"Foreboding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there was borne such a rumour as men are not often permitted to make or to hear. It could scarcely be called a noise; it was rather a terrible and confusing presence translated into sound. So enormous was it, and so distant, that it enfolded us like a foreboding of disaster. It was as though one were listening to the cheering of innumerable myriads on another planet. There was neither cessation to it nor paroxysm, neither surging up nor dying away. It was a continuous and prodigious drone. And the wonder of ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... harmless as doves," replied Catharine, with a languid smile, as she dropped her head upon her breast and surrendered herself to her painful and foreboding reflections. ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... later could not have been. If 1921 could have been fully foreseen in 1912 it might have appeared to many Covenanters as the disappointment of a cherished ideal. But those who lived to listen to the King's Speech in the City Hall realised that it was the dissipation of foreboding. However regarded, it was, as King George himself pronounced, "a profoundly ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... There was no foreboding in his voice; no second meaning in the words. He was open and simple and practical, ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... which they objected. Thus they were alarmed at the turbulence and the lawless shortcomings of various kinds which grew out of the conditions of frontier settlement and sparse population. They looked with anxious foreboding to the time when the turbulent and lawless people would be very numerous, and would form a dense and powerful population; failing to see that in exact proportion as the population became dense, the conditions which caused the qualities to which they objected would disappear. Even the men who ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... observation. As bottles came to stand on the table in greater numbers, the closer and the more solemnly did Billy continue to follow the movements of Mrs. Diggs. They would without doubt have noticed him and his foreboding gravity but for Mr. Diggs's experiences ...
— Philosophy 4 - A Story of Harvard University • Owen Wister
... beat wildly. He spoke in a reserved, haughty tone, and she felt a foreboding that some unpleasant explanation was at hand. She felt more—that perhaps she ought not to become his wife with this cloud hanging over them. She nerved herself to say what she deemed she ought ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... night, I was called up on deck by the cry of a sail in sight, which, you know, is the great event at sea. It passed at some distance, though near enough for us to see it distinctly; but it was a clouded sky, and the waves, dark and foreboding, left such a dreary space of water between it and us, and the poor ship looked so forlorn and helpless, tumbling about on the great loose waves, that all my old fear came back. I thought perhaps there were those ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... writings of Luther we often find passages foreboding a future corruption of the doctrine of justification, concerning which he declared in the Smalcald Articles: "Of this article nothing can be yielded or surrendered, even though heaven and earth, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... have stripped the thorn, And clogged with leaves the forest-creek; Now that the woods look blown and bleak, And webs are frosty white at morn; At night beneath the spectral sky, A far foreboding cry I hear— The wild fowl calling as they fly? Or wild ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... Giraumont and Gawtrey, who appeared talking together, very amicably. The younger novice of that night, equally silent, seated towards the bottom of the table, was not less watchful than Birnie. An uneasy, undefinable foreboding had come over him since the entrance of Monsieur Giraumont; this had been increased by the manner of Mr. Gawtrey. His faculty of observation, which was very acute, had detected something false ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... posts; so he and his fellow-Poles protected themselves and their correspondence by various precautions, fictitious names, confidential messengers. "Bieda"—misfortune—was the pseudonym by which Kosciuszko, his heart heavy with foreboding for his country and grief at her loss, signed himself, and wished to be known, as he set out for a foreign land. Cracow lay in the route that as a fugitive from the Austrian Government he was obliged to choose. He tarried a few days in the beautiful ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... its past lives; but this memory then ceases to be painful or dangerous, for the soul has not only exhausted the greater part of its karma of suffering, it also possesses the strength necessary to sustain its personality, whenever a foreboding of what we ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... government arising on the other side in the Belgian provinces: and though they were at first kept apart from Spain, yet it did not escape the Queen that this would not last for ever: she seems to have had a foreboding that these countries would become the battleground of a later age. However this might be, the antagonism of principle between the Catholic Netherlands (which were still ruled by the Austro-Spanish House) and the Protestant Netherlands (in which the Republic maintained ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... on this foreboding because you imagine it is tragical. There is nothing tragical in death, Tydomin, nor in life. There is only right and wrong. What arises from right or wrong action does not matter. We are not gods, constructing a world, but simple men and women, doing our immediate duty. ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... and Willa sat through it with the food untouched before her. Wiley's insinuations against Kearn Thode she had dismissed utterly from her thoughts, but his renewed taunt of the morning filled her in spite of herself with dread foreboding. Could fate have indeed been playing with her after all, and was it possible that Wiley held within his hands the strings of ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... not occur to him that Quiroz would reject his plea for aid, he was filled with foreboding. He had a premonition that made him uneasy, although there seemed nothing at which to ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... an adjuration that you, at the same time, see that they care for me properly at Hanwell Asylum ... the best by all accounts: yet I feel so sure of you, so safe and confident in you! If any of it had been my work, my own ... distrust and foreboding had pursued me from the beginning; but all is yours—you crust me round with gold and jewelry like the wood of a sceptre; and why should you transfer your own work? Wood enough to choose from in ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... in a twinkling there flashed into her mind the words Margaret had so lightly spoken over the tea-cup. "I see a big black cloud, and it entirely surrounds you." Why did those words come to her now? she asked herself, and why should she have that strange foreboding of impending trouble? So strong was this impression that she was inclined to hurry after Jasper and give him warning. She did nothing of the kind, however, but during the remainder of the evening she was quieter than usual and took little part in ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... or that if she named, to others, would have seemed a reasonable desire. And yet at her heart there was a certain dim, indistinct foreboding of evil, which she could not entirely repress. Was it that, in his glance, as he rode by and beheld her awaiting him, there was less of longing love than of gratified pride? Or did that flush upon his bronzed face indicate too surely his ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... coffee shakes the nerves, Bouvard wished to give up his half cup; but he used to fall asleep after his meals, and was afraid when he woke up, for prolonged sleep is a foreboding of apoplexy. ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... imaginations stretch readily to the extreme view that the Grain Growers are a menace. Such are filled with foreboding. They see the country merchant out of business and the whole business ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... interest of science, habitually forbade himself the luxury of anything like foreboding, but now, with the passing of the madman, he felt distinctively a lift from his spirit. He no longer experienced the vague dread which had followed him towards Possana, and made him glad of any delay ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... unhappy. The uneasiness first stirred by her aunt's questions grew and grew till at the end of ten days that she had not seen Lydgate, it grew into terror at the blank that might possibly come—into foreboding of that ready, fatal sponge which so cheaply wipes out the hopes of mortals. The world would have a new dreariness for her, as a wilderness that a magician's spells had turned for a little while into a garden. She felt that she was beginning ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... threshold to the Hotel Richelieu; I was no sooner gone from the one than I found myself at the other. Now, as on a memorable evening when I had crossed the street in a drizzling rain, and looked that way with foreboding, there were two or three guards, in the Cardinal's livery, loitering in front of the great gates. Coming nearer, I found the opposite pavement under the Louvre thronged with people, not moving about ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... which had passed between them when the advertisement had been discovered in the newspaper. She passionately declared that the vagabond Armadale of that advertisement, and the vagabond Midwinter at the village inn, might, for all she know to the contrary, be one and the same. Foreboding a serious disagreement between the mother and son if the mother interfered, Mr. Brock undertook to see Midwinter again, and to tell him plainly that he must give a proper account of himself, or that his intimacy with Allan must cease. The two concessions which he exacted from Mrs. Armadale ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... uses an ancient ecclesiastical style, the Plagal, a mode that obtained centuries before Palestrina. Harsh and strident, inharmonious, are the tones, which in the opening Adagio typify the dread, the foreboding and dismay, that can be supposed to have been felt by the Son of God when the time came to give up a beatific state and enter on the actualities of earthly existence. The sin of the world is already being borne in anticipation. ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... want. And all the points of the horizon will be ablaze, and the stars and stellar groups will be destitute of brilliancy, and the planets and planetary conjunctions will be inauspicious. And the course of the winds will be confused and agitated, and innumerable meteors will flash through the sky, foreboding evil. And the Sun will appear with six others of the same kind. And all around there will be din and uproar, and everywhere there will be conflagrations. And the Sun, from the hour of his rising to that of setting, will be enveloped by Rahu. And the deity of a thousand ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... afraid thou'rt an infidel, Belford—Why then shall I not know if my beloved offers to go out in my absence?—And shall I not see whether she receives me with tenderness at my return? But this is not all: I have a foreboding that something affecting will happen while I am out. But of this more ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... lugged him in, and Jeeves put him to bed, and I lit a cigarette and sat down to think the thing over. I had a kind of foreboding. It seemed to me that I had let myself in for ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... joyous sound; and the sight of those theatrical angels, with their shameless, unfinished backs, flying off the top of the rococo facade of the church of the Jesuits, has always been a spectacle to fill me with despondency and foreboding. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... had a foreboding that his death was at hand, and that his fylgiur (attendant spirit) had accosted Hedin, when he saw the woman riding on a wolf. There was a king named Alf, a son of Hrodmar, who had appointed a place ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... from her work after he had gone, and sighed. In spite of the sunshine and balm of the bright weather, a sense of heaviness and foreboding oppressed her. Everything looked smiling and beautiful, and there was an almost irresistible contagion in the mirth of her young cousin, but still she could not help feeling sad. It was not merely that she would have to part with Eric, "but ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... years ago. The starosta had not been near the castle all day. Steinmetz and Paul had never lost sight of the ladies since breakfast time. They had not ventured out of doors. There was in the atmosphere a sense of foreboding—the stillness of a crisis. Etta had been defiant and silent—a dangerous humor—all day. Maggie had watched Paul's face with steadfast, quiet eyes full of courage, but she knew now that there ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... he had been reduced to a nullity, and escaped attention all this time: he sat in gloomy silence, and watched with chilled and foreboding heart the strange turn events had taken, and were taking; events which he, and no other man, had ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... resources, Washington must now bitterly have repented leaving Lee in an independent command. If there was any secret foreboding on his part that Lee would play him false, we do not discover it either in his orders or his correspondence. If there was secret antipathy, Washington showed himself possessed of almost superhuman patience and self-restraint, for certainly if ever man's patience ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... I wondered that they had, for I was a sad affair. Surely it was up to me to be as tolerant as they had been, notwithstanding my new mode of life. So I stopped foreboding and tried to accustom my friends to my company on a strictly water basis. The attempt was not entirely successful. I dropped out of a good many gatherings where formerly I should have been one of the ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... begins as of dull foreboding, with a new figure stalking in the depths and, above, a brief sigh in the wind. In the growing stress these figures sing from opposite quarters, the sobbing phrase below, when suddenly the queenly melody stills the tumult. ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... on the piano, felt no foreboding of evil, and flirted charmingly with him. At first her unconsciousness wounded him, then he took Masha's very unconsciousness as a happy omen, and was rejoiced and reassured by it. She had grown fonder and fonder of him ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... carriage, which brought Miss Milner, stopped at the inn gate, and her name was announced to Dorriforth, he turned pale—something like a foreboding of disaster trembled at his heart, and consequently spread a gloom over all his face. Miss Woodley was even obliged to rouse him from the dejection into which he was cast, or he would have sunk beneath it: she was obliged also ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... behind were completely sobered; a foreboding of evil had become blended with their jesting and laughter, and the house seemed, for a while, as empty as after a great fright. The mother who, from the kitchen door had heard everything, anxiously sought Oyvind's eyes, scarcely able to keep back ...
— A Happy Boy • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... to look after Daniel's interests, to learn what were the legal probabilities in consequence of the old man's arrest, and to arrange for his family accordingly, than standing still and silent in the Haytersbank kitchen, too full of fellow-feeling and heavy foreboding to comfort, awkwardly unsympathetic in appearance from the ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... restraint had the unhappy girl been kept from taking flight. The name of Hubert Eldon once more came up in conversation. There was an unauthenticated rumour that he had been seen of late, lurking about Wanley. The more boldly speculative gossips looked with delicious foreboding to the results of a marriage such as this. Given a young man of Eldon's ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... this month for luxuries of sinful extravagance in her economical eyes! Chicken and asparagus, ducks and peas, even in the height of their season, were enormities to such housekeeping as hers, and had raised the sum total to four times the amount that her foreboding soul had dreaded. It exceeded her present supplies, and was a grave addition to the expenses of the two illnesses, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a new discovery of the joy of living. And yet, my friend and I confessed to each other, there was a tinge of sadness, an inexplicable regret mingled with our joy. Was it the thought of how few human eyes had even seen that lovely vision? Was it the dim foreboding that we might never see it again? Who can explain the secret pathos of Nature's loveliness? It is a touch of melancholy inherited from our mother Eve. It is an unconscious memory of the lost Paradise. It is the sense that even if we should find another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly, ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... battlefield. Hopkins the witch-finder's common sense suggested pricking all over to find an insensible flesh-patch, in which case the prickee was a witch. We prefer to keep an open mind about Lady Gwendolen Rivers' foreboding anent that little bottle of Indian poison, until vivisection has shown us, more plainly than at present, how brain secretes Man's soul. We are aware ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... made!) Through lips moist-warm, as thou hadst lately stayed 'Mong rosebuds, wooing to the cheeks of these Loth blushes faint and maidenly—rich Breeze, Still doth thy honeyed blowing bring a shade Of sad foreboding. In thy hand is laid The power to build or blight rich fruit of trees, The deep, cool grass, and field ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... gloomy, foreboding spirit, of rather aristocratic tastes, as she is only attached to highly respectable old families. She never appears but to announce some great misfortune, or the death of a member of the household. She does this by howling and shrieking in the night; and sometimes, they say, she is seen—a ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... been merely the deplorable state of his nerves, but, as he continued to look out upon that unfamiliar landscape, the beauty of it, in growing on him, became almost intolerable. It affected him with an indescribable uneasiness, a yearning, a foreboding, a terror. He gave a deep sigh and turned his ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... cloud could dim or obscure it. That light, that cheerful star, was the wife of his bosom. The tie that bound her to her husband was not an external one alone; she was wedded to him in spirit. Her affection for him, as sorrow, and doubt, and fearful foreboding of coming evils gathered about him, assumed more and more of the mother's careful and earnest love for the peace of her child. She met him with an ever-cheerful countenance; gently soothed his fears, and constantly referred him to the overruling care of Divine Providence. Affliction had ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... a gloomy or despondent person, but the spirit of the night had entered into him. He had yielded himself, as young men of ardent temperament often do, to the subduing magic of the fall. In his mind, as in the air, there was a soft, clinging mist, and blurred lights of thought, and a still foreboding of change. A sense of the vast tranquil movement of Nature, of her sympathy and of her indifference, sank deeply into his heart. For a time he realised that all things, and he, too, some day, must grow old; and he felt the universal pathos of it more sensitively, ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... that day the bride of Zeus made Jason, both to look upon and to hold converse with. Even his comrades wondered as they gazed upon him, radiant with manifold graces; and the son of Ampycus rejoiced in their journey, already foreboding how all ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... straight young figure at once, and turned back to her brother with a quick pang of foreboding that slightly paled her ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... Victoire's fears: but presently even she began to grow impatient; for they waited long after sunset, expecting every moment that Mad. de Fleury would arrive. At last she appeared, but with a dejected countenance, which seemed to justify Victoire's foreboding. When she saw this festive company, each child sitting between her parents, and all at her entrance looking up with affectionate pleasure, a faint smile enlivened her countenance for a moment; but she did not speak to them with her usual ease. Her ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... disasters and the failure of our offensives in the spring warned the Government of the advisability of at least preparing for other measures, and an Act had been passed for a national registration on 15 August of all males between the ages of 15 and 65. The autumn confirmed the foreboding of spring, and on 5 October Lord Derby undertook on behalf of the Government a recruiting campaign by which those who had not enlisted were induced to do so on the condition that they would not be compelled to serve ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... the bread which was for use on the altar. Meanwhile, David's quick eye had caught a glimpse of a face staring at him through the cracks in the simple forest building. It was Doeg, the Edomite, Saul's savage herdsman, who David felt sure had recognised him. A chill of foreboding crept over David and made him at once demand arms from the peaceful priest. There were none to give except Goliath's sword, which David had taken from the giant when he killed him, and which had been there at Nob, wrapped in a cloth, ever since. With eager ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... followed the slow march of the stars through many a year in the troubled watches of the night, when anxiety and foreboding could make no covenant with sleep, there was, in one sense, little to learn. He knew them all in their several seasons, the time of their rising, when they came to the meridian, and when they were ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... on. It was more of a festival than a banquet, and Harry at last gave himself up entirely to its luxurious warmth. The foreboding that their mellow days in the pleasant little city were over, was gone, but it was destined to come again. Now, after the dinner was finished, and the great table was cleared away, they sat and talked, some in the dining room ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Tiresias;—but the Gods, Who give them vision, Added this law: That they should bear too His groping blindness, His dark foreboding, His scorn'd white hairs; Bear Hera's anger Through a life ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... to take what she called "the tuck out of them." And the boy of all the boys who gave the Hendricks boys most homage was little Johnnie Barclay. There was no dread in his hero-worship. He had no father to go to the war. But the other children and all the women were under a great cloud of foreboding, and for them the time was one of tension and hoping against hope that the war would ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... it a purpose, Alfred will!" the aggrieved boy wailed, as he collected and restored to the battered tin as much of its late contents as might be recovered. While on all fours searching for bits which might have escaped him, and diluting the gravy which yet remained in the tin with salt drops of foreboding, a scorching sensation in the region of the back brought his head round. Then he yelled in earnest, for the roaring flame from the other brazier had set the quickset hedge, inflammable with drought, burning as fiercely as the naphtha torch of a fair-booth, while a black patch, widening every ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... delicious afternoon for a winter's walk. The air was clear and cold, but not actually frosty. The ground beneath their feet was dry, and the sky, though not bright, had that appearance of enduring weather which gives no foreboding of rain. There is a special winter's light, which is very clear though devoid of all brilliancy,—through which every object strikes upon the eye with well-marked lines, and under which almost all forms of nature seem graceful to the sight if not actually beautiful. But there is a certain ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... an army's strength, the armies of the nation, the love of mother, and brothers, and sisters, all seemed nothing for protection to your timid and foreboding thought; and now, when the enemy are all around us,—do you talk of a single girl? Why, the spirit of some strange destiny is struggling with your nature, and speaks within you, but we will not ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon
... there the timorous and the bold 340 Plainly appear; the dastard changes hue And shifts from place to place, nor can he calm The fears that shake his trembling limbs, but sits Low-crouching on his hams, while in his breast Quick palpitates his death-foreboding heart, 345 And his teeth chatter; but the valiant man His posture shifts not; no excessive fears Feels he, but seated once in ambush, deems Time tedious till the bloody fight begin;) Even there, thy courage should no blame incur.[8] 350 For should'st thou, toiling in the fight, by spear ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... tempered as by a foreboding of sunset, when the surface of the lake was ribbed like sea sand with the first breathings of the evening breeze, that Herr Haase, riding proudly in the back seat of honor, brought the motor-car to the hotel. He had changed his garb of ceremony and servitude; ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... of change obscurely chills The misty twilight atmosphere, In which familiar things appear Like alien ghosts, foreboding ills. ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... to us a genius which found utterance in song none the less melodious that it was written, not sung. The 'ashen sky' and 'crisped, sere leaves of the lonesome October,' so thrillingly pictured by Edgar Poe in his 'Ulalume,' find echo in the foreboding sadness of the opening bars to Gottschalk's 'Last Hope;' and as both poems grow in vague, dreamy sound, they culminate in a cry of smothered despair at the tomb where all hopes lie buried with the lost Ulalume. The same weird conception and eccentricity of design, with knowledge ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... tent, and soon beheld an unseemly deed,—these [the Greeks] in confusion, and those, the haughty Trojans, routing them in the rear; but the wall of the Greeks had fallen. And as when the vast deep blackens with the noiseless[454] wave, foreboding with no effect, the rapid courses of the shrill blasts, nor yet is it rolled forwards or backwards, before some decisive blast comes down from Jove: so meditated the old man, distracted in his mind between two ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... solace. It had lost its savour; but he would not take this into account, and he slaved away mechanically, by perpetual toil seeking to deaden his anguish. But as the time passed he was seized on a sudden with a curious feeling of foreboding, which he could in no way resist; it grew in strength till it had all the power of an obsession, and he could not reason himself out of it. He was sure that a great danger threatened Margaret. He could not tell what it was, nor why the fear of it ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... he entered Canterbury. "This is England," said his clerks, as they saw the white headlands of the coast. "You will wish yourself elsewhere before fifty days are gone," said Thomas sadly, and his foreboding showed his appreciation of Henry's character. He was now in the royal power, and orders had already been issued in the younger Henry's name for his arrest when four knights from the King's Court, spurred to outrage by a ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... see or feel anything, and that I did not immediately find either her warmth of friendship diminished or the least change in her manner, the continuation and even increase of a too well founded foreboding made me incessantly tremble, lest disgust should succeed to infatuation. Was it possible for me to expect in a lady of such high rank, a constancy proof against my want of address to support it? I was unable to conceal from her this secret foreboding, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... dread foreboding at his heart, Jack rode forward into the isolated valley, when, from a small opening in the centre of the place the sudden whir of wings and the rapid flight of many dark bodies told him the secret ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... story should create a single effect. In his story, "The Fall of the House of Usher," for example, the single effect is a feeling of horror. In the first sentence of the story he begins to create this effect by words that suggest to the reader's imagination gloom and foreboding. This he consciously carries out just as an artist creates the picture of his dreams with many skillful strokes of his brush. Poe gave attention also to compressing all the details of the plot of the story instead of expanding them as in a long story ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... storm was brewing. The sky was overcast, and the clouds were mustering fast from the south in black battalions. Every now and then a hoarse echoing rumble of sound went wandering about in the hollows of the hills with a deep cavernous tone, which sounded astonishingly threatening and foreboding. I suppose that everybody knows more or less the feeling which associates itself with the first view of any memorable place, and fixes itself as it were upon his recollection of it. After all these years I can hardly think ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... reaction from the childish marble palace idea had swung her mind's eye too far. But gazing at the weather-worn old pile, spilling dirtily over the broken sidewalk, she was once more struck and depressed by something almost sinister about it, something vaguely foreboding. To her imagination it was a little as if the ramshackle old pile leered at her: "Wash your hands of me if you will, young lady. I mean you harm ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... worse than my worst foreboding, for first a light came flickering into the sort of companion-hatch at the head of the stairs, and finally Raffles—in his shirt-sleeves! He was not only carrying a candle to put the finishing touch to him as a target; he had dispensed with coat ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... window a long-drawn cry. She recognized it—the high-keyed, monotonous cry of a man who often hurried past with a bundle of newspapers under his arm. Now it startled her. It filled her with foreboding. ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... indeed, become more than usually sharp and foreboding. She received the signorino's gay effusions in ominous silence, and would frown darkly while Madame Petrucci petted her "little bird," as she called Goneril. Once, indeed, Miss Prunty was heard to remark ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... thatching, just before a snow-storm which covered the ground several inches deep for a number of days. They struck work and left us for a while, no doubt in search of food. Birds frequently perish from sudden changes in our whimsical spring weather of which they had no foreboding. More than thirty years ago, a cherry-tree, then in full bloom, near my window, was covered with humming-birds benumbed by a fall of mingled rain and snow, which probably killed many of them. It should seem that their coming was dated ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... smell danger like a pointer dog, hung far out across the parapet of rock, every eager nerve tingling in the hope of coming battle. Winston remained in the cabin door, behind him the open room black and silent, his loaded Winchester between his feet, gamely struggling to overcome a vague foreboding of impending trouble, yet alert and ready to bear his part. It was then that Stutter Brown led the saddled pony forward from out the concealment of bushes. The long awaited moment had come for action. To his whispered word, Mercedes fluttered promptly forth ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... I had more attention to give it, for we rode mysteriously neck deep in velvet darkness over strange hills, and awful shapes rose mysteriously, and the sky silvered with stars like the glittering of little waves. But my mind was filled with dread and foreboding, and a great anxiety for our merry, blue-eyed companion, and a very considerable wonder as to how our guide managed ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... or, at least, that you have spiritual intimations respecting matters which are dark to us grosser people. If that be the case, I should like to ask you what is about to happen; for I am tormented with a strong foreboding that, were I to return even so soon as to-morrow morning, I should find everything changed. Have you any impressions ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... liars—who are reserved for the lake of fire and brimstone! Fear is the one thing that we are always wrong in yielding to: I don't mean timidity and cowardice, but the sort of heavy, mild, and rather pious sort of foreboding that wakes one up early in the morning, and that takes all the wind out of one's sails; fear of not being liked, of having given offence, of living uselessly, of wasting time and opportunities. Whatever we do, we must not lead an apologetic kind of ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... foreboding seized hold of Sara. It was as though the secret dread of something—she could not tell what—which held the mother had communicated itself ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... to the canoe and begged hard to go with him, but the old sailor was firm in his refusal and Walter watched him paddle out of sight with a dim foreboding of evil at ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... Hezekiah even this single argument is decisive, that a glory is here spoken of, which is to be bestowed especially upon Galilee which belonged to the kingdom of the ten tribes. Farther—Although the prophecy be considered as a human foreboding only, how could the Prophet, to whom, everywhere else such a sharp eye is ascribed, that, from it, they endeavour to explain his fulfilled prophecies,—how could the Prophet have expected that Hezekiah, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... and reared their brood within ten or twelve feet of the piazza of a large summer-house in the vicinity. But when the guests commenced to arrive and the piazza to be thronged with gay crowds, I noticed something like dread and foreboding in the manner of the mother bird; and from her still, quiet ways, and habit of sitting long and silently within a few feet of the precious charge, it seemed as if the dear creature had resolved, if ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... enjoy the tussle with them, some turn their minds away from them, while others, chiefly the imaginative or the intellectual, shrink from them with the discomfort which, as years go on, becomes worry, anxiety, foreboding, or any other of the ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... not want to talk about Arthur Chicksands. There was in her a queer foreboding sense about him. She did not in the least expect him to fall in love with her; yet there was a dim, intermittent fear in her lest he might become too important to her, together with a sharp shrinking from the news, which of course might come any day, that he was going to be married. ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... nest in the branches of a tree, a bird chirruped dubiously, as though to assure himself even against his better judgment that the rain was only a threat. The woods which bordered the meadows were blurred into a foreboding, formless black, like a fringe of mourning, and the distant hills stood sentinels at the ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... wood and imitated stone—upon those gloomy rows of formalized minuteness, alike without difference and without fellowship, as solitary as similar—not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground; that those comfortless and unhonoured dwellings are the signs of a great and spreading spirit ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... the others, and I was left with a leaden foreboding of grewsome things in store. I knew what manner of man Ukridge was when he relaxed and became chummy. Friendships of years' standing had failed to ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... earlier and purer emotion. The war was to be a short one. Our enemies would speedily yield before the overwhelming force arrayed against them; they would run from Northern troops; we were sure of easy victory. There was little sober foreboding, as our army set out from Washington on its great advance. The troops moved forward with exultation, as if going on a holiday and festive campaign; and the nation that watched them shared in their careless confidence, and prophesied a speedy triumph. But the event showed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... into a regular dithyramb. It was a song of jubilee, a sigh of innocence and happiness; she sang of God and the stars, of happy love, and of reuniting; of blossom, fragrance, and fanning zephyrs; and in unconscious, foreboding pain, she sang of the sorrows of love, and ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... Warsaw, and shall be back in a fortnight. I hope then to have you here. Still, if that is too long I should be glad to have you return to Paris where you are needed. You know that I have to depend on events." The unhappy Josephine already had a foreboding of his devotion to a ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... not join me again to-day, nor on the morrow. She abandoned me to a sense of dissatisfaction with myself, of foreboding, and of a ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... not shut down the lid so quickly, things would have gone much worse. But she closed it just in time to keep the last of the evil creatures from getting out. The name of this creature was Foreboding, and although he was almost half out of the casket, Pandora pushed him back and shut the lid so tight that he could never escape. If he had gone out into the world, men would have known from childhood just what troubles were going to come to them every day of their lives, ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin
... had a strange, unusual sense of some impending peril. His recent interview with the Doctor, certain remarks which had been dropped in his hearing, but above all an unaccountable impression upon his spirits, all combined to fill his mind with a foreboding conviction that he was very near some overshadowing danger. It was as the chill of the ice-mountain toward which the ship is steering under full sail. He felt a strong impulse to see Helen Darley and talk with her. She was in the common parlor, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his own course? Here is a sincere and solemn avowal—a confession at once devout, poetical, and human—a history in the shape of a prophecy! What more was required of the biographer, than to have put his seal to the writing, testifying that the foreboding had been realized and that the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... his business, and both were glad to leave London. She had a sense of something sinister, foreboding, casting its shadow on the sordid, unclean streets, the neglected buildings falling into disrepair. A lurking savagery, a half-veiled enmity seemed to be stealing among the people. The town's mad lust for pleasure: its fierce, unjoyous laughter: its desire ever to be in crowds as if afraid of itself: ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... FEEL as if she'd come?" he said to himself, and he tried to find out. His heart felt queer and contracted. That seemed like foreboding. Then he HAD a foreboding she would not come! Then she would not come, and instead of taking her over the fields home, as he had imagined, he would have to go alone. The train was late; the afternoon would be wasted, and the evening. He hated her for not coming. ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... Sumter's guns had reverberated throughout the land, and men of all minds were holding their breath and listening, with ears to the ground, for the sound of the next shot. Even Margaret's letters were full of foreboding. "Father is more bitter against the South than ever," she wrote. "He says if he had ten sons each should shoulder a musket. We must wait, Ollie dear. I can only talk to mother about you. Father won't listen, and I never mention your name before ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the shape of a human being in the mass of brown and black which filled the arm-chair. Mrs. Milvain was a much slighter figure; but the same doubt as to the precise lines of her contour filled Ralph, as he regarded them, with dismal foreboding. What remark of his would ever reach these fabulous and fantastic characters?—for there was something fantastically unreal in the curious swayings and noddings of Mrs. Cosham, as if her equipment included a large wire spring. Her voice had ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... unwonted union of blue eyes with that olive-gray skin gave a tinge of wayward shyness to her girlish beauty. The golden locks had ripened to nut-brown, but still caught stray gleams of nestling sunlight. 'Twas with a foreboding regret that Herminia kissed Dolly on both peach-bloom cheeks at parting. She almost fancied her child must be slipping from her motherly grasp when she went off so blithely to visit these unknown friends, ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... and came in with a bundle of letters and papers which he put down before him and withdrew. A grim foreboding settled on him. Something seemed to whisper from the mute heap that here lay the revelation—here was the missing communication from Irene of which her father had spoken. A bare glance at the bundle was enough, for he recognized the ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... foreboding swept over Betty as she followed Cyril into the house. Her imagination showed her willows and the "coral islands," and only John Brown—big square John Brown—there. She knew the story that would soon be all over the school—all over the neighbourhood—that Cyril had been afraid to fight. ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... his sail, and discharged a part of the heavy sum scored against him. But when he awoke, and glanced around him with eyes that resented scanty measure, even a sleepy glance sufficed to show much more than he wished to see. Both sky and sea were overcast with doubt, and alarm, and evil foreboding. A dim streak lay where the land had been, and a white gleam quivered from the sunrise on the waves, as if he were spreading water-lilies instead of scattering roses. As the earth has its dew that foretells a bright day—whenever ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... gray streaks stretching along the eastern horizon and throwing an indistinct light upon the face of the deep, which combines with the boundlessness and unknown depth of the sea around, and gives one a feeling of loneliness, of dread, and of melancholy foreboding, which nothing else in nature can. This gradually passes away as the light grows brighter, and when the sun comes up, the ordinary ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... planets including the Sun seemed to proceed against one another (for combat). Meteoric showers became noticeable and all the quarters seemed ablaze. Thunders fell from a cloudless sky, and fierce winds began to blow. Animals and birds in larger numbers kept thy army to their right, foreboding great calamities. After Karna had set out, his steeds tumbled down on the Earth. A frightful shower of bones fell from the sky. The weapons (of the Kuru warriors) seemed to be ablaze; their standards trembled; and their animals, O monarch, shed copious tears. These and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Veiled in shifting vapors, Mountains, Bleak, foreboding, Mountains, Stark and overpowering. Torrents, Tumbling, crashing, Dragging boulders In their rushing, Lakes, Forlorn and lonesome Heather In magenta patches, Sheep, and cattle Black and somber, Winding roads Through massive passes. Rain, Sun, ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... swift hoofs, thundering South, The dust like the smoke from the cannon's mouth, Or the trail of a comet, sweeping faster and faster, Foreboding to traitors the doom of disaster. The heart of the steed and the heart of the master Were beating like prisoners assaulting their walls, Impatient to be where the battle-field calls; Every nerve of the charger was strained to full play, With ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... grass, and came back without it. "It must have slipped off his tail," I said, and so I didn't know where it was. This honest, straightforward little story made father so angry that he exclaimed with heavy, foreboding emphasis: "The very deevil's in that boy!" David, who had been playing with me and was perhaps about as responsible for the loss of the whip as I was, said never a word, for he was always prudent enough to hold his tongue when the parental weather was stormy, ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... the charge given her by Kaonohiokala, Laieikawai said to her companions, "O comrades, as Kahalaomapuana tells me the message of your brother and my husband, a strange foreboding weighs upon me, and I am amazed; I supposed him to be a man, a mighty god that! When I think of seeing him, however I may desire it, I am ready to die with fear before he ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... Mr. Vosburgh. Marian began to regret her suggestion that the information should come in this way, for she now felt that Merwyn had received the impression that his presence would not be agreeable. She was eager for more details and oppressed with the foreboding that she would never see her light-hearted friend again. She was almost tempted to ask Merwyn to call, but felt a strange reluctance ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... of May Stephen was announced; and with a sudden sense of foreboding she hastened down to ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... to tremble. And birds, uttering fierce cries, hovered in the air. The Sun, radiant as he was when he had risen, became dimmed. And fierce winds blew, indicating great terrors. Frightful jackals wandered, yelling terribly, O king, and foreboding an awful carnage at hand. The quarters seemed, O king, to be ablaze, and showers of dust fell from the blue. And a shower fell there, of pieces of bones mixed with blood. And tears fell from the eyes of the animals which were all weeping. And filled with anxiety, O king, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... a bare instant, caught by a vague foreboding that he could not explain. But in the end he nodded, as though in answer to the unspoken question in his thoughts. "Will you come down into the cabin, Mark?" he invited quietly. "I've much to ask you; and you must ...
— All the Brothers Were Valiant • Ben Ames Williams
... hours until Sunday seemed an age to him—an age of foreboding and dread—but they at last passed by. In a fever of anxiety, he walked with the rest of the boys to church, and mounted the steps ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... not why it was, but then, and there, I felt a sinking sadness, passing tears— A dark foreboding I could not dissolve, Nor drive away. But when, next morn, I woke In the sweet stillness of the Sabbath day, And found myself alone, I knew that hearts Which once have been God's temple, and in which Something divine still lingers, feel the throb Along the lines that bind them to ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... was not without its heaviness. A dark foreboding began to creep into it from some undefined cause. Were his thoughts ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... she isn't like her father," said Charlotte with foreboding, as she aired and swept the southeast spare room for their expected guest. They had three spare rooms at the Grange, but the aunts had selected the southeast one for their niece because it was done in white, "and white seems the most appropriate for a young girl," Ellen said, as she arranged ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... The foreboding passed abruptly, with a jerk of her breath, as the street-lamp revealed a tall and easy figure approaching from the north, swinging a stick in time to its stride. She had given Russell up—and ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... means, money, and men for the contest with a land which, even were the army ready to strike the blow, it seemed difficult to reach and scarce possible to vanquish. He was still a young man, little beyond thirty, but he had apparently, when he was preparing for his expedition, a foreboding that he would not be permitted to attain the end of his labours, or to see otherwise than afar off the promised land. When he left Carthage he enjoined his son Hannibal, nine years of age, to swear at the altar of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... give best to the State; and reward them for doing this in such a way that their primary social service of child-bearing is in no way impaired? But as yet the day is not. There is an outlook that causes foreboding. The female sex is in a dangerous state of disturbance. New and strange urgencies are at work amongst us, forces for which the word "revolution" is only too faithfully appropriate. Little is being done to allay these forces, much conspires to exasperate ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... git thar?" Chad asked so breathlessly that Melissa looked quickly up with a sudden foreboding that she might lose her little playfellow some day. The master had walked, and it took him a week. A good horse could make the trip in four days, and the river-men floated logs down the river to the capital ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... and to compose themselves to sleep as it were in the hollow of God's hand. But long into the night Randall's cigar still marks his pacing up and down as he ponders, with alternations of tender, hopeful glow and sad foreboding the chances of his quest. Will ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... foreboding. He did indeed hasten back, and just reached Mount Vernon in time to die under his own roof, surrounded by his family and friends, and attended in his last moments by that brother on whose manly affection his heart seemed to repose. His death ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... suburbs of that city. When Napoleon heard of it he grew furious, and gave orders to seize her as an intriguer, and to send her back to Geneva, by force if necessary. It was done, but an awful presentiment took possession of the Emperor that she had appeared like a crow foreboding a coming tempest. As if to compensate France for the loss of the exile's literary powers and those of her friends, many means were devised and tried for the encouragement of an imperial literature. In his assumed and noisy contempt for ideals, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... to follow him. They entered the tank not without some foreboding, for it developed that none had been mixed up in such warfare before. But they were not afraid and took the places Hal ...
— The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders • Clair W. Hayes
... former associations revived, and remembrances of past tenderness, though blunted in a heart so much changed, came over him like the breath of fragrance that has nearly passed away. He began, therefore, to contemplate the event without foreboding, and by the time the looked-for period arrived, if the world and its debasing influences were not utterly overcome, yet nature and the quickening tenderness of a father's feeling had made a considerable progress in a heart ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the other,' said Molly, smiling, and trying to look perfectly indifferent, but going extremely red from annoyance at the mention of Mr. Preston's name. It was very difficult for her to keep up any conversation, for her heart was full of Osborne —his changed appearance, his melancholy words of foreboding, and his confidences about his wife—French, Catholic, servant. Molly could not help trying to piece these strange facts together by imaginations of her own, and found it very hard work to attend to kind Miss Phoebe's unceasing patter. She came up to the point, however, when the voice ceased; and ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell |
