"Brooding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a flat in the rue de Sontay then, and the telephone was in my workroom. One night late, as I sat brooding there, the bell startled me; and a voice—a woman's ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... utter and disheartening boredom. His crossed legs were stretched out, one heel digging into the soft pile of the Tabreez rug. Muscular arms folded in an idleness that irked them with aching weariness, he sat there, brooding, motionless. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... conferred for a little while, and as a consequence of that conference Lopez Baeza walked through the narrow streets of the old town to a cafe near the railway station. In a corner a small, wizened, square man was sitting over his beer, brooding unhappily. Baeza took a seat by his side and talked with Juan de Maestre. He went out after a few minutes and hired a motor-car from the stand in front of the station. In the car he drove to the park and went once round it. At ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... The brooding instinct in me—the faint remnant of mother love, that kind Providence has left in every, good man's heart—longed to comfort her and bear her pains. But I was powerless to help her, and, after all, her suffering was ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... thus with himself, the mysterious whispers of the night came nearer to him, in the blackness of garden trees, ancient trees of College gardens brooding alone, whispering alone through the dark hours, of that current of young life which is still flowing past them; how for hundreds of years it has always been flowing, and always passing, passing, passing so quickly to the great silent sea of death and oblivion, to the ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... made thee mightily, my love, He stretched his hands out of his rest And lit the star of east and west Brooding o'er darkness like a dove. God made ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Clarence, brooding over the situation like a Providence, was glad to see that already the new move had weakened the invaders' power. The day after the announcement in the press of the approaching debut of the other generals, the ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... were unique. Probably never before in the history of the world had such things been seen: the stillness, the brooding silence of the vast primeval forest where no, or few, white men have ever been before, and the only path is the track of the elephant; the silence of the forest, stretching for hundreds of miles in all directions, ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... other turned Round through the vast profundity obscure; And said, 'Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds; This be thy just circumference, O World!' Thus God the Heaven created, thus the Earth, Matter unformed and void. Darkness profound Covered the abyss; but on the watery calm His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread, And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth, Throughout the fluid mass; but downward purged The black, tartareous, cold, infernal dregs, Adverse to life; then founded, then conglobed Like things to like; the rest to several place Disparted, ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... day. At times she felt like weeping, and still she had a friendly smile for all she met. Then again she would sink into deep reflection, in which she forgot place and time and everything; she knew nothing of herself, nothing of this brooding. Then when some one spoke to her, she would start up as out of deep sleep; it seemed to her as if she had only just recovered her eyes and ears, as if she were falling back upon ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... way this was a good thing, as it kept me from brooding over Santiago's story, though even at the busiest times the thought of my father's fate would creep into my mind. I saw nothing of Jose, who had been left behind with some Indians to hold a mountain pass, but occasionally I paid a brief visit to the Spanish prisoners for ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... but the very structure of the individuals themselves. It is by the study of heredity that we shall learn to understand the individual. For instance, experimental breeding of the fowl reveals the existence of the brooding instinct as a definite unit, which enters, or does not enter, into the composition of the individual, and which is quite distinct from the capacity to produce eggs. Here is a definite distinction suggested, for the case of ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... wood so damp and still and so secret, in the remote morning air. Morning, with rain in the sky, and the forest subtly brooding, and me feeling no bigger than a pea-bug between the roots of my fir. The trees seem so much bigger than me, so much stronger in life, prowling silent around. I seem to feel them moving and thinking and prowling, and they ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... sign. Bundled again in the soft quilt, he sat in the wagon-box, brooding. For he had divined, with the instinct of the savage, that if the shack on the rise before them would find a faithful friend in him who sat beneath the wavering cross, it was threatened by the presence of a dangerous foe—the man just come to the shanty saloon ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... Jackson buried in Tennessee, Young Lincoln, brooding in Illinois, And Johnny Appleseed, priestly and free, Knotted and gnarled, past seventy years, Still planted on in the woods alone. Ohio and young Indiana— These were his wide altar-stone, Where still he burnt out flesh and bone. Twenty days ahead of the Indian, twenty years ahead ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... took off his hat, rubbed his head, gazed upon the ground, and seemed to be in deep thought for several minutes. So was the miser in deep thought—brooding over his ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... find, and fairly challenges you to come and look for his treasures in his vicinity. But you will not find them if you go. The nest is somewhere on the outer circle of his song; he is never so imprudent as to take up his stand very near it. The artists who draw those cosy little pictures of a brooding mother-bird with the male perched but a yard away in full song, do not copy from nature. The thrasher's nest I found thirty or forty rods from the point where the male was wont to indulge in his brilliant recitative. It was ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... possessed, and promised to do a lot of things of which he had no idea, Mr. Offitt asked "if any brother had anything to offer for the good of the order." This called Mr. Bott to his feet, and he made a speech, on which he had been brooding all day, against the pride of so-called science, the arrogance of unrighteous wealth, and the grovelling superstition of Christianity. The light of the kerosene lamp shone full on the decorated side of ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... "The brooding willow whispered to the yew; Beneath, the deadly nightshade and the rue, With immortelles self-woven into strange Funereal shapes, ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... suspect some machination which, devilish though it might be, was none the less human. The girl's highly strung imagination, her affectionate and credulous mind, the primitive education which had surrounded her childhood with a circle of legends, the constant brooding over her dead father and, above all, the state of sublime ecstasy into which music threw her from the moment that this art was made manifest to her in certain exceptional conditions, as in the churchyard ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... He paused, brooding, then went on: "Last night I did not sleep—much—thinking about it. It's all my fault.... I do not fit. So I am going away, going to try to find ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... soft breeze stirring the orchard, always the clear yellow sunlight burning and dazzling her eyes, always the unvarying monotony of bleating sheep and lowing herds and at evening the hoot of owls. The brooding tenderness of the sky she did not see. The throbbing of the great, quiet southern stars stirred her only with a sense of helpless loneliness that was all but unendurable. And still, from who knows what source, she found strength to meet the days and her friends with that unfailing ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... morn, For sound of bird, and brook, and murmuring bees, For luckless fancies of illusion born, What time in dark we dwelt and framed our lore? Woe, woe, if then regretful we should mourn "What wisdom left we on that human shore!" For brooding kindness can a charm beget, Not duly won, and from Heaven's parapet These terrene colours shine with starry gleam— But this is all a fable and a dream; A fable, for this axiom it brings, Immortal loves must love immortal things; ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... not himself know, and if the others did he'd be sure to find it out. It would make him conspicuous, maybe worry him and set him brooding over himself, so I'm trusting you to keep it secret. And, in any case, what better amusement could you have? The regular exercise in this perfect air will be as good for you girls as ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... Mademoiselle Mariposa drew aside the veil of the future, was Edith Symmes, who sat almost directly before it. To the left of her was Marcia, pale and sad, and close beside her Horace Penfield. Heavens! He jumped impatiently to his feet. He was simply getting into a morbid muddle sitting here brooding over this matter. He must have action, action of some kind, and obeying a sudden impulse, he decided to see Ydo ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... gentle was his nature, that, even stirred as he was, he could not conceive a fitting punishment for so great an offense. He felt his own inadequacy, his own feebleness to cope with the problem before him, and so he sat brooding impotently. ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... back, he stood in the centre of the room, considering his environment with the grave, absent air habitual to him when brooding. And, as he stood there, a sound at the door aroused him, and he turned to confront a young girl in hat, veil, and furs, who was leisurely advancing toward him, stripping the gloves from a pair of very ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... probability killed or stunned; and even if he should escape these dangers it would be impossible for him to clamber upon the cot without rousing the rajah, and impossible even though the rajah were dead! Amazed at the man's daring, and convinced that his sufferings and brooding had destroyed his reason, nevertheless I ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... inspiration seemed to illuminate her features, and to brace with the vigor of immortality those limbs which before had sunk under her. She forgot she was still of earth, while a holy love, like that of the dove in Paradise, sat brooding on her heart. ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... her beneath evidence taken by Royal Commission and Parliamentary Committee, commissioners' reports, testimony of shipowners and captains; calculated tables of tides, sets of currents, prevailing winds; results of surveys hydrographical; all the mass of facts he had been accumulating and brooding over for eighteen long months. But the weight of it closed his lips, and when he opened them again it was to say, "Yes, that ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... opened to admit Mary Raymond. Her babyish face looked white and wan in the clear morning light. For hours after her door had closed upon Marjorie and her mother she had sat on the edge of her bed in her pretty blue party frock, brooding on her wrongs. When she had finally prepared for sleep, it was only to toss and turn in her bed, wide-awake and resentful. At daylight she had risen listlessly, then fixing upon a certain plan of action, had bathed, put on a simple house gown ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... works of the Schlegels, their fame, upon the whole, rests on a different basis. The lovely dreamy mind of Novalis was cut off in the full promise of its spring; it only just awoke from the blissful visions of its childhood, to breathe forth a few lyrical murmurs about the mysteries it had been brooding over, and then fell asleep again. Upon Tieck, therefore, the character of German poetry in the age following those of Goethe and Schiller will mainly depend: and never did Norwegian or Icelandic spring burst forth more suddenly than ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... poor father. The dark moods, since my mother's death, came over him more and more often; it seemed, when he was in one of them, that his mind was not itself. He never slighted his work,—that was like the breath he drew,—but when it was done, he would sit for hours brooding by the fireplace, looking at the little empty chair where my mother used to sit and sing at her sewing. And sitting so and brooding, now and again there would come over him as it were a blindness, and a forgetting ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... land, Moses may have appeared to Satan so evidently under the frown of God, as to encourage his meddlesome efforts to inflict some injury upon him, through dishonor done to his remains. Perhaps he would convey them back to Egypt, a gift to the brooding vengeance of the Pharaohs, who would gratify their anger by preserving that body in the house of their gods;—thus showing their spiteful satisfaction at the disappointment of the prophet whom Jehovah would not permit to enter that promised land, in hope of which the great spoiler ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... a perpetual hunting after things that vex and annoy, and then brooding over them. The cause of it is an inward morbid discontent, often co-existing with a naturally restless temperament. In their extreme form, this discontent and this ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... herself, the best of her sisters, is driven Out of her native land; but her own misfortunes forgetting, Others she seeks to console, and, though helpless, is also most helpful. Great are the woes and distress which over the earth's face are brooding, But may happiness not be evoked from out of this sorrow? May not I, in the arms of my bride, the wife I have chosen, Even rejoice at the war, as you at the ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... the distant convent-bell, Ere Day's last smiles depart, With mellow cadence pleading fell Upon my brooding heart,— And Memory's phantoms thick and fast Their fond illusions bred, From peerless spirits of the past, And ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... caused great excitement in Russia, and the title, "On the Eve," was a subject for vehement discussion everywhere. What did Turgenev mean? On the eve of what? Turgenev made no answer; but over the troubled waters of his story moves the brooding spirit of creation. Russians must and will learn manhood from foreigners, from men who die only from bodily disease, who are not sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. At the very close of the book, one man asks ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... beauty was the queer, mud-brick village of Kurna, with its tomb dwellings of the poor, and immense mud vases shaped like mushrooms, standing straight up on thick brown stems before the crowded hovels. In each vase reposed sleeping babies, brooding hens, dogs, rabbits, or any other live stock, mixed with such rubbish as the family possessed: and the most ambitious mushrooms were ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... SHAKESPEARE Hamlet act v, sc. 2. Anger is violent and vindictive emotion, which is sharp, sudden, and, like all violent passions, necessarily brief. Resentment (a feeling back or feeling over again) is persistent, the bitter brooding over injuries. Exasperation, a roughening, is a hot, superficial intensity of anger, demanding instant expression. Rage drives one beyond the bounds of prudence or discretion; fury is stronger yet, and sweeps one away into uncontrollable violence. Anger is personal and usually ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... is exposed to many dangers before hatching, and the young bird is especially tender, defenceless, and helpless. Every cold rain, every violent wind, every hailstorm during the breeding season, destroys hundreds of nestlings, and the parent often perishes with her progeny while brooding over it in the vain effort to protect it. [Footnote: It is not the unfledged and the nursing bird alone that are exposed to destruction by severe weather. Whole flocks of adult and strong-winged tribes are killed by hail. Severe winters are usually ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... the night Wherin the Prince of light His raign of peace upon the earth began: The Windes with wonder whist, Smoothly the waters kist, Whispering new joyes to the milde Ocean, Who now hath quite forgot to rave, While Birds of Calm sit brooding on ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... was evening, the distant hills, when Valentine sauntered forth, were of an intense solid blue, gloomy and pure, behind them lay wedges of cloud edged with gold, all appeared still, unchanging, and there was a warm balmy scent of clover and country crops brooding over the place. ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... possessions; it is fit enough that you should sometimes sit by the fire and look at the merry faces and listen to the little voices, and think what it would be to lose them. But it is not needful, or rational, or Christian-like, to be always brooding on that thought. And when they grow up, it may be hard to provide for them. The little thing that is sitting on your knee may before many years be alone in life, thousands of miles from you and from his early home, an insignificant item in the bitter price which Britain ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... by despiteful wrong she takes her seat, In lowly grief, at Jove's eternal feet. There of the soul unjust her plaints ascend: So rue the nations when their kings offend— When, uttering wiles and brooding thoughts of ill, They bend the laws, and wrest them to their will. Oh! gorged with gold, ye kingly judges, hear! Make straight your paths, your crooked judgments fear, That the foul record may no more be seen— ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... that come back yet again, but that, when the brooding tourist puts out his hand to them, meet it a little slowly, or even seem to recede a step, as if in slight fear of some liberty he may take. Surely they should know by this time that he is capable of taking none. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... look-out, with the intention of catching a little sleep, if possible, during the middle hours of the night, and of returning to his duty as morning approached. For the first hour nothing occurred to divert his attention from brooding on the melancholy circumstances of their situation. It seemed as if all around him had actually lost the sense of their cares in sleep, and no sound was audible amid that ocean waste, but the light washing of the water, as the gentle waves rolled at intervals against the weather side of the ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... on the tree top, brooding over the fight which he had just witnessed, until the deepening shadows warned him that it was time to seek repose. Turning on his side he laid his head on his pillow, while a soft breeze swayed the tree gently to and fro and rocked him ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... he had done it, but it was done, and that was all there was to it. After that he kept out of sight of all his neighbors. He prowled around mostly at night and was very stealthy and soft-footed, always keeping in the shadows. His temper grew worse and worse from brooding over his lost tail. When any one chanced to surprise him, he would switch his stub of a tail just as he used to switch his long tail. You see he would forget. Then when he was laughed at by those bigger than ...
— Mother West Wind "How" Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... striking across his meditations, had a singular effect upon the Colonel. It made him aware that this was a different Venice from the one which Vittorio had been wont to show him. What had become of the pensive quality of the atmosphere, the brooding melancholy of its impression upon him? Where, he wondered, half-resentfully, was the dim oppression, the subtle pain he had heretofore associated with these tranquil water spaces? What witch-work were those girls playing with the traditions of twenty-five years? He glanced from one to ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... kinship. Amid those surroundings he had been as much at home as if he were again in his native hills, and for the hour had forgotten his fellow churchmen and their ministries. But as their train drew nearer and nearer Corinth, the Doctor saw by his companion's face, and by his fits of brooding silence, that the minister was feeling again the weight of his ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... with a gay, triumphant peal as she tripped out of the room; but as she sat in her own chamber, brooding, she muttered: "Dare I defy him? ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... her hoofs, and glad of the fresh pure air in her nostrils,—and her mistress shared with her the sense of freedom and buoyancy which an open country and fair landscape must naturally inspire in those to whom life is a daily and abounding vigorous delight, not a mere sickly brooding over the past, or a morbid anticipation of the future. The woods surrounding Abbot's Manor were by no means depressing,—they were not dark silent vistas of solemn pine, leading into deeper and deeper gloom, but cheery and picturesque clumps of elm and beech ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... erected shelters and found its way in rivulets through the palm-leaf roofs so that the earthen floors were converted into basins of mud; when game retreated to unknown or inaccessible places so that the procuring of food became an increasingly difficult problem; it was then, after the weeks of brooding and confinement that nerves snapped and the picture of war formed itself as a saving diversion before the blood-shot eyes ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... old,' and this had only seen the summer of twenty. But a precious odor breathed from the casks, and the corroding capsules confessed the mighty powers that lurked within. Inhaling this odor, you seemed to see the Original White Hermit himself, brooding over his tiny principality of barren rock, and performing miracles with the aid of the imported carboy and the indigenous rill. As the evening gloomed, and twilight fell among the crags, a faint snicker spread upon the air, and in the dim light ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... laughed at me as usual, but at the same time explained that it would not be safe; for that if the slaves were allowed books and knowledge, they would soon not be content with their condition, and would be banding together to make themselves free. I knew all this, and I had been brooding over it; and now when the powerful hand of the overseer came in to hinder the little bit of good and comfort I was trying to give the people, my heart was set on fire with a sense of sorrow and wrong that, as I said, no ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the world in defiance of her power. To explain the danger which now awaited them, we must return to their old family enemy, Sir Robert Percy. Master of Percy-hall, and of all that wealth could give, he could not enjoy his prosperity, but was continually brooding on plans of ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... military and naval engagements between the British and U.S. forces, thirty-six were won by the British. Though the victories of 1812 were the direct factors that brought about a change in the national destiny of Canada, "Queenston Heights was not the culminating feat of arms." As a result of brooding over these disasters that had befallen the "Grand Army of the West," and the "national disgrace" of overwhelming defeat, the people of the United States, as a whole, independent of politics, "were now"—so write American ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... wilder fancies. Often he made up tales in which always he figured as the hero and the assistant as the heroine. While Manuel bemoaned the harshness of fate, Roberto, the blond student, gave himself up likewise to melancholy, brooding upon the Baroness's daughter. The student was forced to endure jests especially from Celia, who, according to certain evil tongues, was trying to rouse him from his habitual frigidity. But Roberto gave her ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... violent passions, or even indulged in violent and exciting exercises, may form a very good idea. It is a delirious intoxication, a temporary madness that absorbs every thought and every energy. And can we wonder at the kris-bearing, untaught, brooding Malay preferring such a death, looked upon as almost honourable to the cold-blooded details of suicide, if he wishes to escape from overwhelming troubles, or the merciless of the hangman and the disgrace of a public execution, when he ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... her eyes upon the beautiful rosy west. There was a garden wall behind her and a tall crape myrtle. As she stood, with the light upon her face, Maury Stafford rode by. He saw her as she saw him. His brooding face flushed; he made as if to check his horse, but did not so. He lifted his hat high and rode on, out of the town, back to the encamped army. Judith had made no answering motion; she stood with lifted face and unchanged ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... for a long time silent. The talkative woman in the rocker also kept silence, brooding over many things. Finally ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... hear the Nameless, and descend Into the Temple-cave of thine own self, There, brooding by the central altar, thou May'st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice, By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise; For knowledge is the swallow on the lake, That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there But never yet hath dipt ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... Joshua is the Captain of the Lord's host, as was typified to the first one, in that strange scene outside the walls of Jericho, where the earthly commander, sunk in thought, was brooding upon the hard nut which he had to crack, when suddenly he lifted up his eyes, and beheld a man with a drawn sword. With the instinctive alertness of his profession and character, his immediate question was, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... of Light! Who from the brooding night Draws out the morning holy, calm, and grand; Veils up the moon, Sends out the sun, To glad the ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... simultaneously, in exact accordance with her impulses. For Mary Stuart was never quiet an instant: even in her prison she shared in the movement of the world; her brain never ceased working; she was brooding over her circumstances, her distress and her hope, how to escape the one and realise the other: sometimes indeed there came a moment of resignation, but only soon to pass away again. She throws all her thoughts into her letters ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... room, writing letters. The rest of the household were variously employed. Roscoe Sherriff was prowling about the house, brooding on campaigns of publicity. Dudley Pickering was walking in the grounds with Claire. In a little shack in the woods that adjoined the high-road, which he had converted into a temporary studio, Lord Wetherby was working on a picture which he proposed to call ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... sometimes between two wings, sometimes in the boat in which it floated on the celestial ocean across the sky. The winged disk has almost always two cobra serpents attached to it, and often two rams' horns; the meaning of the whole combination is that Ra protects and preserves, like the vulture brooding over its young, destroys like the cobra, and creates like the ram. This is seen by the modification where it is placed over a king's head, when the destructive cobra is omitted, and the wings are folded together as embracing ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... sad Easter Monday. Even nature seemed to feel the pressure of the brooding horror, for heavy clouds piled up towards noon and a chill wind blew fitfully from the north, bending the young corn and the creaking tree-tops, and moaning about the straw-covered roofs. Then an icy cold rain descended on the village, sending the children, the only humans ...
— The Case of The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... that this was the first occasion of their ever being on their way to the dinner-table of a person of quality, they could refuse to look the admission in the face. A peculiar lightness of heart beset them; for brooding ambition is richer in that first realizing step it takes, insignificant though it seem, than in any subsequent achievement. I fear to say that the hearts of the ladies boiled, because visages so sedate, and voices ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... haunted Tolstoi during all the years of his youth and early manhood, and threw him constantly into fits of melancholy and inner brooding. He could neither dismiss the subject from his mind, nor could he bring into the area of his mortal consciousness that serene contemplation and optimistic line of reasoning which marks all ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... it is youth that can delight in its own excess of shade, and can even dispense with sunshine—hugging to its heart the memory of its own often self-created distresses and conjuring up and, with self-satisfaction, brooding over the pain and imagined horrors of a lifetime. Maturity and age kindly bring their own relief—rendering this kind of ministry to itself no longer desirable, even were it possible. The Master of Ballantrae indeed marks ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... before," Ramsey responded from the deep chair, where he had moodily thrown himself; and, returning to his brooding upon his oratory. "Oh, ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... beset Richard Ancrum for years. On the little book-table to his right lay papers of Huxley's, of Clifford's, and several worn volumes of mental pathology. The brooding intellect was for ever raising the same problem, the same spectre world of universal doubt, in which God, conscience, faith, were words without ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dull and gray. The rain had ceased, but the clouds hung dark and brooding above a world which, in its windless calm, following the spent storm-throe, seemed to us to be waiting "till judgment spoke the doom of fate." We were all up early. None of us, it appeared, had slept ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... as vacuously, over the unbroken blue distance of the Mediterranean, trembling into soft ribbons of silver where the wind rippled its surface, yellowing into a fluid gold towards the path of the lowering sun, deepening, again, into a brooding turquoise along the flat rim of the sea to the southward where the twin tranquilities of sky and ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... frightened by the brooding silence that seemed to envelop the place, and tortured by tragic thoughts in which her father occupied a prominent position—almost crazed by the memory of what had happened during the preceding twenty-four hours—she ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... have come down. I think uncle will be glad also. I am happy to see you again; I have missed you these past weeks. But my happiness is nothing just now, Gerald! [He started.] My uncle, you must speak with him. From brooding so much over the Holy Scriptures, and the natural excitement of his discoveries—they are so extraordinary, dear friend, that he means always to keep them to himself, for he rightly believes that ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... left him with too much spare time. Had he worked at a task that occupied seven or eight hours a day, his thoughts would have filtered through the weariness of his body, and been purified thereby. But his leisure was abundant, and he spent it in brooding over ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... ever sought it, as the rill Seeketh the valley or the ocean's breast; And ere his very wishes were expressed, She strove to trace their meaning in his eyes, Even as a seaman readeth on the skies The coming breeze, the calm, or brooding gale, Then spreads the canvas wide, or reefs the sail. Nor did he doubt that still her heart was free As the fleet mountain deer, which as a sea The wilderness surrounds; for she had grown Up as a desert flower, that he alone Had watched and cherished; and the blinding pride Of wealth ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... Keep an eye on the kid, and do what you can to prevent that busy little mind of hers from brooding." ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... night before Miss Challoner's death I was brooding very deeply over the Hicks Street case. It had so possessed me that I had taken this street in on my way from Flatbush; as if staring at the house and its swarming courtyard was going to settle any such question as that! I walked by the place and I looked up at the windows. No inspiration. ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... no such woman and no such man, but a vast variety of temperaments and dispositions, monadic, dyadic, and polymeric souls, and this sort of heart and brain and that. It is only the young fool and the brooding mattoid who believe in a special separate science of "women," there are all sorts of people, and some of each sort are women and some are men. With every stage in educational development people become more varied, or, at least, more conscious of their variety, more sensitively insistent upon ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... were witches held in respect and fear, but she might be able, through evil arts, to plague the race that had worked her husband to death in the mines, and now had killed her only son. She kept still more at home, brooding, planning, yielding farther and farther to the evil suggestions that her repute as a voodoo priestess offered to her, yet keeping one place in her heart even warmer than before,—the place filled by ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... I dread to be left alone all day. You may laugh at me, but I feel as if something terrible were hanging over me—or you. The spiritual oppression is like the physical presentiment sensitive temperaments suffer when a thunder-storm is brooding, but not ready to break. Yet I can refer my ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... follies of their predecessors. Back of them, one hundred thousand little toddlers whose feet stagger in their innocent helplessness. Back of them, one hundred thousand mothers with babies in their arms. Oh, how sweetly those baby eyes look up into the loving eyes that are brooding over them. Is it possible those baby brows will ever lie low in the gutter, those sweet lips be stained by oath or glass; those crumpled rose-leaf fingers ever strike the murderous blow incited by alcohol? ...
— Almost A Man • Mary Wood-Allen
... operation that was to raise him from his servitude and inferiority to the level of a blind citizen Nunez knew nothing of sleep, and all through the warm, sunlit hours, while the others slumbered happily, he sat brooding or wandered aimlessly, trying to bring his mind to bear on his dilemma. He had given his answer, he had given his consent, and still he was not sure. And at last work-time was over, the sun rose in splendour over the golden crests, and his last day of vision began for him. He had a few minutes ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... one the little creatures creep from behind the blinds into the streets. The brooding tenderness is vanished from the City's face. The fretful noises of the day have come again. Silence, her lover of the night, kisses her stone lips, and steals away. And you, gentle Reader, return home, garlanded with the self-sufficiency of ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... sauvage—cocon chauvage, as Hoka mispronounced it. With people so nice and so touchy, it was scarce to be supposed that our company of greenhorns should not blunder into offences. Hoka, on one of his visits, fell suddenly in a brooding silence, and presently after left the ship with cold formality. When he took me back into favour, he adroitly and pointedly explained the nature of my offence: I had asked him to sell cocoa-nuts; and in Hoka's view articles of food were things that a gentleman should give, not sell; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... talked more fitfully, with intervals of brooding silence. But he was not morose in his fits, and when he excused himself for sulking, she warmly denied that he did any such thing. "I expect you are studying the motor," she said; and he laughed. "I'm very capable ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... Assingham, rather wearily housed again, ascended to the first floor, there to sink, overburdened, on the landing outside the drawing-room, into a great gilded Venetian chair—of which at first, however, she but made, with her brooding face, a sort of throne of meditation. She would thus have recalled a little, with her so free orientalism of type, the immemorially speechless Sphinx about at last to become articulate. The Colonel, not unlike, on his side, some old pilgrim of the desert camping at the foot of ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... Oldcastle, was extended before her. She had played in that house as a child, and as a woman had watched, from its windows, the years go by like a procession. That house was her domain. Hers was the supreme intelligence brooding creatively over it. Out of walls and floors and ceilings, out of stairs and passages, out of furniture and woven stuffs, out of metal and earthenware, she had made a home. From the lawn, in the beautiful sadness ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... impact upon human hearts of any man living. This is a man of the Lincoln type. Like Lincoln he has the saving grace of humour, and sense of proportion. There is something of the mother-heart in these brooding lovers of their kind. There is the constraining love that yearns over darkness and cold and empty hearts. ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... as a singer. It was now in his blindness and old age, with the cause he loved trodden under foot by men as vile as the rabble in "Comus," that the genius of Milton took refuge in the great poem on which through years of silence his imagination had been brooding. ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... the habit of frequently entering into the quiet of his own soul, and who, instead of brooding over himself, transforms and orders those experiences he has had in life, will gain much. For he will perceive that his thoughts and feelings become richer, if through memory he establishes a relationship ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... moonlight rippling on a lake, to the chemical and physical action of material forces—to the vibrations of matter and ether as we know them, that we have exhausted the whole truth of things? Many a thinker, brooding over the phenomena of Nature, has felt that they represent the thoughts of a dominating unknown Mind partially incarnate in ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... Silas had been blessed with a wife, to whose nimbler wits he might have submitted the case, it is probable that he would not have sat for so long a time in his great chair brooding over the contents of the violet-tinted envelope from Boston. But unfortunately the good minister had been forced to lay his helpmate beneath the rough sods of the village churchyard some three years previous. Since this sad event, it is scarcely necessary to state, he had found it essential to his ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley
... the cold dew of heaven Lay on the humbler graves around, what time The pale moon gazed upon the turfy mounds, Pensive, as though like me, in lonely muse, Twere brooding on the dead inhumed beneath. There while with him, the holy man of Uz, O'er human destiny I sympathised, Counting the long, long periods prophecy Decrees to roll, ere the great day arrives Of resurrection, oft the blue-eyed Spring Had met ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... French chemist, born at Chalons-sur-Saone; inventor of photography, the method of effecting which he achieved after long brooding in 1824, and afterwards communicated to Daguerre, with whom he entered into partnership, and who made it known after ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... son of the Augsburg Bohemian came to lay his finger upon the very core and composition of perhaps the haughtiest, the subtlest, the most dread despot since the Caesars? Henry VIII. and Fisher; the Lais Corinthiaca, the Duchess of Milan, his brooding wife; dancing children, and dancing Death; Christ on the Cross, Christ in the Grave, Christ Arisen; lambs in the fields, woods and hills, gaping peasants, wild battle;—put them side by side, the poor ghosts of them left to us, and compute the range of art—"the ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... considerably to the admiration of most of her chums, and decidedly to the envy of one. Lorna, who had settled herself by her side on the steps, was not pleased to be deserted. She could never quite forgive Irene for having so many friends. The brooding cloud that had temporarily dispersed settled down again. When the girls got up to explore the temple she marched glumly away by herself. All the beauty and wonder and loveliness of the scene was lost upon her; for the sake of a foolish ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... whom Satan gives the prize. He has not done anything as yet. He has only a plan, but a plan which, if carried out, would put the deeds of all the other devils into the shade—the plan "to snatch from God his favorite." This favorite of God is Faust, "a solitary, brooding youth, renouncing all passion except the passion for truth, entirely living in truth, entirely absorbed in it." To snatch him from God—that would be a victory, over which the whole realm of night would rejoice. Satan is enchanted; the war against truth is his element. Yes, Faust must be ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass me, a butcher boy in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on a bicycle, children going to school, and suddenly they become vague and unreal, and I hurry again with the artilleryman through the hot, brooding silence. Of a night I see the black powder darkening the silent streets, and the contorted bodies shrouded in that layer; they rise upon me tattered and dog-bitten. They gibber and grow fiercer, paler, uglier, mad distortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold and wretched, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... to make you—not yet—not yet. But,' added the lady, rising, 'you must sit in my chair while I get you the present I have been preparing for you. I told you my spinning was for you. It is finished now, and I am going to fetch it. I have been keeping it warm under one of my brooding pigeons.' ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... children, by monopolies and injustice. But these are discussions unsuited to the moment. I am doubly your countryman in this strait, and all the past is no more than the rough liberties which friends take with each other. Captain Ludlow, there is danger brooding in that dark void ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... In one of his brooding pauses at the window—the window out of which never again apparently should he see Mrs. Ryves glide across the little garden with the step for which he had liked her from the first—he became aware that the rain was about to intermit and the sun to make some grudging ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... growing maturity of thought. In the Holy Family of Francis I., how strong and tender is the mother's attitude, as she stoops to lift her child from his cradle; in the Chair Madonna, how protecting is the capacious embrace with which she gathers him to herself in brooding love. No technical artistic education is necessary for the appreciation of such pictures. All who have known a mother's love look and understand, and look again ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... of martyr, and Cavaignac and Zurlinden and Chanoine in turn strove to impede the course of justice. 'Hope deferred maketh the heart sick,' and thus M. Zola, finding so many difficulties in the way of his return, abandoned for a time all work and fell into brooding melancholy. ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... his own new mode of life in the Holloway lodgings, he began to look about for a fit place for the homeless girl—a place, he thought to himself, which must combine several special advantages; plenty of work—she wanted that to take her mind off brooding; good, honest, upright people; and above all, no religion. Ronald recognised that last undoubted requirement as of absolutely paramount importance. 'She'll stand any amount of talk or anything else from me,' he said to himself often, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... which he had come, and on board of which the others were still doubtless asleep—Portlaw, Malcourt, and Wayward. And at thought of the others he yawned and moistened his lips, still feverish from last night's unwisdom; and leaning forward on his oars, sat brooding, cradled by the flowing motion of ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... irresistible in opinion and in claims; she amused herself in teaching him how completely he was mistaken. Alternately spoiled and crossed, he learned to be exacting, unreasonable, absurd in his pettish resentments or brooding sullenness. He learned to think that she must be dealt with by the same methods which she herself employed. The effect was not produced in a moment; it was the result of a courtiership of sixteen years. But it ended in corrupting a noble nature. Essex came to believe that she ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... brooding, for he was working hard at his lessons with the village Priest; and as to little Daria, she had quickly adapted herself to the ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... he'll be sorry for it all," I said to myself; and I was brooding over the past again, when Esau uttered a low chuckle, which made ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... an autumn evening was abroad. It marched along the roads, stole over the meadows, and sat brooding in the forest; the ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... bay until such time as they might safely continue their voyage. Madam Beritola landed with the rest on the island, and, leaving them all, sought out a lonely and secluded spot, and there abandoned herself to melancholy brooding on the loss of her dear Arrighetto. While thus she spent her days in solitary preoccupation with her grief it chanced that a galley of corsairs swooped down upon the island, and, before either the mariners or any ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... a drink. It was noted also that nothing was doing in the direction of developing his mine; and another quality, the rare gift of reticence, had taken the place of his brag. He sat off by himself, absent-minded and brooding, which was not like the ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... their chairs; clean-faced, clean-handed, wet-haired, murmuring low-voiced courtesies,—"Pass me the gravy, please," "I wouldn't be carin' fer any, thank you,"—and lifting to the faces of waiting girls now and again their strange, young, brooding eyes, bold, laughing, and afraid, hungry, pathetic, arrogant, as the eyes of young men are, tameless and untamable, but full of the pathos of the untamed. Joan's heart shook a little under their looks, but when Pierre lifted his eyes to her, ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... pleasure to bring Beauty out of Chaos, and to establish a fresh order of things upon the surface of our Earth. And, as the first step thereto, "the SPIRIT of GOD moved upon the face of the waters." The Hebrew phrase implies no less than the tremulous brooding as of a bird,—causing the dreary waste to heave and swell with coming life. "And GOD said, Let there be Light. And there was Light." "He spake and it was done[285]." From Himself, who is "the true Light," (not from the Sun, which,—like the rest of the orbs of Heaven,—is but a lamp ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... Hesperus, thou bringest all good things— Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer; To the young birds the parent's brooding wings, The welcome stall to the o'erlaboured steer, etc. Thou bring'st the child, too, ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... helplessness, so that he simply had to shelve his worries, and baby her out of her own. He adored her, and therefore he never questioned her ingenuousness; he didn't see that by monopolizing his thoughts, and turning them entirely upon herself, she prevented him from wasting his energy in futile brooding, even if he had inclined ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... lay, concealed by his external calm, those memories and aspirations which are as strong as passions. In his earlier years, when he had been put to hard shifts for existence, he had found no leisure for close and brooding reflection upon that spoliation of just rights—that calumny upon his mother's name, which had first brought the Night into his Morning. His resentment towards the Beauforts, it is true, had ever been an intense but a fitful and irregular passion. It was exactly in proportion as, by those rare ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Mr. Langton and I went together to THE CLUB, where we found Mr. Burke, Mr. Garrick, and some other members, and amongst them our friend Goldsmith, who sat silently brooding over Johnson's reprimand to him after dinner. Johnson perceived this, and said aside to some of us, 'I'll make Goldsmith forgive me;' and then called to him in a loud voice, 'Dr. Goldsmith,—something passed to-day where you and I dined; I ask your pardon[748].' Goldsmith answered placidly, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... have much indulged in this solitary, idle brooding, for she had work to do, and must be up and doing. First, she had to summon a Privy Council, which met at Buckingham Palace;—more than eighty Peers, mostly solemn old fellows, who had outlived their days of romantic sentiment, if they ever had any, yet to whom the Queen had ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... tried to pull her down to him, gently and coaxingly. In a sort of hysteria, Sally jerked herself free, looking steadily away. Her mouth was open, and brooding resolve was in her eyes. She was not tragic; she was in confusion, set only upon a single purpose, and otherwise passively in ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... transmit to the child substances which are injurious, and in certain cases parasites may pass from the mother to the foetus. The same types of malformations which occur in man are also seen in birds, and it would require a more vigorous imagination than is usual to believe that a brooding hen could transmit an impression to an egg and that a headless chick could result from witnessing the sacrifice of an associate. The idea of the importance of maternal impressions in influencing the character of the offspring ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... the husband and wife. In his hand, he carried a sheet of paper, roughly scrawled. As he stopped before the two, and cleared his throat, Mary withdrew herself from Dick's arms, and regarded the official with brooding eyes from out her white face. Something strange in her enemy's expression caught her attention, something that set new hopes alive within her in a fashion wholly inexplicable, so that she waited ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... each other with hearts full of the hope of peace and happiness, some tyrant king and his armies had come between them. Then what a carnival of lust, rapine and bloody murder! Man was broken on the wheel of power and thwarted Hope sat brooding in his little house. History had been a long siege, like that of Troy, to deliver a fairer Helen from the established power of Kings. Now, beyond three thousand miles of sea, supported by the strength of the ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... and rest were inconceivable while there existed strife and suffering in nature. Nowhere could there be found refuge; drawing near unto the divine, this pain only became wider, more intense, almost insufferable, feeling and assimilating the vastness of divine sorrow brooding over the unreclaimed deep. This pity, this consciousness of pain, not her own, filling her own, filling her life, marked her out from everyone he knew. She seemed to him as one consecrated. Then this lover in his mystic passion passed in the contemplation of his well-beloved from ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... great lake was bright and busy with boats, and the birds twittered in the leafy trees and the lobelias and calceolarias were woven into wonderful patterns by the gardeners. Then she would throw herself down on the thick grass and look up in mystic rapture at the brooding blue sky and forget to read the book she had brought with her, while the other children chased one another about in savage delight. Only once on a Saturday afternoon when her father was not with them, did she get Dutch Debby to break through her ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill |
