to hold up the trousers. The dome of its head was as bald and polished as yellow metal. The steward introduced me to the Chief Engineer. "Yon's a dirty ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... rising among the fertile fields or daisy-dotted pastures; the great circles of standing stones, starred everywhere, in the valleys or upon the uplands, along the rough sides of heather-covered hills. They have everywhere the same aspect of august mystery, the same brooding presence, like sentinels of another world. It is impossible not to feel their overshadowing majesty. Everywhere they follow the same designs in large simplicity; inspired by the same purpose, and with the same tireless ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... left the court, and succeeded in getting an old sailor to row him to the rock. Twilight was brooding over the valley of the Rhine when the boat approached the gigantic cliff; the departing sun had long sunk below the mountains, and now night was creeping on in silence; the evening star was twinkling in the ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... Clarence, brooding over the situation like a Providence, was glad to see that already the new move had weakened the invaders' power. The day after the announcement in the press of the approaching debut of the other generals, the leader ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... and extremely tedious; it being a slow train, which plods on without haste and without rest. At about ten o'clock we reached Birkenhead, and there crossed the familiar and detestable Mersey, which, as usual, had a cloudy sky brooding over it. Mrs. Blodgett received me most hospitably, but was impelled, by an overflow of guests, to put me into a little back room, looking into the court, and formerly occupied by my predecessor, General Armstrong. . . . . She expressed a hope that ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... though with a thousand clinging fingers, and growled and sputtered, and then seemed to quit it for a moment and whisper around the oak boards like invisible conspirators taking counsel in a closet. A scholar on that water nursing his sallow face in the trough of his hand would have fallen a-brooding on the grim boatman crossing to the shore that none may leave, or the old woman of the Sanza, poling her ghostly, everlasting raft; and had he listened, he could have heard the baying of the three-mouthed hound arousing the wardens of the Vedic Underworld to ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... a dream she made her progress, riding through the wonderful stillness of the vast wild land, an ocean on which each littlest sound was afloat, so that each was given its true value almost like a musical tone. An awful, beautiful silence this, brooding back of every sound; nothing in such a place gives forth mere senseless noise; the ripple of frogs in marsh and spring branch fall upon the sense as sweet as bird-songs. The clamour of little falls, the solemn suggestion of wind in the pines, the sweet ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... of Jesus is perfect. Its touch is always gentle and full of healing. Its helpfulness is always wise. Its tenderness is like the warmth of a heavenly summer, brooding over the life which accepts it. All the love of God pours forth in the friendship of Jesus. To be his beloved is to be held in the clasp of the everlasting arms. "I and my Father are one," said Jesus; his friendship, therefore, is the friendship of the Father. Those who accept it in ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... spoken of in a low voice, and with finger pointing to the forehead? There was something ridiculous, as well as repugnant, in such a thought; but it kept possession of Amy's mind. She was brooding upon it when her mother came ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... the wind doth blow, And coughing drowns the parson's saw, And birds sit brooding in the snow, And Marian's nose looks red and raw: When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl— Then nightly sings the staring owl Tuwhoo! Tuwhit! Tuwhoo! A merry note! While greasy Joan doth ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Cambray. But honours and success are followed by envy. The King beheld this accession of glory to his brother with great dissatisfaction. He had been for seven months, while my brother and I were together in Gascony, brooding over his malice, and produced the strangest invention that can be imagined. He pretended to believe (what the King my husband can easily prove to be false) that I instigated him to go to war that I might procure for my brother the credit of making peace. This is not at all probable when it is considered ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... his whip under his arm, brooding over his own thoughts and lifting up one after the other his heavy wooden shoes daubed with clay. Certainly he desired to marry Celeste Levesque. He wanted her with her child because she was the wife he wanted. He could not say why, but he knew it, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... be diverting these children as brooding over real and imaginary woes. It cannot be wrong. If papa could only look in upon us now as he ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... few characters that Strauss could not paint, in those days, so, too, there seemed few situations, few atmospheres, to which he could not do justice. A couple of measures, the sinister palpitation of the timpani and the violas, the brooding of the wood-wind, the dull flickering of the flutes, the laboring breath of the strings, and we are lying on the death-bed, exhausted and gasping for air, weighed by the wrecks of hopes, awaiting the cruel blows on the heart that will end everything. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... epileptic tendencies—as McPherson himself admits—had taken his benefactor's death terribly to heart, and had brooded over it day and night. Is there any reason to doubt that in such an unbalanced nature, this brooding, coupled by fever, should have produced a delirium in which he believed he heard ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... determined to kill her. He started for Manoa at dawn, and proceeded as far as Mahinauli, in mid-valley, where he rested under a hala (Pandanus odoratissimus) tree that grew in the grove of wiliwili (Erythrina monosperma). He sat there some time, brooding over the fancied injury to himself, and nursing his wrath. Upon resuming his walk he broke off and carried along with him a bunch of hala nuts. It was quite noon when he reached Kahaiamano and presented himself before the house of Kahalaopuna. The latter had just ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... burden and sorrow of earth, brooding in dim solicitude over the far times and men yet to be, we cannot recklessly utter a word calculated to lessen the hopes of man, pathetic creature, who weeps into the world and faints out of it. It is our faith not knowledge that the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... they were glad of the exertion, for it kept them from brooding over the troubles of their situation, and a troublesome situation ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... banks, where the road had been worn down at the crest of the volcano's rim; then at once, far below, in a circle of silent trees with here and there a vague shore of marshy land, I saw the Pond of Venus: some miles of brooding water, darkened by the dark slopes around it. Its darkness recalled the dark time before the dawn of our ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... into deep slumber. The fowls had ended by perching on her body; she was buried beneath a wave of living plumage. Hens were brooding over her feet; geese stretched their soft downy necks over her legs. The pig lay against her left side, while on the right, the goat poked its bearded head under her arm. The pigeons were roosting and nestling all over her, on her hands, her waist, and her shoulders. And there ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... from his mind, the questions unanswered and perhaps unanswerable. In spite of the apparent bleakness of the future, he had no desire to die, and there was, psychologically, the possibility that too much brooding of that kind would evoke a subconscious reaction that could slow him down or cause a wrong decision at a vital moment. A feeling of futility could operate to bring on his death in spite of his conscious determination to win the ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... not been put to the question by the great council of Amphictyons? Had they not been smothered in onions by the terrible men of Pyquag? In the midst of this consternation and perplexity, when horror, like a mighty nightmare, sat brooding upon the little, fat, plethoric city of New Amsterdam, the ears of the multitude were suddenly startled by the distant sound of a trumpet;—it approached—it grew louder and louder—and now it resounded at the city gate. The public could not be mistaken in the ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... several reasons why the reaction should be especially sharp in Russia. The Slav peoples that form the great bulk of her population are notoriously sensitive. Shut up for nearly half the year by the rigours of winter, they naturally develop habits of brooding introspection or coarse animalism—witness the plaintive strains of their folk-songs, the pessimism that haunts their literature, and the dram-drinking habits of the peasantry. The Muscovite temperament and the Muscovite climate naturally lead to idealist ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... where my companions were sitting, most of them with their heads sunk between their knees, brooding on our misfortune, except Andrew, who stood with his arms folded, meditating on our future plans, and asking assistance whence alone ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... martyr, the epithets "close" and "deceitful" this reticence earned her. Her time was spent in writing endless, scrawly letters to Evelyn, which covered days; in sitting moodily at the top of the fir tree which she climbed in defiance of her length of petticoat glaring at sunsets, and brooding on dead delights; in taking long, solitary, evening walks, by choice on the heel of a thunderstorm, when the red earth was riddled by creeklets of running water; till Mother, haunted by a lively fear of encounters with "swags" or Chinamen, put ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... inside of a booth of boughs, leaves, and birch-bark, that had been hastily constructed for his accommodation. He was a great, rugged, north-country man, of immense physical power—as most chiefs were in those days. He seemed to be brooding over his sorrows at the time ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... us. Not that prosperity follows righteousness, not that poverty attends wickedness, in worldly measure, but that life is the gift of a right will is her message; how we, striving for eternal life, may best meet the chances and the bitter fates of mortal existence, is her brooding care; ideal characters, or those ideal in some trait or phase, in the midst of a hostile environment, are her fixed study. So far is idealism from ignoring the actual state of man that it most affirms ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... her now, his head in his hands, brooding, sullen, the implacable vein in his forehead swollen with triumph, something brutish and hard dimming his ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... genial heroism in which she was armoured, and it was characteristic of her, as well as of her race, that, while she sat now in the midst of encircling battlefields, with her eyes on the walk over which she had seen the blood of the wounded drip when they were lifted into her door, she should be brooding not over the tremendous tragedies through which she had passed, but over the lesson in physical geography she must teach in the morning. Her lips moved gently, and a listener, had there been one, might have heard her murmur: "The four great alluvial ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... so," he said, "you are doing very wisely to come out once more among your friends. You can accomplish no good by brooding at home. It is better to live one's normal life—even when it is not easy to do it. I say ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... Edward suffered them to redeem themselves from captivity by the payment of heavy fines, and before long gave them back their lands. The king's victory was so complete that neither of the earls could forgive it. In 1295, Gloucester died, without opportunity of revenge; but Hereford lived on, brooding over his wrongs, and in later years signally avenged the trial at Abergavenny. Meanwhile the conqueror of the principality had shown unmistakably that the liberties of the march were an anachronism, since the marchers had no longer the work of defending English ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... the rest were talking, as if brooding over something; at length he exclaimed, "I say, Rogers, I'll not have you call me old Higson—they were ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... as silent at home as elsewhere as to the ill that his enemy meditated toward him, so silent that even hopeful grannie grew first doubtful and then anxious, fearing more than she would have feared any outburst of bitterness, this silent brooding over evils that might be drawing near. She dropped a cheerful word now and then as to the certainty that they would never be left in their old age to anxiety and trouble; but though he usually assented to her words, it was ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... master were congratulating themselves on the pleasing prospect of fine weather and a full moon, to light them through Endeavour's dangerous straits, the unhappy and deluded Christian was, in all probability, brooding over his wrongs, and meditating on the criminal act he was to perpetrate the following morning; for he has himself stated, that he had just fallen asleep about half after three in the morning, and was ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... their ancient honors. He was baffled in his unnatural revenge by the premature death of his son, and passed the remainder of his days in his deserted and dilapidated halls, a gloomy misanthrope, brooding amidst the scenes ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... little man, with his pale face and his cold, grey eyes, was riding to the hunt every morning, silent and brooding, all of them following in his train, in the hope that some word would escape him. And then, when the humour seized him, he would throw a hundred square miles to that man, or tear as much off the other, round off one kingdom by a river, or cut off another by a chain of mountains. That was how he ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Langton presently adjourned to the club, where they found Burke, Garrick, and Goldsmith, the latter still brooding over his sharp reprimand at Dilly's. Johnson, magnanimous as a lion, at once said aside to Boswell, "I'll make Goldsmith forgive me." Then calling to the poet, in a loud voice he said, "Dr. Goldsmith, something passed to-day where you and I ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... to "ride the circuit," read books while travelling in his buggy, told funny stories to his fellow-lawyers in the tavern, chatted familiarly with his neighbors around the stove in the store and at the post-office, had his hours of melancholy brooding as of old, and became more and more widely known and trusted and beloved among the people of his State for his ability as a lawyer and politician, for the uprightness of his character and the overflowing spring of sympathetic kindness ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... those good people laughing at over there? There's no sign of brooding melancholy down in your corner," shouted Mme. Verdurin. "You don't suppose I find it very amusing to be stuck up here by myself on the stool of repentance," she went on peevishly, like ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... begins with the account of the Priestly Code of the creation of the world. In the beginning is chaos; darkness, water, brooding spirit, which engenders life, and fertilises the dead mass. The primal stuff contains in itself all beings, as yet undistinguished: from it proceeds step by step the ordered world; by a process of unmixing, first of all by separating out the great elements. ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... America at the time when the revocation of the Edict of Nantes rendered France no safe dwelling-place for those who had no hinges to their knees. A stern, silent man, this d'Arthenay, like most of his race: holding in scorn the things of earthly life, brooding over grievances, given to dwelling much on heaven and hell, as became his time and class. Leaving castle and lands and all earthly ties behind them, he and his wife came out of Sodom, as they expressed it, and turned not their faces, looking steadfastly forward to the wilderness ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... instantaneously did all dreariness and heaviness of the earth's spirit flit away before one smile of the beneficent sun! This proves that all gloom is but a dream and a shadow, and that cheerfulness is the real truth. It requires many clouds, long brooding over us, to make us sad, but one gleam of sunshine always suffices to cheer up the landscape. The banks of the river actually laughed when the sunshine fell upon them; and the river itself was alive and ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... conclusion, or, at least, have spoken less confidently. [FOOTNOTE: Schumann, who in 1839 attempted to give a history of Liszt's development (in the "Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik"), remarked that when Liszt, on the one hand, was brooding over the most gloomy fancies, and indifferent, nay, even blase, and, on the other hand, laughing and madly daring, indulged in the most extravagant virtuoso tricks, "the sight of Chopin, it seems, first brought him ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... brooding silence of the valley continued, he reached the edge of the wood unhindered, intent on his mission with a concentration which shut out everything save his need and ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... the election Harboro came home and found a letter waiting for him on the table in the hall. He found also a disquieted Sylvia, who looked at him with brooding and ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... brooding over her life problems with a new thought in her mind. She dimly realized that a woman must have a genuine message herself before she tries to give it to the world. And alas, her message was sadly deficient, she ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... and not really under a sense of sin. "Is it possible, think you, for a person to be conceited of his miseries? May there not be a deep leaven of pride in telling how desolate and how unfeeling we are?—in brooding over our unearthly pains?—in our being excluded from the unsympathetic world?—in our being the invalids of Christ's hospital?" He had himself been taught by the Spirit that it is more humbling for us to take what grace offers, than to bewail ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... his work, and a botanical student of no mean order. No comrade helped him pass away an evening in the chimney-corner, pipe in hand and good cheer in the mug. This isolation was not accidental, it was Hermann's own selection. He was a man of brooding moods, and there was no laughter in his withered heart, though the false sound of it crossed his lips at ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... sprawled inside its high, electric-wired fences, and the flood of fading light brushed the town with beauty. The rows of tin shacks which housed its dives, the clustered, nondescript hovels, the merchants' grim strongholds of steel—all merged into a glowing mirage, a scene far alien to the brooding swamp and savage jungle in whose breast it lay. Here and there several space-ships reared their sunset-gilded flanks, glittering high-lights in the final glorious burst ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... paused again and sat brooding, his eyes looking out into space. Muller respected his suffering and sat in equal silence, until Graumann raised his eyes to his again. "Then came the evening of the ...
— The Case of the Registered Letter • Augusta Groner
... have cost a hundred thousand pounds, and all with absolute belief in his own power to realise these splendid visions. Yet every now and then in the very rush of his projects there came a sudden cloud of fear—his jaw fell—he looked apprehensively behind him—became darkly brooding—muttered something about that hideous charge hanging over him—a conspiracy hatched by men who should have been his friends—the probability of a great trial in Westminster Hall; and then he ran on again about builders and architects—Whistler, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... came out with eulogy for any man his status was settled for good and all. Margaret plunged once more into her treasures of early schooldays. Floss and Elinor made merry over some verses Margaret had handed up with a blush. Helen apparently lapsed into a brooding abstraction. And presently Dorothy excused herself, and kissing Margaret good-bye, ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... exploded with a thunderous crump twenty yards or so beyond the trench, there was a sudden noise of ripping canvas, an agonised shout, and the heavy crash of a body encountering china. Then—silence. The sap parties heard only the oil-can; Percy FitzPercy for a wonder was not brooding over his invention, and there was no one who knew that close beside them in an odoriferous underground abode the Brigadier-General lay completely stunned, with his head in a metal soup tureen and his rather extensive set of uppers in a disused tin ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... illusive creature, unused to men, she was troubled by questions, fearful of the sound of her own voice. Yet in repose, as she watched the lights and shadows, she was serene, unconscious; her dark, quiet glance was dreamy and sad, and in it was the sombre, brooding strength of ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey |
