"Brooding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said: But the world gets along very well as it is, and without brooding too much upon ethical problems. To this we may answer: Does the world get along so very well, after all? Are there no evils that foresight and some firmness of character might have obviated? And when we concern ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... on, and a full moon rose high over the trees into the sky, lighting the land till it lay bathed in ghostly day. And with the coming of the night, brooding and mourning by the pool, Buck became alive to a stirring of the new life in the forest other than that which the Yeehats had made, He stood up, listening and scenting. From far away drifted a faint, sharp yelp, followed by a chorus of similar sharp yelps. As the moments passed the yelps grew ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... midnight's holy hour, and silence now Is brooding, like a gentle spirit, o'er The still and pulseless world. Hark! on the winds The bells' deep tones are swelling; 'tis the knell Of the ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... little chance for brooding over his worries, for Lawyer Ed left more and more to him as the days went on. Not that he did any less, but the temperance campaign was on again, all racial and religious prejudices forgotten, in the glory ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... the millions which your steps have bowed? Think ye, ye hold in your ignoble thrall, Mind, soul, thought, taste, hope, feeling, valor, all? No; these unfettered scorn your nerveless hand, Sport at their will, and scoff at your command, Range through arcades of shadow-brooding palms, Snuff their free airs and breathe their floating balms, Or bolder still, on fancy's fiery wing—[22] Caught from their letters at the noon-day spring— With star-eyed science, and her seraph train Read the bright secrets of yon azure plain; Hear Loxian murmurs in Rhodolphe's ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... will get well. Don't fear. Fear destroys strength and therefore increases the trouble. Many get downhearted, discouraged, despairing—the very worst thing that can happen, doing as much harm, and in many cases more, than their former dissipation. Brooding kills; hope enlivens. Then sing with joy that the savior of knowledge has vanquished the death-dealing ignorance of the past; that the glorious strength of manhood has awakened and cast from you forever the grinning skeleton of vice. ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... blotted out the highways, re-planted the forests, till the court house dissolved, and a wondrous maple wood crowned the hill on which it stood. And so back, till the Indians returned, and elk and panthers roamed at will. Then he pointed out a sorrow-stricken, moody, brooding man, seeking a "lodge in the vast wilderness," hunting the spring, and building his shanty, making his clearing, and planting a few apple seeds, brought from his old home; and picking up the section of the tree trunk, he read off from its end, "twenty-nine ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... explanation of the readings, and whatever idle babble you say has come into my head? Have you come full of envy, and dejected because nothing is sent you from home; and while the discussion is going on, do you sit brooding on nothing but how your father or your brother are disposed towards you:—"What are they saying about me there? at this moment they imagine I am making progress and saying, He will return perfectly omniscient! I wish I could become omniscient before I return; but that would ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... alcohol has affected him too. Not to strengthen his courage; for of this he has already enough; but to remove the weight from off his soul, which, after the scene at Don Gregorio's, had been pressing heavily upon it. Six hours have since elapsed, and for the first three he had been brooding over his humiliation, his spirit prostrate in the dust. But the Catalan has again raised it to a pitch of exultation; especially when he reflects upon the prospect of the sure and speedy vengeance ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... Manoa at dawn, and proceeded as far as Mahinauli, in mid-valley, where he rested under a hala (Pandanus odoratissimus) tree that grew in the grove of wiliwili (Erythrina monosperma). He sat there some time, brooding over the fancied injury to himself, and nursing his wrath. Upon resuming his walk he broke off and carried along with him a bunch of hala nuts. It was quite noon when he reached Kahaiamano and presented himself before the house of Kahalaopuna. ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... all in "Pandora," "Proserpine," "La Ghirlandata," "The Day Dream," "Our Lady of Pity," and the other life-size, half-length figure paintings in oil which were the masterpieces of his maturer style. The languid pose, the tragic eyes with their mystic, brooding intensity in contrast with the full curves of the lips and throat, give that union of sensuousness and spirituality which is a constant trait of Rossetti's poetry. The Pre-Raphaelites were accused of exaggerating ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Cliff had made some discovery that he was not sharing with his partner. Often Kay, entering the laboratory, would find Cliff furtively attempting to conceal some operation that he was in the midst of. Kay said nothing, but a brooding anger began to fill his heart. So Cliff was trying to get all the credit for the result of their years of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... I found at close range on his native heath, wearing the mantle of the departed Botha, carrying on a Government with a minority, and with the shadow of an internecine war brooding on the horizon, was the same serene, clear-thinking strategist who had raised his voice in the Allied Councils. Then the enemy was the German and the task was to destroy the menace of militarism. Now it was his own unreconstructed Boer—blood of his blood,—and behind that Boer the larger problem ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... eyes like a man possessed by a devil who will not leave him; and I have always observed, that the devil most obstinate to be expelled is a secret. I knew you were a Corsican. I knew you were gloomy, and always brooding over some old history of the vendetta; and I overlooked that in Italy, because in Italy those things are thought nothing of. But in France they are considered in very bad taste; there are gendarmes who occupy themselves with such affairs, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... worn itself away to nothing. I encountered my first misprint, a thing bad enough, in all conscience, to the mere prose-writer, but to the ardent youngster who really believes himself to be adding to the world's store of poetry, a thing wholly intolerable and beyond the reach of words. Brooding over the slaughtered thousands of Sedan, I wrote what, at the time, I conceived ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... by the artistry and impeccable literary craftsmanship of his weird tales; and he was regarded on both sides of the Atlantic as probably the greatest contemporary master of weird fiction. His ability to create and sustain a mood of brooding dread and unnamable horror is nowhere better shown than in the posthumous tale ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... forehead in his hands, and started from his brooding reverie, to remember where he was, to recall his conversation with the mother of the woman he loved, and her saying that she was capable ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and poetry, with their endless power of complexity, are the special arts of the romantic and modern ages. Into these, with the utmost attenuation of detail, may be translated every delicacy of thought and feeling, incidental to a consciousness brooding with delight over itself. Through their gradations of shade, their exquisite intervals, they project in an external form that which is most inward in passion or sentiment. Between architecture and those romantic arts of painting, music, ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... done, and can be done again; but it needs discretion, forethought, tact, earnestness, and unimpeachable honesty of administration, for unless we can depend upon our school boards and kindergartners implicitly, counting upon them for wise cooeperation, brooding care, and great wisdom in selection of teachers, the experiment will be a failure. We have risks enough to run as it is; let us not permit our little ones, more susceptible by reason of age than any we have to deal with now,—let us not permit them to become victims of politics, ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... motionless on the tree top, brooding over the fight which he had just witnessed, until the deepening shadows warned him that it was time to seek repose. Turning on his side he laid his head on his pillow, while a soft breeze swayed the tree gently to and fro and rocked ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... Greenfield had no notion at all that old Captain Brand was Barnaby True's own grandfather and Capt. John Malyoe his murderer, but when he so thrust at him the name of that man, what with that in itself and the late adventure through which he himself had just passed, and with his brooding upon it until it was so prodigiously big in his mind, it was like hitting him a blow to so fling the questions at him. Nevertheless, he was able to reply, with a pretty straight face, that he had heard of Captain Malyoe and ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... and brooding away in the city." The lad's bright, clear eyes looked frankly into the captain's as he continued. "I have been making a fool of myself, Captain. Got into some mischief with a crowd of fellows at school. Of course, I got caught and had to bear the ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... extraordinary opinion of the physician as to the cause of death; but, after all, it is conceivable that the facts may be explained in a straightforward manner. As to your own sensations, when you went to see the house, I would suggest that they were due to a vivid imagination; you must have been brooding, in a semi-conscious way, over what you had heard. I don't exactly see what more can be said or done in the matter; you evidently think there is a mystery of some kind, but Herbert is dead; where then ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... through the medium of letters and messengers, who had begged, implored me to help him against Orcon, the eccentric planet of my own discovery, the planet which belonged to a solar system at the other end of the Universe from ours. Because of my knowledge of Orcon, with its bubbling seas, its brooding nightmares, and lastly, its queer conduct toward Earth, he had wanted to take me away from my telescopes to fight. ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... the Wolfsberg, it seemed to me that I could distinguish a muttering as of voices full of hate, like men talking low on their beds the secret things of evil and treason. I discerned discontent and rebellion rumbling and brooding over the city that clear, keen night ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... at that point in Orange's life had therefore been decided as much by conditions as it had by principles and conscience. But with the Castrillon difficulty, it was a question of hatred—not love. In hate, Orange was as little given to brooding as he was in other matters. He had never been able to forgive the duel at Loadilla which had occasioned so much scandal in Madrid, and brought Brigit's name into bad company. Robert, before his meeting with Mrs. Parflete, had fought several duels, and each of them ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... first place, that you may be something rather than that you may know something. Get yourself planted in God's garden, and learn to GROW. Woo the sun of life, which is love, and the breeze which is enthusiasm, an impulse from that same creative Spirit, which, brooding upon the primeval waters, out of void brought fulness, and out ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... him strains which only spirits know, And make him captive with the silk-soft chain Of twinned-wings brooding round him, and bestow Kisses of Paradise, as pure as rain; My gems, my moonlight-pearls, my girdle-gold, Cymbaling ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... deck because he felt that he needed air. Malign fate would have it that, as he stood at the rail, brooding over this unsurmountable complication, Little Miss Grouch should appear, radiant, glorious of hue, and attended by the galaxy of swains. She gave him the lightest of passing nods as she went by. He raised his ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... has been dark with brooding cares that would not lift themselves, and on whom chilling rains of sorrow have fallen at intervals through all his years, death is but the clearing-up shower; and just behind it are the songs of angels, and the serenity ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... mansion lay a lucid lake, Broad as transparent, deep, and freshly fed By a river, which its soften'd way did take In currents through the calmer water spread Around: the wildfowl nestled in the brake And sedges, brooding in their liquid bed: The woods sloped downwards to its brink, and stood With their green faces ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... to the present, we ask if these mystic influences of light and of darkness still retain their power. Can we doubt it? We have Milton's Melancholy, "of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born"—"where brooding darkness spreads his jealous wings." All this no mere refurbishing of classical lore, but the outcome of deep sympathy with the poets of the prime. And the same is true of his buoyant lines that describe the breaking of the ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... it were this blessed day, and I went in to him and found a party of his intimates about him. Quoth he to me, 'Let me blood;' so I pulled out my astrolabe and, taking the sun's altitude for him, I ascertained that the ascendant was inauspicious and the hour unfavourable for brooding. I told him of this, and he did according to my bidding and awaited a better opportunity. So I made these lines in honour ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... suffering. Among the beds, which stood in a row, each with its head against the wall, one was pointed out on which a living skeleton lay. The face was very very pale, and it seemed as if the angel of death were already brooding over it. Yet, though so changed, there was no mistaking the aspect and the once powerful frame of ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... persecutor. The skipper laid his revolver upon the rudder-head, as though the end of the sensation had come for the present. I was left to my own suffering for the next two hours. Mr. Whippleton sat at the helm in silence, perhaps brooding upon the plan his busy brain had devised. Occasionally he raised the whiskey bottle to his lips, and drank. I was afraid that his frequent drams would arouse the fiend within him, and induce him to use his revolver upon me. He was intoxicated, and violently ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... hours his time was filled with the ordinary duties of the farm. In the early spring, the maple sugar was to be made and there were long, difficult tramps through woods in those misty, brooding days when the miracle of new life is working in tree and vine and leaf. Often the very earth seemed hushed as if waiting in awe for this marvelous change that transforms brown earth and bare tree to a vision of ethereal, tender green. But his books went with him, and in ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... fool he was incredibly steadfast too, and a steadfast fool is a good tool to retain for simple work. He had, too—the boy—a valuable hatred for Culpepper that he allowed to transfer itself to Katharine herself: a brooding hatred that hung in his blue eyes as he gazed downwards at the barge floor or spat at the planks of the side. Its ferocity was augmented by the patches of plaster that stretched over his skull and dropped ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... again. A few months only had elapsed when the father sickened. But he never communicated to his son, or brother, the secret of his sufferings and grief. Worse, he never sought relief in change or medicine; but, brooding in the solitude, gnawing his own heart in silence, he gradually pined away, and, in a brief year, he was gathered to his fathers. He died, like many similarly-tempered natures, of no ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... you not return within nature's pale even if you have gone beyond it? One thing that I will not allow is that you should go and shut yourself up in that solitary little house of yours, where you madden yourself by brooding over the fall of your faith. Come and spend your time with us, so that we may again give you some ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... brooding, for he was working hard at his lessons with the village Priest; and as to little Daria, she had quickly adapted herself to ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... and stood brooding a moment, demanded another smoke, got it, shrugged off some thought with a gesture, ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... a great, great night. Its last hours before day were very dark and sorrowful, and by the time a golden gleam shot out of the east Quackalina knew that her first glance into the nest must bring her grief. The tiny restless things beneath her brooding wings were chirping in an unknown tongue. But their wiry Japanesy voices, that clinked together like little copper kettles, were very young and helpless, and Quackalina was a true mother-duck, and her ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... coming! not as comes the tempest's wrath, When the frown of desolation sits brooding o'er its path; But with mercy, such as leaves his holy signet-light upon The air in lambent beauty, when the darkened storm is gone. We will vote for Birney, We will vote for Birney, We're for Morris and for Birney, And for Freedom ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... a sound of voices loud and rough, and a tread of heavy feet that, breaking rudely upon the gentle-brooding night, drove the colour from Yolande's soft cheek and hushed her voice to ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... Brooding over her wrongs, Dinewan walked away, vowing she would be revenged. But how? That was the question which she and her mate failed to answer for some time. At length the Dinewan mother thought of a plan and prepared ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... gave but slight attention to this concluding paragraph. Even the thought of her brother's death was put aside by the emotions with which she learnt that her mother still lived. After brooding over the intelligence for half a day, she resolved to question Mary, who perhaps, during so long a residence in Grove Lane, had learnt something of the trouble that darkened her master's life. The conversation ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... passage of time rendered his position hateful in the extreme. The feeling within that he had talent which only required opportunity stung him like a scorpion. The days went by, and everything remained the same. Continual brooding and bitterness of spirit went near ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... in a magazine, they have been carefully excerpted from the book. The mellow music of his tones, the self-restraint and meditative attitude, are pleasant to the reader after the turbid utterances and twisted language of Carlyle; we may compare the stirring rebellious spirit brooding over the folly of mankind with the man who takes humanity as he finds it, and is content to make the best of a world in which he sees not much, beyond art and nature and a few old friends, to interest him. Upon the whole, we may place Carlyle ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Coursegol had gone out; the servants had retired, and Dolores was quite alone. Seated in a low chair before the fire, she was busying herself with her embroidery; but it was easy to see that her thoughts were not upon her work. She was brooding over the past and wondering in what quarter of the globe she might hope ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... laboriously gathered from the tears of tortured experience, had become an obsession. She was silent, brooding over it; but she herself was there, larger, less puzzling and negative than hitherto,—an awakening force. The man lost his anchor of convention and traditional reasoning. He felt with her an excitement, a thirst for this evanescent ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... on eating stolidly, without so much as a look in her direction. Gradually the company came to realize that just as surely as a scene was brooding, just so surely would there be no scene as long as they remained. It was Polichinelle, at last, who gave the signal by rising and withdrawing, and within two minutes none remained in the room but M. Binet, his daughter, and Andre-Louis. And then, at last, Andre-Louis set down knife ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... out-of-the-way place that—that it seems very unlikely a real poet—! And then I have been told there are people who have a passion for appearing to do the thing they are not able to do, and I was anxious to be quite sure! My mind would keep brooding over it, and wondering, and longing to know for certain!—So I resolved at last that I would be rid of the doubt, even at the risk of offending you. I know I have been rude—unpardonably ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... and turned against those who would warn them, as a hasty man turns on the messenger who is the bearer of evil tidings. Is it not strange, my dears, how quickly a mere shadowy thought comes to take living form, and grow into a very tragic reality? At one end of the chain is a king brooding over a point of doctrine; at the other are six thousand desperate men, chivied and chased from shire to shire, standing to bay at last amid the bleak Bridgewater marshes, with their hearts as bitter and as hopeless as those of hunted beasts of prey. A king's ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Thus, little as the world concerned itself with the prisoner at Ham, the tendencies of the time were working in his favour; and his confinement, which lasted six years and was terminated by his escape and return to England, appears to have deepened his brooding nature, and to have strengthened rather than diminished his confidence in himself. On the overthrow of Louis Philippe he visited Paris, but was requested by the Provisional Government, on the ground of the unrepealed ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... of the Caliph during my absence. Know then my condition and divulge not my case." When Ghanim heard her words and knew that she was a concubine of the Caliph, he drew back, for awe of the Caliphate beset him, and sat apart from her in one of the corners of the place, blaming himself and brooding over his affair and patiencing his heart bewildered for love of one he could not possess. Then he wept for excess of longing, and plained him of Fortune and her injuries, and the world and its enmities (and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... brooding," Obed whispered the first thing; and then continued by saying: "What are those queer little taps, Max? I'm sure he has something ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... just before ten o'clock, while the sunset glow was still brooding on the harvest fields, the two farm-girls, after a last visit to the cows, slipped into the little sitting-room. Janet, who was mending her Sunday dress, greeted them with a smile and a kind word. Then she moved to the table and took up a ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... increased as they drew near the spot where the one-sided fight had taken place. He had apparently been brooding over the matter, wondering if the mate of his victim could have come upon the scene of the tragedy and sensing what had happened, was lurking thereabouts, bent on exacting a terrible revenge in payment for the untimely ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... your dream. That promise I shall still exact, and I now tell you what I had intended to ask. It was, my dear Philip, permission to sail with you. With you, I care for nothing. I can be happy under every privation or danger; but to be left alone for so long, brooding over my painful thoughts, devoured by suspense, impatient, restless, and incapable of applying to any one thing—that, dear Philip, is the height of misery, and that is what I feel when you are absent. Recollect, I have your promise, Philip. As captain, you have the ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... seen the Swiss "Times"; am intensely disgusted to find that while I was brooding over the calamities possibly consequent on your lending me a hand, that you have been at the Derby Statue, and are to make an oration apropos of the Priestley Statue in ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... "Wanting a general term for such customs," writes Dr. Tylor, "and finding statements in books that this male lying-in lasted on till modern times, in the south of France, and was there called couvade, that is brooding or hatching (couver), I adopted this word for the set of customs, and it has since become established in English." The discussion was carried on in The Academy, 12th and 19th November, 10th and 17th December; Mr. A.L. Mayhew wrote (12th November): ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... country home in which the future statesman's boyhood was cast. The little village was off the beaten track of travel; not yet had the railway joined it to the river front. There were few distractions to excite or dissipate youthful energies. Roaming amid the brooding silence of the hills, fishing for trout, hunting partridges and rabbits, and joining in the simple village games, the boy took his boyish pleasures and built for his manhood's calm and power. His home had an intellectual ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... purpose of raising the siege of Cambray. But honours and success are followed by envy. The King beheld this accession of glory to his brother with great dissatisfaction. He had been for seven months, while my brother and I were together in Gascony, brooding over his malice, and produced the strangest invention that can be imagined. He pretended to believe (what the King my husband can easily prove to be false) that I instigated him to go to war that I might procure for my brother the credit of making peace. ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... provisions failed. Then, as the Hermione would not come out to him, he determined to go into the Hermione. Hamilton was a silent, much-meditating man, not apt to share his counsels with anybody. In the cells of his brooding and solitary brain he prepared, down to the minutest details, his plan for a dash at the Hermione—a ship, it must be remembered, not only more than double his own in strength, but lying moored head and stern in a strongly fortified ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... the election Harboro came home and found a letter waiting for him on the table in the hall. He found also a disquieted Sylvia, who looked at him with brooding and a question in ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... of multitudes of children lift the shadows from the darkest day, and always there is the glorious scenery; the shadowed mystery of the mountains, a turquoise sky, the blossoms and bamboo. The brooding spirit of serenity soon envelops me, and in its irresistible charm ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... begin) "Affectation"— contains, besides the names of three of the intended personages, Sir Babble Bore, Sir Peregrine Paradox, and Feignwit, nothing but unembodied sketches of character, and scattered particles of wit, which seem waiting, like the imperfect forms and seeds in chaos, for the brooding of genius to nurse them into system ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... a little before the false dawn, The moon was at the window-square, Deedily brooding in deformed decay - The curve hewn off her cheek as by an adze; At the shiver of morning a little before the false dawn So the moon looked ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... in the garden—the abundance of his foot-prints convincing Mrs. Gammit that there was also an abundance of bears. From the garden, at length, he had ventured to the yard and the barn. In a half-barrel, in a corner of the shed, he had stumbled upon the ill-fated white top-knot hen, faithfully brooding her eggs. Undeterred by her heroic scolding, and by the trifling annoyance of her feathers sticking in his teeth, he had made a very pleasant meal of her. And still he had heard nothing from Mrs. Gammit, who, for all her indignation, could ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... writing and sealing of the letter at the beginning of the sleep walking described by the lady in waiting seems as if Lady Macbeth had a secret, a confession to make—in the name of the poet. I think also at the end, when the everlasting brooding over her deed drives her to suicide, she dies as a substitute for her intellectual creator, for his own ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... His face was moody, brooding. She forgot the Delilah-dancer of the afternoon, forgot everything except that this wonderful man-creature was ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... mirror told her, what she had scarcely realized, just how much she had suffered. Her eyes, usually so bright and merry, were dark and brooding. Her face looked thin and drawn, and her lips—those lips that had always seemed to smile even when her eyes were grave—had a pathetic, wistful droop, and there were lines, yes, ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... the hut where my companions were sitting, most of them with their heads sunk between their knees, brooding on our misfortune, except Andrew, who stood with his arms folded, meditating on our future plans, and asking assistance whence alone assistance could ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... Mungo came back from the rock edge, silently almost, brooding over a mystery, and the three looked at ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... all around the wind doth blow, And coughing drowns the parson's saw, And birds sit brooding in the snow, And Marian's nose looks red and raw: When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl— Then nightly sings the staring owl Tuwhoo! Tuwhit! Tuwhoo! A merry note! While greasy Joan doth ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... that many doubts and fears shook the courage of the host, as it drew around the doomed city. Their chief had his own heavy burden. He seems to have gone apart to meditate on what his next step was to be. Absorbed in thought, he lifts up his eyes mechanically, as brooding men will, not expecting to see anything, and is startled by the silent figure of 'a man with a sword drawn' in his hand, close beside him. There is nothing supernatural in his appearance; and the immediate thought of the leader ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was already set out on a little table beside the fireplace in that room of secrets, whose normal atmosphere of brooding gloom was now the darker for the deepening dusk. Only the tea itself remained to be served, a special rite never performed in that household by hands more profane than those of the major-domo, Shaik Tsin himself. And this last could be counted ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... before. The romance and beauty of Djenan-el-Maqui were as nothing in comparison with the fascination of the Monster with the Maw, vast, dark, and patient, waiting for its evening provender. To Charmian it seemed like a great personality. Often she found herself thinking of it as sentient, brooding over the opera, secretly attentive to all that was going on in connection with it. She loved its darkness, the ghostly lightness of the covers spread over it, the ranges of its gaping boxes, the far-off mystery of its galleries receding into a heaven of ebon blackness. She wandered about it, ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... in mind, you see, a nestful of birds being fed. The similarity between the family and the bird life is closely carried out in the picture. The children sit together as snugly as birds in a nest. The mother bends toward them in a brooding attitude which is like the bird mother's. Her extended hand suggests a bird's beak, tapering to a sharp point at the end of the spoon. The young bird's mouth is wide open, and in pops the nice spoonful of broth! The house itself is made to look like a cosy ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... strained state of his relations with the Bible Society, Borrow had no intention of remaining in Madrid brooding over his wrongs. Encouraged by the success that had attended his efforts in the Sagra of Toledo, and indifferent to the fact that his renewed activity was known at Toledo, where it was causing some alarm, he determined to proceed to Aranjuez, and, on his arrival ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... started on his long trip north. The fellow had a single-track mind. He still intended to take the girl with him. When Whaley interfered, there would be a fight. It could not come too soon to suit West. His brooding had reached the point where he was morally certain that the gambler meant to betray him to the police and set them ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... ivory, stretching shields of wrinkled skin, Smoothing sinister and thin squatting gods of ebony, Chip and grunt and do not see. But each mother, silently, Longer than her wont stays shut in the dimness of her hut, For she feels a brooding cloud of memory in the air, A lingering thing there that makes her sit bowed With hollow shining eyes, as the night-fire dies, And stare softly at the ember, and try to remember, Something sorrowful and far, something sweet and vaguely seen Like an early evening star when ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... leaning forward, her eyes brooding over the black outlines, her ears sensuously absorbing the gurgle of the currents. A big market boat from Palestrina winged past them, sliding over the oily water. Several silent figures were standing ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... haunted in all ages the brooding mind of mankind; and every age has fashioned for itself the image of a "somewhere" or "nowhere"—a Utopia in which there should be equality and justice for all. The vision itself is an outcome of that divine discontent which raises man ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... miles off gave me a perfectly groundless hope. If they burst through the defence Hilda von Einem and her prophet and all our enemies would be overwhelmed in the deluge. And that blessed chance depended very much on old Peter, now brooding like a pigeon ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... I write—when Bryda Palmer was full of her own troubles, and with many misgivings tried to persuade herself she had given Mr Bayfield no promise, yet dreading lest he should interpret her acquiescence in the delay as a promise—Chatterton was brooding over his wrongs, and in August was in a frenzy of indignation when he received his cherished manuscripts back from Mr Walpole in a blank cover. This was the unkindest cut of all, for we all know that the wound to pride is, to a sensitive nature, ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... at Shorne Mills again. Every tree, every rock, every human being would remind her of Drake, of the lover she had lost. With Dick gone, there would be nothing for her to do, nothing to distract her mind from the perpetual brooding over the few past weeks of happiness, and the long, gray life before her. With these people there would be sure to be some work for her, something that would save her from spending every hour in futile regret and ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... not himself know, and if the others did he'd be sure to find it out. It would make him conspicuous, maybe worry him and set him brooding over himself, so I'm trusting you to keep it secret. And, in any case, what better amusement could you have? The regular exercise in this perfect air will be as good for you ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... forgotten the thrashing I gave him. He has been brooding over it, Nellie." Fairfax was livid about ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... re-perused the despatches of the Queen, and were brooding in no little despondency over their contents, ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... her sex. As it is, we are keenly affected by the struggles of maternal tenderness in the midst of her preparations for the cruel deed. Moreover, she announces her deadly purpose much too soon and too distinctly, instead of brooding awhile over the first confused, dark suggestion of it. When she does put it in execution, her thirst of revenge on Jason might, we should have thought, have been sufficiently slaked by the horrible death ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Did I not see her drop those stealthy tears into the wine, which, behind my back, he quaffed so eagerly that he seemed to swallow the very glass? Yes, I saw it—I saw it in the mirror with my own eyes. Take care, Francis! Look about you! Some destruction-brooding monster is lurking beneath all this! (He stops, with a searching look, before ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... upon the slight concession. She had scarcely resumed her seat by the fire, after disposing of the obnoxious bouquet, when a maid appeared, who had been sent to wait upon her. She was a pretty, refined looking girl, but very pale, and with an air of deep melancholy—as if she were brooding over a secret sorrow. She offered her services to Isabelle without looking up, and in a low, subdued voice, as if she feared that the very walls had ears. Isabelle allowed her to take down and comb out her long, silky hair, which was very much dishevelled, and to arrange it again ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... himself as he supped alone in the parlour. The bewilderment had passed; the courage and spirit of Mary had infected his own, and the stirring strange life of the palace had distracted him from that dreadful brooding into which he had at ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... he asked. "You were not hurt the other night, were you? Are you still brooding on the fact that you killed your man? Are you ill? Or do you fear that I've forgot my debt? What ails you? Can't you tell me?" The questions hurried on, one after another. "Or is it Mistress Judith's absence, alone, that hurts you thus? Is she to ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... to what you call mind. But the evidence of the Illumined—those in whom the Spiritual Mind has wonderfully unfolded tell us that even in the highest forms of development, the Initiates, yea, even the Masters, realize that above even their highest mental states there is always that eternal "I" brooding over them, as the Sun over the lake; and that the highest conception of the "I" known even to advanced souls, is but a faint reflection of the "I" filtering through the Spiritual Mind, although that Spiritual Mind is as clear as the clearest crystal when compared with our comparatively ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... about ten o'clock, and he then sat brooding over his misery for about an hour. It was his custom when he remained in his chambers to tell his clerk, Stemm, between nine and ten that nothing more would be wanted. Then Stemm would go, and Sir Thomas would sleep for a while in his chair. But the old clerk never stirred till ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... could be here in the evening and at night, and she could, of course, be with you in the shop, she likes that—and it would keep her from brooding. Or, if you will give up the shop, I should like to make it ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... fragment and a quantity of soft matter, coloured a pale red, which he allowed to flop down on to the floor. The man was motionless except that he violently wagged his left big toe. And all the time he made a continuous cooing, purring noise, like that of a brooding hen. ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... vague, gold-colored flicker of appeal her lifted face flared out again into Barton's darkness. Too fugitive to be called a smile, a tremor of reminiscence went scudding across her mouth before the brooding shadow of her old slouch hat ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott |
