"Pensiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a second Wallace. I persevered in this resolution for a whole week; and then meeting with some equally delightful hero of an opposite nature, I changed from grave to gay. My mood during these periods of fascination was as variable as the different heroines I admired. Now I would imitate the pensiveness of Amanda, and go about with streaming tresses, and a softly modulated tone of voice—then I would read of some sprightly heroine who changed all by her vivacity and piquant sayings, and immediately commence springing down three stairs ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... meal at Mrs. Arty's, dining with literary pensiveness at the Armenian, for he had subtle problems to meditate. He bought a dollar fountain-pen, which had large gold-like bands and a rather scratchy pen-point, and a box of fairly large sheets of paper. Pressing his literary impedimenta tenderly under his arm, he attended ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... of flickering sunshine might now and then be seen at its solitary play along the path. This flitting cheerfulness was always at the farther extremity of some long vista through the forest. The sportive sunlight—feebly sportive, at best, in the predominant pensiveness of the day and scene—withdrew itself as they came nigh, and left the spots where it had danced the drearier, because they had hoped to ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... allow'd myself, as I sometimes do, to wander out of myself. The conceit came to me of a copious grove of singing birds, and in their midst a simple harmonic duo, two human souls, steadily asserting their own pensiveness, joyousness. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... reverent silence. They were rebel hearts there to a man, and many exiles from Erin were in the company. The simple tune went right home to them all. The men sat still, gazing into their pannikins, and big bearded diggers had a chastened pensiveness that might have been comic had there been any there to laugh at them. Just as suddenly the girl swung into a rollicking dance-step, abandoning her tender mood with a burst of happy laughter; but Tim Carrol, a young new chum; fresh from 'the most distressful ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... husband, who had come out of his reverie and sat regarding Clem with something like lively interest. He had, in fact, opened his mouth to utter a scriptural quotation, but, checked on the verge of it, dropped back into pensiveness. ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... purpose of hunting, but was observed to ride all the morning with great pensiveness, and in deep thoughts, without any delight in the exercise he was upon, and before the morning was spent, left the field, and alighted at his mother's lodgings at Whitehall, with whom he was shut up for ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... mind was at ease for a good hour to come, so she sat quiet and peaceful. Lucy, too, was at peace. Her eye was clear; and her color coming back; she was not bursting with happiness, for there was a sweet pensiveness mixed with her sweet tranquillity; but she looked every now and then smiling from her work up at Mrs. Wilson, and the dame kept looking at her with a motherly joy caused by her bare presence on that hearth. Lucy basked in ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... says of Chatterton, "Instead of the thoughtless levity of childhood, he possessed the pensiveness, gravity, and melancholy of maturer life. He was frequently so lost in contemplation, that for many days together he would say but very little, and that apparently by constraint. His intimates in the school were few, and those of the most serious cast." Of Burns, his schoolmaster, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Perhaps it was the singular breadth of his forehead which made the lower part of his face look so unusually slight and feminine. His eyes were dark hazel, as clear, brilliant, and tender as a girl's, and brimming full of a pensiveness which seemed both loving and melancholy. Few persons, at all events few women, who looked upon him ever looked beyond his eyes. They were very fascinating, and in a man's countenance very strange. They were the kind of eyes which reveal ...
— The Brigade Commander • J. W. Deforest
... Warner, with something of sarcasm in his pensiveness of tone. "We must not dispute; so I will hold my peace: but make love all you will; what are the false smiles of a lip which a few years can blight as an autumn leaf? what the homage of a heart as feeble and mortal as your own? Why, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... John of Ludlow, alias Mason, came in place, unto whom in comparison these two were but children." This last did so harry a client for four years that the latter, still called upon for new fees, "went to bed, and within four days made an end of his woeful life, even with care and pensiveness." And after his death the lawyer so handled his son "that there was never sheep shorn in May, so near clipped of his fleece present, as he was of many to come." The Welsh were the most litigious people. A Welshman would walk up to London bare-legged, carrying his hose on his neck, to save wear and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... feeds it in the nest until it is fledged, that is to Siegfried, inevitably, Mime! This simile of Mime's suggests to Siegfried a further question. In asking it he has one of those brief accesses of pensiveness which endear him, disclosing the existence of a common human tenderness, after all, under that sturdy wrapping of joy befitting the child of demigods. "Now, since you are so wise, tell me still another ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... delicate as a young girl's; and indeed she was but twenty years older than myself, thus at this date only thirty-four. But while she talked to Mr. Floyd I observed a change in her: her eyes had lost their pensiveness and calm, and fell before his shyly: the flushes came and went on her cheeks. He told her again and again that in meeting her he found the first realization that he had come back to his home: old Mr. Raymond had seemed to be afraid of him, and little Helen had cried ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... more sallow than usual; its upper lip was drawn away from the teeth and deeply wrinkled; the eyes, half-closed, were very soft; they looked as though there was a veil across their pensiveness. He caught Dickie's elbow in his hand, twisted him about, thrusting a knee into his back, and with his other long, bony hand he struck him brutally across the face. The emerald on his finger caught the light of the rising ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... mania just then prevailing there for all things English. Emma was a plump, rosy, fair-haired typical English maiden, full of frolic and harmless fun; I a very slight, pale, black-haired girl, alternating between wild fun and extreme pensiveness. In the boarding-house to which we went at first—the "Chateau du Rhin," a beautiful place overhanging the broad, blue Rhine—there chanced to be staying the two sons of the late Duke of Hamilton, the Marquis of Douglas ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... of the world," remarked the lawyer with unusual pensiveness, setting his hat farther back from his forehead and looking into space. "When I get a glimpse of it as I did this week, I'm tempted to hasten my retirement, to bid farewell to the squabbling world, and turn fisherman,—begin to spread nets for mackerel instead of my fellow men, ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... her night glasses to the bureau. Again she looked out of the window, but this time she remained standing. Nor were her eyes turned upon the distant ranch house. Her whole attitude was one of deep pensiveness. ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... on board our ship, among the emigrant passengers, a rich- cheeked, chestnut-haired Italian boy, arrayed in a faded, olive-hued velvet jacket, and tattered trowsers rolled up to his knee. He was not above fifteen years of age; but in the twilight pensiveness of his full morning eyes, there seemed to sleep experiences so sad and various, that his days must have seemed to him years. It was not an eye like Harry's tho' Harry's was large and womanly. It shone with a soft and spiritual radiance, like a moist star in a tropic sky; and spoke of humility, ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... the great charm of his race found expression in him. Gallant, gracious, generous, tender-hearted in victory and cheerful in defeat (as we had soon to learn, alas!), even his enemies confessed this young Stuart a worthy leader of men. Usually suffused with a gentle pensiveness not unbecoming, the ardour of his welcome had given him on this occasion the martial bearing of a heroic young Achilles. With flushed cheek and sparkling ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... for the time much more to interest and to please. The manners of each were of the highest tone; the person of each was highly pleasing; and when Laura turned to the Lady Helen, and marked the gentle pensiveness of her beautiful countenance, listened to the high, pure, noble words that hung upon her lips, and marked the deep feelings which existed beneath an exterior that people sometimes thought cold, the remembrance of her ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... traverse a peculiar field of observation, sequestered from general interest: and they are composed in a spirit too delicate and unobtrusive to catch the ear of the noisy crowd, clamoring for strong sensations. But this retiring delicacy itself, the pensiveness checkered by gleams of the fanciful, and the humor that is touched with cross lights of pathos, together with the picturesque quaintness of the objects casually described, whether men, or things, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... was of a calmer nature than his fiery cousin would have allowed to be love. It took a good deal of working-up to make it outwardly affect his spirits or demeanour, in general, it served only as an ingredient in the pensiveness that pervaded all his moods, ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... delightful. I have as many as I have dresses, and they cost me nearly as much. I suppose they cost Jimmy a good deal too," she added, with a desultory pensiveness; "but fortunately he is well off, so it doesn't matter. I never go into the slums, though. It is so tiring, and then there is so much infection. Microbes generally flourish most in shabby places, don't they, Mr. Amarinth? A mood that cost one typhoid or smallpox would be really ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... of Marylyn—Marylyn, the baby, all dimples and lisping demands for "Dals!" Marylyn, the child, slender, yellow-haired, pale; Marylyn, entering womanhood, still dependent, and, in her frailty, her pensiveness, more dear than ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... loftiest emotion will want the noble height of that heroic soul, who must always stand forth in history a figure of beautiful and singular distinction, admirable alike for the sensibility and daring, the poetic pensiveness, and the martial ardor that mingled in him and taxed his feeble frame with tasks greater than it could bear. The whole story of the capture of Quebec is full of romantic splendor and pathos. Her fall was a triumph ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... applause of the little boy, and this fact appeared to have a depressing influence upon Uncle Remus. As he leaned slightly forward, gazing into the depths of the great fireplace, his attitude was one of pensiveness. ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... sister talked to her. Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner sat in silent pensiveness, according to their wont, contemplating the boats on the water. Mr. Cecil Burleigh and Julia (he called her Julia) conversed together in low but earnest tones. It seemed that they had much to communicate. Presently they crossed the pier, and stood for ever so long leaning over the ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... always been a quiet, thoughtful boy; and even when the first gush of his agony was over, there remained upon him a gentle, grave pensiveness which it appeared as if ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... length of nave, choir, and chapel, the embowed roof high above, sustained on massive pillars, she uttered a low murmur of 'beautiful!' and there was a heart-felt expression of awe and reverence on her face, a look as of rapt thought, chased away in a moment by his eye, and giving place to quiet pensiveness. After the service they went over the building; but though eager for information, the gravity did not leave her, nor did she speak at once when they emerged into ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... seen many things and heard much talk,' Sidwell was replying, in a gay tone. It irritated him; he would have preferred her to speak with more of the old pensiveness. Yet perhaps she was glad simply because she found herself again talking ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... brothers, abounds in verbal reminiscences of Shakspere; but their genius was not allied to his, being exclusively lyrical, and not at all dramatic. The Muse of this romantic school was Fancy rather than Passion. A thoughtful melancholy, a gentle, scholarly pensiveness, the spirit of Milton's Il Penseroso, pervades their poetry. Gray was a fastidious scholar, who produced very little, but that little of the finest quality. His famous Elegy, expressing a meditative mood in language of the choicest ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... tinged with a certain pensiveness, the effect of too much early sorrow and seclusion upon a very sensitive temperament, Edith better loved the solitude of the grand old forest of St. Mary's or the loneliness of her own shaded rooms at Luckenough than any society the humdrum ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... occupants as fondly as Hawthorne, but no more fondly than all who have been once within the influence of its spell. There glimmer in my memory a few hazy days, of a tranquil and half-pensive character, which I am conscious were passed in and around the house, and their pensiveness I know to be only that touch of twilight which inhered in the house and all its associations. Beside the few chance visitors I have named there were city friends occasionally, figures quite unknown to the village, who came preceded by the steam-shriek of the locomotive, were dropped ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... mother. She has since married —— Hemans, Esq., then an Adjutant in the army. A great number of her pieces have appeared in the Monthly Magazine, as well as the New Monthly, and although a pleasing pensiveness and sombre cast of mind seem to pervade her beautifully mental pictures, she was, I may say, noted in her youth for the buoyancy and sprightliness of her conversation and manner, which made her the delight and charm of every society with which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... seemed now to be excited. One of the men, who had hitherto said nothing, called for the last news-paper; and having perused it a while with deep pensiveness, "It is impossible," says he, "for any man to guess how to act with regard to the stocks: last {74} week it was the general opinion that they would fall; and I sold out twenty thousand pounds in order to a purchase: ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... eyes reluctantly from the brooding peace of mountain and sky, wondered a little at her pensiveness; wondered also where her thoughts—if mere flittings of the mind are entitled to ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... he dies,' she repeated, 'it will be the end of me too.' This thought tranquillised her, and enabled her to seem indifferent. Besides no one troubled her much; Anna Vassilyevna was taken up with her swollen face; Shubin was working furiously; Zoya was given up to pensiveness, and disposed to read Werther; Nikolai Artemyevitch was much displeased at the frequent visits of 'the scholar,' especially as his 'cherished projects' in regard to Kurnatovsky were making no way; the practical chief secretary was puzzled and biding ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... eight-and-twenty, well above the middle height in stature and appearing taller by virtue of his exceeding leanness. He had a thin, pale, rather pleasing hatchet-face, framed in the curls of a golden periwig, a sensitive mouth and pale blue eyes that lent his countenance a dreamy expression, a rather melancholy pensiveness. But they were alert, observant eyes notwithstanding, although they failed on this occasion to observe the slight change of colour which his question had brought to Miss Bishop's cheeks or the suspiciously ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... assigned to him; his thoughts were all for Katie Archdale, his ears were for her, and his eyes, except for the defiant glances which shot past her at Kenelm Waldo, this last arrival, to whom had fallen the place on her other hand. Katie's air of pensiveness as she took her seat seemed to her aunt suitable and very becoming. But it was impossible to the girl's nature not to enjoy the situation, and the smile that often lurked slyly in the depths of ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... girding upon his American sovereignty the hair-shirt of service to self-denial. He was happy in his intense discipline of the flesh, as all men are when they have once tasted power—if it is the power which awakens perception of the highest concerns. His countenance had an April pensiveness about it; you would never have guessed that he could write of owls so jocosely. His manner was such as to suggest that he could mope and weep with them. I never crossed an airy hill or broad field in Concord, without thinking of him who had been ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... and bathing o' mornings at half-past seven; and not drugging ourselves with those dirty and spoiled waters of Lethe that flow round the base of the great pyramid." Then, after mention of the friends who had left him, Sheriff Gordon, the Leeches, Lemon, Egg and Stone: "reflection and pensiveness are coming. I ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... through life, peculiarly interesting rather than beautiful. As mature years perfected her features and her form, there was in the contour of her graceful figure, and her intellectual countenance, that air of thoughtfulness, of pensiveness, of glowing tenderness and delicacy, which gave her a power of fascination over all hearts. She sought not this power; she thought not of it; but an almost resistless attraction and persuasion accompanied ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... question of mind at a temporary phase of Alice's development when she showed a decided inclination for a religious life. He had apparently not observed that the girl had a pensive temperament in spite of the effect of worldly splendour which her mother contrived for her, and that this pensiveness occasionally deepened to gloom. He had certainly never seen that in a way of her own she was very romantic. Mrs. Pasmer had seen it, with amusement sometimes, and sometimes with anxiety, but always with the courage ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... The expression of pensiveness deepened, increased by a sudden, disturbing thought. Would she tell him about Bakersfield and the horrible life there with ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... with a soul as sensitive to the Sublime! In Evelyn's presence I feel a sense of peace, of security, of home! Happy! thrice happy! he who will take her to his breast! Of late she has assumed a new charm in my eyes,—a certain pensiveness and abstraction have succeeded to her wonted gayety. Ah, Love is pensive,—is it not, Cleveland? How often I ask myself that question! And yet, amidst all my hopes, there are hours when I tremble and despond! How ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VIII • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... whole soul seemed to shine in that sweet face. This was how she looked as she gazed upon her son that evening, while he was finishing his supper, seemingly not at all astonished at his mother's silence. He had grown accustomed to these moments of pensiveness on his mother's part. Of late, she often fell into a strange reverie, and little Frank was yet too young to understand these symptoms always followed by a short, hollow cough. His mother was attacked ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... lingered a few minutes in the neighbourhood of her chair, thoughtfully observant of the delicate profile, the pale clear tints of a complexion that had lost its bloom but not its purity, the settled sadness of the perfect mouth, the dreamy pensiveness of the dark-grey eye, and then was ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... fluent forms; the stars repeated their friendliness in her eyes, the grass dimpled her pliant feet, the breeze tossed her brown hair in triumphs of the unstudied becoming, and from the wildness all about her she had her wit and her delightful ways; Morning lent her her cheerfulness, Evening her pensiveness, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... silent well, And leaping rivulet, and evening gloom 485 Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming, Held commune with him, as if he and it Were all that was,—only...when his regard Was raised by intense pensiveness,...two eyes, Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought, 490 And seemed with their serene and azure smiles To ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... was gentle,' writes one of his earliest and closest school-friends, 'retiring, thoughtful to pensiveness, affectionate, without envy or jealousy, almost without emulation, impressible, but not wanting in moral firmness. No one was ever more formed for friendship. In all his words and acts he was simple, straightforward, true. He was very religious. Religion had a real effect upon his character, and ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... have written proceeded not from the pen of vainglory, but from the process of that pensiveness, which two summers since overtook me; whose obscured cause, best known to every name of curse, hath compelled my wit to wander abroad unregarded in this satirical disguise, and counselled my content to dislodge his ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... off with honour from this foolish attempt: but 'tis so fantastic, and carries a face so unlike the common use, that this, peradventure, may make it pass. 'Tis a melancholic humour, and consequently a humour very much an enemy to my natural complexion, engendered by the pensiveness of the solitude into which for some years past I have retired myself, that first put into my head this idle fancy of writing. Wherein, finding myself totally unprovided and empty of other matter, I presented myself to myself for argument and subject. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... a shade of pensiveness. There had been two sides to the watermelon question. Peter and he had not always been able to find ripe watermelons, early in the season, and at times there had been painful consequences, the memory of which came back to the colonel with surprising ease. Nor had they always been careful ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Curate," which is a record of his thoughts and impressions in his Burwash days. One could hardly say that "The Village Curate" would bear reprinting at the present time; we have moved too far from its pensiveness, and an age that does not read "The Task" and only talks about Crabbe is hardly likely to reach out for Hurdis. But within its limits "The Village Curate" is good, alike in its description of scenery, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... painting, and sculpture, the soul itself of the superhuman and sublime. Of the justness of the metaphorical compliment implied in the delineation of the head, it is not for the author to speak; of its exquisiteness and delicacy, his sense is too strong for expression. The habitual pensiveness of the elevated eyebrows, mingled with the momentary gaiety of the rest of the countenance, is one of the most successful points in the picture, and is as true to nature as it is ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... so many great poets have since attempted. The Bright and the Thoughtful aspects of Nature are their subjects: but each is preceded by a mythological introduction in a mixed Classical and Italian manner. The meaning of the first is that Gaiety is the child of Nature; of the second, that Pensiveness is the daughter of Sorrow ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... say how long Mr. Hoopdriver's pensiveness lasted. It seemed a long time before his thoughts of action returned. Then he remembered he was a 'watcher'; that to-morrow he must be busy. It would be in character to make notes, and he pulled out his little note-book. With that in hand he fell a-thinking again. ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... her in the subdued light, under the witching tones of her voice, and the alluring fascination of her face. The face was not perfect; far from it, if by perfect is meant features accordant with one another and true to type. Her hair was flaming red; her eyes were brown, dark brown, a certain pensiveness in them most inaccordant with the hair; her nose was slender, with sensitive nostrils; her mouth was generous with lips a trifle full; her teeth were exquisitely white and symmetrical—and she showed them with due modesty, yet with proper ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... Thorns; and her Throne on which she sat was broken into a Rock, with ragged Pieces pointing upwards for her to lean upon. A heavy Mist hung above her, her Head oppressed with it reclined upon her Arm: Thus did she reign over her disconsolate Subjects, full of her self to stupidity, in eternal Pensiveness, and the profoundest Silence. On one side of her stood Dejection just dropping into a Swoon, and Paleness wasting to a Skeleton; on the other side were Care inwardly tormented with Imaginations, and Anguish ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... town, and as firmly as if she had been bred in the country; she seemed one who dimly knew her appearance to be attractive, but who retained some of the charm of being ignorant of that fact by forgetting it in a general pensiveness. She approached the gate. To let such a creature touch it even with a tip of her glove was to Fitzpiers almost like letting her proceed to tragical self-destruction. He jumped up and looked for his hat, but was unable to find the right one; glancing ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... babalogue, the soldiers' children, sturdiest and toughest of Anglo-Indian urchins,—affording, in their brown cheeks and crisp muscles and boisterous ways, a consoling contrast to the oh-call-it-pale-not-fairness, and the frailness, and premature pensiveness of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... mighty good man," agreed Johnnie with sudden pensiveness. "They've all been mighty good to me ever since I've been here; but I believe Mr. Stoddard has done more for me than any one else. He not only lends me books, but he takes time to explain things ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... therefore, that there was truth in Sir John's observation that young men wanted to protect her. But the bald statement is not sufficient. Whether that quick transition from pensiveness to a dancing gaiety was the cause, or whether it only helped her beauty, this is certain. Young men went down before her like ninepins in a bowling alley. There was something singularly virginal about her. ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... Lady Blanchemain, reconciling herself. Then, after an instant of pensiveness, "So you're already laid low by her beauty. But you haven't found out yet ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... the most authentic portraits[127] of this Prince, had none of the meditative character of that of Charles the First, whom the Chevalier was popularly said to resemble: neither had it the sweetness which is expressed by every feature of that unhappy Monarch, nor had his countenance the pensiveness which wins upon the beholder who gazes upon the portraits of Charles. The eyes of the Chevalier were light-hazel, his face was pale and long, and in the fullness of the lips he resembled his mother, Mary ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... Jemima's personal attractions. Now, Miss Jemima, as I have before observed, had a mild and pensive expression of countenance, and she would have been positively pretty had the mildness looked a little more alert, and the pensiveness somewhat less lackadaisical. In fact, though Miss Jemima was constitutionally mild, she was not de natura pensive; she had too much of the Hazeldean blood in her veins for that sullen and viscid humor called melancholy, and therefore this assumption ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... undeveloped powers, the flashes of daring, of romance, in the awkward reserved girl, the suggestion in her of a big and splendid flowering, fascinated Beryl, and in her humility she never dreamt that she, with her delicate pensiveness, the mingled subtlety and purity of her nature, was no less exceptional. She had been brought up very much alone. Her mother was no companion for her, and the brother nearest her own age and nearest her heart had been killed at the opening of the war. Arthur ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "The utmost pensiveness which can ordinarily be given to a landscape depends on adjuncts of ruin, but no ruin was ever so affecting as the gliding of this ship to her grave. This particular ship, crowned in the Trafalgar hour of trial with chief ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... statues of which the Louvre is full, there is one of Polyhymnia, which is celebrated above the rest for an expression of melancholy pensiveness not usually found among the ancients. It is a singular circumstance that D'Urville should have observed among the Papuans the very expression of countenance distinguishing this antique statue. On board the corvette another company of natives were conducting themselves with a calmness and reserve, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... sister who were ever so successful in imparting to others their own enjoyment of books and people. The tragic circumstance which strengthened and consecrated their natural community of interest had, one might think, something to do with the far-reaching pensiveness even of their most humorous writing, touching often the deepest springs of pity and awe, as the way of the highest humour is—a way, however, very different from that of the humorists of the eighteenth century. But one cannot forget also that Lamb was early an enthusiastic admirer ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... myself to be the cause of their pensiveness, and I should have expected it to be quite otherwise when I found them ...
— Psyche • Moliere
... resumed his work, and thought no more about it; but Caleb alternated between moods of pensiveness and fussy ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... own vitality. But how infinitely less do we profit by them! I will relate to you, before we separate, one among the multitude of mine, as coming the nearest to the poetry of yours, and as having been not totally useless to me. Often have I reflected on it; sometimes with pensiveness, with sadness never. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... she rose and sat in loneliness, Her face grew still more beautiful. Her state Astonished her. "Perhaps it is the King Who hath this wonder wrought. How happy I To be no longer dead!" She washed her face And felt still sad, but with her pensiveness A certain joy was mingled, for her pain Was passed. Her grief the "talking bird" allayed With songs about ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... to his bedroom door to usher out three men and admit others, saw his young lieutenants. He called them to him. He was straighter. He was stern. Fires within had given his eyes the flash of youth. All his usual gentle pensiveness was gone. ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... contrast with that hair, and her slightly faded but delicate complexion, shone, from under dark brows, large eyes, also dark, with a very mild, warm expression, now bright, now tempered by a deep inevitable cloud of pensiveness. In a robe covered with lace, in the glitter of a star of diamonds in the bright aureole of her hair, she greeted the numerous acquaintances who entered her box at the theatre, with the affability and freedom of a perfect society lady. She was even celebrated in that great ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... "He had the inevitable pensiveness and gravity of a person who possessed what a friend has called his 'awful power of insight'; but his mood was always cheerful and equal, and his mind peculiarly healthful, and the airy splendor of his wit and ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... a new portrait of his betrothed, Henrietta Winter; a comely face, shadowed with pensiveness. 'Taken at Torquay; she sent it a day or two ago.—I've been thinking of giving her up. If I do, I shall do it brutally and savagely, to make it easy for her. I've spoilt her life, and I'm pretty sure I've ruined ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... congenial reader. All his productions are life-mysteries, significant of profound truths. His speculations, often bold and striking, are presented with singular force, but with such a quiet grace and simplicity as not to startle until they enter in and occupy the mind. The gayety with which his pensiveness is occasionally broken, seems more than any thing else in his works to have cost some effort. The gentle sadness, the "half-acknowledged melancholy," of his manner and reflections, are more natural ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... jest the same thing," reflected Captain Leezur aloud, with a pensiveness that still had nothing of unavailing regret in it, "ef I'd been a mind tew; and had a monniment put up over me like one o' these here No. 10 Mornin' ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... its rights again and laid claim to absolute dominion in its kingdom, and regret that it had lain so long deprived of its own, gave rise to a tearful pensiveness, which added zest to restitution. It was convalescence, but followed at once by another complaint. Feeling swung from one extreme to ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... which strike every foreigner at his landing. On my first arrival in England, I was asked by a friend how I liked the English women; to which I replied that I thought them all handsome. This is the first impression they produce. There is an air of calmness and pensiveness about them, which surprises and interests particularly a native of the south. They seem to look, if I may apply to them the fine lines of one ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various
... Paralytics.' I suppose the Senores Gamacho and Fuentes knew what they were doing. They are prudent gentlemen. In the Assembly they called themselves Moderates, and opposed every energetic measure with philanthropic pensiveness. At the first rumours of Montero's victory, they showed a subtle change of the pensive temper, and began to defy poor Don Juste Lopez in his Presidential tribune with an effrontery to which the poor man could only respond by a dazed smoothing of his beard and the ringing of the presidential ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... And Lillie, with lingering pensiveness, very graciously acknowledged that it would; and seemed so touchingly resigned, and made such a merit of her resignation, that John told her she was an angel; in fact, he had a sort of indistinct remorseful feeling that he was a sort of cruel monster to deny her any thing. Lillie ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... expresses something immeasurably more difficult of expression. The whole tone of the environment is reproduced in a few touches. We not only realize the scene, but we also feel in its description the same mood of subtle pensiveness, with its flavour of melancholy, in which the writer saw and felt it. For myself I know that the passage brings back to me, exactly and perfectly, not only a mental picture, but also a frame of mind, which I can recognize ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Kitty, with a half-sigh, seating herself upon a fallen stone, and letting her hands fall into each other in her lap as her wont was, "you write them." A curious pensiveness passed from one to the other and ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... astride on a barrel, by Rubens; the most natural and lifelike representation of a tipsy rotundity of flesh that it is possible to imagine. And sometimes, amid these sensual images, I caught the divine pensiveness of a Madonna's face, by Raphael, or the glory and majesty of the babe Jesus in her arm, with his Father shining through him. This is a sort of revelation, whenever ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... transient grief o'ershades the spirit for a while, The momentary tear that falls is followed by a smile; Or if a pensive mood, at times, across the bosom steals, It scarcely sighs, so gentle is the pensiveness it feels ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... her head, her eyes were dimmed with the shade of pensiveness; a thrill of jealousy, in spite of herself, darted to her heart. 'What! and didst thou not fear to go to him?' she said—'Is he not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... bird of night, were heard at distant intervals. Darkness now increased, and through the dusk could only be discerned the pale phantasms of columns and walls. The solitude of the place, the tranquillity of the hour, the majesty of the scene, impressed on my mind a religious pensiveness. The aspect of a great city deserted, the memory of times past, compared with its present state, all elevated my mind to high contemplations. I sat on the shaft of a column, my elbow reposing on my ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... was not very promptly answered. The stranger stood still, regarding him intently for two of three minutes with a look of peculiar pensiveness and abstraction, the heavy double fringe of his long dark lashes giving an almost drowsy pathos to his proud and earnest eyes. Soon, however, this absorbed expression changed to ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... emotion. He closed his eyes, as if fearing to look upon a face that he had last seen in the brightness of his hopes; and which twelve years had left unchanged, except to mature the loveliness of earliest youth into more womanly beauty and expression, and to deepen the pensiveness, that always marked it, into ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... write such arid absurdities to you? But I feel an impulse to scribble wordly words, to stand in a silk hat beside the statue of Liberty and gaze out upon the Atlantic with a Carlylian pensiveness. Idle political tears flow from my brain. For it is obvious that the war the Jabberwock has so nobly waged has been a waste of steel and powder. Standing now on his eight million graves with the tissue-paper of Victory twined about his ears, ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... overshadowed by fishermen's nets hung out to dry, which formed a dark awning that covered them like a tent, overhanging the water on each side, and falling in the most exquisitely graceful folds. There was a monastic pensiveness, a funereal gloom in the appearance of this little company of vessels, which was the more interesting from the general liveliness and glancing motions of the water, they being perfectly still and silent in their ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... cry, thinking it would relieve her, and then spoke to her again with the languid pensiveness of a woman who has also her trouble. "You have been very attentive to Sir Charles, and a kind good servant ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... relieve it. He retired again to his private chamber, and sought for consolation in his own mind; one thought flowed in upon another; a long succession of images seized his attention; the moments crept imperceptibly away through the gloom of pensiveness, till, having recovered his tranquillity, he lifted his head, and saw the lake brightened by the setting sun. "Such," said Seged, sighing, "is the longest day of human existence: before we have learned to use it, we find it ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... made up. I said to his brother, 'Why is your brother's soul still dark against me? It is I who ought to be angry and unforgiving, for I was in the wrong.'" Odisse quem laeseris was never better contravened. But what we chiefly refer to now is the profound pensiveness of the following strain, as if written with a presentiment of what was not then very far off:—"Another Finis written; another milestone on this journey from birth to the next world. Sure it is a subject for solemn cogitation. Shall we continue ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... religious feeling had been to her but too much like what it was to Cowper; I mean, of course, in a far milder form. Without rendering her a prey to those horrors that defy concealment, it subdued her mood and bearing to a perpetual pensiveness; the pillar of a cloud glided constantly before her eyes; she ever waited at the foot of a secret Sinai, listening in her heart to the voice of a trumpet sounding long and waxing louder. Some, perhaps, would rejoice over these tokens of ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... for some time, in a state of tranquil pensiveness, which is not unpleasing. St. Aubert interrupted it by observing, 'This is a very promising young man; it is many years since I have been so much pleased with any person, on so short an acquaintance. He brings back to my memory the days of ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... my girl, Forget him, pretty pensiveness; there will Come others, every day, as good ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... sweetness of her disposition, there was an unusual pensiveness, a tender care for others, which was most endearing, and often touching to witness. One day, perceiving her mother much affected on receiving intelligence of the decease of a valued friend and minister ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... So long as Nisida seemed terrible as well as beautiful, he was subdued;—now that her eyes had ceased to dart forth lightnings, and the expression of her countenance had changed from indignation and resolute menace to pensiveness and a comparatively mournful softness, the bandit as rapidly regained the usual ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... at the font,—the love-name, whereby, if the child lives, the parents know it in their hearts, or by which, if it dies, God seems to have called it away, leaving the sound lingering faintly and sweetly through the house. In Pansie's case, it may have been a certain pensiveness which was sometimes seen under her childish frolic, and so translated itself into French (pensee), her mother having been of Acadian kin; or, quite as probably, it alluded merely to the color of her eyes, which, in some lights, ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... my companion of many lonely hours!" he said with a half whimsical pensiveness. Then, as if in joke, he held out his hand with the key in it, to ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... with the quiet Victorine, he was enchanted with the growing and still budding beauty of Lisette, who was certainly, in outward appearance, the loveliest of the family; then Caliste, too, with her long dark eyelashes, and her look of proud pensiveness, was very charming. In short, the worthy man looked first on one fair girl and then on another in high delight, and concluded by heartily embracing the little Mimi playfully, scolding her for pushing by him so hastily, and then, in the same breath, declaring that never before had any uncle four ...
— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin
... Vicar, falling into a sudden pensiveness as I rose to take my leave, "there are things above fortune's favour, or a King's, or a great lady's. To those cling, Simon, for your name's sake and for my credit, who ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... yet sharp enough to quicken the color in her cheeks, but still indefinably wistful. The song of the wind among the pines, that mountain wind which never ceases to blow, had a sort of sighing pensiveness in its falling cadences. The deep, blue sky dreamed over the russet tree tops and the yellow leaves filled the forest ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... she weeps Troy's painted woes: For sorrow, like a heavy-hanging bell, Once set on ringing, with his own weight goes; Then little strength rings out the doleful knell: So Lucrece, set a-work, sad tales doth tell To pencill'd pensiveness and colour'd sorrow: She lends them words, and she their looks ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... writes assurances; to his friends, his Suhms, Duhans, Voltaires, eager invitations, general or particular, to come to him. "My state has changed," is his phrase to Voltaire and other dear intimates; a tone of pensiveness, at first even of sorrow and pathos traceable in it; "Come to me,"—and the tone, in an old dialect, different from Friedrich's, might have meant, "Pray for me." An immense new scene is opened, full of possibilities of good and bad. His hopes being great, his anxieties, the shadow of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... replied. Sally followed with "Beautiful, isn't it!" and then went slowly towards Tollington Park. Would he follow? She was almost breathless, her eyes downcast, her ears strained. He did not follow. Sally frowned. A sneer came to her lips. Then a pensiveness succeeded, and resolve became fixed. All right; he did not follow. He was a man. All the ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... I can hardly think it necessary to point out to the reader the association between sacred cheerfulness and solemn thought, or to explain any appearance of contradiction between passages in which (as above in Chap. V.) I have had to oppose sacred pensiveness to unholy mirth, and those in which I have to oppose sacred cheerfulness to ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... interfered with her business and made her feel a hypocrite. She heard so much about the paleness of her lips that she decided to end that comment by using paint—the durable kind Ida had recommended. When her lips flamed carmine, a strange and striking effect resulted. The sad sweet pensiveness of her eyes—the pallor of her clear skin—then, that splash of bright red, artificial, bold, defiant—the contrast of the combination seemed somehow to tell the story of her life her past no less than her present. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... of the enslaved! Could she add that to the poetry of her nature, how much greater would be her charm-how much more fascinating that quiet current of thought with which she seems blessed! There is a gentleness in her impulses—a pensiveness in her smile—a softness in her emotions—a grace in her movements—an ardent soul in her love! She is gay and lightsome in her youth; she values her beauty, is capricious with her admirers, and yet becomes ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... negligent curls called oreilles de chien, which became fashionable long afterwards, during the days of the French Directory. Had the Alchemist remained profoundly ignorant as to the identity of the old man, he must still have observed with interest, features which were equally characterised by the pensiveness of the student and the paleness of the valetudinarian. He knew, however, instinctively, as he had done upon the two preceding occasions, that he beheld a personage of illustrious memory. And he knew rightly, for it was Milton. While the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... began to realise that she was growing old. Then a certain pensiveness fell over her beauty which dimmed yet intensified it; sharp angles, glittering points, melted away into curves and enticing gleams. The white harbor put on soft grays and pinks; the far-away ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... soft and warm on that sandy shore even to the end of November; the great long misty sea-line touching the tender-coloured sky; the white sail of a distant boat turning silver in some pale sunbeam:—it seemed as if she could dream her life away in such luxury of pensiveness, in which she made her present all in all, from not daring to think of the past, or wishing ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... said softly. An agreeable glow of relief passed over her. She looked up at Richard with a delightful effect of pensiveness from beneath the sweeping brim of her cavalier hat.—"I can well believe Aunt Katherine would be attracted by her," she continued. "Honoria is quite a woman's woman. Men do not care very much about her as a rule. There is a good deal of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... along the banks of the river. It was now full day: and the cheerful light, and the noble face of the Po,—here a superb stream, equal almost to the Rhine at Cologne,—rolling on to the Adriatic, chased away my pensiveness. The river here flows between lofty embankments,—the adjoining lands being below its level, and reminding one of Holland; and were any extraordinary inundation to happen among the Alps, and force the embankments of the Po, the territory around Ferrara, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... dawn,—the "soft, guileless consolations" of our cigars, as Aeschylus says of certain other incense, the cool, fragrant breezes, gentle as remembered kisses upon the brow, the tremulous tenderness of the star-beams, the listening hush of midnight, having swayed us to a mood of pensiveness which found a reflex in our conversation. From the warning glare of sunlight the heart shuts close its secrets; but hours like these beguile from its inmost depths those subtile emotions, and vague, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a lady, with large lustrous eyes and a pale olive complexion, whose countenance, from its extreme mobility, attracted my attention; at one moment, lighting up with intelligence, and the next, softening into pensiveness. ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... to others since), not long before his death, that all the devils in hell did tear him in pieces. Forster, likewise, after this fact, being a man formerly addicted to hospitality, company, mirth, and music, was afterwards observed to forsake all this, and with much melancholy and pensiveness (some say with madness) pined and drooped away. The wife also of Bald Butter, kinsman to the Earl, gave out the whole fact a little before her death. Neither are these following passages to be forgotten, that as soon as ever she was murdered, they made great haste ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... gentleman's words proved true. The days passed like bright smiles, in which, however, lurked the pensiveness of autumn. Slowly failing maples glowed first with the hectic flush of disease, but gradually warmer hues stole into the face of Nature, for it is the dying of the leaves that causes the changes of ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... he was leaning over the rail at the boat's side, in his pensiveness, unmindful of another pensive figure near—a young gentleman with a swan-neck, wearing a lady-like open shirt collar, thrown back, and tied with a black ribbon. From a square, tableted-broach, curiously engraved with Greek characters, he seemed a collegian—not improbably, a sophomore—on ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... "what's the row? as Salisbury would say; only, more properly we might ask, in your case, what do the tranquillity and genteel pensiveness of your demeanor denote?" ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... longer a girl, but a woman engaged to be married, sitting calmly by her lover's side, without any of the tremblingly delicious emotions which she had once believed would constitute the great mystery, Love—a strange pensiveness overtook her. She felt all the solemnity of her position, and, as yet, little of its sweetness. Perhaps that would come in time. She resolved to do her duty towards him whom she so tenderly honoured, and who ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... heart, and made her lovely breast His tomb, and failed not of wifely faith, Of promis'd love and of her bound behest, Until she ended had her days by death. Ulysses' wife (such was her steadfastness) Abode his slow return whole twenty years: And spent her youthful days in pensiveness, Bathing her widow's ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... presence of this sweet and beautiful lady was a new experience, observed her pensiveness and wondered thereat. His roving glance presently ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... garb is to the body but what the body is to the soul, themselves a constituent part and power or function in the thought—all these are abandoned for their opposites,—as if our countrymen, through successive generations, had lost the sense of solemnity and pensiveness (not to speak of deeper emotions) and resorted to the tombs of their forefathers and contemporaries, only to be tickled and surprised. Would we not recoil from such gratification, in such a place, if the general literature of the country had not ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... in an elegiac mood, though he meant to drive away his cares later in the evening by the "Falernian system." He felt the exodus in the air. Another spring drawing to its close—everybody scattering! He was filled, too, with that peculiar pensiveness which troubles complex people when they have done a kindly act. Virtue had ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... calls the fourth prelude in E minor "a little poem, the exquisitely sweet, languid pensiveness of which defies description. The composer seems to be absorbed in the narrow sphere of his ego, from which the wide, noisy world is for the time shut out." Willeby finds this prelude to be "one of the most beautiful ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... began to pace the little room. The firelight played on her mop of brown hair, bringing out its golden shades, and on the charming pensiveness of her face. Alice watched her, thinking "She could do it all, if she chose!" But she didn't dare to say anything, for ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... pensiveness in them being so notorious, I wonder none of those writers, who have expressly treated of melancholy, should have mentioned it. Burton, whose book is an excellent abstract of all the authors in that kind who preceded him, and who treats of every species of this malady, from the hypochondriacal ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... you," said Mac, after two minutes of pensiveness, "that my cousin Cliff can beat me dancing. We've always been what you might call pals. If you'd take him up instead of me, now, it might be better. He's invented a lot of steps that I ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... his pensiveness, his elegance, I felt that somehow our national triumph was not complete in him,—that there were yet more finished forms of self-abasement in the Old World, till one day I looked out of the window and saw at a little distance my veteran digging a cellar for an Irishman. I own that the spectacle ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... Rosalind needed not when once at liberty, and sporting "under the greenwood tree." The sensibility and even pensiveness of her demeanor in the first instance, render her archness and gayety afterwards, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... restless spirits—notes which, had she not been so young, gay, and healthy, would have swept her trembling nerves like some omen, some anticipatory dirge. In this her prime of existence and bloom of beauty they but subdued vivacity to pensiveness. Snatches of sweet ballads haunted her ear; now and then she sang a stanza. Her accents obeyed the fitful impulse of the wind; they swelled as its gusts rushed on, and died as they wandered away. Caroline, withdrawn to the farthest and darkest end of ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... more necessary to his happiness, to strengthen her hold upon him by every means an affectionate and beloved wife has at her command. She had done well for herself—she was thinking while he concluded as silently within himself that the slight pensiveness tempering the expressive ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... Peter, and sat down nearer. But the disciples were silent and unusually pensive. Images of the road they had traversed, of the sun, the rocks and the grass, of Christ lying down under the shelter, quietly floated through their heads, breathing a soft pensiveness, begetting confused but sweet reveries of an eternal movement under the sun. The wearied body reposed sweetly, and thought was merged in something mystically great and beautiful—and ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... somewhat sobered frame of mind that we presently turned away and started homeward by way of Great Ormond Street. My companion was deeply thoughtful, relapsing for a while into that sombreness of manner that had so impressed me when I first met her. Nor was I without a certain sympathetic pensiveness; as if, from the great, silent house, the spirit of the vanished man had issued forth to ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... delicate fullness, expressive of a mind which took—(of the senses)—only so much life as would hold down the spirit during its probation; and when this spiritual mouth was at rest, no painter has ever drawn lips on which lay more of the unutterable pensiveness of beauty which we dream to have been Mary's, in the childhood of Jesus. A tear in the heart was the instinctive answer to Stephania's every look when she did not smile; and her large, soft, slowly-lifting eyes, were to any elevated perception, it seemed to me, most eloquent of tenderness ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... man who was on his way to college, where he expected to be matriculated the following day. His valise was full of books and other students' requisites, and his heart full of literary ambition. Attracted to me by my uniform, he soon learned my business, and, after a few moments of pensiveness, to my surprise, he told me to inscribe his name among my recruits. Then turning to a friend on board the car, he said, "Take this trunk to my home, and tell my mother I have ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... attained dramatic or narrative power or skill in the presentation of individual character. In place of these elements he has the lyric gift of rendering moods. Aside from ecstatic delight, these are mostly moods of pensiveness, languor, or romantic sadness, like the one so magically suggested in the 'Ode to a Nightingale,' of Ruth standing lonely and 'in ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... did he say about his departure. He never spoiled a thing like this with "Good-bye." Back at Waterman's, Kemp was packing trunks. In forty-eight hours there would be the folding of tents, and Hamilton Hill would be deserted. It added a pensiveness to his manner that made him more than ever charming. It rained on the way home, and it seemed to him significant that his first ride and his last with Becky should ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... Mr Boffin assented, with his former pensiveness, as he took his seat upon his settle. 'I hope good may be coming of it in the future time. Towards which, what's your views, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... flume. It was only four miles away across the fields and through the woods, making a walk of much charm—especially in the autumn, when the colours of the foliage are so fine, and the air has a touch of pensiveness, so that one is induced ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... met in the western cities; and the noses were finely chiselled, with well-defined nostrils. There was no unsteadiness in the eyes, so common to the Persians of the north-west,—and these fellows consequently presented quite an honest appearance, while the overhanging brow added a look of pensiveness. The skull was peculiarly formed, slanting upwards considerably from the forehead to an abnormal height, and giving the cranium an elongated shape. The ears, too, generally malformed or under-developed in most Persians, ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... and self-poised genius. The Mozart sonata for violin and piano is exceedingly interesting in all its three movements, light and airy in its general character,—except in the andante, which is touched with pensiveness,—and not striking very far down in its suggestions, but full of fresh beauty and consummate in its symmetrical grace. In the happiest contrast with the sonata was the wonderful D-minor quartette of Schubert. No better illustration of the marked divergence between the modes of ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... to a shrillish key. A sincere and faithful man, who had walked very demurely through life, though with a touch of sudden, bright, quiet humour and fancy, every now and then crossing the grey of his characteristic pensiveness or melancholy, and drawing effect from it. He was most frank and genial with me, and I greatly ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... good-hearted pensiveness; 'it's not in the course of nature that she should.' She rose as she spoke, as if it behoved her to begin her new duties with alacrity, as there might not long be occasion for them. She put another question before she went. 'And who will there ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... time, however, Henrietta was altogether herself, save for a pretty pensiveness, and emerged with all her accustomed ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... lichens with slow oozing weep; Where cypress and the darker yew start wild; 5 And, 'mid the summer torrent's gentle dash Dance brighten'd the red clusters of the ash; Beneath whose boughs, by those still sounds beguil'd, Calm Pensiveness might muse herself to sleep; Till haply startled by some fleecy dam, 10 That rustling on the bushy cliff above With melancholy bleat of anxious love, Made meek enquiry for her wandering lamb: Such a green ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... nature, and to that only. They festoon the cross with flowers, but never think of dying on it. They are charmed by Gothic churches filled with "dim, religious light." The waves of music from the great; sounding organ awe their souls and fill them with a pensiveness which they mistake for repentance. Pointed arches, sculptured capitals, fretted altars, swinging censers, burning candles, white-robed choir-boys, errorless order in church service—these auxiliaries influence them so strongly in their sense of the beautiful that they ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... and abstruse treatise on metaphysics to even the charms of her society—and often, when she urgently desired my company, I would sit in her drawing-room, turning over the leaves of a book and feigning to be absorbed in it, while she, from her velvet fauteuil, would look at me with a pretty pensiveness made up half of respect, half of gentle admiration—a capitally acted facial expression, by the bye, and one that would do credit to Sarah Bernhardt. We had both heard from Guido Ferrari; his letter to my wife I of course did not see; she had, however, told me he was ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... in this verse. It is a poem of beauty and sorrow that cannot be symbolized by such public figures as Cromwell and Milton. Here the genius of the parting day, and all that it means to the imagination, its quiet movement and its music, its pensiveness and its regrets, have been given a form more lasting than bronze. Perhaps the poem owes a part of its popularity to the fact that it is a great homily, though a homily transfigured. But then does not Hamlet owe a great ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd |
