|
|
|
More "Retrospect" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... illusions which we see in our daily experience in comparing past with present stretches of time. It is a well-known psychological experience that a filled time appears short in passing, but long in retrospect, while an empty time appears long in passing, but short in retrospect. Now this illusion of the open and filled space, for the finger-tip, is at every point similar to the illusion to which our time judgment is subject. If we pronounce judgment on a filled space ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... analysis of retrospect Stuart began to wonder at his host's strange behavior until of idle speculation suspicion was born, but as to that ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... the school, and the school had neither limited nor extended his individuality. Now he found himself completely taken possession of and made a part of something larger than himself, a carefully correlated and guarded system of ranks and rules and traditions. In retrospect the former school seemed as accidental and fleeting as a street crowd, while the new one was an institution with a jealously preserved and deeply revered history to which each new pupil was expected to add more lustre. But most ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... one day was so much like that of every other, that it afforded little of incident in her own labors to require a longer narrative. Painful as many of her experiences were, yet she found as did many others who engaged in it that it was a blessed and delightful work, and in the retrospect, more than a year after its close, she uttered these words in regard to it, words to which the hearts of many other patriotic women will respond, "I mark my Hospital days as my happiest ones, and thank God for the way in which ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... part of his character is accidental, the rest is natural. Such a man is positive and confident, because he knows that his mind was once strong, and knows not that it is become weak. Such a man excels in general principles, but fails in the particular application. He is knowing in retrospect, and ignorant in foresight. While he depends upon his memory, and can draw from his repositories of knowledge, he utters weighty sentences, and gives useful counsel; but as the mind in its enfeebled state cannot be kept long busy and intent, ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... had become so vital a part of him that her nearness had the quality of imperceptibly readjusting his point of view, so that the jumbled phenomena of experience fell at once into a rational perspective. In this redistribution of values the sombre retrospect of the previous evening shrank to a mere cloud on the edge of consciousness. Perhaps the only service an unloved woman can render the man she loves is to enhance and prolong his illusions about her rival. It was the fate of Margaret Aubyn's memory to serve as a foil to Miss Trent's presence, and ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... night in the downtown district was almost deserted, took the crushed letter from his pocket. For a moment he made no attempt to read it, his dark eyes, now that he was free from observation, full of troubled retrospect, fixed on the window at his side. It was not a pleasant thought that it had cost a man his life, nor yet that that life was also the price of his own freedom. True, if there were two men in the city of New York whose ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... formulated into certain products of art, literature, and criticism." Dealing with only one form of the social phenomenon, with sensualism so far as it appeared to affect contemporary poetry, the writer proceeded with a literary retrospect intended to show that the fair dawn of our English poetry in Chaucer and the Elizabethan dramatists had been overclouded by a portentous darkness, a darkness "vaporous," "miasmic," coming from a "fever-cloud generated first in Italy and then blown westward," sucking up on its way ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;—read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are. ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... coveted experience must be granted from without to make it a perfect experience. To ask and to be refused leave to stay till Monday would destroy for him the value of what he had already experienced in three days' residence; even to ask and to be granted the privilege would spoil it in retrospect. He went down the stairs from his room and stood in the little quadrangle, telling himself that at any rate he might postpone his departure until twilight and walk the seven miles from Shipcot to Wych-on-the-Wold. ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... to give a value to my recent labours, and my name may be remembered by after generations in Australia as the first who tried to penetrate to its centre. If I failed in that great object, I have one consolation in the retrospect of my past services. My path among savage tribes has been a bloodless one, not but that I have often been placed in situations of risk and danger, when I might have been justified in shedding blood, but I trust I have ever made allowance for ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... riveted on that desert land to which Fate—as he called his own conduct—had driven him. Yet, strange to say, his mysterious spirit found leisure to fly back to old England and revisit the scenes of childhood. But he had robbed himself of pleasure in that usually pleasant retrospect. He could see only the mild, sorrowful, slightly reproachful, yet always loving face of his mother when in imagination he returned home. It was more than he could bear. He turned to pleasanter memories. He was back again at ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... now I venture to let the season preach to us, and to confine myself simply to suggesting for you one or two very plain and obvious thoughts which may help to make our retrospect wise and useful. And there are two main considerations which I wish to submit. The first is —what we ought to be chiefly occupied with as we look back; and secondly, what the issue of such a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... names of musical history, a brief retrospect over the present century may be in place. The first quarter of the nineteenth century was distinguished by two composers of the first order—Beethoven and Schubert; and by a large number of highly gifted lesser artists, some of whom, such as Spohr and Weber, bid fair to remain long ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... reckless rioter which some writers have been anxious to describe, or whether we regard him as a sincere believer, comparing his past life (though neither licentious nor reckless) with the perfectness of the divine law, the retrospect might well depress him with a consciousness of his own unworthiness, and of his total inability to perform the work which he saw (p. 004) before him, without the strength and guidance of divine grace. For that strength ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... a rigid examination, and see how he was getting on with his duties. These interviews were rather formidable, being characterized by a certain stiffness which I felt to be sufficiently irksome at the moment, though it looks laughable enough in the retrospect. It is my firm belief that these fellow-citizens, possessing a native tendency to organization, generally halted outside of the door to elect a speaker, chairman, or moderator, and thus approached me with all the formalities of a deputation from the American people. After ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Confidence in each other had not yet replaced fear and suspicion. That the first attempt to come into a union could have been a success, that a sacrifice to the god Provincialism could have been avoided, seems in retrospect impossible. ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... discover the vast changes that are likely to come as a direct consequence of the present Armageddon, it is necessary to refer in brief retrospect to some of the main causes and features of the great European war. Meanwhile, I think the general feeling amongst all thoughtful men is best expressed in the phrase, "Never again." Never again ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... he had given her directions how to follow him to Ireland—for Adam knew that Arthur had been gone thither three weeks ago, having recently learnt it at the Chase. Every sad look of Hetty's, since she had been engaged to Adam, returned upon him now with all the exaggeration of painful retrospect. He had been foolishly sanguine and confident. The poor thing hadn't perhaps known her own mind for a long while; had thought that she could forget Arthur; had been momentarily drawn towards the ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... sum up a brief retrospect of the active spirit of discovery set astir, and not likely to die away, as a sequel to the great Burke and Wills Expedition, for by that name it will continue to be known. We have already seen that the Victoria ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... disclosed. The Preface, which stands as an introduction to his poems, is a miniature autobiography of great interest. M. Boissier in his Fin du Paganisme calls it melancolique: though it is rather the retrospect of a serious and awakened, but not morbid, conscience. Prudentius views his past years in the light of that new spiritual truth to which he has opened his soul. We gather that he received a liberal ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... two Presidents, what tales it could tell of notable gatherings! One must read the autobiography of Charles Francis Adams and "The Education of Henry Adams" to appreciate the charm of the succeeding mistresses of the noble homestead, and to enjoy in retrospect ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... abandonment of the innocent Hawkinses to the gallows, is the consequence of what Godwin expressly denounces, punishment for murder. "I conceived it to be in the highest degree absurd and iniquitous, to cut off a man qualified for the most essential and extensive utility, merely out of retrospect to an act which, whatever were its merits, could not be retrieved." Then a new element is imported into the train of causation, Caleb's insatiable curiosity, and the strife begins between these well-matched antagonists, the ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... they probably then wished, with their growing family, to farm themselves. Nothing seems then to have been settled, and they were too poor to risk the perils of a great law-suit. Doubtless, with sad hearts and bitter retrospect, they regretted their unlucky purchases in 1575, which seemed to have pinched them so, and wished at least they had been contented with the half, with the one tenement in Henley Street that formed part of their ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... mankind, the highway robber of the world, that threatens you. He has sent his hirelings among you with this false report, to put you off your guard, that you may fall an easy prey. Then look to your liberties, your property, the chastity of your wives and daughters. Take a retrospect of the conduct of the British army at Hampton, and other places where it entered our country, and every bosom which glows with patriotism and virtue, will be inspired with indignation, and pant for the arrival of the hour when we shall meet and revenge these outrages against the laws ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... now, and say what she has gained, or the world through her, from the last outburst of popular fury; which has not only left her the prey of charlatanism, but made her the victim of the grossest passions. Talleyrand was, undoubtedly, right in his retrospect, but his healthy convictions came too late to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... was a man again, physically and mentally sound, doing all reverence to the memory of his dead wife—a flawless angel in the retrospect—while finding natural solace in the company of living women who were also young and fair. The living women were much in evidence from the first; nothing but the sea could keep them from trying to comfort him. A big fellow, with a square, hard face, and a fist to fell an ox—that was just the ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... sweet Lina!" I shook my cloak loose from his hand, for his words sent a thrill of horror through me, and rushed on, speechless with indignation, to the house. Two days after this I became engaged to Arthur. How happy we were!' said Lina, a dreamy expression passing over her face at the retrospect. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... office. It was suggested to Hal that the success of the function warranted its being established as a regular feature of the shop. Later this was done. One of the participants, however, was very ill-pleased with the morning's entertainment. Dr. Surtaine saw, in retrospect and in prospect, his son being led astray into various radical and harebrained vagaries of journalism. None of those at the breakfast had foreseen more clearly than the wise and sharpened quack what serious difficulties beset the course which Hal ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... autobiography, represent the change that had come over Johnson's life. He was now a man at ease and wrote like one. For the note of disappointed youthful ambition which is only half concealed in the earlier works it substitutes an old man's kindliness of retrospect. Matters of less importance in these years were the publication of his Journey to the Western Islands, of the Prologue to Goldsmith's Good-Natured Man and of his political pamphlets, The False Alarm, Falkland's Islands, ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... what he meant in going to Mrs. Bowen's; in fact, he had done just what he had not meant to do, as he distinctly perceived in coming away. It was then that in a luminous retrospect he discovered his motive to have been a wish to atone to her for behaviour that must have distressed her, or at least to explain it to her. She had not let him do this at once; an instant willingness ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... of that gathering, little noted at the time, assumes strange significance in retrospect. At one platform Patrick Pearse, then headmaster of St. Enda's school, spoke in Irish. What he said may be ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... riddle is not impossible to read, would but the heart cease its hurry an instant; a tumbled sky where the break is coming. It came. The dear old days of my wanderings with Temple framed her face. I knew her without need of pause or retrospect. The crocus raising its cup pointed as when it pierced the earth, and the crocus stretched out on earth, wounded by frost, is the same flower. The face was the same, though the features were changed. Unaltered ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... application to the strange combinations of untoward circumstance that were now rising up with such deadly rapidity in every quarter of the horizon, like vast sombre banks of impenetrable cloud. Prudence in new cases, as has been somewhere said, can do nothing on grounds of retrospect. The work of the Constituent was doomed by the very nature of things. Their assumption that the Revolution was made, while all France was still torn by fierce and unappeasable disputes as to seignorial rights, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... others, they were on the far side of the hill, whence the paths are smooth and gentle and the prospect is peacefulness and the retrospect is dimly rosal. They dressed as they had done those twenty ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... clangour round thy soul: the pale Kingdoms yawn open; there must thou enter, naked, all unking'd, and await what is appointed thee! Unhappy man, there as thou turnest, in dull agony, on thy bed of weariness, what a thought is thine! Purgatory and Hell-fire, now all-too possible, in the prospect; in the retrospect,—alas, what thing didst thou do that were not better undone; what mortal didst thou generously help; what sorrow hadst thou mercy on? Do the 'five hundred thousand' ghosts, who sank shamefully on so many battle-fields from Rossbach to Quebec, that thy Harlot might take ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... composition. But this is to take for granted a theory of the relation between artist and production which has against it the general testimony of creator and critic alike. It is not at the pitch of an emotional experience that an artist successfully transmutes his life into art, but in retrospect, when his recollective imagination reproduces his mood in a form capable of being expressed without being dissipated. Of course, Shakespeare must have lived and enjoyed and suffered intensely; but this does not commit us to a belief in an immediate turning to account ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... that Morpheus waves his ebon wand in vain. The evening is fine beyond the power of description; all Nature is serene and harmonious, in perfect unison with my present disposition of mind. I have been taking a retrospect of my past life, and, a few juvenile follies excepted, which I trust the recording angel has blotted out with a tear of charity, find an approving conscience and a heart at ease. Fortune, indeed, ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... or malice, personal or national, every fresh accession to historic knowledge must be welcome. For every new-comer of proved merit, more especially if that merit should have been previously overlooked, he makes ready room in his recognition or his reverence. But no retrospect of scientific literature has as yet brought to light a claim which can sensibly affect the positions accorded to two great Path-hewers, as the Germans call them, whose names in relation to this subject are linked in ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... into the arguable points of this latest duel of the sexes, Mr. Punch, already in the last year which completes his fourth score, may be allowed to indulge in an old man's privilege of retrospect and incidentally to congratulate the ladies on the wonderful and triumphant progress they have made in instrumental art since the roaring 'forties. For in the 'forties women, though still supreme on the lyric stage, had hardly begun to assert themselves as executants, save on the pianoforte. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... evening, one as daring as the extremely daring fashions of that year permitted an unmarried woman to wear. It seemed to her that Siddall was still more costly and elegant-looking than before, though this may have been due to the fact that he always created an impression that in the retrospect of memory seemed exaggerated. It seemed impossible that anyone could be so clean, so polished and scoured, so groomed and tailored, so bedecked, so high-heeled and loftily coiffed. His mean little countenance with its grotesquely waxed mustache and imperial ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... is little to be feared from the malevolence of men, and yet less to be hoped from their affection or esteem. Something they may take away, but they can give me nothing. Riches would now be useless, and high employment would be pain. My retrospect of life recalls to my view many opportunities of good neglected, much time squandered upon trifles, and more lost in idleness and vacancy. I leave many great designs unattempted, and many ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... no. Better were it for thee thou hadst never been born." And so on, in the controversial dialect of the time, calling the vice-chancellor a "poor mushroom," and abusing him generally. Elsewhere, in a retrospect which I shall presently quote at length, he refers to his university experiences: "Of my persecution at Oxford, and how the Lord sustained me in the midst of that hellish darkness and debauchery; of ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... parent when the dear boy of his heart has been for a short time missing, and remembers the pangs of doubt, the apprehension, the painful forebodings, nay, the despair itself into which an absence protracted beyond custom, and not to be accounted for, has thrown him, will be able, from a retrospect of his reflections on such an occasion, to imagine what must have been the danger of this boy, and what the courage he must have had to encounter it—and will, while pondering with admiration upon his fortitude and manliness, tremble for his fate. This writer once asked ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... looms up on the retrospect of my memory as Number 3 was as unlike the Kentuckian, as the latter was to Thompson. He was a disciple of Esculapius—not thin and pale, as these usually are, but fat, red, and jolly. I think he was originally a "Yankee," though his long residence in the Western ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... the book of fate, and have seen the forty years' fearful afflictions that were to follow, I certainly should not have rejoiced at this my escape from Glatz. One year's patience might have appeased the irritated monarch, and, taking a retrospect of all that has passed, I now find it would have been a fortunate circumstance, had the good and faithful Schell and I never met, since he also fell into a train of misfortunes, which I shall hereafter relate, and from which he could never extricate himself, but by death. The sufferings which ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... of the fair. He composed a poem, of fifteen hundred lines, entitled "Mahomet, or the Hegira," and performed the extraordinary mental effort of retaining the whole on his memory, at the period being unable to write. "The Retrospect," a poem of more matured power, was announced in 1824. At the recommendation of friends, having proceeded to Edinburgh to seek the counsel of men of letters, he submitted the MS. of his poem to Professor Wilson, Dr M'Crie, Mr Glassford Bell, and others, who severally expressed their ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... common, wants a Name. It is the very contrary to Procrastination: As we lose the present Hour by delaying from Day to Day to execute what we ought to do immediately; so most of us take Occasion to sit still and throw away the Time in our Possession, by Retrospect on what is past, imagining we have already acquitted our selves, and established our Characters in the sight of Mankind. But when we thus put a Value upon our selves for what we have already done, any further than to explain our selves in order to assist our future Conduct, that ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... evidence, that which had preceded the present order of things, he then either misleads himself, or writes a fable for the amusement of his reader. A theory of the earth, which has for object truth, can have no retrospect to that which had preceded the present order of this world; for, this order alone is what we have to reason upon; and to reason without data is nothing but delusion. A theory, therefore, which is limited to the actual constitution ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... fountains sent a delightful mist across the pavement even to the street. It was all very cool and refreshing. She began to see where certain phases of city life might prove to be quite pleasant. The modern fleshpots may seem alluring not alone in retrospect. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... at Pola and Parenzo, and the same thing occurs at Sebenico. The hotel porters are not allowed to carry baggage to and from the steamers or the station; we were told there was a law against it, which a man sitting by said was just enough, for the odd-job men must live! The retrospect from the railway is fine. The southern end of the inlet is in the foreground, with a training-ship upon it; the city on its hill lies to the right, crowned by Fort S. Anna, and higher still the Fort S. Giovanni; while to the left is the other ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... priests and bishops you have, in the faithful discharge of your pious duty, committed to chains, imprisonment, transportation, and the scaffold—think of all these things, I say, and take comfort to your soul by the retrospect. Would you wish to receive the rites and consolations of religion at ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... of husband whose wife betakes herself early to the feet of God. From him to them had been a short though painful step. It seemed short to her in retrospect, but I had really taken the whole of the first year of their marriage, and every inch of the way had been a struggle, and every inch of it was stained, she felt at the time, with her heart's blood. All that was over now. She had long since found peace. And ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... several pages, may pause to reconstruct his conception of the narrative, and may even re-read the entire passage through which the secret has been withheld from him. But in the theatre, the spectators cannot stop the play while they reconstruct in retrospect their judgment of a situation; and therefore, in the drama, a moment of surprise should be carefully led up to by anticipatory suggestion. Before Lady Macbeth is disclosed walking in her sleep, her doctor and her waiting-gentlewoman are sent on to tell the audience of her "slumbery ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... her tidings of his love-affair, has also told her it is clandestine. Mrs Clancy may not like this. It has the semblance of a slight to her son, as herself—more keenly felt by her in their reduced circumstances. But then, as compensation, arises the retrospect of her own days of courtship carried on ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... conditions; a battle against pests, frosts, soil, weather, and weariness. The conflict never ceased, nor was there hope of emerging from its sordidness into the high places where were breathing space and vision. One could never hope when night came to glance back over the day and see in retrospect a finished piece of work. There was no such thing as writing finis beneath any chapter of the ponderous tome ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... country to be solicited to share the riot of the dissolute and idle." His intemperance was, as Heron says, in fits; his aberrations were occasional, not systematic; they were all to himself the sources of exquisite misery in the retrospect; they were the aberrations of a man whose moral sense was never deadened, of one who encountered more temptations from without and from within than the immense majority of mankind, far from having to contend ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... am thirty-seven years old. My youth is going, and I have nothing to show for it but ten years of dressmaking. The best of my life is over, and when I look back on it, it is only a blank." It was as if the interview with the great man she had just left had completed the desolating retrospect of a lifetime. Was there nothing but disenchantment ahead of her? Was life merely the dropping of illusion after illusion, the falling of petals at the first touch from a flower that is beginning to fade? "Yes, nothing has ever happened to me that was worth while," she repeated, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... popularity his works obtained was the patriotic ardor they breathed. The words above quoted are an example, and 'Chester,' it is said, was frequently heard from every fife in the New England ranks. The spirit of the Revolution was also manifest in his 'Lamentation over Boston,' his 'Retrospect,' his 'Independence,' his 'Columbia,' ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... retrospect greater and more revolutionary changes are seen to have occurred during the nineteenth century than in any century preceding. In these changes no department of thought and activity has failed to share, and theological thought has been quite as much affected as scientific or ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... mysteries of life in all its phases—the ideal, the real and the actual. Sober people look both ways at the beginning of the year, surveying the errors of the past, and providing against possible errors of the future. I, too, was thus exercised. I had little pleasure{210} in retrospect, and the prospect was not very brilliant. "Notwithstanding," thought I, "the many resolutions and prayers I have made, in behalf of freedom, I am, this first day of the year 1836, still a slave, still wandering in the depths of spirit-devouring thralldom. My faculties ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... the whole island of Daem, which I assumed to be the only civilization in the world, while great events unfolded around me, of which I was supposed to be the primary actor, was very disconcerting, though I find in retrospect that fate worked so mysteriously in my situation that it is quite puzzling to think about, meaning, of course, my relationship with the doom of humanity as preventer and ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... school I had as good teaching as I had had in the primary. It seems to me in retrospect that it was as good, on the whole, as the public school ideals of the time made possible. When I recall how I was taught geography, I see, indeed, that there was room for improvement occasionally both in the substance and in the method of instruction. But I know of at least one teacher ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... cut off, and if the Georges had never come from Hanover, the Whartons would now probably be great people and Britain a great nation. But the Evil One had been allowed to prevail, and everything had gone astray, and Sir Alured now had nothing of this world to console him but a hazy retrospect of past glories, and a delight in the beauty of his own river, his own park, and his own house. Sir Alured, with all his foibles and with all his faults, was a pure-minded, simple gentleman, who could not tell ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... on the events of the preceding day, was, to Isabella, a very unpleasing retrospect. She owed her life, and that of her father, to the very person by whom, of all others, she wished least to be obliged, because she could hardly even express common gratitude towards him without encouraging hopes which might be ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... came within a measurable distance of doing so. A man so prone, as is my friend, to spend his time in modest admiration of the prowess of others is apt to lag behind. Miss Dashaway remains to Mr. Sims, as all else does, a retrospect ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... been scanning a newspaper left in the mess-room, and it has provoked me to further thought. I see, in retrospect, those myriads of nicely dressed, God-fearing suburbans in their upholstered local trains, each with his face turned towards his daily sheet, each with his scaly hide of prejudice clamped about his soul, each placidly settling the world's politics and religion to his own ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... In a retrospect of the hundreds of competitors who have started for the prize of public patronage since our outset, we shall not, perhaps, be accused of vanity in placing to our own account the first appropriation of such means as may have contributed to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 584 - Vol. 20, No. 584. (Supplement to Vol. 20) • Various
... the old rule, by which he had measured all things in his youthful days. These days did not seem so far removed from him now as they used to do, and sometimes he found himself looking back over the last ten years, with the clear truthful eyes of eighteen. It was not always a pleasant retrospect. There were some things covered up by that time, of which the review could not give unmingled pleasure. These were moments when he could not meet Graeme's truthful eyes, as with "Don't you remember?" she recalled his own words, spoken long ago. He knew, though she did not, how ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... Alamo after eleven days inside, that seemed in the retrospect almost as many months. He flattened himself against the wall, and stood there for a minute or two, looking and listening. He thought he might hear Crockett again inside, but evidently the Tennesseean had gone back at once. In front of him was ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... distance. She remembers that she burst asunder the bonds of duty, that she caused the death of a fond parent; while I, through Heaven's mercy, have never been subject to the temptation to create for myself a retrospect ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... the long course of years during which the successive Heads of your Government have offered, through their Representatives here, similar professions of amity, without one interruption having occurred to mar the retrospect. I should be sorry were the President, or you, to suppose for one instant that I regard these professions merely as a civil form of words called for ...
— Speeches of His Majesty Kamehameha IV. To the Hawaiian Legislature • Kamehameha IV
... looked toward his two companions as if for confirmation. He looked at the three crewmen, at Cal, all sprawled or crouched there beneath the tree at the edge of the clearing. "We thought it was the end of everything," he said in retrospect, "but we found out quick that ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... away, wrapped in her furs, and for once unconscious of her own beauty, so dissatisfied was she with the part she had played in the great tragedy. Somehow her parts seemed always to dwindle this way in retrospect. ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... for fear of the opinion of worldly companions, for fear of being pitied or laughed at, over and over again you have run away. The things that seemed important when they were present seem pitifully insignificant in the retrospect. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... in mournful retrospect commune O'er what that still cold heart and brain have won: A hymn of life in lispings first begun, Ending in harmony's ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... Brighton; there comes back to me another, considerably more infantile than that of 1854, so infantile indeed that I wonder at its having stuck—that of a place called the Pavilion, which must have been an hotel sheltering us for July and August, and the form of which to childish retrospect, unprejudiced by later experience, was that of a great Greek temple shining over blue waters in the splendour of a white colonnade and a great yellow pediment. The elegant image remained, though imprinted in a child so small as to be easily portable by a stout nurse, I remember, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... amidst the benedictions of his countrymen, and the caresses of numerous friends, he spent the short remnant of his days, participating every rural sweet with the dear woman of his choice, feasting on the happy retrospect of a life passed in fighting for THE RIGHTS OF MAN, and fondly cherishing the ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... the dawn of her own drama. A man in her place would have "looked up" the past—would even have consulted old newspapers. It remained remarkable indeed that in her long contact with the partner of her retrospect no accident had lighted a train; but there was no arguing about that; the accident had in fact come: it had simply been that security had prevailed. She had taken what Hague had given her, and her blankness ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... diligently. I cannot say, now, just where my wanderings took me; but, of course, it was down into the gardens sloping towards the river. In a way the first images of places always remain, however blurred and broken, and the Temple gardens were a dim and fractured memory in the retrospect as I next saw them. It needed all the sunshine of my September day to unsadden them, not from the rainy gloom in which I had left them then, but from the pensive associations of the years between. Yet such sunshine as that can do much, and ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the very height of desire and human pleasure,—worldly, social, amorous, ambitious, or even avaricious,—does there mingle a certain sense of doubt and sorrow—a fear of what is to come—a doubt of what is—a retrospect to the past, leading to a prognostication of the future? (The best of Prophets of the future is the Past.) Why is this? or these?—I know not, except that on a pinnacle we are most susceptible of giddiness, and that we never fear falling except from ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... three or four years of her life, I must desire you will give me, as opportunity shall offer, all you can recollect in relation to the honoured lady, and of her behaviour and kindness to you, and with a retrospect to your own early beginnings, the dawnings of this your bright day of excellence: and this not only I, but the countess, and Lady Betty, with whom I am going over your papers again, and her sister, Lady ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... not visit Egypt or go so far back in history to encounter crocodile worship, as this can be readily found in France at the end of the last century.—Unfortunately, a hundred years is too long an interval, too far away, for an imaginative retrospect of the past. At the present time, standing where we do and regarding the horizon behind us, we see only forms which the intervening atmosphere embellishes, shimmering contours which each spectator may interpret in his own fashion; no distinct, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... brown creatures belonged to a tribe of dwarf Indians who might attempt to scalp him with their little knives if they caught him out after dusk. Though his childhood had not been happy, he had reached a bend in the road where to pause and look back was to find the retrospect full ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... affair, as it enabled us to consult together. We would all much rather have declined this invitation; but we felt that it would not be quite kind to Mrs Forrester, who would otherwise be left to a solitary retrospect of her not very happy or fortunate life. Miss Matty and Miss Pole had been visitors on this occasion for many years, and now they gallantly determined to nail their colours to the mast, and to go through Darkness Lane rather than fail ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... excited about coming to England; she had expected the "associations" would be very charming, that it would be an infinite pleasure to rest her eyes upon the things she had read about in the poets and historians. She was very fond of the poets and historians, of the picturesque, of the past, of retrospect, of mementos and reverberations of greatness; so that on coming into the English world, where strangeness and familiarity would go hand in hand, she was prepared for a multitude of fresh emotions. They began very promptly—these tender, fluttering sensations; ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... Lectures on General Literature, Poetry, &c., with a Retrospect of Literature, and a View of modern English Literature. ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... known the worst men from all the ends of the earth, to have shared in their business and their pleasures. He seemed to have been in every discreditable undertaking that came beneath his notice. In retrospect they pleased him—all and ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... the tremendous question thus raised, we have need of a retrospect. Property in man is older than history and has been nearly universal. It cannot be doubted that in an early stage of human development slavery is a means of furthering civilization. Negro slavery originated in Africa, spread to Spain before the discovery of America, to America soon ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... late reverend and venerable DR. MILLER of New Jersey, then an active minister of the Presbyterian church in this city, published here, in two large octavo volumes, the First Part of A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, containing a Sketch of the Revolutions and Improvements in Science, Arts and Literature, during that Period. Six other volumes were contemplated, to cover grounds since occupied by the great work upon the Eighteenth Century, by Dr. Schlosser, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... such exact pictures of every posture in the minde, that any man might see how to set a good countenance upon all the discountenances of adversitie."[201] When Greville wrote thus, Sidney was dead, and in his retrospect of his friend's life he was with perfect good faith discovering high, not to say holy motives, for all his actions. Sidney's own explanation suits his work better; he was delivering his "young head" of "many, many fancies," and their main ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... was not backed by better horsemen from any part of the Union." But the glory grew fainter as the distance increased from the centre of illumination. In New York, praise was qualified. The Rev. Samuel Miller of that city, who published in 1800 "A Brief Retrospect of the Literature of the Eighteenth Century," calls Mr. Trumbull a respectable poet, thinks that Dr. Dwight's "Greenfield Hill" is entitled to considerable praise, and finds much poetic merit in Mr. Barlow's "Vision"; but he closes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... with an earnest and eloquent appeal from the missionaries for an increase to their number.1 And there is nothing more painful in the retrospect of this mission, than the numerous and often unexpected and surprising openings for usefulness, that were so often effectually closed, solely, as it would seem, because there were not missionaries to enter and take ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... took all this grimy unpleasantness as if it were the most natural and proper setting for existence imaginable. It was the world as I knew it. My mind was entirely occupied then by graver and intenser matters, and it is only now in the distant retrospect that I see these details of environment as being remarkable, as significant, as indeed obviously the outward visible manifestations of the old world disorder ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... fresh from Lady Charlotte's school, he had recently done so with success, and had seen the ladies feel toward him, as he felt under his instructress in the art. Some nature, however, is required for every piece of art. Wilfrid knew that he had been brutal in his representation of the part, and the retrospect of his conduct at Brookfield did not satisfy his remorseless critical judgement. In consequence, when he again saw Lady Charlotte, his admiration of that one prized characteristic of hers paralyzed him. She looked, and moved, and spoke, as if the earth were her own. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... now well astern; the long string of empty bathhouses slid by, water foamed under the swelling sail. Gliding with the bark, dreamy retrospect met and joined hands with solider prospect. Carlisle threw round a measuring eye, and perceived that she had covered more distance than she had thought; had passed the limits of the board-walk and the beach, which was quite far enough, considering. She luffed cleverly, having ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... pleasures and the pains of memory. A retrospect will confirm this declaration on many occasions. It is so in our contemplations of a newspaper; and in no instance have I been more sensible of this than when considering the origin, the career, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Proceedings of the Society. These selections form the substance of two long articles.[39] The thirty-one books comprise twenty-four of Automatic Writing, four Records of Physical Phenomena, and three of retrospect and summary. Two of these recapitulate physical phenomena, ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... his thoughts upon the past, certain vague souvenirs began to shape themselves in his memory. They were only dim shadows, resembling the retrospect of a dream, and yet he was impressed with the belief that they had once been realities. He was the more confirmed in this idea, because such visions had occurred to him before—especially upon the night when he sat by the death-bed of his adopted mother—the ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... Hillard, and Whipple; of Stuart and Robinson; of Norton, Palfrey, Peabody, and Bowen; and, lastly, that of Emerson himself, and how much American classic literature would be left for a new edition of "Miller's Retrospect"? ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... native well; that, if his meal were scanty, he received it from the hand of her, who was most dear to him; that, when he laboured, he laboured for her and his offspring. His daily task being finished, he reposed with his family. No retrospect of the happiness of former days, compared with existing misery, disturbed his slumber; nor horrid dreams occasioned him to wake in agony at the dawn of day. No barbarous sounds of cracking whips reminded him, that with the form and image of a man his destiny was that of the ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... not especially productive. She wrote a few reminiscences of her journey and occasional poems on the Jewish themes, which appeared in the "American Hebrew;" but for the most part gave herself up to quiet retrospect and enjoyment with her friends of the life she had had a glimpse of, and the experience she had stored,—a restful, happy period. In August of the same year she was stricken with a severe and dangerous malady, from which she slowly recovered, only to go through a terrible ordeal and affliction. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... that became strange and magical as the sun went down, so that I was held gazing at it, and afterwards had to flee the twilight across the windy spaces and under the dim and darkling trees. It is only now in the distant retrospect that I identify that far-off city of wonder, and luminous mist with the commonplace little town, through whose narrow streets we drove to the railway station. But, of course, that is what it must ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... to expand this incomparable catalogue; but to make intelligible that remarkable series of events in which he bore such a conspicuous part, we must first invite our readers to accompany us in a historical retrospect in which we shall point out the opening and growth of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... Prayer" is to be found in the seventeenth chapter of St. John's Gospel. And throughout that prayer the holy Suppliant has nothing to confess, nothing to regret. He knows that the end is nigh, but there are no shadows in His retrospect; of all that is done there is nothing He could wish undone or done otherwise. "I glorified Thee on the earth, having accomplished the work which Thou hast given Me to do." It is so when He comes to die. Among the Seven Words from the Cross ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... conception of the idea in solitude, heroic execution of it in action; intrepidity and coolness in storms, fearlessness of death in civil strife; confidence in the destiny—not of an individual, but of the human race; a life risked without hesitation or retrospect in venturing into the unknown and phantom-peopled ocean, 1,500 leagues across, and on which the first step no more allowed of second thoughts than Caesar's passage of the Rubicon; untiring study, knowledge ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... and the other judges; and, with the approbation of the present judges, declared the answers for which these magistrates had been impeached to be just and legal:[****] and they carried so far their retrospect as to reverse, on the petition of Lord Spenser, earl of Glocester, the attainder pronounced against the two Spensers in the reign of Edward II.[*****] The ancient history of England is nothing but a catalogue of reversals: every thing ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences—for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect—if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack! Now we begin to have compunctions, and look back at the brave bottles squandered upon dinner-parties, where the guests drank grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the schoolboy ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... us through two chapters. Before passing onward I must, however, invite the reader to pause awhile and reconsider, even at the risk of retrospect and repetition, some of the salient features of his character. And now I remember that of his personal appearance nothing has hitherto been said. 'Tasso was tall, well-proportioned, and of very fair complexion. His thick hair and beard were of a light-brown color. His head was large, forehead ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... York. Theodore had been there perhaps a dozen times since he took that first surreptitious trip with Mr. Hastings, but in these visits he had always been a hurried business man, with little leisure or taste for retrospect. Now, however, it was different, and traversing the streets with his wife leaning on his arm, he had a fancy for going backward, and painting pictures from the past for her amusement. The hotel to which he had escorted Mr. Hastings on that day had advanced with the advancing tide, and was just now ...
— Three People • Pansy
... a hard or a cruel woman ... she was very kind and loved her son with a long clutching love ... but her life with her husband had contained so many disturbances of comfortable courses, thrilling enough at the time, but terrifying when viewed in retrospect, that her nature, inclined to quiet, fixed ways and to acceptance, with slight resistance, of whatever came to her, made all the efforts that were possible to it to keep her life and her son's life in peace. She hated change of any sort, whether of circumstances or of friends, ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... sat still in a queer kind of realization of what they both had just seen, and in the retrospect. While he and his fireman had been conversing, just ahead in the white moonlight he had seen two human figures against the sky. It was a flashing glimpse only, for the train was making a forty mile clip, but, ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... bent with years,' may pass, but 'Conscious Virtue, void of fears,' is poor. 'Halcyon Peace on moss reclined,' is a picture; 'Retrospect that scans the mind,' is nothing; 'Health that snuffs the morning air,' is a living image; but what sense is there in 'Full-eyed Truth, with bosom bare?' and how poor his 'Laughter in loud peals that breaks,' to Milton's 'Laughter, holding both his sides!' The paragraph, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... in the belief that she practically lived on him, for though it was not in him to follow adequately Mrs. Highmore's counsel there were exasperated confessions he never made, scanty domestic curtains he rattled on their rings. I may exaggerate in the retrospect his apparent anxieties, for these after all were the years when his talent was freshest and when as a writer he most laid down his line. It wasn't of Mrs. Stannace nor even as time went on of Mrs. Limbert that we mainly talked when I got at longer intervals a smokier ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... called her by the familiar name. He was wishing he could have shielded her from all this. Painful as the retrospect might be to her, the recital was far more painful ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the trip down the bay and into the sound that night was a wonderful adventure. She remembered it afterward far more vividly than the shipwreck, which became blurred in retrospect, so that she soon began to think of it as of some half-forgotten nightmare. To begin with, the personality of Murray O'Neil intrigued her more and more. The man was so strong, so sympathetic, and he had such a resistless way of doing things. The stories she had heard of him were romantic, and ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... they, two weeks later, at the retrospect of many an unsuccessful chase from which they had returned—when, after twelve days spent in "jaging" the elephant, they had added only a single pair of tusks to the collection, and these the tusks of a cow elephant, scarce two ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... this, notwithstanding the agitation I endured on this retrospect of my sufferings, I also felt considerable surprise at the knowledge he seemed to possess concerning me. I suppose some astonishment was exhibited in my countenance, for Mr. Kirwin hastened to say, "Immediately upon your being taken ill, all the papers that were ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... near five months in coming out from Boston under the blundering seamanship of Captain Coffin (ominous cognomen!), and salt water, hard junk and weevilly biscuit were as unattractive to me in possible prospect as they were in retrospect. The sea I had weighed in the balance and had found it much wanting. I would, then, go ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... not be considered out of place if, in this retrospect, which is intended, first of all, for my children and grandchildren, I state that a personal fact, which was known to many from other sources, was confirmed to me in one of these conversations: General Grant informing me, as he had previously informed my wife, that he had ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... War was a side-show, so distant from Europe that even the tragedy of Kut and the slaughter which failed to save our troops and prestige were felt chiefly in retrospect, when the majority of the men who suffered so vainly had gone into the silence of death or of captivity. When Maude's offensive carried our arms again into Kut, and beyond, to Baghdad, interest revived; but of ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... the audience who were most resolutely opposed to the opinions which he advocated. Without any undue exercise of self-esteem, he could look back on the close of his lecture with the conviction that he had really done justice to himself and to his cause. The retrospect of the public discussion that had followed failed to give him the same pleasure. His warm temper, his vehemently sincere belief in the truth of his own convictions, placed him at a serious disadvantage towards the more self-restrained speakers (all older than ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... this paper without recording my conviction that the great acts, and the great forbearances, which immediately followed the close of the Civil War form a group which will ever be a noble object, in his political retrospect, to the impartial historian; and that, proceeding as they did from the free choice and conviction of the people, and founded as they were on the very principles of which the multitude is supposed to be least ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... here; secessionism there; acquisition and filibusterism elsewhere. These were the formidable elements of misrule with which the Executive had to cope. How well he met, and how entirely he for the time overcame these enemies of the peace of the republic, we leave the historian to relate; but our retrospect would be incomplete and disingenuous, did we not accord the meed of praise justly due to high moral excellence and intellectual and administrative honesty and talent, as developed in the ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... as there was no occasion for rousing himself, according to the point of view established by both of them, he settled back into his natural groove and never got beyond his soda-fountain days in retrospect. ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... Trinidad, by the grace of the Colonial Office, was subjected to the manipulation of an unctuous dandy. This successor of Gordon, of Elliot, and of Cairns, durst not oppose high-placed official malfeasants, but [72] was inexorable with regard to minor delinquents. In the above retrospect we have purposely omitted mentioning such transient rulers as Mr. Rennie, Sir G. W. Des Voeux, and last, but by no means least, Sir F. Barlee, a high-minded Governor, whom death so suddenly and inscrutably snatched away from the good ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... written at Diodati in July, 1816 (probably towards the end of the month; see letters to Murray and Rogers, dated July 22 and July 29), is a retrospect and an apology. It consists of an opening stanza, or section, on the psychology of dreams, followed by some episodes or dissolving views, which purport to be the successive stages of a dream. Stanzas ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... office of hasty retrospect in a paper like this is only to enlarge by degrees, like the pupil of an eye, the reader's contemplation and estimate of the coming time, and to prepare him for some practical suggestions of a very ...
— On Books and the Housing of Them • William Ewart Gladstone
... in the Harrow Road, and began to wish he had not made it. Rosamund had not mentioned Mrs. Clarke again, and he began to fear that she had not really liked her, although her profile was beautiful. If Rosamund had not liked Mrs. Clarke, his cordial enthusiasm at Mrs. Chetwinde's—in retrospect he felt that his attitude and manner must have implied that—had been premature, even, perhaps, unfortunate. He wished he knew just what impression Mrs. Clarke had made upon Rosamund, but something held ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Further eastward, masses of mountain in the extreme distance appeared covered, also, with open forests, and presented finely rounded outlines, not likely to impede our passage, in any direction. But towards the N.W. our view was not so extensive; like the uncertain future, it still lay hid. The retrospect was very extensive, including Mount Faraday in the extreme distance, and which thus afforded me a valuable back angle for the correction of our longitude from any errors of detailed survey. The lofty mass of Buckland's Table Land still overlooked all from the E., and I ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... puppy down the steps and watched its return to the attack. Then with something of melancholy retrospect in his pale eyes he pursued his reflections. "Now there was Sissy Belmire an' Bud Thomas, been keeping company for two years, then washed hands in common at the Christian Endeavor picnic an'—" He broke off to shake his head ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... Retrospect of the life of the Country Merchant, in making Money, to become a "Solid Man of Boston."—Humble Beginnings.—Tempted into Smuggling from Canada in Embargo times, and makes a Fortune, by the aid of the desperate and daring Services ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... and now, sir, let prejudice, the rage of party, and the habitual insolence of successful vice—pause but for one moment,—and let religion, laws, power herself, the policy of a nation's virtue, and Britain's guardian genius, take a short, impartial retrospect but of one transaction, notorious in this land,—then must they behold yeomen, freemen, citizens, artizans, divines, courtiers, patriots, merchants, soldiers, sailors, and the whole plebeian tribe, in septennial procession, urged ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... brood over what had been done. It was always the new, the untouched, the untried, that he was in search of. Hugh never wished that he had done otherwise, nor did he indulge in the passion of the past, or in the half-sad, half-luxurious retrospect of the days that are no more. "Ah," I could fancy him saying, "that was all delightful while it lasted—it was the greatest fun in the world! But now!"—and I knew as well in my heart and mind as if he had come behind me and spoken to me, that he was moving ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... own times that the rate of progress in the arts and sciences proceeds in a geometrical ratio as knowledge increases, and so when we carry back our retrospect into the past, we must be prepared to find the signs of retardation augmenting in a like geometrical ratio; so that the progress of a thousand years at a remote period may correspond to that of a century in modern times, and ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... impressive proportions, and has now its own magnificent church building, costing over $200,000, and entirely paid for when its consecration service on January 6 shall be celebrated. This is certainly a very remarkable retrospect. ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy
... sands. The bitter war of winds and waves was over, and the defeated enemy had retired with spent fury, and sunk into silence. Could it be a dream? had we really lived through that dreadful nightmare? But at this moment Nurse Gill interrupted the painful retrospect by placing the fragrant coffee and ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... disappeared in disgrace; and there I sat by my Wife's side, endeavouring to form a retrospect of the year 1999 and of the possibilities of the year 2000; but not quite able to shake of the thoughts suggested by the prattle of my bright little Hexagon. Only a few sands now remained in the half-hour glass. Rousing myself from my reverie I turned ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... supreme importance; if we concede that any link in a chain regardless of size is of more importance than any other link. Undoubtedly it remains the most conspicuous event, as the world views it now, in retrospect. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... deputation to the President, January 10th, 1917, the first line of sentinels, a dozen in number, appeared for duty at the White House gates. In retrospect it must seem to the most inflexible person a reasonably mild and gentle thing to have done. But at the same time it caused a profound stir. Columns of front page space in all the newspapers of the country gave more or less dispassionate accounts ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... thrill of horror through me, and rushed on, speechless with indignation, to the house. Two days after this I became engaged to Arthur. How happy we were!' said Lina, a dreamy expression passing over her face at the retrospect. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... grumbling like Jos Sedley to the ends of their lives about the cold, and the carelessness of English cooks in preparing curries, and harbouring unending regrets for the flesh-pots and comforts of life in Boggley Wollah, which in retrospect no doubt appeared more attractive than they had done in reality. The West Indian, on the other hand, settled down permanently with his wife and family in the island of his choice. Barbados and Jamaica are the only two tropical countries under the British flag where ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... of the number of avowedly Christian men. Some who have greatly furthered movements which in the end proved fruitful for Christian thought, have been men who in their own time alienated from professed and official religion. In the retrospect we must often feel that their opposition to that which they took to be religion was justifiable. Yet their identification of that with religion itself, and their frank declaration of what they called their own irreligion, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... thickly is it studed and storied with objects and recollections. Altogether, we have rarely seen a topographical panorama of such diversified character: it has reminiscences of history and poetry to lead us through the retrospect of chivalrous ages, princely contests for crowns that rarely sat lightly on their wearers, and the last flickering hopes of defeated ambition and ill-starred fortune. Yet, how powerfully, not to say painfully, are these pages in the chronicles of human actions, when contrasted with the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... realized how the first hours of the Sabbath had passed, he started up much vexed with himself, and after a brief retrospect said: "Such excitements as those of yesterday are little better than a debauch, and I must shun them hereafter. God has blessed and succeeded me, and it is but a poor return I am making. However my unfortunate attachment may end, ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... that there are other important duties constitutionally attached to the Supreme Executive—I hope I shall be enabled within my department, with the continued advice of a wise and faithful Council, so to act my part, as that a future retrospect of my conduct may afford me consoling reflections; and that my administration may be satisfactory to reasonable and candid men, and finally meet with the approbation of God, the Judge of all.—May his wisdom preside in all our Councils and deliberations, and lead to ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... fostered his infancy—of the companions of his youth, before he had lived in sin, or dwelt with sorrow—of the innocent girl, who had loved, though she had forsaken him—all passed before him; the retrospect became the present; and his heart swelled painfully within him; for he thought on what he had been, and on what he was, until, drawing his coarse hand across his brows, he gave forth a dissolute song, seeking, like many who ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... my belief that after the passing of this depression, when we can examine it in retrospect, we shall need to consider a number of other questions as to what action may be taken by the Government to remove Possible governmental influences which make for instability and to better organize mitigation of the effect of depression. It is as yet too soon to constructively ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Herbert Hoover • Herbert Hoover
... will take a brief retrospect of the fruit crops of 1883, and inquire into the causes of ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... melancholy retrospect. Mrs. Nesbit might be said to have perfectly succeeded in the object of her life. She had formed her beloved niece, like the fabled image of snow, moulded by the enchanter and animated by no will but his, and had seen her attain the ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Labor. The public, however, did not anticipate the revolutionary ideal which again sought to inflame industrial unionism. After the decadence of the older type of the industrial union several conditions manifested themselves which now, in retrospect, appear to have encouraged the violent militants who call themselves the Industrial Workers ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... which he had learnt above all others is that which he teaches above all others—love. I think, brothers, we can picture the old white-haired Bishop of Ephesus, borne day after day upon a litter into his church, and ever saying the same tender words, "little children, love one another." What a retrospect there was for S. John to look back along that stretch of years! What memories must have filled the old man's heart of those days when he was a sunny-haired stripling, working with his brothers in the fishing boat, and casting net, and pulling oar ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... He looked toward his two companions as if for confirmation. He looked at the three crewmen, at Cal, all sprawled or crouched there beneath the tree at the edge of the clearing. "We thought it was the end of everything," he said in retrospect, "but we found out quick that ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... the retrospect began with the mysterious anonymous letters which had been addressed to ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... the composer a reminiscence of Mendelssohn. "Anyone can find that out," was the rough-and-ready reply of Brahms. But if Mendelssohn be the prevailing influence in the Scherzo, Schubert has his turn in the Trio. The fourth movement is an Intermezzo, entitled "Rueckblick" (Retrospect). The opening phrase, and indeed the whole of the short movement, carries us back to the picture of the lovers. Some change has taken place: have the lovers grown cold? or has death divided them? The themes are now sad, and clothed in minor harmonies. The Finale, perhaps, shows skill rather than ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... that it was possible fate had in store for him something better than he had known in the past. In the meanwhile the cigar he held went out, and the striking of a match as Courthorne lighted another roused him suddenly from the retrospect he was sinking into. The bitter wind still moaned about the ranch, emphasizing its loneliness, and the cedar shingles rattled dolefully overhead, while it chanced that as Winston glanced towards the roof his eyes rested on the suspended piece of rancid pork which, with a ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... relish the "cold soup of retrospect" and persist in picking the "bones of regret," without any appetite for the present or promises of the future. Beside one of these I would place a happy-hearted soul, who laughs through the window of the eye and on whose face you ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... to the dockyard last Saturday, and one still more to be dwelt on the next day, on the ramparts; when the balmy air, the sparkling sea, and your sweet looks and conversation were altogether in the most delicious harmony, and afforded sensations which are to raise ecstasy even in retrospect. This, as well as I understand, is to be the substance of my information. He makes me write, but I do not know what else is to be communicated, except this said visit to Portsmouth, and these two said walks, and his introduction to your family, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... not a hard or a cruel woman ... she was very kind and loved her son with a long clutching love ... but her life with her husband had contained so many disturbances of comfortable courses, thrilling enough at the time, but terrifying when viewed in retrospect, that her nature, inclined to quiet, fixed ways and to acceptance, with slight resistance, of whatever came to her, made all the efforts that were possible to it to keep her life and her son's life in peace. She hated ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... Liege, Anthony and Gloria arrived in New York. In retrospect the six weeks seemed miraculously happy. They had found to a great extent, as most young couples find in some measure, that they possessed in common many fixed ideas and curiosities and odd quirks of mind; ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... she did not, but was created imperfect, and was so created in order that only by work and merit she should arrive at completion and perfection and Behold God (instead of merely, as now in this world, being able only to apprehend Him by the retrospect of His effect upon her), then she was always below angels. If through work and obedience she becomes so raised that she merits sight and the actual Beholding of God, then she becomes equal to angels because of this Beholding; and so Christ tells us that she does ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... were wild days, before Mr. McAlpine cam'," replied his friend, giving himself up to the joys of retrospect. "Yer faither used to say the Glen was jist like the Garden o' Eden until the serpent cam', an' it wes the tavern. Ah mind when yon Eerish crew from the Flats cam' up here to Pete Nash's tavern, an' the lads from the Oa cam' doon, a' McDonalds to a man, an' ye could ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... In retrospect, the Great Rebellion seems the mightiest battle and the most glorious victory in the annals of time. The battle-field was a thousand miles in length; the combatants numbered two million men; the struggle was protracted over four ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... bestows a reflection on its original aspect, the mind seems to be carried back to a period of time much more remote than it really is. One advantage at least results from having lived in a state of society ever on the change and always for the better, that it doubles the retrospect of life. With me at any rate it has had that effect. Did not the definite number of my years teach me to the contrary, I should think myself at least one hundred years old instead of fifty. The case is said to be widely different with those who have passed their ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... parish of St. John's, where, amidst the benedictions of his countrymen, and the caresses of numerous friends, he spent the short remnant of his days, participating every rural sweet with the dear woman of his choice, feasting on the happy retrospect of a life passed in fighting for THE RIGHTS OF MAN, and fondly cherishing the hopes of ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... thus completed a painful retrospect of the appalling amount of crime committed by the colored population in the District at large, compared with the general mass of the white population, I now consider it my duty to advert more particularly to what has been passing more immediately under my own observation ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... storekeeper, it does not take very long before he accumulates a burden greater than he can carry. When he begins to totter he tries to pass some of the load over to others, and it is usually the storekeepers who are willing to assist him to the limit if his assets are in good retrospect. And what could be a greater security than a whole mountain full of gold? So the storekeepers assumed a large portion of the Too Sure Man's burden. And their loads became heavier and heavier. One day a ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... with the antique and heraldic aspects of the general costume, and ventures to suggest either boots or sandals as an improvement. Had Goethe felt himself at liberty from all restraints of private consideration in composing these Memoirs, can it be doubted that he would have taken his retrospect of this Frankfort inauguration from a different station; from the station of that stern revolution which, within his own time, and partly under his own eyes, had shattered the whole imperial system of thrones, in ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... open-air walks exerted a beneficial influence on his own darkened mind. It is one thing to struggle from idea to idea; it is another when material objects mingle with the retrospect; they seem to supply stepping-stones in the gradual resuscitation of memory ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... Once when they were alone, her softened heart would have confessed to Herbert this painful conviction, but he was too happy and too generous to permit her for a moment to indulge in such a remorseful retrospect. All the error, he insisted, was his own; and he had been fool enough to have wantonly forfeited a happiness which time and experience had now ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... they swell somewhat in the retrospect, like the same peas put to soak; and I am aware now of some June days of those which we first spent at Kittery Point this year, which were nearly twenty-four hours long. Even the days of declining years linger a little here, where there is nothing to hurry them, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... am now declining to decrepitude, there is little to be feared from the malevolence of men, and yet less to be hoped from their affection or esteem. Something they may take away, but they can give me nothing. Riches would now be useless, and high employment would be pain. My retrospect of life recalls to my view many opportunities of good neglected, much time squandered upon trifles, and more lost in idleness and vacancy. I leave many great designs unattempted, ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... have derived from it, just as the satisfaction with which we look back upon a right action far more than compensates for any pain with which it may have been attended. The 'mens sibi conscia recti' is the highest reward which a man can have, as, on the other hand, the retrospect on base, unjust, or cruel actions constitutes the most acute of torments. Now, when a man looks back upon his past actions, what he regards is not so much the result of his acts as the intention and the motives by which the intention was actuated. It is not, therefore, ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... Villa Quarto, as it is usually called, was a more pretentious place and as beautifully located, standing as it does in an ancient garden looking out over Florence toward Vallombrosa and the Chianti hills. Yet now in the retrospect, it seems hardly to have been the retreat for an invalid. Its garden was supernaturally beautiful, all that one expects that a garden of Italy should be—such a garden as Maxfield Parrish might dream; but its beauty was that which comes of antiquity—the accumulation of dead years. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... less pleasant were they, two weeks later, at the retrospect of many an unsuccessful chase from which they had returned—when, after twelve days spent in "jaging" the elephant, they had added only a single pair of tusks to the collection, and these the tusks of a cow-elephant, scarce two feet in length, ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... in a degree and manner which are alike rare, of the more constant and the higher judgment of his people. It is plainer still that he embodied the resolute purpose which underlay the fluctuations upon the surface of their political life. The English military historians, Wood and Edmonds, in their retrospect over the course of the war, well sum up its dramatic aspect when they say: "Against the great military genius of certain of the Southern leaders fate opposed the unbroken resolution and passionate devotion to ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... Italians he gave no thought. He was convinced that neither of them cared to come alone to close quarters with him; and this conviction was so strong that the prompt retreat of the fellow with the rope had not surprised him, either at the moment or in retrospect, though both men had fought well under Shaw's eyes. If the Italians were again on guard in the grounds, it would be his job to choke them off before they could warn Shaw of his presence. Warning Shaw, he hoped, was about all they ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... sympathies of the reader be for or against the standpoint of the Irish Loyalists, the actual events which make up what may be called the Ulster Movement would be wholly unintelligible without some introductory retrospect. Indeed, to those who set out to judge Irish political conditions without troubling themselves about anything more ancient than their own memory can recall, the most fundamental factor of all—the line of cleavage between ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... Ordinary anniversaries lead to retrospect: after a year of the greatest of all wars it is natural to indulge in a stock-taking of the national spirit, and comforting to find that, in spite of disillusions and disappointments, the alternation of exultations ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... serve as a text for the last remark I have to offer. To Pepys I think I have been amply just; to the others, to Burns, Thoreau, Whitman, Charles of Orleans, even Villon, I have found myself in the retrospect ever too grudging of praise, ever too disrespectful in manner. It is not easy to see why I should have been most liberal to the man of least pretensions. Perhaps some cowardice withheld me from the proper warmth of tone; perhaps it is easier to ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... North Stoke has a fine Norman door worthy of inspection. Here a British canoe was discovered in the last century; it may be seen in the Lewes Museum. Across the river, and only to be approached by a detour past Amberley Station, is Houghton. From the bridge over the Arun is a very beautiful retrospect of the valley towards Arundel with the hills falling in graceful curves to the river. The church is Early English of a severe type; here is a fifteenth century brass but nothing more of ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... life. But, after this, I find one sentence repeatedly on his lips. During a journey a man is often too engrossed with the perplexities of the immediate present to be able to review the path as a whole. But, when he looks back, he surveys the entire landscape in grateful retrospect, and is astonished at the multiplicity and variety of the perils that he has escaped. Henry Martyn had some such feeling. When, at the age of twenty-two, he entered the ministry, he was amazed at the greatness of the grace that had made such ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... made her reminiscent, and when she was reminiscent she invariably exaggerated—in retrospect she saw everything as she would have liked it to have been. "When he first came here what a man he was! And this, what a neighbourhood then, an elegant residential district. I had a position then, I could recommend him; everybody knew Miss Houston of Houston Street." In spite of her ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... indeed a pleasure," said General Washington in reply, "from the walks of private life to view in retrospect the difficulties through which we have waded, and the happy haven into which our ship has been brought. Is it possible after this that it should founder? will not the all wise and all powerful Director of human events preserve it? I think he will. He may, however, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... theater in time for the date set for opening. In fact it was not completed, but when the season arrived he was ready to attempt all that he had said he would do, except keep some wild promises about singers; and when the season closed the fact that loomed largest in the retrospect was the undaunted manner in which he had carried on a difficult and dangerous enterprise, compelling a large element of the public to respect and admire him, and making it possible for him to lay out a second season on lines of real pith and moment, and carry an admirable ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... I had as good teaching as I had had in the primary. It seems to me in retrospect that it was as good, on the whole, as the public school ideals of the time made possible. When I recall how I was taught geography, I see, indeed, that there was room for improvement occasionally both in the substance and in the method of instruction. ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... heaven: To make undying music in the world, Breathing as beauteous order that controls With growing sway the growing life of man. So we inherit that sweet purity For which we struggled, failed and agonized, With widening retrospect that bred despair. Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued, A vicious parent shaming still its child Poor, anxious penitence, is quick dissolved; Its discords, quenched by meeting harmonies, Die in the large and charitable air. And all our rarer, ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... tent blew down in a driving storm at night, he met these mishaps as though they were the very things he had come north to get, as though without them the trip would have lacked its spice. This is an easy philosophy in retrospect but hard when the wet canvas falls across you and the rain beats in. A—— laughed at the very moment of disaster as another man will laugh later in an easy chair. I see him now swinging his axe for firewood to dry ourselves ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... desirable—or, rather, she shrank from the alternative. When she visualized the North it uprose always in its most threatening presentment, indescribably lonely, the playground of ruthless, elemental forces, terrifying in its vast emptinesses. It appalled her in retrospect, loomed unutterably desolate in contrast ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to the imagination; and the imagination of young America has now a foreign war instead of a civil war to look back upon. The smoke of battle, in which the South stood shoulder to shoulder with the North, has done more than many years of peace could do to soften in retrospect the harsh ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... undistinguishable now to our own heart—nor knows that heart if it be a dream of imagination or of memory. Yet why should we wonder? In our happiest hours there may have been something in common with our most sorrowful—some shade of sadness cast over them by a passing cloud, that now allies them in retrospect with the sombre spirit of grief; and in our unhappiest hours there may have been gleams of gladness, that seem now to give the return the calm character of peace. Do not all thoughts and feelings, almost all events, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... atmosphere of his native town. It had been there ever since he knew it, he fondly imagined—being as poor a prophet as most of us—that it would always be. And, as he sat there in the Macomber yard, his thoughts were busy, not with Bayport's past or future, but with his own, and neither retrospect nor forecast was cheerful. He could see little behind him except the mistakes he had made, and before him—not even the ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... wounded, was given a small room aside. Samson, however, shared his quarters in order to perform any service that an injured man might require. It had been a full and unusual day for the painter, and its incidents crowded in on him in retrospect and drove off the possibility of sleep. Samson, too, seemed wakeful, and in the isolation of the dark room the two men fell into conversation, which almost lasted out the night. Samson went into the confessional. This was the first ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... master. But it is only now, in the retrospect of years, that I have any sense of triumph; for I had won the supremacy with small effort, comparatively,—with the small effort required of him who sees the conditions of a situation clearly, and, instead of trying to combat or to change them, intelligently uses them to his ends. Nor do I now regard ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... decidedly complex, costs and commissions," stammered the judge, becoming more turkey-red than he naturally was. "We won't retrospect. To the ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... from Lady Charlotte's school, he had recently done so with success, and had seen the ladies feel toward him, as he felt under his instructress in the art. Some nature, however, is required for every piece of art. Wilfrid knew that he had been brutal in his representation of the part, and the retrospect of his conduct at Brookfield did not satisfy his remorseless critical judgement. In consequence, when he again saw Lady Charlotte, his admiration of that one prized characteristic of hers paralyzed him. She looked, and moved, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... particular, it had come; and should never dream thereby (though much would she suffer from that!) of how interesting he might have been. She had, in a finer sense, no manners, and to be concerned with her in any retrospect was—since their discourse was of losses—to feel the dignity of history incur the very gravest. It was true that such fantasies, or that any shade of inward irony, would be Greek to Mrs. Folliott. It was also true, however, and not much more strange, when she ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... against a corporation whose purposes were ever unchanged, and its life perpetual. But it was not the state alone which thus took detriment from her connection with the Church; the latter paid a full price for the temporal advantages she received in admitting civil intervention in her affairs. After a retrospect of a thousand years, the pious Fratricelli loudly proclaimed their conviction that the fatal gift of a Christian emperor had been the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... with that of the fitful meteor, Lord Brougham. What a great, dazzling genius Brougham unquestionably is; yet his greatest admirer must admit that his life has been a brilliant failure. But while you, thoughtful reader, in such a retrospect as I have been supposing, sometimes wonder at the decent and reasonable success of the dunce, do you not often lament over the fashion in which those who promised well, and even brilliantly, have disappointed the hopes entertained of them? What ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... Mamma," whispered Carry, with a vague retrospect of their recent conversation. "Don't ky. I fink I SHOULD like a new papa, if he loved you very ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... Ned broke in. "Life's too short for a ghost who can only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can't we do better ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... his heart, even self-pity and longing faded. He entered her visionary retrospect and knew, like her, that it was too late; that everything was too late; that everything was really over. And, as he realised it, a chill went over him. He felt like a strayed reveller waking suddenly from long slumber and finding himself alone ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... wait before telling her the story, until Fenton and I had made sure if there were anything golden about the mountain, except its name. If we were doomed to disappointment I could then give the tale a humorous turn, easier to do in retrospect than anticipation. Now, when in blinding light of noon we pointed out, in an impersonal manner, to all who cared to see, the pyramid-field of Meroee, it seemed strange to think that no heart but Anthony's and mine beat the faster. ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... the last few days pass before his vision. Retrospect is terrible. In this maze it avails not that he is guiltless of crime. The circumstances affirm his criminality. Is he ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... quality of the talk was far more manifest in the retrospect than it had been at the time. It had seemed then bold and strange, but not impossible; now in the cold darkness it seemed sacrilegious. And the bishop's share, which was indeed only the weak yielding of a tired man ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... smiling as if in retrospect, and kept looking into the fire and turning about in his hand ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... himself in the horrible throes of seasickness, had performed a radical operation for acute mastoiditis. There had been no facilities. The whole thing had been in the last degree makeshift. The half-trained stewardess had held his instruments ready for him, and the sea-sickness, comic in retrospect, had weighed heavily against Mr. Fletcher's chance of seeing land again. Nevertheless, the eminent New York surgeon, consulted at the first opportunity, had pronounced the operation a neat performance—under ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... minute. Lady Kilmarny had said it would not be many weeks before the Turnours went to England. There, if Miss Paget (who seemed extremely nice by contrast and in retrospect) were still of the same mind, I might find a good home. If not, she was as kind as she was queer, and would help me look further. So I replied that I would accept the fifty francs, and would do my best to please ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... progress and decay. The history of religion, of art, of literature, of social and industrial development, of scientific progress, have all their different methods. A writer who treats of some great revolution that has transformed human affairs should deal largely in retrospect, for the most important part of his task is to explain the long course of events that prepared and produced the catastrophe; while a writer who treats of more normal times will do well to plunge rapidly into ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... world and bleated my protest against living at all, but I pass by those years when I was only a slip of humanity taking root on earth and come to that May day which is the first to rise distinctly on my inward vision when I turn to retrospect. Even now I mark it as a day of great adventure. Since then I have battled with salmon in northern waters, I have felt my line strain under the tarpon's despair, I have heard my reel sing with the rushes of the bass, yet ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... with lamps. Each globe a sphere of pinkish yellow, they stretched before him in a line that marched into a distance of mingled lights and more accentuated shadows. He looked along them as if they were bearing his thoughts back over the past, every globe a station in the retrospect, stage by stage advancing him toward a ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... she had hated. And always, when the dark memory impinged upon peace, she fought and fought until she seemed to be fighting hatred itself. Scorn of scorn and hate of hate! Yet even her battles grew to be dreams. For when the inevitable retrospect brought back Jean Isbel and his love and her cowardly falsehood she would shudder a little and put an unconscious hand to her breast and utterly fail in her fight and drift off down to vague and wistful dreams. The clean and ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... primary cause for the true union was remote in origin and deep and persistent, Bancroft gives a retrospect of the steps toward union from the founding of the colonies to the close of the war for independence. Thenceforward, suggestions as to method or form of amending the Articles of Confederation, whether made by individuals, or State Legislatures, or by Congress, were in his view helps ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... time in my life found myself under the dominion of a superior. When I remember, how even those bowed down before him, who had been to him in the place of parents,—accomplished and experienced minds,—I cease to wonder in the retrospect, that he riveted me in such a bondage. Henceforth I began to ask: what will he say to this and that? In his reply I always expected to find a higher portion of God's Spirit, than in any I could frame for myself. In order to learn divine truth, it became to me a surer process to consult him, ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... to dwell upon the thoughts that spring from these words. Take them in the barest outline. No man that makes the worse choice of earth instead of God, ever, in the retrospect, said: 'I have a goodly heritage.' One of the later Roman Emperors, who was among the best of them, said, when he was dying: 'I have been everything, and it profits me nothing.' No creature can satisfy your whole nature. Portions of it may be fed with their appropriate satisfaction, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Actually given or only meditated, the whole of these twenty Readings—meaning the entire collection of the identical marked copies used by the Novelist himself on both sides of the Atlantic—have, for the verification of this retrospect, been placed for the time being in the writer's possession. Selecting from among them those merely which are familiar to the public, from their having been actually produced, he here proposes cursorily to glance one by one through ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... about those last minutes. In less than an hour after my escape I struck the highway, but it was an hour which in the retrospect unrolls itself into unquiet years. I was dimly conscious of scrambling through a ditch and coming to a ghostly white road. The schimmel swung to the right, and the next I knew some one had taken my bridle and ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... processes unaccountable to himself, had passed from a vivid dislike of General Kervick to a habit of mind in which he thoroughly enjoyed having him about. The General had been twice to High Thorpe, and on each occasion had so prolonged his stay that, in retrospect, the period of his absence seemed inconsiderable. The master now, thinking upon it in this minute of silence, was conscious of having missed him greatly. He would not have been bored to the extremity of threatening to go to London, if Kervick had been ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... behaviour. She was very unhappy, but to excite my sympathy she was able to make a show of her unhappiness. It was evident that she had been prepared to weep, for she had provided herself with a sufficiency of handkerchiefs; I admired her forethought, but in retrospect it made her tears perhaps less moving. I could not decide whether she desired the return of her husband because she loved him, or because she dreaded the tongue of scandal; and I was perturbed by the suspicion ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... his mental retrospect as an accusation against this unwarrantable tenderness the vision of the Resident's daughter—almost his fiancee. Indeed Elizabeth was the antithesis in physical appeal of the gentle Gulab; the drawing-room ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... time. Seen through the vista of long years, perhaps centuries, it will assume quite different hues. Perhaps those long lists of trades, tools, and occupations would not be so repellent if we could read them, as we read Homer's catalogue of the ships, through the retrospect of ages. They are justified in the poem aside from their historic value, because they are alive and full of action,—panoramas of the whole mechanical and industrial life of America, north, east, south, west,—bits of scenery, bird's-eye views, glimpses of moving ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... hindrance is want of rest; my nocturnal complaints grow less troublesome towards morning; and I am tempted to repair the deficiencies of the night[423].' Alas! how hard would it be if this indulgence were to be imputed to a sick man as a crime. In his retrospect on the following Easter-Eve, he says, 'When I review the last year, I am able to recollect so little done, that shame and sorrow, though perhaps too weakly, come upon me.' Had he been judging of any one else in the same circumstances, how clear would he have been on the favourable side. How ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... "Sometimes in retrospect of a great book the mind falters, confused by the multitude and yet the harmony of the detail, the strangeness of the frettings, the brooding, musing intelligence that has foreseen, loved, created, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... actions too often match their tempers, one of the most difficult of daily duties is to reserve judgment upon that which appears ambiguous in the conduct of their associates. The dreary list of slain friendships that makes retrospect painful to those of mature years; the disappointments that to the young have the bitterness of death; the tale of trusts betrayed and promises broken—how would the story be shortened and brightened if conscientious and impartial trial of the accused preceded sentence and punishment!—if, ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... England, than in most other countries where the art has been cultivated and esteemed. In order, therefore, to acquire an accurate knowledge of the state of musical taste and science which now prevails among us, it will be necessary to take a brief retrospect; and as much of the music still popular was composed during the earliest period of the art in England, we shall rapidly trace its history from the times of those early masters, whose names are still held in remembrance and repute, down to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... his youthful days. These days did not seem so far removed from him now as they used to do, and sometimes he found himself looking back over the last ten years, with the clear truthful eyes of eighteen. It was not always a pleasant retrospect. There were some things covered up by that time, of which the review could not give unmingled pleasure. These were moments when he could not meet Graeme's truthful eyes, as with "Don't you remember?" she recalled his own words, spoken ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... these twenty years would appear in the retrospect scarcely longer than the week to which Wakefield had at first limited his absence. He would look on the affair as no more than an interlude in the main business of his life. When, after a little while more, he should deem it time to re-enter ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... have been intimate friends for more than seventy years, but so it will be, for I was only nine when I made my first appearance in London, in a velvet knickerbocker suit with pearl buttons and a Fauntleroy collar. Still, it will all make a lovely retrospect for me, and when I finally retire it will be with a heart very full of gratitude to my generous friends in all four ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... means for the accomplishment of its purposes. Of all our social contrivances, the formal dinner is probably the cause of more anxiety in the arrangement, of more weariness in the performance, and usually of less satisfaction in the retrospect than any other social function. However carefully the guests are selected, it lacks the spontaneity that gives intellectual zest to the chance dining together of friends. This Delancy party was made up for reasons ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Home." That was supposed to be woman's domain, where she was the sovereign power; there she was helper, sustainer, director, the dear dispenser of favors. The woman's kingdom, queen of the home. Gradually the words led her down long lanes of retrospect, led by the rose-leaf touch of the baby's fingers; they kept her strong. What kingdom had she ever made her own? She, poor, bedraggled, complaining suppliant, a beggar where she should have been a queen! Home and the heart of her husband—there lay her woman's kingdom, her realm, her God-given ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... perpetuate their action upon the peripheral nerves. The simple problem in physiology and mechanics involved in this question I was fortunate enough to solve quite a long time ago; and I must confess that in the retrospect these undertakings in themselves do not seem to me of great magnitude, though in their practical application their significance appears more considerable. Herein lies, it may be, the explanation of the interest which these ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... drank his water from his native well; that, if his meal were scanty, he received it from the hand of her, who was most dear to him; that, when he laboured, he laboured for her and his offspring. His daily task being finished, he reposed with his family. No retrospect of the happiness of former days, compared with existing misery, disturbed his slumber, nor horrid dreams occasioned him to wake in agony at the dawn of day. No barbarous sounds of cracking whips reminded him, that with the form and image of a man his destiny ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... subdued, but not wholly mournful, period at Bishopsworthy—a time very precious to Rachel in the retrospect—though there was much to render it anxious. Alick continued to suffer from recurrences of the fever, not very severe in themselves after the first two or three, but laying him prostrate with shivering and headache every third ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ecstatically compared her to Latona seated in an open coach, between a youthful Apollo and a young Diana. In spite of the abbe's poetical extravagance, Madame de Sevigne recognized, in this moment of retrospect, the truth of the picture. That, indeed, had been a radiant moment! Her life at that time had been so full, and the rapture so complete—the rapture of possessing her children—that she could remember to have had the sense of fairly evaporating happiness. ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... with years,' may pass, but 'Conscious Virtue, void of fears,' is poor. 'Halcyon Peace on moss reclined,' is a picture; 'Retrospect that scans the mind,' is nothing; 'Health that snuffs the morning air,' is a living image; but what sense is there in 'Full-eyed Truth, with bosom bare?' and how poor his 'Laughter in loud peals that breaks,' to Milton's 'Laughter, holding both his sides!' The paragraph, however, commencing ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the surrender of New York seem now in the retrospect to be but the necessary and inevitable consequence of the clash of modern appliances and social conditions produced by the scientific century on the one hand, and the tradition of a crude, romantic ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... into the particulars of this adventure, let us take a retrospect of the amours of his Royal Highness, prior to the declaration of his marriage, and particularly of what immediately preceded this declaration. It is allowable sometimes to drop the thread of a narrative, when real facts, not generally known, give such a variety upon the ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... differences are forgotten and our contests of political opinion are no longer remembered, nothing in the retrospect of our public service will be as fortunate and comforting as the recollection of official duty well performed and the memory of a constant devotion to the interests of ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... is one of the purest, since it is that which unites us also with our youth; it is one of the happiest, for it binds us to the days when we looked forward and not backward, for in hope there is nothing to regret, while in retrospect there is a touch of autumn and a ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... his individuality from its centre, and thus destroyed his power of work and completed his soul-ruin. Oscar's second fall—this time from a height—was fatal and made writing impossible to him. It is all clear enough now in retrospect though I did not understand it at the time. When he went to live with Bosie Douglas he threw off the Christian attitude, but afterwards had to recognise that "De Profundis" and "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" were deeper and better work than ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... historical work is cast, the reader has a right to ask that it should give him some idea, not only of what happened, but of why it happened. A catalogue of dates and names is as meaningless as the photograph of a crowd. In the following retrospect, I have attempted to trace the principal factors that worked towards Italian unity. The Liberation of Italy is a cycle waiting to ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... weariness. The conflict never ceased, nor was there hope of emerging from its sordidness into the high places where were breathing space and vision. One could never hope when night came to glance back over the day and see in retrospect a finished piece of work. There was no such thing as writing finis beneath any chapter of the ponderous tome of ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... the foregoing retrospect as merely ancient history. On the contrary, let all those who desire to see the British Empire follow the path of its natural development in tranquillity study the recent past. By doing this we shall be able to estimate aright ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... by the author of the Retrospect, that "in the heat of battle, it is not only possible but easy to forget death, and cease to think; but in the cool and protracted hours of a shipwreck, where there is often nothing to engage the mind but the recollection of tried ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... this dismal ruler, Trinidad, by the grace of the Colonial Office, was subjected to the manipulation of an unctuous dandy. This successor of Gordon, of Elliot, and of Cairns, durst not oppose high-placed official malfeasants, but [72] was inexorable with regard to minor delinquents. In the above retrospect we have purposely omitted mentioning such transient rulers as Mr. Rennie, Sir G. W. Des Voeux, and last, but by no means least, Sir F. Barlee, a high-minded Governor, whom death so suddenly and inscrutably snatched away from the good work he had loyally begun. Every one of the above temporary administrators ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... to let the season preach to us, and to confine myself simply to suggesting for you one or two very plain and obvious thoughts which may help to make our retrospect wise and useful. And there are two main considerations which I wish to submit. The first is —what we ought to be chiefly occupied with as we look back; and secondly, what the issue of such a retrospect ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the most remarkable phenomenon of the day; and why? Because the most remarkable expression of a movement, accomplished and proceeding in a quarter that, if any on this earth, might be thought sacred from change. Oh, fearful are the motions of time, when suddenly lighted up to a retrospect of thirty years! Pathetic are the ruins of time in its slowest advance! Solemn are the prospects, so new and so incredible, which time unfolds at every turn of its wheeling flight! Is it come to this? Could any man, one generation back, have ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... honourable, I am sure. I regret that my arrangements in life, combined with circumstances over which I have no control, will put it out of my power ever to fall back upon that offer or to renew it in any shape or form whatever, but it will ever be a retrospect entwined—er—with friendship's bowers." Mr. Guppy's bronchitis came to his relief and stopped his measurement ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... meeting of a village council an aged peasant farmer, who cried "We are not subjects but servants of William II." Was imprisoned for six weeks. The occasion that called forth the protest was an enforced levy for some public works of no advantage whatever to the inhabitants. Sad indeed is the retrospect, sadder still the looking forward, with which we quit French friends in the portions of territory now known as Alsace-Lorraine. And when we say "Adieu" the word has additional meaning. Epistolary intercourse, no ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... and that their future existence seems to have been suspended on the contingency, whether the Persian or the Grecian banner should wave victorious in the beams of that day's setting sun. And, as his imagination kindles at the retrospect, he is transported back to the interesting moment; he counts the fearful odds of the contending hosts; his interest for the result overwhelms him; he trembles, as if it were still uncertain, and seems to doubt whether he may consider Socrates and Plato, Demosthenes, Sophocles, and ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... beauty? Cicero speaks of tree-planting as the most delightful occupation of advanced life; and Sir Robert Walpole once said that among the various actions of his busy life none had given him so much satisfaction in the performance and so much unsullied pleasure in the retrospect as the planting with his own hands many of those magnificent trees that now ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... easy night in holding the cattle. On my return, they were just grazing out from the river, their front a mile wide, making a pretty picture with the Yellowstone in the background. But as I sat my horse and in retrospect reviewed my connection with the cattle before me and the prospect of soon severing it, my remuda came over a near-by hill in a swinging trot for their second drink. Levering threw them into the river below ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... is the very contrary to Procrastination: As we lose the present Hour by delaying from Day to Day to execute what we ought to do immediately; so most of us take Occasion to sit still and throw away the Time in our Possession, by Retrospect on what is past, imagining we have already acquitted our selves, and established our Characters in the sight of Mankind. But when we thus put a Value upon our selves for what we have already done, any further ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... drunk too much, he thought as he rode the hotel elevator. For in retrospect, the evening was a haze of pleasure that was hard to pin his attention to. Everything he had said, everything that had happened seemed profoundly right, an atmosphere which he had encountered rarely before and only then in the last stage of drunkenness. ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... Miss Martineau, in her Retrospect of Western Travel, has given us some striking and valuable glimpses of the eminent men of that period, particularly of the three most eminent, who frequently visited her during her stay in Washington. This passage, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... intimate and professional relations, but who seem now as absolutely to belong to a bygone order of things, as if they had wrangled before the Dikasts of Athens, or pleaded before the Praetor at Rome. Mr. Phillips seems to feel this, and, as the gay days of his sanguine youth flit by his memory, the retrospect brings, as it will ever bring, melancholy, and even sadness, with it. Yielding himself up to the dominion of feeling, in place of keeping his reason predominant, he mourns over the past, as if, in comparison with the present, it were ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... Dome, one of the great granite mountains, began to dominate the world; but though the cascades were in his kingdom they could not be governed by him, because spirits are not ruled by earthly kings. There was Vernal Fall, gentle in majesty; and Nevada, a wild and untamed water spirit; and retrospect glimpses of ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... natures of brother and sister were strongly similar—light- hearted and happy, laughing and gay, keen to enjoy life, but reading some part of its mysteries, understanding some of its sorrows and showing at times evidences of searching thought and grave retrospect. ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;[194]—read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... is severe in his criticisms. In his "retrospect, pointing out the mistakes that were made," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... forgotten and our contests of political opinion are no longer remembered, nothing in the retrospect of our public service will be as fortunate and comforting as the recollection of official duty well performed and the memory of a constant devotion to the ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... was not more than two minutes in length, but it seemed a good hour to Buffle, whose acquaintanceship the delicacy of the trigger of his beloved pistol caused his past life to pass in retrospect before him several times before they reached the light. The light proved to be in the saloon whose locality had provoked the quarrel. The saloon was full, the door was open, and there was a buzz of astonishment, which culminated in a volley of ejaculations, in which strength predominated ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... She had listened to his heartbeats; with her own abundant strength she had shielded him, fought for him, drawn him, by very force of her will, back to life; the anguish she had suffered during those long hours became, in retrospect, a poignant pleasure. ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... with the night of the first attempt of his suppressed poetical genius to manifest itself, and gave Hollington a comprehensive account of each detail of his subsequent experiences, down to the reading of the letters and the spiritual retrospect they had induced. He did not tell the story dramatically; he had no fire left in him; he stated it in a matter-of-fact way, which was impressive because of the speaker's indisputable belief in his own words. Hollington ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... changes in one's way of life are not decided as casually as trading in the old car for a model of the current year. Usually the decision to pioneer backward is reached so gradually that those who take the step can hardly tell in retrospect just when the die was cast. A vacation or summer in the country may have put it in mind. Then a period of vague indecision follows when city and country appear about equally attractive. Suddenly some chance ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... historical retrospect greater and more revolutionary changes are seen to have occurred during the nineteenth century than in any century preceding. In these changes no department of thought and activity has failed to share, and theological thought has been quite as much affected as scientific ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... moment: that, say, in which Hamlet turns on Caudius and kills him—rather, leads him out to kill him. To that you are led by a little sparse dialog, ominous enough, and pregnant with dire significance, between two or three actors; many long speeches in which the story is told in retrospect; much chanting by the chorus—Horatio multiplied by a dozen or so—to make you feel Hamlet's long indecision, and to allow you no escape from the knowledge that Claudius' crime would bring about its karmic punishment. It is a unity: one thunderbolt from Zeus;—first ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Carteret's motion for an address, beseeching his majesty to remove sir Robert Walpole from his presence and councils for ever. The speech that ushered in this memorable motion would not have disgraced a Cicero. It contained a retrospect of all the public measures which had been pursued since the revolution. It explained the nature of every treaty, whether right or wrong, which had been concluded under the present administration. It described the political connexions subsisting between the different powers in Europe. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... happily fills up what would otherwise have been the only void in the scene, so thickly is it studed and storied with objects and recollections. Altogether, we have rarely seen a topographical panorama of such diversified character: it has reminiscences of history and poetry to lead us through the retrospect of chivalrous ages, princely contests for crowns that rarely sat lightly on their wearers, and the last flickering hopes of defeated ambition and ill-starred fortune. Yet, how powerfully, not to say painfully, are these pages ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... end of the dinner conversation and hilarity were growing apace. Men were forgetting the scramble of existence in the recollection of old college days, when their blood was like wine and the world a thing of adventure. Mellowed by retrospect, they laughed over incidents that had caused heart-burnings at the time; and as they laughed more than one felt a swelling of the throat. It was, perhaps, just an odd streak of sentiment (and the man who is without such is a sorry ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... well astern; the long string of empty bathhouses slid by, water foamed under the swelling sail. Gliding with the bark, dreamy retrospect met and joined hands with solider prospect. Carlisle threw round a measuring eye, and perceived that she had covered more distance than she had thought; had passed the limits of the board-walk and the ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... largess bestowed, perhaps exclusively, on the sense of sight, and this bounty contributes essentially to the acquirement and retention of knowledge. They are the unfading transcripts of vision, and they exhibit the original picture to the retrospect of memory. They are but little under the immediate direction of the will, and cannot be arbitrarily summoned or dismissed, but owe their introduction to a different source, to be explained hereafter. They perform important offices, although they are not the materials to rear ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... their new home, while Mr. and Mrs. Mallery went on to New York. Theodore had been there perhaps a dozen times since he took that first surreptitious trip with Mr. Hastings, but in these visits he had always been a hurried business man, with little leisure or taste for retrospect. Now, however, it was different, and traversing the streets with his wife leaning on his arm, he had a fancy for going backward, and painting pictures from the past for her amusement. The hotel to which he had escorted Mr. Hastings on that day had advanced ...
— Three People • Pansy
... Theologico-Politicus, and the scathing criticism on the perversions of the teaching of Christ in that treatise may have suggested certain passages in a poem presently to be noted.[172] Yet, so far as his own contemporary testimony goes, we are led to conclude that in his retrospect he has assigned to an earlier period experiences which were of gradual growth, and which only at a later date were realised with the vividness he ascribes to them. If we turn to his actual life during the same period, it is equally hard to trace in it the ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... "In the retrospect, nothing. It seems to me already as but an infinitesimal point. Things that engrossed me, and seemed of such moment, that overshadowed the duty of obeying my conscience—what were they, and where? Ah, where? They endured but a moment. Reality and ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... cheered up. "For opportunities lost," he said. "The lost opportunities—how sad a theme, how melancholy a retrospect! Tell ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... our retrospect of American literature before 1861 with a brief notice of one of the most striking literary phenomena of the time—the Leaves of Grass of Walt Whitman, published at Brooklyn in 1855. The author, born at West Hills, Long Island, in 1819, had been printer, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... form some idea of what must be its power on those who were within the charmed ring; who were actually under the wand of the enchanter, for whom there was music in that voice, fascination in that eye, and habitual command in that spare but lustrous countenance; and who can trace again in this retrospect the colours and shadows which in those years which fixed their destiny, passed, though in less distinct hues, into their own lives, and made them what ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... itself a sufficient cause for gratitude, on account of the happiness it has actually conferred and the example it has unanswerably given But to me, my fellow-citizens, looking forward to the far-distant future with ardent prayers and confiding hopes, this retrospect presents a ground for still deeper delight. It impresses on my mind a firm belief that the perpetuity of our institutions depends upon ourselves; that if we maintain the principles on which they were established they are ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... said Mr. Deane, spreading himself in his chair a little, and entering with great readiness into a retrospect of his own career. "But I'll tell you how I got on. It wasn't by getting astride a stick and thinking it would turn into a horse if I sat on it long enough. I kept my eyes and ears open, sir, and I wasn't too fond of my own back, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... 'Paracelsus' was affixed a preface, now long discarded, but which acquires fresh interest in a retrospect of the author's completed work; for it lays down the constant principle of dramatic creation by which that work was to be inspired. It also anticipates probable criticism of the artistic form which on this, and so many subsequent occasions, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... revengeful for the moment. She realized now that he meant this—that in his heart was no least feeling for all that had gone before—no sweet memories, no binding thoughts of happy hours, days, weeks, years, that were so glittering and wonderful to her in retrospect. Great Heavens, it was really true! His love was dead; he had said it! But for the nonce she could not believe it; she would not. It really ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... a human life can be told in very few words. A youth of golden dreams and visions; a few years of struggle or of neglected opportunities; then retrospect ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... abbe paused, smiling as if in retrospect, and kept looking into the fire and turning about in his hand ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... concerned further with the girl's singular history. He hated the irregular, the pretentious. His own life, so clear, so well regulated, made her daily performances the more monstrous. The whole had become so foolish in retrospect that he refrained from speaking of it, even to ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... within fifteen years it has grown to its present impressive proportions, and has now its own magnificent church building, costing over two hundred thousand dollars, and entirely paid for when its consecration service on January 6 shall be celebrated. This is certainly a very remarkable retrospect. ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... book of fate, and have seen the forty years' fearful afflictions that were to follow, I certainly should not have rejoiced at this my escape from Glatz. One year's patience might have appeased the irritated monarch, and, taking a retrospect of all that has passed, I now find it would have been a fortunate circumstance, had the good and faithful Schell and I never met, since he also fell into a train of misfortunes, which I shall hereafter relate, and from which he could ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... and here for the first time gave herself up to him with tears, with twinges of her conscience, and at the same time with such ardour and tenderness, that the poor secretary lost his head completely—was plunged entirely into that senile love, which no longer knows either reason or retrospect; which compels a man to lose the last ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... coward for a father, a scarecrow, a butt for a gang of miners' boys! This, this was her father! Why, even crippled old Jim, the wood-chopper, seen in retrospect and haloed by copper-colored dreams of romantic ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... crush out at one blow, in the interest of the reigning Valois, not the Huguenots only but the rival houses of Guise and Bourbon. The word, the act, from hour to hour through what presented itself at the time as a long-continued season of frivolity, suggested in retrospect alike to friend and foe the close connexion of a mathematical problem. And yet that damning coincidence of date, day and hour apparently so exactly timed, in the famous letter to the Governor of Lyons, by which Charles, the trap being now ready, seems ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... come into a condition of vast perplexities. For the first time in my life, at least so it seems to me now in this retrospect, I looked at my ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... that. It is enough; too much. What, in the reconstruction of a life, are, in retrospect, its triumphs but empty shards, drained and discarded, the litter of a picnic party that has fed and ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... sky is changed; O world! What pictures and what harmonies are thine! The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene, So like the soul of me, what if 't were me? A melancholy better than all mirth. Comes the sweet sadness at the retrospect, Or at the foresight of obscurer years? Like yon slow-sailing cloudy promontory Whereon the purple iris dwells in beauty Superior to all its gaudy skirts. And, that no day of life may lack romance, The spiritual stars rise nightly, shedding down A private beam into ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... same thing occurs at Sebenico. The hotel porters are not allowed to carry baggage to and from the steamers or the station; we were told there was a law against it, which a man sitting by said was just enough, for the odd-job men must live! The retrospect from the railway is fine. The southern end of the inlet is in the foreground, with a training-ship upon it; the city on its hill lies to the right, crowned by Fort S. Anna, and higher still the Fort S. Giovanni; while to ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... beginning of it," Jed Dawkins answered. He looked toward his two companions as if for confirmation. He looked at the three crewmen, at Cal, all sprawled or crouched there beneath the tree at the edge of the clearing. "We thought it was the end of everything," he said in retrospect, "but we found out quick that things had ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... walks exerted a beneficial influence on his own darkened mind. It is one thing to struggle from idea to idea; it is another when material objects mingle with the retrospect; they seem to supply stepping-stones in the gradual resuscitation of memory ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... page. He tried, too, to serve and help his simple country neighbours, as indeed he had desired to do even at Eton, by showing them many small, thoughtful, and unobtrusive kindnesses, just as his father had done. But he lived much, like all poetical natures, in tender retrospect; and the ending of the bright days brought with it a heartache that even nature, which he worshipped like a poet, was powerless to console. But he loved his woods and sloping fields, and the clear river passing under its high banks ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... by retrospect, humped his way through the crowd at the gates of the Aqueduct. There was not a friendly eye in that crowd. He stuffed his ears with indifference. He would not bear their remarks as they recognized him. He summoned all his nerve to look them in the face unflinchingly—that nerve that had ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... reached the Achilles Statue, and a hurried retrospect showed me the terrier some thirty paces away, exchanging discourtesies with an Aberdeen. The two were walking round each other with a terrible deliberation, and from their respective demeanours it was transparently clear that only an immediate ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... having felt sorry for everybody else, Charity began to feel pleasantly sorry for Jim Dyckman. Her own rebuke of him for assaulting Cheever had absolved him. In the retrospect, the attack took on a knightliness of devotion. She recalled his lonely dogging of her footsteps. If he had played the dog, after all, she loved dogs. What was so faithful, trustworthy, and lovable ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... from a retrospect of the history which this and the preceding chapter contain, but they will more fitly form a part of a subsequent chapter of this volume, when a sketch of the results achieved by Psychological Medicine will be given, as ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... be in the retrospect more distinct to him was the process by which he had become aware that Kate's acquaintance with her was greater than he had gathered. She had written of it in due course as a new and amusing one, and he had written back that he ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... in vindication of the national rights and honor. The present condition of the country is similar in some respects to that which existed immediately after the close of the war with Great Britain in 1815, and the occasion is deemed to be a proper one to take a retrospect of the measures of public policy which followed that war. There was at that period of our history a departure from our earlier policy. The enlargement of the powers of the Federal Government by construction, which ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... girl, mistress of many gay frocks, could make herself! There was an implied crime-partnership in her glance which revolted him. Dick Langdon must have talked in his own home. Crane's conscience—well, he hardly had one perhaps, at least it was always subevident; to put it in another way, the retrospect of his manipulated diplomacy never bothered him; but this gratuitous sharing in his evil triumph was disquieting. The malicious glitter of the girl's small black eyes contrasted strongly with the honest, unaffected look that was forever in the ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... complex; but, whether the sympathies of the reader be for or against the standpoint of the Irish Loyalists, the actual events which make up what may be called the Ulster Movement would be wholly unintelligible without some introductory retrospect. Indeed, to those who set out to judge Irish political conditions without troubling themselves about anything more ancient than their own memory can recall, the most fundamental factor of all—the line of cleavage between Ulster and the rest of the island—- is more than unintelligible. ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... and the two went together to spend the forenoon in Walden woods, calling on Emerson by the way to inquire what the best road might be. Emerson prudently detained them until after the townspeople were safely in their churches, and then accompanied them. It is a pleasant retrospect to think of those two mighty men, so like and yet so unlike, together with their amiable and gifted friend, going off on this Sunday excursion. Mr. Hillard was a fortunate companion for him, for no one could serve better as a mean between two extremes. ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... accompanied me thus far, will not need to be informed that I have designedly omitted many of those remarks on scenery, manners, and institutions, which were naturally suggested to my own mind by a retrospect of my sojourn in the United States. On various subjects of great interest and importance, it would be difficult for me to add anything new or valuable to the information contained in other and well known works; while on those points to which my attention was chiefly directed, I have endeavored, ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... asunder into the several churches of the Lutheran and the Reformed confessions; there are many even now to deplore it as a disastrous set-back to the progress of the kingdom of Christ. But in the calmness of our long retrospect it is easy for us to recognize that whatever jurisdiction should have been established over an undivided Protestant church would inevitably have proved itself, in no long time, just such a yoke as neither the men ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... Longfellow, and Lowell; of Prescott, Ticknor, Motley, Sparks, and Bancroft; of Verplanck, Hillard, and Whipple; of Stuart and Robinson; of Norton, Palfrey, Peabody, and Bowen; and, lastly, that of Emerson himself, and how much American classic literature would be left for a new edition of "Miller's Retrospect"? ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... insignificant they look now—for fear of criticism, for fear of being thought odd, for fear of the opinion of worldly companions, for fear of being pitied or laughed at, over and over again you have run away. The things that seemed important when they were present seem pitifully insignificant in the retrospect. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... and words of Christ, obedience to His precepts, delight in His ways, preservation from their own iniquities, and consistent behaviour, as evidences that their faith was living, and their hope warranted; and in this way the retrospect conduced to their encouragement. Moreover, they all concur in declaring that, while they left their infirmities behind them, they should take their graces along with them, and that ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... my former letter I made some rather disparaging remarks about certain ocean liners, but I want to take them all back. Life is a series of comparisons and in retrospect the steamer on which I crossed seems a veritable floating palace. I offer it my humble apologies. Of one thing only I am certain—I shall never, never have the courage ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... life, to his moderation and goodwill, and to the impressive effect of his preaching and teaching upon the people of the city.[12] Vadian, the Humanist and reformer of St. Gall, too, in spite of his disapproval of some of Denck's ideas, speaking of him in retrospect after his death, called him "a most gifted youth, possessed of all excellencies." But his teaching was too strange and unusual to be allowed currency even in free Strasbourg. After being granted a public discussion he was ordered ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... poignancy of beauty. The memory of suffering endured is often the last thing from which we would be parted, while humdrum happiness we are quite willing to forget. Because we realize completely only in retrospect, it may well be that the present exists chiefly for the sake of the future. Then let the days come with veiled faces, accept their gifts whose value we are so little able to appraise! There is a profound and practical truth in Christ's saying, ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... rigorously scrutinized, tortured, and blackened, should never have heard that act of power complained of. The present Lord Barrington who opposed him, saw his fall, and the secret committee appointed' to canvass his life, when a retrospect of twenty years was desired and only ten allowed, would certainly have pleaded for the longer term, had he had any thing to say, in behalf of his father's sentence. Would so warm a patriot then, though so obedient a courtier now, have suppressed the charge to this hour? This Lord ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... good pummeling at the hands of the future humorist, who, though upheld by the captain, decided to quit the Pennsylvania at New Orleans and to come up the river by another boat. The Brown episode has no special bearing on the main tragedy, though now in retrospect it seems closely related to it. Samuel Clemens, coming up the river on the A. T. Lacey, two days behind the Pennsylvania, heard a voice shout as they approached the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... message without getting caught at it. I recollected now how cautious he had been to hand me no paper, and how openly and obviously he had dropped each specimen into my book; because he knew someone was watching him and expecting him to slip in a message. He had, as I could see now in the retrospect, been conspicuously careful that nothing suspicious should pass from his ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... he was first in the army, and knowing the distress it caused his family at home, his mind was so troubled that he wrote to his mother: "Oh, what agony I have endured! What sleepless nights I have passed since the perusal of that letter! The review of my past life, especially the retrospect of the last two years, has at last quite startled me, and at the same time disgusted me." And again: "Oh, that I had the last two years allotted to ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... other countries where the art has been cultivated and esteemed. In order, therefore, to acquire an accurate knowledge of the state of musical taste and science which now prevails among us, it will be necessary to take a brief retrospect; and as much of the music still popular was composed during the earliest period of the art in England, we shall rapidly trace its history from the times of those early masters, whose names are still held in remembrance and repute, down to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... conversation grew gradually more and more Indian; it always does under similar circumstances. A sea voyage is half retrospect, half prospect; it has no personal identity. You leave Liverpool for New York at the English standpoint, and are full of what you did in London or Manchester; half-way over, you begin to discuss American custom-houses and New York hotels; by the time ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... in the present, not in the future, nor much even in the past, till the world has been some time with him, and he by degrees shares the common heritage of retrospect and anticipation. This is the great secret of the quiet happiness which strikes almost all visitors to a ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... sad, too much Of retrospect have I; And well for me, that I, sometimes, Can put those ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... for the latest brief doings in current fiction; and usually in the background—and often long in abeyance—was something in the way of memoirs or biography, many-volumed, which could fill the empty hours either through retrospect or anticipation. ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... service one happens upon experiences that, though they make no immediate impression, become more prominent than the most dramatic events, when the period is past and can be viewed in retrospect. Sub-consciousness, wiser than the surface brain, penetrates to the inner sanctuary of true values, photographs something typical of war's many aspects, places the negative in the dark room of memory, and fades into inertia until ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... speculators' creeds and customs may amuse himself, however, with reminiscences like the preceding only in a sense of that proud historic retrospect which concerns past radiant records of "the street." He may, if so minded, con other pages of its noble archives, and dazzle his young brain with admiration for the shining exploits of "Black Friday," an occasion when greed held one of its most sickening ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... Bridget rode a fiery little chestnut. Maule had already had opportunity to admire the famous O'Hara seat. They had hunted together once or twice on the Campagna, that winter when they had met in Rome. It was difficult to avoid retrospect, but Bridget seemed determined to keep it within conventional limits. They found plenty, however, to talk about in their immediate surroundings. Perhaps it was the effort to throw off the load on her heart that made Bridget gaily confiding. She drew humorous pictures of the comic ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... the city of Alexandria was intense and universal when the Roman army entered it to reinstate Cleopatra's father upon his throne. A very large portion of the inhabitants were pleased with having the former king restored. In fact, it appears, by a retrospect of the history of kings that when a legitimate hereditary sovereign or dynasty is deposed and expelled by a rebellious population, no matter how intolerable may have been the tyranny, or how atrocious the crimes by which the patience of the subject was exhausted, the lapse of ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... prosperous; and prosperity does not bind, it merely assembles people—at dinners and dances. It is adversity that binds—beside the gravestone, beneath the desolated roof. Could you come here and see what I have seen, the retrospect of suffering, the long, lingering convalescence, the small outlook of vigor to come, and the steadfast sodality of affliction and affection and fortitude, your kind but unenlightened heart would be wrung, as mine has been, and ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... I have not been able to steal a moment from the rich and varied objects before me to write about them. I will, therefore, take a brief retrospect of the ground. ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... energy, and lift our politics to a broader view of the people's essential interests. It is a record of singular variety and singular distinction. But I shall not attempt to review it. It speaks for itself and will be of increasing influence as the years go by. This is not the time for retrospect. It is time, rather, to speak our thoughts and purposes concerning the present and ...
— In Our First Year of the War - Messages and Addresses to the Congress and the People, - March 5, 1917 to January 6, 1918 • Woodrow Wilson
... decease of James Howell, and in 1668 the death of Davenant opened the situation of poet-laureate. These two offices, with a salary of L200 paid quarterly, and the celebrated annual butt of canary, were conferred upon Dryden 18th August 1670.[29] The grant bore a retrospect to the term after Davenant's demise, and is declared to be to "John Dryden, master of arts, in consideration of his many acceptable services theretofore done to his present Majesty, and from an observation of his learning and eminent abilities, and his great skill and elegant ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... several attempts. They say it is different in other parts of the region. But when you have plank roads and first-class hotels and all the modern conveniences, I don't call that going into the woods and camping out. The real thing is not very much fun except in the retrospect, when you can thank your stars that you got out alive. For the greater part it is a snare and a delusion. But if you still pine for the forests and streams and the free out-of-door life, I don't wish to discourage you, and you know I never ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... were almost unnoticed of Barlow. All up the climb the retrospect was with him, claiming his thoughts. Just that—all that was in evidence, a pigment in the skin, caste; and yet reacting away back to God's mandate against the union of the white and black. And verily a sin to be visited even unto the third and ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... overflowing schedule at the University of South Dakota. It has been my companion on many journeys and six states have witnessed its progress toward completion. In spite of the time consumed it seems in retrospect not far short of presumptuous to have tried in three or four years to put into acceptable English what Dio spent twelve in writing down. Yet the task was not quite the same, for half of this historian's books have been caught up and whirled away ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... Whartons would now probably be great people and Britain a great nation. But the Evil One had been allowed to prevail, and everything had gone astray, and Sir Alured now had nothing of this world to console him but a hazy retrospect of past glories, and a delight in the beauty of his own river, his own park, and his own house. Sir Alured, with all his foibles and with all his faults, was a pure-minded, simple gentleman, who could not tell a lie, who could not do a wrong, and who was earnest in his desire to make those ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... proceeded upon a botanising tour about the neighbourhood, in the hope of making some discovery that might prove useful to us. For my own part, happening to think of the question which had been started in the morning, as to the day of the week, I began to make a retrospect of all that had taken place since the fearful night of the mutiny, and to endeavour to fix the order of subsequent events, so as to arrive at the number of days we had been at sea, and upon the island. In the course of these calculations, and while Browne ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... higher opinion of my fellow-citizens, if such a thing could be. They were indeed very charming people, and such of them as I mostly saw were readers and lovers of books. Society in Columbus at that day had a pleasant refinement which I think I do not exaggerate in the fond retrospect. It had the finality which it seems to have had nowhere since the war; it had certain fixed ideals, which were none the less graceful and becoming because they were the simple old American ideals, now vanished, or fast vanishing, before the knowledge of good ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sacque. This dame, who seemed more merry than refined, hailed me, seized me, and tried to seat me in her lap; a jolly and coarse old girl from whom, in my hour of sentiment, I fled with craven shrinking: to whom, upon a retrospect, I do more justice. The two lepers (both women) sat in the midst of their visitors, even the children (to my grief) touching them freely; the elder chatting at intervals—the girl in the same black weed and bowed in the same attitude as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lead to retrospect: after a year of the greatest of all wars it is natural to indulge in a stock-taking of the national spirit, and comforting to find that, in spite of disillusions and disappointments, the alternation of exultations and agonies, the soul ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... contemplation is profitable only as a legitimate topic of contrition. How much wiser and more profitable to anticipate the serious judgment which sooner or later we must pass upon our actions, and so to shape our conduct in advance, that the retrospect, when it comes, may be a source of joy and congratulation, rather than of shame and repentance. How much wiser to direct our bark to some definite and well selected channel, than to float at random along the current of events, the sport of every idle ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... mild persistence urge man's search To vaster issues. So to live is heaven: To make undying music in the world, Breathing as beauteous order that controls With growing sway the growing life of man. So we inherit that sweet purity For which we struggled, failed and agonized, With widening retrospect that bred despair. Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued, A vicious parent shaming still its child Poor, anxious penitence, is quick dissolved; Its discords, quenched by meeting harmonies, Die ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... numbers of Popish priests and bishops you have, in the faithful discharge of your pious duty, committed to chains, imprisonment, transportation, and the scaffold—think of all these things, I say, and take comfort to your soul by the retrospect. Would you wish to receive the rites and consolations ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... mindful of us: He will bless us." In that joyful assurance there is both retrospect and prospect. There is the trodden pathway of Providence, and there is the star of hope! The eyes are steadied and refreshed in sacred memories, and then they gaze into the future with serene and happy confidence. ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... I would have purchased a franc's worth of iodine for almost anybody on earth. Not then. On the contrary, I grew positively low-spirited when, after three more days, the lamentations began to diminish in volume. They were sweet music to my ears, at the time. They are sweeter by far, in retrospect. If only one could extract the same amount of innocent and durable pleasure out of all ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... cinquante ans depuis que j'ai premier vu Madame Warens,' what a yearning of the soul is implied in that short sentence! Was all that had happened to him, all that he had thought and felt in that sad interval of time, to be accounted nothing? Was that long, dim, faded retrospect of years happy or miserable—a blank that was not to make his eyes fail and his heart faint within him in trying to grasp all that had once filled it and that had since vanished, because it was not a prospect into futurity? Was he wrong in finding more to interest him in it than ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... the satisfaction with which we look back upon a right action far more than compensates for any pain with which it may have been attended. The 'mens sibi conscia recti' is the highest reward which a man can have, as, on the other hand, the retrospect on base, unjust, or cruel actions constitutes the most acute of torments. Now, when a man looks back upon his past actions, what he regards is not so much the result of his acts as the intention and the motives by which the intention was actuated. ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... in retrospect it seems that the blind musician stood in some peculiar and significant relation to the more ordinary life about him. But for him, I should probably have omitted to describe my night among the Turks. He ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... Charlotte's school, he had recently done so with success, and had seen the ladies feel toward him, as he felt under his instructress in the art. Some nature, however, is required for every piece of art. Wilfrid knew that he had been brutal in his representation of the part, and the retrospect of his conduct at Brookfield did not satisfy his remorseless critical judgement. In consequence, when he again saw Lady Charlotte, his admiration of that one prized characteristic of hers paralyzed him. She looked, and moved, and spoke, as if the earth were ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... stirs him to lofty enterprise—a man prompt, capable, and calm, wanting nothing in soldiership except good-fortune. Ever tempted to reverie, he yet refuses, even for one little hour, to yield up the weal of Flanders to idle thought or vacant retrospect. Having once put his hand to the plough of action, with clear foresight, not blindfold bravery, his language is—'Though I indulge no more the dream of living, as I hoped I might have lived, a life of temperate and thoughtful joy, yet I repine not, and from this time forth will cast ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... remembers the pangs of doubt, the apprehension, the painful forebodings, nay, the despair itself into which an absence protracted beyond custom, and not to be accounted for, has thrown him, will be able, from a retrospect of his reflections on such an occasion, to imagine what must have been the danger of this boy, and what the courage he must have had to encounter it—and will, while pondering with admiration upon his fortitude and manliness, tremble for his fate. This writer ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... to attempt to discover the vast changes that are likely to come as a direct consequence of the present Armageddon, it is necessary to refer in brief retrospect to some of the main causes and features of the great European war. Meanwhile, I think the general feeling amongst all thoughtful men is best expressed in the phrase, "Never again." Never again must we have to face the possibility of such a world-wide catastrophe. Never again must ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... preliminary instructions. Cardinal Mercier presents these under "propaedeutics," even for his grown-up scholars, placing logic properly so called in its own rank as the complement of the other treatises of speculative philosophy, seen in retrospect, a science ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... gathering, little noted at the time, assumes strange significance in retrospect. At one platform Patrick Pearse, then headmaster of St. Enda's school, spoke in Irish. What he said ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... never ceased, nor was there hope of emerging from its sordidness into the high places where were breathing space and vision. One could never hope when night came to glance back over the day and see in retrospect a finished piece of work. There was no such thing as writing finis beneath any chapter of the ponderous tome of ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... professions, whilst the inveterate habits of sovereignty convert the wish into claim and positive right, and an incompliance with it into crime and treason;—these facts, these passions, these moral verities, on which the whole tragedy is founded, are all prepared for, and will to the retrospect be found implied, in these first four or five lines of the play. They let us know that the trial is but a trick; and that the grossness of the old king's rage is in part the natural result of a silly trick suddenly and most unexpectedly baffled ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... actions wait, are well The prompter's hand is on his bell; The coming heroes, lovers, kings, Are idly lounging at the wings; Behind the curtain's mystic fold The glowing future lies unrolled,— And yet, one moment for the Past; One retrospect,—the first and last. ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... vaguely aware of pressure of our clothing. Usually it is not sufficiently noticeable to cause much annoyance, but occasionally it is, as is demonstrated at night when we take off a shoe with such a sigh of relief that we realize in retrospect it had been vaguely troubling us ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... "associations" would be very charming, that it would be an infinite pleasure to rest her eyes upon the things she had read about in the poets and historians. She was very fond of the poets and historians, of the picturesque, of the past, of retrospect, of mementos and reverberations of greatness; so that on coming into the English world, where strangeness and familiarity would go hand in hand, she was prepared for a multitude of fresh emotions. They began very ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... people. It is plainer still that he embodied the resolute purpose which underlay the fluctuations upon the surface of their political life. The English military historians, Wood and Edmonds, in their retrospect over the course of the war, well sum up its dramatic aspect when they say: "Against the great military genius of certain of the Southern leaders fate opposed the unbroken resolution and passionate devotion to the Union, which he worshipped, ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... entertaining and more philosophical than that which arises from beholding the musty ruins of Rome. Here everything would inspire the reflecting traveller with the most philanthropic ideas; his imagination, instead of submitting to the painful and useless retrospect of revolutions, desolations, and plagues, would, on the contrary, wisely spring forward to the anticipated fields of future cultivation and improvement, to the future extent of those generations which are to replenish and embellish this boundless continent. There the half-ruined amphitheatres, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... On a retrospect, among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, including the spectacles of the Southern Cross, the Cloud of Magellan, and the other constellations of the Southern Hemisphere, the glacier leading its blue stream of ice overhanging the sea in a bold precipice, the lagoon-islands ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... Tresilian and the other judges; and, with the approbation of the present judges, declared the answers for which these magistrates had been impeached to be just and legal:[****] and they carried so far their retrospect as to reverse, on the petition of Lord Spenser, earl of Glocester, the attainder pronounced against the two Spensers in the reign of Edward II.[*****] The ancient history of England is nothing but a catalogue of reversals: every thing is in fluctuation and movement: one faction is continually ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... get 'em back. Lost two of our best men,—scalped at Bloody Creek,—and had to drop a dozen redskins in their tracks,—me and another man,—lyin' flat in er wagon and firin' under the flaps o' the canvas. I don't know ez they waz wuth it," he added in gloomy retrospect; "but I've got to get rid of 'em, I reckon, somehow, afore I work ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... windfall pure and simple. The years of petty pickering suddenly seemed more horrid to her in retrospect than she had ever realized they were in the living. It was hateful to have reckoned in car fares and to so often have appeared to do the niggardly thing before the unspoken reproach ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... up like a little dog, but tired as he was he could not sleep—not at first. He was nothing but a baby boy, but he had quite a retrospect or panorama passing before his eyes as he lay on the dirty caravan floor. He saw the old court at home; he saw the pretty farm of Warren's Grove; he saw that tiring day in London when it seemed to both Cecile and himself that ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... is taken becomes canonised, and the looks of the homeliest babe seem in the retrospect 'heavenly the three last days of his life.' But it appears that James and Mary had indeed been children more than usually engaging; a record was preserved a long while in the family of their remarks and 'little ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... storm had scoured the air, and the world was bright as a new pin. In the shaded solitude of the after-deck, Mr. Carstairs's agent sat in an easy-chair with a cigarette, and thought over the remarkable happenings of his first night in Hunston. In retrospect young Editor Smith seemed to be but the ordered instrument of fate, dispatched in a rowboat to draw him against his will from the yacht to the town, where all his business was neatly arranged for ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... should have attained to a greater size, and a more muscular body. Perhaps, instead of placing the causes which effect disparity of stature among various nations in the difference of food, this instance ought to teach us to have retrospect likewise to the original races from which those tribes are descended, that fell under our examination. Let us, for instance, suppose, that the people of New Caledonia are the offspring of a nation, who, by living ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... man again, physically and mentally sound, doing all reverence to the memory of his dead wife—a flawless angel in the retrospect—while finding natural solace in the company of living women who were also young and fair. The living women were much in evidence from the first; nothing but the sea could keep them from trying to comfort him. A big fellow, with a square, hard face, and a fist to fell an ox—that was ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... eyes, and let them answer for going on in their practice.[5] My province is much larger than at first sight men would imagine, and I shall lose no part of my jurisdiction, which extends not only to futurity, but also is retrospect to things past; and the behaviour of persons who have long ago acted their parts, is as much liable to my examination, as that of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... "Clarion" office. It was suggested to Hal that the success of the function warranted its being established as a regular feature of the shop. Later this was done. One of the participants, however, was very ill-pleased with the morning's entertainment. Dr. Surtaine saw, in retrospect and in prospect, his son being led astray into various radical and harebrained vagaries of journalism. None of those at the breakfast had foreseen more clearly than the wise and sharpened quack what serious difficulties beset ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... back over the way which the Lord has led us these forty years in the wilderness, we sometimes find in retrospect the Marahs no sadder than the Elims. Nay, there are times when the Elims are ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... the tuft-headed Circassian girls of cheap museums; the vistas of shabby cross streets; the survival of an old hip-roofed house here and there at their angles; the Swiss chalet, histrionic decorativeness of the stations in prospect or retrospect; the vagaries of the lines that narrowed together or stretched apart according to the width of the avenue, but always in wanton disregard of the life that dwelt, and bought and sold, and rejoiced or sorrowed, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Then all was anxious terror that I would not be there in time to see one look, or to hear one word. Now there was nothing imaginary—all was real misery. There now remained not even a chance of happiness, but what depended on the retrospect of better days ...
— A Week at Waterloo in 1815 • Magdalene De Lancey
... head. He leaned back, half closed his eyes, put his finger-tips together, and almost smiled as if something in retrospect pleased ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... Technique: /n./ [TMRC] A visionary quality which enables one to ignore the standard approach and come up with a totally unexpected new algorithm. An attack on a problem from an offbeat angle that no one has ever thought of before, but that in retrospect makes total sense. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... after intervening contrast, something which has originally given pleasure. Furthermore this sound psychological principle finds an analogy in our own life: with its early years of striving, its middle period of development and its closing years of climactic retrospect and satisfaction. There is a corresponding structural treatment in the denoument of a drama. In the classic composers, the Recapitulation is almost always a literal repetition of the Exposition, although Beethoven began to be freer, e.g., in the climax of the Coriolanus overture, where he modifies ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... stores the best they had, and a luxurious supper was spread upon the grass. The meal might have been one of ten courses, it occupied so long; it provoked so much mirth, such a rippling stream of reminiscence; finally, such a sweetly solemn retrospect of the sorrows and mercies and triumphs of the campaign they had shared together. This latter feeling ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... from it at first chiefly an impression of quantity. Then he sees that this quantity is really wealth; that the dim confusion of faces is a magnificent composition, and that some of the details of this composition are extremely beautiful. It is impossible however in a retrospect of Venice to specify one's happiest hours, though as one looks backward certain ineffaceable moments start here and there into vividness. How is it possible to forget one's visits to the sacristy of the Frari, however frequent they may have been, and the great work of ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... referred to in the last letter was given at the Royal Institution, February 10, 1860. The following letter was written in reply to Mr. Huxley's request for information about breeding, hybridisation, etc. It is of interest as giving a vivid retrospect of the writer's experience on ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... all that was stirring and vivid around him undoubtedly hindered him in the race for university honours; though his success was sufficient to inspirit him at the time, and to give him abiding pleasure in the retrospect. He twice gained the Chancellor's medal for English verse, with poems admirably planned, and containing passages of real beauty, but which may not be republished in the teeth of the panegyric which, within ten years after they ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Behavior in retrospect.—The caption of this chapter implies the behavior of human beings, as a matter of course, and the study of this subject is, at once, both alluring and illusive. No sooner has the student arrived at deductions ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... undying music in the world, Breathing a beauteous order that controls With growing sway the growing life of man. So we inherit that sweet purity For which we struggled, failed, and agonized With widening retrospect that bred despair. Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued, A vicious parent shaming still its child, Poor anxious penitence, is quick dissolved; Its discords quenched by meeting harmonies, Die in the large and charitable air. And all our rarer, better, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... had disappeared in disgrace; and there I sat by my Wife's side, endeavouring to form a retrospect of the year 1999 and of the possibilities of the year 2000; but not quite able to shake of the thoughts suggested by the prattle of my bright little Hexagon. Only a few sands now remained in the half-hour ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... concern. Such additions, whether literary or social, are the best kind of refreshment that travel supplies. She published two books on America: one of them abstract and quasi-scientific, Society in America; the other, A Retrospect of Western Travel, of a lighter and more purely descriptive quality. Their success with the public was moderate, and in after years she condemned them in very plain language, the first of them especially ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... obtain the laurel till Aug. 18, 1670, but Mr. Malone informs us, the patent had a retrospect, and the salary commenced from the Midsummer ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... anguish, not to marry Barbara. "How could he marry her?" he had replied, in his soothing pity. "She, Isabel, was his wife. Who was Barbara? Nothing to them?" But it had all come to pass. She had brought it forth. Not Mr. Carlyle; not Barbara; she alone. Oh, the dreadful misery of the retrospect! ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... occupied us through two chapters. Before passing onward I must, however, invite the reader to pause awhile and reconsider, even at the risk of retrospect and repetition, some of the salient features of his character. And now I remember that of his personal appearance nothing has hitherto been said. 'Tasso was tall, well-proportioned, and of very fair complexion. His thick hair and beard were of a light-brown color. His head was large, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... mystical retrospect, beginning in vein of prologue: over mysterious murmuring strings, long sustained notes of the reed and horn in octave descent are mingled with a soft carillon of horns and trumpets in the call of the Scherzo. In broad swing a free fantasy rises ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... have read the book of fate, and have seen the forty years' fearful afflictions that were to follow, I certainly should not have rejoiced at this my escape from Glatz. One year's patience might have appeased the irritated monarch, and, taking a retrospect of all that has passed, I now find it would have been a fortunate circumstance, had the good and faithful Schell and I never met, since he also fell into a train of misfortunes, which I shall hereafter ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... obliged to part with a sound tooth in self-defense, restored him for the time being. But he was not the only one to whom the retrospect brought a momentary pain. Nattie sighed as she looked back to the day that had brought Clem, but not restored as she then supposed, but ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... the return of a man to the haunts of his youth, after he has acquired fame and a recognised position in the world, which is of itself sufficient to arrest attention. We are interested in the retrospect and the contrast, the juxtaposition of the old and the new, the hopes of early years, the memory of the struggles and contests of manhood, the repose of victory. A man may differ as much as he pleases from the doctrines of Mr. Carlyle, he may reject his ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... Ireland—for Adam knew that Arthur had been gone thither three weeks ago, having recently learnt it at the Chase. Every sad look of Hetty's, since she had been engaged to Adam, returned upon him now with all the exaggeration of painful retrospect. He had been foolishly sanguine and confident. The poor thing hadn't perhaps known her own mind for a long while; had thought that she could forget Arthur; had been momentarily drawn towards the ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... after this, the writer, about to leave London, called at Harcourt House, to say farewell to his comrade in arms. He passed with Lord George the whole morning, rather indulging in the contemplation of the future than in retrospect. Lord George was serene, cheerful, and happy. He was content with himself, which was rarely the case, and remembered nothing of his career but its distinction, and the ennobling sense ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... to direct his thoughts upon the past, certain vague souvenirs began to shape themselves in his memory. They were only dim shadows, resembling the retrospect of a dream, and yet he was impressed with the belief that they had once been realities. He was the more confirmed in this idea, because such visions had occurred to him before—especially upon the night when he sat by the death-bed of his adopted mother—the widow of Arellanos. The revelations ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... were they, two weeks later, at the retrospect of many an unsuccessful chase from which they had returned—when, after twelve days spent in "jaging" the elephant, they had added only a single pair of tusks to the collection, and these the tusks of a cow-elephant, scarce two feet in length, ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... of national progress and decay. The history of religion, of art, of literature, of social and industrial development, of scientific progress, have all their different methods. A writer who treats of some great revolution that has transformed human affairs should deal largely in retrospect, for the most important part of his task is to explain the long course of events that prepared and produced the catastrophe; while a writer who treats of more normal times will do well to plunge rapidly ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... repeatedly on his lips. During a journey a man is often too engrossed with the perplexities of the immediate present to be able to review the path as a whole. But, when he looks back, he surveys the entire landscape in grateful retrospect, and is astonished at the multiplicity and variety of the perils that he has escaped. Henry Martyn had some such feeling. When, at the age of twenty-two, he entered the ministry, he was amazed at the ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... In the retrospect she was amazed to think how things had gone to pieces, for at the outset she had been quite prepared to go home again upon terms. While waiting for his coming she had stated her present and future relations with him with what had seemed to her the most satisfactory lucidity ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... an occasion to be remembered, to be considered wistfully in retrospect during the troubled hours so soon to come to each one of the four of them. While Elmer and Florrie gathered fire-wood, Norton showed Virginia how simple a matter it was here in this seldom-visited mountain-stream to take a trout. Cool, shaded pools under overhanging, gouged-out banks, ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... skilled in the discernment of mental laws and their subtle, irresistible working, might have predicted the fate which overtook the man Jose, the fulsome details of which are herein being recounted. Perhaps such a one might say in retrospect that the culmination of years of wrong thinking, of false beliefs closely cherished, of attachment to fear, to doubt, and to wrong concepts of God, had been externalized at length in eddying the man upon this far verge of civilization, still clinging feebly to the tattered fragments ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... height of desire and human pleasure,—worldly, social, amorous, ambitious, or even avaricious,—does there mingle a certain sense of doubt and sorrow—a fear of what is to come—a doubt of what is—a retrospect to the past, leading to a prognostication of the future? (The best of Prophets of the future is the Past.) Why is this? or these?—I know not, except that on a pinnacle we are most susceptible of giddiness, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... more than probable, however, that this was written by a personal friend; for a year later the same magazine, in its semi-annual retrospect of British literature, expressed somewhat altered opinions. This time it says: "It is not for us to vindicate Mary Godwin from the charge of multiplied immorality which is brought against her by the candid as well as the censorious, by the sagacious ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... nodded, and disappeared. The consul, amused yet somewhat perplexed over the naive brusqueness of the interview, waited patiently. Presently she returned, a little out of breath, but apparently still enjoying some facetious retrospect, and said, "Maw will be down soon." After a pause, fixing her bright eyes mischievously on the ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... pause. It was only a moment before Eugenia spoke; it seemed years, so charged it was with retrospect. ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... herself impatiently out of that retrospect. It was done. Life, as her brother had prophesied, was no kid-glove affair. The future was her chief concern now, not the past. Yet that immediate past, bits of it, would now and then blaze vividly before her mental vision. The only defense against that lay in action, in something ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... historical work. Yet when the author makes a survey of the slavery and reconstruction periods with a view to estimating what the Negro has been, what has been done for him, and what he himself has accomplished it claims the attention of historians. From this historic retrospect the author approaches such questions as the Negroes' grievances, their political rights and wrongs, blood admixture, race hostility and grounds ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... would have purchased a franc's worth of iodine for almost anybody on earth. Not then. On the contrary, I grew positively low-spirited when, after three more days, the lamentations began to diminish in volume. They were sweet music to my ears, at the time. They are sweeter by far, in retrospect. If only one could extract the same amount of innocent and durable pleasure out ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... his hand, for his words sent a thrill of horror through me, and rushed on, speechless with indignation, to the house. Two days after this I became engaged to Arthur. How happy we were!' said Lina, a dreamy expression passing over her face at the retrospect. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... to leave him to himself; and drawing his chair to the open window, he began to ruminate upon the many strange events that had happened to him since he first beheld that fair prospect almost from the same place; and he was indulging in this retrospect, when his own name, pronounced in tones familiar to him, caught his ear, and looking forth, he perceived Dick Taverner, seated on a bench in front of the house, drinking in company with some half dozen other apprentices, ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... loneliness until she seemed to look back years at the self she had hated. And always, when the dark memory impinged upon peace, she fought and fought until she seemed to be fighting hatred itself. Scorn of scorn and hate of hate! Yet even her battles grew to be dreams. For when the inevitable retrospect brought back Jean Isbel and his love and her cowardly falsehood she would shudder a little and put an unconscious hand to her breast and utterly fail in her fight and drift off down to vague and wistful dreams. The clean and healing forest, with its whispering wind and imperious ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... said General Washington in reply, "from the walks of private life to view in retrospect the difficulties through which we have waded, and the happy haven into which our ship has been brought. Is it possible after this that it should founder? will not the all wise and all powerful Director of human ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... complete his theater in time for the date set for opening. In fact it was not completed, but when the season arrived he was ready to attempt all that he had said he would do, except keep some wild promises about singers; and when the season closed the fact that loomed largest in the retrospect was the undaunted manner in which he had carried on a difficult and dangerous enterprise, compelling a large element of the public to respect and admire him, and making it possible for him to lay out a second season on lines of real pith and ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of the year is a point from which, as from a sort of eminence, one looks back over the past, happy if the prospect is not gloomy, and if the retrospect carries with it no feelings of regret and self-reproach. The past year has been full (as what year is not?) of events, of which that which has made the deepest impression on society is the death of Lord Holland. I doubt, from all I see, whether anybody (except his own family, including ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... which he was brought up; and in the passage of Don Juan, to which I have just referred, his allusion to the romantic bridge of Don, and to other localities of Aberdeen, shows an equal fidelity and fondness of retrospect:— ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... the course of the anarchists on any other theory than that they were subsidized by the capitalists, but, at the same time, there is no doubt that the theory is wholly erroneous. It certainly was not held at the time by any one, though it may seem so obvious in the retrospect.] ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... tell precisely the reach of his soul, but it was certainly "above buttons." The chopping of the firewood, the providing of food, the state of the weather, the prospects of the advancing spring, and the retrospect of the long dreary winter that was just vanishing from the scene, were not sufficient to appease his intellectual appetite. They sufficed, indeed, for his square, solid, easy-going, matter-of-fact interpreter, Donald Mowat; and for his chief fisherman, guide, and bowman, Bartong, as ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... awake, In dreams, and in the musing moods that wait On unfulfilled purposes, I've done it; And thought upon it afterwards, nor shrunk From the fell retrospect. ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... rapture, as though they were carried out of themselves into the divine. I have seen dancing more accomplished, more elaborate, more astonishing than this. But never any that seemed to me to fulfil so well the finest purposes of the art. The Russian ballet, in the retrospect, seems trivial by comparison. It was secular; but this was religious. For the first time I seemed to catch a glimpse of what the tragic dance of the Greeks might have been like. The rhythms were not unlike those of Greek choruses, the motions corresponded strictly to the rhythms, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... to show that only heroic measures could now save the American cause. Fortunately Washington was surrounded by a little knot of officers of approved fidelity, whose spirit no reverses could subdue. And though a calm retrospect of so many disasters, with all the jealousies, the defections, and the terror which had followed in their wake, might well have carried discouragement to the stoutest hearts, this little band of heroes now ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... room, regarding me as he went in such a manner, that I could not fail recognising him: and here, my friend, I must lay aside every particle of self-love and vanity ere I can make you a complete confession; the retrospect of my life brings many events, of which the remembrance is indeed painful to me, and only the solemn promise I am under to conceal nothing restrains me from consigning many particulars to oblivion. I am once more about to incur ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... the land, which they probably then wished, with their growing family, to farm themselves. Nothing seems then to have been settled, and they were too poor to risk the perils of a great law-suit. Doubtless, with sad hearts and bitter retrospect, they regretted their unlucky purchases in 1575, which seemed to have pinched them so, and wished at least they had been contented with the half, with the one tenement in Henley Street that formed part of their residence. For, had they only ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... down the steps and watched its return to the attack. Then with something of melancholy retrospect in his pale eyes he pursued his reflections. "Now there was Sissy Belmire an' Bud Thomas, been keeping company for two years, then washed hands in common at the Christian Endeavor picnic an'—" He broke off to shake his head ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... methods of the Knights of Labor. The public, however, did not anticipate the revolutionary ideal which again sought to inflame industrial unionism. After the decadence of the older type of the industrial union several conditions manifested themselves which now, in retrospect, appear to have encouraged the violent militants who call themselves the Industrial Workers of ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... ancient town that became strange and magical as the sun went down, so that I was held gazing at it, and afterwards had to flee the twilight across the windy spaces and under the dim and darkling trees. It is only now in the distant retrospect that I identify that far-off city of wonder, and luminous mist with the commonplace little town, through whose narrow streets we drove to the railway station. But, of course, that is what it must ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... quit this place, and have been wandering over it for the last time. You will imagine I can have no attachment to it: yet a retrospect of my sensations when I first arrived, of all I have experienced, and still more of what I have apprehended since that period, makes me look forward to my departure with a satisfaction that I might almost call melancholy. This cell, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... first time gave herself up to him with tears, with twinges of her conscience, and at the same time with such ardour and tenderness, that the poor secretary lost his head completely—was plunged entirely into that senile love, which no longer knows either reason or retrospect; which compels a man to lose the last thing—the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... ancient critiques have no appreciable bearing on our argument and we cite them rather for historical interest and retrospect.[13] [Sidenote: Festus] [Sidenote: Brix] While Festus[14] makes a painful effort to explain the location of the mythical "Portus Persicus" mentioned in the Amph.,[15] Brix[16] in modern times shows that there is no historical ground for the elaborate ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... together with the unfriendly sky, it kept me at home. I am sorry now, as for many another omission on my wanderings, when lack of energy or a passing mood of dullness has caused me to miss what would be so pleasant in the retrospect. ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... not attempt to reason, he merely gave way to gloomy retrospect, without sequence or order. Seen in the light of his experiences during the past weeks, his life looked poor, and dull, and misdirected. It was little comfort to assert that he had at least been true to ideals high, no ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... endure this terrible retrospect, Paslew strove to bend his thoughts on other things. The choir was singing the "Dies Irae," and ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... exchange of slow and cumbrous means of conveyance for those which enable you in these days to perform the journey of weeks in, you might say, as many hours; and the not less marked advance in education and intelligence. The retrospect, material as well as moral, social, and religious, is useful in ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... she was not of royal birth. There were hunting parties again, when the huntsmen wore brave green and scarlet instead of the Bourbon blue and silver; there were court fetes, which made the entertainments of Louis Philippe, the honest Citizen-King, seem very dull in retrospect. The Spanish Empress longed to rival the fame of Marie Antoinette, the Austrian wife of Louis XVI who had followed that King to the scaffold. Like Marie Antoinette, she was censured for extravagances, the marriage being ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... hoop-stick." Actually given or only meditated, the whole of these twenty Readings—meaning the entire collection of the identical marked copies used by the Novelist himself on both sides of the Atlantic—have, for the verification of this retrospect, been placed for the time being in the writer's possession. Selecting from among them those merely which are familiar to the public, from their having been actually produced, he here proposes cursorily to glance one by one through ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... I think, brothers, we can picture the old white-haired Bishop of Ephesus, borne day after day upon a litter into his church, and ever saying the same tender words, "little children, love one another." What a retrospect there was for S. John to look back along that stretch of years! What memories must have filled the old man's heart of those days when he was a sunny-haired stripling, working with his brothers in the fishing boat, and casting net, and pulling oar over the bright waters of Gennesareth. ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... was not settled even in the final retrospect, when it appeared that at the very moment that Northwick showed himself mindful of the company's interests on those minor points, he was defrauding it further in the line of his defalcations, and keeping back a large ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... further urged that in historical retrospect, and in the light of evolution, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in the course of man's development from a savage and barbaric condition all manner of ills—bloodshed, slavery, etc.—have been necessary stages; may not, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... do not want to indulge in useless retrospect. I do not want to exercise my imagination and yours in tracing out some more desirable course of events that might have resulted from your acting otherwise. But I cannot help giving expression to my deep ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... condemned it to a slow decline to the ruin of to-day; and it profoundly affected the Liberal party, giving it a new orientation and producing the leader who was to make it the dominating force in Canadian politics. These things were not realized at the time, but they are clear enough in retrospect. Party policy, party discipline, party philosophy are all determined by the way the constituent elements of the party combine; and the shifting from the Conservative to the Liberal party of the political weight of Quebec, not as the result of any profound change of conviction ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... the Georges had never come from Hanover, the Whartons would now probably be great people and Britain a great nation. But the Evil One had been allowed to prevail, and everything had gone astray, and Sir Alured now had nothing of this world to console him but a hazy retrospect of past glories, and a delight in the beauty of his own river, his own park, and his own house. Sir Alured, with all his foibles and with all his faults, was a pure-minded, simple gentleman, who could not tell a lie, who could ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... when actions wait, are well: The prompter's hand is on his bell; The coming heroes, lovers, kings, Are idly lounging at the wings; Behind the curtain's mystic fold The glowing future lies unrolled; And yet, one moment for the Past, One retrospect,—the first and last. ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... license. We every where see empires torn by their dissensions; thrones overturned by their machinations; princes immolated to their power and revenge; subjects animated to revolt against the prince that ought to give them more happiness than they actually enjoyed; and when we take the retrospect of these, we find that the ambition, the cupidity, and vanity of the clergy have been the true causes and motives of all these outrages on the peace of the universe. And it is thus that their religion has so often produced anarchy, and overturned the very empires ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... that the convention should look back and punish all judiciary assassinations, abuses of authority, massacres, and arbitrary acts committed since the 1st of Sept. 1792. The convention passes to the order of the day, saying, that such retrospect would involve half of France. All the members of the revolutionary committee of Brest are delivered over to the tribunals. The Vendeans have further successes. Fresh massacres are committed at Macon. A section of Paris demands of the convention that it should efface the inscriptions ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz
... it grow anxieties, premature despairs, incongruous with fresh cheeks and a mind not yet mature. This misery was mine for those four years which to most men are the happiest of a whole career, but to me at every retrospect seem so beset with gloomy shadows that could I live my life again, I would not traverse them once more for all ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... arrival was sufficient to satisfy his imaginative sentiment. He was not anxious to open the epistle, and in truth did not begin to read it for nearly half-an-hour, anticipating readily its terms of passionate retrospect and tender adjuration. When at last he turned his feet to the fireplace and unfolded the sheet, he was surprised and pleased to find that neither extravagance nor vulgarity was there. It was the most charming little missive he had ever received from woman. To ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... Davenant opened the situation of poet-laureate. These two offices, with a salary of L200 paid quarterly, and the celebrated annual butt of canary, were conferred upon Dryden 18th August 1670.[29] The grant bore a retrospect to the term after Davenant's demise, and is declared to be to "John Dryden, master of arts, in consideration of his many acceptable services theretofore done to his present Majesty, and from an observation of his learning and eminent abilities, and ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... home that a meditative man really makes such a trip. All the unpleasant features are strained out or transformed. In retrospect it is all enjoyable, even the discomforts. I am aware that I was often irritable and ungracious, but my companions were tolerant, and gave little heed to the flitting moods of an octogenarian. Now, at this distance, and sitting beside my open fire at Slabsides, I look upon the ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... now upon that lonely launch of mine in London, I see a very curious and sombre picture. In the living I am sure there must have been mitigations, and light as well as shade. In the retrospect it seems one long disillusion. I see myself, and the few folk with whom my relations were intimate, struggling like ants across a grimy stage, in the midst of an inferno of noise, confusion, pointless turmoil, ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... not obtrude into his mental retrospect as an accusation against this unwarrantable tenderness the vision of the Resident's daughter—almost his fiancee. Indeed Elizabeth was the antithesis in physical appeal of the gentle Gulab; the drawing-room perhaps; ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... emerges clearly enough from Lord HALDANE'S pages—the danger of playing diplomat to a democracy. "Extremists, whether Chauvinist or Pacifist, are not helpful in avoiding wars" is one of many conclusions, double-edged perhaps, to which he is led by retrospect of his own trials. His book, while making no concessions to the modern demand for vivacity, is one that no student of the War and its ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... even a chimney. He stood and stared at it; but his thoughts were elsewhere: he found himself trying to call to mind Polly's face. Except for a pair of big black eyes—magnificent eyes they seemed to him in retrospect—he had carried away with him nothing of her outward appearance. Yes, stay!—her hair: her hair was so glossy that, when the sun caught it, high lights came out on it—so much he remembered. From this he fell to wondering whether her brain kept pace with her nimble hands and ways. Was she stupid ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... that these twenty years would appear in the retrospect scarcely longer than the week to which Wakefield had at first limited his absence. He would look on the affair as no more than an interlude in the main business of his life. When, after a little while more, he should deem it time to re-enter his parlor, his wife would clap ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Indians who might attempt to scalp him with their little knives if they caught him out after dusk. Though his childhood had not been happy, he had reached a bend in the road where to pause and look back was to find the retrospect full ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... liberty of quoting Secretary Lane's inspiring words given at the opening of the Exposition - a fine retrospect that we must not lose sight of when we look upon the determined woodsman of the ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... phase of my insanity or not, I don't know, but I woke the next morning in pretty good spirits. Remembrance of the previous day's humiliations troubled me surprisingly little. They did not seem nearly so great in the retrospect. What difference did it make to me what that crowd of snobs ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... wilt miss them then in retrospect, When thou hast that whereby one judges worth. But let us now forget what's past and gone! I like it not, when starting on a course, By any hindrance thus to bar the way With rubbish from an earlier estate. I do absolve myself from all my sins. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... had been improvement in the candles; the audience was more civilised; the orchestra had been increased; the rushes had been swept from the stage; everything that had been mean was now "all otherwise." The manager possibly had in his mind during this retrospect the condition of the Vere Street Theatre while under his management. The audience possessed an unruly element. 'Prentices and servants filled the gallery; there were citizens and tradesmen in the pit, with yet a contingent of spruce gallants and scented fops, who combed their wigs during the pauses ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... army, and knowing the distress it caused his family at home, his mind was so troubled that he wrote to his mother: "Oh, what agony I have endured! What sleepless nights I have passed since the perusal of that letter! The review of my past life, especially the retrospect of the last two years, has at last quite startled me, and at the same time disgusted me." And again: "Oh, that I had the last two years allotted to ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... very sweet and gracious repose. It was a hard-featured countenance; it had never been handsome; only the beauty of sense and character it had, and the dignity of a well-lived life. Something more too; some thing of a more noble calm than even the fairest retrospect can give; a more restful repose than comes of mere cessation from labour; a deeper content than has its ground in the actual present. She was a most reverent person, to look at. Just now she was waiting for something, and listening; for ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... knowledge must be welcome. For every new-comer of proved merit, more especially if that merit should have been previously overlooked, he makes ready room in his recognition or his reverence. But no retrospect of scientific literature has as yet brought to light a claim which can sensibly affect the positions accorded to two great Path-hewers, as the Germans call them, whose names in relation to this subject are linked in indissoluble association. These names are Julius Robert ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... incredible that he, whose minutest acts and his most innocent were so rigorously scrutinized, tortured, and blackened, should never have heard that act of power complained of. The present Lord Barrington who opposed him, saw his fall, and the secret committee appointed' to canvass his life, when a retrospect of twenty years was desired and only ten allowed, would certainly have pleaded for the longer term, had he had any thing to say, in behalf of his father's sentence. Would so warm a patriot then, though so obedient a courtier now, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... he had measured all things in his youthful days. These days did not seem so far removed from him now as they used to do, and sometimes he found himself looking back over the last ten years, with the clear truthful eyes of eighteen. It was not always a pleasant retrospect. There were some things covered up by that time, of which the review could not give unmingled pleasure. These were moments when he could not meet Graeme's truthful eyes, as with "Don't you remember?" she recalled his own words, spoken long ago. He ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... the wedding shocked Crosson. He endured a jealousy whose intensity surprised him in retrospect. He endured a good deal of humor, too, from village cut-ups, who teased him because his best girl was marrying the ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... temperance and peace, 280 A rigorous student. [a] What a stormy course Then followed. [b] Oh! it is a pang that calls For utterance, to think what easy change Of circumstances might to thee have spared A world of pain, ripened a thousand hopes, 285 For ever withered. Through this retrospect Of my collegiate life I still have had Thy after-sojourn in the self-same place Present before my eyes, have played with times And accidents as children do with cards, 290 Or as a man, who, when his house is built, A frame locked up in wood and stone, doth still, As impotent fancy ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... was now well astern; the long string of empty bathhouses slid by, water foamed under the swelling sail. Gliding with the bark, dreamy retrospect met and joined hands with solider prospect. Carlisle threw round a measuring eye, and perceived that she had covered more distance than she had thought; had passed the limits of the board-walk and the beach, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the country to be solicited to share the riot of the dissolute and idle." His intemperance was, as Heron says, in fits; his aberrations were occasional, not systematic; they were all to himself the sources of exquisite misery in the retrospect; they were the aberrations of a man whose moral sense was never deadened, of one who encountered more temptations from without and from within than the immense majority of mankind, far from having to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... delightful, gentle, upright man, with charm and a sense of humor, such as none of the rest of my stark characters possessed. I felt that he was necessary to explain the fierceness of the sisters' rivalry for him. I planned one or two ways to get him in, in retrospect—and liked one of the scenes better than anything that finally was left in the story. Finally, very heavy-hearted, I put him out of the story, for the merely material reason that there was no room for him. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... Europe for as the Water Gap itself—worth even the risk of being torpedoed. Our procession seemed to pass through a painted and tapestried corridor, so pink and purple and azure and gold were the rocks that lined our way, with millions of delicate wild flowers. And oh, the retrospect view! It was wonderful, too, crossing by ferry, and looking back. Albertson's ferry we chose, and one car at a time rolled sedately on to a flatboat to be rowed to the opposite side of the river by a very young Charon in a ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... walls, and chairs, and tables, and all the commonplace reality that surrounded her, seemed to lay bare the future too, and bring out into oppressive distinctness all the details of a weary life to be lived from day to day, with no hope to strengthen her against that evil habit, which she loathed in retrospect and yet was powerless to resist. Her husband would never consent to her living away from him: she was become necessary to his tyranny; he would never willingly loosen his grasp on her. She had a vague notion of some protection ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... three days that they had spent in tender acquaintance on the romantic slopes above the Neckar were stretched out in retrospect to the length and importance of years; made to form a canvas for infinite fancies, idle dreams, luxurious melancholies, and sweet, alluring assertions which could neither be proved nor disproved. Grace was never mentioned between them, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... cannot say, now, just where my wanderings took me; but, of course, it was down into the gardens sloping towards the river. In a way the first images of places always remain, however blurred and broken, and the Temple gardens were a dim and fractured memory in the retrospect as I next saw them. It needed all the sunshine of my September day to unsadden them, not from the rainy gloom in which I had left them then, but from the pensive associations of the years between. Yet such sunshine as that can do much, and I found it restoring me to my wonted ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... of my giddy zenith, Gazing back in retrospect, I should say Lord Brixton (Kenneth) Had the brightest intellect; Though of course no age enfeebles James Kircudbright's mental vim (Now the seventh Duke of Peebles)— I have lots of tales ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... dropped, and, as there was no occasion for rousing himself, according to the point of view established by both of them, he settled back into his natural groove and never got beyond his soda-fountain days in retrospect. ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... possession had flowed for him with a rhythmic regularity of movement—and yet in glancing back he could place his finger upon no past events and say of them "this brought me happiness—and this—and this." In retrospect his pleasures showed cheap and threadbare—woven of perishable colours, of lost illusions—and he felt suddenly that he had been cheated into a false valuation of life, that he had been deluded into ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... things in the world as Home Rule, Obstruction, Newmarket Lowther, and Brummagem Joe. And all the time here were we, who could be his sons, grinding our hearts in despair—in futile anger—in melancholy retrospect. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... gild our retrospect. It was in 1903 that Martin Culpepper, a man in his seventies, collected and published "The Complete Poetical and Philosophical Works of Watts McHurdie, together with Notes and a Biographical Appreciation by Martin F. Culpepper." ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... rolled up to the door, with retired merchants and their wives. The retired merchants were of a pattern not altogether extinct in New York, who, at the ages of sixty years and upward, had cleared their skirts of business, and settled down to a calm retrospect of the past, and serene anticipations of the future. They were evidently destined for a good old age, and had fat pocket books to help them through. The proper place to look for this class of retired merchants is on the tax books, and not in public assemblies, or among ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... It was a melancholy retrospect. Mrs. Nesbit might be said to have perfectly succeeded in the object of her life. She had formed her beloved niece, like the fabled image of snow, moulded by the enchanter and animated by no will but ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... saddened because of sympathy for at least two members of the old man's family who would mourn his loss. The "case," now so nearly finished, appeared, as she reviewed it, quite an ordinary one, all the tiny things that had struck her as odd or arresting seemed trivial in retrospect, unworthy of the attention she had bestowed on them. No doubt everything had grown out of the rather peculiar personality of Sartorius from whom she would soon be dissociated—without regret. She would certainly not continue to work for him, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... with the monster of his own creation to "Balder's ride to the death kingdoms, through frozen rain, sound of subterranean torrents, leaden-coloured air"; and in the retrospect of the Reminiscences touchingly refers to his thirteen years of rarely relieved isolation. "A desperate dead-lift pull all that time; my whole strength devoted to it ... withdrawn from all the world." He received few visitors and had few correspondents, but kept his life vigorous by riding ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... the Smells— London Smells! What a world of retrospect his tyranny compels! In the silence of the night How we muse on the old plight Of Kensington,—a Dismal Swamp, and lone! Still the old Swamp-Demon floats O'er the City, as our throats Have long known. And the people—ah, the people— Though as high as a church steeple ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 1, 1890 • Various
... remains to sum up a brief retrospect of the active spirit of discovery set astir, and not likely to die away, as a sequel to the great Burke and Wills Expedition, for by that name it will continue to be known. We have already seen that the Victoria steamer, under Commander Norman, was sent round to the Gulf of Carpentaria to search ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... subway train, and, choosing a seat alone near the centre of the car, which at that hour of night in the downtown district was almost deserted, took the crushed letter from his pocket. For a moment he made no attempt to read it, his dark eyes, now that he was free from observation, full of troubled retrospect, fixed on the window at his side. It was not a pleasant thought that it had cost a man his life, nor yet that that life was also the price of his own freedom. True, if there were two men in the city of New York whose crimes merited neither sympathy nor mercy, those ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements. The accumulation of knowledge has been so great, that we are lost in wonder at the height it has reached, instead of attempting to climb or add to it; while the variety of objects distracts and ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... no paper, and how openly and obviously he had dropped each specimen into my book; because he knew someone was watching him and expecting him to slip in a message. He had, as I could see now in the retrospect, been conspicuously careful that nothing suspicious should pass from ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... admit, with Sir Henry Taylor, that "the retrospect of life swarms with lost opportunities"? "Whoever enjoys not life," says Sir T. Browne, "I count him but an apparition, though he wears about him the visible affections ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... ways. Now her hands, hardened and callous as a boy's, were coarse-skinned with broken nails, sometimes dirty, and her hair hung rough from the confining teeth of a comb and a few bent pins. When in flashes of retrospect she saw her old self, this pampered self of crisp fresh frocks and thoughts moving demurely in the narrow circle of her experience, it did not seem as if it could be ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... listen to a song which I did not recognize, but which, by and by, I settled upon as probably the work of a freakish prairie warbler. At that moment, as if to confirm my conjecture,—which in the retrospect becomes almost ridiculous,—a prairie warbler hopped into sight on an outer twig of the water-oak out of which the music had proceeded. Still something said, "Are you sure?" and I stepped inside the fence. ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... his childhood, when he returned hither to live, the dreamy glamour of the mystic East. At home he lived altogether among books, and in the companionship of poetic imagination passed the years of almost exile from Malta, his fondest retrospect. A winning soul was John Worthington, widely beloved for what he was, and mourned for all that he might ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... becomes canonised, and the looks of the homeliest babe seem in the retrospect 'heavenly the three last days of his life.' But it appears that James and Mary had indeed been children more than usually engaging; a record was preserved a long while in the family of their remarks and 'little innocent and interesting ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... derived from the same original. The fancy had a comic humor in it he found it impossible to resist, but it was kindly and pleasant to the last;[6] and if the later picture showed him plenty to laugh at in this retrospect of his youth, there was nothing he thought of more tenderly than the earlier, as long as he was ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... than even Ezekiel's dry malice imagined. For an instant, Blandford remained stupefied. In the five years' retrospect of his resolution on that fatal night, whatever doubt of its wisdom might have obtruded itself upon him, he had never thought of THIS. He had been willing to believe that his wife had quietly forgotten him as well as her treachery to him, he had passively acquiesced in the results of that ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... the feminist movement was never clearly defined during all the time of its maximum violence. We begin to perceive in the retrospect that the movement was multiple, made up of a number of very different movements interwoven. It seemed to concentrate upon the Vote; but it was never possible to find even why women wanted the vote. Some, for example, alleged ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... Calm retrospect shows that the Confederacy's commissioners were, from first to last, only played with by the skilled sophists of Europe. And, ere the end came, that absolute conviction penetrated the blockade; convincing the South that her policy would ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... humorist, who, though upheld by the captain, decided to quit the Pennsylvania at New Orleans and to come up the river by another boat. The Brown episode has no special bearing on the main tragedy, though now in retrospect it seems closely related to it. Samuel Clemens, coming up the river on the A. T. Lacey, two days behind the Pennsylvania, heard a voice shout as they approached ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the opinion of worldly companions, for fear of being pitied or laughed at, over and over again you have run away. The things that seemed important when they were present seem pitifully insignificant in the retrospect. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... the horror created in the general mind by the perverse and unsocial government from which they had so fortunately escaped, that the people appear to have anxiously avoided all retrospect, and, with Prynne and Vicars, to have lost sight of Shakspeare and "his fellows." Instead, therefore, of taking up dramatic poetry where it abruptly ceased in the labours of Massinger, they elicited, as it were, a manner of their own, or fetched it ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... contrary, should be freed from this godless idolatry of parasites, and be placed in a position where he would be able to live on some smaller ecclesiastical preferment, or on his own patrimony. As for the historical retrospect which Miltitz wanted, and which Luther briefly appends to this letter, all that the latter says in vindication of himself is, that it was not his own fault, but that of his enemies, who had driven him further and further onward, that 'no small part of the unchristian doings at Rome ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... when he looked into sweet eyes and talked of Italian airs, when his future appeared all a succession of bright scenery and joyous acts, without any provision for a drop-curtain. And as my ear listened, and my mind wandered in this happy retrospect, my every faculty seemed exalted, and, without any thought upon the matter, I ground points upon my pins so fine, so regular and smooth, that they would have pierced with ease the leather of a boot, or slipped among, without abrasion, the finest threads of rare old lace. When the organ stopped, ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... A calm retrospect of the reform movement, culminating in the acts of 1832, compels us to see how little the course of politics is guided by reason, and how much by circumstances. Every argument employed in that and the preceding year possessed equal ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... use. This Germanic horde, which I saw pouring down across Belgium, bound for France, does not in retrospect seem to me a man-made, man-managed thing. It seems more like a great, orderly function of Nature; as ordained and cosmic as the tides of the sea or the sweep of a mighty wind. It is hard to believe that it was ever fashioned of thousands of separate atoms, so perfectly ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... surface, an abyss behind every bottom, beneath every "foundation." Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy—this is a recluse's verdict: "There is something arbitrary in the fact that the PHILOSOPHER came to a stand here, took a retrospect, and looked around; that he HERE laid his spade aside and did not dig any deeper—there is also something suspicious in it." Every philosophy also CONCEALS a philosophy; every opinion is also a LURKING-PLACE, every ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... have to be summoned; it was chiefly owing to the consequences of his treacherous foolishness. For this half-home with her friend thenceforward denied to her, she had accepted a protector, called husband—rashly, past credence, in the retrospect; but it had been her propelling motive; and the loathings roused by her marriage helped to sicken her at the idea of a lengthened stay where she had suffered the shock precipitating her to an act ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and moaning women and hard-eyed husbands and deluges of lethe, and the men ask, 'What's the news?' as if the old were so bad. How many individuals can we count in society? how many actions? how many opinions? So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of very few ideas and of very few original tales; all the rest being variation ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... so plainly, to all the world military, our non-military antecedents. We bore the hallmark of fifty years of neutral aloofness, of fifty years of indifference to the business of national defense. What makes the situation amusing as a retrospect is the fact that we were traveling on third-class military passes, as befitted our rank as eleve-pilotes and soldiers of ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... who maintained—in the face of extreme opposition, I am sorry to say—that this town of Flamsted would soon make itself a factor in the vast industrial life of our marvellous country. In retrospect, I reflect that those who had this faith, this trust in the resources of their native town, were looked upon with scorn; were subjected to personal derision; were termed, to put it mildly, 'mere dreamers'—if I am not mistaken, the original ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... All this, in rapid retrospect, passed through Mora's mind as she stood alone beside her splendid Knight, miserably conscious that she had shivered, and that he knew it; and fearful lest he divined the shrinking of her soul away from him, away from love, away from all for which ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... have to deal will have been, in their own time, of the number of avowedly Christian men. Some who have greatly furthered movements which in the end proved fruitful for Christian thought, have been men who in their own time alienated from professed and official religion. In the retrospect we must often feel that their opposition to that which they took to be religion was justifiable. Yet their identification of that with religion itself, and their frank declaration of what they called their own irreligion, was often a mistake. It was a mistake to which both they and their ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... insurgent forces and the restoration of the Union, Lincoln's career would have been a colossal failure and the Emancipation Proclamation a subject of ridicule. The prime essential was military success. Lincoln gained it. Judged in the retrospect of nearly half a century, with his every written word now in print and with all the facts of the period brought out and placed in proper perspective by the endless studies, discussions, and arguments of the intervening ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... incidents that followed the surrender of New York seem now in the retrospect to be but the necessary and inevitable consequence of the clash of modern appliances and social conditions produced by the scientific century on the one hand, and the tradition of a crude, romantic patriotism ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... in self-observation having been gained by concentrating the attention upon short divisions of the day's experience, the student will become more and more expert in this kind of retrospect, continued practice enabling him to review the events of the whole day completely and quickly. It will become ever more and more the ideal of the occult student to assume such an attitude with regard ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... is no new experience. As age creeps on, we all have the same tale to tell. The days of our youth are those we remember best and most fondly, and even the sorrows of that bygone time become pleasures in the retrospect. Of my own solitary childhood I retain the keenest recollection, as ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... our modern stories do, the author never directly states the situation to the reader: it is made sufficiently plain either directly in the conversation itself, or indirectly in the necessary comments and descriptions. Or it may be presented as a retrospect indulged in by one of the characters. On the stage this takes the form of a soliloquy; but since few men in their right minds really think aloud, in the short story it is better for the author to imagine such thoughts running through ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... radical operation for acute mastoiditis. There had been no facilities. The whole thing had been in the last degree makeshift. The half-trained stewardess had held his instruments ready for him, and the sea-sickness, comic in retrospect, had weighed heavily against Mr. Fletcher's chance of seeing land again. Nevertheless, the eminent New York surgeon, consulted at the first opportunity, had pronounced the operation a neat performance—under the ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
