"Meditative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon its own suggestions: but truth is to be mined from Nature, to be wrung from experience, to be seized as the victor's trophy on the battlefield of action and suffering. The flowers of poetry may bud spontaneously around the meditative spirit of genius, but the harvest of Truth, though, to be reaped by mind, must grow out ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... be spoken language. There are more reasons for demurring to the soundness of the latter doctrine, than can conveniently be made to fill a digression here. For one thing, spoken language necessarily implies one or more listeners, whereas written language may often have to express meditative moods and trains of inward reflection that move through the mind without trace of external reference, and that would lose their special traits by the introduction of any suspicion that they were to be overheard. Again, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... sentence tailed out into a meditative silence. His voice and eyes told of a mind reminiscent of the past and perhaps dreamful of the future. Yet awhile, and he snatched himself ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... smooth movement through the summer air, which met him with such friendly sweetness under the great trees of the long avenue. Beside him, little Ann was silent, with her legs stuck out rather wide apart. Motoring was a new excitement, for at home it was forbidden; and a meditative rapture shone in her wide eyes above her sudden little nose. Only once she spoke, when close to the lodge the car slowed down, and they passed the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the loftiest peaks of the cloudland in the skies that to the scientific gazer first caught the colors of the new morning in advance. But the whole vast range alike of sweeping glooms overhead dwelt upon all meditative minds, even upon those that could not distinguish the tendencies nor decipher the forms. It was, therefore, not her own age alone, as affected by its immediate calamities, that lay with such weight upon Joanna's mind, but her ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... The occasional observations which he throws in are always ingenious and sometimes profound. He shows himself at every turn to be an acute observer, a comprehensive thinker, and deeply imbued with the meditative spirit. The defects incidental to his peculiar training are more than compensated by the freshness of his manner and the directness of his language. More interesting still is the imaginative tendency which gives to many of his passages the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... slapped his knee as he uttered this meditative monosyllable, and continued to regard his niece with keener scrutiny, if that were possible, than before. 'It is John's temper—a very firebrand. My dear, you are very young, and you should not be above taking advice. Let me advise you to control that fiery passion. Temper doesn't pay—it is one ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... their host, meditative. "My faith!" he commented, with brightening eyes. "It sounds almost too good to be true! And I've been growing afraid that the world was getting to be a most humdrum and uninteresting planet!... Miss Calendar, I am a widower of so many years standing that ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... the air; or was he obeying another Dominie, of a wider parish, whose voice he heard in his heart? It was not often that the painter went to church. More frequently, in his little studio at the top of a house in Fulton Street, he sat smoking meditative cigars during the Sunday hours; or, if the day were auspicious, ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... in, one at a time. They would whisper to Ranjoor Singh, and hurry out again. Some of them would whisper to Yasmini over in the window, and she would give them mock messages to carry, very seriously. Babu Sita Ram was stirred out of a meditative coma and sent hurrying away, to come back after a little while and wring his hands. He ran over ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... assiduous attentions,—and his infinite superiority in gentleness of disposition, and grace of manners, over the race of rude warriors with whom she lived? But her affection was of that quiet, timid, meditative character, which sought rather a reflected share in the happiness of the beloved object, than formed more presumptuous or daring hopes. A little Gaelic song, in which she expressed her feelings, has been translated by the ingenious and unhappy Andrew M'Donald; and we willingly ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... shouts of the children. There was a boy's curiosity in his face. From his lyceens uniform he was evidently a schoolboy, and the book he was reading was the Arabian Nights. Small wonder that he was deeply absorbed. He sat perfectly still in a meditative attitude, with his elbow on the table, and his hand propping his head—the white fingers contrasting strongly with the brown hair into which they were thrust. As he sat, with the light turned full upon his face, and the rest of his body in shadow, he ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... his appearance as a heaven-sent boon, the master was obliged to walk to the door and command him sternly away, when, retreating to the fence, he mounted the uppermost rail, and drawing a knife from his pocket, cut a long splinter from the rail, and began to whittle it in patient and meditative silence. But when recess was declared, and the relieved feelings of the little flock had vent in the clearing around the schoolhouse, the few who rushed to the spot found that Uncle Ben had already disappeared. Whether the appearance of the children was too inconsistent ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... he loved her memory with steady constancy. If—and I think we may—if we allow that every author has some especial quality with which, in more or less degree, he endows all his children—if we grant that Shakespeare's people are all meditative, even the sprightly Rosalind and the clownish Dogberry—if we allow that all our acquaintances in Dickens are a trifle self-conscious, in George Eliot conscientious to such an extent that even Tito ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... ends of two of her pencils, she wrote down three words on the fair white page before her. Then she drew a long sigh, threw aside the second ruined pencil, and picked up a slender green one with a beautiful point. This point she eyed with a meditative frown. ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... comments on the phraseology see The Rhythm of Modern Music by Abdy Williams, pp. 75-77. We may add that the pieces called Intermezzi, are generally of a meditative, somber nature; whereas the Capriccios are more sprightly, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... except by one person,—and she took to it amazingly. That person was Mrs. Gaunt. There seems to be, even in educated women, a singular, instinctive love of twilight; and here was twilight at high noon. The place, too, suited her dreamy, meditative nature. Hither, then, she often retired for peace and religious contemplation, and moved slowly in and out among the tall stems, or sat still, with her thoughtful brow leaned on her white ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... to his more advanced age, but mainly, no doubt, to his meditative and introspective cast of mind, Mr. Edison is far less active than is Mr. Ford. When we would pause for the midday lunch, or to make camp at the end of the day, Mr. Edison would sit in his car and read, or curl up, boy fashion, under a tree and ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... and nasal, she began to read. Maria Clara gazed vaguely into space. The first commandment finished, Aunt Isabel observed her listener over her glasses, and appeared satisfied with her sad and meditative air. She coughed piously, and after a long pause began the second. The good old woman read with unction. The terms of the second commandment finished, she again looked at her niece, who slowly ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... meditative Quixotism is, like the practical Quixotism, madness, a daughter-madness to the madness of the Cross. And therefore it is despised by the reason. At bottom, philosophy abhors Christianity, and well did the gentle ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... soul to tell him of outline or perspective, of anatomy or of shadow; and yet he had given all the weary, worn-out age, all the sad, quiet patience, all the rugged, care-worn pathos of his original, and given them so that the old, lonely figure was a poem, sitting there meditative and alone, on the dead tree, with the darkness of the descending night ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... only, but to some will rather appear a result of deliberate judgment; for people have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli's work, and his name, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important. In the middle of the fifteenth century he had already anticipated much of that meditative subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the great imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the simple religion which had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century, and the simple naturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of birds ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... affectionate simplicity of his demeanor. As it was the country's custom to educate the first-born of royalty for the throne, the Ali-Mami of Footha-Yallon had been brought up almost within the precincts of the mosque. I found the prince, therefore, more of a meditative "book-man" than warrior; while the rest of his family, and especially his younger brothers, had never been exempt from military duties, at home or abroad. Like a good Mussulman, the sovereign was a quiet, temperate gentleman, never indulging in "bitters" or any thing stronger ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... so last night and promised me the sunburst. He was," admitted the willowy girl regretfully, "a good bit tanked at the time, but I guess he'll make good." She mused awhile, a rather anxious expression clouding her perfect profile. She looked like a meditative Greek Goddess. "If he doesn't," she added with maidenly dignity, "it's the las' time I go out with the big stiff. I'd tie a can to him ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... cryptogram over to his chief, who studied it for a while with a meditative frown, then laid it aside and listened in a non-committal silence to his story. When the incidents of the day had been ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... and action. And when the thing was done, Sapt's coolness, so rarely upset, yet so completely beaten by the force of that wild idea, came back to him. He lit his pipe again and lay back in his chair, puffing freely, with a meditative ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... creatures, and out of the weeds and stones of the heath. How often, and for how profound a reason, does he not show us to ourselves, not as we or our fellows see us, but out of the continual observation of humanity which goes on in the wary and inquiring eyes of birds, the meditative and indifferent regard of cattle, and the deprecating ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... raft, which bore the family and all their possessions to the shore of Indiana; and, child as he was, he gave help as they toiled through dense forests to the interior of Spencer county. There, in the land of free labor, he grew up in a log-cabin, with the solemn solitude for his teacher in his meditative hours. Of Asiatic literature he knew only the Bible; of Greek, Latin, and mediaeval, no more than the translation of Aesop's Fables; of English, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. The traditions of George Fox and William Penn passed to him dimly along the lines ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... which he so ardently delights. Not only is the Swiss determined by the peculiarities of his geographical position to lead a pastoral life, but the climate, and mountain scenery, and bracing atmosphere inspire him with the love of liberty. The reserved and meditative Hindoo, accustomed to the profuse luxuriance of nature, borrows the fantastic ideas of his mythology from plants, and flowers, and trees. The vastness and infinite diversity of nature, the colossal magnitude of all the forms of animal and vegetable life, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... lift an arras, and then hurrying on, To some fresh clue, belike! The sharp-nosed mouse Through joist and floor discreetly gnawed her way, And for her glossy young a lodging made In a cracked corselet that once held a heart. The meditative spider undisturbed Wove his gray tapestry from sill to sill. Over the transom the stone eagle drooped, With one wing gone, in most dejected state Moulting his feathers. A blue poisonous vine, Whose lucent berry, hard as Indian jade, No squirrel tried his tooth on, June ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... and, doing this, we avoid in great measure the thorns and entanglements of life. We know we are performing our duty; and the fruit of this knowledge is contentment. Season after season, day after day, you have made me serious, pensive, meditative, and almost wise. Being so little a girl, I was proud that you, so much taller, should lean on my shoulder to overlook my work. And greatly more proud was I when in time you taught me several Latin ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... for my brothers," the second man spoke up, filling his pipe in a meditative manner. Hay Stockard was at times as thoughtful of speech as he was wanton of action; ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... of Political Economy, and such like; and all have to be elected by a universal-suffrage ballot-box,—I do not see how the English Parliament itself will long continue sea-worthy! Nay, I find England in her own big dumb heart, wherever you come upon her in a silent meditative hour, begins to have dreadful ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... her from the worlds of hearing and speech—which set her apart among her fellow-creatures, a solitary living being in a sphere of death-silence that others might approach, but might never enter—gave a touching significance to the deep, meditative stillness that often passed over her suddenly, even in the society of her adopted parents, and of friends who were all talking around her. Sometimes, the thoughts by which she was thus absorbed—thoughts only indicated to others by the shadow of their mysterious presence, moving in the ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... Evander, "when I have stared my fill at your meditative cabbage I shall entreat no more of your kindness but that you convoy me to the safe port of the library, where ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... be slow from the exact opposite of these two reasons. First, when there is a great back-ground of thought suggested by the words, and second, when the reflective and meditative nature of the thought leads to slow action on the part of the mind. In some selections both of these conditions are present; in others only one of them. In The Day is Done (p. 63) there is little thought ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... real triumph was at dessert—Lancelot sedately by his mother; between her and the Judge, who briskly made way for him. Lancelot in his Eton jacket took on an air of precocious, meditative wisdom infinitely diverting to a man who reflects upon boys—and, ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... power of Hamlet's soul to conquer external events, without taking into careful account that the Vision from another world came to Hamlet, when he was outraged at the re-marriage of his mother and full of emotion that the sudden death of his father called forth in his meditative mind.[4] But Maeterlinck never refers to anything of this sort. He does not seem to realise what the effects of the vision must have been on a complicated character—on "a great gentleman in whom the courtier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, were all united." ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... his seat, and arranged his flowing and finely embroidered robes around him. I proffered him the pan supari I had prepared, but with a wave of the hand he declined this courtesy. So I placed the morsel in my own mouth, fell to its meditative mastication, and awaited the ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... of a whimsical character, and it did not arrive anywhere, so far as it went; but I believe that it might have been different with a Yankee story in verse such as we have fragmentarily in 'The Nooning' and 'FitzAdam's Story'. Still, his gift was essentially lyrical and meditative, with the universal New England tendency to allegory. He was wholly undramatic in the actuation of the characters which he imagined so dramatically. He liked to deal with his subject at first hand, to indulge through himself all the whim and fancy ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Sardou, as represented by the biograph, is no longer a man of letters; but he remains, scarcely less evidently than in the ordinary theatre, a skilful and effective playwright. Hamlet, that masterpiece of meditative poetry, would still be a good play if it were shown in moving pictures. Much, of course, would be sacrificed through the subversion of its literary element; but its essential interest as a play would yet remain apparent through ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... The grave, immovable Fyne of the Civil Service, gasped! This was enough, you'll admit, to cause me to put my feet to the ground swiftly. That fellow was always making me do things in subtle discord with my meditative temperament. No wonder that I had but a qualified liking for him. I said with just a ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... had hit accidentally, as it were, on an idea or fact mysteriously related to some morbid sentiment in the inmost core of his nature, and connecting itself with numerous scattered observations of human life, lying unrelated in his imagination. In a sort of meditative dream, his intellect drifts in the direction to which the subject points, broods patiently over it, looks at it, looks into it, and at last looks through it to the law by which it is governed. Gradually, individual ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... rigidly meditative, gripping the corners of the gingham folds in his hands. His face is eloquent of conflicting considerations. Can he learn it in a week? That's the question. Otherwise Briggs will get next week, and he will have to wait until September—when the weather is often ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... a number of dexterously manipulated allusions, which always, I found, produced the desired result of eliciting the required information (to be gleaned only from personal intercourse) as to my manner and habits. Later in our acquaintance, I found that he, like all meditative men, had the greatest conceivable dread of being taken unawares, and that there was no safer way for any fresh acquaintance to insure his taking violently against him, than to take the step of coming down ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... and tell you," was the meditative reply. "It's your extraordinary insouciance. It seems to me, as a budding diplomat, that you are running the most ghastly ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that had determined to appropriate Nevil. But at any rate there was the hope and the probability that this Mr. Lydiard of the pen had taken a long start of Nevil in the heart of Miss Denham: and struggling to be candid, to ensure some meditative satisfaction, Rosamund admitted to herself that the girl did not appear to be one of the wanton giddy-pated pusses who play two gentlemen or more on their line. Appearances, however, could be deceptive: never pretend to know a girl by ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and serenity characterized her fair, oval countenance and regular features. Her open forehead, dark and well-arched eyebrows, and eyes of a gray so deep that it was often mistaken for blue, added to her natural grave and meditative appearance; her nose was straight and well formed, her mouth serious ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... Prosper, meditative always at the sight of death, stood and pondered upon it. Everything was well, no doubt; such things should be! but the indifference of the defunct seemed almost shocking. Do they not care for decent interment? Then he ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... wine, the spirit of God pervading all his works, but producing in those who see and taste an effect, for good or evil, according to the nature of the recipient. The strong, powerful, self-willed, passionate character of Mrs. Hazleton, found, in the calm meditative fall of the cataract, in the ever shifting play of the wild waters, and in the watchful stillness of the air around, a softening, enfeebling influence. The gentle character of Emily turned from the scene with ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... to a reddish earthenware pot upon the table, took out a cigarette and lit it at a candle. Then he sat smoking, pushed back a little from the circle, gravely watching. Sometimes I heard his deep, grave voice assenting 'Ye-es, ye-es,' with meditative boredom. Sometimes his little finger flicked off the ash on to the floor. His manner was that of a man too much interested in the life about him to wish to be more than a spectator. His interest was in life, not in ideas. He was new to that ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... September while he was going through one of his contortions on the rings in the nearly deserted room he was addressed by a meditative fat man whom he had noticed watching him ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... mood, while it remains objective in contents, as in Virgil the mood pervades the poem so deeply as to be a main part of it, then the mood must be one of those felt or capable of being felt universally,—the profound moods of the meditative spirit in grand works, the common moods of simple joy and sorrow in less serious works. In proportion as society develops, whether in historic states singly or in the progress of mankind, the direct expression of self for its own sake becomes more usual; literature becomes more personal or ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... and somewhat faithlessly, upon the mountains, and the rare mysteries of their untrodden snows. She went across the sparse turf, starred with tiny clear, coloured flowers, her face stern, for all its youthful bloom and softness, her eyes meditative and profound. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... course he would do that," said Wilson in a meditative matter-of-course way, "but the thing that puzzled me was, why he didn't look to that last night, for one thing, and why he let you carry such a matter into a court of law at all, either before the duel or after it. It's no place for it. It was not like him. I couldn't understand ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... there is no lack of intricate Official Labor, which, even in the Tabagie, Friedrich Wilhelm does not forget. At the time he was concocting those Instructions for his little Prince's Schoolmasters, and smoking meditative under the stars, with Magdeburg "RITTER-DIENST" and much else of his own to think of,—there is an extraneous Political Intricacy, making noise enough in the world, much in his thoughts withal, and no doubt occasionally murmured of amid the tobacco-clouds. The Business ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... it was the subject that lay nearest to his heart at present, and he found no lack of words. The prisoner had watched him with twinkling eyes, nodding his head as if in agreement; and when he had finished his little speech, nodded again in meditative silence. ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... right in making some slight alteration. Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating . . . [In a meditative manner.] Eighteen, but admitting to twenty at evening parties. Well, it will not be very long before you are of age and free from the restraints of tutelage. So I don't think your guardian's consent is, after all, ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... over his whole face, did not even hear him. When the Brother quitted him at the parsonage door, he went round and entered the church. It was grey and gloomy, as on that terrible rainy evening when temptation had racked him so violently. And it still remained poverty-stricken and meditative, bare of all that gleaming gold and sighing passion that had seemed to him to sweep in from the countryside. It preserved solemn silence. But a breath of ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... way Hubert was a graceful talker, and he knew how to adapt his theme, and bring it within the circle of the sympathies of his listeners. There was some similarity of temperament between himself and Mrs. Bentley; they were both quiet, fair, meditative Saxons. She lent her whole mind to the conversation, interested in the account that the young man gave ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... to be "slothful in business;" not over devoted to it, but not to retire from it. We may do all things whatever we are about to God's glory; we may do all things heartily, as to the Lord, and not to man, being both active yet meditative; and now let me give some instances to show what ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... contradict him with my happier sentiments, lest I should awaken some fresh pain. I heard him, therefore, in quiet and meditative silence, or made but such general answers as could hazard no allusions. Yet, should I ever see him in better spirits, I shall not scruple to discuss, in such a way as I can, this point, and to vindicate as well as I am able ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... taught your fathers better." Long-Beard thrust his hairy paw into the bear meat and drew out a handful of suet, which he sucked with a meditative air. Again he wiped his hands on his naked sides and went on. "What I am telling you happened in the long ago, ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... quickly away towards the house. Rene followed the retreating figure with a meditative look, so long as he could keep her in sight, then turned his gaze to the island and there stood lost in a deep muse, regardless of the fact that his sweetheart, Moggie, was awaiting a parting interview at the lodge, and that the tide that would wait for ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... he soon or late, must have more than sharp eyes if he would have audience with Hiram, my royal friend of Tyre," the adventurer said, in his meditative way, feeling at the same time in the folds of his gown for the chart so the object of solicitude on the ship. The roll, the emerald, and the sword were also safe. Signing the slaves to remain where they were, he moved slowly across the chamber, and by aid of his lamp surveyed an ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... intermingled with graceful girls dancing gracefully, youths playing on pipes, and amidst them fauns, the lovely animality of the woods, of the landscape ages, when men first began to milk their goats, and when one man out of the tribe, more pensive, more meditative than the others, went down to the river's bank and cut a reed and found music within it. The vase I remembered best has upright handles springing from the necks of swans. It stands about two feet high, perhaps a little more, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... living, Achleitner had had to pay the penalty of his undignified, dog-like love, and the girl, shaken and refined to the depths of her being, was wax in his hands. Often he would look at her to find that her eyes had been fixed upon him in a long, grave, meditative gaze. Then he would seem to himself a very sorry sort of person, and was compelled to admit that he who had once wished to overwhelm the girl with the infinite riches of a passionately loving soul, was a bankrupt, groping with empty hands in empty pockets. He ought to speak, ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... biggest of all, which he did, not so much because he set out to deliberately as because, by the choice of chance, he had invited us to Voisin's in the Rue St. Honore, where the red-cushioned seats, the mirrors, the white paint, the discreet gilding, the air of retirement, the few elderly, rotund, meditative diners, each dining with himself, were all typical of the old classical Paris restaurant, and assured us beforehand of a good dinner and a price in keeping. That we ate asparagus from Argenteuil and petites fraises des bois I know because the season was spring; that ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... in Hal, who had been noticeably quiet and meditative since the last very important discovery. "This makes it look as if that last distress message we got from the ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... the "gentle Cinara" as having held the paramount place in his heart. She was his one bit of romance, and this all the more that she died young. Cinarae breves annos fata dederunt—"Few years the fates to Cinara allowed;" and in his meditative rambles by the Digentia, the lonely poet, we may well believe, often found himself sighing "for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... to where Sir Thomas stood smoking a meditative cigar and watching in a dispassionate way the efforts of his wife to bully the solitary porter attached to the station into a frenzy. Sir Thomas was a very tall, very thin man, with cold eyes, and tight, thin lips. His clothes fitted him ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... eyed me with the air of a man looking down from a great height upon another. The Vicomte smiled quietly to himself as he combed his fair beard with his forefinger in a meditative fashion, whilst even Roxalanne—who had sat silently listening to a conversation that she was at times mercifully spared from following too minutely—flashed me a humorous glance. To the Vicomtesse alone who in common ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... Because, as the stars cease to shine in presence of the sun, quenched by the effulgence, and drowned in the flood of his brighter beams, these lose all their wonders beside this little Child. To a meditative man it is curious to stand over any cradle where an infant sleeps; and, as we look on the face so calm, and the little arms gently folded on the placid breast, to think of the mighty powers and passions which are slumbering there; to think that this feeble nursling has heaven ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... the governor took in so delicate a matter. On one side he was pressed by the archbishop; on the other he was solicited by the Jesuits and the friars. During these contests I found him one evening when I went to see him, meditative and thoughtful. He had two letters in his hand, which the archbishop had written to him, successively, that same day. He told me, with demonstrations of feeling which showed his embarrassment, that the archbishop was writing to him letter after letter, on a matter that depended on him ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... consent. He did not think of his folly, he was too happy; he seemed like one in a quiet dulcet dream; he walked slowly, leaning from time to time against the wooden paling, for he wished to prolong this meditative moment; he saw everything vaguely, and loved all with a quiet fulness of heart; he took in the sense of this village and its life as he had never done before. He compared it with Ireland; Mount Rorke, ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... once, when you came to the vicarage, and I had not the least idea what your name was. But I—I hoped you would come back; and so I used to write poems to you. They were very good, too," added John in a meditative tone, "I have never written any nearly so good ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... that the recognition was mutual. Merton, on turning his eyes by chance from the ground, looked to the opposite side of the street, and there beheld a nose. He then turned his eyes to the earth in his usual meditative mood; but, reflecting that a nose without an owner was rather a singular phenomenon, he looked a second time, and there, behind the nose, he saw a man; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... at first it was an intercourse infinitely tedious and exasperating, but imperceptibly it has grown to comprehension. And my patience has grown to meet its limitations, Phi-oo it is who does all the talking. He does it with a vast amount of meditative provisional 'M'm—M'm' and has caught up one or two phrases, 'If I may say,' 'If you understand,' and beads ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... dirges had a fresh leaf added to it in "The Death of the Flowers," which was at once a pastoral of autumn and a monody over a beloved sister. A new element appeared in "The Summer Wind," and was always present afterward in Mr. Bryant's meditative poetry—the association of humanity with nature—a calm but sympathetic recognition of the ways of man and his presence on the earth. The power of suggestion and of rapid generalization, which was the key-note of "The Ages," lived anew in every line of "The Prairies," in which a series of poems ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... was bowed across and emptied by the trio; and presently there began to fall upon them a luxurious spell, under the influence of which little but the sound of quiet and confidential laughter interrupted the long intervals of meditative silence. ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... looks at me so?" Cuckoo asked, in a manner unusually meditative. "But then he, Valentine, did the same! Why, could that be what scared him that ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... women were not fruitful. To which I added myself another argument, that a different diet from ours is necessary to those who take wives unto themselves. Thou understandest me, Joseph? Women have never been a temptation to me, Joseph answered, nor to Jesus, and in meditative mood he related the story of the wild man in the woods, at the entrance of whose cave Jesus had laid a knife so that he might cut himself free ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... the slaty banks of the "Crystal Wharf," and the Strid of Wilson, in his best moments, was as large as the valley of Glencoe. Yet Wordsworth loved intensely all the more beautiful aspects of the country, and of country-life. No angler and no gardener, indeed,—too severely and proudly meditative for any such sleight-of-hand. The only great weight which he ever lifted, I suspect, was one which he carried with him always,—the immense dignity of his poetic priesthood. His home and its surroundings were fairly typical of his tastes: a cottage, (so called,) of homely material ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... didn't know he was at Turtle Head; and I am satisfied now that he is the man that shook up Hasbrook that night," continued Laud, in meditative mood. ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... of history do not haunt their ancient habitations. Places, as well as persons, have lives and influences; and the horror of murder will not away from a spot. Haunted by its crimes, oppressed and debilitated by the fierce excesses of its Empire, Rome, silent, grave, and meditative, sighs over its past, wrapped in the penitent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... as he spoke in this meditative way, and Cuthbert could read between the lines, knowing what a wasted life it must seem to look back upon, with the monotony broken only by scenes of violence, when Indians went upon the warpath or halfbreeds became rebellious, as during the great uprising ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... a long article (pp. 114, 115) on the meaning of Samadhi, which is one of the seven sections of wisdom (bodhyanga). Hardy defines it as meaning "perfect tranquillity;" Turnour, as "meditative abstraction;" Burnouf, as "self-control;" and Edkins, as "ecstatic reverie." "Samadhi," says Eitel, "signifies the highest pitch of abstract, ecstatic meditation; a state of absolute indifference to all influences from within or without; a state of torpor of both ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... never cared to ask why he wore ear-rings. His nature was not meditative. Enough for him that all the other men of Flamborough did so; and enough for them that their fathers had done it. Whether his own father had done so, was more than he could say, because he knew of no such parent; and of that other ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... obscured by times for a moment as the shadow of the fair inhabitant passed betwixt the taper and the window. At length the light was removed or extinguished, and that object of speculation was also withdrawn from the eyes of the meditative lover. Dare I confess the fact, without injuring his character for ever as a hero of romance? These eyes gradually became heavy; speculative doubts on the subject of religious controversy, and anxious ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... conversion, and of the life in The Retreat, had already changed him. His customary keenness and excitability of look had subsided, and had left nothing in their place but an expression of suave and meditative repose. All his troubles were now in the hands of his priest. There was a passive regularity in his bodily movements and a beatific ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... set apart for the purpose, whose leisure tempts them to invention, whose interest prompts them to imposture. A symbolical religion is a proof of a certain refinement in civilization—the refinement of sages in the midst of a subservient people; and it absorbs to itself those meditative and imaginative minds which, did it not exist, would be devoted to philosophy. Now, even allowing full belief to the legends which bring the Egyptian colonists into Greece, it is probable that few among them were acquainted with the secrets of the symbolical mythology they introduced. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Japanese have never been spiritually gifted. We are neither meditative and reflective like the Hindus nor individualistic like the Anglo-Saxons. Nevertheless, like all mankind we have spiritual yearnings. They will be best stirred ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... at that time the appendages of gentlemen; Mr. Day wore not either. He was tall and stooped in the shoulders, full made but not corpulent, and in his meditative and melancholy air a degree of awkwardness and dignity were blended.' She then compares him with his guest, Mr. Edgeworth. 'Less graceful, less amusing, less brilliant than Mr. E., but more highly imaginative, more classical, and a deeper reasoner; ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... portrait is very like it; only, in the latter, the line formed by the lower jawbone that runs from the chin towards the ear is more rounded, and the whole has a more youthful appearance. As to the expression, it is not only meditative but even melancholy. This last point leads me naturally to another question. The delicate build of Chopin's body, his early death preceded by many years of ill-health, and the character of his ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... have seen, offered to the former mysterious and oracular Sibylline leaves, profoundly significant of an indwelling humanity diffused through all her woods and fields and mountains, all her fountains, streams, and seas. Those meditative creators sat at her feet, earnest disciples, but gathering rather the spirit and motive of her gifts than the gifts themselves, making an Ideal and worshipping it as a deity. But for the cathedral-builder, Dryads and Hamadryads, Oreads, Fauns, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... the horizon of the summit level around her. But no Rand appeared. Presently she began to laugh quietly to herself. This occurred several times during her occupation, which was somewhat prolonged. The result of this meditative hilarity was summed up in a somewhat grave and thoughtful deduction as she walked slowly back to the cabin: "I do believe I'm the first woman that ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... fiercely or resentfully, but in a sort of meditative, passive despair. A sense of the wickedness, the cruelty there was in the world, the hopelessness of struggling against it, of disentangling fact from falsehood, of silencing malice and disarming envy, came upon Christian in a fit of bitterness uncontrollable. ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... I have, a mulatto outlaw. But this shall not stop here, no, by St. George! Yes, I did well to call you. Now my anger boils; the most cruel plans crowd in upon my imagination. Yes, yes, that is it;" said Croustillac, with a meditative air. "I have it at last! I have found a revenge ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... what Christianity is expected to produce," Mr. Morgan replied, in a meditative way; "but I have an idea that the early Christians in their assemblies all knew each other, having met elsewhere in social intercourse, or, if they were not acquainted, they lost sight of distinctions in one paramount interest. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... surprise, that he didn't know and didn't care; that it was quite certain if we did not go forward we could not expect to get on, and that in the ordinary course of things if we proceeded we should undoubtedly come to something. To this I replied, in a meditative tone, that there was much truth in the observation, and that, at any rate, if we did not come to something, something would certainly ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... who saw in art nothing but Art itself, was perched on a step-ladder which helped him to work at a large high painting, now nearly finished. Criticising himself, honestly admiring himself, floating on the current of his thoughts, he then lost himself in one of those meditative moods which ravish and elevate the soul, soothe it, and comfort it. His reverie had no doubt lasted a long time. Night fell. Whether he meant to come down from his perch, or whether he made some ill-judged movement, believing himself to be on the floor—the event did not allow ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... kingdoms there was nothing like so much intercourse as between England and Scotland in the eighteenth century. In both countries, a cold and lifeless state of public religion prevailed up to the American and French Revolutions. These great events gave a shock everywhere to the meditative, and, consequently to the religious impulses of men. And, in the mean time, an irregular channel had been already opened to these impulses by the two founders of Methodism. A century has now passed since ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... saved!" cried Ezra, with meditative brows and hands plunged deep in his trouser pockets. "There is that girl's money. Could we not get ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... He was an ideally poetical figure; moreover, he charms by his flowing, musical verse, by the enthralling elegance and grace of his poetical imagery, and genuine lyric inspiration. All his poetry is filled with quiet, meditative sadness. It is by the music of his verse and the tender tears of his feminine lyrism that Nadson penetrates the hearts of his readers. His masterpiece is "My Friend, My Brother," and this reflects the sentiment of all his work.[52] Here ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... corrupt, the deeply meditative system of Buddha was introduced into many parts of India, and certainly brought a much higher theory and purer code than that founded on the garbled nature- worship of ancient India; but both religions co-existed, ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... of the sun, out of the blast, Out of the world, alone I passed Across the moor and through the wood To where the monastery stood. There neither lute nor breathing fife, Nor rumour of the world of life, Nor confidences low and dear, Shall strike the meditative ear. Aloof, unhelpful, and unkind, The prisoners of the iron mind, Where nothing speaks except the bell, The ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ploughman every morning, and on occasions daringly dashed in amongst the poachers by the palings of his park or paddock on summer evenings; yet whose hands were reasonably white and flexible, as if they handled other things than guns and fishing-rods, and whose eyes, at once clear and meditative, had studied more than the spire of his brother's church and the village street, more than quiet country towns, and loud watering-places, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... with the financier to whom the boat belonged, they set forth. Mr Mifflin, having remarked, 'Yo-ho!' in a meditative voice, seated himself at the helm, somewhat saddened by his failure to borrow a quid of tobacco from the Ocean Beauty's proprietor. For, as he justly observed, without properties and make-up, where were you? George, being skilled in the ways of boats, was ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... warn him that his enthusiasm was the prey of the eternal vanity. He leaned back in his meditative hieratic attitude, his elbows resting on the arm of his chair, his thin hands joined at the finger-tips, wondering what he should say to help her. After all, Audrey had stated her case a little vaguely—there was a reticence as to details. These, however, ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... and feeling that he had passed through all these seas and toils, he thought it was time for his spirit, wearied with calamities, to withdraw from his labours. So he took a queen from Sweden, and exchanged his old pursuits for meditative leisure. His life was prolonged in the utmost peace and quietness; but when he had almost come to the end of his days, certain men persuaded him by likely arguments that souls were immortal; so that he was constantly turning over in his mind the questions, to what abode he was to fare when ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... more meditative moods it was the narrowing perspective of far-off yards which pleased her best. She loved, at twilight, when the distant brown-stone spire seemed melting in the fluid yellow of the west, to lose herself ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... I should suppose, addicted himself to any out of door's sports whatever. He would, I fancy, as soon have thought of slaying his own mutton as of handling a fowling-piece; he used to shudder when he saw a party equipped for coursing, as if murder was in the wind; but the cool, meditative angler was in his eyes the abomination of abominations. His small elegant features, hectic cheek and soft hazel eyes, were the index of the quick, sensitive, gentle spirit within." "He would dismount to lead his horse down what his friend hardly perceived to be ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... Dumps, "s'posin you tell us a tale." Tot warmly seconded the motion, and Mammy, who was never more delighted than when astonishing the children with her wonderful stories, at once assumed a meditative air. "Lem me see," said the old woman, scratching her head; "I reckon I'll tell yer 'bout de wushin'-stone, ain't neber told yer dat yit. I know yer've maybe hearn on it, leastways Milly has; but den she mayn't have hearn de straight on it, fur 'taint eb'y nigger knows ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... later I had telegraphed my acceptance, and had mentally selected books enough for a dozen vacations. I knew enough of Helen's boys to be sure they would give one no annoyance. Budge, the elder, was five years of age, and had generally, during my flying visits, worn a shy, serious, meditative, noble face, and Toddie was a happy little know-nothing of three summers, with tangled ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... she untied her little velvet bonnet and tossing it away with her long cloak stood looking at him with meditative eyes. ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... which Miss Jane blew into every separate finger of her gloves and folded them up with the neatest exactitude. Presently she murmured with a meditative air: ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... remain, my sister?" he said presently. "He bien! it happens that to-night I am in a mood for granting almost any favor. A little later and I will attend to your merits." The fleet disorder of his visage had lapsed again into the meditative smile which was that of Lucifer watching a toasted soul. "And so it ends," he said, "and England loses to-night the heir that Manuel the Redeemer provided. Conqueror of Scotland, Scourge of France! O unconquerable king! and will the worms of ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... general apostasy of the times, that this family was so much in advance of any other, that it was to it that Abraham was obliged to send, a generation previous, for a suitable wife for the amiable and meditative Isaac. What wonder then that many practices prevailed among the descendants of Jacob that were not in accordance with either the will or the ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... of the word that is here translated 'good' is very nearly parallel with that idea. The true bread, the true vine, the true Shepherd—which comes to this, to use modern phraseology, that Jesus Christ, in His relation to you and me, fulfils all that in figure and shadow is represented to the meditative eye by that lower relationship between the material shepherd and his sheep. That is the picture, this the reality. There is another point to be made clear, and that is, that whilst the word 'good' is perhaps a fair enough representation of that which is employed by our Lord, there ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... of meditative smoking: "Yes, I guess that's the best thing you can do. It will strike her fancy, if she's an imaginative girl, and she'll ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... without claim to a glance of approbation now and then from a lady's eye. You must not suppose I care at all about the matter. But as I have not even a book allowed me to take up my thoughts, my curiosity fixes itself strangely upon this silent, sulky, meditative little person, who takes about as much notice of me as of the figure of Father Time ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... body regular and secular, is due to this contrast. Previously, they were not always well-disposed to it; the peasantry, nowhere, were content to pay tithes, and the artisan, as well as the peasant, regarded the idle, well-endowed, meditative monks as but little more than so many fat drones. The man of the people in France, by virtue of being a Gaul, has a dry, limited imagination; he is not inclined to veneration, but is rather mocking, critical and insubordinate at the powers above him, with a hereditary undertone of distrust and envy ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... is marvellously interesting," answered Anastase in a meditative tone, as he resumed his work, and glanced critically from Madame Mayer to his ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... meditation and prayer a passage from the Gospels. It struck me that here was a strange and sad inversion of the right order of proportion; devotional books daily, and the New Testament (in any sense of earnest meditative study) about twice a week! Very different, I thought, is the view and teaching of the Church of England in this matter of the spiritual reading of her Ministers. What does the Church say, through the Bishop, when the Deacon is ordained Presbyter? "Seeing ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... I want to know it, right slam-bang out," I told him. And for the first time he turned and looked at me, in a meditative and impersonal sort of way that brought the fish-hook tugging at my thorax again. He looked at me as though some inner part of him were still debating as to whether or not he was about to be confronted by a woman in tears. Then a touch of cool ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... means, his shabby valet, his threadbare cloak, and the humbleness of his diplomatic position, the fire and honesty of his character combined with his known ability to place him high in the esteem of the society of St. Petersburg. His fidelity, devotion, and fortitude, mellowed by many years and by meditative habits, and tinged perhaps by the patrician consciousness of birth, formed in him a modest dignity of manner which men respected. They perceived it to be no artificial assumption, but the outward image of a lofty and self-respecting spirit. His brother diplomatists, even the representatives ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... vivacious, unusually mobile face. At first sight he appeared younger than his years. The high, white forehead gave an impression of freshness and vigour; the eyes blazed one moment with intelligence, emotion or gaiety, a moment later they wore a meditative, dreamy expression, then again they looked young, even childlike. At other times they evidenced knowledge of life, or looked so weary, so bored that they betrayed their owner's age; at these times there appeared between them three furrows, certain indications of time and knowledge of life. Smooth ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... don as he had seen him emerging from his studious seclusion to walk the streets of Athens, absent, meditative, moving the passers-by to laughter (Ep. II, ii, 81). Pope carries him ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... of the cloudland in the skies, that to the scientific gazer first caught the colors of the new morning in advance. But the whole vast range alike of sweeping glooms overhead, dwelt upon all meditative minds, even those that could not distinguish the altitudes nor decipher the forms. It was, therefore, not her own age alone, as affected by its immediate calamities, that lay with such weight upon Joanna's mind; but her own age, as one section ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... seen in his Satires, though neither the unbridled voluptuousness which makes his Elegies shocking to modern propriety, nor the far-off conceit which appears in his meditative and miscellaneous poems, is very strongly or specially represented here. Nor, naturally enough, is the extreme beauty of thought and allusion distinctly noteworthy in a class of verse which does not easily admit it. On the other hand, the force and originality of Donne's intellect are nowhere ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... of scampering sheep, past meditative cows who started up, puffing out snorts of perfume; scrambling through hedges, over gate and stile and ditch, with eyes upon the distant woods full of the purple gloom of evening, and, in my ears, the muffled ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... outlines, till the phantom fortress topples into red ruin while we gaze. The tiniest stream eats out its little valley and rounds the pebble in its widening bed, rain washes down the soil, and frost cracks the cliffs above. So silently and yet mightily does the law of change work that to a meditative eye the solid earth seems almost molten and fluid, and the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... years. The building of his house with his own hands, and the disposition of the land about it occupied him for the better part of one; the next, with its progressive seasons of fruition, was spent in meditative ecstasy; by the beginning of the third his cure was complete. The poet in him was now the philosopher's humble servant, as should surely always be the case. Resolved that the world should be sweetened yet, ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... dresses up his sleek, hectic, beardless archangels as Roman warriors, and makes them stand, straddling beatically on thin little dapper legs, wistfully gazing from beneath their wondrously ornamented helmets on the walls of the Cambio at Perugia; when he masquerades meditative fathers of the Church as Socrates and haggard anchorites as Numa Pompilius; most ludicrous of all, when he attires in scantiest of clinging antique drapery his mild and pensive Madonnas, and, with daintily-pointed toes, places them to throne bashfully on allegorical ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... information and hoped that some day we could verify it by actual test. Yet when I inquired whether he meant merely the environs of the city of Paris, or the very heart of the city such as the Place de l'Opera, he studied me with the meditative eye with which Huxley must ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... moment at her in meditative sympathy]. That such must be your lot I long had guessed. When first I met you, I can well recall, You seemed to me quite other than the rest, Beyond the comprehension of them all. They sat at table,—fragrant tea a-brewing, And small-talk ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... enough for a man in chambers. To dream of entering as a householder on that sum, in these days, would be stark nonsense: and a man two removes from a baronetcy has no right to set his reckoning on deaths:—if he does, he becomes a sort of meditative assassin. But what were the Fates about when they planted a man of the ability of Tom Redworth in a Government office! Clearly they intended him to remain a bachelor for life. And they sent him over to Ireland on inspection duty for a month to have sight of an Irish Beauty ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was now a constant, meditative, hooning whistling; but presently this ceased, and the silence seemed worse; for there is such a sense of hidden ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... apt picture in a few words (if we like to take it so) of the long pilgrimage of the Human Race, its early and pathetic clinging to the tradition of the Eden-garden, its careless and vigorous boyhood, its meditative youth, with consciousness of sin and endless expiatory ritual in Nature's bosom, its fleeting visions of salvation, and finally its complete disillusionment and despair in the world-slaughter and ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... society demanded, with unaffected ease and grace. But while the trifles and pleasures of the passing day were to her companions everything, they were to her little and unsatisfying. For the last few years of her mother's life, whose habits were meditative and devotional, she had daily listened to the gracious lessons of divine truth, and the closet of Beatrice Adony was hallowed by the Eye that seeth in secret, and that often saw ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... lose its filial place, and be succeeded by different melodies, though his own still survives in a few collections, sometimes with Collyer's "O Jesus in this solemn hour." It is good music for a hymn of praise rather than for meditative verse. Many years the hymn has been sung to "Woodstock," an appropriate and still familiar ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... human pleasures is the Queen, Robed in her own unrivalled peerless green, Wed to the sun's all-glorious majesty, Eternal witnesses of Deity. Friendship with her makes one sensation full Of calm delight, that heart and spirit lull. Such meditative hours I dearly love, They seem a benediction from above; The beautiful, eternal as the true, Affords through nature inspiration new, Making each varying season of the year A revelation fresh from heaven appear. A lawn in gentle undulations ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... side of things is presented by some of the groups: in the ungainly figure of the elephant of Senegal running; in the bear lying on his back in a trough and eating with great gusto some sweet morsel which he holds between his paws; and in the meditative stork standing on the back of a turtle. Some of the animals are shown as sleeping or reclining, and there is a cat sitting, a goat feeding, a deer scratching its side and a pheasant walking, among others, ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... Callistion's meditative eyes were dry, but those of Melicent were not. And Melicent came to the Dacian woman, and put one arm about her in that dim, sweet-scented place, saying, "I ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... sickened him. He turned away abruptly, and the lady-in-waiting, having curtsied once more profoundly, passed on with her glistening sheaf of bloom and disappeared vision-like in a gleam of azure light falling through one of the further and higher casements. The King watched her disappear, the meditative line of sadness still puckering his brow, then, followed by his equerry, he entered a small private audience chamber, where Sir Roger de Launay notified an attendant gentleman usher that his Majesty was ready ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... reader quarrels with a waste of precious material, Mr. Blackmore pursues his meditative way, with his smile of genial observation, himself the best of all his personages. The smell of the heather and the wild moorland odors, the honeyed grass and the fragrant thyme, the darker breathings of the sea, get into his pages and render ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... motionless in her meditative struggle, while the evening slowly deepened into night. But the struggle changed continually, as that of a man who begins with a movement towards striking and ends with conquering his desire to strike. The energy that would animate a crime is not more than is wanted to inspire ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... of the outer room, in which stood a huge writing-table loaded with letters, pamphlets and manuscripts. Between the two windows of the inner room was a cage in which a large, grey parrot was clambering, using both beak and claws to assist him in his slow and meditative peregrinations. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... place where her chair had been, and tried to conjure up the scene again; then, becoming uncertain as to the exact spot, went down to the cabin, where, the locker being immovable, no such difficulty presented itself. He gazed his fill, and then, smoking a meditative pipe, turned ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... field, walking slowly, his hands thrust in his pockets, his eyes fixed steadily on a point in front of him that his mind didn't see, drawn back in some intense contemplation. He strolled into the ring so slowly that she had time to note the meditative gestures of his shoulders and chin. He stood beside her, very straight and tall, not speaking, still hiding his hands in his pockets, keeping up to the last minute his pose of indestructible tranquillity. He was so close that she could hear his breathing and ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... pleading to unpractised eyes? Who hid such import in an infant's gloom? Who lent thee, child, this meditative guise? Who mass'd, round that slight brow, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... been gathered chiefly from Friends in Council, though a few of them are taken from Companions of my Solitude. The two books are informed with the same spirit; and to a meditative person, one could not recommend a choicer store of reading. Those, however, to whom the works are as yet unknown, may wish to see some longer and more connected extract. It is difficult to decide upon what ought to be presented, where almost everything is exquisite; ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... by this outward bark Not conclude too much upon your mistress's inviolable chastity Not for any profit, but for the honour of honesty itself Not having been able to pronounce one syllable, which is No! Not in a condition to lend must forbid himself to borrow Not melancholic, but meditative Not to instruct but to be instructed Not want, but rather abundance, that creates avarice Nothing can be a grievance that is but once Nothing falls where all falls Nothing is more confident than a bad poet Nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne • Michel De Montaigne
... long trail to follow," he said, slowly, "trying to get back dues from the government. There's red tape and lawyers and rulings and evidence and courts to keep you waiting. I'm not certain," continued the commissioner, with a profoundly meditative frown, "whether this department that I'm the boss of has any jurisdiction or not. It's only Insurance, Statistics, and History, ma'am, and it don't sound as if it would cover the case. But sometimes a saddle blanket can be made to stretch. You keep your seat, just for a few minutes, ma'am, till ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... said Hugh Crombie, in a meditative tone. "Of a certainty, my conscience has grown unreasonably tender within the last two years. This one small sin, if I were to aid in it, would add but a trifle to the sum of mine. But then ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was a very pensive, meditative young man, of poetic temperament, and of unsullied purity of character. With such persons love ever becomes an all-absorbing passion. It has been well said that love is represented as a little Cupid shooting tiny arrows, ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... a silent kiss on the lips of the Muses, and they seemed to stir and move. But my rays lingered longest about the Nile group with the colossal god. Leaning against the Sphinx, he lies there thoughtful and meditative, as if he were thinking on the rolling centuries; and little love-gods sport with him and with the crocodiles. In the horn of plenty sat with folded arms a little tiny love-god, contemplating the great solemn river-god, a true picture of the boy at the spinning wheel—the ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... and shading in her character: a springing and tender fancy, a Madonna depth of meditative softness, and a purity which has been unstained, and keeps her dignified even in the most unfavorable circumstances. She was born for the love and ornament of life. I can scarcely forbear weeping sometimes, when I look on her, and think what happiness ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli |
