"Abstracted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lying on the leafy slope, he was busying himself with gathering together all the acorns and acorn-cups within his reach, examining them carefully one by one, and yet with a face that grew grave and became abstracted. More time passed than he knew probably, and Hazel had leisure to come out of her own abstractions and wonder at his. He did not look as if he remembered her presence; and yet a sensible woman has no objection to such ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... all the principal gods were assembled under Prometheus's roof, doing justice to the figs and mulberries, and wine cooled with Taygetan snow. The guests were more than usually despondent. Prometheus was moody and abstracted, his breast seemed labouring with thought. "So looked my Pythoness," whispered Apollo to his neighbour, "when about to ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... long, Lem," responded Lon. Fledra was not too abstracted to notice the uneasy tone in the ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... his bag and went out on the street, hailed the least vociferous of the taxi pirates and had himself driven to the Granada Hotel. His brows were still knitting in abstracted thought when a bell-boy had transported the black bag and himself to a room on the sixth floor, received his gratuity and departed. Thompson was high above the rumble of street cars, facing a thoroughfare given largely to motor traffic, with a window which overlooked the lower town and harbor, ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... matter and form, with Aristotle, corresponds to the opposition between the element of generality and the element of particularity. Matter is indeterminate; form is determinate. Matter, abstracted from form, in thought, is entirely without predicate and distinction; form is that which enters into the definition of every subject, and without which it could not be defined. Matter is capable of the widest diversity of forms, but is itself without form. Pure form is, in fact, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... tale humdrum, And with attention read Tom Thumb; My spirits with my body progging, Both hand in hand together jogging; Sunk over head and ears in matter. Nor can of metaphysics smatter; Am more diverted with a quibble Than dream of words intelligible; And think all notions too abstracted Are like the ravings of a crackt head; What intercourse of minds can be Betwixt the knight sublime and me, If when I talk, as talk I must, It is but prating to a bust? Where friendship is by Fate ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... undertaken, that he often seemed to overlook the claims upon his attention of her he had chosen as his partner in his struggle against the powers of darkness. Sometimes I did not see him for several days; and often when we were together he was so abstracted he did not seem aware I was present. Whenever I could get him to speak of himself, he would dilate on the unspeakable felicity that he felt in drawing nearer to the end of his work. I affected not to know to what he alluded; ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... was gloomy and abstracted; arguments about Justification interested him little, and when the talk fell upon the price of wool, he remained standing, absolutely lost in gloomy dreams. It grew a little dark in the room, the sky being so overcast, and suddenly, all the voices having ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... still in the street to see a dog gnaw a bone."[2301] Man, in abandoning himself wholly to society, had withheld no portion of his personality for himself while decorum, clinging to him like so much ivy, had abstracted from him the substance of his being and subverted every principle ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... later Ronald noticed that Andrew, who had been absent for some time, and had only returned just in time for supper, looked worried and abstracted, and replied almost at random to any questions put ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... thoughts on which thou wert intent. For, first and foremost, it was the wish of thy soul that thine Austin might, as little as possible, be reminded of the change in his fortunes,—might miss as little as possible those interruptions to his abstracted scholarly moods at which, it is true, he used to fret and to pshaw and to cry Papa! but which nevertheless always did him good, and freshened up the stream of his thoughts. And, next, it was the conviction of thine understanding that a little society and boon companionship, and the proud ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for what pay? Who is to do no work, and for what pay? And there are curious moral and religious questions connected with these. How far is it lawful to suck a portion of the soul out of a great many persons, in order to put the abstracted psychical quantities together and make one very beautiful or ideal soul? If we had to deal with mere blood, instead of spirit (and the thing might literally be done—as it has been done with infants before now)—so that it ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... office, Mr. Dill was noticeably abstracted. His smiling suavity, his gracious manner, had given place to taciturnity and Ore City's choicest bon mots, its time-tested pleasantries, fell upon inattentive ears. As a matter of fact, his bones ached like a tooth from three long, hard days in the mail-carrier's sledges, and also he recognized ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... fast and furious, and might have been continued for any length of time, but for a sudden alarm that was raised respecting worms, for Harry had just abstracted the last unfortunate wriggler from the ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... Apperception. By this formidable term Kant merely meant the fact that the consciousness "I think them" must (potentially or actually) accompany all our objects. Former skeptics had said as much, but the "I" in question had remained for them identified with the personal individual. Kant abstracted and depersonalized it, and made it the most universal of all his categories, although for Kant himself the Transcendental Ego ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... to pension millionaires who suffered mental anguish because of the draft, and to administer worse than useless laws, still the amount so unnecessarily abstracted would be but a mere bagatelle if labor was steadily employed and reaped its just reward. With the mighty energies of this nation in full play and the wealth remaining with its producers, we could give even all the candidates an office, with plenty to get and little to do, and still ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... small sums advanced him by a speculative solicitor on the chance of one of the wills turning up. I saw a lot of Philipson: such a jolly nose—like a big red truffle. He said he was certain the late head clerk—a chap of Egyptian or Arab extraction, named Daireh—had got the will, or wills, having abstracted them after my uncle's death, because he had hinted at being able to tell him how to find them, and had appointed the Sunday to meet him, but had failed to keep tryst, and had disappeared. All this ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... went, in consequence of an invitation, to Petrograd, the Tzar presented him with a sword on which were the Russian crown and the Montenegrin crown in diamonds. When the old warrior came back to Cetinje, Nikita said that such a weapon could not possibly be worn by a simple man; he therefore abstracted the diamonds and gave it him with false ones in their place. Nikita could not endure criticism, but those persons, including myself, who have charged him with inhuman treatment in the case of Vladimir Tomi['c], an intelligent young judge, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... who was always doing so, rode over to Redford to see if he could help her pack. He wondered at her abstracted manner, and her sudden change of mind concerning the piano and wardrobe and other things. Having laboriously packed books and pictures, she now proposed to unpack half of them. She wanted to see what room she would have in her cottage first. In fact, it seemed ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... a whisper, as she evidently did not wish Arthur to hear. But of this there seemed to be little risk: he hardly seemed to notice the children, but paced on, silent and abstracted; and when, at the entrance to the wood, they bid us a hasty farewell and ran off, he seemed to wake out of ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... chum in an abstracted frame of mind. He had certainly expected his achievement that afternoon would give him a "footing" in Templeton, but in his wildest dreams he had not supposed it would give him such ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... dark abstracted guise Seem most alone in greatest company, With dearth of words, or answers quite awry To them that would make speech of speech arise, They deem, and of their doom the rumour flies, That poison foul ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... between the sanctity of a honeymoon with Lily Young in a fair enchanted pavilion on a terrace by the sea, near, but not too near, white villas, in a place as fairylike as a town etched by Whistler, and some months of pensive and abstracted life, full to overflowing with the joy and eagerness of incessant cerebration; a summer spent in a quiet country-side, full of field-paths, and hedge-rows, and shadowy woodland lanes—rich with red gables, surprises of woodbine and great sunflowers—where he would walk meditatively ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... showed me that the Ganapati was gone, and that my strong box, too, with its silver hoard had disappeared, together with the package of gold coin and jewellery. My hands went instantly to my waistband; it had been torn open, and the crystal casket that held the blue diamonds abstracted. ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... rites and heavy discipline were required to keep the mind in order, and the punishment of the idolatrous nation served as an example for the Jews. When Christianity took the place of Judaism the ideas of the Supreme Being became more pure and abstracted, and the visible attributes of Jehovah and His angels appear to have been less frequently presented to the mind; yet even for many ages it seemed as if the grossness of our material senses required some assistance from the eye in fixing or perpetuating the character of religious instinct, and ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... that he could claim a home and its comforts did he but chose to return to England and Weatherbury Farm. Whether Bathsheba thought him dead was a frequent subject of curious conjecture. To England he did return at last; but the fact of drawing nearer to Weatherbury abstracted its fascinations, and his intention to enter his old groove at the place became modified. It was with gloom he considered on landing at Liverpool that if he were to go home his reception would be of a kind very unpleasant ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... according to our view of the matter, by rejecting the scholiast's explanation. No two eggs can be more like each other than Horace's Malthinus and Seneca's Mecenas."— Philological Museum, Vol. i, p. 477. "Acting, conduct, behaviour, abstracted from all regard to what is, in fact and event, the consequence of it, is itself the natural object of this moral discernment, as speculative truth and [say or] falsehood is of speculative reason."—Butler's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... is precisely what she did. He did not know where the money was, so he watched every movement of her eyes and saw them go automatically towards the drawer and stay there; then he slipped his card into the drawer, abstracted the pocket-book, and took his leave, driving his impudence and skill to the length of making her see him to ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... moving sand; But are not all things so with wretched man? All things soon pass away like rapid streams Which hasten to the sea, where lost for ever In th' ocean's vast abyss unknown they lie. Our wisest wishes and desires are vain, Abstracted vanities, gay painted bubbles, That break when touch'd, and vanish into air. Love, ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... most imperturbably cool and calculating of mankind, under circumstances superinducing peculiar reflection on every word uttered, cannot but come with the force of a whole volume of excoriative evidence against the demoralization of war, even upon the most abstracted and elevated natures.—Vide Letters ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... of the paper been of no interest, she might even have continued to read more in that same abstracted mood; but those four first lines were of a nature which sent a thrilling sensation of horror through her entire frame; the feeling terminating with an ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... She stopped at the door a moment this afternoon in the carriage; she had been over to Rivermouth for her pictures. Unluckily the photographer had spilt some acid on the plate, and she was obliged to give him another sitting. I have an intuition that something is troubling Marjorie. She had an abstracted air not usual with her. However, it may be only my fancy.... I end this, leaving several things unsaid, to accompany my father on one of those long walks which are now his chief ...
— Marjorie Daw • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... I like to come to your place. Your Aunt Maria is so straight out, nothing false about her. I like her. But now I bet you're thinking of how many berries you can eat," she added as she noted the child's abstracted look. ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... it between his face and her, have read an hour or so in silence; but Mr. Sewell had not this resort. He knew perfectly well that he had excited his sister's curiosity on a subject where he could not gratify it, and therefore he took refuge in a kind of mild, abstracted air of quietude which bid defiance to all ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and when he awoke next morning found that his little friend was not with him. He dressed himself; and then made another discovery, which was, that every farthing of his money had been abstracted from his pockets. Of this unpleasant fact he ventured to complain to one or two boys, who were lying on other beds with their clothes on; they laughed at him, called him a greenhorn, and made use of other language, which ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... to be envied who can thus be abstracted in prayer. How do they manage it? For, in fact, it is not easy, if one thinks of the sorrows of the world, to praise the vaunted mercy of God. It is all very fine to believe that He exists, to be certain ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... To these chemists music seems to be no more than the art of resolving sounds. They mistake the alphabet for a book. Christophe shrugged his shoulders when he heard them say complacently that to understand art it must be abstracted from the man. They were extraordinarily pleased with this paradox: for by it they fancied they were proving their own musical quality. And even Goujart subscribed to it—Goujart, the idiot who had never been able to ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... expressed so much surprise at hearing the man whom he believed to be the Duke of Monmouth give vent to such a peculiar exclamation, that the Gascon realized the imprudence of which he had been guilty. He quickly recovered his usual coolness, looked at De Chemerant in an abstracted manner; then, as if he had awakened from a profound meditation, he said, in a short tone, "Very well, sir, let us go." Again mounting his horse, the Gascon took the road to Fort Royal, still followed by the escort and accompanied ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... upon their own citizens—monies passing from hand to hand, and for provisions provided and works done in the colonies; but the large sums appropriated by Parliament for the war in the colonies was so much money abstracted from England, sent across the Atlantic, and added to the resources and ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... scurrilous Jewish 'Life of Christ,'"—the Hebrew text with a Latin translation and explanatory notes, appeared at Leyden in 1705, under the title Historia Jeschuce Nazareni,—the many wonders admitted to have been performed by Christ are ascribed to his "having abstracted from the Temple the Ineffable Name and concealed it in his thigh,"—an idea thought to be of Indian origin. Clouston goes so far as to say: "Legends of the miracles of Isa, son of Maryam, found in the works of Muslim writers, seem to have been derived ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... from the Prince, she returned, silent and abstracted, with Vogotzine. She saw Andras depart with a mournful sadness, and a sudden longing to have him stay—to protect her, to defend her, to be there if ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of details of the cartel Brereton showed himself curiously variable, at times sitting completely abstracted from what was being discussed, and then suddenly entering into the discussions, only to compel an entire going over of points already deemed settled, and raising difficulties which ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... obeisance, withdrew. The seer adjusted his beard, carefully brushed the down from his velvet cap, and sate for a while as if abstracted from all outward intercourse. His keen quick eye became fixed, its lustre imperceptibly waning. A cloud seemed to pass gradually over his sharp features, until their expression was absorbed, giving place to a look of mere lifeless inanity. A spectator might have fancied himself gazing at a sage of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... gathered about Rosecrans and tried to make their way out of the press. With the conviction that nothing more could be done, mental and physical weakness seemed to overcome the general. He rode silently along, abstracted, as if he neither saw nor heard. Garfield went to him and suggested that he be allowed to try to make his way by Rossville to Thomas, the sound of whose battle seemed to indicate that he was not yet broken. Rosecrans assented listlessly and mechanically. As Garfield told it ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... of the hickory sticks in the chimney, and those soft movements about the table. If ever such movements were made with pleasure—if ever a face of very deep peacefulness hovered over the placing and displacing of knives and forks, plates and salt-cellars,—it was then. Yet it was not a very abstracted face, nor looked as if the outward quiet might be absolutely immovable. The last touch put to the table, Faith glanced at the hickory sticks on the fire; but they wanted nothing; and then her look came round to Mr. Linden, and the smile which could ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... moments, on the authority of Laplace's friend and pupil, the well-known mathematician Poisson: 'After the publication (in 1825) of the fifth volume of the Mecanique Celeste, Laplace became gradually weaker, and with it musing and abstracted. He thought much on the great problems of existence, and often muttered to himself, "Qu'est-ce que c'est que tout cela!" After many alternations he appeared at last so permanently prostrated that his family applied to his favourite pupil, M. Poisson, to try to get ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... gate from out a cabbage-patch toward nightfall, may, perhaps, have observed, that, immediately upon emerging from the sacred vegetable preserve, a couple of the more elderly and designing of them assumed a sudden air of abstracted musing, and reduced their progress to a most dignified and leisurely walk, as though to convince the human beholder that their recent proximity to the cabbages had been but the trivial ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... been nothing proven as yet. Others as well as you have had access to the safe, and could, if they wished, have opened the envelope and abstracted those papers. I must have time to think this over. First I shall call up the Boston firm and settle that point. Then, when Mr. Gibbs gets here he and I will try to find out just what could have ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... know. This very shabby man was quite close to the bookstall, while Mr Sandbach stood quite ten yards away. Mr Sandbach gazed steadily at the man, but the man, ignoring Mr Sandbach, allowed dreamy and abstracted eyes to rest on the far distance, where a locomotive or so was impatiently pushing and pulling waggons as an excitable mother will drag and shove an inoffensive child. The platform as a whole was sparsely ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... came Hobbes; with a cry from the sofa, There where he lay, the great Hobbes, contemplative, corpulent, witty; Author forgotten and silent of currentest phrase and fancy; Mute and exuberant by turns, a fountain at intervals playing, Mute and abstracted, or strong and abundant as rain in the tropics; Studious; careless of dress; inobservant; by smooth persuasions Lately decoyed into kilt on example of Hope and the Piper, Hope an Antinous mere, Hyperion ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... 1. Abstracted from all consideration of the profundity of criticism that is displayed, no man can avoid being struck with the humour and pleasantry in which they are conceived, or the elegant and gentlemanlike language in which they are couched. What can be more natural or more ingenuous than to ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... due to different causes—rain, wind, and evaporation being the chief—are taken into consideration, the effect of 10,000 cubic feet a second abstracted would probably not be noticeable. That this would be so is the opinion, after careful investigation, of many eminent American engineers. On the other hand there is a similar unanimity of opinion as to the advantages that would be obtained ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... himself from his abstracted mood, and listened with a smile to the conversation of his young relatives. Yet his voice had something peculiar in its tones when he undertook ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... very arches of the eyebrows of thirty men— captain, mates, and crew—a boat was to be abstracted; they knowing nothing of the event, until all knowledge ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... so easy for them as you think, George," said Little Douglas; "for I shut all the doors behind me, and some time will elapse before the keys that I have left there open them. As to these," added he, showing those he had so skilfully abstracted, "I resign them to the Kelpie, the genie of the lake, and I nominate him ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... nodded. He was not of an impulsive nature. He got down from his horse and looked at the girder in an abstracted way; and presently there came into his eyes a dreamy, far-away, sad sort of expression, as if there had been a very sad and painful occurrence in his family, way back in the past, and that piece of timber in some way reminded him of it and brought the old ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... the young man, moody and abstracted, still looked on ahead, some of his senses seemed yet on guard. His head turned at the slightest sound of the forest life that came to him. If a twig cracked, he heard it. If a green nut cut by some early squirrel clattered softly on the leaves, ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... gentleman was evidently much embarrassed; but he was very quiet and subdued in his manner. He was less impatient and snappish than usual; said nothing about "stupidity" and "blundering," as was his habit. He seemed to be abstracted, as well he might; but while he displayed less enthusiasm in his teaching, he was infinitely more gentlemanly and kind. As he gave no occasion for any trouble, none came. Though the captain did not appear at any recitation conducted by him, ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... here," said Dr. Dean, "underneath this remarkable stone carving of your warrior-prototype, Monsieur Gervase. You seem very much abstracted. I asked you before if you were not well; but you never ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... bade adieu to Mrs. Heartwell and stepped forth from her neat white cottage on this cool September morning, accompanied by the young school-mistress. His thoughtful face bore the impress of a sleepless night, and he was taciturn and abstracted. By his side Lizzie chatted away, as though bribed to dispel the gloom and silence that threatened to surround them-chatted as though no other feeling than gayety filled her own fearful heart-chatted till a curve in ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... chisel. The lock was broken: tremblingly and eagerly Catherine ransacked the contents; opened paper after paper, letter after letter, in vain: no certificate, no will, no memorial. Could the brother have abstracted the fatal proof? A word sufficed to explain to Philip what she sought for; and his search was more minute than hers. Every possible receptacle for papers in that room, in the whole house, was explored, and ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which Cotherstone sat, the decanter on the table, the glass in Cotherstone's hand, and he knew that Cotherstone was telling a fib when he said he had been asleep. He noticed, too, the six sovereigns and the two or three silver coins lying on the desk, and he wondered what had made his master so abstracted that he had forgotten to pocket them. For he knew Cotherstone well, and Cotherstone was so particular about money that he never allowed even a penny to lie ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... funeral it was noticed that Alfred Blumenthal appeared abstracted, as if continually occupied with grave thoughts. One day, as he stood leaning against the window, gazing on the stars and stripes that floated across the street, he turned suddenly and exclaimed: "It is wrong to be staying here. ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... impression upon Mrs. Buskirk. A citizen of Plainton who possessed a yacht was not to be disregarded. After this she was rather abstracted, and the conversation fell off. Burke saw that it was time for him to go, and as he had now said all he cared to say, he was ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... appear to have noticed it. He seemed to be thinking of something else. His air was pensive and abstracted. ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... had employed in the various countries of her sojourn, and a disquisition upon their several lives and characters, fortifying her statements by reference of doubtful points to her daughter. This occupied some time, and Ferris listened to it all with an abstracted air. At last he said, with a smile, "There was an Italian priest came to see me this morning, who astonished me by knowing English—with a brogue that he'd learned from an English priest straight from Dublin; perhaps he might do, Mrs. Vervain? He's professionally ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... eighty-five," said Matt in his deep, abstracted voice, pointing at the bluish cylinder. "Located it about a year ago. Last of the missing elements. Does strange tricks when subjected to heavy electric current. In each of those things that look like searchlights is one ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... at the Rue Basse, he found to his horror that the lock of his precious casket had been forced, and some of Madame Hanska's letters had been abstracted. It was a case of blackmail, as the thief demanded 30,000 francs, in default of which the letters would at once be handed over to the Czar. If this were to happen, Balzac's hopes of happiness were annihilated, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... brother Henry, a posthumous child, feeble, and in his nurse's arms, but on this morning showing signs of unusual animation and of sympathy with the glorious promise of the young June day. Whirling round on his heel, at a little distance, and utterly abstracted from all around him, my next brother, Richard, he that had caused so much affliction by his incorrigible morals to the Sultan Amurath, pursued his own solitary thoughts—whatever those might be. And, finally, as regards myself, it happened that I was standing close to the edge ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Back upon itself, and disclosing objects in succession, until the eye could embrace all that came within its extent of vision. As the officers yet lingered near the rude grave of their companion, watching with abstracted air the languid and almost mechanical action of their jaded men, as they emptied shovel after shovel of the damp earth over the body of its new tenant, they were suddenly startled by an expression of exultation from Sir ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... mistake and to their unskilfulness slowly and patiently to work out its cure. To go away were, for him, to consent to be the one unbroken string on a noble but difficult instrument. These thoughts and many more like them passed to and fro, out through the abstracted eyes of the one, across to the fading clouds, and back through the abstracted eyes and into the ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable
... from the Rue de Normandie to the Rue de Richelieu, Pons drew from the abstracted Schmucke the details of the story of the modern prodigal son, for whom Death had killed the fatted innkeeper. Pons, but newly reconciled with his nearest relatives, was immediately smitten with a desire to make a match between Fritz ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... wonder that these things are forgotten in the daily struggle of London. And if the merchant spares an abstracted glance from the morning or evening newspaper out upon the fields from the carriage window, the furrows of the field can have but little meaning. Each looks to him exactly alike. To the farmers and the labourer such and such a furrow marks ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... preferred to be alone, you seemed so abstracted," she said, lamely; and then, as they came out into the sunlight in the circle, she began talking of the garden as she would to any visitor; of its beginnings, its growth, and its future, when her father's plans should ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... the brainless fop; The staid and sober priest and minister; And she who worshiped at proud fashion's shrine; The mental giant, serious and sad; The thoughtful student and philosopher; And some of intellect diminutive; The man of letters, with abstracted mien, And he whose every thought was on the toil Which made his bare existence possible; The blushing maiden, pure and innocent; The stately grandam, dignified and gray; The matron, with the babe upon her breast; The silly superannuated flirt, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... give rise to a train of reflections in which there is bitterness. The heroine of the rifle remains silent while in the act of reloading; and the tinge of melancholy that pervades her countenance tells that her thoughts are abstracted. While priming the piece, she is even maladroit enough to spill a quantity of the powder—though evidently not from any ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... what these three did, but I haven't told you yet what Elizabeth Ann did. And it is worth telling. As Cousin Ann stepped in, glancing suspiciously from her sober-faced and abstracted parents to the lamb-like innocence of old Shep, little Elizabeth Ann burst into a shout of laughter. It's worth telling about, because, so far as I know, that was the first time she had ever laughed out heartily in all her life. For my part, I'm ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... that the young nobleman addressed himself for admittance; but Faustus immediately objecting the tenderness of his constitution, discouraged his desires with words of some harshness; "Go," said he, "and first learn to live in the world abstracted from its pleasures. Who can well suppose, that you on a sudden, relinquishing a life of softness and ease, can take up with our coarse diet and clothing and can inure yourself to our watchings and fastings?" The saint, with downcast eyes, modestly replied: "He, who hath inspired me with the will ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... county, had also long been held in the Town-Hall of Horsham; but this privilege was selfishly abstracted from the town, by the inhabitants of Lewes; and even the county gaol, which has been stationed here, for time immemorial, is, we understand, to be removed to the all devouring eastern rival: the quarter sessions however, are ...
— The History and Antiquities of Horsham • Howard Dudley
... by making additions to the store of jewels, and it shall never be recorded that on finding the most valuable of our possessions stolen, I made no effort to trace and recover them. True, they have been abstracted in a manner almost miraculous for ingenuity and rapidity, but from this moment I will not rest until they are recovered. And you, Scarsmere, as Keeper of ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... observes, are generally too retired and abstracted to let their example be of much service to the world: whereas the bad, on the contrary, are conspicuous to all; they stand forth, they appear on the fore ground of the picture, and force themselves ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... will we stay here?" asked Nick, who had some idea on his mind, as the others readily understood from his abstracted manner. ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... partly because he is not attending to it himself, his thoughts being busy with the approaching crisis of his fortune, and drawn away to the other matters which he has in hand, and partly because in her trance of wonder at what he is relating she seems abstracted and self-withdrawn from the matter of his discourse. His own absent-mindedness on this occasion is aptly and artfully indicated by his broken and disjointed manner of speech. That his tongue and thought are not beating ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... I see him?" and Samson ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair in an abstracted manner. "Wall, let me see. It was somewhar out in the hills. I've been in so many places that it's hard fer me to tell one from t'other. I do git terribly mixed up ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... about him; she talked only of her partner, after he had made his bow and retired; of the music, the floor, the rare misfortune of having already torn her dress. Isabel was sure, however, she had discovered her lover to have abstracted a flower; though this knowledge was not needed to account for the dutiful grace with which she responded to the appeal of her next partner. That perfect amenity under acute constraint was part of a larger system. ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... alarm as easily as they had taken it up, turned to their own affairs again. In a few minutes Wharton appeared on the scaffolding and went to his regular work-place. After a time they saw him coming to their corner. He looked paler than usual and more abstracted, and, what was unusual, he carried a brush in his hand, as though he had broken off his work without thinking what he was doing. He hardly noticed them, but sat down, holding the brush with both hands, though it was ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... later that she had been surprised at Cherry's quietness; Cherry had looked pale and abstracted, and had not seemed ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... was endowed with delicate features, a soft, Madonna like expression of countenance, elegance of movement and a quiet, yet gracious manner. Attentive to those around the board, she said but little. Occasionally, she listened in abstracted mood to the ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... and living energetic presence, and collateral duties, which accompany a Professor in a great school of learning, I do not see (abstracting from him, I repeat, in hypothesis, what never could possibly be abstracted from him in fact), why the chair of Astronomy in a Catholic University should not be filled by a La Place, or that of Physics by a Humboldt. Whatever they might wish to say, still, while they kept to their ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... degree, he did not stint the labours of others, so far as he could command or procure them. Every pleading or necessary paper connected with his causes was in tile first place to be multiplied into numerous copies, and then abstracted or condensed into the smallest possible limits, but no material point or idea was by any means to be omitted. His propensity to concision or condensation was a peculiar trait in his mind. He would reduce an elaborate ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Saurin there of having come to this house, one Saturday when we were all out; of having gone into my room, taken my keys out of the pocket of a coat lying there, opened the cricket and football japanned box, and abstracted four pounds twelve shillings from a purse inside it. Then I assert that he put the keys back in the coat-pocket, having first locked the box and put it back in its place, and ran back to his tutor's house, where he changed and went out to play at football. The motive of this theft ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... rain-fall of two inches on an acre, (200 tons,) would require over 20 tons of coal. Of course a considerable—probably by far the larger,—part of the heat taken up in the process of evaporation is furnished by the air; but the amount abstracted from the soil is great, and is in direct proportion to the amount of water removed by this process; hence, the more we remove by draining, the more heat ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... that two of the letters seized and held as evidence—letters from M. Wilson to Madame Limouzin—were written on paper manufactured after their date,—an incident not unfamiliar to readers of old-fashioned English novels. The real letters, therefore, had undoubtedly been abstracted, and replaced by others of ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... spread: Such as fools say become not Men to shed; Past hours of bliss, regenerated charms, Rose, when he felt his Daughter in his arms: So tender was the scene, the generous Dame Wept, as she told of Phoebe's virtuous fame, And the good Host, with gestures passing strange, Abstracted seem'd through fields of joy to range: Rejoicing that his favour'd Roof should prove Virtue's asylum, and the nurse of Love; Rejoicing that to him the task was given, his full Soul was ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield
... beheld nothing more than an abstracted frown over the tip-top edge of his paper, I defiantly swung into The Humming Coon, which apparently had no more effect than Herman Lohr. So with malice aforethought I slowly and deliberately pounded out the Beethoven Funeral March. I lost myself, in fact, in that ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... very gently he took her hand in his. "Don't you worry," he soothed. "Some time, after we get home, perhaps you will come to New York, and then I'll show you Broadway. It's better than anything you can get over here, anyway! Here, I have your handkerchief," and he abstracted a filmy little square, all lace and no center, from his pocket ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... us long?" inquired the shoeman, after trying on the shoes and cursing out Peter, the adenoidic clerk, in an abstracted, hopeless manner. ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... passing through the age of the Distribution of Knowledge. The spread of the English-speaking race since 1850, and the cheapness of printing, have brought in primers and handbooks by the million. All the books of the older literatures are being abstracted and sown abroad in popular editions. The magazines fulfil the same function; every one of them is a penny cyclopedia. Andrew Lang heads an army of organized workers who mine in the old literature and coin ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... a politician of the rip-roaring variety who pounded the table and howled his enthusiasm, whose logic was all expressed in the short-story form, sometimes witty, sometimes far-fetched and often profane. He interested me least of all, and my mind abstracted by the Tillhurst feature went back again to the Plains. I could not realize what was going on when the politician had finished amid uproarious applause, and the chairman was introducing the next speaker, until I caught my father's name, coupled with lavish ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... they got some years later by means of the Clare election. Yet if, in some instances like this, Mr. Pearce has too largely drawn upon official papers, which he should rather have abstracted and condensed, on the other hand, his work has a specific value in bringing forward private documents, to which his opportunities have gained him a confidential access. Two portraits of Lord Wellesley, one in middle life, and one in ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... kingdoms from the exalted heights to which they had been raised; that of Bel was in the Tropic of Cancer, that of Ea in the Tropic of Capricorn. They gathered around them all the divinities who could easily be abstracted from the function or object to which they were united, and they thus constituted a kind of divine aristocracy, comprising all the most powerful beings who guided the fortunes of the world. The number ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... accordingly been prepared and published for their information by Mr. Ratcliffe, the corresponding secretary, at an expense of about L3,500. In the preface to the last edition it is stated that "this sum has not been abstracted from the funds set apart for relief during sickness, for assurances at death, or for providing for necessitous widows and orphans, but from the management funds of the lodges—funds which, being generally raised by direct levy on the members, ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... a moment of peril and fear, when he had need to grasp unseen strength, sitting in an abstracted mood, tracing on the table with his finger the words 'Vivit! vivit!'—'He lives! He lives!' It is our hope for ourselves, and for God's truth, and for mankind. Men come and go; leaders, teachers, thinkers speak ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... and Co. discovered that a number of rare books had been abstracted from their Strand shop, including a first edition of Burns's 'Poems,' 1786; Shakespeare's 'Poems,' 1640, first edition, with portrait by Marshall, and eleven extra leaves at the end; Heywood's 'Thyestes of Seneca,' 1560; and Piers Plowman's 'Vision and Crede,' 1561—all ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... if half in soliloquy or meditation, though he was looking towards Callista. The contrast between them was singular: he thus abstracted; she too, utterly forgetful of self, but absorbed in him, and showing it by her eager eyes, her hushed breath, her anxious attitude. At last she said impatiently, "Father, you are speaking to yourself; ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... find some pretext to stand beneath the same roof. She wears a little languid air; last evening was a sore trial to young nerves. A tinge of accusing plaintiveness is in her voice. She is markedly abstracted; her thoughts are wandering, of course, all about the house in search of him. She has her pretext ready, and meets Sachs's warm compliment upon her appearance with a reproachful: "Ah, master! So ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... gesture of apology towards her sister-in-law. She looked at her husband and gave him a silent, urgent message to break the awkward pause, a message which he disregarded, continuing coolly to inspect his fingernails with an abstracted air, contradicted by the half-smile on his lips. Sylvia, listening to the talk, could make nothing out of it, but miserably felt her little heart grow leaden as she looked from one face to another. Judith and Lawrence, tired of waiting for the music to begin, had dropped asleep ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... represent a family of tales found scattered all over Europe. They are also connected distantly with one of the stories in the "1001 Nights," and thus with the Orient again. For a discussion of this cycle, see Clouston, "Popular Tales and Fictions," 2 : 332 ff., where are cited and abstracted versions from the Old-English prose form of the "Seven Wise Masters," from the Gesta Romanorum, also the fabliau "Destourmi;" then five other fabliaux from Legrand's and Barbasan's collections, especially the trouvere Dutant's "Les Trois Bossus;" and the second tale of the ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... elements of a sequence in the material order, as results of a designed and skilful dealing of accomplished fingers with precious forms of matter for the delight of the eyes. Greek sculpture has come to be regarded as the product of a peculiarly limited art, dealing with a specially abstracted range of subjects; and the Greek sculptor as a workman almost exclusively intellectual, having only a sort of accidental connexion with the material in which his thought was expressed. He is fancied to have been disdainful ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater |
