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More "Meditative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and spent the rest of the evening bursting into spasmodic and immediately interrupted song,—breaking off after a few bars with a cough of remembrance and apology. When this happened Fritzing and Priscilla looked at each other with grave and meditative eyes; they knew how completely they were in ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... 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 own age as one section in a vast mysterious drama, ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... walk to and fro in the house." In councils and formal receptions it is customary for the orator to walk slowly to and fro during the intervals of his speech. Sometimes, before beginning his address, he makes a circuit of the assembly with a meditative aspect, as if collecting his thoughts. All public acts of the Indians are marked with some sign ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... a boy of delicate constitution, not addicted to the active sports or any of the more vigorous habits of boys of his age. His only companions were a few intimate friends, and, thus secluded, his character naturally took a sensitive, meditative cast, and his growing disrelish for severer tasks was confirmed. As has been intimated, he entered as a pupil at Athens; but as the course of instruction in that institution was not in harmony with his tastes, he soon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... of sending Miss Chase to bed quite unusually meditative, and, do what she would, she could not get off to sleep for wondering whether she ever would come back to Queensland again. It seemed of all things most impossible, and yet, as she argued, who would ever have thought of her coming at all this time ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... 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 ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... The affliction which separated 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 ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... 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 ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... will say those things which I have meditated for their own sake and not for the first time with a view to that occasion." In these words is the secret of his relation to the Whig party. He asked no office, and he gave only the ripe fruit of his meditative life. It is not to be supposed that, in 1838, he saw in the young man at Auburn the astute United States Senator of the fifties; or the still greater secretary of state of the Civil War; but he had seen enough of Seward to discern the qualities of mind and heart that lifted ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... enough money to keep my wife and mother comfortable. They, like myself, have learned the lesson of being poor and happy. But I must keep them above want—I will keep them above want!" As he repeated the words the meditative mood dropped from him. He straightened himself in his chair with sudden energy, his voice trembled and sunk almost to a whisper, in place of the dreamy look his ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... down and ate her sandwiches thoughtfully, with long, meditative intervals between bites. She regarded the pinto curiously, wondering if Starr had really taken him as security for a debt, and wishing that she had asked him what its name was. It was queer, the way he rode up unexpectedly every ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... course, 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 all ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... soaring dreams of fancy in 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, the broad and massive ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Canaan. The Bingerloch, the ruins, and the never-failing vines scattered among them, like verdant youth revelling amid age and decay, give a picture nowhere else exhibited, uniting to the joyousness of wine the sober tinge of meditative feeling. The hills back the picture, covered with feudal relics or monastic remains, mingled with the purple grape. Landscapes of greater beauty, joined to the luxuriance of fruitful vine ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... against the tree, smoking in a meditative manner, and watching the flicker of the firelight on the face of his companion, whose thoughts seemed to be concentrated ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... Errington looked meditative. "Nothing at present We'll go fishing with the others. But, I tell you what, if you're up to it, we'll leave Duprez and Macfarlane at the minister's house this evening and tell them to wait for us there,—once they all begin to chatter they ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... wrote also, and to her I offered my heart. Looking backward, I have sometimes wondered that I felt so little hesitation; not that I have ever doubted since, that what I did then was the one perfectly right thing which I have done in my life, but because it was my habit so to confuse myself with meditative indecision. I had doubted before. I remember once being so near engaging myself to a girl that the desk was open and the paper under my hand. But I held back, could not make up my mind, and happily was stayed. Had I not been restrained, I should for ever have been miserable. The remembrance ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... way he had made of his explanation an apology. While his slow brown fingers rolled a cigarette he stared away through the garden and across the desert with an expression half melancholy, half merely meditative, which made the girl wonder what his thoughts were. When she came to know him better she would know too that at times like this he was not ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... 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 to ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... those solemn words about saving a child; they saw in him only No. 17 of the captured Russians, arrested and detained for some reason by order of the Higher Command. If they noticed anything remarkable about Pierre, it was only his unabashed, meditative concentration and thoughtfulness, and the way he spoke French, which struck them as surprisingly good. In spite of this he was placed that day with the other arrested suspects, as the separate room he had occupied was required ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... waggon, and looking back as if bound to finish the chase by hunting the cat-like creature out; but he always altered his mind and went under the waggon once more, to walk close to the heels of the last pair of oxen, one of which looked back from time to time in a thoughtful meditative way, with its great soft eyes, as if in consideration whether it ought to kick out and send ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... wasn't. She fell into silence again, standing by her mother's knee, staring out of the window and watching the clouds move steadily across the sky doing their share of the world's work for all they looked so soft and lazy. Her mother did not break in on this meditative contemplation. She took up her sewing-basket and began busily to sew buttons on a small pair of half-finished night-drawers. The sobered child beside her, gazing up at the blue-and-white infinity of the sky, heard faintly and distantly, ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the kind that achieve a result by their clean-limbed elegance alone. Van Dyck has painted the two with what might be called a greyhound brush-stroke, a style of handling that is nothing but courtly convention and strut to the point of genius. He is as far from the meditative spirituality of Rembrandt as could well ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... elderly 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 ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... watched again with meditative stare Places where you had wandered, Golden and calm in distance: Voices from all your altering past came sighing ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... hour brought us back to Aiasulouk and the mosque of Sultan Selim. Here everything seemed still more quiet than when we left. Even the storks were sitting or standing in a meditative posture, not one flying about. The railway porters and some rayahs were lying on the platform in the enjoyment of their midday slumbers, their heads and faces carefully wrapped up in their capotes, while their bare, bronzed shanks and huge feet, in shapeless red shoes, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... grandson were driving in a distant part of the valley some miles from home. A forest came down to the road and through the forest Wine Creek wriggled its way over stones toward a distant river. All the afternoon Jesse had been in a meditative mood and now he began to talk. His mind went back to the night when he had been frightened by thoughts of a giant that might come to rob and plunder him of his possessions, and again as on that night when he had run through the fields crying for a son, he became excited ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... strengthened his intellect by hard though irregular study, his meditative and impassioned nature, feeling in the highest degree the necessity of confirming its impressions, experienced more imperatively than a youth of fifteen generally does, the want of examining the traditional ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... and remaining as short a time as possible in this unedifying city, which is a bad and overheated imitation of a French provincial town, we concede only so much to its modern character as to hire a fine open carriage in which to proceed inland toward Constantina. This city is reached after a calm, meditative ride through sunny hills and groves. After so quiet a preparation the first view of Constantina is fairly astounding. Encircled by a grand curve of mountainous precipices, rises a gigantic rock, washed by a moat formed of the roaring cascades of the river Rummel. On the flat top of this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... meditative slowness and with playful eyes: "Whenever I am justified in having such anxieties, they ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable
... who wrote pastorals or elegies and went out for long, solitary walks to commune with nature. In my eagerness to please Lalage I went so far as to write to Selby-Harrison, asking him to make out for me a list of the leading poets of the meditative and mystical schools. I also gave an order to a bookseller for all the books of original poetry published during that autumn. The number of volumes I received surprised me. I used to exhibit them with great pride to my ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... 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 ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... to understand Turner's depth of sympathy farther still. In both these high mythical subjects the surrounding nature, though suffering, is still dignified and beautiful. Every line in which the master traces it, even where seemingly negligent, is lovely, and set down with a meditative calmness which makes these two etchings capable of being placed beside the most tranquil work of Holbein or Duerer. In this "Cephalus" especially, note the extreme equality and serenity of every ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... 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 turned ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... give him cards and spades when it comes to driving a dog-team, though," Daylight observed, after a meditative pause. "And I really believe I could put him on to a few wrinkles in poker and placer mining, and maybe in paddling a birch canoe. And maybe I stand a better chance to learn the game he's been playing all his life than he would stand of learning the ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... admired and loved his old schoolfellow, and grieved deeply when he died. The recollection of this event, which happened many years afterwards (in 1834), never left Lamb until his own death: he used perpetually to exclaim, "Coleridge is dead, Coleridge is dead," in a low, musing, meditative voice. These exclamations (addressed to no one) were, as Lamb was a most unaffected man, assuredly involuntary, and showed that he could not get rid of ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... his feelings? We weren't engaged.' A meditative pause and then suddenly, 'Evelyn Mary doesn't smoke. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... shifts his character with the shift in his worshippers' real affections. What the psalmist loves is the beauty of God's house and the place where his glory dwelleth. A priestly quietude and pride, a grateful, meditative leisure after the storms of sedition and war, some retired unity of mind after the contradictions of the world—this is what the love of God might signify for the levites. Saint John tells us that he who says he loves God and loves not his neighbour is a liar. Here the love of God is ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... delight that the world can never realize outside the region of the brain. If that needs proof you have only, dear friends, to meditate upon such lives as Newton, or Shakespeare, or Kepler, or if you turn to the region of meditative thought, to such lives as our own George Eliot—yes, there is that in the mere exercise of intellect which is intoxicating, which is consoling even to the highest degree. But intellect, after all, finds its frontier. I may say of it what I have said ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... last morsel of bread Tom King wiped his plate clean of the last particle of flour gravy and chewed the resulting mouthful in a slow and meditative way. When he arose from the table, he was oppressed by the feeling that he was distinctly hungry. Yet he alone had eaten. The two children in the other room had been sent early to bed in order that in ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... their games there again," said Mr. Cathcart with meditative geniality. "I'd like to blow up ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... in the book; exquisite glimpses into the loveliness of nature here and there shine out from its lines,—a charm wanting which meditative writing always seems to have a defect; beautiful gleams, too, there are of the choicest things of art, and frequent allusions by the way to legend or picture of the religious past; so that, while you read, you wander ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... or no conversation during the evening. In fact, I do not remember that anyone spoke at all, excepting once, when the Captain remarked, in a meditative manner, that my parents "must have reached New York by this time"; at which supposition I nearly strangled myself in attempting to intercept ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... he might lie on fern or withered heath, While from the singing lark (that sings unseen The minstrelsy that solitude loves best), And from the sun, and from the breezy air, 20 Sweet influences trembled o'er his frame; And he, with many feelings, many thoughts, Made up a meditative joy, and found Religious meanings in the forms of Nature! And so, his senses gradually wrapt 25 In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds, And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark, That singest like ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... man in him was very different, almost wholly independent of the first, and very generally in direct conflict with it, at that time. It was an imaginative and meditative personality, easily deceived into assuming a false premise, but logical beyond all liability to deception when reasoning from anything it had accepted. Its processes were intuitively correct and almost instantaneous, while ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... were so near the fire that it was necessary to change the conversation. Luckily, at that instant, Cap, who had been in the block in company with his dying brother-in-law, and who knew nothing of what had passed since the capitulation, now appeared, walking with a meditative and melancholy air towards the group. Much of that hearty dogmatism, that imparted even to his ordinary air and demeanor an appearance of something like contempt for all around him, had disappeared, and he seemed thoughtful, ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... train moved on he found himself disinclined for further talk. He had suddenly become meditative, and curled up in a corner with his head hard against the window pane, watching the wet fields and glistening roads as they slipped past. He had his plans made for his conduct at Glasgow, but, Lord! how he loathed the whole ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... no heed of this rodomontade, but sits quite still, with downcast eyes, tapping the small table near her with the tips of her slender fingers in a meditative fashion. ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... 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 ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... attentions of a dog who would climb to her lap, and there, with an angry nose, put to no more than temporary rout the nimble guests of his jacket. Shortly Mrs. Morrissy began to look upon the toy terrier with a meditative eye. ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... the goblin motions of inanimate things. The lover thinking of his lass welcomes the night and the rapturous walks among well-known scenes and kindly objects. With glimmering lamps in the foliage and the not distant sounds of daily life, even the woods have nothing fearful to the meditative or the distraught. But in flight, with fear as a garment that can not be laid aside, the somber forms of the forest are more terrible than an army with banners, as a haunted house is a more unnerving dread than burglars or any form of night marauders. It was ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... on a raised divan, propped by cushions, and in front of her was a huge water-pipe at which she occasionally took a meditative pull. She was dressed quite in Oriental fashion, in trousers, zouave jacket, sash, and all the rest of it; but she was unmistakably English in features, though strongly suggestive of the Boadicea. She was a large, heavily-boned woman, enormously covered with flesh, and she dandled across her knees ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... same significance. "In a little time the cathedrals and churches will have taken upon themselves the proud, poetical glamour of abandoned temples. Men and women will enter them with reverent indulgence as they now in meditative mood visit the few remaining pantheons of the pagan worship." (Llewelyn ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... 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
... he had found leisure to fish, though from the very outset of his Potwell career he had promised himself abundant indulgence in the pleasures of fishing. Fishing, as the golden page of English literature testifies, is a meditative and retrospective pursuit, and the varied page of memory, disregarded so long for sake of the teeming duties I have already enumerated, began to unfold itself to Mr. Polly's consideration. A speculation about Uncle Jim died for want of material, ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... come 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 ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... fair-skinned than any his Highness has favoured before,' he said in a meditative voice. 'Yet Cromwell knows the King's tastes better than any man.' He sank down into her tall-backed chair and suddenly tossed the piece of bark into the fire. 'I would have you walk across the floor, elevating your arms as you ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... hair was streaked with grey. He was light- hearted then, and he was still buoyant with his fellows, still alert and vigorous, quick of speech and keen of humour—but only before the world. In his own home he was fitful of mood, impatient of the grave, meditative look of his wife, of her resolute tenacity of thought and purpose, of her unvarying evenness of mood, through which no warmth played. It seemed to him that if she had defied him—given him petulance for petulance, impatience for impatience, it ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... case that may well give to both Utilitarians and Anti-utilitarians pause—with this difference, however, that whereas it brings the former to an everlasting standstill, the latter may, after a while, go on complacently meditative, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... to," admitted Willie in less meditative tone. "Only last night I was thinkin' after I got to bed how would be the best way of givin' it to him. I've sorter set my heart on springin' it on him as ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... Wordsworth stand pre-eminent among our English poets in being almost exclusively occupied with one theme, the mystical interpretation of nature. Both poets are of a meditative, brooding cast of mind; but whereas Wordsworth arrives at his philosophy entirely through personal experience and sensation, Vaughan is more of a mystical philosopher, deeply read in Plato and the mediaeval alchemists. The constant comparison of natural with spiritual processes is, on the whole, ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... strong bond between them. And then, by different ways, following each his own bent of mind, they had attained to poesy. Lucien, destined for the highest speculative fields of natural science, was aiming with hot enthusiasm at fame through literature; while David, with that meditative temperament which inclines to poetry, was drawn by his tastes ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... day had culminated. It was nearly five o'clock in the afternoon. Mr. Norton was lying upon a lounge in Mr. Brown's apartment. Both gentlemen appeared to be in a meditative mood. The silence was only interrupted by the unusual sound of an ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... explained his position and difficulties, and it was quite obvious, judging from the glittering eyes and mobile mouth, that he poured his tale into peculiarly sympathetic ears. When he had finished, the negro stood for a considerable time gazing in meditative silence at the sky. ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... the event of a change of wind. He had whistled "St. Patrick's Day in the Morning," and was about beginning another interminable strain of the same kind. Claude was lounging about, and gradually drew nearer to the meditative Zac, whom ...
— The Lily and the Cross - A Tale of Acadia • James De Mille
... sensuous, and the sensuous temperament in its full strength is essentially solitary. The play of social intercourse, its quick transitions, and incessant demands, are fatal to free and uninterrupted abandonment to the flow of soft internal emotions. Rousseau, dreaming, moody, indolently, meditative, profoundly enwrapped in the brooding egoism of his own sensations, had to mix with men and women whose egoism took the contrary form of an eager desire to produce flashing effects on other people. We may be sure that as the two sides of his character—his notions of serious principle, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... think I could hit you,' said she, in a meditative tone of perfect unconsciousness as to the ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... from God, and passed majestic from our sight. The valley beneath us was littered with enormous boulders spilt from the ancient hollows of the hills. It must have been a great sight when the giants set them trundling down in work or play!—I said this to Vanna, who was looking down upon it with meditative eyes. She roused herself. ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... one should drink it with art. The mere commonplace drinks one absorbs with free heart; But this—once with care from the bright flame removed, And the lime set aside that its value has proved— Take it first in deep draughts, meditative and slow, Quit it now, now resume, thus imbibe with gusto; While charming the palate it burns yet enchants, In the hour of its triumph the virtue it grants Penetrates every tissue; its powers condense. Circulate ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... curate of Ivell still held aloof, tantalizing Frances by his elusiveness. Plainly he was waiting upon events. Millborne bore the reproaches of his wife and daughter almost in silence; but by degrees he grew meditative, as if revolving a new idea. The bitter cry about blighting their existence at length became so impassioned that one day Millborne calmly proposed to return again to the country; not necessarily to Exonbury, but, if they ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... to die," he pursued, in the same meditative tone, "that morning in the Pre Catalan. George Eveleth could have had my life for the asking. I'd never known him to miss his mark, and he wouldn't have missed me—if he hadn't had another destination for his bullet. I've regretted it more than once. I've had pretty nearly all that life could ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... 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 ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... seemed very beautiful. She liked lying in bed, staring out at the upper reaches of sombre sky. She liked it to be rainy when she woke up—there was something about leaden colour everywhere and falling rain that made you fit for nothing but placid staring, yet, at the same time, pleasantly meditative. Then was the time that the strange big things which filter through your dreams linger evanescently in ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... he at last. "You must try to make her as comfortable as you can. There is consumption in the family, you see," he added, with a meditative sigh. ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... the river Jan took him alone; and not to the near water in Squire Walcote's grounds, but to the old bridge that crossed the Amber some way out of the village. It was the typical Cotswold bridge, with low parapets that make such a comfortable seat for meditative villagers. Just before they reached it she loosed Tony's hand, and held her breath to see what he would do. Would he run straight across to get to the other side, or would he ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... I have told you everything that could be demanded of me," said the Princess, looking coldly meditative. It seemed as if she had exhausted her emotion in their former interview. The fact was, she had said to herself, "I have done it all. I have confessed all. I will not go through it again. I will save myself from agitation." And she ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... pursed about the eyes with seafaring. And now that I came to look, the three rowers forward, though mere lads, repeated their elders' features and build; the gaunt frame, the long, serious face, the swarthy complexion and meditative eye—in short, Don Quixote of la Mancha at various stages of growth. Men and lads, I remarked, wore ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the intellect are so allied, that some imaginative power usually appears in all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of the first class, but especially in meditative men of an intuitive habit of thought. This class serve us, so that they have the perception of identity and the perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe, never ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Mary Magdalene and St. Barbara, the former as the type of penance, humility, and meditative piety, the latter as the type of fortitude and courage, is also very common. When between St. Mary Magdalene and St. Catherine, the idea suggested is learning, with penitence and humility; this is a most popular group. So is St. Lucia ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... what he meant to imply, and I also knew that he knew that I understood that he considered me a disturbing element. Then he again raised the half-demolished hunk of bread to his mouth, stopped and regarded the apple in meditative indecision. From head to heels he was clothed in the most exquisite white flannel and buckskin tennis clothes, but for all their civilized worldliness he resembled nothing so much as a feeding king of the forest in the poise of his wonderful head and equally wonderful body. I glanced ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... reached the carriage and pair when this meditative remark escaped him. Thinking he was referring to some other gee-gee of his, possibly one called appropriately after the Falls, and which was being broken in, I said that I thought the present pair went very well in harness together and had a lot ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... the Alderman failed. There is a feeling which universally pervades landsmen and landswomen, when they first embark on an element to which they are strangers, that ordinarily shuts their mouths and renders them meditative. In the older and more observant travellers, it is observation and comparison; while with the younger and more susceptible, it is very apt to take the character of sentiment. Without stopping to analyze the cause, or the consequences, ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... and pretty girl—Miss Mildred Margrave—came and went this morning, and a peculiar, meditative look on her face, suggesting some recent experience, caused the artist to transfer her to his notebook. Her step was sprightly, her face warm and cheerful in hue, her figure excellent, her walk the most admirable thing about her—swaying, graceful, lissom—like ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... bull-fight, shaking its little banner of distraction and allurement. Pitt felt the confusion of them, and at the same time was more than vaguely conscious on the other side of a certain steady white light which attracted towards another goal. He walked on in meditative musing, slowly and carelessly, not knowing where he was going nor what he passed on the way; till he had walked far. And then he suddenly stopped, turned, and set out to go back the road he had come, but now with a quick, measured, steady footfall which gave no indication ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... them somewhat wistfully as their white apparelled figures went by—ten had already left the chapel. Two more passed, then other two, and last of all came one alone—one who walked slowly, with a dreamy, meditative air, as though he were deeply absorbed in thought. The light from the open door streamed fully upon him as he advanced—it was the monk who had recited the Seven Glorias. The stranger no sooner beheld him than he instantly stepped forward and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... he was the wisest man in our ranks. As large, as powerful, and as black as our good-looking Color-Sergeant, but more heavily built and with less personal beauty, he had a more massive brain and a far more meditative and systematic intellect. Not yet grounded even in the spelling-book, his modes of thought were nevertheless strong, lucid, and accurate; and he yearned and pined for intellectual companionship beyond all ignorant men whom ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... neither hens nor pigs of our own. But hens we must certainly keep. There is something very sociable, and quiet, and soothing, too, in their soliloquies and converse among themselves; and, in an idle and half-meditative mood, it is very pleasant to watch a party of hens picking up their daily subsistence, with a gallant chanticleer in the midst of them. Milton had evidently contemplated such a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... and a dog came from the laurel thickets of the valley where the white brook brawled with the rocks. They followed the deep line of the path across the ridges. The dog—a large lemon and white setter—walked, tranquilly meditative, at his ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... least have been blessed; and, perhaps, we—my valued rector and I—might possibly have seen more of him at church, than, I deeply regret, we have done.' He shook his head a little, as he smiled with a sad complacency on me through his blue steel spectacles, and then sipped a little meditative sherry. ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... it ever took me so long to say so few words, and though they were profoundly sincere they sounded unutterably shallow, irrelevant and grotesque. She made no effort to help me out, but sat silent, listening, with her meditative smile. 'It's my duty, dearest, as a man,' I rambled on. The more I love ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... so as to command a better view of the road. He watched in meditative silence until the tramp had become a mere blot upon the whiteness of the dusty road and had finally disappeared over the brow of a distant hill. Then he spoke in ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... Wake-Robin, a series of books on birds, flowers and rural scenes which has made him the successor of Thoreau as a popular essayist en the plants and animals environing human life. His later writings showed a more philosophic mood and a greater disposition towards literary or meditative allusion than their predecessors, but the general theme and method remained the same. His chief books, in addition to Wake-Robin, are Birds and Poets (1877), Locusts and Wild Honey (1879), Signs and Seasons (1886), and Ways of Nature (1905); these are in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... least 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 ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... betook myself after a protracted lunch and a meditative pipe, and, being the first to arrive—the jury having already been sworn and conducted to the mortuary to view the remains—whiled away the time by considering the habits of the customary occupants of the room by the light of the objects ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... there seems to be a warehouse of some company that makes an "aromatic disinfector." Wandering in there by chance, we stood delighted at the sweet medicinal savour that was wafted on the air. It had a most cheering effect upon our emunctory woes, and we lingered so long, in a meditative and healing ecstasy, that young women immured in the basement of the aromatic warehouse began to peer upward from the barred windows of their basement and squeak with astonished and nervous mirth. We blew a loud salute and ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... to their clergy, to the entire 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 ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the table, pushed his hat away from his broad, shining forehead, and then, meditative, absently lifted higher his carefully tended hand and lowered the singing gas-jet, only ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... old companion, just this, that I am very probably spending a meditative winter in gaol. The charge is that I did aid and abet a peculiarly ingenious gang of desperadoes to blow a jeweller's safe, knock the jeweller on the head and get safely away with the stuff. I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... not so much for what he did as for what he was. His services to the State were considerable, but not transcendent. He was a great man, but not pre-eminently a great emperor. He was a meditative sage rather than a man of action; although he successfully fought the Germanic barbarians, and repelled their fearful incursions. He did not materially extend the limits of the Empire, but he preserved and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... they deserved his force of faith, his earnestness, the glow and hurry of his thought, and the (if every third stump-speaker among us were not a Demosthenes, we should have said Demosthenean) eloquence of his verse; but here we meet him in a softer and more meditative mood. He seems a Berserker turned Carthusian. The half-mystic tone of "The Shadow and the Light" contrasts strangely, and, we think, pleasantly, with the warlike clang of "From Perugia." The years deal kindly with good men, and we find a clearer and ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... 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
... her. But to-night she was so wide-awake, and Joanna and Elin were so fast asleep, that every movement forcing itself upon her ear, made her more wide-awake still. The turning of keys and unlocking of drawers roused her to a whimsical meditative wonder. Poor Pam! What dead memories and coffined hopes was she bringing out to the dim light of her solitary candle? Was it possible that she ever cried over them a little when there was no one to see her relaxing mood? Poor Pam! Theo sighed ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... been the hardest of workers at Eton. Though some kinds of study and reading came as easily as boating to him, he was not of the material that usually makes the first-rate Eton scholar. There had sprung up in him a meditative yearning after wide knowledge which is likely always to abate ardor in the fight for prize acquirement in narrow tracks. Happily he was modest, and took any second-rate-*ness in himself simply as a fact, not as a marvel necessarily to be accounted for by a ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the Greek and Mediaeval artists. Nature, we 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, and Naiads ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... and very subtle was the vibrant stir of that wire as it conveyed back to his ear the little sigh with which she made answer to his plea. He took his way upward in a mood which was meditative ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... that is an exceedingly cynical and stupid story," observed the girl. "And so I shall be off to look for Jurgen. For he makes love very amusingly," says Dorothy, with the sweetest, loveliest meditative smile that ever was lost ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... 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 ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... arrived as the Regent had just quitted the two persons with whom he had been talking. The Comte de Toulouse was in his mantle, and saluted the company with a grave and meditative manner, neither accosting nor accosted: M. le Duc d'Orleans found himself in front of him and turned towards me, although at some distance, as though to testify his trouble. I bent my head a little ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... theory, too," said Rolfe, in a meditative tone. "And the only person who can tell us which is the right one is Sir Horace's lady friend. The problem ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... of nothing more to say, and he smoked in silence. Neilson had apparently no wish to break it. He looked at his guest with a meditative eye. He was a tall man, more than six feet high, and very stout. His face was red and blotchy, with a network of little purple veins on the cheeks, and his features were sunk into its fatness. His eyes were bloodshot. ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... smallest coins are those which have the greatest intrinsic value, so Phokion in his speeches seemed to say much with few words. We are told that once while the people were flocking into the theatre Phokion was walking up and down near the stage, plunged in thought. "You seem meditative, Phokion," said one of his friends. "Yes, by Zeus," answered he, "I am considering whether I can shorten the speech which I am going to make to the Athenians." Demosthenes himself, who despised the other orators, when Phokion rose used to whisper to his friends, "Here comes ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... 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 which the more dramatic talent indulges ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of witch-meeting? Be it so, if you will; but, alas, it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown! a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate, man, did he become from the night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath-day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen, because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... move on another stone. He was fully awake and alert instantly. The horses were still in the middle of the plain, quietly feeding, but one or two of them were looking at an old tree stump in the curious meditative way which resting animals have of looking at things which ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... mention of her novices' names the Abbess turned on the two girls fiercely. "You minxes," she cried. "Do you make eyes at my man?" The pair shrank back from her fury, but Master Villon, who seemed suddenly to have fallen into a meditative mood, rambled on in a, kind of reverie, as indifferent to the Fircone and all his surroundings as if he were a lonely shepherd tending his sheep on a ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of the reader to the lowest point. Only extreme literary art can so nullify this effort in effect as to make description by detail pleasurable, if of any length. Description by detail is, perhaps, more admissible in writing having a meditative tone than in any other, except, ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... with his brush) 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 ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... psychical monologues which Browning has written. It seems to me that if these two poems only, "Prospice" and "Rabbi Ben Ezra," were to survive to the day of Macaulay's New Zealander, the contemporaries of that meditative traveller would have sufficient to enable them to understand the great fame of the poet of "dim ancestral days," as the more acute among them could discern something of the real Shelley, though time had preserved but ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... as a style of technique which he himself has largely created. The second movement of this, the march tempo, represents Schumann's imagination in a forcible light in two directions—its bold, strong moods, and its deeply subjective, meditative activity. The "Kreisleriana" consists of eight fantasies named after an old schoolmaster near Leipsic, noted for his eccentricities. This work was coldly received when first produced, but later has become very popular. ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... left; opposite is the bridge; over that, on the right, the thick dark foliage is blackening almost into sombreness as the night draws on. Immediately beneath are the arched cloisters resounding with the solitary footfall of meditative students, and suggesting grateful retirement. I say to myself then, as I sit in my open window, that for a continuance I would rather have this than any scene I have visited during the whole of our most enjoyed tour, and fetch ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... silvery wavelets. It was a night for meditation and prayer. Unhappy is the state of man who can look forth from the deck of a ship on such a scene and not feel gratitude to the Framer of the magnificent firmament above him,—whom it does not make more meditative, more prayerful, than his wont,—whom it does not cause to ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... time in our long connection I observed Jeeves almost smile. The corner of his mouth curved quite a quarter of an inch, and for a moment his eye ceased to look like a meditative fish's. ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... I yesterday observed, slow-pacing beside the waves, a meditative priest, who gave me some details regarding the ruined church of which Gissing speaks. It lies in the direction of the cemetery, outside the town; "its lonely position," he says, "made it interesting, and the cupola of coloured tiles (like that of the cathedral of Amalfi) remained ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... self-creation 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, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... the printed pages of the newspaper with no outward sign of excitement. Then he took out his money, quietly, and counted it, with meditative ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... she never looked his way, he took a wicked pleasure in surreptitiously closing first one eye and then the other in her direction. This might not entirely satisfy the aspirations of his soul, yet it seemed to serve as some vent for his pent-up spirit. He turned to his spouse with a pleasantly meditative air. ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... 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
... essential loss of intelligibility through the suppression of the dialogue. 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 ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... he went on in a meditative way, "even to the feet, but the feet I came back and saved, cutting the burnt bone from them, and hid them under the stone bench there, wrapped up in a piece of linen. Surely, I remember it as though it were but yesterday. Perchance they are there, if none have found them, even to this hour. ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... in a meditative way. "Well," he drawled, "He haven't made many, true enough. I'm not sayin' He mightn't have made more. But He've done very well. They's enough—oh, ay, they's enough t' get along with. For, look you! lad, they's no real need o' any more. 'Twas ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... the carriage and pair when this meditative remark escaped him. Thinking he was referring to some other gee-gee of his, possibly one called appropriately after the Falls, and which was being broken in, I said that I thought the present pair went very well in harness together and had a lot ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... fate of all drama other than that of contemporary or frivolous life, is a kindred question not without interest. The mind naturally flies to the triumphs of the Hellenic and Elizabethan theatre in exhibiting scenes laid "far in the Unapparent," and asks why they should not be repeated. But the meditative world is older, more invidious, more nervous, more quizzical, than it once was, and being ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... man inured to camps and battles shines in the modest unconsciousness of a Christian gentleman or meditative sage, we feel unusual reverence for him. We feel that his soul is unpolluted, and that he ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... humourists are trying to live with?" said the Duke, in a meditative tone. "I think they brighten life a good deal; but of course there are people who do not ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... allied sovereigns were there, and obtained an interview with the Russian tzar. Alexander was by nature of a devotional turn of mind, and the terrific scenes through which he had passed had given him a meditative and pensive spirit. He listened eagerly to the suggestions of Madame Krudoner, and, aided by her, sketched as follows the plan of ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... Peter looked meditative and stitched. "Old Fitz," he murmured, "is one of the best. A real sportsman.... Don't, Elmslie; I didn't think of that, I heard Childers say it. Childers also said, 'By Jove, old Fitz knocks spots out of 'em every time,' but I don't know what he meant. I'm trying ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... And thus the soul, By that sweet taste of pleasure unpursued Doth find herself [13] insensibly disposed To virtue and true goodness. 105 Some there are, By their good works exalted, lofty minds And meditative, authors of delight And happiness, which to the end of time Will live, and spread, and kindle: even such minds [14] 110 In childhood, from this solitary Being, Or from like wanderer, haply have received [15] (A thing more precious far than all ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... Mrs. Manstey's 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 in vague memories of a trip to Europe, ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... of the ship agreed with him, for he made no immediate answer. For several moments he remained in meditative silence, his brow wrinkled, as though he was turning the whole thing over and ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... interval 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 think you ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... listened attentively while Leroy described his first groping efforts to determine whether or not he personally possessed psychic powers. He began with regular periods of mental concentration, an opening of the soul, as it were, to spirit impressions; he would sit alone, in a state of meditative receptiveness for ten or fifteen minutes every day, and later several times a day, waiting for something to happen—he did not ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... the question," resumed the marquise, after a meditative pause. "We are both still beautiful enough to inspire love, but we could never convince any one of ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... 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 have once ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... that day. When, as often happened, she looked dreamy and meditative, I instantly recollected the colonel on the parade ground, and I felt so awkward and uncomfortable that I began to see her less frequently. So my love came to naught. Yes; such chances arise, and they alter and direct a man's ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... meditate day and night, that "he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper." Here the devout meditative student of the blessed book of God is likened to an evergreen tree planted beside unfailing supplies of moisture; his fruit is perennial, and so is his verdure—and whatsoever he doeth prospers! More than a thousand years pass away, and, before ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... 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
... 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, but the tragic note is struck in most of ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... goblin motions of inanimate things. The lover thinking of his lass welcomes the night and the rapturous walks among well-known scenes and kindly objects. With glimmering lamps in the foliage and the not distant sounds of daily life, even the woods have nothing fearful to the meditative or the distraught. But in flight, with fear as a garment that can not be laid aside, the somber forms of the forest are more terrible than an army with banners, as a haunted house is a more unnerving dread than burglars or any form of night marauders. ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... shack of the house he placed the best chair for Nash and set about frying ham and making coffee. This with crackers, formed the meal. He watched Nash eat for a moment of solemn silence and then the foreman looked up to catch a meditative chuckle from ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... bad and overheated imitation of a French provincial town, we concede only so much to its modern character as to hire a fine open carriage in which to proceed inland toward Constantina. This city is reached after a calm, meditative ride through sunny hills and groves. After so quiet a preparation the first view of Constantina is fairly astounding. Encircled by a grand curve of mountainous precipices, rises a gigantic rock, washed by a moat formed of the roaring ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... neophyte will perceive in what meditative sphere of thought the Tablets may be used. The method of study is, as shown, a purely synthetic deduction of human ideas from spiritual symbols of universal principles. The Tablets themselves constitute a grand arcane Tarot of man, God and the universe, ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... a meditative tone, for it had occurred to him for a moment that the girl was now in his power; that he could compel her to get into the bow of the canoe, and might steer her to his home at Waruskeek if he chose, whether ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... the most beautiful, pall upon him, he extols the fancy, which can escape from reality and is not tied by place or season in its search for new joys. This is, of course, only a passing mood, as the extempore character of the poetry indicates. We see more of settled conviction in the deeply-meditative Ode to Autumn, where he finds the ideal in ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... did not seem to surprise him in the least or to make him think the worse of me. He looked at me for a while, pulling his long beard in a meditative fashion, ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... of gasp broke from Lady Richard's lips; she gazed helplessly at her friends. Fanny began to laugh. May preserved a meditative seriousness; she seemed to be reviewing Quisante's efforts in a ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... siege, attended by his favourite cats. Cardinal Richelieu was also fond of cats; and when we have enumerated the names of Cowper and Dr Johnson, of Thomas Gray and Isaac Newton, and, above all, of the tender-hearted and meditative Montaigne, the list is far from complete of those who have bestowed on the feline race ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... UP I ROSE. Contrast this active exuberant pleasure not unmixed with pain with the passive meditative joy that the preceding ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... departing figure with a meditative smile. "So entirely ill-natured have I never yet found any one. He cannot fail to come to grief of some sort. Many there be who squander their wits, but they reserve enough to keep house with. The hour of weakness comes for each one of us, when he turns fool and is open to parley." So entirely ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... reverse of poetical. For a soldier or an adventurer, the course of training through which he then passed would have been perfect;—his athletic sports, his battles, his love of dangerous enterprise, gave every promise of a spirit fit for the most stormy career. But to the meditative pursuits of poesy, these dispositions seemed, of all others, the least friendly; and, however they might promise to render him, at some future time, a subject for bards, gave, assuredly, but little hope of his shining ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... 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 ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... devil came you here?" ejaculated the stranger, putting aside the lute, which hung suspended from his neck by a diamond chain. "You are deeply in love with the dead, cavalier, to select such a place as this for the haunt of your meditative dreams." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... servant's story into reality 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 look on his face. ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... meditation and prayer. Unhappy is the state of man who can look forth from the deck of a ship on such a scene and not feel gratitude to the Framer of the magnificent firmament above him,—whom it does not make more meditative, more prayerful, than his wont,—whom it does not ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... girl, Duffy; you're worse than usual,' said her brother, setting his elbows on the table, and nibbling the end of the pen-holder in a meditative fashion. 'Of course he was properly introduced to the class ...
— That Scholarship Boy • Emma Leslie
... know, to get you to talk to me like this," said Sir Basil, after a meditative pause; "I saw a good bit of you in New York, but you never talked ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... evident characteristics of a musician. No doubt could be entertained whatsoever, by any who once saw him or his large meditative form, that music was his calling. The duties inherent to the post of "music taster" to the house of Novello, Ewer, & Co., he hopefully acquitted for many years, succeeding to that office on the retirement of my once, in a choral sense, esteemed conductor, Sir Joseph Barnby. The pianoforte ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... know 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 ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... origin to the system, now said to be the religion of one-third of the human race, begin with Prince Siddhartha, a young man disposed to be an ascetic, and inclined to retire from the world. In order to wean him from his meditative tendency, his father, in order to cure him, and prevent him from forsaking his caste, married him to a beautiful princess, and introduced him to the splendid dissipation of a luxurious court. A dozen years of this life convinced him that 'all was ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... hev a storm to-morrow," said Jim, relinquishing his pipe long enough to speak. He had been silent, and now his meditative gaze was on the west, through the cabin window, where a dull afterglow faded under the heavy laden clouds of night and left ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... of suggestion that in fifteen minutes the Happy Family had passed out of sight over the top of the grade; all save Andy Green, who told them he would be along after a while, and that they need not wait. He looked at the clock, smoked a meditative cigarette and went up to the White House, to attend the second meeting of the ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... second Canaan. The Bingerloch, the ruins, and the never-failing vines scattered among them, like verdant youth revelling amid age and decay, give a picture nowhere else exhibited, uniting to the joyousness of wine the sober tinge of meditative feeling. The hills back the picture, covered with feudal relics or monastic remains, mingled with the purple grape. Landscapes of greater beauty, joined to the luxuriance of fruitful vine ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... said he at last. "You must try to make her as comfortable as you can. There is consumption in the family, you see," he added, with a meditative sigh. ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... those evenings, in a word, which calls up, we know not why, a train of thought not altogether sad, nor wholly tender, but calm and meditative and averse to action. I had been wandering along thus for nearly an hour, musing deeply all the while, yet perfectly unconscious that I was musing, much more what was the subject of my meditations, when coming suddenly to the turn of the lane, the old summer-house met my eyes, and almost startled ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... room, there was now a constant, meditative, hooning whistling; but presently this ceased, and the silence seemed worse; for there is such a sense of hidden mischief in ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... 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
... pretty girl—Miss Mildred Margrave—came and went this morning, and a peculiar, meditative look on her face, suggesting some recent experience, caused the artist to transfer her to his notebook. Her step was sprightly, her face warm and cheerful in hue, her figure excellent, her walk the most admirable thing about her—swaying, graceful, lissom—like perfect dancing with ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... day she caught Sartorius looking at her in a meditative fashion, as though speculating about her mental condition. Each time she felt his gaze upon her she longed again to burst into laughter, her eyes danced, her mouth twitched. If only ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... the girl uttered distinctly, preserving her meditative pose, chin in hand, and a far-away ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... precisely, to Wordsworth's among English poets. With no humor, with somewhat restricted sympathies, with little flexibility or openness to new impressions, but gifted with a high, austere imagination, Bryant became the meditative poet of nature. His best poems are those in which he draws lessons from nature, or sings of its calming, purifying, and bracing influences upon the human soul. His office, in other words, is the same which Matthew ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... much musical sectarianism. There has been much contention whether the music of the modern Italian school, that of Rossini and his successors, be impassioned or not. Without doubt, the passion it expresses is not the musing, meditative tenderness, or pathos, or grief of Mozart or Beethoven. Yet it is passion, but garrulous passion—the passion which pours itself into other ears; and therein the better calculated for dramatic effect, having a natural adaptation for dialogue. Mozart also is great in musical oratory; but his most ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... for a moment with an expression of simple surprise, her eyes growing large. Then her glance fell to her dress, and when she again looked up her expression had changed to one which was at once meditative, humorous, and ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... 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 Nothing is so supple ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne • Michel De Montaigne
... of Plymouth; nor was other treatment to be expected from the learned and accomplished Bradford. In appearance he was somewhat less than fifty years of age, with a mild and thoughtful expression of countenance, which revealed to the close observer as much of the meditative student as of the man of action. A thorough receiver and admirer of the principles of the sect to which he belonged, it was the business of his life to illustrate them by his learning, and enforce them by ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... 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
... as he grew more intimate, became less conversational, and after the sisters had blushingly accorded him the privilege of a pipe he began to permit himself long stretches of meditative silence that were not without charm to his hostesses. There was something at once fortifying and pacific in the sense of that tranquil male presence in an atmosphere which had so long quivered with little feminine ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... she referred had not been unregarded by the individual she addressed, and while she spoke, his looks assumed a meditative expression, and he replied as in soliloquy, and in ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... flung herself upon the bed, a little meditative frown puckering her forehead, and began a mental checking up of all the hundred and ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... ugly and forbidding exterior. One morning in the month of November, A.D. 1818, this man arose before daylight, and on coming out of the apartment where he slept he was surprised at finding old Moya in the kitchen, sitting over the raked-up fire, and smoking her tobacco-pipe in a very serious and meditative mood. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... 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 everlasting mountains ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... fashion. Surely we ought to use thoughts like these of my text in order to stay the soul in seasons which come to every one sometimes, when we are made painfully conscious of the transiency of this Present. Meditative hours come to us all—moments when perhaps some strain of music gives us back childhood's days; when perhaps some perfume of a flower reminds us of long-vanished gardens and hands that have crumbled into dust; when some ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... l'), elder son of M. and Mme. de l'Estorade; godson of Louise de Chaulieu, who was Baronne de Macumer and afterwards Mme. Marie Gaston. Born in December, 1825; educated at the college of Henri IV. At first stupid and meditative, he awakened afterwards, was crowned at Sorbonnne, having obtained first prize for a translation of Latin, and in 1845 made a brilliant showing in his thesis for the degree of doctor of laws. [Letters of Two Brides. The Member ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... Mr. Cottrell, in a meditative manner; "I have known Lady Mary for many years, and that is her great charm as a hostess. She is always anxious that her guests should amuse themselves after their own fashion. Too many of our entertainers, alas! will insist upon it we shall amuse ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... built up out of such and such constituent parts! As if happiness were not essentially accidental—a bright and wandering bird, utterly irregular in its migrations; with us one summer's day, and forever gone from us on the next! Look at marriages, for instance," mused Robert, who was as meditative in the jolting vehicle, for whose occupation he was to pay sixpence a mile, as if he had been riding a mustang on the wild loneliness of the prairies. "Look at marriage! Who is to say which shall be the one judicious selection out of nine hundred and ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... and pulling out his pipe began to smoke. A new growth of grass and bushes was springing up; there were traces of an earthwork under a mass of thorny twigs. "It all started from here," he said, after a long and meditative silence. On the other hill, two hundred yards across a sombre precipice, I saw a line of high blackened stakes, showing here and there ruinously—the remnants of Sherif Ali's ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... the pulse; but, what is very singular, the skin of the face is not colored blue in this subject, as is ordinarily the case in asphyxia from submersion," answered the doctor with imperturbable coolness, looking at Fleur-de-Marie with an air profoundly meditative. ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... every object wore that aspect of mesmeric fixity which the suspensive quietude of daybreak lends to such scenes. Outside her window helpless immobility seemed to be combined with intense consciousness; a meditative inertness possessed all things, oppressively contrasting with her own active emotions. Beyond the road were some cottage roofs and orchards; over these roofs and over the apple-trees behind, high up the slope, and backed by the plantation on the crest, was the house yet occupied by her future ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... the man, has been intensely modified by the humanities and moral personalities distinguishing the subject. We read a Physiology, and need no information as to the life and conversation of its author; a meditative poem becomes far better understood by the light of such information; but a work of genial and at the same time eccentric sentiment, wandering upon untrodden paths, is barely intelligible without it. There is a good reason for arresting judgment on the writer, that the court ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... was in no meditative mood, the old horse was, and he halted at intervals to ponder over the load he was drawing, and ask why on this occasion he had to drag uphill two ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... 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
... irregularly, but by no means unbearably, for about twelve hours. My hope lay in the wind abating, and our keeping in the air and eastward of Finisterre until it did, and the chief danger was the exhaustion of our petrol. It was a long and anxious and almost meditative time; we were fairly warm, and only slowly getting hungry, and except that my uncle grumbled a little and produced some philosophical reflections, and began to fuss about having a temperature, we talked very little. I was tired ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... she once asked, and when he gave a surly answer she said, carelessly, "You better get something from the doctor," and began to sing immediately afterwards. But she knew how he looked even when her back was turned, and she often stared at Mary in a meditative way as though the child were the doubtful quantity ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... pools, and the brooding notes of leaf-hidden mocking-birds." But the beauty and pathos of human life were not forgotten; and now and then he touched upon the great spiritual truths on which the splendid heroism of his life was built. For delicacy of feeling and perfection of form, his meditative and religious poems deserve to rank among the best in our language. They contain what is so often lacking in poetry of this class, genuine ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... not least 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 ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... With a slow, meditative step he went back to the curtained doorway and, pulling aside the hangings, went out on to the balcony. It was four o'clock, and already the heat of the day had broken. Long rays of sunlight struck eastward across the garden and touched with their faded golden fingers the topmost ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... Genestas' hand as an invitation to follow him, and they went out. By this time the first room was full of people who had come from another mountain commune; all of them waited in meditative silence, as if the sorrow and grief that brooded over the house had already taken possession of them. As Benassis and the commandant crossed the threshold, they overheard a few words that passed between one of the newcomers and the eldest son of ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... stand only on one round of an upward course—only in a little segment of the immense plan? I will merely say now, that if, through faith, religion is a help to these by interpreting life in harmony with individual experience, so through this faith does it help the meditative man troubled by the general problem of existence and humanity. The meaning of these various conditions in the city—the meaning of these sins, and sorrows, and inequalities—the meaning of this tide of life itself that rolls in endless succession ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... pension had gone over to the Cheniere Caminada in Beaudelet's lugger to hear mass. Some young people were out under the wateroaks playing croquet. Mr. Pontellier's two children were there sturdy little fellows of four and five. A quadroon nurse followed them about with a faraway, meditative air. ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... 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, even granting that all composition ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... taken. A patient, and an easy interlocutor, he was a home questioner, and he could listen—a rare talent in the grandees of the earth. He carried with him into battle a cool and impassable courage. Never was mind so deeply meditative, more fertile in rapid and sudden illuminations. On becoming Emperor he ceased not to be the soldier. If his activity decreased with the progress of age, that was owing to the decrease of his physical powers. In games of mingled ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... faultless as if Grace herself had moulded them on her lathe. Their clothing was a deep rich purple. White villas, like pearls, sparkled upon them; and they were dotted with the cypress, which stood on their sides in silent, meditative, ethereal grace. The scene possessed not the sublime grandeur of Switzerland, nor the rugged picturesqueness of Scotland: its characteristic was the finished, spiritualized, voluptuous beauty of Italy. But hark! the ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... 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 turned away ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... that Mrs. Pendomer mounted, in meditative mood, to Mrs. Musgrave's rooms; and that Mrs. Pendomer, recovering her breath, entered, without knocking, into a gloom where cologne and menthol and the odor of warm rubber contended for mastery. For Patricia had ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... and another way out!" he said, his voice sinking to a sort of meditative croon—"One road to the West, and the other to the East!—and round about to the meeting-place! Ou ay! Ye'll ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... eager questioner of bronze, as the west wind caught the lovely banner and waved it, oh, so gently, over this hallowed spot. A robin repeated his evening song softly from a maple near it, and a mourning dove began his meditative cooing. Slowly we left the secluded place where the hero and heroine slumber and returned to the Wayside Inn, while myriads of stars began to sparkle and gleam on the vast field of blue above, reminding us that "ever the stars above ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... gentle music of the brook, Its solitary, meditative song. On every hill Some stream has birth, Some lyric rill, To wake the selfish earth, And smile and toss the heavens their shining look, Repeat and every flash of life prolong. In spite of play, Along its cheerful way It turns to rest beneath some sheltering tree In richer beauty; Or at call of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... himself to interest himself about them any further; that a dinner with a friend, or a game at backgammon, put them all to flight, and restored him to the undoubting belief of all the maxims which his meditative hours had stripped him of. It was natural, Harrington said; for such scepticism was impossible. He added, however, that, had Hume been honest, he would never have employed his subtilty in the one-sided way he did; "for," said he, "if his principles be true, they tell just as ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... 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. ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... put my foot in it, saying what I did," said Rutherford, staring through his eye-glasses in a meditative manner, "but it did make me hot, their insinuating things in that way about such a nice little girl as Lyle, ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... 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 own age as one section in ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... two parts; the first is a sonnet sequence describing the author's capture with his battalion in the great March Offensive, his weary tramp as a prisoner, and internment in a German camp; the second consists of a series of meditative sonnets on these inevitably suggested by close confinement. The poems show great promise, their intense sincerity being ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... stick between his knees, the old man leant his hands upon it, with a meditative and judicial air. The boy stood looking down at him, a broad smile lighting up the dark and vivid face. Old 'Lias supplied him with a perpetual ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... from Kew caught a distant view Of a peacefully meditative gnu, And he said: "I'll pursue, and my hands imbrue In its blood at a closer interview." But that beast did ensue and the hunter it threw O'er the top of a palm that adjacent grew; And he said as he flew: "It is well ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... his chair so as to command a better view of the road. He watched in meditative silence until the tramp had become a mere blot upon the whiteness of the dusty road and had finally disappeared over the brow of a distant hill. Then he spoke in ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... an atmosphere of Indian scents and cigarette smoke, she talked and I made endless notes, while now and then, when she was meditative, her maids sang to an accompaniment of rather melancholy wooden flutes. But whenever I showed a tendency ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... resembled an idol. The Director, satisfied the anchor had good hold, made his way aft and sat down amongst us. We exchanged a few words lazily. Afterwards there was silence on board the yacht. For some reason or other we did not begin that game of dominoes. We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... Ally gave a meditative laugh. "Do you know what she told me before she went away? She told me she was going to send for me to come over to Springfield and make some things ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... than resentful; yet she realized that it contained a disagreeable sting. Was her long day over at last? Had the sun set on her conquests? Had her adventurous return to power been merely a prelude to the ultimate Waterloo? Lifting her eyes suddenly from her plate she met the deep meditative gaze of John Benham across the marigolds on the table; and the faint flush that kindled her face made her eyes glow like embers. Had he read the thought in her mind? Was the tenderness in his glance only an ironical comment on the ignominious end of ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... of girded faith in the Flight into Egypt, the haste of obedience, not of fear; and unweariedness, but through spiritual support, and not in human strength—Swift obedience of passive earth to the call of its Creator, in the Resurrection of Lazarus—March of meditative gladness in the following of the Apostles down the Mount of Olives—Rush of adoration breaking through the chains and shadows of death, in the Spirits in Prison. Pacing of mighty angels above the Firmament, poised ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... things, and was such a failure all round. Sir Edmund forgot her existence, as she knew he would, and walked up and down the verandah with bent head and hands clasped behind his back. Sometimes he trod firmly and even whistled in a meditative way, and then he would pull himself up suddenly and creep backwards and forwards in silence, remembering the task in which his wife was engaged. It was long before Lady Antony came out, with swollen eyes, and called softly to ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... learned to expect and to—dread. I knew what he meant to imply, and I also knew that he knew that I understood that he considered me a disturbing element. Then he again raised the half-demolished hunk of bread to his mouth, stopped and regarded the apple in meditative indecision. From head to heels he was clothed in the most exquisite white flannel and buckskin tennis clothes, but for all their civilized worldliness he resembled nothing so much as a feeding king of the forest in the poise ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... moving wind caught and drew out upon itself a long weft of aerial vapour, that showed a delicate blue against the rose-flushed west. The long lines of leafless trees, the faint outlines of the low distant hills, seemed wrapped in meditative silence, dreaming wistfully, as the earth turned her broad shoulder to the night, and as the forlorn and chilly sunset faded by soft degrees on the horizon. As the day thus died, the frost made itself felt, ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... from month to month and year to year. In 1867, Padre Cristoforo of the Benedictine Monastery, looked scarcely older than when he picked out a nurse for the Luttrell family in 1854. He was a tall man, with a stooping gait and a prominent, sagacious chin; deep-set, meditative, dark eyes, and a somewhat fine and subtle sort of smile which flickered for a moment at the corner of his thin-lipped mouth, and disappeared before you were fully conscience of its presence. He was summoned ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... real or dramatic, which informs the sonnets of Shakespeare. So the poem stands alone, cloistered; not fiery with indignation, not breaking into actual prophecy, like Shelley's Adonais; not capable, by reason even of its meditative metre, of the organ music of Lycidas. Yet it is not to be reckoned inferior to these because its aim and plan ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... mortal ever watched the ocean-roll or heard its thunder without feeling serious. I have noticed that even animals,—horses and cows,—become meditative in the presence of the sea: they stand and stare and listen as if the sight and sound of that immensity made them forget all ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... however, the Alderman failed. There is a feeling which universally pervades landsmen and landswomen, when they first embark on an element to which they are strangers, that ordinarily shuts their mouths and renders them meditative. In the older and more observant travellers, it is observation and comparison; while with the younger and more susceptible, it is very apt to take the character of sentiment. Without stopping to ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... the background of the picture, you will perceive that it is already of a dusky, sombre hue; now, this being of a meditative and grave character, has been denominated by our academy the 'brown-study color'; and it would clearly have been supererogatory to lay the same tint upon it. No, sir; we avoid repetitions even in our prayers, deeming them to be so many proofs ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... mean by this?" Razumov asked himself, turning his eyes fully on his companion. The face of Peter Ivanovitch expressed a meditative seriousness. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... sauntering upon the sidewalk, see her pass, I pay homage to her beauty, and her lover can do no more; and if, perchance, my garments—which must seem quaint to her, with their shining knees and carefully brushed elbows; my white cravat, careless, yet prim; my meditative movement, as I put my stick under my arm to pare an apple, and not, I hope, this time to fall into the street,—should remind her, in her spring of youth, and beauty, and love, that there are age, and care, and poverty, also; then, perhaps, the good fortune ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... endurance, and that her soul felt bondage as her body would have felt a harrow. So I left the fugitives of Egyptian slavery under the frown of the Almighty in the wilderness of Sin; Sidney was trusting me; uncle and aunt were trusting me; and between them I was getting into a narrow corner. After a meditative silence my questioner asked: ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... 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, the broad and massive ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... head. His hair and very scanty whiskers were gray; but, then too, he was gray from head to foot. The colour of his trade had so clung to him, that no one could say whether that grayish whiteness of his face came chiefly from meal or from sorrow. He was a silent, sad, meditative man, thinking always of the evil things that had been ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... or accumulative learning. Certainly, there is a power of a delight that the world can never realize outside the region of the brain. If that needs proof you have only, dear friends, to meditate upon such lives as Newton, or Shakespeare, or Kepler, or if you turn to the region of meditative thought, to such lives as our own George Eliot—yes, there is that in the mere exercise of intellect which is intoxicating, which is consoling even to the highest degree. But intellect, after all, finds its frontier. I may say ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... Doctor in a meditative voice, "and L400 is a good deal of money. It is not easily earned, and with a large family it is always wanted. That's what your mother said, and she was very wise. Still, still, children, I keep forgetting how old you are. In reality you are, neither of you, ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... 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 ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... clock, to see if there was time for a cigarette before church, lit it, and, leaning against the window, gazed towards the hazy park with a meditative air. ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... He had never had a 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 ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... with a twisted mind Of the nasty, meditative kind. He'd meditate on the modes of Gosh, And dared to muse on the acts of Splosh; He dared to speak, and, worse than that, He spoke out loud, and he said it flat. "Why climb?" said he. "When you reach the top There's nowhere to go, and you have to ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... Of the three volumes of collected works, each may be had separately, and is complete in itself. The first contains "The Search after Proserpine, and other Poems—Classical and Meditative." The second contains the "Legends of St. Patrick, and Legends of Ireland's Heroic Age," including a version of the "Tain Bo." The third contains two plays, "Alexander the Great," "St. Thomas of Canterbury," ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... answer, and they walked on in meditative silence toward the roadside inn, which stood up against the southern sky a ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... the personal nobility which distinguished him as a thinker and a man, was not of the heroic type. He had nothing Homeric in his inspiration, nothing of the warrior or the patriot in his nature. His genius, when it pursued its bias, found instinctive utterance in elegy and idyl, in meditative rhetoric and pastoral melody. In order to assume the heroic strain, Tasso had recourse to scholarship, and gave himself up blindly to the guidance of Latin poets. This was consistent with the tendency of the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... years old. She was a good child, and not shallow, not frivolous, but meditative and thoughtful, and much given to thinking out the reasons of things and trying to make them harmonize with ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the book; exquisite glimpses into the loveliness of nature here and there shine out from its lines,—a charm wanting which meditative writing always seems to have a defect; beautiful gleams, too, there are of the choicest things of art, and frequent allusions by the way to legend or picture of the religious past; so that, while you read, you wander by a clear brook of thought, coining far from the beautiful hills, and winding ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Miser often sat leaning his head on his hand, a meditative, half whimsical expression on his face, as if he found both wonder and amusement in the chance that had so strangely brought these ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... he was scrupulous of accepting favours; he was strong in the love of independence, and he had saved twenty pounds at the period of his death. His general appearance did not indicate intellectual superiority; his countenance was calm and meditative, his eyes were gray, and his hair a light-brown. In person, he was under the middle size. Not ambitious of general learning, he confined his reading chiefly to poetry. His poems are much inferior to his songs; of the latter will be found admirers while the Scottish language ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... obeyed. Gerard was still occupying the centre of the diamond, holding the ball aloft while his meditative gaze apparently dwelt on the batsman. There was scarcely a perceptible turn of his brown head, yet as the two in the car watched, the impromptu pitcher's glance flashed from behind his uplifted arm and he whirled ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... surely, thought I, there's enou To fill life's dusty way; And who will miss a poet's feet, Or wonder where he stray! So to the woods and wastes I'll go, And I will build an ozier bower; And sweetly there to me shall flow The meditative ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... is comparatively a fixed, a secluded and a meditative life. She is more the companion of her own thoughts and feelings; and if they are turned to ministers of sorrow, where shall she look for consolation? Her lot is to be wooed and won; and if unhappy in her love, her heart is her world—is like some ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... significance. "In a little time the cathedrals and churches will have taken upon themselves the proud, poetical glamour of abandoned temples. Men and women will enter them with reverent indulgence as they now in meditative mood visit the few remaining pantheons of the pagan worship." (Llewelyn Powys: "An ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... in learning that his friend had in fact departed by the eight o'clock train—the morning was now well advanced; and then, over his breakfast, he gave himself up to meditative surprise. What had happened during the evening—what had happened after their conversation in Gordon's room? He had gone to Mrs. Vivian's—what had happened there? Bernard found it difficult to believe that he had gone there simply to notify her that, having talked it over with an intimate friend, ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... may 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 below the surface; ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... own meagre possessions in their proper receptacles, which was the girls after-breakfast occupation, she came upon an unfinished silk purse, and this served to bring an end for a time to the restoration of order, while she sat upon the floor in a meditative attitude. Presently she laid it on the bureau with a little sigh and returned to her task. Once this was completed, she again took the purse, and seating herself, set about ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... bridge; over that, on the right, the thick dark foliage is blackening almost into sombreness as the night draws on. Immediately beneath are the arched cloisters resounding with the solitary footfall of meditative students, and suggesting grateful retirement. I say to myself then, as I sit in my open window, that for a continuance I would rather have this than any scene I have visited during the whole of our most enjoyed tour, and fetch down a Thucydides, for I must go to ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... 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 ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... there is more truth in that remark than either you or I would at first think," said the painter in a meditative tone. ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... the trader would never finish the meditative caressing of his beard, but at last he arose and called for his scales. The Dane took the little heap of silver rings weighed out to him, and strode out of the tent. At the same time, he passed out of the English boy's life. What a pity that the result of their short acquaintance ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... flattered Standish, but Robinson's later criticism of his methods at Weymouth hurt the little captain cruelly. He seems to have cherished an intense affection for the Leyden pastor, such as valorous natures often feel for meditative ones, and that Robinson died before he—Standish—could justify himself was a deep grief to the soldier to whom mere physical hardships were as nothing. We do not know a great deal about this relationship between the two men: in this ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... 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
... rude, and silly, and publicly rebuked. She sat with cheek on fire, and a little natural water in her eyes, and looked ten times comelier and more womanly and interesting than she had done all day. The desertion of the best narrator broke up the party, and the unassuming Denys approached the meditative mijauree, and invited her in the most flattering terms to gamble with him. She started from her reverie, looked him down into the earth's centre with chilling dignity, and consented, for she remembered all in a moment what a ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... Seeing her meditative, Deane slipped away to his cigar, and she sat in the hotel hall, musing. Deane's revelation of Charlie's treachery hardly surprised her; she meant to upbraid him severely, but she was conscious that, if little surprised, she was hardly more than a little angry. His conduct was ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... answered, Dave chewed a meditative cud. "Maybeso you're right—and maybe 'way off. Say you're wrong. Say Meldrum has nothing to do with this. In that case it is in the hills that we have got to find ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... gird his waist With a monk's rope, like Luther? or pursue The goat, like Tell? or dry his nets in haste, Like Masaniello when the sky was blue? Keep house, like other peasants, with inlaced Bare brawny arms about a favourite child, And meditative looks beyond the door (But not to mark the kidling's teeth have filed The green shoots of his vine which last year bore Full twenty bunches), or, on triple-piled Throne-velvets sit at ease to bless the poor, Like other pontiffs, in the Poorest's name? The old tiara keeps itself ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... further meditative surmising, and I crept swiftly to a point of vantage, and with sweep-net awaited their reappearance. It was five minutes before faint, discolored spots indicated their rising, and at least two minutes more before they actually disturbed the surface. With eight or nine ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... when the tide is out and the high ground the other side of the river is assuming undefinable shadows, the little town has other charms to the meditative man. Such life as there is, is confined to the taverns and the two or three narrow little streets which comprise the town. The tree-planted walk by the river is almost deserted, and the last light of the dying day is reflected in the pools and ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... great and needful advantages attendant upon the use of them. Then Dolly begged for instances. Had we, Americans, ever fought at sea? Mr. Eberstein answered that, and gave her details of facts, while Mrs. Eberstein sat by silent and watched Dolly's serious, meditative face. ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... those cultivated young Arabs, who discuss poetry, lolling indolently upon the cushions of a divan, while they roll between their fingers the amber beads of their rosary, or walking slowly under the arcades of a mosque, draped in their white-silk simars, with a serious and meditative air, gestures elegant and measured, courteous and harmonious speech, and something discreet, polite, and already clerical in their tone ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... rode along, silent and meditative, each occupied with his own thoughts, there came the assistance for which Thomas Seymour had prayed, fluttering along in the shape of ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... 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, a matter of ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... thoughts and sweet desires; and each may possibly have its own defect. I will not here describe the excellence or defect of either; but will, if it be in my power, say a word as to this difference. The German girl of one-and-twenty,— our Isa's age,—is more sedate, more womanly, more meditative than her English sister. The world's work is more in her thoughts, and the world's amusements less so. She probably knows less of those things which women learn than the English girl, but that which she does know is nearer ...
— The House of Heine Brothers, in Munich • Anthony Trollope
... with comfortable warmth, and I stretched my legs. My pipe was out and I refilled it. A meditative snail crawled up and ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... sings unseen The minstrelsy that solitude loves best), And from the sun, and from the breezy air, 20 Sweet influences trembled o'er his frame; And he, with many feelings, many thoughts, Made up a meditative joy, and found Religious meanings in the forms of Nature! And so, his senses gradually wrapt 25 In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds, And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark, That singest like an angel ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 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 ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... rather old-fashioned study 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... day, and dissipating all night. I can't possibly disturb her in her studio, for she has to work tremendously hard—and I'm decidedly not going to dissipate with her. So I shall have my days and nights to my sequestered and meditative self." ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... in 1845 or 1846 that the Howitts made the acquaintance of Tennyson, whose poetry they had long admired. 'The retiring and meditative young poet, Alfred Tennyson, visited us,' relates Mary, 'and cheered our seclusion by the recitation of his exquisite poetry. He spent a Sunday night at our house, when we sat talking together till three in the morning. All ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
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