"Meditative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... house in which I lived had on either side of the entrance a picture-shop; and this was always closed, as well as most of the other places of business along the route. The streets were remarkably quiet; and all the circumstances were most favourable for a meditative walk amid such magnificent memories. The inhabitants of Rome pay respect to the Sunday so far as abstaining from labour is concerned; but they make up for this by throwing open their museums and places of interest on that day, which indeed ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... yard, until at length he seated himself on the board-pile beneath the evergreen trees, and so sank into an idle reverie, his chin in his hand, and his eyes staring out across the wide field. His face, now in repose, seemed more meditative; indeed one might have called it almost mournful. The shoulders drooped a trifle, as though their owner for the time forgot to pull himself together. He sat thus for some time, and the sun was beginning to encroach upon his refuge, when suddenly he was aroused by the faint and far-off sound ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... and applying his great plans. He travelled usually five thousand miles a year, preaching twice and thrice a day, commencing at five o'clock in the morning. In the midst of all this travelling and preaching, he carried with him the meditative and studious habits of the philosopher. No department of human inquiry was omitted by him. "History, poetry, and philosophy," said he, ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... to please," her face turned partially away, her look meditative, "and—and dictatorial; but I will try. You are intelligent, a splendid dancer, fairly good-looking, rather bright at times, and, no doubt, would prove venturesome if not held strictly to your proper place. Take it all in all, you are even interesting, and—I ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... stimulating companion, one loves to be where Amos MacGentle is; to watch his quiet movements, and listen to his meditative talk. What he says generally bears the stamp of thought and intellectual capacity, and at first strikes the listener as rare good sense; yet, if reconsidered afterwards, or applied to the practical tests of life, his wisdom is apt to fall mysteriously ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... and spent the rest of the evening bursting into spasmodic and immediately interrupted song,—breaking off after a few bars with a cough of remembrance and apology. When this happened Fritzing and Priscilla looked at each other with grave and meditative eyes; they knew how completely they were in ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... the loftiest peaks of the cloudland in the skies that to the scientific gazer first caught the colors of the new morning in advance. But the whole vast range alike of sweeping glooms overhead dwelt upon all meditative minds, even upon those that could not distinguish the tendencies nor decipher the forms. It was, therefore, not her own age alone, as affected by its immediate calamities, that lay with such weight upon Joanna's mind, but her own age as one section in a vast mysterious drama, ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... walk to and fro in the house." In councils and formal receptions it is customary for the orator to walk slowly to and fro during the intervals of his speech. Sometimes, before beginning his address, he makes a circuit of the assembly with a meditative aspect, as if collecting his thoughts. All public acts of the Indians are marked with some sign ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... a boy of delicate constitution, not addicted to the active sports or any of the more vigorous habits of boys of his age. His only companions were a few intimate friends, and, thus secluded, his character naturally took a sensitive, meditative cast, and his growing disrelish for severer tasks was confirmed. As has been intimated, he entered as a pupil at Athens; but as the course of instruction in that institution was not in harmony with his tastes, he soon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... of sending Miss Chase to bed quite unusually meditative, and, do what she would, she could not get off to sleep for wondering whether she ever would come back to Queensland again. It seemed of all things most impossible, and yet, as she argued, who would ever have thought of her coming at all this time ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... characterized her fair, oval countenance and regular features. Her open forehead, dark and well-arched eyebrows, and eyes of a gray so deep that it was often mistaken for blue, added to her natural grave and meditative appearance; her nose was straight and well formed, her ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... The affliction which separated her from the worlds of hearing and speech—which set her apart among her fellow-creatures, a solitary living being in a sphere of death-silence that others might approach, but might never enter—gave a touching significance to the deep, meditative stillness that often passed over her suddenly, even in the society of her adopted parents, and of friends who were all talking around her. Sometimes, the thoughts by which she was thus absorbed—thoughts only indicated to ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... his knee as he uttered this meditative monosyllable, and continued to regard his niece with keener scrutiny, if that were possible, than before. 'It is John's temper—a very firebrand. My dear, you are very young, and you should not be above taking advice. Let me advise you ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... will say those things which I have meditated for their own sake and not for the first time with a view to that occasion." In these words is the secret of his relation to the Whig party. He asked no office, and he gave only the ripe fruit of his meditative life. It is not to be supposed that, in 1838, he saw in the young man at Auburn the astute United States Senator of the fifties; or the still greater secretary of state of the Civil War; but he had seen enough of Seward to discern the qualities of mind and heart that lifted ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... enough money to keep my wife and mother comfortable. They, like myself, have learned the lesson of being poor and happy. But I must keep them above want—I will keep them above want!" As he repeated the words the meditative mood dropped from him. He straightened himself in his chair with sudden energy, his voice trembled and sunk almost to a whisper, in place of the dreamy look his ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... down and ate her sandwiches thoughtfully, with long, meditative intervals between bites. She regarded the pinto curiously, wondering if Starr had really taken him as security for a debt, and wishing that she had asked him what its name was. It was queer, the way he rode up unexpectedly every ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... course, at first it was an intercourse infinitely tedious and exasperating, but imperceptibly it has grown to comprehension. And my patience has grown to meet its limitations, Phi-oo it is who does all the talking. He does it with a vast amount of meditative provisional 'M'm—M'm' and has caught up one or two phrases, 'If I may say,' 'If you understand,' and beads all ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... soaring dreams of fancy in which he so ardently delights. Not only is the Swiss determined by the peculiarities of his geographical position to lead a pastoral life, but the climate, and mountain scenery, and bracing atmosphere inspire him with the love of liberty. The reserved and meditative Hindoo, accustomed to the profuse luxuriance of nature, borrows the fantastic ideas of his mythology from plants, and flowers, and trees. The vastness and infinite diversity of nature, the colossal magnitude of all the forms of animal and vegetable life, the broad and massive ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Canaan. The Bingerloch, the ruins, and the never-failing vines scattered among them, like verdant youth revelling amid age and decay, give a picture nowhere else exhibited, uniting to the joyousness of wine the sober tinge of meditative feeling. The hills back the picture, covered with feudal relics or monastic remains, mingled with the purple grape. Landscapes of greater beauty, joined to the luxuriance of fruitful vine ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... against the tree, smoking in a meditative manner, and watching the flicker of the firelight on the face of his companion, whose thoughts seemed to be concentrated ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... Errington looked meditative. "Nothing at present We'll go fishing with the others. But, I tell you what, if you're up to it, we'll leave Duprez and Macfarlane at the minister's house this evening and tell them to wait for us there,—once they all begin to chatter they ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... wrote also, and to her I offered my heart. Looking backward, I have sometimes wondered that I felt so little hesitation; not that I have ever doubted since, that what I did then was the one perfectly right thing which I have done in my life, but because it was my habit so to confuse myself with meditative indecision. I had doubted before. I remember once being so near engaging myself to a girl that the desk was open and the paper under my hand. But I held back, could not make up my mind, and happily was stayed. Had I not been restrained, I should for ever have been miserable. The remembrance ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... way he had made of his explanation an apology. While his slow brown fingers rolled a cigarette he stared away through the garden and across the desert with an expression half melancholy, half merely meditative, which made the girl wonder what his thoughts were. When she came to know him better she would know too that at times like this he was not ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... having curtsied once more profoundly, passed on with her glistening sheaf of bloom and disappeared vision-like in a gleam of azure light falling through one of the further and higher casements. The King watched her disappear, the meditative line of sadness still puckering his brow, then, followed by his equerry, he entered a small private audience chamber, where Sir Roger de Launay notified an attendant gentleman usher that his Majesty was ready to ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... those solemn words about saving a child; they saw in him only No. 17 of the captured Russians, arrested and detained for some reason by order of the Higher Command. If they noticed anything remarkable about Pierre, it was only his unabashed, meditative concentration and thoughtfulness, and the way he spoke French, which struck them as surprisingly good. In spite of this he was placed that day with the other arrested suspects, as the separate room he had occupied was required ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... waggon, and looking back as if bound to finish the chase by hunting the cat-like creature out; but he always altered his mind and went under the waggon once more, to walk close to the heels of the last pair of oxen, one of which looked back from time to time in a thoughtful meditative way, with its great soft eyes, as if in consideration whether it ought to kick out and send ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... wasn't. She fell into silence again, standing by her mother's knee, staring out of the window and watching the clouds move steadily across the sky doing their share of the world's work for all they looked so soft and lazy. Her mother did not break in on this meditative contemplation. She took up her sewing-basket and began busily to sew buttons on a small pair of half-finished night-drawers. The sobered child beside her, gazing up at the blue-and-white infinity of the sky, heard faintly and distantly, ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the kind that achieve a result by their clean-limbed elegance alone. Van Dyck has painted the two with what might be called a greyhound brush-stroke, a style of handling that is nothing but courtly convention and strut to the point of genius. He is as far from the meditative spirituality of Rembrandt as could well ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... elderly women were not fruitful. To which I added myself another argument, that a different diet from ours is necessary to those who take wives unto themselves. Thou understandest me, Joseph? Women have never been a temptation to me, Joseph answered, nor to Jesus, and in meditative mood he related the story of the wild man in the woods, at the entrance of whose cave Jesus had laid a knife so that he might cut ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... watched again with meditative stare Places where you had wandered, Golden and calm in distance: Voices from all your altering past came sighing ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... hour brought us back to Aiasulouk and the mosque of Sultan Selim. Here everything seemed still more quiet than when we left. Even the storks were sitting or standing in a meditative posture, not one flying about. The railway porters and some rayahs were lying on the platform in the enjoyment of their midday slumbers, their heads and faces carefully wrapped up in their capotes, while their bare, bronzed shanks and huge feet, in shapeless red shoes, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... grandson were driving in a distant part of the valley some miles from home. A forest came down to the road and through the forest Wine Creek wriggled its way over stones toward a distant river. All the afternoon Jesse had been in a meditative mood and now he began to talk. His mind went back to the night when he had been frightened by thoughts of a giant that might come to rob and plunder him of his possessions, and again as on that night when he had run through the fields crying for a son, he became excited ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... strengthened his intellect by hard though irregular study, his meditative and impassioned nature, feeling in the highest degree the necessity of confirming its impressions, experienced more imperatively than a youth of fifteen generally does, the want of examining the traditional ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... and remaining as short a time as possible in this unedifying city, which is a bad and overheated imitation of a French provincial town, we concede only so much to its modern character as to hire a fine open carriage in which to proceed inland toward Constantina. This city is reached after a calm, meditative ride through sunny hills and groves. After so quiet a preparation the first view of Constantina is fairly astounding. Encircled by a grand curve of mountainous precipices, rises a gigantic rock, washed by a moat formed of the roaring cascades of the river Rummel. On the flat top of this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... meditative slowness and with playful eyes: "Whenever I am justified in having such anxieties, they ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable
... who wrote pastorals or elegies and went out for long, solitary walks to commune with nature. In my eagerness to please Lalage I went so far as to write to Selby-Harrison, asking him to make out for me a list of the leading poets of the meditative and mystical schools. I also gave an order to a bookseller for all the books of original poetry published during that autumn. The number of volumes I received surprised me. I used to exhibit them with great pride to my ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... step-ladder which helped him to work at a large high painting, now nearly finished. Criticising himself, honestly admiring himself, floating on the current of his thoughts, he then lost himself in one of those meditative moods which ravish and elevate the soul, soothe it, and comfort it. His reverie had no doubt lasted a long time. Night fell. Whether he meant to come down from his perch, or whether he made some ill-judged movement, believing himself to be on the ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... to understand Turner's depth of sympathy farther still. In both these high mythical subjects the surrounding nature, though suffering, is still dignified and beautiful. Every line in which the master traces it, even where seemingly negligent, is lovely, and set down with a meditative calmness which makes these two etchings capable of being placed beside the most tranquil work of Holbein or Duerer. In this "Cephalus" especially, note the extreme equality and serenity of every ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... and nasal, she began to read. Maria Clara gazed vaguely into space. The first commandment finished, Aunt Isabel observed her listener over her glasses, and appeared satisfied with her sad and meditative air. She coughed piously, and after a long pause began the second. The good old woman read with unction. The terms of the second commandment finished, she again looked at her niece, who slowly turned ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... give him cards and spades when it comes to driving a dog-team, though," Daylight observed, after a meditative pause. "And I really believe I could put him on to a few wrinkles in poker and placer mining, and maybe in paddling a birch canoe. And maybe I stand a better chance to learn the game he's been playing all his life than he would stand of learning the ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... admired and loved his old schoolfellow, and grieved deeply when he died. The recollection of this event, which happened many years afterwards (in 1834), never left Lamb until his own death: he used perpetually to exclaim, "Coleridge is dead, Coleridge is dead," in a low, musing, meditative voice. These exclamations (addressed to no one) were, as Lamb was a most unaffected man, assuredly involuntary, and showed that he could not get rid of ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... his feelings? We weren't engaged.' A meditative pause and then suddenly, 'Evelyn Mary doesn't smoke. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... shifts his character with the shift in his worshippers' real affections. What the psalmist loves is the beauty of God's house and the place where his glory dwelleth. A priestly quietude and pride, a grateful, meditative leisure after the storms of sedition and war, some retired unity of mind after the contradictions of the world—this is what the love of God might signify for the levites. Saint John tells us that he who says he loves God and loves not his neighbour is a liar. Here the love of God is ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... delight that the world can never realize outside the region of the brain. If that needs proof you have only, dear friends, to meditate upon such lives as Newton, or Shakespeare, or Kepler, or if you turn to the region of meditative thought, to such lives as our own George Eliot—yes, there is that in the mere exercise of intellect which is intoxicating, which is consoling even to the highest degree. But intellect, after all, finds its frontier. I may say of it what I have said ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... last morsel of bread Tom King wiped his plate clean of the last particle of flour gravy and chewed the resulting mouthful in a slow and meditative way. When he arose from the table, he was oppressed by the feeling that he was distinctly hungry. Yet he alone had eaten. The two children in the other room had been sent early to bed in order that in ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... their games there again," said Mr. Cathcart with meditative geniality. "I'd like to blow up ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... in the book; exquisite glimpses into the loveliness of nature here and there shine out from its lines,—a charm wanting which meditative writing always seems to have a defect; beautiful gleams, too, there are of the choicest things of art, and frequent allusions by the way to legend or picture of the religious past; so that, while you read, you wander ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... or no conversation during the evening. In fact, I do not remember that anyone spoke at all, excepting once, when the Captain remarked, in a meditative manner, that my parents "must have reached New York by this time"; at which supposition I nearly strangled myself in attempting to intercept ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... he might lie on fern or withered heath, While from the singing lark (that sings unseen The minstrelsy that solitude loves best), And from the sun, and from the breezy air, 20 Sweet influences trembled o'er his frame; And he, with many feelings, many thoughts, Made up a meditative joy, and found Religious meanings in the forms of Nature! And so, his senses gradually wrapt 25 In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds, And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark, That singest like ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... man in him was very different, almost wholly independent of the first, and very generally in direct conflict with it, at that time. It was an imaginative and meditative personality, easily deceived into assuming a false premise, but logical beyond all liability to deception when reasoning from anything it had accepted. Its processes were intuitively correct and almost instantaneous, while ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... were so near the fire that it was necessary to change the conversation. Luckily, at that instant, Cap, who had been in the block in company with his dying brother-in-law, and who knew nothing of what had passed since the capitulation, now appeared, walking with a meditative and melancholy air towards the group. Much of that hearty dogmatism, that imparted even to his ordinary air and demeanor an appearance of something like contempt for all around him, had disappeared, and he seemed thoughtful, ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... train moved on he found himself disinclined for further talk. He had suddenly become meditative, and curled up in a corner with his head hard against the window pane, watching the wet fields and glistening roads as they slipped past. He had his plans made for his conduct at Glasgow, but, Lord! how he loathed the whole ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... no heed of this rodomontade, but sits quite still, with downcast eyes, tapping the small table near her with the tips of her slender fingers in a meditative fashion. ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... to his more advanced age, but mainly, no doubt, to his meditative and introspective cast of mind, Mr. Edison is far less active than is Mr. Ford. When we would pause for the midday lunch, or to make camp at the end of the day, Mr. Edison would sit in his car and read, or ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... attentions of a dog who would climb to her lap, and there, with an angry nose, put to no more than temporary rout the nimble guests of his jacket. Shortly Mrs. Morrissy began to look upon the toy terrier with a meditative eye. ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... the goblin motions of inanimate things. The lover thinking of his lass welcomes the night and the rapturous walks among well-known scenes and kindly objects. With glimmering lamps in the foliage and the not distant sounds of daily life, even the woods have nothing fearful to the meditative or the distraught. But in flight, with fear as a garment that can not be laid aside, the somber forms of the forest are more terrible than an army with banners, as a haunted house is a more unnerving dread than burglars or any form of night marauders. It was ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... on a raised divan, propped by cushions, and in front of her was a huge water-pipe at which she occasionally took a meditative pull. She was dressed quite in Oriental fashion, in trousers, zouave jacket, sash, and all the rest of it; but she was unmistakably English in features, though strongly suggestive of the Boadicea. She was a large, heavily-boned woman, enormously covered with flesh, and she dandled across her knees ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... same significance. "In a little time the cathedrals and churches will have taken upon themselves the proud, poetical glamour of abandoned temples. Men and women will enter them with reverent indulgence as they now in meditative mood visit the few remaining pantheons of the pagan worship." (Llewelyn ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... out into a meditative silence. His voice and eyes told of a mind reminiscent of the past and perhaps dreamful of the future. Yet awhile, and he snatched himself ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... meditative silence, listening to the wind and the roar of the train; then Thompson said, with a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... he had found leisure to fish, though from the very outset of his Potwell career he had promised himself abundant indulgence in the pleasures of fishing. Fishing, as the golden page of English literature testifies, is a meditative and retrospective pursuit, and the varied page of memory, disregarded so long for sake of the teeming duties I have already enumerated, began to unfold itself to Mr. Polly's consideration. A speculation about Uncle Jim died for want of material, ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... come in, one at a time. They would whisper to Ranjoor Singh, and hurry out again. Some of them would whisper to Yasmini over in the window, and she would give them mock messages to carry, very seriously. Babu Sita Ram was stirred out of a meditative coma and sent hurrying away, to come back after a little while and wring his hands. He ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... fair-skinned than any his Highness has favoured before,' he said in a meditative voice. 'Yet Cromwell knows the King's tastes better than any man.' He sank down into her tall-backed chair and suddenly tossed the piece of bark into the fire. 'I would have you walk across the floor, elevating your arms as you ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... meditative gaze to the face of Phinuit. "But surely there is more...." he suggested in a ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... hair was streaked with grey. He was light- hearted then, and he was still buoyant with his fellows, still alert and vigorous, quick of speech and keen of humour—but only before the world. In his own home he was fitful of mood, impatient of the grave, meditative look of his wife, of her resolute tenacity of thought and purpose, of her unvarying evenness of mood, through which no warmth played. It seemed to him that if she had defied him—given him petulance for petulance, impatience for impatience, it ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... case that may well give to both Utilitarians and Anti-utilitarians pause—with this difference, however, that whereas it brings the former to an everlasting standstill, the latter may, after a while, go on complacently meditative, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... to," admitted Willie in less meditative tone. "Only last night I was thinkin' after I got to bed how would be the best way of givin' it to him. I've sorter set my heart on springin' it on him as ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... Wordsworth stand pre-eminent among our English poets in being almost exclusively occupied with one theme, the mystical interpretation of nature. Both poets are of a meditative, brooding cast of mind; but whereas Wordsworth arrives at his philosophy entirely through personal experience and sensation, Vaughan is more of a mystical philosopher, deeply read in Plato and the mediaeval alchemists. The constant comparison of natural with spiritual processes is, on the whole, ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... strong bond between them. And then, by different ways, following each his own bent of mind, they had attained to poesy. Lucien, destined for the highest speculative fields of natural science, was aiming with hot enthusiasm at fame through literature; while David, with that meditative temperament which inclines to poetry, was drawn by his tastes ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... day had culminated. It was nearly five o'clock in the afternoon. Mr. Norton was lying upon a lounge in Mr. Brown's apartment. Both gentlemen appeared to be in a meditative mood. The silence was only interrupted by the unusual sound of an ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... explained his position and difficulties, and it was quite obvious, judging from the glittering eyes and mobile mouth, that he poured his tale into peculiarly sympathetic ears. When he had finished, the negro stood for a considerable time gazing in meditative silence at the sky. ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... the event of a change of wind. He had whistled "St. Patrick's Day in the Morning," and was about beginning another interminable strain of the same kind. Claude was lounging about, and gradually drew nearer to the meditative Zac, whom ...
— The Lily and the Cross - A Tale of Acadia • James De Mille
... sensuous, and the sensuous temperament in its full strength is essentially solitary. The play of social intercourse, its quick transitions, and incessant demands, are fatal to free and uninterrupted abandonment to the flow of soft internal emotions. Rousseau, dreaming, moody, indolently, meditative, profoundly enwrapped in the brooding egoism of his own sensations, had to mix with men and women whose egoism took the contrary form of an eager desire to produce flashing effects on other people. We may be sure that as the two sides of his character—his notions of serious principle, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... think I could hit you,' said she, in a meditative tone of perfect unconsciousness as to the ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... from God, and passed majestic from our sight. The valley beneath us was littered with enormous boulders spilt from the ancient hollows of the hills. It must have been a great sight when the giants set them trundling down in work or play!—I said this to Vanna, who was looking down upon it with meditative eyes. She roused herself. ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... one should drink it with art. The mere commonplace drinks one absorbs with free heart; But this—once with care from the bright flame removed, And the lime set aside that its value has proved— Take it first in deep draughts, meditative and slow, Quit it now, now resume, thus imbibe with gusto; While charming the palate it burns yet enchants, In the hour of its triumph the virtue it grants Penetrates every tissue; its powers condense. Circulate ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... curate of Ivell still held aloof, tantalizing Frances by his elusiveness. Plainly he was waiting upon events. Millborne bore the reproaches of his wife and daughter almost in silence; but by degrees he grew meditative, as if revolving a new idea. The bitter cry about blighting their existence at length became so impassioned that one day Millborne calmly proposed to return again to the country; not necessarily to Exonbury, but, if they ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... to die," he pursued, in the same meditative tone, "that morning in the Pre Catalan. George Eveleth could have had my life for the asking. I'd never known him to miss his mark, and he wouldn't have missed me—if he hadn't had another destination for his bullet. I've regretted it more than once. I've had pretty nearly all that life could ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... with the financier to whom the boat belonged, they set forth. Mr Mifflin, having remarked, 'Yo-ho!' in a meditative voice, seated himself at the helm, somewhat saddened by his failure to borrow a quid of tobacco from the Ocean Beauty's proprietor. For, as he justly observed, without properties and make-up, where were ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... seemed very beautiful. She liked lying in bed, staring out at the upper reaches of sombre sky. She liked it to be rainy when she woke up—there was something about leaden colour everywhere and falling rain that made you fit for nothing but placid staring, yet, at the same time, pleasantly meditative. Then was the time that the strange big things which filter through your dreams linger evanescently in ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... he at last. "You must try to make her as comfortable as you can. There is consumption in the family, you see," he added, with a meditative sigh. ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... the river Jan took him alone; and not to the near water in Squire Walcote's grounds, but to the old bridge that crossed the Amber some way out of the village. It was the typical Cotswold bridge, with low parapets that make such a comfortable seat for meditative villagers. Just before they reached it she loosed Tony's hand, and held her breath to see what he would do. Would he run straight across to get to the other side, or would he ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... I have told you everything that could be demanded of me," said the Princess, looking coldly meditative. It seemed as if she had exhausted her emotion in their former interview. The fact was, she had said to herself, "I have done it all. I have confessed all. I will not go through it again. I will save myself from agitation." And she ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... pursed about the eyes with seafaring. And now that I came to look, the three rowers forward, though mere lads, repeated their elders' features and build; the gaunt frame, the long, serious face, the swarthy complexion and meditative eye—in short, Don Quixote of la Mancha at various stages of growth. Men and lads, I remarked, wore ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the intellect are so allied, that some imaginative power usually appears in all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of the first class, but especially in meditative men of an intuitive habit of thought. This class serve us, so that they have the perception of identity and the perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe, never ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Mary Magdalene and St. Barbara, the former as the type of penance, humility, and meditative piety, the latter as the type of fortitude and courage, is also very common. When between St. Mary Magdalene and St. Catherine, the idea suggested is learning, with penitence and humility; this is a most popular group. So is St. Lucia ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... what he meant to imply, and I also knew that he knew that I understood that he considered me a disturbing element. Then he again raised the half-demolished hunk of bread to his mouth, stopped and regarded the apple in meditative indecision. From head to heels he was clothed in the most exquisite white flannel and buckskin tennis clothes, but for all their civilized worldliness he resembled nothing so much as a feeding king of the forest in the poise of his wonderful head and equally wonderful body. I glanced ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... reached the carriage and pair when this meditative remark escaped him. Thinking he was referring to some other gee-gee of his, possibly one called appropriately after the Falls, and which was being broken in, I said that I thought the present pair went very well in harness together and had a lot ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... the Alderman failed. There is a feeling which universally pervades landsmen and landswomen, when they first embark on an element to which they are strangers, that ordinarily shuts their mouths and renders them meditative. In the older and more observant travellers, it is observation and comparison; while with the younger and more susceptible, it is very apt to take the character of sentiment. Without stopping to analyze the cause, or the consequences, ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... and pretty girl—Miss Mildred Margrave—came and went this morning, and a peculiar, meditative look on her face, suggesting some recent experience, caused the artist to transfer her to his notebook. Her step was sprightly, her face warm and cheerful in hue, her figure excellent, her walk the most admirable thing about her—swaying, graceful, lissom—like ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... bull-fight, shaking its little banner of distraction and allurement. Pitt felt the confusion of them, and at the same time was more than vaguely conscious on the other side of a certain steady white light which attracted towards another goal. He walked on in meditative musing, slowly and carelessly, not knowing where he was going nor what he passed on the way; till he had walked far. And then he suddenly stopped, turned, and set out to go back the road he had come, but now with a quick, measured, steady footfall which gave no indication ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... them somewhat wistfully as their white apparelled figures went by—ten had already left the chapel. Two more passed, then other two, and last of all came one alone—one who walked slowly, with a dreamy, meditative air, as though he were deeply absorbed in thought. The light from the open door streamed fully upon him as he advanced—it was the monk who had recited the Seven Glorias. The stranger no sooner beheld him than he instantly stepped forward and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... he was the wisest man in our ranks. As large, as powerful, and as black as our good-looking Color-Sergeant, but more heavily built and with less personal beauty, he had a more massive brain and a far more meditative and systematic intellect. Not yet grounded even in the spelling-book, his modes of thought were nevertheless strong, lucid, and accurate; and he yearned and pined for intellectual companionship beyond all ignorant men whom ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... neither hens nor pigs of our own. But hens we must certainly keep. There is something very sociable, and quiet, and soothing, too, in their soliloquies and converse among themselves; and, in an idle and half-meditative mood, it is very pleasant to watch a party of hens picking up their daily subsistence, with a gallant chanticleer in the midst of them. Milton had evidently contemplated such a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... and a dog came from the laurel thickets of the valley where the white brook brawled with the rocks. They followed the deep line of the path across the ridges. The dog—a large lemon and white setter—walked, tranquilly meditative, at his ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... least have been blessed; and, perhaps, we—my valued rector and I—might possibly have seen more of him at church, than, I deeply regret, we have done.' He shook his head a little, as he smiled with a sad complacency on me through his blue steel spectacles, and then sipped a little meditative sherry. ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... it ever took me so long to say so few words, and though they were profoundly sincere they sounded unutterably shallow, irrelevant and grotesque. She made no effort to help me out, but sat silent, listening, with her meditative smile. 'It's my duty, dearest, as a man,' I rambled on. The more I love ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... so as to command a better view of the road. He watched in meditative silence until the tramp had become a mere blot upon the whiteness of the dusty road and had finally disappeared over the brow of a distant hill. Then he spoke in ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... Wake-Robin, a series of books on birds, flowers and rural scenes which has made him the successor of Thoreau as a popular essayist en the plants and animals environing human life. His later writings showed a more philosophic mood and a greater disposition towards literary or meditative allusion than their predecessors, but the general theme and method remained the same. His chief books, in addition to Wake-Robin, are Birds and Poets (1877), Locusts and Wild Honey (1879), Signs and Seasons (1886), and Ways of Nature (1905); these are in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... least seen in his Satires, though neither the unbridled voluptuousness which makes his Elegies shocking to modern propriety, nor the far-off conceit which appears in his meditative and miscellaneous poems, is very strongly or specially represented here. Nor, naturally enough, is the extreme beauty of thought and allusion distinctly noteworthy in a class of verse which does not ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... betook myself after a protracted lunch and a meditative pipe, and, being the first to arrive—the jury having already been sworn and conducted to the mortuary to view the remains—whiled away the time by considering the habits of the customary occupants of the room by the light of the objects ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... there seems to be a warehouse of some company that makes an "aromatic disinfector." Wandering in there by chance, we stood delighted at the sweet medicinal savour that was wafted on the air. It had a most cheering effect upon our emunctory woes, and we lingered so long, in a meditative and healing ecstasy, that young women immured in the basement of the aromatic warehouse began to peer upward from the barred windows of their basement and squeak with astonished and nervous mirth. We blew a loud salute and ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... to their clergy, to the entire body regular and secular, is due to this contrast. Previously, they were not always well-disposed to it; the peasantry, nowhere, were content to pay tithes, and the artisan, as well as the peasant, regarded the idle, well-endowed, meditative monks as but little more than so many fat drones. The man of the people in France, by virtue of being a Gaul, has a dry, limited imagination; he is not inclined to veneration, but is rather mocking, critical and insubordinate at the powers ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the table, pushed his hat away from his broad, shining forehead, and then, meditative, absently lifted higher his carefully tended hand and lowered the singing gas-jet, only ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... old companion, just this, that I am very probably spending a meditative winter in gaol. The charge is that I did aid and abet a peculiarly ingenious gang of desperadoes to blow a jeweller's safe, knock the jeweller on the head and get safely away with the stuff. I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... not so much for what he did as for what he was. His services to the State were considerable, but not transcendent. He was a great man, but not pre-eminently a great emperor. He was a meditative sage rather than a man of action; although he successfully fought the Germanic barbarians, and repelled their fearful incursions. He did not materially extend the limits of the Empire, but he preserved and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... they deserved his force of faith, his earnestness, the glow and hurry of his thought, and the (if every third stump-speaker among us were not a Demosthenes, we should have said Demosthenean) eloquence of his verse; but here we meet him in a softer and more meditative mood. He seems a Berserker turned Carthusian. The half-mystic tone of "The Shadow and the Light" contrasts strangely, and, we think, pleasantly, with the warlike clang of "From Perugia." The years deal kindly with good men, and we find a clearer and ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... which stood a huge writing-table loaded with letters, pamphlets and manuscripts. Between the two windows of the inner room was a cage in which a large, grey parrot was clambering, using both beak and claws to assist him in his slow and meditative peregrinations. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... her. But to-night she was so wide-awake, and Joanna and Elin were so fast asleep, that every movement forcing itself upon her ear, made her more wide-awake still. The turning of keys and unlocking of drawers roused her to a whimsical meditative wonder. Poor Pam! What dead memories and coffined hopes was she bringing out to the dim light of her solitary candle? Was it possible that she ever cried over them a little when there was no one to see her relaxing mood? Poor Pam! Theo sighed ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... been the hardest of workers at Eton. Though some kinds of study and reading came as easily as boating to him, he was not of the material that usually makes the first-rate Eton scholar. There had sprung up in him a meditative yearning after wide knowledge which is likely always to abate ardor in the fight for prize acquirement in narrow tracks. Happily he was modest, and took any second-rate-*ness in himself simply as a fact, not as a marvel necessarily to be accounted for by a ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the Greek and Mediaeval artists. Nature, we have seen, offered to the former mysterious and oracular Sibylline leaves, profoundly significant of an indwelling humanity diffused through all her woods and fields and mountains, all her fountains, streams, and seas. Those meditative creators sat at her feet, earnest disciples, but gathering rather the spirit and motive of her gifts than the gifts themselves, making an Ideal and worshipping it as a deity. But for the cathedral-builder, Dryads and Hamadryads, Oreads, Fauns, and Naiads ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... and very subtle was the vibrant stir of that wire as it conveyed back to his ear the little sigh with which she made answer to his plea. He took his way upward in a mood which was meditative ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... that is an exceedingly cynical and stupid story," observed the girl. "And so I shall be off to look for Jurgen. For he makes love very amusingly," says Dorothy, with the sweetest, loveliest meditative smile that ever was lost ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... yet he had given all the weary, worn-out age, all the sad, quiet patience, all the rugged, care-worn pathos of his original, and given them so that the old, lonely figure was a poem, sitting there meditative and alone, on the dead tree, with the darkness of the descending ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... arrived as the Regent had just quitted the two persons with whom he had been talking. The Comte de Toulouse was in his mantle, and saluted the company with a grave and meditative manner, neither accosting nor accosted: M. le Duc d'Orleans found himself in front of him and turned towards me, although at some distance, as though to testify his trouble. I bent my head a little ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... theory, too," said Rolfe, in a meditative tone. "And the only person who can tell us which is the right one is Sir Horace's lady friend. The problem ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... of nothing more to say, and he smoked in silence. Neilson had apparently no wish to break it. He looked at his guest with a meditative eye. He was a tall man, more than six feet high, and very stout. His face was red and blotchy, with a network of little purple veins on the cheeks, and his features were sunk into its fatness. His eyes were bloodshot. ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... smallest coins are those which have the greatest intrinsic value, so Phokion in his speeches seemed to say much with few words. We are told that once while the people were flocking into the theatre Phokion was walking up and down near the stage, plunged in thought. "You seem meditative, Phokion," said one of his friends. "Yes, by Zeus," answered he, "I am considering whether I can shorten the speech which I am going to make to the Athenians." Demosthenes himself, who despised the other orators, when Phokion rose used to whisper to his friends, "Here comes ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... went; but I believe that it might have been different with a Yankee story in verse such as we have fragmentarily in 'The Nooning' and 'FitzAdam's Story'. Still, his gift was essentially lyrical and meditative, with the universal New England tendency to allegory. He was wholly undramatic in the actuation of the characters which he imagined so dramatically. He liked to deal with his subject at first hand, to indulge through himself all the whim and fancy which the more dramatic talent indulges ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of witch-meeting? Be it so, if you will; but, alas, it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown! a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate, man, did he become from the night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath-day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen, because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... move on another stone. He was fully awake and alert instantly. The horses were still in the middle of the plain, quietly feeding, but one or two of them were looking at an old tree stump in the curious meditative way which resting animals have of looking at things which ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... mention of her novices' names the Abbess turned on the two girls fiercely. "You minxes," she cried. "Do you make eyes at my man?" The pair shrank back from her fury, but Master Villon, who seemed suddenly to have fallen into a meditative mood, rambled on in a, kind of reverie, as indifferent to the Fircone and all his surroundings as if he were a lonely shepherd tending his sheep on a ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of the reader to the lowest point. Only extreme literary art can so nullify this effort in effect as to make description by detail pleasurable, if of any length. Description by detail is, perhaps, more admissible in writing having a meditative tone than in any other, except, ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... with his brush) dresses up his sleek, hectic, beardless archangels as Roman warriors, and makes them stand, straddling beatically on thin little dapper legs, wistfully gazing from beneath their wondrously ornamented helmets on the walls of the Cambio at Perugia; when he masquerades meditative fathers of the Church as Socrates and haggard anchorites as Numa Pompilius; most ludicrous of all, when he attires in scantiest of—clinging antique drapery his mild and pensive Madonnas, and, with daintily pointed toes, places them to throne bashfully ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... psychical monologues which Browning has written. It seems to me that if these two poems only, "Prospice" and "Rabbi Ben Ezra," were to survive to the day of Macaulay's New Zealander, the contemporaries of that meditative traveller would have sufficient to enable them to understand the great fame of the poet of "dim ancestral days," as the more acute among them could discern something of the real Shelley, though time had preserved but ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... as a style of technique which he himself has largely created. The second movement of this, the march tempo, represents Schumann's imagination in a forcible light in two directions—its bold, strong moods, and its deeply subjective, meditative activity. The "Kreisleriana" consists of eight fantasies named after an old schoolmaster near Leipsic, noted for his eccentricities. This work was coldly received when first produced, but later has become very popular. ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... left; opposite is the bridge; over that, on the right, the thick dark foliage is blackening almost into sombreness as the night draws on. Immediately beneath are the arched cloisters resounding with the solitary footfall of meditative students, and suggesting grateful retirement. I say to myself then, as I sit in my open window, that for a continuance I would rather have this than any scene I have visited during the whole of our most enjoyed tour, and fetch ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... silvery wavelets. It was a night for meditation and prayer. Unhappy is the state of man who can look forth from the deck of a ship on such a scene and not feel gratitude to the Framer of the magnificent firmament above him,—whom it does not make more meditative, more prayerful, than his wont,—whom it does not cause to ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... time in our long connection I observed Jeeves almost smile. The corner of his mouth curved quite a quarter of an inch, and for a moment his eye ceased to look like a meditative fish's. ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... I yesterday observed, slow-pacing beside the waves, a meditative priest, who gave me some details regarding the ruined church of which Gissing speaks. It lies in the direction of the cemetery, outside the town; "its lonely position," he says, "made it interesting, and the cupola of coloured tiles (like that of the cathedral of Amalfi) remained ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... self-creation upon its own suggestions: but truth is to be mined from Nature, to be wrung from experience, to be seized as the victor's trophy on the battlefield of action and suffering. The flowers of poetry may bud spontaneously around the meditative spirit of genius, but the harvest of Truth, though, to be reaped by mind, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... the printed pages of the newspaper with no outward sign of excitement. Then he took out his money, quietly, and counted it, with meditative ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... she never looked his way, he took a wicked pleasure in surreptitiously closing first one eye and then the other in her direction. This might not entirely satisfy the aspirations of his soul, yet it seemed to serve as some vent for his pent-up spirit. He turned to his spouse with a pleasantly meditative air. ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... poetical figure; moreover, he charms by his flowing, musical verse, by the enthralling elegance and grace of his poetical imagery, and genuine lyric inspiration. All his poetry is filled with quiet, meditative sadness. It is by the music of his verse and the tender tears of his feminine lyrism that Nadson penetrates the hearts of his readers. His masterpiece is "My Friend, My Brother," and this reflects the sentiment of all his work.[52] Here ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood |
