"Brooding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on toward their destination, Pocahontas, at Werewocomoco, was daily with her father, watching him with alert ears and eyes, for she saw that the old ruler was brooding over some matter of grave import, and she drew her own inference. Only when planning to wage war on an alien tribe or plotting against the Jamestown settlers did he so mope and muse and fail to respond to her overtures. Late one evening, ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... imperceptibly into the one that followed, blending into a whole that chorded with the night and sea and wind and the driftwood fire crackling in the little stove in the lonely island cabin. The boys sat motionless, listening, brooding over the visions the music opened to each. They had never heard such music before. Even Percy had to acknowledge that, as he leaned breathlessly forward, eyes glued ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... after he retired to Germany, was spent in industry, if not in peace and quietness. He could not fail to be cast down by the utter failure of his English partnership, and the loss of the fruits of his ingenious labours. But instead of brooding over his troubles, he determined to break away from them, and begin the world anew. He was only forty-three when he left England, and he might yet be able to establish himself prosperously in life. He had his own head ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... Houlbieque went off, his whip under his arm, brooding over his own thoughts and lifting up one after the other his heavy wooden shoes daubed with clay. Certainly he desired to marry Celeste Levesque. He wanted her with her child because she was the wife he wanted. He could not say why, but he knew it, he was sure of it. He had ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... as possible, and not to add to the misery of the world at large by forcing it to witness one's private grief. She and Nan had their hours of tender mourning and sincere regret, but it was always Miss Severance's desire that no unwholesome brooding should be indulged in ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... the sunny day went by, And night came brooding o'er the seas; A thick cloud swathed the distant sky, And hollow murmurs filled the breeze. The white gull screaming, left the rock, And seaward bent its glancing wing, While heavy waves, with measured shock, Made the dun cliff with echoes ring. How changed the scene! ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... here and there, over which to reach each other," thought Lynda; "it's the one path for us both." Then her eyes grew tenderly brooding as she remembered how 'twas a little child that had led them—not ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... warm Sunday afternoon, and I found myself alone in the house, the family and servants at church, and a brooding stillness that presaged the approach of a storm, settling over all. At that time I was a dreamy, romantic, long-haired youth with all sorts of notions about the artistic temperament, carelessness in dress, and painting ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... Mr. Meyer was aroused from a brooding lethargy, by a crowd of shouting underwriters, who rushed into the Captain's room, seized him by the shoulders, and hurried him out ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... along with bent head brooding over the incredible thing that had happened, my companion's shapely legs gave out, and with a sigh of fatigue he suggested we should take a skiff amongst the many lying about upon the margins and sail towards the town, "For," said he, "the breeze blows thitherward, and ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... and stoutly battled for its protection. She further increased their prospects by laying three others. After that the king made up his mind that she was a most remarkable bird, and went away pleasure-seeking; but the queen settled to brooding, a picture ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... fit of brooding gave way to one of sullen fury against his wife, himself, but most of all against his dead father. Drunk with excitement, rage, and baffled avarice, he seized and candle and staggered up to the room where the corpse had been laid, launching imprecations as he ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... he burst out. "It's a thing I've never told any one else. But you fellows have been so white to me, to say nothing of one of you having risked his life for mine, that I'm going to take a chance. Perhaps it will be a relief anyway. Brooding over it so long and not confiding in any one, I've been afraid some time I might go crazy ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... smiles he greets them, and when we've raised a pot, upon the mat he meets them and ties them in a knot. From Russia's frozen acres, from Grecian ports they sail, and Turkey sends her fakers to gather in the kale; old brooding Europe breeds them, these mighty men of brawn; our Strong Man takes and kneads them, and puts their hopes ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... hands and roll your 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, judges who condemn, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... exertion kept us in a state of excellent health, and consequently in fairly good spirits; the labour, though of anything but an intellectual character, kept our minds sufficiently employed to prevent our brooding over our ill fortune; we were allowed to take matters pretty easily so long as we did not dawdle too much, and thus entail upon our lounging guard the unwelcome necessity of scrambling to their feet ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... born and bred as she had been, to voluntarily open up a correspondence with a man who was as yet little more than a mere acquaintance; but, all the same, he chafed under that silence and spent many a wakeful hour at night brooding ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... with the heart of Christ, I go bewildered from thine altar place, These brooding boughs and grey-lit forest wings, Nor know if thou deniest My destiny and race, Man's goalward falterings, To sing the perfect joy that lay Along the path we missed somewhere, That led thee to thy home ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... Brinsley talked, Geoffrey watched Anne. She had Peggy in her arms. Such women were made, he felt, to be not only the mothers of children, but the mothers of the men they loved—made for brooding tenderness—to inspire—to sympathize. ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... undoubtedly was, and earnest as he felt to become different to what he had been in olden time, he could not shake off from his mind the sad memory of the past. His mind was continually brooding upon poor little Dobbin's death, and upon the share which he had in it. For now he knew all the truth. He had seen old Leonard, and sat with him for many hours; and at his earnest request the old man had told him all the truth. "Keep nothing back from me," said the ...
— The One Moss-Rose • P. B. Power
... and privation, this constant contention with such foes as famine, and disease, and squalor, and uncouth savagery? Look at the portrait painted of him in London some years later, and see if there is not an infinite weariness, a brooding Cui bono? set as a seal upon those haughty features. Can one after studying that face much wonder that when the Massachusetts Bay authorities in 1646 besought Plymouth to spare their sometime governor, their wise and astute statesman, to ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... one fierce desire in life alone possessed me. The brooding mystery that enveloped my life ceased to be passive, and became an active goad, as it were, to push me forward incessantly on my search for the runaway I was the creature of a fixed idea. A fiery energy spurred me on all my time. I was determined now to find out my father's murderer. ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... things that he could not force himself to disclose—follies, indiscretions, perhaps the grievous mistakes which he himself wants to forget, knowing that improvement lies in determination for better conduct, and not in brooding ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... listened to for a moment. Lord Hutchinson still made attempts at negociation, but they were all vain; nothing could induce her to change her purpose. Irritated by studied insults abroad; incensed by threats of ministerial vengeance; brooding over the wrongs she had endured from one who had promised before the altar of God to love and cherish her through life; and, above all, assured of the popular support, she pursued her way; and she reached the shores ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... 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 fix'd ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... hair, much as a somnambulist might do who was having a bad dream. Then he seemed to arrive at a definite purpose; and without a word he put on his hat and passed quickly out of the house. His wife sat brooding, with a drawn face, and did not seem to be aware that she was alone. Now and then she murmured, "Lead us not into t . . . but—but—we are so poor, so poor! . . . Lead us not into . . . Ah, who would be hurt by it?—and no one would ever know . . . Lead us . . . " The voice ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... relief, a joyful moment; yet on that very day, and on the next before he rode away, I, even I who had been unjustly and cruelly struck with a horsewhip, felt my little heart heavy in me when I saw the change in his face—the dark, still, brooding look, and knew that the thought of his fall and the loss of his home was exceedingly bitter to him. Doubtless my mother noticed it, too, and shed a few compassionate tears for the poor man, once more homeless on the great plain. But he could ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... very often be insupportable, but for the luxury of self-compassion; in cases numberless, this it must be that saves from suicide. For some there is great relief in talking about their miseries, but such gossips lack the profound solace of misery nursed in silent brooding. Happily, the trick with me has never been retrospective; indeed, it was never, even with regard to instant suffering, a habit so deeply rooted as to become a mastering vice. I knew my own weakness when I yielded to it; I despised myself when it brought me comfort; I could laugh scornfully, even ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... said the hen, 'you have nothing to do, and so you sit brooding over such fancies. Lay eggs, or purr, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... tumbling her over the ledge. Marie rose, groaning with pain, being severely bruised. The cup of her indignation, which had long been full, was now overflowing. She slowly returned to her home in Guayave, brooding over schemes of revenge, and formed the determination to betray her husband into the hands of justice. She called upon Dr. Duncan, a rich planter and a magistrate, and offered to guide him to the spot where Jack Shadow, the daring rebel, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... time there was deep silence in the room, and the trembling women in the adjoining chamber hung upon this silence with beating hearts, well aware what a storm of passion was brooding within it. ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... future for her, or for any girl here, that she knew. Miss Thornton, after twelve years of work, was being paid forty-five dollars, Miss Wrenn, after eight years, forty, and Susan only thirty dollars a month. Brooding over these things, Susan would let her work accumulate, and endure, in heavy silence, the kindly, curious speculations and comments ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... been brooding over some affair of the heart. A day in advance he therefore gave proper injunctions to Pei Ming. "As I shall be going out of doors to-morrow at daybreak," he said, "you'd better get ready two horses and wait at the back door! No one else need follow as ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... for it all," I said to myself; and I was brooding over the past again, when Esau uttered a low chuckle, which made me ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... interesting to realise that our general word for the essence of wine and beer and such things comes from a people which has made particular war upon them. I suppose that some aged Moslem chieftain sat one day at the opening of his tent and, brooding with black brows and cursing in his black beard over wine as the symbol of Christianity, racked his brains for some word ugly enough to express his racial and religious antipathy, and suddenly spat out the horrible word "alcohol." The fact that the doctors had to use this ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... regulating their lives by his minute instructions, and depending upon him for guidance after he should return. But what if he should never return? And why hadn't he come already? These thoughts were too much for them. Judie sat in her corner brooding over her trouble, and crying a little now and then. Joe was simply frightened, and his eyes grew bigger and rounder than ever. Tom was sustained in part by the thought that the burden of responsibility was now on him, and so he suppressed all manifestations of uneasiness, as well ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston
... fool of yourself like too many others? The image of the mother bird, hiding her brood under her wings, seemed to David just to express that act of God's fatherly love, in words which will be true for ever, as long as a brooding bird is left on the earth, to remind us of David's song; and of One greater than David, too, who said—"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and thou wouldest not." ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... much affected; so, of course, was his daughter; nor was Jos without feeling. In that long absence of ten years, the most selfish will think about home and early ties. Distance sanctifies both. Long brooding over those lost pleasures exaggerates their charm and sweetness. Jos was unaffectedly glad to see and shake the hand of his father, between whom and himself there had been a coolness—glad to see his little sister, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the ride—and you," flashed Carley, contrarily. She knew he had meant the deep-walled canyon with its brooding solitude. ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... thrift; in her patience and unremitting toil, her nimble fingers and bent back, her shapeless figure and unbounded and unexpressed (verbally, that is) love for her children. Pa Werner—sullen, lazy, brooding, tyrannical—she soothed and mollified for the children's sake, or shouted down with a shrewish outburst, as the occasion required. An expert stone-mason by trade, Pa Werner could be depended on only ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... empty sounds they beat. Intent to hear, and eager to repeat. Error sits brooding there, with added train Of vain Credulity, and Joys as vain: Suspicion, with Sedition joined, are near, And Rumours raised, and Murmurs mixed, and panic Fear." ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... such a startling thing under the circumstances, that he could not rid himself of the thought of it. It haunted him through the rest of the day, and when night came and the store being closed, he retired as usual to the back part of the house, he was brooding over it still. ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... again! Then, suddenly, he was aware of a hand upon his shoulder. So tense were his nerves that had he looked up and seen either William Henry or Susan Jane, he would not have been surprised. But it was Janet, and her eyes were full of brooding love. ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... which she had seen in the pleached walk, she knew was only the shadow and projection of her own thoughts, a brooding fancy which she had unconsciously conjured up into the form of her hated rival. The addition of the child was the creation of the deep and jealous imaginings which had often crossed her mind. She thought of that yet unborn pledge of a once mutual affection as the secret spell by which Caroline, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... it was 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 heart ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... Cecilia Renaud, though evidently in a state of mental derangement, was hurried to the scaffold without a hearing, for the vague utterance of a truth, to which every heart in France, not lost to humanity, must assent. Brooding over the miseries of her country, till her imagination became heated and disordered, this young woman seems to have conceived some hopeless plan of redress from expostulation with Robespierre, whom she ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... shade of his brooding there flashed the memory of the scene when he had heard those words spoken. Like the touch of a magic wand the memory changed gloom to ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... long while the captives sat in silence, brooding over their fate. Worn out by the trials of the day, the two farmers at last fell asleep. Washington, too, was soon snoring, and the two boys felt drowsy. The regular breathing of the professor told that he, also, had forgotten his troubles in dreamland, and Andy was about ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood
... their bases, thick with dark pine, hemlock and balsam fir, interspersed with birch, mountain maple and oak resembling a vast sea of emerald; within the rising hills a large space with velvety meadows, rich with the color of the Oxeye daisy and first golden rods; and brooding over it all, that indescribable misty veil of purplish blue, and you still have only a faint idea of the grandeur and majesty of these hills ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... SHAKESPEARE Hamlet act v, sc. 2. Anger is violent and vindictive emotion, which is sharp, sudden, and, like all violent passions, necessarily brief. Resentment (a feeling back or feeling over again) is persistent, the bitter brooding over injuries. Exasperation, a roughening, is a hot, superficial intensity of anger, demanding instant expression. Rage drives one beyond the bounds of prudence or discretion; fury is stronger yet, and sweeps one away ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... are drops of candle grease and the remains of a fire. On the day of the Mathers's picnic he doubtless saw the party pass through and recognized Colonel Gaylord. It brought to his mind the thrashing he had received. While he was still brooding over the matter, the Colonel came back alone, and it flashed into the fellow's mind that this was his chance. He may have been afraid at first or he may have hesitated through kindlier motives. At any ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... wild impending rocks, Involved in clouds, and brooding future woe, The demon Superstition Nature shocks, And waves her sceptre o'er ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... the scarcely visible swell, lifted and fluttered feebly for a second or two, pointing now this way, and anon in some other direction, showing that, away up aloft there, and as yet too high to reach and stir the surface of the sea, the air currents were awakening under the brooding influence of the coming storm. These movements occurred at first at long intervals, and were of the most evanescent character; but the intervals rapidly shortened, and within an hour of the occurrence of the first manifestation of atmospheric movement it had increased to ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... streamlet slid away, Singing, smiling, dimpling down To a mossy nook and brown, Under bending boughs of May; Where the nodding wind-flower grows, And the coolwort's lovely pink, Brooding o'er the brooklet's brink Dips and ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... "He is so conscious of his affliction that he cannot bear it to be remarked. He usually stays at home and walks up and down a path in the garden, brooding, I am afraid, over his treatment by Mr. Hayle. It goes to ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... sensitive about it! All us girls think it ever so romantic, and we call you sometimes the lord of the realm, and when we see you walking through the darkling wood at evenfall we say, ‘My lord is brooding upon the treasure ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... at Oeneus's neglect in not inviting her to a feast. She must have taken the disappointment very much to heart. I fancy I see her, poor Goddess, left all alone in Heaven, after the rest have set out for Calydon, brooding darkly over the fine spread at which she will not be present. Those Ethiopians, too; privileged, thrice-happy mortals! Zeus, one supposes, is not unmindful of the handsome manner in which they entertained him and all his family for twelve days running. With the Gods, clearly, nothing goes ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... usual feminine impulsiveness and full expression of emotion is replaced in her by an extraordinary condensation of phrase and feeling. In her letters we find the eternal womanly in her yearning love for her friends, her brooding anxiety and sympathy for the few lives closely intertwined with her own. In her poems, however, one is rather impressed with the deep well of poetic insight and feeling from which she draws, but never unreservedly. In spite of frequent ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... own home only to find his father awake and brooding. To him he talked with that strong vein of sympathy and understanding which is usually characteristic of those drawn by ties of flesh and blood. He liked his father. He sympathized with his painstaking effort to get ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... enjoyed in her saturnine, brooding way the warmth of April sunshine and the stirring greenery of awakening life now beginning to soften the brown austerity of the dead winter earth. Beside her kitchen wall the pink cones of rhubarb were showing, and the fat buds of the lilacs, which ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... passed. It was but two minutes ere we touched the shore and said good-night, and went our way and left the ferryman. But in that brief passage he had opened our souls to everlasting things—the freshness, and the darkness, and the kindness of the brooding, all-enfolding night ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... glories of this our fair creation! What golden sunset casts not its far-beaming splendour, not only on the great mountains and the glittering sea, but also breaks, as if in mockery, into ghastly chambers where the desolation of death, "the wages of sin," is miserably brooding! And yet how solemnizing, how elevating in their influences, are all the highest beauties both of art and nature, notwithstanding the awe, approaching to fearfulness, with which they not seldom affect our spirits. The veneration with which we gaze even on insensate walls which once formed the loved ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... tinder. The fish were baked over the fire thus kindled. Though the outside was smoked, the inside was sweet and palatable, and neither was disposed to be fastidious. The preparation of the meal took considerable time, but they had abundance of that, and occupation prevented their brooding over their ...
— Brave and Bold • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... here and there, by a diffused tone and color, with very little show of analysis. Perhaps it is a sufficient definition to say that his method was the sympathetic. In the end the reader is put in possession of the luminous and complete idea upon which the author has been brooding, though he may not be able to say exactly how the impression has been conveyed to him; and I doubt if the author could have explained his sympathetic process. He certainly would have lacked precision in any ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... have neglected to relate here a trifling, but memorable adventure I had with the said Grimm one day, on which we were to dine at the fountain of St. Vandrille, I will let it pass: but when I thought of it afterwards, I concluded that he was brooding in his heart the conspiracy he has, with so much ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Black are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea of Thought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead. Monsters uncouth and wild, arise in premature, imperfect resurrection; the several parts and shapes of different things are joined and mixed by chance; and when, and how, and by what wonderful ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... of shame, when their officers blush at being compelled to do a good action." The commandant of the boat feigned not to understand the reproaches conveyed in these words, and, to divert our minds from brooding over our wrongs, endeavoured to counterfeit the ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... stirred. I had seen colored people in what they call "the black sulks," when, for days, they neither smiled nor spoke, and scarcely ate. But this was something more than that; for the man was not dully brooding over some small grievance,—he seemed to see an all-absorbing fact or fancy recorded on the wall, which was a blank to me. I wondered if it were some deep wrong or sorrow, kept alive by memory and impotent regret; if he mourned for the ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... the brooding gaze, hear the lilting laughter Of the children that you loved, feel their soft- lipped kisses; Think of all the little joys that a hard world misses- What though bitter ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... this class, however, goes out for the sake of exercise only, it does not in general produce so good an effect, as might be expected; for he is continually brooding over the state of his health: there is no new object to arrest his attention, and he is constantly reminded of the cause of his riding. Exercise will therefore be most effectual when employed in the pursuit of a journey, where a succession of pleasant scenes are likely to present ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... the foundlings to crowd out their fellow-nestlings. The cowbirds were the first to leave the sylvan roof tree. Thus it appears that the intrusion of the cowbird's eggs does not always mean disaster to the real offspring of the brooding family, but of course it often prevents the laying of the full complement of eggs ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... always so approach a life He deals directly with a soul through the influence of the Holy Spirit, and life receives its most holy nurture in those sacred hours. Therefore, the highest service permitted a Sunday School teacher is to pray effectually for the brooding Spirit to rest upon the pupils in his class. The mother can do nothing which shall mean so much for the precious life in her arms as learning, herself, the secret of prevailing prayer, for, "If we ask anything according to His Will, He heareth us; and if we know that He ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... so and think so still; his manner was changed to-day; before, he had that restless, nervous, excitable look that is the indication of one phase of insanity; to-day there was the gloomy, brooding sort of look that is equally characteristic of another form ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... them from slavery to texts, and which gave them a working faith in the steady moral and spiritual development of man. I mean the principle that this Christ whom they had discovered anew was an eternal manifestation of God, an immanent Word of God, a Spirit brooding over the world of men, as in the beginning over the face of the waters, present in the unfolding events of history as well as in the far-away "dispensations of Grace." As a result, they grew less interested in the problem that had fascinated so many mystics, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... artist paints the low rocks among the reeds, with the breakers playing about them, while the distant sea stretches out to a horizon, with dark, stormy clouds brooding over the solitary waste. A remarkable union of the beauty of land and water is produced by a foreground of brilliant fancy flowers relieved by a scrubby tree in the background, with the faint responsive touch of yellow in the clouds over a calm sea, where gentle motion is only indicated by the little ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... In Helbeck's heart? But in the inmost shrine of that heart she felt the brooding of a majestic and exacting power that knew her not. Her jealousy—her fear—grew ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... daily to acquire for himself some knowledge of this strange Universe where he had arrived, be his task therein what it might. Infinite was his progress; thus in some fifteen months, he could perform the miracle of—Speech! To breed a fresh Soul, is it not like brooding a fresh (celestial) Egg; wherein as yet all is formless, powerless; yet by degrees organic elements and fibres shoot through the watery albumen; and out of vague Sensation grows Thought, grows Fantasy and Force, and we have Philosophies, Dynasties, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Men go out to-day to face a life shadowed by vast industrial, commercial, and social problems. Life has grown complicated, involved, hard to understand, difficult to deal with. Tension, conflict, subtlety, surprise, and amid it all, or over it all, a vast brooding weariness that ever and again turns the heart sick. Oh the pains and the perils of the going out! There are elements of danger in modern life that threaten all the world's toilers, whatever their work may be and wherever they may have to do it. There is the ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... of his life at Bologna, Cardan seems to have lived comparatively alone, and to have spent his weary leisure in brooding over his sorrows. He began his long rambling epilogue to the De Libris Propriis, and, almost on the threshold, pours out his sorrow afresh over Gian Battista's unhappy fate. After affirming that Death must necessarily come as a friend to those whose lives are wretched, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... difference between right and wrong survive? His own state of mind was thoroughly wretched. The creed in which he had been brought up was giving way under him, and he could find no principle of action at all. Brooding ceaselessly over these problems, he at the same time lowered his physical strength by abstinence, living upon bread, milk, and vegetables, giving up meat and wine. In this unpromising frame of mind, and in the course of solitary ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... as she stooped to them. Her fear of them made her supremely gentle. Little Barbara put up her round rose face with its soft mouth thrust forward in a premature kiss. Janet gave her a tiny hand and gazed at her with brooding, irresponsive eyes. Her little mouth never moved as Kitty's mouth ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... looking like an "easy mark" or "a soft thing." The line of his lips and the lower of his strongly marked eyebrows made strangers slow of approach. He was never awkward, he could not be so any more than could a fox or a puma, but he was restless, irresolute, brooding, and gloomy. ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... work in the gloomy room in Lincoln's Inn, and in spite of heart-sickness he worked on stolidly and well. The evenings were his worst time, when he went back to the empty house at Cheyne Walk and sat on the balcony brooding over his troubles, until the light faded and an eerie darkness ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... She was brooding over one thought all the time, and at last could not keep it in: "You don't know my father ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... much to do, and work kept me from brooding. It was three days after I had gone to find Reverdy that he came to see me, bringing Douglas. My first words to Reverdy were concerning Zoe; but Douglas at once took a hand in that subject. She would either turn up after a little wandering ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... quiet court and way The grass has crept—and sun and shadows play Beneath her elms, in changing traceries; The years have claimed her theirs, and the still peace Of wind and sun and mist, blown thick and white, Has folded her. The voices of the seas Through many a soft, bright day and brooding night Have wrought her silence, wide as they, and deep, And dreaming of the ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... future, was Edith Symmes, who sat almost directly before it. To the left of her was Marcia, pale and sad, and close beside her Horace Penfield. Heavens! He jumped impatiently to his feet. He was simply getting into a morbid muddle sitting here brooding over this matter. He must have action, action of some kind, and obeying a sudden impulse, he decided ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... hidden her somewhere close at hand; and when he had given them all his reasons for thinking so, his hearers were of the same opinion; but Mr Proctor continued very doubtful and perplexed, clear though the story was. He sat silent, brooding over the new mystery, while the brothers discussed the ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... While brooding in the deepest melancholy, a sound at his verandah door arrested his attention. It was distinctly the frou-frou of a woman's skirts. Could it be possible that his wife was seeking to force ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... indulged in violent and exciting exercises, may form a very good idea. It is a delirious intoxication, a temporary madness that absorbs every thought and every energy. And can we wonder at the kris-bearing, untaught, brooding Malay preferring such a death, looked upon as almost honourable to the cold-blooded details of suicide, if he wishes to escape from overwhelming troubles, or the merciless of the hangman and the disgrace of a public execution, when he has taken the law into his own hands and too hastily ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... community where Increase Mather had been a high priest indeed. In such men as Cotton Mather the old spirit lived on, sharply accentuated by defeat; and transformed, in such men as Jonathan Edwards, by dint of morbid introspection and brooding on the sins of a perverse generation, into a kind of disease, or spiritual neurasthenia. Such men could but look back with poignant regret to the golden age that was past. Of that golden age, Cotton Mather himself, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... a step or two, as if to follow, but a reflection that she could do no good by talking at the moment, and a certainty that she held him in the hollow of her hand, made her pause. With a hitch of her shapely shoulders she resumed her seat by the fire, brooding sombrely on the way in which this Gentile had rejected her love. Bending her black brows and showing her white teeth like an irritated dog, she inwardly cursed herself for cherishing so foolish a love. Nevertheless, ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... kind of tobacco. It was evening now and they talked over the fight, made jokes about their luckier shots, smoked their new tobacco and sang; altogether it was the jolliest evening they'd had. But Shard alone on the quarter-deck paced to and fro pondering, brooding and wondering. He had chopped off Bad Jack's wounded hand and given him a hook out of store, for captain does doctor upon these occasions and Shard, who was ready for most things, kept half a dozen or so of neat new limbs, and ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... asked Abner in his amiable drawling voice. He was a silent, brooding man, heavily built, with a coarse reddish beard, stained with tobacco juice, which hung over his chest. Since the death of his wife, Blossom's mother, some fifteen years before, he had become more gloomy, more silent, more obstinately unapproachable. He was one who appeared to dwell always ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... his cranky spells, too. But neither the one nor the other lasted very long, and the sunshine soon not only broke through the clouds, but scattered them altogether. Happy are those natures not given to brooding over real or fancied troubles. Gloom never mends matters: it ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... the first white man to look upon the scene, lay the open way to two thousand miles of fair pasture-lands and brooding desert-wastes — of limitless plains and boundless rolling downs — of open grassy forests and barren scrubs — of solitary mountain peaks and sluggish rivers; and, though then hidden from even the most brilliant imagination, the wondrous potentialities ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... to afford steering way, swept majestically down stream, borne by the force of the current, which veered from bank to bank. We were moving scarcely swifter than from eight to ten miles an hour, and the monotonous voice of the man casting the lead line arose continuous through the brooding silence. The only other perceptible sounds were the exhaust of the steam pipes and the splash of running water. Thockmorton had told me we were already approaching the mouth of the Illinois, and I lingered against the rail, straining my eyes through ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... Quite unconsciously the brooding anxiety of the afternoon slipped from Sheldon, and he felt strangely cheered at the sight of her running up the steps laughing, face flushed, hair flying, her breast heaving from the violence of her ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... trimmed my bludgeon to a nicety, I laid it by, and sat brooding, the knife betwixt my knees; now a beam of sun falling athwart the leaves lit upon the broad blade of the knife and made of it a glory. And beholding this and the hand that grasped it, I took pleasure to heed how strong and sinewy were my fingers and how the muscles bulged beneath ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... offices of active rural life, and to be, in mature age, the selectman, the deacon, the representative, the colonel. As for Septimius, let him alone a moment or two, and then they would see him, with his head bent down, brooding, brooding, his eyes fixed on some chip, some stone, some common plant, any commonest thing, as if it were the clew and index to some mystery; and when, by chance startled out of these meditations, he lifted his eyes, there would be a kind of perplexity, a dissatisfied, foiled look in them, as ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had finished visualizing the scene, his jaw was set hard. It had been easy, very easy, to throw himself into the fierceness of his dead father's mood. During this moment of brooding he had been looking down, and he did not notice the glance of Denver fasten upon him with an almost hypnotic fervor, as though he were striving to reach to the very soul of the younger man and read what was written there. When Terry looked up, the face ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... sense the whole is his. Most of the books are dispersed, but the catalogue remains, not merely as a record of rareties and bibliographical details dear to the collector's heart, but as a token of taste. Just as there is, so Wordsworth reminds us, 'a spirit in the woods,' so is there still, brooding over and haunting the pages of the 'Rowfant Catalogue,' the spirit of true connoisseurship. In the slender lists of Locker's 'Works' this book must ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... had so often in the past shown him to be. I joked and laughed at him, and in a good-natured way told him the East Tennessee climate gave him that disease known among soldiers as "crawfishing." This I did to withdraw his mind from this gloomy brooding. We had no real battle, but a continual skirmish with the enemy, with stray shots throughout the day. As we were moving along in line of battle, I heard that peculiar buzzing noise of a bullet, as if in ricochet, coming in our direction, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... Many a treasure is said to lie here, buried, and never again dug up, because those who alone knew where to look had perished in defence of the Peel. Truly, if the troubled spirits of those slain ones yet wander, brooding over hidden chattels and lost penates, they are not greatly to be pitied, for a spot more beautiful, one less to be shunned if our spirits must wander, it would be hard to find in all Northumberland ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... receive it, the truth must be acknowledged: my Susan was sentimental. She had had her longings and dreams, and an abundance of those great vague heartaches which only sentimental people can have. She had gone through with the whole—the sweet hopes, the yearning expectancy, the vague anxiety, the brooding doubt, the slow giving up—the reluctant acceptance of her fading life. Her romance died hard. Very gradually, and with many a protest, the woman of heartaches and sentiment glided into the practical and commonplace maiden lady who ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... inspiration, thereby normalizing his existence to some extent, if Reynolds had not appeared and simplified the painter's credit to a point where he made no further search for unsympathetic models. Fate, weaving the destiny of two O'Neills, would have changed her loom. As it was, sick with brooding and pity for himself, Kenny abandoned all pretense of labor and rushed on blindly to his fate. The spring was in his blood. What form of midsummer madness lay ahead of him depended now upon the hairtrigger of impulse. A wind, a sketch, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... Talmud (the "derashot") and explain them in a rationalistic manner so as to remove what appears on the surface to be offensive to sound reason. But instead of proceeding at once to the performance of this cherished object of his philosophic ambition, he kept it in his bosom, brooding over it during a life of intense literary and practical activity, until it was in the end matured and brought to fruition in a manner quite different from that at first intended. The book explanatory of the Rabbinic legends was given up for reasons ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... every thing she says or does, displays her capability for profound thought and feeling, as well as her lively and romantic disposition; and as I have seen in an Italian garden a fountain flinging round its wreaths of showery light, while the many-colored Iris hung brooding above it, in its calm and soul-felt glory; so in Portia the wit is ever kept subordinate to the poetry, and we still feel the tender, the intellectual, and the imaginative part of the character, as superior to, and presiding over its spirit ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... many minutes in the room there was silence broken only by the crackling of the fire, and the voices of the storm without. Olga sat motionless, the old sombre shadow brooding in her eyes. At last she ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... generally less interesting objects than the women; their countenances and hues were very varied, according to the part of the African coast from which they came; some were soot-black, having a certain ferocity of aspect that indicated strong and fierce passions, like men who were darkly brooding over some deep-felt wrongs, and meditating revenge. When any one was ordered, he came forward with a sullen indifference, threw his arms over his head, stamped with his feet, shouted to show the soundness of ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... returned on deck, came down in about a quarter of an hour, and informed the party, who were silently brooding over this sudden change in their prospects, that the wind was very light, and that he thought the fog was clearing off a little, and that if it did so before it was dark, he was in great hopes that they should be recaptured. This intelligence appeared to revive the hopes of Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... Barbarian had lived long enough in England to know that, except in the pages of a holiday supplement, this was rarely the accompaniment of a Christmas landscape, and he cheerfully accepted, on the 24th of December, the background of a low, brooding sky, on which the delicate tracery of leafless sprays and blacker chevaux de frise of pine was faintly etched, as a consistent setting to the turrets and peacefully stacked chimneys of Stukeley Castle. Yet, even ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Odd parts of clothes hung on the ornate images and decorations of the room. A German rifle hung by its sling from the patient neck of a life-sized Saviour, while further over, the vermin-infested shirt of a Britisher hung over the rounded breasts of a brooding Madonna, with the ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... at the age of twenty-one, he was appointed president of a committee to prepare plans for the Trans-Siberian railway, and the following year he made a tour in the Far East, visiting China and Japan. In the last-named country he was attacked and wounded by a police officer who had been brooding over the wrongs which his country had suffered at the hands of Russia. Nicholas recovered and proceeded to Vladivostok, where he initiated the building of the great continental line. He returned to St. Petersburg by way of Siberia and Moscow, ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... meaning "For a Trifle"), the poet tells how the peace of a household was undermined on account of a barley grain discovered by accident in the soup at the Passover meal, which must be free from every trace of fermented food. Brooding over the incident and filled with remorse for having served the doubtful soup to her family, the poor woman runs to the Rabbi, who decides that she has, indeed, caused her family to eat prohibited ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... saw him before," Ramsey responded from the deep chair, where he had moodily thrown himself; and, returning to his brooding upon his oratory. "Oh, murder!" ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... when he sat alone before the fire in the cabin brooding until he was filled with savage hatred of Philip. He would think of all sorts of impossible means of eliminating this Spaniard from Claire's life; then Philip would come in, talk to him, seem so very normally friendly as man ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... Prelude of the "Well-tempered Clavier." Spitta mentions the fine fugue, with the subject standing for the melancholy, the counter-subject for the madness of the king; and he justly remarks that these two images of Saul "contain the poetical germ of a truly musical development." The "dimly brooding" theme of the fugue brings to one's mind the "Kyrie eleison" fugue of Mozart's Requiem; also the theme of the Allegro of Beethoven's Sonata in C minor (Op. 111), notwithstanding the fact that Kuhnau's is slow and sad, but Beethoven's, fast ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... genuine creation that comes to the man who has just garnered the harvests of his own fields into his bulging barns. He is a prophet of plenty, but he has no answer ready when we ask him what we are going to do with it after we have got it. Like a true son of the brooding North, he wishes to set us thinking, but he has no final ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... was wearing her heart out in brooding over the coming marriage. Jasper Wilde refused to be bought off, and Bernardine herself declared that it must take place. She, alas! ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... him his simple living; but most unlucky in that it left him with too much spare time. Had he worked at a task that occupied seven or eight hours a day, his thoughts would have filtered through the weariness of his body, and been purified thereby. But his leisure was abundant, and he spent it in brooding over ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... instant his frenzy was at an end. He gazed for a time in mute bewilderment upon his victim; then drawing his buffalo robe over his head, he sat down beside the corpse, and remained brooding over his crime and his loss. Three days elapsed, yet the chief continued silent and motionless; tasting no food, and apparently sleepless. It was apprehended that he intended to starve himself to death; his people approached ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... University and making inquiries. What she was told there decided her. She took up the course and enjoyed it. It occupied her mind and prevented her brooding over the past. She might have made many friends among the other students, but she was careful to treat them only as acquaintances. Her recent experience with "friends" was too fresh in her mind. She studied hard and applied her knowledge at home. She and Annie made some odd and funny ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Bells and Pomegranates, Men and Women, Christmas Eve, and Dramatis Personae had successively glorified his Italian period. But he was already brooding half-unconsciously on more famous things. He has himself left on record a description of the incident out of which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatest achievement. In a passage marked with all his peculiar sense of material ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... understanding was not to be duped in matters of plain morality. And so, unable to cure the wrongs he deplored, unable to put his conscience into his pocket like Richard Hardie, or into his heart like Jane, he wandered alone, or sat brooding and dejected: and the attentive reader, if I am so fortunate as to possess one, will not be surprised to learn that he was troubled, too, with dark mysterious surmises he half dreaded, yet felt it his ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade |
