"Pensiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... breadth of his forehead which made the lower part of his face look so unusually slight and feminine. His eyes were dark hazel, as clear, brilliant, and tender as a girl's, and brimming full of a pensiveness which seemed both loving and melancholy. Few persons, at all events few women, who looked upon him ever looked beyond his eyes. They were very fascinating, and in a man's countenance very strange. They were the kind of eyes which reveal passionate romances, ...
— The Brigade Commander • J. W. Deforest
... moving. "I have thought it over. For your sake, I will be the man I was. It's true, I can't restore the old face; but the old outlook on life, the old habits, the old pensiveness, will bring back the old expression. I will resume the old name, the old set of memories, the old sense of personality. I said last night that a resumption of the old self could be only mental, and ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... and lonely. But after all, no woods are so interesting as those where you might possibly see a bear or an elk." And upon another occasion, after a cry of enthusiasm at the view from the top of Mount Anthony, "It's lovely, lovely, lovely," she said, with diminishing cadence, ending in pensiveness once more. "Do you see that little bit just there? No, not where the trees are—that bare spot that looks brown and warm in the sun. With a little sagebrush, that spot would look something like a place I know ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... said Warner, with something of sarcasm in his pensiveness of tone. "We must not dispute; so I will hold my peace: but make love all you will; what are the false smiles of a lip which a few years can blight as an autumn leaf? what the homage of a heart as feeble and mortal as your own? Why, I, with a ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... my happiness was the pensiveness that hung like a soft cloud over the spirits of Edith. She was still kind and affectionate to me; but the sweet unreserve of former intercourse was gone. I had come between her and her brother's heart. I was the shadow on her dial of flowers, that made their bloom wither. I never walked with ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... Monty devoted himself to his guests, and at the first sign of pensiveness he was ready with a jest or a story. But he did it all with a tact that inspired the crowd as a whole with hope, and no one suspected that he himself was not cheerful. For Peggy Gray there was a special tenderness, and he made up his mind that if ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... productions are life-mysteries, significant of profound truths. His speculations, often bold and striking, are presented with singular force, but with such a quiet grace and simplicity as not to startle until they enter in and occupy the mind. The gayety with which his pensiveness is occasionally broken, seems more than any thing else in his works to have cost some effort. The gentle sadness, the "half-acknowledged melancholy," of his manner and reflections, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... field of observation, sequestered from general interest: and they are composed in a spirit too delicate and unobtrusive to catch the ear of the noisy crowd, clamoring for strong sensations. But this retiring delicacy itself, the pensiveness checkered by gleams of the fanciful, and the humor that is touched with cross lights of pathos, together with the picturesque quaintness of the objects casually described, whether men, or things, or usages; and in the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... Newman, a cheerful temper, and "a sunniness of mind all his own," Saint Gregory of Nazianzus was a fair humourist, and Saint Basil was a wit. "Pensive playfulness" is Newman's phrase for Basil, but there was a speed about his retorts which did not always savour of pensiveness. When the furious governor of Pontus threatened to tear out his liver, Basil, a confirmed invalid, replied suavely, "It is a kind intention. My liver, as at present located, has ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... foreigner at his landing. On my first arrival in England, I was asked by a friend how I liked the English women; to which I replied that I thought them all handsome. This is the first impression they produce. There is an air of calmness and pensiveness about them, which surprises and interests particularly a native of the south. They seem to look, if I may apply to them the fine lines of one ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various
... eyes reluctantly from the brooding peace of mountain and sky, wondered a little at her pensiveness; wondered also where her thoughts—if mere flittings of the mind are entitled to be ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... rich and lovely land," said Eglamore—"this kingdom which a half-hour since lay in the hollow of my hand." He viewed it for a while, and not without pensiveness. Then he took Graciosa's hand and looked into her face, and he ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... good man," agreed Johnnie with sudden pensiveness. "They've all been mighty good to me ever since I've been here; but I believe Mr. Stoddard has done more for me than any one else. He not only lends me books, but he takes time to explain ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... that passage expresses something immeasurably more difficult of expression. The whole tone of the environment is reproduced in a few touches. We not only realize the scene, but we also feel in its description the same mood of subtle pensiveness, with its flavour of melancholy, in which the writer saw and felt it. For myself I know that the passage brings back to me, exactly and perfectly, not only a mental picture, but also a frame of mind, which I can recognize across the years which now separate me ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... good angels guard you, And spread their gracious wings about your slumbers. The drowsy night grows on the world, and now The busy craftsmen and the o'er-labour'd hind Forget the travail of the day in sleep: Care only wakes, and moping pensiveness; With meagre discontented looks they sit, And watch the wasting of the midnight taper. Such vigils must I keep, so wakes my soul, Restless and self-tormented! O, false Hastings! Thou hast destroy'd my peace. [knocking without. ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe
... the present time,' Mr Boffin assented, with his former pensiveness, as he took his seat upon his settle. 'I hope good may be coming of it in the future time. Towards which, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... shore even to the end of November; the great long misty sea-line touching the tender-coloured sky; the white sail of a distant boat turning silver in some pale sunbeam:—it seemed as if she could dream her life away in such luxury of pensiveness, in which she made her present all in all, from not daring to think of the past, or ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... is impossible, is out of nature; that what to the young bird is the old bird, which feeds it in the nest until it is fledged, that is to Siegfried, inevitably, Mime! This simile of Mime's suggests to Siegfried a further question. In asking it he has one of those brief accesses of pensiveness which endear him, disclosing the existence of a common human tenderness, after all, under that sturdy wrapping of joy befitting the child of demigods. "Now, since you are so wise, tell me still another thing: When the ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... a lady, with large lustrous eyes and a pale olive complexion, whose countenance, from its extreme mobility, attracted my attention; at one moment, lighting up with intelligence, and the next, softening into pensiveness. ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... by virtue of his exceeding leanness. He had a thin, pale, rather pleasing hatchet-face, framed in the curls of a golden periwig, a sensitive mouth and pale blue eyes that lent his countenance a dreamy expression, a rather melancholy pensiveness. But they were alert, observant eyes notwithstanding, although they failed on this occasion to observe the slight change of colour which his question had brought to Miss Bishop's cheeks or the suspiciously ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... time, I sallied out, and sauntered along the banks of the river. It was now full day: and the cheerful light, and the noble face of the Po,—here a superb stream, equal almost to the Rhine at Cologne,—rolling on to the Adriatic, chased away my pensiveness. The river here flows between lofty embankments,—the adjoining lands being below its level, and reminding one of Holland; and were any extraordinary inundation to happen among the Alps, and force the embankments of ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... him in pieces. Forster, likewise, after this fact, being a man formerly addicted to hospitality, company, mirth, and music, was afterwards observed to forsake all this, and with much melancholy and pensiveness (some say with madness) pined and drooped away. The wife also of Bald Butter, kinsman to the Earl, gave out the whole fact a little before her death. Neither are these following passages to be forgotten, ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... antique statues of which the Louvre is full, there is one of Polyhymnia, which is celebrated above the rest for an expression of melancholy pensiveness not usually found among the ancients. It is a singular circumstance that D'Urville should have observed among the Papuans the very expression of countenance distinguishing this antique statue. On board the corvette ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... she weeps Troy's painted woes: For sorrow, like a heavy-hanging bell, Once set on ringing, with his own weight goes; Then little strength rings out the doleful knell: So Lucrece, set a-work, sad tales doth tell To pencill'd pensiveness and colour'd sorrow: She lends them words, and she their looks ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... gentleman's words proved true. The days passed like bright smiles, in which, however, lurked the pensiveness of autumn. Slowly failing maples glowed first with the hectic flush of disease, but gradually warmer hues stole into the face of Nature, for it is the dying of the leaves that causes the changes ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... good-hearted pensiveness; 'it's not in the course of nature that she should.' She rose as she spoke, as if it behoved her to begin her new duties with alacrity, as there might not long be occasion for them. She put another question before she went. 'And who will ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... Mrs. Purchase turned to her husband, who had come out of his reverie and sat regarding Clem with something like lively interest. He had, in fact, opened his mouth to utter a scriptural quotation, but, checked on the verge of it, dropped back into pensiveness. ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... transfer our inward feelings to their outward condition, and with our religious spirit imbue all the ongoings of animated and even inanimated life. There is always a shade of melancholy, a tinge of pensiveness, a touch of pathos, in all profound rest. Perhaps because it is so much in contrast with the turmoil of our ordinary being. Perhaps because the soul, when undisturbed, will, from the impulse of its own divine nature, have high, solemn, and ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... Wordsworth, who seems above all others, except Burns, to have had a catholic ear for the whole multitude of natural sounds, not only refusing the character of melancholy to the nightingale's song, but placing it below the stock-dove's, because it is deficient in the pensiveness and seriousness which mark the note of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... time, he was leaning over the rail at the boat's side, in his pensiveness, unmindful of another pensive figure near—a young gentleman with a swan-neck, wearing a lady-like open shirt collar, thrown back, and tied with a black ribbon. From a square, tableted-broach, curiously engraved with Greek characters, he seemed a collegian—not improbably, a sophomore—on ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... of her happy pensiveness by that smooth and now unutterably sinister voice, she turned to ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... purpose of hunting, but was observed to ride all the morning with great pensiveness, and in deep thoughts, without any delight in the exercise he was upon, and before the morning was spent, left the field, and alighted at his mother's lodgings at Whitehall, with whom he was shut up for the space of two or three hours, the noise of their discourse ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... game of shine and shadow in among the trees of the gum forest; the aromatic exhalations from the trees give the evening air a hint of balm and spice; the people driving or riding grow a little pensive, for the spell of the Australian forest, "tender, intimate, spiritual," is upon them. But it is a pensiveness of pure, quiet joy, of those who have come near to Nature and enjoyed the peace ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... mind I was joined by Flora. She laid her hand on my arm, and we walked up and down together. She was serious, almost sad, and she viewed the English hills with a pensiveness which became ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... back and looked at him, and sighed, and sighed, and looked at him till bedtime, shaking her head sadly when he demanded the reason for her pensiveness, he wished he had made her stay at home. He decided that Zeburee Nute had probably been busy with his tongue as to that boyish display of temper ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... seemed to belong to some other world then; her whole soul seemed to shine in that sweet face. This was how she looked as she gazed upon her son that evening, while he was finishing his supper, seemingly not at all astonished at his mother's silence. He had grown accustomed to these moments of pensiveness on his mother's part. Of late, she often fell into a strange reverie, and little Frank was yet too young to understand these symptoms always followed by a short, hollow cough. His mother ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... heart than in this verse. It is a poem of beauty and sorrow that cannot be symbolized by such public figures as Cromwell and Milton. Here the genius of the parting day, and all that it means to the imagination, its quiet movement and its music, its pensiveness and its regrets, have been given a form more lasting than bronze. Perhaps the poem owes a part of its popularity to the fact that it is a great homily, though a homily transfigured. But then does not ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... wonder what they imagine feudalism to be?) 'Down with the Goths and Paralytics.' I suppose the Senores Gamacho and Fuentes knew what they were doing. They are prudent gentlemen. In the Assembly they called themselves Moderates, and opposed every energetic measure with philanthropic pensiveness. At the first rumours of Montero's victory, they showed a subtle change of the pensive temper, and began to defy poor Don Juste Lopez in his Presidential tribune with an effrontery to which the poor man could ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... poultry fed, the butter churned, and the pudding safe in the pot, and her mind was at ease for a good hour to come, so she sat quiet and peaceful. Lucy, too, was at peace. Her eye was clear; and her color coming back; she was not bursting with happiness, for there was a sweet pensiveness mixed with her sweet tranquillity; but she looked every now and then smiling from her work up at Mrs. Wilson, and the dame kept looking at her with a motherly joy caused by her bare presence on that hearth. Lucy basked in these maternal glances. At ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... cheerful sweetness of her disposition, there was an unusual pensiveness, a tender care for others, which was most endearing, and often touching to witness. One day, perceiving her mother much affected on receiving intelligence of the decease of a valued friend and minister at a distance ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... few minutes in the neighbourhood of her chair, thoughtfully observant of the delicate profile, the pale clear tints of a complexion that had lost its bloom but not its purity, the settled sadness of the perfect mouth, the dreamy pensiveness of the dark-grey eye, and then ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... memorable, as it certainly made both life and work beautiful. The pain and suffering which attended the latter part of her life never found its way into her work save through increased sweetness and pensiveness. No shadow of death fell upon her pages. To the last the soul ruled the body to its will. Phenomenon Pauline Johnson was, though to call her a genius would be to place her among the immortals, and no one was more conscious of her limitations than herself. Therefore, ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... say about his departure. He never spoiled a thing like this with "Good-bye." Back at Waterman's, Kemp was packing trunks. In forty-eight hours there would be the folding of tents, and Hamilton Hill would be deserted. It added a pensiveness to his manner that made him more than ever charming. It rained on the way home, and it seemed to him significant that his first ride and his last with Becky should have been in ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... with the bright glow of noon, at certain points; in other places, there is a shadow as deep as the glow; but along the greater portion sunshine glimmers through shadow, and shadow effaces sunshine, imaging that pleasant mood of mind when gayety and pensiveness intermingle. A bird is chirping overhead among the branches, but exactly whereabout you seek in vain to determine; indeed, you hear the rustle of the leaves, as he continually changes his position. A little sparrow, however, hops into view, alighting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... there was in the two ladies with whom she was now associated for the time much more to interest and to please. The manners of each were of the highest tone; the person of each was highly pleasing; and when Laura turned to the Lady Helen, and marked the gentle pensiveness of her beautiful countenance, listened to the high, pure, noble words that hung upon her lips, and marked the deep feelings which existed beneath an exterior that people sometimes thought cold, the remembrance ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... by them! I will relate to you, before we separate, one among the multitude of mine, as coming the nearest to the poetry of yours, and as having been not totally useless to me. Often have I reflected on it; sometimes with pensiveness, with sadness never. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... the chief of those Elysian matrons who come crowding, in the poem of Claudian, to the marriage toilet of Proserpine, the goddess of the fertility of the earth and of all creatures, but still of fertility as arisen out of death;* and therefore she is not without a certain pensiveness, having seen the seed fall into the ground and die, many times. Persephone is returned to her, and the hair [148] spreads, like a rich harvest, over her shoulders; but she is still veiled, and knows that the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... hearty applause of the little boy, and this fact appeared to have a depressing influence upon Uncle Remus. As he leaned slightly forward, gazing into the depths of the great fireplace, his attitude was one of pensiveness. ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... ugly, old, fat, jolly Bacchus, astride on a barrel, by Rubens; the most natural and lifelike representation of a tipsy rotundity of flesh that it is possible to imagine. And sometimes, amid these sensual images, I caught the divine pensiveness of a Madonna's face, by Raphael, or the glory and majesty of the babe Jesus in her arm, with his Father shining through him. This is a sort of ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The Greeks have not, it appears, in any supreme way, given to their statues character, beauty, or divine strength. Can they give divine sadness? Shall we find in their art-work any of that pensiveness and yearning for the dead which fills the chants of their tragedy? I suppose, if anything like nearness or firmness of faith in after-life is to be found in Greek legend, you might look for it in the stories about the Island of Leuce, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... found in Bacon's wisest maxims, and from his point of view in their composition we could not expect to find them there. We seek in vain amid the positivity of Bacon, or the quaint and timorous paradox of Browne, or the acute sobriety of Shaftesbury, for any of that poetic pensiveness which is strong in Vauvenargues, and reaches tragic heights in Pascal.[30] Addison may have the delicacy of Vauvenargues, but it is a delicacy that wants the stir and warmth of feeling. It seems as if with English writers poetic sentiment ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... the end of me too.' This thought tranquillised her, and enabled her to seem indifferent. Besides no one troubled her much; Anna Vassilyevna was taken up with her swollen face; Shubin was working furiously; Zoya was given up to pensiveness, and disposed to read Werther; Nikolai Artemyevitch was much displeased at the frequent visits of 'the scholar,' especially as his 'cherished projects' in regard to Kurnatovsky were making no way; the practical chief secretary was puzzled and ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... Victorine, he was enchanted with the growing and still budding beauty of Lisette, who was certainly, in outward appearance, the loveliest of the family; then Caliste, too, with her long dark eyelashes, and her look of proud pensiveness, was very charming. In short, the worthy man looked first on one fair girl and then on another in high delight, and concluded by heartily embracing the little Mimi playfully, scolding her for pushing by him so hastily, and then, in the same breath, declaring ...
— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin
... a cast of pensive thought on her forehead, that spoke of a longer experience of grief than so brief a portion of life might be supposed to have furnished. She had once lovers; but they had gradually dropped away in the despair of moving her, and awed by a deep and settled pensiveness which, in the gayest season of youth, her character had suddenly but permanently assumed. Besides, they all knew her affections were already engaged, and had come to learn, though late and unwillingly, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... touched with sadness at the thought, "Sakuntala must go to-day"; my throat is choked with flow of tears repressed; my sight is dimmed with pensiveness but if the grief of an old forest hermit is so great, how keen must be the pang a father feels when freshly parted ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... with a half-sigh, seating herself upon a fallen stone, and letting her hands fall into each other in her lap as her wont was, "you write them." A curious pensiveness passed from one to the ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... a breeze; so that a gleam of flickering sunshine might now and then be seen at its solitary play along the path. This flitting cheerfulness was always at the farther extremity of some long vista through the forest. The sportive sunlight—feebly sportive, at best, in the predominant pensiveness of the day and scene—withdrew itself as they came nigh, and left the spots where it had danced the drearier, because they had hoped to find ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... And Lillie, with lingering pensiveness, very graciously acknowledged that it would; and seemed so touchingly resigned, and made such a merit of her resignation, that John told her she was an angel; in fact, he had a sort of indistinct remorseful feeling that he was a sort of cruel monster ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... too, was longing in her own way for the season to be over. She had gone through another of them, thank goodness, she said to herself at times with a rare tinge of pensiveness, only to discover that the Hughs, and the Guys, and the Algies, and the Montys were just as fatuously inane as ever; and were just as anxious as before to make her share their fatuous inanity for a whole lifetime. Only fancy living with an unadulterated Monty from the time ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... were ever so successful in imparting to others their own enjoyment of books and people. The tragic circumstance which strengthened and consecrated their natural community of interest had, one might think, something to do with the far-reaching pensiveness even of their most humorous writing, touching often the deepest springs of pity and awe, as the way of the highest humour is—a way, however, very different from that of the humorists of the eighteenth century. But one cannot forget also that Lamb was ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... and sweet"—with just a possibility in it of rising to a shrillish key. A sincere and faithful man, who had walked very demurely through life, though with a touch of sudden, bright, quiet humour and fancy, every now and then crossing the grey of his characteristic pensiveness or melancholy, and drawing effect from it. He was most frank and genial with me, and I greatly honour his ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... parents know it in their hearts, or by which, if it dies, God seems to have called it away, leaving the sound lingering faintly and sweetly through the house. In Pansie's case, it may have been a certain pensiveness which was sometimes seen under her childish frolic, and so translated itself into French (pensee), her mother having been of Acadian kin; or, quite as probably, it alluded merely to the color of her eyes, which, in some lights, were very like the dark petals of a tuft of pansies ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... afterwards, during the days of the French Directory. Had the Alchemist remained profoundly ignorant as to the identity of the old man, he must still have observed with interest, features which were equally characterised by the pensiveness of the student and the paleness of the valetudinarian. He knew, however, instinctively, as he had done upon the two preceding occasions, that he beheld a personage of illustrious memory. And he knew rightly, for it was Milton. While the great plague was desolating the metropolis, he had escaped ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... delicate as a young girl's; and indeed she was but twenty years older than myself, thus at this date only thirty-four. But while she talked to Mr. Floyd I observed a change in her: her eyes had lost their pensiveness and calm, and fell before his shyly: the flushes came and went on her cheeks. He told her again and again that in meeting her he found the first realization that he had come back to his home: old Mr. Raymond ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... the almost noiseless motion of the boat, the livid shades surrounding the place, all contributed to the mood of pensiveness and meditation which was rapidly stealing upon them. The very silence of the cove was infectious. Marjorie felt it almost immediately, ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... Appeared, she rose and sat in loneliness, Her face grew still more beautiful. Her state Astonished her. "Perhaps it is the King Who hath this wonder wrought. How happy I To be no longer dead!" She washed her face And felt still sad, but with her pensiveness A certain joy was mingled, for her pain Was passed. Her grief the "talking bird" allayed With songs about the ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... recollection? And yet, why torment myself thus? She loves me—that I cannot doubt; and surely her approaching change of condition, and the separation from her father which it must sooner or later entail, are sufficient to account for an occasional pensiveness on the part of a young and susceptible girl. In vain do I seek for any other probable cause of her melancholy. At times I fancy that she has some disclosure or confession to make to me, which she has difficulty ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... noticed his confusion she did not appear to do so. Her heart had been touched by all she had heard from her son of the lonely boy, and she had also been interested in accounts of his gifts that had come to her from various sources. The beauty, the poetry, the pensiveness of his face moved her deeply—knowing his history and divining the lack of sympathy one of his bent would probably find in the Allan ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... doubt many a time the Merry Monarch had doffed his plumed hat in salutation, paled and grew dim before the living rose of Maryllia's dainty loveliness and the magnetic tenderness of Maryllia's eyes. Something of the exquisite pensiveness of her mother's countenance, as portrayed in the long hidden picture which was now one of the gems of the Manor gallery, seemed to soften the outline of her features, and deepen the character and play of the varying expression which made her so fascinating ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... nostrils seemed formed to give expression and escape to scornful anger. His eyebrows were rayed and finely arched. His dark-blue eyes, which were deeply set, had an expression of resignation, and an earnestness that was almost pensiveness. His forehead was sometimes marked with thought, but never with inquietude; his countenance was mild and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... mother. She has since married —— Hemans, Esq., then an Adjutant in the army. A great number of her pieces have appeared in the Monthly Magazine, as well as the New Monthly, and although a pleasing pensiveness and sombre cast of mind seem to pervade her beautifully mental pictures, she was, I may say, noted in her youth for the buoyancy and sprightliness of her conversation and manner, which made her the delight and charm of every society with which she mixed. She likewise ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... commissary being in extreme pensiveness, knew no other remedy but this extraordinary, and caused a figure to be made by one expert in astronomy—and his judjment doth continually persist upon this, that he fled in a tawny coat south-eastward, and is in the middle of London, and will shortly to the sea ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... brightened wonderfully, and Emily, imagining her a female Gilbert, was devoted to her, and thought her a marvel of learning, depth, goodness, and humility, the more striking for her tinge of grave pensiveness. ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Some of thy pensiveness serene, Some of thy never-dying green, Put in this scrip of mine, That griefs may fall like snowflakes light, And deck me in a robe of white, Ready to be an angel bright, O ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... with sad pensiveness, "offer you the hospitality of my own home, gentlemen—you remember, Prosper, dear, the large salon and our staff of servants at Lexington Avenue!—but since my son has persuaded me to take charge of ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... can hardly think it necessary to point out to the reader the association between sacred cheerfulness and solemn thought, or to explain any appearance of contradiction between passages in which (as above in Chap. V.) I have had to oppose sacred pensiveness to unholy mirth, and those in which I have to oppose sacred cheerfulness ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... occasional impression, I find gradually dispelling the pleasing pensiveness which the melancholy event, the subject of my last, had diffused over my mind. Naturally cheerful, volatile, and unreflecting, the opposite disposition I have found to contain sources of enjoyment which I ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... miniatures. None of these will ever rekindle a smile on her face; and there, beyond, is her music, which only of all that she possesses, will now become dearer to her than ever; but not, as once, to feed a self-mocked pensiveness, or to cheat a half-visionary sadness. She will be sad indeed. But she is one of those that will suffer in silence. Nobody will ever detect her failing in any point of duty, or querulously seeking ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... a kiss or two, confess, What doth cause this pensiveness, Thou most lovely neat-herdess? Why so lonely on the hill? Why thy pipe by thee so still, That erewhile was heard so shrill? Tell me, do thy kine now fail To full fill the milking-pail? Say, what ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... head, her eyes were dimmed with the shade of pensiveness; a thrill of jealousy, in spite of herself, darted to her heart. 'What! and didst thou not fear to go to him?' she said—'Is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... reminiscences of Shakspere; but their genius was not allied to his, being exclusively lyrical, and not at all dramatic. The Muse of this romantic school was Fancy rather than Passion. A thoughtful melancholy, a gentle, scholarly pensiveness, the spirit of Milton's Il Penseroso, pervades their poetry. Gray was a fastidious scholar, who produced very little, but that little of the finest quality. His famous Elegy, expressing a meditative mood in language of the choicest perfection, is the representative poem of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... evening meal at Mrs. Arty's, dining with literary pensiveness at the Armenian, for he had subtle problems to meditate. He bought a dollar fountain-pen, which had large gold-like bands and a rather scratchy pen-point, and a box of fairly large sheets of paper. Pressing his literary impedimenta tenderly ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... myself to be the cause of their pensiveness, and I should have expected it to be quite otherwise when I found them ...
— Psyche • Moliere
... his bedroom door to usher out three men and admit others, saw his young lieutenants. He called them to him. He was straighter. He was stern. Fires within had given his eyes the flash of youth. All his usual gentle pensiveness was gone. ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... drawing their bows so masterly—every motion a study. I allow'd myself, as I sometimes do, to wander out of myself. The conceit came to me of a copious grove of singing birds, and in their midst a simple harmonic duo, two human souls, steadily asserting their own pensiveness, joyousness. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... in his fixed gaze I fancied I detected something more than curiosity—something of the lingering pensiveness with which, years ago, he had turned back to look at John—as if the lad reminded him of some one he knew. "Sir, ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... "The utmost pensiveness which can ordinarily be given to a landscape depends on adjuncts of ruin, but no ruin was ever so affecting as the gliding of this ship to her grave. This particular ship, crowned in the Trafalgar hour of trial with chief ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... the day began to realise that she was growing old. Then a certain pensiveness fell over her beauty which dimmed yet intensified it; sharp angles, glittering points, melted away into curves and enticing gleams. The white harbor put on soft grays and pinks; the ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... with a shade of pensiveness. There had been two sides to the watermelon question. Peter and he had not always been able to find ripe watermelons, early in the season, and at times there had been painful consequences, the memory of which came back to the colonel with ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... and our good friend, Mr. Desmond, to whom we had taken a great liking, was about to sail for an indefinite absence in foreign lands. Though the mother-in-law's presence was less oppressive than formerly, there was now a pensiveness, an air of departed glory about it, that was not cheerful. There was danger of settling down to a humdrum sort of life, free from strife, perhaps, but at the same time devoid of that buoyancy which should make the home of a young ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... therefore, that there was truth in Sir John's observation that young men wanted to protect her. But the bald statement is not sufficient. Whether that quick transition from pensiveness to a dancing gaiety was the cause, or whether it only helped her beauty, this is certain. Young men went down before her like ninepins in a bowling alley. There was something singularly virginal about her. She had, too, quite naturally, an affectionate ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... his pensiveness. There was no denying the fact that he was an important personage in Tinkletown, and to the residents of Tinkletown that meant a great deal, for was not their village a perpetual monument to the American Revolution? Even the most generalising of historians were compelled to devote at least ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... velvet doublet—deeming the occasion worthy of it—whilst Andrea wore a handsome suit of black, with gold lace, which for elegance it would have been difficult to surpass. An air of pensiveness added interest to his handsome face and courtly figure, and methought that Genevieve must be hard to please if she fell not a victim ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... nostrils. There was no unsteadiness in the eyes, so common to the Persians of the north-west,—and these fellows consequently presented quite an honest appearance, while the overhanging brow added a look of pensiveness. The skull was peculiarly formed, slanting upwards considerably from the forehead to an abnormal height, and giving the cranium an elongated shape. The ears, too, generally malformed or under-developed in most Persians, were better shaped in these people, although by no means perfect. ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Lincoln, seized Dalaber and put him in the stocks, but was too late for Garret, who had made off into Dorsetshire. He took counsel with the Warden of New College and with the Dean of Wolsey's new foundation, Cardinal College; and at length, as they could find out nothing, being 'in extreme pensiveness', they determined to consult an astrologer. They knew they were doing wrong. Such inquiries were forbidden by the law of the Church, and they were afraid; but they were more afraid of Wolsey. The man of science drew a figure upon ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... dull pensiveness Bewray itself in my long-settled eyes, Whence those same fumes of melancholy rise, With idle pains, and missing aim, do guess. Some, that know how my spring I did address, Deem that my Muse some fruit of knowledge plies; Others, because the Prince my service tries, Think, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... started homeward by way of Great Ormond Street. My companion was deeply thoughtful, relapsing for a while into that sombreness of manner that had so impressed me when I first met her. Nor was I without a certain sympathetic pensiveness; as if, from the great, silent house, the spirit of the vanished man had issued forth ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... time, in a state of tranquil pensiveness, which is not unpleasing. St. Aubert interrupted it by observing, 'This is a very promising young man; it is many years since I have been so much pleased with any person, on so short an acquaintance. He brings back to my memory the days of my youth, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... "There is a pensiveness in his aspect, which would induce any one to imagine Sir Edward to be a man of feeling; but those who have depended upon outward appearances alone, have found themselves miserably deceived; for as hypocrisy assumes a look ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... and the Thoughtful aspects of Nature are their subjects: but each is preceded by a mythological introduction in a mixed Classical and Italian manner. The meaning of the first is that Gaiety is the child of Nature; of the second, that Pensiveness is the ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... had always been a quiet, thoughtful boy; and even when the first gush of his agony was over, there remained upon him a gentle, grave pensiveness which it appeared as ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... walked as delicately as if she had been bred in town, and as firmly as if she had been bred in the country; she seemed one who dimly knew her appearance to be attractive, but who retained some of the charm of being ignorant of that fact by forgetting it in a general pensiveness. She approached the gate. To let such a creature touch it even with a tip of her glove was to Fitzpiers almost like letting her proceed to tragical self-destruction. He jumped up and looked for his hat, but was unable to find the right one; glancing again out of the window he ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... Peter, and sat down nearer. But the disciples were silent and unusually pensive. Images of the road they had traversed, of the sun, the rocks and the grass, of Christ lying down under the shelter, quietly floated through their heads, breathing a soft pensiveness, begetting confused but sweet reveries of an eternal movement under the sun. The wearied body reposed sweetly, and thought was merged in something mystically great and beautiful—and ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... was pale and serious, evidently feeling much, though seeking no tete-a-tetes; and chiefly engrossed with waiting on Margaret, or fondling little Gertrude. No one saw the inside of her mind—probably, she did not herself. On the outside was a very suitable pensiveness, and affection for all that she was leaving. The only one in the family to whom she talked much was Norman, who continued to see many perfections in George, and contrived, by the force of his belief, to impress the same on the ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... how long Mr. Hoopdriver's pensiveness lasted. It seemed a long time before his thoughts of action returned. Then he remembered he was a 'watcher'; that to-morrow he must be busy. It would be in character to make notes, and he pulled out his little note-book. With that in hand he fell a-thinking ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... the meditative character of that of Charles the First, whom the Chevalier was popularly said to resemble: neither had it the sweetness which is expressed by every feature of that unhappy Monarch, nor had his countenance the pensiveness which wins upon the beholder who gazes upon the portraits of Charles. The eyes of the Chevalier were light-hazel, his face was pale and long, and in the fullness of the lips he resembled his mother, Mary of Modena. To this physiognomy, on which it is said a smile was rarely seen ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... The expression of pensiveness deepened, increased by a sudden, disturbing thought. Would she tell him about Bakersfield and the horrible life ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... all gay and happy in the house again, running out as we pleased, beginning to think of parties and drives and theatres and all enjoyment—and rather unobservant, as young folks are apt to be unobservant of Aunt Pen's slight habitual pensiveness in the absence of guests or excitement, and of her ways generally—than Aunt Pen would challenge some lobster-salad to mortal combat, and, of course, come out floored by the colic. A little whiskey then; and as a ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... fascination of her face. The face was not perfect; far from it, if by perfect is meant features accordant with one another and true to type. Her hair was flaming red; her eyes were brown, dark brown, a certain pensiveness in them most inaccordant with the hair; her nose was slender, with sensitive nostrils; her mouth was generous with lips a trifle full; her teeth were exquisitely white and symmetrical—and she showed them with due modesty, yet with proper ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... of the flowing sea, Heard never but at eve, when shifts and gleams On waves afar the light of joy still ours, Because remembered still, thy voice o'erpowers My soul with pensiveness, sweet reverie And memory ...
— Across the Sea and Other Poems. • Thomas S. Chard
... shapeless asceticism, who is so excessively penetrated with the reality, the duties, the claims, and the constant hazards of civilisation, as to find in himself no chord responsive to that sombre pensiveness into which Obermann's unfathomable melancholy and impotence of will deepened, as he meditated on the mean shadows which men are content to chase for happiness, and on all the pigmy progeny of giant effort? 'C'est ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... Gregory says of Chatterton, "Instead of the thoughtless levity of childhood, he possessed the pensiveness, gravity, and melancholy of maturer life. He was frequently so lost in contemplation, that for many days together he would say but very little, and that apparently by constraint. His intimates in the school were few, and those ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... as true to the Beautiful, with a soul as sensitive to the Sublime! In Evelyn's presence I feel a sense of peace, of security, of home! Happy! thrice happy! he who will take her to his breast! Of late she has assumed a new charm in my eyes,—a certain pensiveness and abstraction have succeeded to her wonted gayety. Ah, Love is pensive,—is it not, Cleveland? How often I ask myself that question! And yet, amidst all my hopes, there are hours when I tremble and despond! How can that innocent ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... looked out above and below. It amused Flint, as he sat there alone, to fancy these polemical gentlemen issuing from their bindings and sitting down together around his evening lamp, to talk things over. "Probably," he mused, with that idle pensiveness which is the lazy man's apology to himself for not thinking, "the thing which would surprise them most would be to see how much they held in common. If they could get rid of the cant of theology and the jargon of metaphysics, they would find that they were not so far apart after all. ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... great boys enhancing her soft youthfulness. The smile was certainly changed; it was graver, sadder, tenderer, and only conjured up by maternal affection or in grateful reply, and the blitheness of the young brow had changed to quiet pensiveness, but more than ever there was an air of dependence almost beseeching protection, and Rachel's heart throbbed with Britomart's devotion ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a long time. At last a wan smile stole to her lips, but it did not reach her eyes. They remained absorbed and searching, and were made painfully sad by the wide, dark lines under them. Her fair skin was fairer than ever, but it was delicately faded, giving her a look of pensiveness, while yet there was that in her carriage and at her mouth which suggested strength and will and new forces at work in her. She carried her head, weighted by its splendour of golden hair, as an Eastern woman carries a goulah of water. There was something pathetic yet ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "Beautiful, isn't it!" and then went slowly towards Tollington Park. Would he follow? She was almost breathless, her eyes downcast, her ears strained. He did not follow. Sally frowned. A sneer came to her lips. Then a pensiveness succeeded, and resolve became fixed. All right; he did not follow. He was a man. All the more ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... nature than his fiery cousin would have allowed to be love. It took a good deal of working-up to make it outwardly affect his spirits or demeanour, in general, it served only as an ingredient in the pensiveness that pervaded all his moods, even ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... all this, when suddenly a beautiful female looked down upon him from a window, and cried, in sweet amazement: "Holy Catherine! what a noble head! what soft and angelic pensiveness in the eyes! what a sweet and lovely physiognomy!" These melodious words sunk into the heart of Faustus. He looked up to the window: her eyes met his for a moment ere she drew herself back. Faustus whispered ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... than usual; its upper lip was drawn away from the teeth and deeply wrinkled; the eyes, half-closed, were very soft; they looked as though there was a veil across their pensiveness. He caught Dickie's elbow in his hand, twisted him about, thrusting a knee into his back, and with his other long, bony hand he struck him brutally across the face. The emerald on his finger caught the light of the rising sun and flashed like a little ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... aged soul, and pure adoration went up to the Giver of every good from its altar. He lifted his gaze to the cerulean blue above him, and dwelt upon his future, with a glow of hope upon his heart—then he turned to the past, and his beaming expression gradually mellowed into pensiveness: in thought, he travelled through the long vista of years which he had left behind him, and his ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... envelop and take in it, as it were, the whole inventory of Miss Jemima's personal attractions. Now, Miss Jemima, as I have before observed, had a mild and pensive expression of countenance, and she would have been positively pretty had the mildness looked a little more alert, and the pensiveness somewhat less lackadaisical. In fact, though Miss Jemima was constitutionally mild, she was not de natura pensive; she had too much of the Hazeldean blood in her veins for that sullen and viscid humor called melancholy, and therefore ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... jest the same thing," reflected Captain Leezur aloud, with a pensiveness that still had nothing of unavailing regret in it, "ef I'd been a mind tew; and had a monniment put up over me like one o' these here No. 10 Mornin' Glory ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... repeated their friendliness in her eyes, the grass dimpled her pliant feet, the breeze tossed her brown hair in triumphs of the unstudied becoming, and from the wildness all about her she had her wit and her delightful ways; Morning lent her her cheerfulness, Evening her pensiveness, and Night her soul. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... autumn a pensiveness falls upon us, as the leaves drift by in their fading, may we not wisely look up in hope to their mighty monuments? Behold how fair, how far prolonged in arch and aisle, the avenues of the valleys, the fringes of the hills! so stately,—so ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... was gentle,' writes one of his earliest and closest school-friends, 'retiring, thoughtful to pensiveness, affectionate, without envy or jealousy, almost without emulation, impressible, but not wanting in moral firmness. No one was ever more formed for friendship. In all his words and acts he was simple, straightforward, true. He was ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... the enslaved! Could she add that to the poetry of her nature, how much greater would be her charm-how much more fascinating that quiet current of thought with which she seems blessed! There is a gentleness in her impulses—a pensiveness in her smile—a softness in her emotions—a grace in her movements—an ardent soul in her love! She is gay and lightsome in her youth; she values her beauty, is capricious with her admirers, and yet becomes the ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... moping Pensiveness; With Meagre, discontented Looks they sit, And watch the wasting ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... Lady Blanchemain, reconciling herself. Then, after an instant of pensiveness, "So you're already laid low by her beauty. But you haven't found ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... boy of his age, the pensiveness and composure of that expression were indeed almost unnatural, and they combined with a calm firmness and immobility of feature, which promised, I know not what of resolution and tenacity of purpose. It was not gravity, much less sternness, or sadness, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various |
