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More "Solitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... minutes to gaze at the novel and interesting scene, we turned up a path through a ravine, and were quickly again in the solitude of the mountains. We travelled upwards for three days, sleeping at nights at the huts of Indians, where we received a warm welcome from their wives, but the men were in all cases absent. We were now crossing the Puna heights, as the table-lands ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... alone, as I have done to-day, doing two days in one, no less than one hundred and forty li of terrible road through the most isolated country, that one can enjoy the comfort of one's own loneliness and own inner room. The scenery was picturesque, much like Scotland, but the solitude was the best of all. I had left office and books and manuscripts, and was on a lonely walk, enjoying a solitude from which I could not escape, a reverie which was passed not nearly so much in thinking ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... garb was composed of rags, tied to his body by the free use of rope. He once told my mother that he had more than once changed clothes with a scarecrow. Sometimes this queer person would never be seen by mortal man for months together, unless it were that I disturbed his solitude occasionally; but then, of course, I was only a boy. "Luke" had a bad name amongst us lads. I know people couldn't fairly make out where he lived; he was wonderfully "lucky," and no doubt he had a comfortable lair somewhere among the rocks and caves. Still ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... the impression of an ocean depth—at the broad lawns and magnificent savannahs glowing in verdure and sunlight—at the princely estates and palace mansions—at the luxuriant cultivation, and the sublime solitude of primeval forests, where trees of every name, the mahogany, the boxwood, the rosewood, the cedar, the palm, the fern, the bamboo, the cocoa, the breadfruit, the mango, the almond, all grow in wild confusion, interwoven ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Thou hast a good knowledge of all the Vedas. Thou hast earned great ascetic merit. It behoveth thee, therefore, to bear like an ox the burthen of thy ancestral kingdom. Penances, sacrifices, forgiveness, learning, mendicancy, keeping the senses under control, contemplation, living in solitude, contentment, and knowledge (of Brahma), should, O king, be striven after by Brahmanas to the best of their ability for the attainment of success. I shall now tell thee the duties of Kshatriyas. They are not unknown to thee. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... he describes the extensive and romantic valley of the Limpopo, "which strongly contrasts with its own solitude, and with the arid lands which must be traversed to arrive within its limits; Dame Nature has doubtless been unusually lavish of her gifts. A bold mountain landscape is chequered by innumerable rivulets abounding in fish, and watering ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... with comparatively unknown streams, in a country where all is gigantesque. There is nothing mountainous or craggy, but the banks and hills at the back being luxuriously wooded, and conveying the idea of being well tenanted, the absence of human habitations seems unnatural, and gives the solitude an air of mystery, only broken at long intervals by a bowered cottage or a wreath of smoke. The most remarkable building is the French chateau of M. Papineau, very prettily situated on the northern bank, commanding an extensive ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... you to be on your guard against that intellectual foible, which I believe has held me back in a region of sadness and solitude that I need not have lingered in, ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... insult, and prudent friends dispense, In pity's strains, the worst of insolence, Oft with thee, Lloyd, I steal an hour from grief, And in thy social converse find relief. The mind, of solitude impatient grown, Loves any sorrows rather than her own. Let slaves to business, bodies without soul, Important blanks in Nature's mighty roll, Solemnise nonsense in the day's broad glare, We Night prefer, which heals or hides our care. 10 Rogues justified, and by success ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... increased. There were only thirty-five miles to be travelled, but excepting on the margin of a few slender streams the country through which their route lay was the barest of desert land. There was no shelter from the chill blasts of this mountain solitude, where, even in November, the thermometer sometimes sank to sixteen degrees below zero. There was no fuel but the wild sage and willow; there was little ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... all right," said the other. But from the tone of the voices, it was clear that poor Ring was despondent at the thoughts of his coming solitude, and that Arkwright was already ...
— Returning Home • Anthony Trollope
... from the Whig party, and established the Glasgow Constitutional, the editorship of which he resigned in 1836. In 1832-3, he published a periodical, entitled, "Bennet's Glasgow Magazine." Continuing to write verses, he afterwards published a poetical volume, with the title, "Songs of Solitude." His other separate works are, "Pictures of Scottish Scenes and Character," in three volumes; "Sketches of the Isle of Man;" and "The Chief of Glen-Orchay," a poem in five cantos, illustrative of Highland manners and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... staircase, leading to two more above. These last were fitted up as bed-chambers. Neither in them, nor in the rooms below, was any scarcity of convenient furniture observable, although the fittings were of a bygone fashion; but solitude and want of use seemed to have rendered it unfit for any purposes of comfort, and to have given it a ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... penalty of a fine of two and sixpence, or in a private dwelling, if strangers were present; and no two could use it together. That iron pipe of Miles Standish, still preserved at Plymouth, must have been smoked in solitude or not at all. This strictness was gradually relaxed, however, as the clergy took up the habit of smoking; and I have seen an old painting, on the panels of an ancient parsonage in Newburyport, representing a jovial circle of portly divines sitting pipe in hand around ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... the theories of the science, if there be any great science about it, and can hardly explain, even now, the true physical condition of Grace. She had pent up her sufferings in her own bosom, for six cruel months, in the solitude of a country-house, living most of the time entirely alone; and this, they tell me, is what few, even of the most robust frames, can do with impunity. Frail as she had ever seemed, her lungs were sound, and she spoke easily and ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... encounters, which did not cease through many a turbulent year. Philbrook lived in the saddle, for he was a man of high courage and unbending determination, leaving his wife and child in the suspense and solitude of their grand home in which they ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... refused food, resolving to end his odious life by starvation. Only the prayers of his friends made him change this resolution. Then, like one pursued by the furies, he fled from the city, hid himself in solitude, and kept aloof from the eyes and voices of men. For several years he thus dwelt in self-afflicting solitude, and when at length time reduced his grief and he returned to the city, he shunned all prominent positions, and lived in humility ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... time still came when it was necessary to be separated from those I loved. There is little indeed in the more immediate suburbs of London to gratify the sense of the beautiful. Yet there was a cedar by which I used to walk up and down, and think the same thoughts as under the great oak in the solitude of the sunlit meadows. In the course of slow time happier circumstances brought us together again, and, though near London, at a spot where there was easy access to meadows and woods. Hills that purify ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... garb was rendered still more effective by the pieces of red stuff cut into hearts and sewed all over their skirts. "These caravans of strange beings, who preserve under every sky their dreamy laziness, their rebellion against the yoke, their love of solitude," had always possessed an irresistible charm for him, and he had never understood the scorn and disgust of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... wild, sad heart! thy passions haunt it; Play hermit in thy house with heart undaunted; A governed heart, thinking no thought but good, Makes crowded houses holy solitude." ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... conception of such a poem, is to be found decisive evidence of the mighty change which the human mind had undergone since the expiring lays of poetry were last heard in the ancient world; of the vast revolution of thought and inward conviction which, during a thousand years, in the solitude of the monastery, and under the sway of a spiritual faith, had taken place in the human heart. A gay and poetic mythology no longer amazed the world by its fictions, or charmed it by its imagery. Religion no longer basked ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... cursed his fate, abused himself, abused politics, his system, abused everything he had boasted of and prided himself upon, everything he had held up to his son as a model; he declared that he believed in nothing and then began to pray again; he could not put up with one instant of solitude, and expected his household to sit by his chair continually day and night, and entertain him with stories, which he constantly interrupted with exclamations, "You are for ever lying,... a pack ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... long and on such frivolous pretexts, that I began seriously to think what was to be done with such a lovesick page. To oppose Fred would be worse than useless. Opposition determined him. If I could have sent her away, solitude would be my bane; for not one of the Fontevraults could I endure. Then as I pondered, I laughed at the absurdity of the whole thing. Not only was Leonora older than the student, a woman in society, but she had been engaged (with that fact I resolved to frighten Fred), ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Horleydene shortly after two, and Mrs. Holymead was the only passenger who alighted at the lonely little wayside station which stood in a small wood in a solitude as profound as though it had been in the American prairie, instead of the heart of an English county. The only sign of life was a dilapidated vehicle with an elderly man in charge, which stood outside the station yard all day waiting ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... prolong'd. Thou tyrant, yes! the declaration God Himself hath utter'd—"I'm the avenging rod!" Words wing'd with fate and fire! oh, not in vain Ye cleft the air, and swept Gomorrah's plain, When, dark idolatry unmask'd, she stood The mark of heaven—a fiery solitude! And still ye sped—still mark'd the varied page In every time—through each revolving age— Wherever man trampled his fellow man, Unscared by crimes, ye marr'd his ruthless plan— Still shall ye speed till time has pass'd away, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... write on the 4th day of July, 1859, a New Treatise, while others are keeping the shadow for reality, rejoicing in companies and filling my ears with explosions of crackers and thunders of guns and my nostrils with the most disagreeable smell of gun powder, while I am mourning in my solitude in the midst of hundreds of thousands of people of the City of New York and neighbourhood, because they would not receive our message of peace and learn how to bring forth fruits of the true liberty of nations. This treatise was occasioned by the book "The War in Europe, its remote and recent ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... on a dreary and unwholesome fen where he had no neighbours but a few rude shepherds. His dwelling was singularly well situated for a contraband traffic in French wares. Cargoes of Lyons silk and Valenciennes lace sufficient to load thirty packhorses had repeatedly been landed in that dismal solitude without attracting notice. But, since the Revolution, Hunt had discovered that of all cargoes a cargo of traitors paid best. His lonely abode became the resort of men of high consideration, Earls and Barons, Knights and Doctors of Divinity. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... lady who has this estate to sell: I am at present at her house; she is very amiable; a widow about thirty, with an agreable person, great vivacity, an excellent understanding, improved by reading, to which the absolute solitude of her situation has obliged her; she has an open pleasing countenance, with a candor and sincerity in her conversation which would please me, if my mind was in a state to be pleased with any thing. Through all the attention and civility I think myself obliged to shew her, she seems to perceive ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... touch, at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan—but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes—an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanour. His air appalled me—but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... have pierced the pain and come to peace. I hold my peace, my Cleis, on my heart; And softer than a little wild bird's wing Are kisses that she pours upon my mouth. Ah, never any more when spring like fire Will flicker in the newly opened leaves, Shall I steal forth to seek for solitude Beyond the lure of light Alcaeus' lyre, Beyond the sob that stilled Erinna's voice. Ah, never with a throat that aches with song, Beneath the white uncaring sky of spring, Shall I go forth to hide awhile from Love The quiver and the crying of my heart. Still I remember how ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... counsel and good judgment, that he sat down and wrote her a long letter, pouring out his whole soul, hoping somehow that she, his guardian angel, though dead, might see it. A year later he wrote a friend: "There is a sensation of loss which nothing alleviates—a solitude which no society interrupts. Amid the smiles and prattle of children, and the kindness of sympathizing friends, I am alone; Roxana is not here. She partakes in none of my joys, and bears with me none of my sorrows. I do not murmur; I only feel daily, constantly, and with deepening ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... still, with the intense silence of mountain solitude. Not a breath of air stirred the motionless cedars. Cautiously he circled the black cabin, every nerve taut for struggle, every sense alert. He found nothing to reward his search—whoever the coward had been, he had disappeared among the rocks, vanishing completely ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... de Cleves say to his wife, "But why do you wish not to return to Paris? What can keep you in the country? For some time past you have shown a taste for solitude which surprises me and pains me, because it keeps us apart. In fact, I find you sadder than usual, and I am afraid that something is annoying you." "I have no mind-trouble," she answered with an embarrassed air; "but the tumult of the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... and tall, and dark, Fit shrine for humble worshipper to hold Communion with his Maker. These dim vaults, These winding aisles, of human pomp or pride Report not. No fantasting carvings show The boast of our vain race to change the form Of thy fair works. But thou art here—thou fill'st The solitude. Thou art in the soft winds That run along the summit of these trees In music;—thou art in the cooler breath That from the inmost darkness of the place Comes, scarcely felt; the barky trunks, the ground, The fresh moist ground, are all instinct with ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... be pitchforked up to the Exchequer. They say it's quite settled. The higher a monkey climbs—; you know the proverb." So saying Laurence Fitzgibbon passed into the room, and Phineas Finn took his departure in solitude. ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... the delirious leg shaking? The excesses of merrymaking are nowhere discoverable. Des Moines, Iowa, or Camden, New Jersey, would present quite as festive a spectacle, he thinks, as he gazes up at the sepulchral shadows on the gigantic Opernhaus before him. He cannot understand the nocturnal solitude of the streets. There is actual desolation about him. A chlorotic girl, her cheeks unskilfully painted, brushes up to him with a careless "Geh Rudl, gib ma a Spreitzn." But that might happen in Cleveland, Ohio—and Cleveland is not framed as a modern Tyre. He is puzzled and distressed. ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... to my question," she exclaimed. "What care I for rain or storm; let the lightning flash and the thunder roar, and do its worst. Go your way, I say, and leave me to my solitude." ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... Dominic (1170-1221) and St. Francis (1182-1226). The principles on which these fraternities were established were very different from those which had shaped all previous monastic institutions. Until now the monk had sought cloistral solitude in order to escape from the world, and through penance and prayer and contemplation to work out his own salvation. In the new orders, the monk was to give himself wholly to the work of securing the salvation ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Solitude and seclusion were at an end. The world had found out where Hazel was and what she had been doing. So many millions were out of the market certainly, but still they might be useful in various ways; and ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... without principally regarding or neglecting the circumstances of fortune or beauty. These may still love in spite of adversity or sickness. The former we may in some measure defend ourselves from; the other is the common lot of humanity. Love has nothing to do with riches or state. Solitude, with the person beloved, has a pleasure, even in a woman's mind, ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... them, Augereau is inclined to be insolent and insubordinate; a favourite of Barras, a general who owes his rank to the events of Vendemiaire who has won his grade by street-fighting, who is looked upon as bearish, because he is always thinking in solitude, of poor aspect, and with the reputation of a mathematician and dreamer. They are introduced, and Bonaparte keeps them waiting. At last he appears, girt with his sword; he puts on his hat, explains the measures he has taken, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... the devil or a monster that had taken his residence in that place. When I recovered a little from my surprise, I called myself a thousand fools, for being afraid to see the devil one moment, who had now lived almost twenty years in the most retired solitude. And therefore resuming all the courage I had, I took a flaming firebrand, and in I rushed again. I had not proceeded above three steps, when I was more affrighted than before; for then I heard a very loud sigh, like that of a ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... somewhat revived him, and he stood still for a moment to collect his thoughts. He felt the need of absolute solitude for a while, to help him to realize—or at any rate to understand—this thing which had happened, and with almost feverish haste he called a hansom from the other side of the road. The man whipped up the horse, but hesitated as he reached the pavement. Looking ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and the almost insane fire which gleamed from under his bushy eyebrows, made him approach nearly to our idea of some seer of Scripture, who, charged with high mission to the sinful Kings of Judah or Israel, descended from the rocks and caverns in which he dwelt in abstracted solitude, to abash earthly tyrants in the midst of their pride, by discharging on them the blighting denunciations of Divine Majesty, even as the cloud discharges the lightnings with which it is fraught on the pinnacles and towers of castles and palaces. In the midst of his most wayward ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... the shining repentance of the storm,—the assurance of joy after sorrow- -the passionate love of the soul rising upwards in perfect form and beauty after long imprisonment in ice-bound depths of repression and solitude—it was anything and everything that could be thought or imagined ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... and spent these stolen moments in a wine-cellar. The final charge asks by what authority he has latterly allowed a strange maiden to appear, and to make music in the choir. This "strange maiden," who made music with Bach in the solitude of the empty church, was none other than his cousin, Maria Barbara. A year later (1707) he married her, and took her to Muehlhausen, where he had found a less troublesome post as organist in ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... could not tell whether he was conscious or not. Nor could I explain to myself why I was concerning myself with his wound. Was it to save, if possible, his life? Was it to lengthen out his term of torture here in the great final solitude, helplessly facing the end, with snarling wolves and screaming kites for his death-watch? ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... In this solitude, where one is thrown entirely upon one's own resources, one discovers how dependent one is upon men and books for inspiration. It is hard even to find a name. Not that finding a name is easy in any circumstances. Every one who lives by his pen knows the difficulty of the ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... pleasantly situated on the brow of a hill, about a mile from the city, [which] hath a very fine prospect of the River Tajo from Lisbon to the sea." With that pleasant prospect the Voyage closes. Begun as it was to while away the enforced solitude of his cabin, a condition, which no man, he tells us, disliked more than himself and which mortal sickness rendered especially irksome, these pages, some of which "were possibly the production of the most disagreeable hours which ever haunted the author," reveal Fielding to us if not ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... face had pressed his. It seemed ages. And suddenly Violet had shown sulkiness and irritation. He couldn't understand it. He couldn't understand how she could have chosen their first hour of solitude for finding fault with the arrangement of the room. He himself had been distinctly pleased; proud, too, of having furnished throughout from Woolridge's, in a style that would last, and at a double discount which he owed to his payment in ready money, and to ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... said good-by there was a gentle pity in her eyes, for she was certain her long-time friend was headed for the highroad of destruction. But instead I turned into the dim solitude of Shiba Park. I had something to think about. To-day's experiences had painted anew in naming colors the difference in husbands. How prone a woman is, who is free and dearly beloved, to fall into the habit of taking things for granted, forgetting how one ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... they did find (and lose) a treasure even greater than Black Bartlemy's? After having "consorted with pirates and like rogues" and having "endured much of harms and dangers, as battle, shipwreck, prison and solitude," it seemed we had sighted happiness at last. But even at the very end things took an ill turn and our Martin, our dear Martin, is left stranded and in sorry plight. Yet must there be a sequel to this. Had he been left to die on ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... that he needed someone to keep his house in order, than from any of the feeling that usually accompanies such unions. In time, however, he had come to love her, and her loss was a very heavy blow to him. It was the void that he felt in his home as much as his desire for solitude, that induced him to leave Highgate and settle in ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... derelict dead in its unnatural solitude and the men who inhabited the dug-out there was only a slender partition of earth, and I realize that the place in it where I lay my head corresponds to the spot buttressed by ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... ceremonies, prayer, and contemplation. From time to time a solitary individual raised his voice against the prevailing abuses, or retired from his monastery to spend the remainder of his days in ascetic solitude; but neither in the monastic population as a whole, nor in any particular monastery, do we find at any time a spontaneous, vigorous movement towards reform. During the last two hundred years reforms have certainly ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... started in his mind since his return from India; even his relations to his wife. Once or twice it flashed across him that he was confessing himself with an extraordinary frankness to a woman he had made up his mind to dislike. But the reflection did not stop him. The balmy night, the solitude, this loveliness that walked beside him so willingly and kindly—with every step they struck his defences from him; they drew; ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... grounded in the elements of both,—laws, by-laws, theory, legends, proverbs, truisms, and even a few abstract truths. But there was no meaning in either to these little prisoners of self. Seclusion is an enemy to youth; solitude its destruction. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... beholding the capital reduced to such a state, the illustrious and virtuous and best of Rishis, Vasishtha was resolved upon applying a remedy and brought back unto the city that tiger among kings, Samvarana, along with his wife, after the latter had passed so long a period in solitude and seclusion. After the king had entered his capital, things became as before, for, when that tiger among kings came back to his own, the god of a thousand eyes, the slayer of Asuras, poured rain in abundance ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... me moreover own to thee, that Dr. Hale, who was my good Astolfo, [you read Ariosto, Jack,] and has brought me back my wit-jar, had much ado, by starving, diet, by profuse phlebotomy, by flaying-blisters, eyelet-hole-cupping, a dark room, a midnight solitude in a midday sun, to effect my recovery. And now, for my comfort, he tells me, that I may still have returns upon full moons—horrible! most horrible!—and must be as careful of myself at both equinoctials, as Caesar was warned to be ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... things about Nina's genius. It was the flame, unmistakably the pure flame. If solitude, if virginity, if frustration could do that——She knew what it had cost Nina, but it was worth it, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... silence, and his father, following, turned the key upon him, and left him to solitude ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... the skipper that I both could and would, whereupon he furnished me with the necessary materials and left me in solitude to perform my task, going on deck himself to superintend the preparations ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... other's corpses, he sat in his royal robes, and gave away the lands of Edwin and Morcar to his liegemen. And thus, like the Romans, from whom he derived both his strategy and his civilization, he "made a solitude and called ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... newspaper man and his company started eastward. Livingstone went some distance with them, and then, a broken old man, "clad in faded gray clothes," with bowed head and slow step, returned to his chosen solitude. Five months later the relief party reached Zanzibar, and news of Livingstone's safety and whereabouts was flashed to all ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... I often felt that similarity was wanting between us,—that the ascendency of a dominating temper, united to that of twenty years more of age, made one of these superiorities too much. If we lived in solitude, I had sometimes very painful hours to pass: if we went into the world, I was liked by persons, some one of whom I was fearful might affect me too closely. I plunged into my husband's occupations, became his copying clerk, corrected his proofs, and fulfilled the task with ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... at present wholly immersed in country business, and begin to take a delight in it. I wish I might hope to see you here some time, and will not despair of it, when you engage in a work that will require solitude and retirement. ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... stars, the moon-blanched valley with its grazing herds, the beautiful wild mourn of the hunting wolf and the whistle of the stag, and always and ever the murmur of the stream—in these, and in the solitude and loneliness of their haunts, he found his goal, his serenity, the truth and best of remaining life ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... must go, they tell me, since you cannot turn the hill inside out without destroying the trees and bushes that crown it. What person who has known it and has often sought that spot for the sake of its ancient associations, and of the sweet solace they have found in the solitude, or for the noble view of the sacred city from its summit, will not deplore this fatal amiability of the authorities, this weak desire to please every one and inability to say ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... was not supremely contented in his solitude with his self-drawn mental resources. His friends at Avignon came seldom to see him. Travelling even short distances was difficult in those days. Even we, in the present day, can remember when the distance of fourteen miles presented a troublesome journey. The few guests who came, to him could ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... develops in solitude, yet bustle and crowds and business activity are as necessary to the man as sunshine is ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... moment Miss Raven and I had kept silence, watching this unexpected arrival in our solitude; now, turning to look at her, I saw that the thought which had come into my mind had also ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... had been, nor was his retreat ever discovered. This was his constant practice during the whole time he received his pension. He regularly disappeared, and returned. He indeed affirmed that he retired to study, and that the money supported him in solitude for many months, but his friends declared, that the short time in which it was spent, sufficiently confuted his ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... judgments of good and ill are true or not. Truth supposes a standard outside of the thinker to which he must conform; but here the thinker is a sort of divinity, subject to no higher judge. Let us call the supposed universe which he inhabits a moral solitude. In such a moral solitude it is clear that there can be no outward obligation, and that the only trouble the god-like thinker is liable to have will be over the consistency of his own several ideals with one another. Some of these will no doubt be more pungent and appealing than the rest, their goodness ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... particularly good dinner while denouncing the slaughter of animals, and eulogising the "sparkling brook" while getting slightly drunk. He declaims against the folly and crime of the modern world in not making philosophers kings, and announces his intention of seeking complete solitude. But Clarice, still polite, decides that he must stay with them a little while, in order to enlighten and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... The desolation and solitude of the scene overpowered John, and he sat down on a fragment of masonry and wept, unrestrainedly, for some time. He roused himself, at last, as ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... now gazed down on the once more placid, treacherous sea, we each and all thanked God for our deliverance from the peril of the waters, as He had already delivered us from the cruelty of man—in the person of that treacherous, drunken demon who had abandoned us there to the solitude and the misery of exile and sailed off to enjoy, as he thought, the ill-gotten treasure of which he had robbed us. But he had met even a worse fate than he had meted out to us; for, what could have been worse for him than ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... solitude, and was talkative and fond of being caressed, like all of his kind. One day, when there was no one in the country house, all having gone out into the garden or the fields, I heard him saying over what few words he knew, in different ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... but we have made a compact with you, and, until the year expires, we must suffer you. For the space of sixty days you must dwell apart from us, never leaving the room, where each day a task will be assigned to you, and subsisting on bread and water only. Let us hope that in this period of solitude and silence you will sufficiently repent your crime, and rejoin us afterwards with a changed heart; for all offenses may be forgiven a man, but it is impossible ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... cruelty and neglect, their straitened circumstances, the sacrifices made by the mother to maintain her son at the university, her pride in the talents and conduct of that son, and the increasing gratitude and affection of the latter, nursed in his scholastic and cloistered solitude—these form an affecting but noble record in the ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... and the judges on the bench were as much a part of the machinery of prosecution as the Counsel for the Crown. The whole thing was a ghastly farce—as ghastly as the private enquiries that intervene between the Russian rebel and the hunger, and solitude, and death of the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, or ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... steps in other localities. In Connecticut this woman was Isabella Beecher Hooker, who had scarcely dared to think, and much less to give shape in words, to the thoughts that, like unwelcome ghosts, had haunted her hours of solitude from year to year. Elizabeth Barrett Browning describes a hero as one who does what others do but say; who says what others do but think; and thinks what others do but dream. The successive steps by which Mrs. Hooker's dreams at last took ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... sewing-machine, an ice-cream freezer in like condition, a cracked and discarded marble mantelpiece, chipped porcelain and chinaware of all sorts, rusted stove lids and flatirons, half a dozen dead mops and brooms. This was the laboratory, and here, in congenial solitude, Herbert conducted his investigations. That is to say, until Florence arrived he was undisturbed by human intrusion, but he was not alone—far from it! There was, in fact, almost too much life ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... and exchanged our thoughts in whispers. It was one of those crowds that create a solitude for lovers. Not that we talked sentiment or that we were lovers. We conversed about the excitements of the day—of the Leste affair, in which the king and the king's ministry were accused of protecting dishonesty; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... afraid to describe. But to tell what Venice is, I feel to be an impossibility. And here I sit alone, writing it: with nothing to urge me on, or goad me to that estimate, which, speaking of it to anyone I loved, and being spoken to in return, would lead me to form. In the sober solitude of a famous inn; with the great bell of Saint Mark ringing twelve at my elbow; with three arched windows in my room (two stories high) looking down upon the grand canal and away, beyond, to where the sun went down to-night ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger. I divert his senses by other objects of ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... my customed round, To mark how buds yon shrubby mound, And every opening primrose count, That trimly paints my blooming mount; Or o'er the sculptures, quaint and rude, That grace my gloomy solitude, I teach in winding wreaths to ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... stacked himself in front of a window an' began to talk about the gloomy ghastliness of solitude, until me an' Locals couldn't stand it no longer, an' we heaved him out into a drift. Under ordinary circumstances he would have rolled his eyes, pulled his hair, an' ranted around about the base ungratitude of man; but this time he looked up to the sky an' hollered, "Come out here ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... "You are certainly more alert than most! But, as I was saying, I am usually to be found Thinking. The first condition of Thinking is solitude. And that, I fear, is a desideratum most ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... qu'on le peut au niveau des femmelettes avec lesquelles l'on vit, et qui, pour plaire, affectent plus de frivolite qu'elles n'ont reellement. Le plaisir de causer nous est defendu." Nevertheless, however much she may have mentally appreciated the solitude of a crowd, she determined to adapt herself to her social surroundings. "C'est un sacrifice," she says, "que je fais a mon Dieu et a mon devoir comme Anglaise." Impelled, therefore, alike by piety and patriotism, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... drew the crowd, and the old ones were left in solitude, while the Nakonkirhirinons surged and scrambled for a look at the white woman fallen from a clear sky, leagues from where they had seen her. Half-breeds, dissolute renegades, and Indians, they pushed and peered ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... eighty head of cattle as relays for the return journeys, were robbed of all; and when they came back to Kolobeng, found the skeletons of the guardians strewed all over the place. The books of a good library—my solace in our solitude—were not taken away, but handfuls of the leaves were torn out and scattered over the place. My stock of medicines was smashed; and all our furniture and clothing carried off and sold at public auction to pay the expenses of the foray. I do not mention these things by way of making a pitiful ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... the inn-yard again. There had come a lull. Instead of the noisy place it was an hour or two before, the yard was perfectly still and empty, except for the carriages that stood here and there. Perhaps there was a servants' table-d'hote just then. I was rather pleased to find solitude; and undisturbed I found out my lady-love's carriage, in the moonlight. I mused, I walked round it; I was as utterly foolish and maudlin as very young men, in my situation, usually are. The blinds were down, the doors, I suppose, locked. The brilliant moonlight revealed everything, ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... side of her fought squarely against this obsession of the intangible; but it persisted and prevailed. The mocking shadows crowded about her, compelled her to a discomfortable realisation of her solitude in a station needing the perpetual alertness of armed men to ensure peace and safety. For Kohat city boasted a creditable average of bad characters and murder cases—a corpse more or less on the Border being of no more consequence than ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... hands: "How gloomy and ill we are in this odious Paris! Please tell M. de Talleyrand that it is really something pitiable. Not even a word of gossip! In short, we are as bored as we are virtuous. I don't know which is the cause and which the effect, but I do know that I am horribly bored. The solitude of this great city is really remarkable; the theatres are empty; I hardly ever ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... misery of our state, in prison and in poverty of circumstances, we have been enabled to live nearer to Him. He has brought us far from the corrupt influences of large towns into this lonely country where He has prepared for us a better home. Here you are like a flower flourishing in solitude, where, if it has not the admiration of man, it has nothing to fear from ...
— The Basket of Flowers • Christoph von Schmid
... the invalid as for the man of robust health. The fine flavour, however, which Nature has given to all birds coming under the definition of poultry, man has not been satisfied with, and has used many means—such as keeping them in solitude and darkness, and forcing them to eat—to give them an unnatural state of fatness or fat. This fat, thus artificially produced, is doubtless delicious, and the taste and succulence of the boiled and roasted bird draw forth the praise of the guests around ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... therefore, there was a public festival coming on, in which it was the custom for women to come to the public solemnity; she pretended to her husband that she was sick, as contriving an opportunity for solitude and leisure, that she might entreat Joseph again. Which opportunity being obtained, she used more kind words to him than before; and said that it had been good for him to have yielded to her first solicitation, and to have given her no repulse, both because of the ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... abandoned of aim or view in life, with a strong appetite for sociability, as well from native hilarity as from a pride of observation and remark; a constitutional melancholy or hypochondriasm that made me fly solitude; add to these incentives to social life my reputation for bookish knowledge, a certain wild, logical talent, and a strength of thought, something like the rudiments of good sense; and it will not seem surprising that I was generally a welcome guest ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... of the clock came Darden, quite sober, distrait in manner and uneasy of eye, and presently interrupted Mistress Stagg's flow of conversation by a demand to speak with his wife alone. At that time of day the garden was a solitude, and thither the two repaired, taking their seats upon a bench built ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... idea took hold of him, he was seized with a deadly shuddering. His heart knocked against his ribs, and an icy coldness came over him. "Only the same tormenting dream," he thought. "Before it was a vision; now it is a voice. It is generated by solitude and separation. I must resist it I must be strong. It will drive me into an oppression as of madness. Men do not 'see their souls' until they are bordering on madness from ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... enters upon the extremity of His humiliation. Death must have been repulsive to Him. If the failure of heart and flesh, the cold sweat, the physical collapse, the last parting, the solitude and separation of the grave are all repelling and painful to us, how ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... Katherine more than Mrs. Liddell knew. Her worn look, her cough, her unwonted depression, thrilled her daughter's warm heart with a passion of tender longing to be with her, to help her, to give her the rest she so sorely needed; and in the solitude of her large dreary room she sobbed herself to sleep, her lips still quivering with the loving epithets she had murmured ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... in the atmosphere by the camp-fire of the hostiles, but he was disappointed in that also. Had he not learned the contrary the previous night, he could have believed that he was the first human being whose feet had ever pressed that solitude. ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... at last alone. The two coppery maids had followed by rail the flight of their mistresses. At first the old man felt a little bewildered by this solitude, which obliged him to eat uncomfortable meals in a restaurant and pass the nights in enormous and deserted rooms still bearing traces of their former occupants. The other apartments in the building had also been vacated. All ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... secret of this contrast, we shall find it partly in the author himself, partly in a popular, half-baked philosophy of the period. That philosophy was summed up in the words "the return to nature," and it alleged that all human virtues flow from solitude and all vices from civilization. Such a philosophy appealed strongly to Cooper, who was continually at odds with his fellows, who had been expelled from Yale, who had engaged in many a bitter controversy, who had suffered abuse from newspapers, and who in every case was inclined ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... as if, within the wide rim of the horizon, no thing moved save the tonga. They were then passing rapidly over higher ground and seemed to have drawn a shade nearer to the raw red northern hills. Amber would have said that they could never have found a solitude more absolute. ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... dissipate her sombre thoughts; but I soon perceived that everything brought them back to her mind, and that the sight of this savage nature, whose solitude affected my own thoughts with sorrow, contributed to increase her melancholy. Within her own dwelling she was less agitated, but more depressed; her fever was then languid, and her beautiful face despoiled of that expression, full of agreeable recollections, that animated her ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... "As to solitude," she said calmly, pointing down the valley. "There's Tracy Corridor; it will be all over the Club to-night—he's been watching us for some time"; a long thin youth, his head turned in their direction, had passed down the footpath towards its ruined chapel, and was rapidly ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... Brother Emmanuel could just stand; he is not greatly taller than I. And he is marvellous contented with a very little, and has been used to passing days and weeks in the solitude of his cell. Sure this would not be to him an evil place. If he had but a book or two and the needful food, he would ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... knew no one, and had not dared to join himself to any of the groups, paced in solitude at a distance, hoping for nothing better than that he might escape notice and be left to himself. But Dick, whose interest in him had become very decided, found him out before long and, much to his ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... walked down the wild canon beneath the brilliant African moon the call of the jungle was strong upon him. The solitude and the savage freedom filled his heart with life and buoyancy. Again he was Tarzan of the Apes—every sense alert against the chance of surprise by some jungle enemy—yet treading lightly and with head erect, in ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... recitations came in the afternoon, and after four the boy had the remainder of the day to spend as he liked. Sometimes the shore claimed him, sometimes the rocks. Then there were excursions, in company with old Hagar, to the solitude of the pines, after cones and dry, resinous branches for the kitchen fire, which never seemed to burn well unless the old housekeeper had an abundance of ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... orchards; had therefore to live in Kent; and must, one would think, see through apple blossom by this time, since his wife, for whose sake he did it, eloped with a novelist; but no; Cruttendon still paints orchards, savagely, in solitude. Then Jinny Carslake, after her affair with Lefanu the American painter, frequented Indian philosophers, and now you find her in pensions in Italy cherishing a little jeweller's box containing ordinary pebbles picked off the road. But if you look at them ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... to say, a burden lay upon her chest. It was that weight which presses there when we are alone with those with whom we are not strangers, but with whom we are not completely at home, and she actually found herself impatient and half-desirous of solitude. This must be criminal or disease, she thought to herself, and she forcibly recalled Frank's virtues. She was so far successful that when they parted and he kissed her, she was more than usually caressing, and her ardent embrace, at least for the moment, ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... Cassel, he became "a desk man"; it was no longer his function to execute orders; thenceforth he had the far more trying duty of issuing orders—a truly awful responsibility and one which demands much solitude, much soul-searching as well as map-pondering and other weighing of the ponderable which is so easily off-set by the ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... heavy old seats, its gravelled floor, had been the scene of a thousand childish gambols with my brother and sister. Old memories clung to it with a loving fondness. Even when the sports of childhood gave place to graver thoughts and occupations, the cool retirement of this rustic solitude had never failed to possess the strongest attractions for me. The songbirds built their little nests within the overhanging foliage, and swarms of bees gave melodious voices to the summer air as they hovered over its honey-yielding flowers. The past united ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... Maidens of Fifty, who lonely abide, Yet who heartily scout solitude, If Jack with his whiskers is not at your side, It is time to ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... our communion with Jesus and the sense of His real presence with us. How life's burdens would be lightened if we faced them all in the strength of the felt nearness of our Lord! How impossible it would be that we should ever feel the dreary sense of solitude, if we felt that unseen, but most real, Presence wrapping us round! It is only when our faith in it has fallen asleep that any earthly good allures, or any earthly evil frightens us. To be sure, in our thrilling consciousness, that we dwell with Jesus is an impenetrable ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a strange train of thought for a very young man; but Guy had lived much alone, and in solitude one is like a person who has climbed a high mountain; the air is purer about him, his vision is freer; the eye goes straight and clear to the distant view which below on the plain a thousand things would ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... oppressive awfulness of solitude, and all the weary monotony of waste, come now, with Kinglake, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... baptism, seemed almost to verify the idea of the Essenes. Was He indeed the long-expected Deliverer of Israel? Surely He must find this out—He must wring the answer from the inmost recesses of His soul. And so, He sought refuge in the Wilderness, intuitively feeling that there amidst the solitude and desolation, He would fight His fight and receive ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... voice coarse. Possibly, also, his princess had recovered from her disappointment. Maybe she had been married off to some nobody of Portugal, or France, or Austria, for state reasons, and had entered on the usual loveless life of royalty. Or she may have beguiled her maidenly solitude by drinking much wine of Oporto, Madeira, and Xeres with her dinner, thereby acquiring that amplitude of girth, that ruddiness of countenance, and that polish of nose, which add so little to romance. At all events, we hear ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... grew up—he was all his life the "child-man" his sister calls him. After nights without sleep he would come out of his solitude with laughter, joy, and excitement to show a new masterpiece; and this was always more wonderful than anything which had preceded it. He was more of a child than his nieces, Madame Surville tells us: "laughed ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... who have made solitary trips over snow-capped mountain ridges can appreciate the overwhelming feeling of solitude that I felt on looking about me. To whatever point of view I turned my eyes were greeted with a tumbled sea composed of stupendous ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... watch of the night; and the pale, quivering, and deceptive light, from a new moon, was playing over the endless waves of the prairie, tipping the swells with gleams of brightness, and leaving the interval land in deep shadow. Accustomed to scenes of solitude like the present, the old man, as he left the encampment, proceeded alone into the waste, like a bold vessel leaving its haven to enter on the trackless field of the ocean. He appeared to move for some time without object, or, indeed, without ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... with an old boar, he was stooping down to meet the tusker with a low thrust. His wife and Sir Arnold were some twenty paces behind him, and all three had become separated from the huntsmen. Seeing the position and the solitude, the Lady Goda turned her meaning eyes to her companion. An instant later Sir Arnold's boar-spear flew like a cloth- yard arrow, straight at Sir Raymond's back. But in that very instant, too, as the boar rushed upon him, Warde sprang to one side, and, almost dropping to his knee, ran the wild ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... not think it was always so,' replied Attwater, 'This was once a busy shore, although now, hark! you can hear the solitude. I find it stimulating. And talking of the sound of bells, kindly follow a little experiment of mine in silence.' There was a silver bell at his right hand to call the servants; he made them a sign to stand still, struck the bell with force, and leaned eagerly forward. The ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... it the greatest, the only joys of my childhood! It was to gain solitude that, later, I set myself to win my independence, knowing that, if I did not meet with the love I wished, I should yet be ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... at Piso's house; thence, occupied with varied talk, we traversed the six furlongs that lie between the Double Gate and the Academy; and entering the walls which can give such good reason for their fame, found there the solitude which we sought. 'Is it,' said Piso, 'by some natural instinct or through some delusion that when we see the very spots where famous men have lived we are far more touched than when we hear of ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... healing, for it was more easily disturbed as I turned in my sleep, while I could ease my arm at all times, and it came on slowly. My sufferings drew on my flesh, my blood, and my spirits, and to this was added that disease inaction, the corrosion of solitude, and the fever of suspense and uncertainty as to Alixe and Juste Duvarney. Every hour, every moment that I had ever passed in Alixe's presence, with many little incidents and scenes in which we shared, passed before me—vivid and cherished pictures of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a merry, fanciful mood, Inspired by the time and the solitude, The Lady Lorraine, In whimsical vein, Said, "On Christmas eve, 'neath this mistletoe bough, I'll solemnly make an immutable vow." With a glance at the portraits that hung on the wall, She said, "I adjure ye to witness, all: I vow by the names that I've long revered,— By my great-great-grandfather's ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... in every face save one, and that appertained to Morris, who watched his opportunity, button-holed Glyn and Singh, and led them off into the solitude ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... very learned treatises and search into the sciences. Below they never descend, unless for their dinner and supper, so that the essence of their heads do not descend to the stomachs and liver. Only very seldom, and that as a cure for the ills of solitude, do they have converse with women. On certain days Hoh goes up to them and deliberates with them concerning the matters which he has lately investigated for the benefit of the state and all the nations ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... is one vast series of squattages . . . the toil and solitude of a day's journey between the homesteads of ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... Borneo, as well as the posts and rafters. In England it is constantly used for umbrella-sticks. The most interesting birds were the pigeons, with feathers of the richest metallic hues. The plaintive cooings of their notes as they issued from the solitude of the sombre woods, were mournful but soothing to my ear. Their air is full of softness, and their eyes of gentleness; the very turn of the neck and the carriage of the head are full of grace; every motion is elegant, and their forms of the ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... voyageurs traverse the Indian trail through the forests along the rapids to that launching place named after the patron saint of French voyageur—Ste. Anne's. The river widens into the silver expanse of Two Mountains Lake, rimmed to the sky line by the vernal hills, with a silence and solitude over all, as when sunlight first fell on face of man. Here the eagle utters a lonely scream from the top of some blasted pine; there a covey of ducks, catching sight of the coming canoes, dive to bottom, only to reappear ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... that is left out of the popular history. For instance, even a working man, a carpenter or cooper or bricklayer, has been taught about the Great Charter, as something like the Great Auk, save that its almost monstrous solitude came from being before its time instead of after. He was not taught that the whole stuff of the Middle Ages was stiff with the parchment of charters; that society was once a system of charters, and of a kind much more interesting to him. The carpenter ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... Late arrival at the feast, Coming when the songs have ceased And the merry guests departed, Leaving but an empty room, Silence, solitude, and gloom,— Are you lonely, heavy-hearted; You, the last of all your kind, Nodding in the autumn wind; Now that all your friends are flown, ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke
... my son," said the good Doctor. "I am in need of better company than this foot. Solitude is like water—good for a dip, but you can not live in it. Margaret has been here trying to give me comfort, although she ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... accept, and he had no pupils. Alone he worked, and he could not bear to have any one near him looking on. In silence and solitude he lay there painting those marvellous frescoes of the story of the Creation to the time of Noah. Only Pope Julius himself dared to disturb the master, and he alone climbed the ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... up, suddenly and mysteriously, in the midst of enjoyment and serene delight, to mingle bitterness in the cup of earthly bliss. It has come in the season of sorrow to heighten the distress. Amongst men, and in the din of business, the vision has intruded, and in solitude it has followed me to throw its shadows across the bright green fields, beautiful in their freshness. Night after night—I cannot count their number—it has been the form and substance of my dreams, and I have gone to rest—yes, for months—with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... neglected to adopt any plan for the improvement of the prisoners when they have separated them. They work, it seems, every day for years in silence, without intermission, except the time allowed for meals, which are always taken in solitude. The Bible is the only book allowed them—no paper nor pens: and this is called giving them habits of industry. I should say nothing can be more calculated to disgust them with every description of work all the rest of their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 573, October 27, 1832 • Various
... crowd he wanted this one woman, but wanted her away from them, away from that race of slaves and cut-throats from which she sprang. He wanted her for himself—far from everybody, in some safe and dumb solitude. And as he spoke his anger and contempt rose, his hate became almost fear; and his desire of her grew immense, burning, illogical and merciless; crying to him through all his senses; louder than his hate, stronger ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... his early youth from the Prince of Gerano, and he was not the man to undervalue it because he had not a drop of gentle blood in his veins. But his refined nature craved refined intercourse, and preferred solitude to what he could get in any lower sphere. The desire for the atmosphere of the uppermost class, rather than the mere wish to appear as one of its members, often belongs to the artistic temperament, and many artists are unjustly ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... long dark hours through, as if he thought that besides the comfort it brought to him to be near to Naomi, the tramp, tramp, tramp of his footsteps, which once or twice provoked the challenge of the night-guard on his lonely round, would be company to her in her solitude. And sometimes, watching his opportunity that he might be unseen and unheard, he would creep in the darkness under the window and cry up the wall in an underbreath, "Naomi! Naomi! It is I, Ali! I have come back! ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... for her sympathy, but he had none to give her in return! He could not pity her failures,—even though he had himself caused them! If he had a grain of intelligence about him he must, she thought, understand well enough how sore it must be for her to descend from her princely entertainments to solitude at Matching, and thus to own before all the world that she was beaten. Then when she asked him for advice, when she was really anxious to know how far she might go in filling her house without offending him, he told her to ask Lady Rosina De Courcy! ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... other, and never was I, in youth along the Tiber, so anxious of first reaching the goal. I would not outlive him: I should reflect too painfully on earlier days, and look forward too despondently on future. As for friends, lampreys and turbots beget them, and they spawn not amid the solitude of the Apennines. To dine in company with more than two is a Gaulish and German thing. I can hardly bring myself to believe that I have eaten in concert with twenty; so barbarous and herdlike a practice does not now appeal to me—such an incentive to drink much and talk loosely; not ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... met at last in this same cave of greenery, while the summer night hung round us heavy with love, and the odours that crept through the silence from the sleeping woods were the only signs of an outer world that invaded our solitude. What followed I cannot clearly remember. The succeeding horror almost obliterated it. I woke as a grey dawn stole into the cave. The damsel had disappeared; but in the shrubbery, at the mouth of the cave, ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... perfect. It has cost me nearly what remains of my savings to build it, but out here I will have the solitude I need so much. I estimate six months more will see completion of my pilot model. It is a source of deep bitterness in me that I am forced to work on my ship like a common laborer, when my part should ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... there was a tool shed, and following the side path which led to this, he found in the rear of the shed a workman's bench, evidently little used in these cold January days. Tacitly, it invited the discoverer to solitude and meditation, and Laurie gratefully dropped upon it, glad of the opportunity to escape Burke's eye and uninterruptedly think things out. But the daisied path of calm reflection ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... the way along the corridor, past the class-rooms and the refectoire on the right, to the narrow, high-walled garden. We found it smaller than in the time when Miss Bronte loitered here in weariness and solitude. Mademoiselle Heger explained that, while the width remains the same, the erection of class-rooms for the day-pupils has diminished the length by some yards. Tall houses surround and shut it in on either side, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... the sage explained that it was desired to obstruct no more light than was absolutely necessary, and he said, anticipating Lord Dundreary, "A single pane can no more be in a line with itself than one bird can go into a corner and flock in solitude. The Abbot's condition was that no diagonal lines should contain ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... consideration in which the thing was done; with reference to the opportunity which the doer seems to have had of executing the business; and that opportunity is measured by the importance of the action, by the interval which has elapsed, by the distance, by the nearness, by the solitude of the place, or by the frequented character of it, by the nature of the spot itself and by the neighbourhood of the whole region. And it is estimated also with reference to these characteristics, whether the place be sacred or not, public or private, whether it belongs ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... would throw down his book and say aloud in his solitude, "Bah, I'm more loyal to the South than this sombre-faced veteran. He would keep his State forever in his own crippled condition. No crutches for the South, I say; no general clerkship to the North, but an equal onward march, side by side, to one national destiny. He thinks he is ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... his shoulders: "two or three years in penal servitude, I expect. Anyhow, Broken Feather's ambitious career doesn't look as if it would materialize. He'll be put out of the way of doin' further mischief, and we can settle down in our peaceful solitude, happy ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... of personal reminiscences in order to the comprehensive measurement and verification of historic records, seeing into the secrets of human nature,—secrets that daylight never yet revealed to mortal,—but detecting their whole scope and purport with the infallible eyes of unbroken solitude and night. And then the shades of the old mighty men might have risen from their still profounder abodes and joined him in the dim corridor, treading beside him with an antique stateliness of mien, telling ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... indebted for the honour of a visit from Mr Prothero? I think I sent you a message to the effect that I am not now in a position to receive company. My chambers are anything but suited to convivial society, and I prefer solitude just at present. I have already had the benefit of clergy, and do not need any of your sermons, excellent as I am told they are. Indeed, divinity was ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... extremely little about bringing up little girls. There is no greater misfortune than the loss of a mother, especially such a mother as my Cornelia. It was terrible for my poor child to lose her at the tender age of three. Please bring a good friend with you, so that you won't suffer from solitude in this ...
— Cornelli • Johanna Spyri
... fast wasting away my little remaining strength. I now mounted two very high mounds. Nothing lived or moved but myself in the unbroken silence, the undisturbed solitude! I observed my being too far north, I must return south. Another camel appeared. Yes, it was a small black bush, on the top of a little hillock, shaping itself into a camel. Now a marvel—life I was sure I saw. Two beautiful antelopes, light as air, bounded by me with ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... may have been the spot from which he looked out upon the AEgean Sea, and upward into the heavens, communing in solitude with his own thoughts, or with his Lord for whom he was there. Patmos was for this a fitting place, whether he had gone there from his own choice, or had been driven thither by the cruelty of his persecutor. In such solitude did Milton ...
— A Life of St. John for the Young • George Ludington Weed
... gloomy, Mart had planned vengeance. But against whom? No one man could fight the Government. Failure was sure to come, and it meant death or worse—further imprisonment. In time Mart had come to regard all humanity as his enemy. Thus does crime and solitude twist the mind of man. Mart was ripe for a killing. And these men were offering ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... back. There was nowhere else to go. If the gateway had been awful in its solitude, the Peak was still more desolate. There was nothing living there, except themselves and the dog that followed closely at their heels, making no excursions of its own. The hour was wearing toward midnight when they sank down by the boulder once more to watch the darkness disappear, and wait ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... and strong emotion. He had not come to the age of twenty-four without some experience of the other sex, but never before had he known any such sensation as that which now overpowered him, never before had he fully realized what solitude meant as he did now that she had left him. In youth, when love does come, he comes as a strong ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... and the delayed supper was ready. The evening was very still and cool. The life-giving air was heavy with the breath of dew-touched cedars, while the hoarse clamor of the river accentuated the hush of the mountain solitude. Strange to say, both of the girls were thinking about the vagrant, and Helen Savine, who considered herself a judge of character, had been more impressed by him than she would have cared to admit. There was no doubt, she ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... whom has come some inconsolable trouble of spirit seek, as though it were a medicine to drive away their sadness, far and sequestered retreats, and cannot bear the greatness of their grief amid the fellowship of men; so dear, for the most part, is solitude to sickness. For filthiness and grime are chiefly pleasing to those who have been stricken with ailments of the soul. Now he had been wont to give out from the top of a hill decrees to the people when they came to consult him; and hence when they came they upbraided the sloth of the king for hiding ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... at length, putting his hand to his brow. "Methinks either long solitude has bewildered me, or, sweet sir, your apparition dazzles. I know you not—am I sure?—" and Rienzi's hair bristled while he slowly rose—"Am I sure that it is living man who stands before me? Angels have entered the prison-house before now. Alas! an angel's comfort never ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... downstairs. She had been willing to put it off as long as she could, dreading to witness the change below-stairs, and feeling, too, that in entering on the family room, without power of leaving it, she was losing all quiet and solitude, as well as giving up that monopoly of her father in his evenings, which had ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... garden for his favourite relaxation of trimming the box-tree borders to the plots. A sound like luggage thrown down from the coach was a gun far away at sea; and what looked like a tall man by the gate at dusk was a yew bush cut into a quaint and attenuated shape. There is no such solitude in country places now as there was in ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... blue house he had found only frank, disinterested friendship,—a somewhat ironic comradeship, the condescending tolerance of a person compelled by solitude to choose as her comrade the least repulsive among a host of inferiors. Alas! How clearly he remembered and could again foresee the sceptical, cold smile with which his words were always received, though he was sure he had crammed them with burning passion! What a laugh she had given,—as ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... profoundly, the ghostly gleam of the sands baffled the eye by its lack of form. Far off, the growth of bushes in the centre raised a massive black bulk against the stars to the southward. Mrs. Travers lingered for a moment near the boat as if afraid of the strange solitude of this lonely sandbank and of this lone sea that seemed to fill the whole encircling universe of remote stars and limitless shadows. "There is nobody here," she whispered ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... sun, touching the rim of the desert, flung long crimson shafts heavenward—in hues of rose and amethyst, against the deep umber and the purple of far spaces. From monotonous and burning desolation the desert had become a vast momentary solitude of changing beauty and enchantment. Then all at once the colors vanished, space shrank, and occasional stars trembled in the velvet roof of the night. And one star, brighter than the rest, grew gradually larger, until ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... brought me to such despair, and hatred of life, and distaste of all pleasure, and lasting sorrow. I bitterly wept this misery, that I must needs be a laughing-stock, that marriage must be denied me, and that I must ever live in solitude. You ask for the cause of this misfortune, a matter which I am quite unable to explain. Because of the reasons just mentioned, and because I dreaded that men should know how grave was the ill afflicting me, I shunned ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... we measure the councils of heaven by the narrow impotence of human faculties, or conceive that silence and solitude reign throughout the ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... gesture of protest. "It will certainly need four weeks of solitude to counteract the conceit I shall acquire," she said lightly, as she passed ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... me how it is that you can speak English so well," said Mrs. Van Buren, as they stood in the cabin, where the prospect of solitude seemed to please the boy. A gleam of something like mischief appeared on ...
— Little Sky-High - The Surprising Doings of Washee-Washee-Wang • Hezekiah Butterworth
... sycamores back of the girls' sleeping-tent, and Mrs. Winship lay down for her afternoon nap. Pancho saddled the horses for Bell and Margery, who went for a gallop. Polly climbed into the sky-parlour to write a long letter to her mother, and Laura was left to solitude in the sleeping-tent. Now everybody knows that a tent at midday is not a particularly pleasant spot, and after many a groan at the glare of the sun, which could not be tempered by any system of shawls, and moans ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... as they chanced to sight each other in the awful solitude of Space, "I have been thinking over that world of yours, and your crowning absurdity, 'man.' Pray do not become too inflated with weak conceit at my condescending to think about such trivialities; for the fact is, any subject of thought—however ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... intended coup de main on Antwerp, and Henri hoped to arrive in time for it. He pleased himself with the idea that he should die sword in hand, in his brother's arms, under a French flag, and that his death would be talked about until the sound even reached the solitude in which the mysterious lady lived. Noble follies! glorious, yet ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... father on the night following the first day of the trial, she was naturally much excited. She could not understand the great change which had come over him. Never before had she known him to be so much moved by any case with which he had to do. She wondered why it was, and in the solitude of her room began to think of reasons. Had he learnt something about Paul of which she was ignorant? Had he discovered the real murderer? She had sat throughout the day's trial, and no word had fallen, no argument ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... and rivulet, with clustering shrubs and trees clinging to the cliffs, and clothing the mountain slopes in rich, and, in many places, soft luxuriance. It was one of those scenes of grandeur and loveliness in profound solitude which tend to raise in the thoughtful mind the perplexing but not irreverent question, "Why did the good and bountiful Creator form such places of surpassing beauty to remain for thousands of years almost, if not quite, unknown ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... and shooting and riding, and all these were without a companion. I loved this solitude then, and have loved it ever since, and love ...
— Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln - A Book for Young Americans • James Baldwin
... life in Lindon. Abner Sawyer felt hurt and alone. He had slipped in an unwary moment from his wound-proof armor of conscious superiority and in this world of friends outside it, there was more room for Jimsy than there was for him. Small comfort, after all, the solitude ...
— Jimsy - The Christmas Kid • Leona Dalrymple
... our fathers, let us resolve, come weal or woe, we will, in life and in death, now and forever, stand by the Stars and Stripes. They have been unfurled from the snows of Canada to the plains of New Orleans, in the halls of the Montezumas and amid the solitude of every sea; and everywhere, as the luminous symbol of resistless and beneficent power, they have led the brave to victory and to glory. They have floated over our cradles; let it be our prayer and our struggle that they shall float ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... out and Idol and Diamond were left to darkness and solitude. In the vaulted room, at the entrance to the winding way that led to the cavern, Ducie's eyes were again bandaged. Then up the twenty-two stone stairs, and so into the carpeted room above, where was the ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... hour he sat by his window. He could dimly see the broad winding river, with its curtain of pale gray mist, and beyond, the dark outline of the forest. A cool breeze from the water fanned his heated brow, and the quiet and solitude ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... beyond his years with learning and talent: report said that he had already begun to thwart his mother's views, and to entertain republican principles. However this might be, the haughty Countess entrusted none with the secrets of her family-tuition. Adrian was bred up in solitude, and kept apart from the natural companions of his age and rank. Some unknown circumstance now induced his mother to send him from under her immediate tutelage; and we heard that he was about to visit Cumberland. A thousand tales were rife, explanatory of the Countess of Windsor's conduct; ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... that moment to contemplate that red simar—the gorgeous robe of office—and the rich lace, or who gazed on that pale brow, bent in anxious meditation, might, in the solitude of that apartment, combined with the silence of the ante-chambers and the measured paces of the guards upon the landing-place, have fancied that the shade of Cardinal Richelieu lingered still in his ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... The solitude disquieted him, particularly as it was now nearly dark, and he could hardly hope to finish before night cleaning ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... the distant unknown land, wrap and enfold her while she thought things out for herself, for indeed this real world—the world of men and women, of passions and hatred and love—was nothing but a huge and cruel puzzle. She longed for solitude—the solitude which the plains can offer in such absolute completeness—because her heart was heavy and she felt that if she were all alone she might ease the weight on her heart in a comforting flow ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... great blow to find that her uncle had written to both Allen and Mr. Acton that they had better not come home at present. She thought it cruel and unjust both towards them and herself; and in her sickening sense of solitude and injury she had a vague expectation that they were all going to be left wholly orphans, like the children of fiction, dependent on their uncle and aunt, who would be unjust, and prefer their own children; and she had ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... difficult matter to set forth what form and appearance the State should have if Christian philosophy governed the commonwealth. By nature it is implanted in man that he should live in civil society, for since he cannot attain in solitude the necessary means of civilized life, it is a Divine provision that he comes into existence adapted for taking part in the union and assembling of men, both in the Family and in the State, which alone can supply adequate facilities for the perfecting of life. ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... tired of solitude, and longed to go to the villages. So one day she said to her little brother: "I am going away to find our brother who has taken up his abode in the villages. I will come back in a few moons. ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... evening, I shall perform the homa. I shall reduce my body by eating very sparingly and shall wear rags and skins and knotted locks on my head. Exposing myself to heat and cold and disregarding hunger and thirst, I shall reduce my body by severe ascetic penances, I shall live in solitude and I shall give myself up to contemplation; I shall eat fruit, ripe or green, that I may find. I shall offer oblations to the Pitris (manes) and the gods with speech, water and the fruits of the wilderness. I shall not see, far less ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... swiftly in Paris, and after one quiet day, during which Judge Hauteville was drawing together the threads of the mystery, Kittredge found himself, on Tuesday morning, facing an ordeal worse than the solitude of a prison cell. The seventh of July! What a date for the American! How little he realized what was before him as he bumped along in a prison van breathing the sweet air of a delicious summer morning! He had been summoned for the double test put upon ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... I think I envy liberty as little as they do to any other nation. But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions and human concerns on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... matured in solitude. Emerson found him, in the year 1833, on the occasion of his first visit to England, living at Craigenputtock, a farm in Nithsdale, far away from all civilization, and "no one to talk to but the minister of the parish." He, good man, could make but little of his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... reflection. We all looked out on the solemn and silent night, cast our eyes along the wide and long reach of the river, in which we happened to be, and saw nothing but the calm of nature, rendered imposing by solitude and the stillness of the hour. Guert smilingly renewed his assurances that all was right, and moved on. Away we went! Guert evidently pressed his horses, as if desirous of being placed beyond this anxiety as soon as possible. The blacks flew, rather than trotted; and we ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... my father's repeated requests had with me the weight of a positive command. I thought I could not do that amiss, which I only did in obedience to him. I took a kinswoman with me. At first he seemed a little confused; for he was reserved toward women. Being newly come out of a five years' solitude, he was surprised that I was the first to address him. He spoke not a word for some time. I knew not to what attribute his silence. I did not hesitate to speak to him, and to tell him a few words, my difficulties about prayer. Presently ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... thousand and seventy-nine feet, and Cape Solitude, six thousand one hundred and fifty-seven feet, are respectively about seventeen and twenty miles east of Grand View, and may be visited in the saddle during a camping-out trip of two days. They both command views of the amphitheatre where the Colorado River makes an almost ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... their way through a rank growth of nettles which covered the decayed bracken, when Colwyn experienced a mental perception as tangible as a cold hand placed upon the brow of a sleeper. He had the swift feeling that there was somebody else besides themselves in the solitude of the wood—somebody who was watching them. He looked around him intently, and his eyes fell upon a screen of interlaced branches which grew on the other side of the dip they were traversing. Without any conscious effort on his own part, his eyes travelled to the thickest part of the obstruction, ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... to understand an Indian Purana, one must begin by imagining the father of a family who, "having seen a son on his son's knees," follows the law and, with ax and pitcher, seeks solitude under a banyan tree, talks no more, multiplies his fastings, lives naked with four fires around him under the fifth fire, that terrible sun which endlessly devours and resuscitates all living things; who fixes his imagination in turn for weeks at a ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... like a heap of stones; boundless ice rose up to the southern skyline; the dark water to the north was broken by an occasional berg or the ice-covered islands. This wonderful region of ice and sea looks beautiful on a fine day. But what a terrible, vast solitude, constantly swept by icy winds and drift, stretches away to the south! A party will go out to-morrow to visit the depot at the top of the slope. This is the seventh day we have been waiting and hoping to welcome ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... would include description, soliloquy, and narrative, to show that in solitude the maiden had habits, duties, something to think about and be interested in. The accidental approach of some cosmopolitan visitor would give occasion to illustrate dramatically the contrast between life in retirement and in society. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... of good-luck had befallen the young mothers in their mountain solitude, and that was the possession of Roxy and her mother Euphane. They were sister and niece to good old Debby, who for so many years had presided over Dr. Carr's kitchen; and when they arrived one day in Burnet fresh from the Isle of Man, and announced that they had come out for good ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... go out are always accompanied by somebody or other. As no man cares to make himself conspicuous by being seen in their company, and as they are afraid of solitude, they take with them either those who are not well enough off to have a carriage, or one or another of those elegant, ancient ladies, whose elegance is a little inexplicable, and to whom one can always go for information in regard to the ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... killed in a brawl; some that he was again marooned and was adopted by a savage tribe; some that he perished in a fight upon the Indian Ocean. At any rate that rough and valiant soul is lost to history, and—somewhere—in the vast solitude of the Southern Hemisphere, lie the bleaching bones of him who had flaunted the skull-and-cross-bones upon the wide highway of the gleaming wastes of salty brine. His was a rough and careless life. Do not emulate ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... too found it as nectar to the palate. The guid-wife "had no English," but the two women conversed eloquently with the language of the eyes, concerning the sleeping baby in its cradle, and the toddling urchins around the door. Here in the solitude this brave woman of the people reared her family, made their garments, tended them when they were sick, cooked for them, baked for them, washed for them, mended for them, and kept the three- roomed cot as exquisitely clean as hands could make it. ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... one of the nights in the rainy season in March, the four and twentieth year of my first setting foot in this island of solitude, I was lying in my bed, or hammock, awake; very well in health, had no pain, no distemper, no uneasiness of body, nor any uneasiness of mind, more than ordinary, but could by no means close my eyes, that is, so as to sleep; no, not a wink all night long, otherwise than as follows:—It ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... the consciousness of solitude he said: "She told me I must find her out. I will. I will know whether she is as free from human frailty as she seems. I have little doubt that before many days I can cause her to show all the inherent weaknesses of her sex; and I should think New York and Paris had taught me what they are. She has ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... do so. His sentiments were so strangely complex that he experienced a desire for solitude in order that he might strive to understand them. As he stood at the door watching the car move toward the Strand he knew that to-day he could not count upon his intuitive powers to warn him of sudden danger. But he keenly examined the faces of passers-by and stared at the occupants ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... leader among leaders, statesman among statesmen, monk among monks. He was one who passed from a great though barbaric court, where he had been a trusted official, into the strictness of monastic training, and then into the solitude of secluded communion with God. Such lives as his were the great attractive forces of the seventh century; such retreats as the valley of Fontenelle were the centres of ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... the reason when he failed to see her pass. She tied back the flaps of her tent to let the wind blow through, and to show any caller that she was not at home, then saddled her horse and rode away into the hills. It needed a day of solitude, she thought, to come to a conclusion on the question how she was to face it out with Jerry Boyle. Whether to stay and fight the best that she was able, or to turn and fly, leaving all her hopes behind, was a matter which must be ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... having experienced anything but pain in marriage, she never troubled her husband to go through the ceremony again. Now seeing that the old fellow was scarcely equal to it—as has been before stated—she lived in perfect solitude, like a nun. She hated the society of men, and never suspected that the Author of the world had put so much joy in that from which she had only received infinite misery. But she loved all the more her little one, who had cost her so much before he was ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... of Jesus upon Capernaum in the fifteenth year of Tiberias. Tertullian makes points out of this, also from the account of His preaching in the synagogue and of the expulsion of the devil. After this incident Marcion's Gospel represented our Lord as retiring into solitude. It did this as it would appear in words very similar to those of the Canonical Gospel. I place side by side the language of Tertullian with that of the Vulgate (Codex Fuldensis, as given by Tregelles). I have also compared the translation in the two codd., Vercellensis and Veronensis, ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... young fellows going out with tents to fish in lonely bays or shoot in the mountains, and rough it properly like bushmen—not with deck chairs, crockery, a piano and servants. For you can camp in the grand and rugged solitude of the bush within a stone's throw of the ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... of the skill of man, seeing how, here and there, his energy has pushed the desert out of his path across the continent. But I fear that I am not so practical. To many the desert in its stony sterility, its desolateness, its unbroken solitude, its fantastic savageness, is either appalling or repulsive. To them it is tiresome and monotonous. The vast plains of Kansas and Nebraska are monotonous even in the agricultural green of summer. Not ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... the only consolation that my anxious heart can know in the dreary solitude of this place. Oh! my friend, how would your tender heart bleed did you but know the least of my sufferings; but they are all requited by the delightful anticipations of Park-Place. I hope your dear aunt has not found it necessary to lay down her carriage in the change of the ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... safe and secret pocket, Casey Ryan carried a check for twenty-five thousand dollars, made payable to himself. A check for twenty-five thousand dollars in Casey's pocket was like a wildcat clawing at his imagination and spitting at every moment's delay. Casey had endured solitude and some hardship while he coaxed Starvation Mountain to reveal a little of its secret treasure. Now he wanted action, light, life and plenty of it. While he drove he dreamed, and his dreams beckoned, urged him ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... of psychology had not misled him. Directly they gathered that he was advertising something, the crowd declined to look at it; they melted away, and Arthur returned to his work in solitude. ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... in the plural, as if we were rather in town than at a country seat; and so we appear to be. The French nobility do not seem to have any taste for solitude. Their love of variety induces them to change the scene; but the same tumult of guests and visitors, coming and going, is every where their delight. Whatever can attract company they seek with avidity. I am dear ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... done even more than this for friendship. It has superseded its name by fulfilling its offices to a degree of perfectness which had never entered into the ante-Christian mind. Man shrinks from solitude. He feels inadequate to bear the burdens, meet the trials, and wage the conflicts of this mortal life, alone. Orestes always needed and craved a Pylades, but often failed to find one. This inevitable yearning, when it met no human response found still less to satisfy it in the ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... remarked Mlle. Fouchette, with a precision and nonchalance that defied suspicion, "Monsieur Lerouge is probably off in some sweet solitude unknown to ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... a man who seeks as I do to keep his heart full of worship the very air of this place is stifling, with its idleness and pride. It gives the lie to all my faith about life, and I have only to go back into my solitude and forget it as soon as ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... up the ravine, and to the other side, where an unusually bright star seemed to be rising over the solitude beyond. It was about a quarter of a mile away, and its brightness such as to ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... interested in,—down along the line—and it's all I want, too. It's enough, I should judge. Now here we are at Napoleon. Good enough country plenty good enough—all it wants is population. That's all right—that will come. And it's no bad country now for calmness and solitude, I can tell you—though there's no money in that, of course. No money, but a man wants rest, a man wants peace—a man don't want to rip and tear around all the time. And here we go, now, just as straight as a string for Hallelujah—it's a beautiful angle —handsome up grade ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... should be the meanest, most ungrateful of mortals if I could be ashamed of you. For forty years you have been my companions in solitude; to you I owe whatever inspirations I have ever felt; from you have descended in copious streams the ideas that raised my poor life above the commonplace, and the sentiments that have animated every good thing and every holy purpose that I have accomplished. Friends that ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... one of sylvan solitude, through which two wanderers are sauntering. They are artists, and one of them, Reinhardt, is attracted to the spot by his longing for the sweet village-flower, whom he has not forgotten in the whirl of the great world. Already he sees the ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... lonely place, and when, in utter exhaustion and pain, Nora closed her eyes, poor Kitty felt almost as if she were sitting alone in this great solitude with a person who ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... rehearsing in the forenoon, and performing in the evening, and sharing in convivialities afterwards, Barry Cornwall relates of him that he would often begin to study when his family had retired for the night, practising in solitude, after he had transformed his drawing-room ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... a poor steward were about to interrupt the savage quiet of Timon's solitude. For now the day was come when the ungrateful lords of Athens sorely repented the injustice which they had done to the noble Timon. For Alcibiades, like an incensed wild boar, was raging at the walls of their city, and with his ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... out without destroying the trees and bushes that crown it. What person who has known it and has often sought that spot for the sake of its ancient associations, and of the sweet solace they have found in the solitude, or for the noble view of the sacred city from its summit, will not deplore this fatal amiability of the authorities, this weak desire to please every one and inability to say no to such ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... in better case than others. Their work is so hard and exacting, if they do it aright, they have no time to feel solitude. The one complaint of engineering students is that they find it enormously difficult to gain opportunities for learning the practical side of their work. Firms are most reluctant to admit them as apprentices. France and Germany welcome them, and Continental ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... imperceptibly his mind wanders to thoughts of home, and in one moment scenes long left behind are conjured up by memory, and incidents are recalled which banish for a time the scene before him. Lost for a moment in the enchanting power of solitude, where fancy and reality combine in their most bewitching forms, he is suddenly roused by a distant sound made doubly loud by the surrounding silence—the shrill trumpet of an elephant. He wakes from his reverie; the reality of the present scene is at once manifested. ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... dominie, wheeling on the pessimist, who was visibly subdued by the poor prisoner's love for his humble pet, 'there, you see! Here is a captive wretch whose estate is hopeless. He wears the brand of a felon and is doomed to stone-caged solitude throughout his life. And yet, without friends or light or liberty, with everything to sour and harden and promote the worst that's in him, he finds it in his heart to love! From those white seed which were planted by Providence in the beginning that beautiful ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... tired of society, or for some reason at enmity with it, crossed over from the main shore, erected a small house, dug a well, set out trees, planted a garden and built a wharf—in fact, set up thereon a complete habitation. But not long did he endure his self-imposed solitude. Scarcely were his arrangements completed when an unfortunate accident caused his death, and the island and its improvements were left to be the home of the sea-fowls or the temporary ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... have numbered some four hundred when the small-pox came and reduced them by one-fourth. Six months later a woman developed tubercular consumption; the disease spread like fire about the valley, and in less than a year two survivors, a man and a woman, fled from the newly-created solitude.... Early in the year of my visit, for example, or late the year before, the first case of phthisis appeared in a household of 17 persons, and by the end of August, when the tale was told me, one soul survived, a boy who had been ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... also of the time when the most formidable army of Europe, led by the greatest conqueror the world has ever known, tried to overwhelm the vast Russian Empire. But the empire was mightier than the Great Army, and it returned not from the glacial solitude of the steppes.... So let it go far, ever farther on, that German army already decimated, panting, exhausted; let it reach the Tigris, the Euphrates, even far off India! It will ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... for all the arrogance and vanity which her exalted position must engender? for all the flattery and falsehood with which she must be surrounded? for all the soul-corrupting homage with which she is met at every moment of her existence? what other cure than to cast herself down in darkness and solitude before God—to say that she is dust and ashes—and to call down the pity of the Almighty upon her difficult and dangerous life. This is the antidote of kings against the slavery and the baseness which surround them; they should think often of death—and ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... scene. Near the centre of it was a small island, with two old ash-trees, leaning toward each other, their pensive images reflected in the stirless water. The only cheery influence of this scene of antiquity, solitude, and neglect was that the house and landscape were warmed with the ruddy western beams. I knocked, and my summons resounded hollow and ungenial in my ear; and the bell, from far away, returned a deep-mouthed and surly ring, as if it resented ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... "Madam, the mighty power of use Now strangely pleads in my excuse; If you unused have scarcely strength To gain this walk's untoward length; If, frighten'd at a scene so rude, Through long disuse of solitude; If, long confined to fires and screens, You dread the waving of these greens; If you, who long have breathed the fumes Of city fogs and crowded rooms, Do now solicitously shun The cooler air and dazzling sun; If ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... eventless, like the uniform pages of a dull book. When the solitude grew unbearable, Maurice went to visit Frau Furst, and had his supper with the family. He was a welcome guest, for he not only paid for all the beer that was drunk, but also brought such a generous portion of sausage for his own supper, that it ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... lane ends now where its prettiest windings once began; being cut off by a cross-road leading out of Dulwich to a minor railway station: and on the other side of this road, what was of old the daintiest intricacy of its solitude is changed into a straight, and evenly macadamized carriage drive between new houses of extreme respectability, with good attached gardens and offices—most of these tenements being larger—all more pretentious, and many, I ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... of Rodrigo; and the Count insulted Diego and gave him a blow. Now Diego was a man in years, and his strength had passed from him, so that he could not take vengeance, and he retired to his home to dwell there in solitude and lament over his dishonour. And he took no pleasure in his food, neither could he sleep by night, nor would he lift up his eyes from the ground, nor stir out of his house, nor commune with his friends, but turned from them in silence as if the breath of his shame would taint them. Rodrigo ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... society of her daughter in order that the latter might enjoy the advantages of an education which the city of New York could only offer at that period. A few months afterward death had deprived him of the remaining companion of his solitude; but still he had enough real regard for his child not to bring her into the comparative wilderness in which he dwelt, until the full period had expired to which he had limited her juvenile labors. The reflections of the daughter were less melancholy, and mingled with a pleased ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... was shut just so for years; the lonely bars of sunlight flecked the solitude of the room, and the lilies faded on the table. We children passed it with hushed footfall, and shrank from it at twilight, as from a room that held the dead. But into it we ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... are numerous bayous that form a net-work converting the land into a series of islands. When separated from your companions, you can easily imagine yourself in a wilderness. In the wild woods of the Oregon there is no greater solitude." ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... government were insuperable, and De Maistre vexed his soul in an unequal and only partially successful contest. In after years, amid the miseries of his life in Russia, he wrote to his brother thus: 'Sometimes in moments of solitude that I multiply as much as I possibly can, I throw my head back on the cushion of my sofa, and there with my four walls around me, far from all that is dear to me, confronted by a sombre and impenetrable future, I recall the days when in a little town that ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... as I walked I felt infinite peace pour over me. So had the silent Campo Santo at Pisa affected me; so had I felt for a moment among the ancient ruins of the abbey at Rivaulx. In this dawn hour came a time of reversion. I too was very solitary, and loved my solitude. The necessities of civilisation were necessities no more: I needed luxury even less than I needed news. I cared for nothing that the men of a city ask: there was space before me and room to ride. The ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... of his pledge, and all Europe now understood the nature of the contest. It was between the Jesuits and the monarchs of Europe. Ganganelli was compelled to give his decision. His health declined, his spirits forsook him, his natural gayety fled. He courted solitude, he wept, he prayed. But he must, nevertheless, decide. The Jesuits threatened assassination, and exposed, with bitter eloquence, the ruin of his church, if he yielded her privileges to kings. And kings threatened secession from Rome, deposition—ten thousand ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Luther, conducted, no doubt, by a higher Providence, but in discourse of reason, finding what a province he had undertaken against the Bishop of Rome and the degenerate traditions of the Church, and finding his own solitude, being in nowise aided by the opinions of his own time, was enforced to awake all antiquity, and to call former times to his succours to make a party against the present time. So that the ancient ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... into the fire. Was the prospect of sharing this gipsy-like life attractive to him? An adventurer himself, was he drawn toward these homeless strollers, for whom the illusions of dramatic art shone with enticing luster in the comparative solitude of the circuit on ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... love with that young woman of twenty-four years, delicate, slender, and full of the fears and artlessness of a child. Accustomed to the quiet solitude of the house of her guardian, she, when at Paris, in her husband's study, arranging his books, his papers, his legislative plans and reports, sought to surround her dear Sulpice with the comforting felicity of bourgeois happiness that was enjoyed calmly, ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... answered Harris; "you know their way. Not one grove will they consent to dedicate to solitude and contemplation; not one height will they leave to the lover of nature unpolluted by the gross ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... not only the central theme of the lad reared in woodland solitude, making his entrance into a world of whose ordinary relations he is absolutely and ludicrously ignorant, and the traditional illustrations of the results of that ignorance, such as the story of the Lady of the Tent and the stolen ring; but we have also the sinister figure of the Red ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... to witness. He therefore determined to make his escape on the first opportunity. Having lived so well on our island, he determined to hide himself on landing on this one, preferring to live a life of solitude to the society of heathen savages. "Now, Massa Walter, I no care. Oliver always say One above look after poor people who lub him, and now I know he does." We slept soundly in our cave, and at the earliest dawn clambered back into ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... came here that your words should be remembered," he said. "And your actions shall not be forgotten, either. There are safe places, even in Madrid, where you can live in the retirement you desire so much, even in total solitude." ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... the poor fellow had gone crazy in his solitude, and I suppose I must have shown the feeling in my face; for he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... about a thousand inhabitants. [105] On the north, cattle fed, and sportsmen wandered with dogs and guns, over the site of the borough of Marylebone, and over far the greater part of the space now covered by the boroughs of Finsbury and of the Tower Hamlets. Islington was almost a solitude; and poets loved to contrast its silence and repose with the din and turmoil of the monster London. [106] On the south the capital is now connected with its suburb by several bridges, not inferior in magnificence and solidity to the noblest works of the Caesars. In ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... quivered across the ceiling and over the walls. A stranger in the house, with its paintings, its statues and its silence, the light—itself silent and indefinite—awakened painful thoughts in him as to the vanity of bolts and guards and walls. And then, in the dead of night, in the silence and solitude of a strange bedroom, a sensation of unbearable ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... man—the ruling of his own spirit. He saw her sisterly solicitude and goodwill, but could not respond in a manner as natural as her own. This was beyond human capability. His best resource was the comparative solitude of constant occupation. He was growing doubtful, however, as to the result of his struggle, while Amy was daily becoming more lovely in his eyes. Her English life had not destroyed the native talent of an ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... district which stretched away to the south, and across which our road lay, we could not but be struck by the bleak appearance of the mountains, neither desolate nor rugged enough to possess the majesty of a bold and sublime solitude, nor sufficiently wooded and populous to exhibit that softer and more animating character which in the scenery of Switzerland is no less charming than its grandeur is imposing. Of course this does not apply to all Nepaul; the ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... head, her smile was as intoxicating as strong wine. "Don't say that," he said guiltily. "I am but a man and more than once—in the solitude—I was tempted." ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... in private, it would not have seemed so galling. For years she had been a recluse from society, mingling only with her humble neighbors, and with them no more than her circumstances required. She had labored in solitude, and shunned observation as much as possible, by carrying her work back and forth in the evening. Years of hard toil had not familiarized her with the circumstances of her lot. She tried to be humble and submissive, but the memory of her early days ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... living amid the solitude of the island, brought them tea, in a rustic sitting-room, furnished with a couple of chairs, a table, a piano, and a sofa. The panelling was mildewed, the planks of the flooring had started. Felicie looked out of the window at the lawn ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... they were sitting on the edge of the ledge, their feet dangling, the abyss below them, the desert stars twinkling coldly above them; around them the indescribable solitude of a desert night filled with mystery, its vague, haunting, whispering voice burdened with its age-old secrets. Trevison had an arm around the Judge's shoulder. Their voices mingled—the Judge's low, quavering; ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... already sped far ahead of him, in the shooting-cart which his master had declined. His dog, a black retriever, was at his heels, and both dog and man were somewhat weary and stiff with exercise. But for the privilege of solitude, Aldous Raeburn would at that moment have faced a good deal more than the two miles of extra walking which now lay between ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hour. Yes, I know what you would say. I know you have a costly gift for me—the noblest that man can make —YOUR HEART! You should not offer it to one so unworthy. Heaven, you know, has allowed my father's house to be made a house of solitude, a home of silent obedience, which my parents say is more to be admired than big names and high-sounding titles. Notwithstanding all this, let me speak the emotions of an honest heart —allow me to say in the fullness of my hopes that I anticipate better days. The bird may stretch its wings toward ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Porphyry, we have good evidence, as to Babylon, that it had not yet reached the stage of utter desolation predicted by Isaiah. Four centuries after Christ, we learn from a Father of the Christian Church, who had good personal information as to its condition, that it was then become a solitude, but a solitude in good preservation as a royal park. The vast city had disppeared, and the murmur of myriads: but as yet there were no signs whatever of ruin or desolation. Not until our own nineteenth century was the picture ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... pets, and as Ben went under the barn on his hands and knees, Leander started off with his rabbits, Bob went to look for his calf, Reddy gathered up his bundle of paper, and Joe seized his pasteboard box, all going away where they could think over the ruin in solitude. ...
— Mr. Stubbs's Brother - A Sequel to 'Toby Tyler' • James Otis
... of me and I sat myself down on a rock and covered my face with my hands that I might not see the tears, which I knew were gathering in my eyes, as they fell from them. Yes, there in the midst of that awful solitude, I, Hubert of Hastings, whose soul it filled, sat down like ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... every mark of the enemy having fled by night. They then rode up leisurely to the gates, from whence, with perfect safety, they took a clear view through straight streets quite across the city. They report to the consul, that the city was abandoned by the enemy, as was plain from the solitude, the recent tracks on their retreat, and the things which, in the confusion of the night, they had left scattered up and down. On hearing this, the consul led round the army to that side of the city which ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... strolling along the grass by the lake would have been a pleasant evening even to people more blase than X., nor did that person enjoy it any the less from catching sight of Usoof and Abu standing as lonely amongst this mass of strangers as ever he was wont to feel when brooding in his solitude at home, while they sang songs in the moonlight ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... a lamp. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan—but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes—an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanour. His air appalled me—but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... grounds, and look back at the abbey, with a presentiment that she was to behold it for the last time. The dark and ragged outline of the edifice was clearly delineated against the northern sky, while the open windows and neglected doors permitted a view of the solitude within. Twenty tapers were shedding their useless light in the empty apartments, as if in mockery of the deserted walls; and Cecilia turned shuddering from the sight, to press nigher to the person of her indignant uncle, with a secret impression that her presence ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... been made clear to him that a chief who could not control his young braves was not the kind of a chief the Great White Mother desired to have in command of her Indian subjects. White Horse, also, after three months sojourn in the cooling solitude of the Police guard room, went back to his people a humbler and a ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... least, as to keep to her bedroom. But she was very thin, and her great handsome eyes always seemed to be staring at some point beyond, searching. There was a look in them that seamen's eyes sometimes have when they are drawing on a coast of which they are not very certain. She lived almost in solitude: she hardly ever saw anybody except when they sought her out. To those who were anxious about her she laughed and said she was ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... beyond measure, he caught sight of a precipitous hill which he remembered passing on the outward march. Looking back at the first favorable point, he could see nothing that betokened the presence of Hadendowas, or any other human beings, in all that far-flung solitude. Were it not for the presence of the Italian rifle and cartridge-belt, and the blood-stained gun-barrels resting across his knees, the fierce struggle in that forbidding valley might have been the ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... guerillas rushed with fixed bayonets into the court. It was deserted save by the horses. The doors and windows of the convent were closely shut, and not a single Carlist was to be seen. Just then several shots, fired in rear of the building, explained the solitude in its front. The besieged had endeavoured to escape by the outer windows, but had been prevented by Torres and his detachment. Foiled in this attempt, Baltasar now showed himself, raging like a wolf at bay, at a window above the gate of the convent. Some ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... paddling or shrimping or sailing or farmyard life. He wanted a velvet lawn, a cedar, a rose garden, lavender, a sun dial, iced lemonade and solitude. Or he wanted his own cool apartment, with drawn sunblinds, vases full of flowers, his immense writing table, and ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... immersed in present circumstances. And certainly, for one thing, English boys are younger for their age. Sabbath observance makes a series of grim, and perhaps serviceable, pauses in the tenor of Scottish boyhood—days of great stillness and solitude for the rebellious mind, when in the dearth of books and play, and in the intervals of studying the Shorter Catechism, the intellect and senses prey upon and test each other. The typical English Sunday, with a huge midday dinner and the plethoric afternoon, leads perhaps ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her fought squarely against this obsession of the intangible; but it persisted and prevailed. The mocking shadows crowded about her, compelled her to a discomfortable realisation of her solitude in a station needing the perpetual alertness of armed men to ensure peace and safety. For Kohat city boasted a creditable average of bad characters and murder cases—a corpse more or less on the Border being of no more consequence than the fall of a sparrow; and the ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... of solitude, as well as student and dreamer, the church warden's favorite resort, when his duties left him at leisure, was a dense grove not far from the town. Thither he went when he wished to be free from all distraction, to think and dream over many things which would ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... conspicuously; Naples and Piedmont were in arms; and Austria conceived an alarming idea of the national spirit she had partially contravened. The rigor of espionage towards the imprisoned and their friends increased; the prosecution was insidiously prolonged; privation and solitude, vigilance and suspense were made instruments for subduing the resolution and invading the confidence of the captives; they pined in desolation, ignorant of their fate, uninformed of the welfare of those most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
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