"Abstracted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... more Whitish Metalls did not much Tinge their Menstruums, though the conspicuously Colour'd Metalls as Gold, and Copper, do. For Lead dissolv'd in Spirit of Vinegar or Aqua-fortis gives a Solution cleer enough, and if the Menstruum be abstracted appears either Diaphanous or White. Of the Colour of Iron we have elsewhere said something: And 'tis worth noting, that though if that Metall be dissolv'd in oyl of Vitriol diluted with water, it affords a Salt or Magistery so like in colour, as well as some ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... small depredations—such as the loss of a pair of blankets, a sheet, or a pair of stockings, carried off by the ungrateful vagabonds whom he sometimes sheltered. There were, however, one pair of blankets abstracted in this way, that found their road back to their owner in ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... wise of Miss Huntley to begin the English Language lesson, for though every one was of course very abstracted, it gave some ostensible occupation. Before the hour was over Miss Bishop sailed into the room. She looked pale and anxious, but spoke with her usual ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... no amount of search, no shaking of handkerchief, or turning of pocket inside out could avail to find it. The letter was lost, and in the utmost consternation Juno returned to the parlor, still hunting for the letter, and appearing so abstracted as scarcely to be civil when Katy came down to see her; asking if she was going that night to Sybil Grandon's, and talking of the dreadful war, which she hoped would not be a war after all. Juno was too wretched ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... "That will never do, and what an arduous job to uselessly saddle one's self with; for even though there be interred in some graves people, who've been dead for several hundreds of years, it wouldn't be a propitious thing were their corpses turned topsy-turvey now and the bones abstracted; just for the sake of preparing some ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... what it was that made him so abstracted, and then so suddenly merry?" was the thought in ...
— Dick Prescott's Third Year at West Point - Standing Firm for Flag and Honor • H. Irving Hancock
... visit, when he recovered from the fit of meditation into which he was thrown by the sight of the marvellous banquet aforesaid, was to the Colosseum; but his account of the wonders of this celebrated place of resort, perhaps from his faculties still being in some measure abstracted, is less full than might have been expected. The ascending-room (which the Persian prince describes as "rising like an eagle with large wings into the atmosphere, till, after an hour's time, it stopped in the sky, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... heterogeneous assemblage gathered from various countries, and composed for the most part of blacks and persons of mixed blood, had previously given other indications of mischievous and dangerous propensities. Early in the same month property was clandestinely abstracted from the depot of the Transit Company and taken to Greytown. The plunderers obtained shelter there and their pursuers were driven back by its people, who not only protected the wrongdoers and shared the plunder, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... lying on the leafy slope, he was busying himself with gathering together all the acorns and acorn-cups within his reach, examining them carefully one by one, and yet with a face that grew grave and became abstracted. More time passed than he knew probably, and Hazel had leisure to come out of her own abstractions and wonder at his. He did not look as if he remembered her presence; and yet a sensible woman has no objection to such indications ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... the common way. I was provoked to see Leonora satisfied. She assures me that Helen has uncommonly strong affections, and that her character rather exceeds than is deficient in enthusiasm. Possibly; but I am certain that Helen is in no danger of becoming romantic. Far from being abstracted, I never saw any one seem more interested and eager about every present occurrence—pleased, even to childishness, with every passing trifle. I confess that she is too much of this world for me. But I will if possible suspend my judgment, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... he could Randy repeated the talk he had heard. Jack's father listened with keen interest. He was astonished when Randy mentioned the papers which had been abstracted ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... his side Till now; but love he owes me, for my thoughts Ne'er left him, nor my eyes longed without tears To see my child again,—and now I have found him! But how! obedient, but with coldness; duteous In my sight, but with carelessness; mysterious— 420 Abstracted—distant—much given to long absence, And where—none know—in league with the most riotous Of our young nobles; though, to do him justice, He never stoops down to their vulgar pleasures; Yet there's some tie between them which I can not Unravel. They look up to him—consult him— ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... to traduce my noble patron," replied Varney; "yet I am compelled to own that some deep, overwhelming, yet secret feeling hath of late dwelt in my lord's mind, hath abstracted him from the cares of the household which he was wont to govern with such religious strictness, and hath left us opportunities to do follies, of which the shame, as in this case, partly falls upon our patron. Without this, I had not had means or leisure to commit ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... toward the coffee-hour. Two or three women, wives of members, a young girl to whom McLean had been rather attentive before he met Harmony and who bridled at the abstracted bow he gave her. And, finally, when hope in Peter was dead, one of the ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... silence when the Colonel ceased, and then a clearing of the throat and a preliminary movement of the arms gave warning that Mrs. Gradinger was going to speak. The unspoken passage from Racine evidently sat heavily on her chest. Abstracted and overwrought as he was, these symptoms aroused in Sir John a consciousness of impending danger, and he rushed, incontinent, into the breach, before the lady's opening ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... that moment, he thought nothing of the past, nothing of the future. The present claimed his whole undivided mind, and to the present he surrendered it, abstracted from all speculations, clear and unclouded, and ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... society of Margaret Verschoyle was, indeed, beginning to mean a great deal to him. He had not, before, met any woman who interested him in this way; and, already, he knew that none other ever would. She said very little now; having, he noticed, become more silent and abstracted as her brother grew effusive, apparently in the endeavour to make up for his previous ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... satisfied with, even cheered by, his liquid refreshment. His wife came to her place at the table when they were almost through, and sat stirring a bowl of the mixture of bread and thin soup, her eyes set in abstracted stare in the middle of the table, far beyond the work of her hands. She did not speak to Joe; he did not undertake any ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... attempted faintly to describe, was its charm. Such an utter, such a refreshing absence of all earthiness—such purity and calmness of soul—such mental sweetness as it bespoke! When I first directed my eye to him, it seemed as if his thoughts were abstracted from the comparatively noisy scene over which he presided—busy it might be, in reviewing the charge which he had delivered to the jury, and upon the credit of which the miserable culprit had been doomed to die. I do not exaggerate when I assert, that at this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... to midnight; the most respectable flat in respectable Westminster; a lonely and very abstracted novelist—and a pale-faced, beautiful woman, enveloped in costly furs, sitting staring with fearful eyes straight before her. This was such a scene as his sense of the proprieties and of the probabilities could never have permitted ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... that Jim Smith, in appropriating his uncle's wallet, abstracted therefrom a five-dollar bill before ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger
... have the power only of alluding to the body: the mind cannot be confined or bound: it will be free, though its mansion be beset with chains. But if, in every sale of the human species, you are under the necessity of considering your slave in this abstracted light; of alluding only to the body, and of making no allusion to the mind; you are under the necessity also of treating him, in the same moment, as a brute, and of abusing therefore that nature, which cannot otherwise be considered, ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... execution. How Don Antonio, returning from the wars in Mexico, with his band of piratical adventurers, had landed in a boat upon the beach at Ensenada—how he had entered the chateau, and with the help of his two subordinate villains had abstracted the Countess and her infant—himself Fabian—how the assassination of the mother had been committed in the boat, and the child only spared in the belief that the murderer's steel was not necessary—in the belief that the waves ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... then,' said he; and just as I wrenched the portfolio from his hand, he deftly abstracted the greater part of its contents, and after turning them over a moment he cried out,—'Bless my stars, here's another;' and slipped a small oval of ivory paper into his waistcoat pocket—a complete miniature portrait that I had sketched with such tolerable success as to ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... with us long?" inquired the shoeman, after trying on the shoes and cursing out Peter, the adenoidic clerk, in an abstracted, hopeless manner. ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... game in progress, and as all should be fish that comes to a water-collector's net, the dear old gentleman was by no means scrupulous in appropriating to himself the property of his neighbours, which, on the contrary, he abstracted whenever an opportunity presented itself, smiling good-humouredly all the while, and making so many condescending speeches to the owners, that they were delighted with his amiability, and thought ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... that Lucille was moody and abstracted next morning. Sometimes for a few moments she talked and smiled as before, but this was fitfully, and with an effort. She appeared like one brooding over some wrong that had taken possession of her thoughts, or some dark and angry scheme which engrossed her imagination. She soon left Julie ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... that after the relics left Rome no one had any opportunity of meddling with them. Moreover, Lunison, throwing himself at Eginhard's feet, confessed with many tears what actually took place. It will be remembered that after the body of St. Marcellinus was abstracted from its tomb, Ratleig deposited it in the house of Deusdona, in charge of the latter's brother, Lunison. But Hunus, being very much disappointed that he could not get hold of the body of St. Tiburtius, and afraid to go back to his abbot empty-handed, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... marshal at a tourney, they discovered, was a prime necessity. As for coursers, barbs, destriers, or whatever name their noble steeds might bear, they had no choice. There were but a couple of clumsy farm mares available to them, and these the knights secured, their only equipments being headstalls abstracted from the harness in the barn, while the course fixed upon was a meadow well out of sight from the houses and the eyes of the elders. Valentine was instructed in his duties, particularly in the manner of giving the word of command. Laissez aller, ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... Mathematical disquisition, and the boldness of Pindaric daring. I have three strong champions to defend me against the attacks of Criticism: the Novelty, the Difficulty, and the Utility of the work. I may justly plume myself that I first have drawn the nymph Mathesis from the visionary caves of abstracted idea, and caused her to unite with Harmony. The first-born of this Union I now present to you; with interested motives indeed—as I expect to receive in return the more valuable offspring of your Muse. Thine ever, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... table d'hote the abstracted lady sat next to me. A ragout of some sort was handed round, and after I had taken some she asked me, before ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... after this, Mr. Smith did not appear at all like himself. He seemed abstracted and puzzled. Miss Maggie, who still felt self-conscious and embarrassed over her misconception of his attentions to Mellicent, was more talkative than usual in her nervous attempt to appear perfectly natural. The fact ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... clerk behind his brass bars took her notes, and carefully examined them one by one. She watched him, not entirely convinced of his reality, and thought vaguely of the detestable morning when she had abstracted the notes from Gerald's pocket. She was filled with pity for the simple, ignorant Sophia of those days, the Sophia who still had a few ridiculous illusions concerning Gerald's character. Often, since, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... up with the little party from Yatton than with the serious business of the day. His horse, however, had an eye to business; and with erect ears, catching the first welcome signal sooner than the gallant person who sat upon it, sprang off like lightning and would have left its abstracted rider behind, had he not been a first-rate "seat." In fact, Kate herself was not sufficiently on her guard; and her eager filly suddenly put in requisition all her rider's little and skill to rein her in—which having done, Kate's eye looked rather anxiously after her late ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... Mr. Fotheringay was abstracted and thoughtful all that day, and performed no miracles except certain provisions for Winch, and the miracle of completing his day's work with punctual perfection in spite of all the bee-swarm of thoughts that hummed through his mind. And the extraordinary abstraction and meekness of his manner ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... mode of addressing me gave me constantly that feeling. So much the more affecting was it, when the sanity of his perceptions and his remembrances returned; but these intervals were of slower and slower occurrence. In this condition, silent or babbling childishly, self- involved and torpidly abstracted, or else busy with self-created phantoms and delusions, what a contrast did he offer to that Kant who had once been the brilliant centre of the most brilliant circles for rank, wit, or knowledge, that ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... following Sunday both he and the Finn folks were at Berg church, and he secretly abstracted a handful of mould from one of the Finn graves, and put it in his pocket. The same evening, when they came home, he strewed the mould over his father's lines unobserved. And, oddly enough, the very next time his father cast his lines, as many fish were caught as in the good old times. But after ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... was not the great, but the beautiful, or the pretty, that caught her attention. And in composition, the polish of style, and harmony of numbers, interested her much more than the flights of genius, or abstracted speculations. ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... was much worried when he learned that Merrick had fallen in with a captain of a tramp vessel who was ready to go on a hunt for the treasure. And he was still more worried when Dick told him of the letters which had been abstracted from his coat pocket by the thieves. Among them was one from Mrs. Stanhope mentioning the treasure hunt and how she would be on hand at Philadelphia to board the steam yacht with ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... spoke like a man charged with some fluid which had abstracted him from life's monotonous routine. He had to consider the chance of never leaving the grounds alive; yet as he entered the place, where smooth grass between the trees made good footing for the work to be done, the thrill of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... horses driven may never have deserved the thong. In this matter of the Eustace diamonds the police had been very active; but they had been unsuccessful, and had consequently been abused. The robbery was now more than three weeks old. Property to the amount of ten thousand pounds had been abstracted, and as yet the police had not even formed an assured opinion on the subject! Had the same thing occurred in New York or Paris every diamond would by this time have been traced. Such were the assertions made, and ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... in my power, every man that drew his sword, unless in the Service, or purely to defend his life, person, or goods, from violence (I mean abstracted from all punctos or whims of honour) should ride the wooden horse in the Tilt Yard[387] for such first offence, for the second stand in the pillory, and for the third be ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... great events in the spring of '34 began to take place, Chris was in a period of abstracted peace, and the rumours of them came to him as cries ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... house. Lester remained rooted in the shadows of the colonnade for a minute or two, looking after her, with a set, abstracted face. Then the sound of the altercation overhead smote him too with alarm. He moved quickly away lest through the open windows he might catch ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and their comparative dignity and importance. According to the faculty or source, from which the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the merit of such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic style;—first, that not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry;—secondly, that whatever lines ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... small, quick, with sunny blue-gray eyes belying the gloomy curve of his mouth, was everywhere; arranging for bearers, selecting hymns, conferring with the family, keeping abstracted old women off the seats reserved for the mourners, and maintaining an ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... week after week, after the advent of Louise, trying to nerve herself to the point where she could speak or act. Lester was consistently generous and kind, but she felt at times that he himself might wish it. He was thoughtful, abstracted. Since the scene with Louise it seemed to her that he had been a little different. If she could only say to him that she was not satisfied with the way she was living, and then leave. But he himself had plainly indicated after his discovery of Vesta that ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... alone external intuition is possible. Thus, the form of all phenomena may exist a priori in the soul as a pure intuition previous to all experience. So we can only speak of space and of extended objects from the standpoint of human reason. But when we have abstracted all the forms perceived by our sensibility, there remains a pure intuition which we call space. Therefore our discussion teaches us the objective validity of space with regard to all that can appear before us externally as an object; but equally ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... known from the moment he learned the tin box was missing, that only the frail, fair fingers of Minnie Merle could have abstracted it, but justice demanded that he should have indisputable proof of her presence in V—— after twelve o'clock, for he had not left the library until that hour, and knew that the train ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... to the archway of the great hovel which protected the kiln, and pointed like a conspirator to the figure of the guardian fireman dozing near his monster. The boy had the handle-less remains of an old spade, and with it he crept into the hovel, dangerously abstracted fire from one of the scorching mouths, and fled therewith, and the fireman never stirred. Then Darius, to whom the mentor kindly lent his spade, attempted to do the same, but being inexpert woke the fireman, who held him spellbound by ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... although, there, the circumstances under which the tales were told, with the terror of the plague hanging over the merry company, lend a grim grotesqueness to the narrative, unless we can look at it abstracted from its setting. Chaucer, on the other hand, strikes a perpetual key-note of gaiety whenever he mentions the word "pilgrimage;" and at every stage of the connecting story we bless the happy thought which gives us incessant incident, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... which must be exhibited here also. It is the force of the law in nature, that must be brought into opposition here with the height of the word, the ideal word, the higher, but not yet scientifically abstracted word, that seeks in vain because it has no 'grappling-hook' on the actuality, to bind it. There already are the heights of learning as it is, as this school finds it, dramatically exhibited on the one hand; but this, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... remained standing, however, before me, her eyelids drooping,—not shyly, for her eyes had a steady, abstracted expression, as if she were arranging her facts in systematic order so as to tell me her story in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... pillow, Somerset began to kindle once more into the hot fit of the detective fever; and the next morning resumed the practice of his art with careless hand and an abstracted mind. The day was destined to be fertile in surprises; nor had he long been seated at the easel ere the first of these occurred. A cab laden with baggage drew up before the door; and Mrs. Luxmore in person rapidly mounted the steps ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he not known the secret of his sorrow, it would have soon become plain to his acute and watchful nurse that some hidden trouble was gnawing at his heart, for he was taciturn, abstracted and sometimes morose. He manifested no curiosity as to the benefactor upon whose charity he was living, but received the alms bestowed by that unknown hand as children receive the gifts ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... Angelica's heart? Alas! whether he wished so or not, it was but too evident to all that he had gained her preference. In her blushing cheek and downcast eyes, and tremulous voice and embarrassed manner, when he was present, in her abstracted mind, and restless air of wandering glances when he was absent, the truth was but ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... type. Her hair was black as midnight, her eyes had no less deep a shade, and her complexion showed the richness demanded as a support to these decided features. As she continued to look at the pretty fellow before her, apparently so far abstracted into some speculative world as scarcely to know a real one, a warmer wave of her warm temperament glowed visibly through her, and a qualified observer might from this have hazarded a guess that there was Romance blood in ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... here and there, on church or citadel, produced a fine pictorial effect, and, in places where the ground lay unevenly, held out the right hand of conduct to the benighted. But sun, moon, and stars abstracted or concealed, the night-faring inhabitant had to fall back - we speak on the authority of old prints - upon stable lanthorns two stories in height. Many holes, drilled in the conical turret-roof of this vagabond Pharos, let up spouts of dazzlement into the bearer's eyes; ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have been a kind-hearted man, not so wholly absorbed in speculation and self as some of the more greedy and vulgar members of the Stock Exchange. One day Mr. Goldsmid observed his favourite waiter at the City of London Tavern very melancholy and abstracted. On being pressed, John confessed that he had just been arrested for a debt of L55, and that he was thinking over the misery of his wife and five children. Goldsmid instantly drew out his chequebook, and wrote a cheque for L100, the sight of which ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... mastered years ago. To seem to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse to hurry—itself a confession of miscalculation; by attention to these simple rules, Dubois had built up a steady reputation from the days when he had been a promising junior officer, a still, almost abstracted young man, deliberate but ready. Even then men had looked at him and said: 'He will go far.' Through fifty years of peace he had never once been found wanting, and at manoeuvres his impassive persistence had perplexed and hypnotised and defeated many ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... slave-holders stood on the records of heaven, and whether the fact of slave-owning would cause the insertion of an item in the mortal warrant forming the exception to a peaceful conclusion with the Father's forgiveness. He felt as if he would surely die during the night past, and his mind became so abstracted about what he had done in his life,—what was to come, how negro property had been treated, how it should be treated,—that, although he had opinions now and then widely-different, it had left a problem which would take him all his life-time to solve,—if he should live ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... personality apart from this abysmal dualism, the ebb and flow of which, with the relative victory of love over malice, is our ultimate definition of what living personality is. The emotion of love abstracted from personality is not the secret of the universe, because personality in its concrete living activity is the secret of the universe. It is this very abstraction of love, isolated from any person who loves, and projected as an abstract into the void, that has done so much ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... Still strangely abstracted (but conscious now of the way by which he went), Mr. Bashwood left the public-house a few minutes later, in his turn. He walked on mechanically, in his dreary black garments, moving like a blot on the white surface of the sun-brightened road, as Midwinter had seen him ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... take no part, though he could not doubt that Baboushka would denounce him—a stranger, and the principal in the duel with canes. His cloak would help toward the identification and unless the hag's crew had abstracted it, it would be forthcoming, he ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... later, Newland Archer, sitting in abstracted idleness in his private compartment of the office of Letterblair, Lamson and Low, attorneys at law, was summoned by the head of ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... Pecksniff, looking up, and gradually exchanging his abstracted face for one of joyful recognition. 'Here already! Martin, my dear boy, I am delighted to welcome ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... what he had dreaded most and probably thought he had escaped. She had stared at him, at the stewardess, at the walls, with abstracted, vacant, and bewildered, but always undimmed and unmoistened eyes. A sudden convulsion shook her whole frame, her blank expression broke like a shattered mirror, she threw her hands over her eyes and fell forward with ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... The talk turned again on the morality of London, and exciting stories were told of a fracas which had occurred between two well-known men. So their desks had been broken open, and packets of love letters abstracted. New scandals were about to break to blossom, other scandals had been ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... cried one of the peasants; "shout, the boy may hear you!" "Alas," answered the father, " he cannot hear; you forget that my child is deaf and dumb!" At that instant, Theodor, who for a brief while had stood apart, abstracted and silent, approached St. Aubyn and grasped his hand. "Shout!" repeated he, with the earnestness of a command; "call your boy by his name!" St Aubyn looked at him with astonishment; then in a clear piercing voice obeyed. "Charlie!" he cried; "Charlie, my boy! where are you?" ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... toe as the foot rose nor upon the heel as it fell. He never wore his shoes out at the heel and the toe, as most men do, more than at the middle. Yet his gait was not altogether awkward, and there was manifest physical power in his step. As he moved along thus, silent and abstracted, his thoughts dimly reflected in his sharp face, men turned to look after him as an object of sympathy as well as curiosity. His melancholy, in the words of Mr. Herndon, 'dripped from him as he walked.' If, however, he met a friend in the street, and was roused by a hearty 'Good-morning, ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... miles gregarius, or miles manipularis—there was none for an officer; that is to say, each several rank of officers had a name; but there was no generalization to express the idea of an officer abstracted from its several species or classes.] It cannot much surprise us that this department of the public service should gradually have gone to ruin or decay. Under the senate and people, under the auspices of those awful symbols—letters more significant and ominous ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... John Caldigate with horror. Hester's nurse, of course, sympathised with her and her baby. During these two hours the packing was completed, but Hester found that her strong walking-boots and her bonnet had been abstracted. Did they really think that at such a time as this boots and bonnets would be anything to her? They could know nothing of her nature. They could not understand the sort of combat she would carry on if an attempt were made to take from her her liberty,—an attempt made by those who had by ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... labour of Africa is continued to be abstracted to any considerable extent by Europeans, and from any points except from free European settlements in Africa, in order to cultivate other quarters of the world, all hope of improving the condition of Africa is at an end; because the abstraction of such labour can only ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... sorrows endured, of hopes that could not be satisfied, of desires that could not know fulfilment; pictures, painted in words, of scenes such as we ourselves have moved through in old moods of delight, scenes from which the marvellous alchemy of memory has abstracted all the base and dark elements, leaving only the pure gold of remembered happiness—the wide upland with the far-off plain, the garden flooded with sun, the grasses crisped with frost, the snow-laden trees, the flaming ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... not said one word to me about the tragedy which we had witnessed, but I observed all the morning that he was in his most thoughtful mood, and he gave me the impression, from his vacant eyes and his abstracted manner, of a man who is striving to recall something to his memory. We were in the middle of our lunch when he suddenly sprang to his feet. "By Jove, Watson; I've got it!" he cried. "Take your hat! Come with me!" He hurried at his top speed down Baker Street and along ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... eyebrows and bracing up were matters of frequent occurrence, as Frank grew more and more silent and abstracted, and now after he had sat through a funny story told by Mr. St. Claire and had not even smiled, or given any sign that he heard it, he suddenly caught Dolly's eye and saw that both eyebrows, and nose, and chin were ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... visited them, was much impaired by want of shrubs and trees. This was in 1787: the poet, accompanied by his future biographer, Professor Walker, went, when close on twilight, to this romantic scene: "he threw himself," said the Professor, "on a heathy seat, and gave himself up to a tender, abstracted, and voluptuous enthusiasm of imagination. In a few days I received a letter from Inverness, for the poet had gone on his way, with the Petition enclosed." His Grace of Athole obeyed the injunction: the picturesque points are now crowned with thriving ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... would destroy their hopes. They seemed under the conviction that the will was in the bureau; and if they had been men otherwise than merely what, as the world goes, are called honest, they might have abstracted the document; for the generous Rachel never even looked at their proceedings, grieved as she was at the death of her father. They were, at ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... his chair from the table, and I knew sat watching me. I would give him no opportunity, for my opportunity I could not have then. I kept quiet till the ladies moved; I moved with them; and sat all the evening abstracted in my own meditations, without paying Preston any attention; feeling indeed very old and grey, as no doubt I looked. When I was ordered to bed Miss Pinshon desired I would hold no conversation with anybody. Whereupon Preston took my candle and boldly ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... lived sixty years afterwards, had a distinct recollection of the turning-up of the mouse. Like a thoughtless youth as he was, he ran after the creature to kill it, but was checked and recalled by his master, who, he observed, became thereafter thoughtful and abstracted. Burns, who treated his servants with the familiarity of fellow-labourers, soon after read ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... mental abstraction is employed more elaborately in Tr. iii. (vide infra, p. 44) and in Cons. v. pr. 4, where the notion of divine foreknowledge is abstracted ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... I look pretty well in this!' said he, eyeing first one side and then the other as he buttoned it. He then stuck a chased and figured fine gold brooch, with two pendant tassel-drops, set with turquoise and agates, that he had abstracted from his lordship's dressing-case, into his, or rather his lordship's finely worked shirt-front, and crowned the toilet with his lordship's best new blue coat with velvet collar, silk facings, and the Flat Hat Hunt ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... when the Oil is poured into the Glass, you may set a small head on, upon a Furnace in sifted Ashes, joining a Receiver to the Nose of the head, make a small fire under it, as the heat of the Sun in March, and no hotter; for there is yet some moisture of the Vinegar in the Oil, that it may be abstracted, continue it in that heat, that can perceive no moisture in the Head, then augment the fire a little, as the heat of the Sun at Midsummer, and if there be yet more moisture in it, you will perceive it in the head, but if you perceive it not ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus
... a slight improvement took place in his situation. His mother, to whom he was indebted for all the happiness of his childhood, opened a day school, and, as it abstracted her from the groveling cares of a butcher's shop, his home was made much more comfortable; and, instead of being confined to his father's business, he was placed in a stocking loom, with the view of bringing him up to the trade of a hosier, the poverty of his ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... by a speculative solicitor on the chance of one of the wills turning up. I saw a lot of Philipson: such a jolly nose—like a big red truffle. He said he was certain the late head clerk—a chap of Egyptian or Arab extraction, named Daireh—had got the will, or wills, having abstracted them after my uncle's death, because he had hinted at being able to tell him how to find them, and had appointed the Sunday to meet him, but had failed to keep tryst, and had disappeared. All this had to be wormed out of Philipson, who spoke very reluctantly at first. And I ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... indifferently out of the window, while a great historic party was steering straight for shipwreck; but it really was too much to see this man who ought to be taking the situation with the seriousness it deserved, strolling about the room with that abstracted air, looking superciliously at Mr. Dunbarton's examples of the Glasgow school. Farnborough balanced himself on wide-apart legs and thrust one hand in his trousers' pocket. The other hand held a telegram. 'The Liberal platform as defined at Dutfield is going ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... a chair by the fire, which, after civilly saluting me, he stirred almost fiercely, eyeing as he did so the blazing coals with a half-abstracted and sullen, cowed, disquieted look altogether unusual with him. At least wherever I had before seen him, he had been as loquacious and boastful ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... an abstracted and sullen glance at him, growled angrily, "Well?" ... Yegor stood like a statue, showing his teeth as if he were grinning! Looking at him from the side, you'd say the ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... to each other; in other words, space does not represent to us any determination of objects such as attaches to the objects themselves, and would remain, even though all subjective conditions of the intuition were abstracted. For neither absolute nor relative determinations of objects can be intuited prior to the existence of the things to which they belong, and ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... 115; see also to Eichler, 'Excurs. Morpholog. de format. flor. Gymnosperm.,' in "Mart. Flor. Brasil," abstracted in English in 'Natural History Review,' ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... a moment, during which Mrs. Goyte remained with her head dropped, sinister and abstracted. Suddenly she lifted her face, and ...
— Wintry Peacock - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • D. H. Lawrence
... sterling merit, which deal not in party-politics, nor exemplify their ethical discussions by holding out living characters to censure or contempt, win the applause of those, whose passions leave them no leisure for abstracted truth, and whom virtue itself cannot please by its naked dignity. But, by such, Johnson professed, that he had little expectation of his writings being perused. Keeping then our main object more immediately in view, the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... the present instance, as in that of "Absalom and Achitophel," could adapt the narrative of ancient or foreign transactions to the political events of his own time, and "moralize two meanings in one word." Altogether abstracted from this consideration, the "Duke of Guise," as a historical play, possesses merit amply sufficient to rescue it from the oblivion into which ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... arrival at Sonores he had perceived, hidden behind a screen of poplars, a little chateau which so vividly recalled that of La Valliere to his mind that he halted for nearly ten minutes to gaze at it, and resumed his journey with a sigh too abstracted even to reply to Olivain's respectful inquiry about the cause of so much fixed attention. The aspect of external objects is often a mysterious guide communicating with the fibres of memory, which in spite of us will arouse them at times; this thread, ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... distinct expressions, which, in a great measure, characterized the whole man. When engaged in traffic, the intelligence of his face appeared lively, active, and flexible, though uncommonly acute; if the conversation turned on the ordinary transactions of life, his air became abstracted and restless; but if, by chance, the Revolution and the country were the topic, his whole system seemed altered—all his faculties were concentrated: he would listen for a great length of time, without speaking, and then would ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... reparations to two and a quarter milliard francs. An Inter-Allied commission in Sofia is to find and return the loot to its lawful owners, but it is to charge no indemnity for the damage done. Nor will it contain representatives of the states whose property the Bulgars abstracted. Serbia is allowed neither indemnity nor reparation. She is to receive a share which the Treaty neglected to fix of the two and a quarter milliard francs on a date which has also been left undetermined. She is not even to get back the herds of cattle of which the Bulgars ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... has been entered, the poor's box opened, and money to the amount of twenty pounds been abstracted. My dear old friend," he continued, grasping his hand, "can you throw any ...
— George Leatrim • Susanna Moodie
... Esq., Dear Sir,—I am favored with your note, refering me to General Cadwalader's pamphlet, which you inform me has been abstracted from the Philadelphia Library. I have access to material, far beyond any thing in importance and value which could possibly be obtained by General Cadwalader; nevertheless the abstraction of his pamphlet is a circumstance which I will not fail to turn to good account. The gentleman ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... the contrary, It is written (1 Cor. 14:32): "The spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets." Now this were impossible if the prophet were not in possession of his faculties, but abstracted from his senses. Therefore it would seem that prophetic vision is not accompanied ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... be abstracted for fully thirty seconds after the quiet question; then, as Bernard did not repeat it but merely ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... gone through that night, it disturbed Fenn very little to find on the following morning that the professional cracksman had gone off with one of the cups in his study. Certainly, it was not as bad as it might have been, for he had only abstracted one out of the half dozen that decorated the room. Fenn was a fine runner, and had won the "sprint" events at the sports ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... relating to the present Question, which have been afforded by experiments, especially since it might seem injurious to our senses, by whose mediation we acquire so much of the knowledge we have of things corporal, to have recourse to far-fetched and abstracted Ratiocination [Errata: Ratiocinations], to know what are the sensible ingredients of those sensible things that we daily see and handle, and are supposed to have the liberty to untwist (if I may so speak) into the primitive bodies they consist of. He annexed that ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... in her own mind. All the cruel pain, the sullen brooding, the hot anguish, the desolation, the jealousy seemed to surge over her heart and soul like the waves of a deadly sea. If she saw her husband silent and abstracted, she said he was thinking of Madame Vanira; if she saw him laugh and light of heart she said he was pleased because he was going to see Madame Vanira. She had sensible and reasonable grounds for jealousy, but she was ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... make any difference—now!" sighed Letty, pushing back her hair with an abstracted gesture. "I gave up a good deal for the darlings once, but that's past and gone. Now, after all, they're the only life I have, and I'd rather make coats for them ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... being seized by Vritra, their liquid property left them. At this Indra became highly enraged and again smote him with his thunderbolt. And he (Vritra) smitten by the thunderbolt by the most powerful Indra betook himself to the Jyoti (luminous matter) and abstracted its inherent property. The luminous matter being overwhelmed by Vritra and its property, colour and form being thereby lost, the wrathful Indra again hurled his thunderbolt at him. And thus wounded again by Indra of immeasurable power, Vritra entered all on a sudden ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... volunteered to break the silence. It was done in obedience to a request of Karl who, having noticed the abstracted air of his brother, had ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... and Lydia fried them, with the daintiness and skill that seemed to have been born in her. She laid an envelope at her father's plate and when he sat down, silent and abstracted, without heeding the fish, she shook her head at Lizzie who was about ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... periods, with a hopeful birth and a disappointing death, have begun to accumulate, and to bear a fruit of generalities; his glance sometimes seeming to state, 'I have already thought out the issue of such conditions as these we are experiencing.' At other times he wore an abstracted look: 'I seem to have ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... was that, seeing Tommy Dye riding toward him, he had only a grave word of greeting, without any of the merry banter that the adventurer had come to expect. He stopped, however, feeling that Tommy had something to say, but he listened in rather abstracted silence, till Tommy spoke of having been to see the Sisters in order ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... imaginations; and for this reason I do not class astonishment among the emotions, nor do I see any reason why I should do it, since this abstraction of the mind arises from no positive cause by which it is abstracted from other things, but merely from the absence of any cause by which from the contemplation of one thing the mind is determined to think other things. I acknowledge, therefore, only three primitive or primary emotions, those of ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... abstracted manner, until he had manufactured into delicate shavings the whole of his raw materiel, when he very deliberately resumed a position of more ease and security, by resting his chair on two legs instead of one, and putting ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... adult. The production of thought wears away the cerebral substance. In ordinary use, the brain requires one-fifth of the blood to support its growth and repair. Great mental efforts are attended by a corresponding expenditure of vital treasures, which are abstracted from the total forces available for the necessities of the system. To repair the losses thus occasioned, materials are appropriated from the blood, which furnishes supplies in proportion to the demands ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... about Rosecrans and tried to make their way out of the press. With the conviction that nothing more could be done, mental and physical weakness seemed to overcome the general. He rode silently along, abstracted, as if he neither saw nor heard. Garfield went to him and suggested that he be allowed to try to make his way by Rossville to Thomas, the sound of whose battle seemed to indicate that he was not yet broken. Rosecrans assented listlessly and mechanically. As Garfield ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... produce. Remember, therefore, that he, to whom the punishment of another is sweet; though his act may be just with respect to others, with respect to himself it is a deed of darkness, and abhorred by the Almighty.' HAMET, who had stood abstracted in the contemplation of the new injury he had suffered, while OMAR was persuading him not to revenge it, started from his posture in all the wildness of distraction; and bursting away from OMAR, with an ardent and furious look hasted toward the palace, ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth |
