"Brooding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seen a face that was like the face of Captain Swope's wife—in a great church in a Latin country. It was a painting of the Madonna, and the master who had painted it had given the Mother's face an expression of brooding tenderness as deep as the sea, an expression of pity and sympathy as wide as the world. You felt, as you looked at the picture, that the artist must have known life, ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... applies to myself, for I am certain I would not have recuperated so soon had it not been that I was relieved from a great deal of care and worry by my confidence in him, while I have had enough to employ my mind to keep me from brooding sorrow. I am now confident the doctor gave me the best possible advice when he said, 'You had better not give up ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... raise me above earth and all of earthly good. Opening my inner vision to behold, far as the eye of the finite may behold, what is comprehended in the omniscient glance of the Infinite—removing the clouds brooding so darkly over my spirit, and filling it with holy joy, by imparting radiant glimpses of the soul's calmer and higher life in the land beyond—'the life that rights the wrongs, and reveals the mysteries of this,'—the words that were once my hope and the inspiration of my toil, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... lookout, and rousing me from sleep at any time of the day watch below to climb aloft and loose a royal stop buntlines, or remove an Irish pennant—a loose rope yarn, you know—from any part of the rigging. My nerves went back on me from loss of sleep and futile anger and brooding; and once, when Macklin stripped off the sling I had rigged to hold my sore fist, and knocked me down for protesting, I saw ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... days which immediately followed the scene at the concert I noticed how he would set about things with a kind of hurried zeal, then suddenly stop and throw them aside, as if sick of them, and fall to brooding with head sunk upon his breast, and lowering brow; a state and a spectacle which caused me pain and misery not to be described. He would begin sudden conversations with me, ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... short unsatisfying slumber which sometimes follows a night of insomnia I was awakened by the laughter and shouts of children. When I looked out I saw brooding above the hollow a still gray day, in whose light the woodlands of the park were all in sombre brown, and the trout stream between its sedgy banks ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... even exhilarating was the silence and loneliness, the feeling that ourselves only, of all the world, were in that beautiful mysterious place. Had I had prayers to say, I should have said them, sure that some sort of a God was brooding on the waters and suspicious perhaps, at the back of my mind, that where the black cliffs upreared themselves, there the ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... steps aloof, and oft Lies perdue in a nook or gloomy cave, Prompt to enchant some inadvertent wretch With his unhallowed touch. So (poets sing) Grimalkin, to domestic vermin sworn An everlasting foe, with watchful eye Lies nightly brooding o'er a chinky gap, Protending her fell claws, to thoughtless mice Sure ruin. So her disembowelled web Arachne, in a hall or kitchen, spreads Obvious to vagrant flies: she secret stands Within her woven cell; the humming prey, Regardless ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... occurred to her, now regarding conduct and now costume: but a miserable time Blanche found it. She felt herself, and she fancied every one else considered her, in dire disgrace. Yet beneath all the mortification, the humiliation, and the grief over which she was brooding, there was a conviction in the depth of Blanche's heart, resist it as she might, that the father who was crossing her will was a wiser and truer friend to her than the mother who ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... gathered in it? Who will look after the farm and the horses and cattle and poultry, the fruit-trees and lawns and flowers as I do? Do you think that all these cares are pleasures to me? No, my dear lad, but they are my duty. I wouldn't have thy father find out that I neglected even a brooding hen. No, I wouldn't. And the yacht was thy father's great pleasuring. I only went with him to double that pleasure. I don't like the sea, though I never let him know it. Oh, my dear! But there! You haven't learned ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... 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
... his country overrun by the armies of nations which his ambition had provoked. He did not drag out the last years of his life an exile and a prisoner, in an unhealthy climate and under an ungenerous gaoler, raging with the impotent desire of vengeance, and brooding over visions of departed glory. He went down to his grave in the fulness of power and fame; and he left to his son an authority which any man of ordinary firmness and prudence ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... now hungry, tired, and disappointed. Indeed the calls of appetite became so clamorous that he sought a cheap restaurant. After demolishing a huge plate of such viands as could be had at little cost, he sat brooding over a cup of coffee for an hour or more. The world wore a different aspect from that which it had presented in the morning, and he was lost in a ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... at Strasburg that travellers are reminded of another "marvellous boy," who, if he did not "perish in his pride," certainly shortened his days by overreaching ambition and the brooding bitterness ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... were not up as yet, they would probably wait for the moon, and the birds and beasts were all at rest. I cannot describe the intensity of the quiet of the night: to me in my weak state, and fretting as I was over the non-return of the Hottentot Hans, it seemed almost ominous—as though Nature were brooding over some tragedy which was ...
— Hunter Quatermain's Story • H. Rider Haggard
... came a gush of firelight warm and bright. Her voice reached him—"Richard!" He entered. She was sitting in a great old chair by the fire, idle for a wonder, her hands, fine and slender, clasped over her knees. The light struck up against her fair, brooding face. "It is late!" she said. "Late and cold! Come to the fire. Ailsy will have supper ready in ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... from Renteria to Irun would come before me as the storm battalions mustered outside, and the waves began lashing themselves into violence of temper. What if I had to go to Madrid while such weather as this was brooding? To get to the capital one is obliged to embark at Bayonne for Santander, and proceed thence by rail—so long as no Carlist partidas meddle with the track. ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... valleys, and away in the distance to the west showed the white town and castle of Elmina and the nine-mile road thither, skirting the surf-bound seashore, only broken on its level way by the mouth of the Sweet River. Over all was the brooding silence of the noonday heat, broken only by the ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... were documents enough in existence to have proved my part in the affair; but not one of them dared the King produce, since they would also show me to have been no more than his instrument. And so, desiring my death as it was now clear he did, he must sit impotently brooding there with what patience he could command, like a gigantic, evil spider into whose web I obstinately ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... working faith in the steady moral and spiritual development of man. I mean the principle that this Christ whom they had discovered anew was an eternal manifestation of God, an immanent Word of God, a Spirit brooding over the world of men, as in the beginning over the face of the waters, present in the unfolding events of history as well as in the far-away "dispensations of Grace." As a result, they grew less interested in the problem that had ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... 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
... sensitive about it! All us girls think it ever so romantic, and we call you sometimes the lord of the realm, and when we see you walking through the darkling wood at evenfall we say, ‘My lord is brooding ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... and re-perused the despatches of the Queen, and were brooding in no little despondency over their contents, ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... Mother Mayberry worked quietly among her dependent feather folk and as she worked, her gentle face had its brooding mother-look and her lips moved as she comforted and fortified herself with snatches of prayer for the journey through the deep waters, on which she was to lead this child of her affection. After the last tangle had ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... graving hieroglyphs; Hindus, with hymn and apothegm and endless epic; Hebrew prophet, with spirituality, as in flashes of lightning, conscience like red-hot iron, plaintive songs and screams of vengeance for tyrannies and enslavement; Christ, with bent head, brooding love and peace, like a dove; Greek, creating eternal shapes of physical and esthetic proportion; Roman, lord of satire, the sword, and the codex;—of the figures, some far off and veil'd, others nearer and visible; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the tragic fate which ended the lives of nearly all of these men, the most frequent and the most terrible being that of insanity. It is of course a matter of common knowledge that chronic melancholy or the persistent brooding over personal misfortune is an almost inevitable preliminary to mental derangement. And when this melancholy takes root in the finely organized mind of genius, it is only to be expected that the result will be even more disastrous ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... Hrogar, sails back to Sweden, and relates his adventures to Hygelac. Here the first half of the poem ends. The second begins with the accession of Bewulf to the throne, after the fall of Hygelac and his son Heardred. He rules prosperously for fifty years, till a dragon, brooding over a hidden treasure, begins to ravage the country, and destroys Bewulf's palace with fire. Bewulf sets out in quest of its hiding-place, with twelve men. Having a presentiment of his approaching end, he pauses and recalls to mind his past life and exploits. He ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... the crown and consummation of what opium can do for human nature. I, whose disease it was to meditate too much and to observe too little, and who upon my first entrance at college was nearly falling into a deep melancholy, from brooding too much on the sufferings which I had witnessed in London, was sufficiently aware of the tendencies of my own thoughts to do all I could to counteract them. I was, indeed, like a person who, according to the old legend, had entered the cave of ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... weeks past the prisoner had been brooding over a means of escape. His wife, whose every thought was devoted to him, had often cast her eyes on the great chest or trunk in which the books of Erpenius had been conveyed between Loevestein and Gorcum for the use of the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... unequal warfare, her whole frame underwent an appalling change: her eyes glistened, and her hands shook violently, as she threw back with a resolute movement the tresses of her redundant hair. Again she stopped as if brooding over some frightful design; her throat became swollen with hysteric affection; the blood that hitherto had seemed congealed in its source, rushed with impetuosity down its wonted channels, and the blue veins through which the little rivulet of life had gently flowed, now became dark and ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... graces of boyhood had given place to a finished manliness of deportment, a calmer expression of feature, denoting that years had changed and steadied the character, even as the form. He then seemed as one laboring under painful and heavy thought, as one brooding over some mighty change within, as if some question of weighty import were struggling with recollections and visions of the past. He had spoken little, evidently shrinking in pain from all reference to or information on the late engagement. He tarried ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... Meanwhile, brooding storm sat on Katherine's brow, on her lips, dwelt in her every movement. And something of this Julius perceived, for his devotion to her was intact, as was his self-abnegation. Throughout all these years he had never sought to approach her more closely. His attitude had remained ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Brooding over all this I discerned dimly, even in that dusty, brawling place, and time showed me more and more clearly, that I had always been aware of the Gods and conscious of their omnipresence. It seemed plain to me that Zeus, whose haunt is dark Dodona, lorded it over ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... and admonitions, the sacred hiao or filial submission, the tablets and ancestral piety, were a part of her blood; as was the infinitely fainter infusion of Buddhism; yet in her intellectual brooding it was to the Tao-teh-king that she returned. She paused to recall that, the brace at last removed, she was practically completely recovered; but the bent, the bracing, given her ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... alone, with his head a little bent forward, looking at the table in front of him. The light fell strongly on his face, making it almost seem to shine, and I looked at the little white seam of the scar on his cheek that had helped to identify him, at his black, brooding eyebrows, and the long lock of hair falling over his forehead, and I thought, so softly that it scarcely dared to be a thought, "Perhaps I shall never see any of these again." I felt very quiet, as though I should never want to laugh ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... Aeschylus' poetic work was not only due, we may be sure, to his native genius and gifts, powerful as they were, but were partly inspired by the personal share he took in the great actions of a heroic national uprising. In the same way, the poet's brooding thoughtfulness on deep questions—-the power of the gods, their dealings with man, the dark mysteries of fate, the future life in Hades—though largely due to his turn of mind and temperament, was doubtless connected with the place where his childhood was passed. Eleusis ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... would survive the occasions which called them forth: they were protests, alarm signals, trumpet-calls to action, words wrung from the writer's heart, forged at white heat, and of course lacking the finish and careful word-selection which reflection and patient brooding over them might have given. Such as they are, they belong to the history of the Anti-Slavery movement, and may serve as way-marks of its progress. If their language at times seems severe and harsh, the monstrous wrong ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Brooding uncertainty had flooded the sparkle out of her eyes. She was statue-like in her stillness, her breaths impalpable in their softness. But the points of her knuckles were ghostly, sharp spots on her tightly clenched hands. All that Westerling could tell ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... interval of brooding, he sauntered down to the riverside, through his fragrant garden, fragrant and fresh with the cool odours of the night, and peered into the darkness, towards Castel Ventirose. Here and there he could discern a gleam of yellow, where ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... not 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 which, even ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... infantile blitheness left her face. The sadness which is inherent in the Irish countenance spread over it, like sudden mist over a landscape. The ancient brooding aspect of the ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... breast 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 ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... man to mourn; shall tears bring forth what smiles neer brought; Shall brooding breed a thought of joy? Ah hush ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... watched her with the same sidewise attention, but his face was brooding, his half-veiled eyes were red and threatening. What would happen in the nighttime as the stage pursued its lonely way across the bleak prairie? Since Red Kimball meant to appeal to the law in his revenge against Brick, there ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... on very well—communication with the world seemed to have commenced all at once. Nearly every family took a different newspaper, and these being exchanged with each other, afforded plenty of food for the mind, and prevented it brooding too deeply over the ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... done; it would have been done even had she not spoken. And when, on the day after the funeral, brother and sister parted to go their several ways, the sadness they bore with them had no embitterment of brooding regret. A little graver than usual, Will took his place behind the counter, with no word to Allchin concerning the cause of his absence. He wrote frequently to Jane, and from her received long letters, which did him good, so redolent were they of ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... not have been bought in spite of her better self if a good angel in the likeness of a stout lady with silvery curls about the benevolent face, enshrined in a plain bonnet, had not accosted her as she joined Kitty, still brooding ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... by repeated biting, shaking, tearing, etc. From this original meaning the word has enlarged until now it means to tease, to trouble, to harass with importunity or with care or anxiety. In other words it is undue care, needless anxiety, unnecessary brooding, ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... a perfect paradise. It was a warm, balmy, moonlight evening in June. The rich resinous odour of the woods filled the air with delicious perfume; fire-flies were glancing like shooting stars among the dark foliage that hung over the water, and the spirit of love and peace sat brooding over the luxurious solitude, whose very silence was eloquent with praise of the great Maker. How I envied the residents of the parsonage their lovely home! How disappointed I felt, when Mrs. G—- told me ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... and in it a culver of the forest, that is to say, a wood-pigeon,[FN63] the bird renowned among birds as the minstrel of love-longing, with a collar of jewels about its neck marvellous fine and fair. He considered it awhile and, seeing it absently brooding in its cage, he shed tears and repeated ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... But brooding lay the sun of my love upon me, in his own juice stewed Zarathustra,—then did shadows and doubts ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... oppressed, too," observed Bess, looking moodily seawards. "I wouldn't wonder if something is brooding over us. A big ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... violent articles, warning men of this deluge of barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no nearer his enemy, and, what was worse, no nearer a living. As he paced the Thames embankment, bitterly biting a cheap cigar and brooding on the advance of Anarchy, there was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage or so solitary as he. Indeed, he always felt that Government stood alone and desperate, with its back to the wall. He was too quixotic to have ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... the midst of that brooding stillness, Napoleon entered upon the last phase of his greatness, his brief ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... stealthily about the garden, memorizing by their father's orders their weekly hymn. The house was still, and very hot. All the afternoon young Sam lay upon his bed turning the pages of The Wealth of Nations, and brooding over his failures: he could not make Mrs. Richie love him; he could not write a great drama; he could not add up a column of figures; he could not understand his father's rages at unimportant things; "and nobody cares a continental ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... brow and a high-bridged nose; his companion was a younger man with light, curly hair and frank, and even innocent, eyes. Symon scarcely seemed to hear the newcomers; it seemed almost as if he had not realized that the return of the light revealed his brooding attitude. Then he started in a guilty fashion, and when he saw the elder of the two strangers, his pale face seemed ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... the busy door— There sleeps a Roman born: upon the floor His wife, dark-haired and handsome, takes her rest, Their black-eyed baby tugging at her breast. Her hands lie still. Her brooding glances roam Above the pushing crowd to her far home, And slow she smiles to think how fine 'twill be When they (so rich!) return ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... the medium of letters and messengers, who had begged, implored me to help him against Orcon, the eccentric planet of my own discovery, the planet which belonged to a solar system at the other end of the Universe from ours. Because of my knowledge of Orcon, with its bubbling seas, its brooding nightmares, and lastly, its queer conduct toward Earth, he had wanted to take me away from my telescopes to ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... of redolent pinewoods. It was as though the gradual densifying of this belt of woodland country had culminated upon the hill. The brooding gloom of the forest was profound. The dark green foliage of the pines seemed black by contrast with the snow, and gazing in amongst the leafless lower trunks was like peering into a world of dayless night The horses walked with ears pricked and wistful eyes alertly gazing. The darkness ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... that time possible, in the private soul; it was democratic, feminine, and unworldly; its Oriental deity and prophets had a primitive simplicity and pathos not found in pagan heroes or polite metaphysical entities; its obscure Hebrew poetry opened, like music, an infinite field for brooding fancy and presumption. The consequence was a doubling of the world, so that every Christian led a dual existence, one full of trouble and vanity on earth, which it was piety in him to despise and neglect, another full of hope and consolation in a region parallel to earth and directly ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... her system that she had even shunned the presence of the Queen, believing that every eye which rested on her produced some baneful result; while her very attendants were dismissed from her presence when they had terminated their duties, and she thus remained hour after hour in solitude, brooding over the sickly fancies of her disordered brain. The sight of her husband's murderer had, however, instantly and for ever restored the healthful tone of her mind. She did not weep, for she had already exhausted all her tears; she asked no mercy, for she was aware that, whatever might ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... more talk, and when Wingfold went up stairs, he found Helen asleep. Annoyed with himself for having spoken harshly to Mrs. Faber, and more than usually harassed by a sense of failure in his sermon, he threw himself into a chair, and sat brooding and praying till the light began to appear. Out of the reeds shaken all night in the wind, rose with the ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... and who would wish to be the first to pronounce that gentle wife a widow? Darker and still deeper grew the overshadowing cloud, and the hopes of the trusting ones less. Mrs. Grosvenor would sit for whole days brooding over her sorrows, clinging to the last ray of hope, with almost the insanity of hope; but the last spark finally went out, never again to be rekindled. The untiring wheels of time still went their rounds, and everything moved on, as if there were no hearts ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... drawn off her bed; her hands clasped her knees, and she bent forward, with her eyes fixed on the door at which they entered. Her once dazzling beauty was now transformed to a haggard glare—the terrible lightning which gleamed on the face of Satan, when he sat brooding on the burning ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... friendship of Jesus is perfect. Its touch is always gentle and full of healing. Its helpfulness is always wise. Its tenderness is like the warmth of a heavenly summer, brooding over the life which accepts it. All the love of God pours forth in the friendship of Jesus. To be his beloved is to be held in the clasp of the everlasting arms. "I and my Father are one," said Jesus; his friendship, therefore, is the friendship of the Father. Those ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... beauty was clouded by a deep sadness, turned soon to the third sitter at the table, a tall, lank gentleman of perhaps thirty-five, who, with dark, brooding eyes and a serious limp, had just entered. He was the redoubtable Uncle John, of loud and fearless opinion; and, if the bar-room bowie had missed him, a stray Radical bullet had been more successful. A political fight in the railroad turn-table, some months ago, had been the scene of this heartbreaking ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... deemed invincible. This boasted superiority was now to be tested. For years the Russians had been groaning under heavy taxes. During this period they had been finding fault with their central government in a mild, Siberia-fearing manner. To keep them from brooding on their oppressed condition, visions of glory and conquest were to be opened to them by a foreign war. As the patriotic enthusiasm and military fervor increased, the praises of Nicholas were sounded throughout the vast dominion. "The coming war was regarded ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... only an idea of mine, born of after brooding upon the scene. I am inclined to think it must be so, for I was only a child at the time, and would hardly have noticed such a thing. But it seems to my remembrance that as the old crone ceased, another woman in the crowd raised her eyes slowly, and fixed them on a withered, ancient man, who leant ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... pity, only the sickness of the shambles. And yet it would be unjust to ascribe their unimaginative ghastliness to any special love of cruelty. This evil element may be rationally deduced from false dramatic instinct and perverted habits of brooding sensuously on our Lord's Passion, in minds deprived of the right feeling ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Cottage, a letter of introduction in his hand, and a feeling of hero-worship in his heart, he was ushered into the presence of the great romancer, who advanced "carrying his head with a heavy forward droop" and with pondering pace. His look was "somber and brooding—the look of a man who had dealt faithfully and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil which forever attracted ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... when Father-in-law had been particularly tender and helpful, she looked at Eveley with brooding eyes, and said, "You are such a nice girl, but I sort of blame you because father is not with us. You are so much cleverer than I,—couldn't you have opened my eyes ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... into silence, and his thoughts flew on apace. The unwashed face grew meaner and more brooding, the fair brows drew closer over the large blue eyes, the jaws were shut as tight as they well could be, for he was painfully overshot, and his chin was almost hidden, so far receding was it under ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... snow through the distant woods were the brooding birds, but they arose before we were near and sailed splendidly overhead in a sweeping, wide-fronted rank. As nearly as I could number them, there were 120, but evidently some were elsewhere, as this would not allow a ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... alive?" tolled the bell. "I sit all day in my little wooden temple, brooding over ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... valley at a brisk pace, becoming more aware of the clouds and atmospheric haze. Distant objects seemed blurred by the mist, taking on a somber, brooding grayness. For all Kolin could tell, he and the others were isolated in a world bounded by the rocky ridge behind them and a semi-circle of damp trees and bushes several hundred meters away. He suspected that the hills rising mistily ahead were part of a continuous slope, ...
— The Talkative Tree • Horace Brown Fyfe
... about him, lay down upon his thick, springy mattress of fir-brush, with his feet toward the fire, and slumbered as only a decent, hard-working man can. Out among the dancing shadows that flitted among the snow-mantled bushes and heavily laden trees a hundred and fifty eyes glared in the brooding darkness—as though all the wolves in the forest were gathering there. Later, when the sound of heavy breathing was heard round the fires, a fierce, wolfish-looking dog, bolder than the rest, left its snowy bed to hunt for more sheltered quarters. There was a whine, a snarl, then the sound ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... to no matter what else is done, because lack of intelligent care in early life will be reflected in poor performance when the chicks reach maturity. One can seldom, if ever, offset the mistakes of brooding time by the best of ...
— Pratt's Practical Pointers on the Care of Livestock and Poultry • Pratt Food Co.
... They have a lot of books to read, they play games and smoke, and for awhile they will be able to bear up in their captivity; but not for long, not for very long, I take it. I am told they have times of deadly brooding and depression. I made them a speech—sitting down. It just happened so. I don't prefer that attitude. Still, it has one advantage—it is only a talk, it doesn't take the form of a speech. I have tried it once before on this trip. However, if ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... The smallest annoyance, whether it comes from our fellow-men or from the things around us, may swell up into a monster of dreadful aspect, putting us at our wits' end—and all because we go on brooding over our troubles and painting them in the most glaring colors and on the largest scale. It is much better to take a very calm and prosaic view of what is disagreeable; for that is the easiest way ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... are drops of candle grease and the remains of a fire. On the day of the Mathers's picnic he doubtless saw the party pass through and recognized Colonel Gaylord. It brought to his mind the thrashing he had received. While he was still brooding over the matter, the Colonel came back alone, and it flashed into the fellow's mind that this was his chance. He may have been afraid at first or he may have hesitated through kindlier motives. At any rate he did ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... heart made nest, With the fond trust of brooding bird, I find no all-embracing word To say how deeply I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... the beds, which stood in a row, each with its head against the wall, one was pointed out on which a living skeleton lay. The face was very very pale, and it seemed as if the angel of death were already brooding over it. Yet, though so changed, there was no mistaking the aspect and the once powerful ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... Roman poets, and believed the Horatian philosophy the only true creed by which a man should shape his existence. But it must not be supposed that books brought repose to the mind and heart of Marmaduke Lovel. He was a disappointed man, a discontented man, a man given to brooding over the failure of his life, inclined to cherish vengeful feelings against his fellow-men on account of that failure. Books to him were very much what they might have been to some fiery-tempered ambitious soldier of fortune buried ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... not know how, the secret of her double life came out. No doubt long brooding over these voices, long intercourse with such celestial visitors, and the mission continually pressed upon her—meaningless to the child at first, a thing only to shed terrified tears over and wonder at—ripened her intelligence so that she came at last to perceive that it was ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... thoughtfully into the fire, the glow of which fell full upon his face, revealing every feature like carving. His nose was hooked slightly, and to Dick it now looked like the beak of an eagle. The somber eyes, too, expressed brooding ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... Christian countries had sent him wandering, so that it was inevitable he must return to China by the route he had come. He was the most mournful of sights, sitting most of the day in a retired spot, brooding, apparently over his fate. He never smiled, though I who have been much in China, tried to stir him from his sadness by exclamations and gestures. His race has a very keen sense of humor. They see a thousand ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... preparing &c. v.; in preparation, in course of preparation, in agitation, in embryo, in hand, in train; afoot, afloat; on foot, on the stocks, on the anvil; under consideration &c. (plan) 626; brewing, batching, forthcoming, brooding; in store for, in reserve. precautionary, provident; preparative, preparatory; provisional, inchoate, under revision; preliminary &c. (precedent) 62. prepared &c. v.; in readiness; ready, ready to one's band, ready made, ready cut and dried; made to one's hand, handy, on the table; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... of raising the siege of Cambray. But honours and success are followed by envy. The King beheld this accession of glory to his brother with great dissatisfaction. He had been for seven months, while my brother and I were together in Gascony, brooding over his malice, and produced the strangest invention that can be imagined. He pretended to believe (what the King my husband can easily prove to be false) that I instigated him to go to war that I might procure ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... in. All our tempting tonics and special dishes had failed to curve the angles in the boy's face and body. He still looked ill. The brooding sadness that frequently overshadowed ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... been declared alike by Christian and non-Christian asceticism to be one of the proper helps of the spiritual life. Though Hoeffding perhaps exaggerates when he reminds us that mediaeval art always depicts the saints as deeply absorbed in their books, and suggests that such brooding study directly induces contemplative states,[142] yet it is true that the soul gains greatly from such communion with, and meek learning from, its cultural background. Ever more and more as it advances, it will discover within that background the records of those very experiences ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... state, East and Tom were one evening sitting in their study. They had done their work for first lesson, and Tom was in a brown study, brooding, like a young William Tell, upon the wrongs of fags in general, and his own ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... stones to the clear and wonderful skies, have held, still hold, their secrets; but they do not seek for yours. The terrific temples, the hot, mysterious tombs, odorous of the dead desires of men, crouching in and under the immeasurable sands, will muck you with their brooding silence, with their dim and sombre repose. The brown children of the Nile, the toilers who sing their antique songs by the shadoof and the sakieh, the dragomans, the smiling goblin merchants, the Bedouins who lead your camel into the pale recesses ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... boats had turned, the whole scene had become involved in a murky twilight, through the gloom of which the brig, still with every stitch of canvas set, could with difficulty be made out. Still, although it seemed to me that the brooding squall might burst upon us at any moment, the atmosphere maintained its ominous condition of stagnation until the boats had reached within some four cables' lengths—or somewhat less than half-a-mile—of us; when, as I was intently watching their progress, ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... 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 me turn to ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... damned badly with you, when that other man let you in for the bill you backed for him, and that girl you were to have married went off with someone else, what did you do to keep yourself from brooding? Because you must have done something, man, as ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... fact, been brooding over some affair of the heart. A day in advance he therefore gave proper injunctions to Pei Ming. "As I shall be going out of doors to-morrow at daybreak," he said, "you'd better get ready two horses and wait at the back door! ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... never in my life seen anything more clearly. As far as I could judge, the figure was that of a tall, thin man. He stood with his legs a little separated, his arms folded, his head bowed, as if he were brooding over that enormous wilderness of peat and granite which lay before him. He might have been the very spirit of that terrible place. It was not the convict. This man was far from the place where the latter had disappeared. Besides, he was a much taller man. With a cry of surprise I pointed him ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... yet he skirted the cause of the quarrel with perfect tact: "The misinterpretation of a few careless and kindly words, said in passing, and repeated, with garbling additions, to a man who was not himself.... The brooding of a mind most unhappily beset with alcohol.... A blow resented by a too devoted but ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... strength and athletic skill, the early promise of what was to be a man fit for all offices of active rural life, and to be, in mature age, the selectman, the deacon, the representative, the colonel. As for Septimius, let him alone a moment or two, and then they would see him, with his head bent down, brooding, brooding, his eyes fixed on some chip, some stone, some common plant, any commonest thing, as if it were the clew and index to some mystery; and when, by chance startled out of these meditations, he lifted his eyes, there would ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was poor wretch in more woeful plight for, 'prisoned in the stifling hold where no ray of kindly sun might ever penetrate, and void of all human fellowship, I became a prey to wild, unholy fancies and a mind-sickness bred of my brooding humours; my evil thoughts seemed to take on stealthy shapes that haunted the fetid gloom about me, shapes of horror and murder conjured up of my own vengeful imaginations. An evil time indeed this, of long, uneasy sleepings, ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... fascinating, by virtue even of that "pale cast of thought" which has "sicklied it o'er" in the sense of making it too intellectual for dramatic unity and strict dramatic success. Between these undramatic, brooding soliloquies which stand so aloof from the action, but dominate the minds of those who read and meditate the text, and the old sensational elements of murder, ghost, fencing and killing, which hold the interest of the crowd—between these constituents, ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... year rolled over the Cabbage Patch, and it was nearing Christmas again. The void left in Mrs. Wiggs's heart by Jim's death could never be filled, but time was beginning to soften her grief, and the necessity for steady employment kept her from brooding over her trouble. ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... seen all that there was to be seen; and now nothing more remained but to return as soon as possible, and spend that night at Salerno. They had seen nothing of the driver since they left him, and they accounted for this on the ground that he was still maintaining himself in his gigantic sulk, and brooding over his wrongs; and they thought that if he chose to make a fool of himself, they would allow him to do so as long as it was ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... His angels high, Spreads over all in brooding joy; On great wings borne, entranced they lie, And all is bliss ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Greece had set her pace Between a laurelled lad And a singing maiden, pitched her purple tents In Rome, leaned with a mother's fears In Bethlehem to nurse a son of God upon her breast And learned the tender loneliness of tears, Awhile had hid in Europe, sad In the shadow of magnificence, Brooding, finding no rest, And then of a sudden she had run forth from her hiding-place, Rejoicing, desperate, intense Against her enemy, a rod Of fire in her hand, her tresses crowned With liberty, her purpose bold and bound That every son should be a son of God. And then she wept for France.... ...
— The New World • Witter Bynner
... "The brooding willow whispered to the yew; Beneath, the deadly nightshade and the rue, With immortelles self-woven into strange Funereal ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... by the authority of the common conscience. That "we are not our own" has not, indeed, been left to Lassalle or Marx to discover. But if you could have moved this quiet Englishman to speak, he would have said—his strong, brooding face all kindled and alive—that the enormous industrial development of the past century has shown us the forces at work in the evolution of human societies on a gigantic scale, and by thus magnifying them has ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Duke is," she thought. "How heavy this man, and dull and slow. The Duke's face is at once kindly and spirited, the Count's brooding and awkward. The Duke is a man, the Count ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt |
