"Look back" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... blue; one low, overhanging, dark, dismal cloud, like London smoke; Mayflower is out coursing too, and Lizzy gone to school. Never mind. Up the hill again! Walk we must. Oh what a watery world to look back upon! Thames, Kennet, Loddon—all overflowed; our famous town, inland once, turned into a sort of Venice; C. park converted into an island; and the long range of meadows from B. to W. one huge unnatural ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... the stairs, determined not to show any sign of fear, and then, as he passed the door, he shut his eyes and hurried by. He ran down the next flight of stairs, afraid to look back, and did not pause in his running until he had reached the ground floor. He stood still in the hall for a few minutes to recover himself, and then he entered the room where ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... galvanic, devil-ridden, too truly possessed by a devil: For, in short, Mammon is not a god at all; but a devil, and even a very despicable devil. Follow the Devil faithfully, you are sure enough to go to the Devil: whither else can you go?—In such situations, men look back with a kind of mournful recognition even on poor limited Monk-figures, with their poor litanies; and reflect, with Ben Jonson, that soul is indispensable, some degree of soul, even to save ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... the origin of psychical forces may yet be discovered in matter. This idea is clearly hinted at by Littre. The physicist Tyndall gave it a definite formula when he uttered at the Belfast Congress this phrase so often quoted: "If I look back on the limits of experimental science, I can discern in the bosom of that matter (which, in our ignorance, while at the same time professing our respect for its Creator, we have, till now, treated with opprobrium) the promise and the power of all ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... girlhood: you saw these things as others saw them—no, indeed, you did not; you saw them as others could not, and they only made her the more dear to you. And you were having one of the best and most valuable experiences of your boyhood, to which you may look back now, whatever life has brought you, with a smile that has in it nothing of regret, of derision, or ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... that lay beneath this introduction to my tale, we must for a moment forget the actors in it, and look back at certain previous incidents, of which the last was closely concerned with the death of Madame Crochard. The two parts will then form a whole—a story which, by a law peculiar to life in Paris, was made up of two distinct ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... the rear. He stopped when he heard a horse galloping toward the east end of the street behind the buildings which lined that side. He hurried behind two buildings which did not extend as far as the resort and hastened up the street. He did not once look back. ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... desperate undertakings were rather the rule than the exception. Moreover, love was the leader and Beverley the blind follower. Nothing could daunt him or turn him back, until he found an army to lead against Hamilton. It seems but a romantic burst of indignation, as we look back at it, hopelessly foolish, with no possible end but death in the wilderness. Still there was a method in love's madness, and Beverley, with his superb physique, his knowledge of the wilderness and ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... gold that glitters fair, And sometimes in the pattern shows most sweet Where there are sombre colors. It is true That we have wept. But O! this thread of gold, We would not have it tarnish; let us turn Oft and look back upon the wondrous web, And when it shineth sometimes we shall know That memory ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... have laboured in the desert of the Egyptian Soudan will realise what is meant—can feel as we feel towards the veldt of the Karoo. There is in that mysterious, almost uncanny, fascination of those cool nights which succeed a grilling day a something which you always look back upon with delight. What this influence is, you can never precisely say; but it is ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... 'it is not bitterness. That is over. I am thankful to have broken loose, and to be able to look back on it calmly, as a past delusion. Great qualities ill regulated are fearful things; and though I believe trials will in time teach her to bring her religious principle to bear on her faults, I see that it was an egregious error to think that ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reader of experience writes: "When I look back over the many records I have read and studied, it seems to me that it is very difficult to draw a line between desertion and non-support cases, either in the kind of problem they present, or in the treatment ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... "It's so hard to remember! It is something like this! I seem to have lived for such a long time, and when I look back I can remember things that happened a very long time ago, but then there seems a gap, and everything is all misty, and it makes my head ache dreadfully to ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the night wished them good speed with a smiling face, and they were riding off when Lawrence happened to look back and saw that the man had taken off his turban and was making a derisive gesture, to the great delight of the group of people ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... and the bloom of her lips. The child with whom she would have loved to play kept aloof from her too, and would not pick up the ball when it rolled to his feet. All this, if one thinks of it, is hard to bear. It is very hard to have had no period for rounders, not to be able even to look back to one's games, and to talk of them to one's old comrades! "But why then did she allow herself to be carried off by the wicked wrinkled earl with the gloating eyes?" asks of me the prettiest girl in the world, just turned eighteen. Oh heavens! ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... the days of our ancestors: the farther we look back, the purer honour was. In the days of chivalry, a love promise was a law; the braver the knight, the truer in love: then, too, religion, delicacy, sentiment, romantic passion, disinterested friendship, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... amount of lies told about every man, and do we pretty much all tell the same amount of lies? Is the average greater in Ireland than in Scotland, or vice versa—among women than among men? Is this a lie I am telling now? If I am talking about you, the odds are, perhaps, that it is. I look back at some which have been told about me, and speculate on them with thanks and wonder. Dear friends have told them of me, have told them to me of myself. Have they not to and of you, dear friend? A friend of mine was dining ...
— English Satires • Various
... for a third party to watch them, it must have seemed that Merriwell felt an intuition which told him exactly when Snell was going to look back. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... companions in arms for their prowess in many a well-fought field. And what did we not owe also to the naval power for the preservation of our soil from the insults and the cruelties of our enemy? I must bid you look back to the recollection of those days when you won glory in Holland, Copenhagen, and Canada, and since in India and China. I remember well the stirring phrases used by the great captain of the age, the commander-in-chief of the British army, the Duke of Wellington, ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... those in the sleigh who were able to look back saw that it was running at a great rate of speed and swaying from side to side of the roadway. It contained four young men, out, evidently, for a gloriously good time. Dave did not dare look back to see what was coming. ...
— Dave Porter and His Double - The Disapperarance of the Basswood Fortune • Edward Stratemeyer
... monasteries of China. His influential position as President of your Society, and his personal relations with Sir John Bowring, then English Resident in China, enabled him to set in motion a powerful machinery for attaining his object; and if you look back some five-and-twenty years, you will find in your Journal a full account of the correspondence that passed between Professor Wilson, Sir J. Bowring, and Dr. Edkins, on the search after Sanskrit MSS. in the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... the founding of Quebec, and still the colony could scarcely be said to exist but in the founder's brain. Those who should have been its support were engrossed by trade or propagandism. Champlain might look back on fruitless toils, hopes deferred, a life spent seemingly in vain. The population of Quebec had risen to a hundred and five persons, men, women, and children. Of these, one or two families only had learned to support themselves from the products of the soil. All withered under the monopoly ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... turning it upside down." The friends among us of constitutional liberty and of legality, the enemies of anarchy, the unseduced execrators of slavery, the upholders of the tie of brotherhood across the Atlantic, may well look back with shame to the time—and it was no matter of days or weeks, but a period of about four years together—when the loudest and most accepted voices in England exulted over the now ludicrously delusive proposition ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... beyond your comprehension," he said, calmly. "If you look back to the past you will remember how we laid our mark upon the man who stole the Four Finger Mine. That man, I need not say, was yourself. To gain your ends you did not scruple to take the life of your greatest friend, the greatest benefactor you ever had. You thought the ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... soul with new conceptions of angelic beauty, and while your image dwells in my mind, I look back upon it and place every feature, every expression living upon the canvass! If this picture is completed, your father's love for art will make him respect the ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... Nisida, flying in horror and alarm from her whom he nevertheless loved so tenderly and devotedly. He fled as if from the brink of the yawning pit of hell, into which the malignant fiend who coveted his soul was about to plunge him. Nor once did he look back. Absorbed as his feelings were in the full conviction of the tremendous peril from which he had just escaped, he still found room for the reflection that were he to turn and catch but one glimpse of the beauteous, ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... the beginning of our work; and that we must save ourselves for the future. Gamala is but one town; and we shall have plenty of opportunities for striking at the enemy, in the future. We have put our hands to the plow now and, so long as the war lasts, we will not look back. It may be that our example may lead others to follow it and, in that case, the Romans' difficulties will thicken, every day. Were there scores of bands of determined men, like us, hanging around ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... in the power of a present state of mind, or a present state of outward circumstances, to bring up vividly before us all such states in our past history. We are depressed, we are worried; and when we look back, all our departed days of worry and depression appear to start up and press themselves upon our view to the exclusion of anything else; so that we are ready to think that we have never been otherwise than depressed and worried all our life. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... which began that Wednesday afternoon seems, as I look back to it now, a bit of the remote past, instead of seven days of a year ago. Its happenings, important and wonderful as they were, seem trivial and tame compared with those which came afterward. And yet, at the time, that week was ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... grins faded. The minstrels' jokes changed colour. As I look back, it seems to me that I can almost see with the physical eye the broad restless upheaval beneath the surface of all society. The Mexican war was just over, and the veterans—young veterans all—filled with the spirit of adventure turned eagerly toward this ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... the summit of the divide to go downhill into the west, they halted for one last look back. And as they stood there among the rocks gazing down into the sink which lay thousands of feet below them walled in by the mountains on both sides, one of the mothers lifted her arm in a ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... mulberries ripened in the last week of July, and the shepherd's pretty children and the monastery boys were covered with red stains, as though from a battlefield, as they descended from the attractive boughs. It was a very peaceful existence, and I shall often look back with pleasure to our hermitage by the walls of the old monastery, which afforded a moral haven from all the storms and troubles that embitter life. On Sundays we sent a messenger for the post to the ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... of hearty laughter from the manly-looking lad addressed, as he stood, with his hands clinging and his head twisted round, to look back: for he had spread-eagled himself against a nearly perpendicular scarp of rock which he had begun to climb, so as to reach a ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... cabin at this forlorn place. He collected them in silence while I saddled my own animal, and in silence we packed the two packhorses, and threw the diamond hitch, and hauled tight the slack, damp ropes. Soon we had mounted, and as we turned into the trail I gave a look back at ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... no doubt be said that it is a pity to suggest ideas of sex to an innocent child, but surely those who look back on their own youth will remember that there came a time when the problem of their own origin ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... is proposed to supersede the ordinary rights of property and laws of inheritance—the latter, as is observed, having, after due experience, failed to realise that happiness of condition which was anticipated sixty years ago at their institution. As it is always instructive to look back on the first departure from rectitude, let us say a few words as to how the French fell into ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... Norway, and were now discharged from the ship in the order in which they were wanted. Besides which, Stubberud himself had built the house, so that he knew every peg of it. It is with gladness and pride that I look back upon those days. With gladness, because no discord was ever heard in the course of this fairly severe labour; with pride, because I was at the head of such a body of men. For men they were, in the true sense of the word. Everyone knew his duty, and ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... toasted by them as a "brick," as his "just decision enabled them to laugh at the fanatics:" and as they now sold liquor with impunity, even a great many of the pretended friends of temperance began to lose heart, not possessing sufficient mental acumen to look back of the effect to the cause ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... two hundred yards from the bushes, I paused to look back. My purpose was to fix in my memory the direction of the hill, and more especially the point where my comrades had been left in ambush: in the event of a close pursuit, it would not do to ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... could muster. But the thought of his father's loss and his own share in it recurred often to his mind. Suddenly he was roused from his revery by a whisper from the darkness behind, "Listen," a voice said, low but very distinct, in his ear, "do not look back. You are in danger in this place. So am I. Meet me to-night at the Brig, at twelve o'clock precisely. Keep at home till the ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... 'What hath God wrought!' When I look back upon the darkness of last winter and reflect how, at one time everything seemed hopeless; when I remember that all my associates in the enterprise of the Telegraph had either deserted me or were discouraged, and one had even ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... crown of such majestic towers doth grace The gods' great mother, when her heavenly race 60 Do homage to her, yet she cannot boast, Among that num'rous and celestial host. More heroes than can Windsor; nor doth Fame's Immortal book record more noble names. Not to look back so far, to whom this isle Owes the first glory of so brave a pile, Whether to Caesar, Albanact, or Brute, The British Arthur, or the Danish Knute, (Though this of old no less contest did move Than when for Homer's birth seven cities strove) 70 (Like him in birth, thou shouldst be like in fame, As ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... When I look back on the processes of history, when I survey the genesis of America, I see this written over every page: that the nations are renewed from the bottom, not from the top; that the genius which springs up from the ranks ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... his medicine like a man, and go when the time came, without whimpering, without protest or reproach. He wanted to go away feeling that he had her respect, at least; go knowing that there was not a single word or action of his upon which she could look back with contempt. Yes, he wanted greatly her respect. She ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... arrived at it, though his mind was far from being occupied with such tender and agreeable ideas: however, when he thought himself at a sufficient distance to be out of danger of meeting Lord Chesterfield and his hounds, he chose to look back, that he might at least have the satisfaction of seeing the prison where this wicked enchantress was confined; but what was his surprise, when he saw a very fine house, situated on the banks of a river, in the most delightful and pleasant country imaginable. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Once I was in love with a grande dame, bestially in love, dog-like. Well, she gave me a rendezvous, and I didn't, couldn't, keep it, because suddenly I thought of her husband, and it made me feel sick. And you know, it's queer, that now, when I look back, instead of being glad that I was decent, I am as sorry as if I had sinned. But with Masha it's so different; I'm filled with joy that I've never soiled the brightness of my feeling for her. (He points his finger at the floor.) I may go ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... rage and with shaking limbs, Ben did as he was commanded. He was thoroughly cowed, and not once did he look back as he crawled into his car, started it, ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... earliest key-note. Could I sing this song, If my dead masters had not taken heed To help the heavens and earth to make me strong, As the wind ever will find out some reed And touch it to such issues as belong To such a frail thing? None may grudge the Dead Libations from full cups. Unless we choose To look back to the hills behind us spread, The plains before us sadden and confuse; ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... reigned between us now, and I discovered that, though it is exceedingly hard to get a Welsh miner to talk freely to "a Saxon," when he opens his heart, and can look back for a period of fifty years, he is a ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... nothing but our money. A counterfeit is as good as ever we'll get—and it's as good as we're entitled to. I'd rather know what it is to live for an hour than to go on forever just pretending to live. If I've got to be unhappy, then give me something to be unhappy over; something to look back on. I'd rather be—But, pshaw! You ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... it, then, that this day in May, of all others, should stand up like a wall, as I look back over my life, and seem to me the beginning of all things? Perhaps this history may show—or, perhaps, he who reads it may come to see that I was right when I said I ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... bride is perhaps the best part of matrimony. This our young Barndale would not have believed. He believed, rather, that the tender hopes and chilling fears of love were among the chief pains of life, and would have laughed grimly if anyone had prophesied that he would ever look back to them with longing regret. We, who are wiser, will not commiserate but envy this young gentleman, remembering the time when those tender hopes and chilling fears were ours—when we were happier in our miseries than we have now the power to ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... tributaries. The atmosphere becomes denser, and breathing easier. We no longer have a singing in the ears, or palpitations or headache as on the great heights, and the cold has been left behind. Even in the early morning the air is warm, and soon come days when we look back with regret to the cool freshness up in Tibet. One of my dogs, a great shaggy Tibetan, suffered severely from the increasing heat, and one fine day he turned right about and ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... Gravois came to his feet. He did not hear the shrill cry of terror from the twist in the trail. He did not look back to see Melisse standing there. But Dixon both saw and heard, and he laughed tauntingly over Jean's head as the little Frenchman came toward him again, more ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... having been left alone in the quiet enjoyment of No. 4, had examined the little apartment with an interest not altogether unmingled with painful reflections. There are few persons, however fortunate, who can look back to eight years of their life, and not feel somewhat of disappointment in the retrospect; few persons, whose fortunes the world envy, to whom the token of past time suddenly obtruded on their remembrance does not awaken hopes destroyed and wishes deceived which that ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... look back to-day and see how proud he used to be When I'd come home from school and say they'd recommended me. I didn't understand it then, for school boys never do, But in a vague and general way it seems to me I ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... Your letter, save in what respects your dear Sister's health, chear'd me in my new solitude. Mary is ill again. Her illnesses encroach yearly. The last was three months, followed by two of depression most dreadful. I look back upon her earlier attacks with longing. Nice little durations of six weeks or so, followed by complete restoration—shocking as they were to me then. In short, half her life she is dead to me, and the other half is made anxious with fears and lookings forward to the next shock. With such prospects, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... spun and woven and dyed at home, linen in abundance, fresh meat at most seasons of the year, with the unstinted products of the farm at all seasons, and even tea and coffee, wines and spirits, at moderate cost; so that the New Englanders of the eighteenth century could look back with complacency and gratitude on the days when the Pilgrim Fathers first landed and settled in the dreary wilderness, feeling that the "lines had fallen to them in pleasant places," and yet be unmindful that even the original settlers, with all their discomforts ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... "a style vigorous and pliable, sometimes strangely incorrect, but often rising into a touching eloquence." Ten years later such was the private opinion of D.G. Rossetti, who was "inspired by reading Rienzi and Ernest Maltravers, which is indeed a splendid work." Now that we look back at Bulwer-Lytton's prodigious compositions, we are able to perceive more justly than did the critics of his own day what his merits were. For one thing, he was extraordinarily versatile. If we examine his books, we must be astonished ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... to divert her mind and save her from despair, and she would not look back, would not dwell upon the past. But how her tender, loving heart ached and throbbed with the memory of those happy weeks, with the never-to-be-forgotten kisses of the man who had won her heart, whose face and voice haunted her every moment ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... plagued with visions. The torment of his days took many forms in an alert subconscious too taut to relax. He had seen before him mountains too steep to cross—chasms too deep and wide to bridge. Often, when a great problem was solved, he would look back, nights later, to see the mountain or the chasm from the ...
— The Big Tomorrow • Paul Lohrman
... local tribe in which several of these stocks are included. Then a fictitious human ancestor is adopted, and perhaps even adored. Thus the wolves might call themselves Claudii, from their chief's name, and, giving up belief in descent from a wolf, might look back to a fancied ancestor named Claudius. The result of these changes will be that an exogamous totem kin, with female descent, has become a gens, with male kinship, and only the faintest trace of exogamy. ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... "We'll look back to this day as one of the strangest in all our experience," remarked Frank, hanging his wet garments where the sun would fall upon them, for the clouds had passed away, ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... question of the princess they swam, and while they swam Halaaniani bade the princess, "As we swim do not look back, face ahead; when my crest is here, then I will ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... had ridden a little way he halted his horse and turned in his saddle to look back. She was sitting there in the sun, her head bowed, her hands clasped over her face, as if she wept or prayed. A little while he waited there, as if meditating a return, as if he had forgotten something—some solace, perhaps, for which her lips had ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... look back upon it," he said to me but the other day, with a hearty laugh, "I respect myself more for having never once got the best mark for an exercise than I should do if I had got it every time it could be got. I am glad nothing could make me do Latin and Greek ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... on. Poor Sam! One of three dreadful deaths seemed prepared for him, either to be torn by the bear or to be dashed to pieces down the precipice, with the very great chance of being shot by us, his friends, should we attempt to fire at the bear. He dared not look back to see where he was going, lest the bear should seize him. He felt his left foot over the edge of ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... those months I owe a deep debt of gratitude. That they would do everything in their power to make the hospital a success went without saying, but it was quite another matter that they should all have conspired to make the time for me one of the happiest upon which I shall ever look back. Where all have been so kind, it is almost invidious to mention names, and yet there are two which must stand by themselves. To the genius and the invincible resource of Madame Sindici the hospital owes an incalculable debt. Her friendship is one of my most delightful memories. ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... "won't you forgive us? We never dreamed it would hurt you so. Now that I look back upon it, I can't see how we could have asked you to do it. We did believe that Miss Pierson betrayed us; but after all, that had nothing to do with your being captain of the team. I think you have been a great deal ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... look back with considerate benevolence to the poor hostess, whose necessities he had relieved by pawning his gala coat, for we are told that "he often supplied her with food from his own table, and visited her frequently with the sole purpose to ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... a lord of high degree. He had been made a baronet, and was childishly proud of the title; his work and his vast earnings were devoted to the dream of a feudal house which should endure through the centuries and look back to Sir Walter as its noble founder. While living modestly on his income at Ashestiel he had used the earnings of his poems to buy a rough farm at Clarty Hole, on the Tweed, and had changed its unromantic name to Abbotsford. More land was rapidly added ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... look back on him he seems to have torn through his stages at an incredible pace. There are several that I haven't counted, so suddenly did he leave them behind him: the stage when he was literary adviser to a firm of publishers, who wouldn't believe him when he said the thing was calculable; the stage when ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... ripens in a single night, she fell into the most furious rage, but being terribly afraid of her daughter, she controlled herself, and bade the boy go and find the field guarded by eighteen millions of demons, warning him on no account to look back after having plucked the tallest spike of rice, which grew ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... gone. Austerlitz is but a name. But the passes of the Alps remain. "When will it be ready for the transport of the cannon?" enquired Napoleon respecting the Simplon road. War is a rough pioneer; but without such a pioneer to clear the way the world would stand still. Look back. What do you see throughout the successive ages? War, with his red eye, his iron feet, and his gleaming brand, marching in the van; and commerce, and arts, and Christianity, following in the wake ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... the back trail. A tenderfoot would have taken the gulch at breakneck speed. Most old-timers would have found a canter none too fast. But Jack Roberts held to a steady road gait. Not once did he look back—but every foot of the way till he had turned a bend in the canon there was an ache in the small of his back. It was a purely sympathetic sensation, for at any moment a bullet might come crashing ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... of every age has built on the foundations laid by his predecessors, and his work has always formed, and must ever form, the base on which his successors shall build. The astronomer of to-day may look back upon Hipparchus and Ptolemy as the earliest ancestors of whom he has positive knowledge. He can trace his scientific descent from generation to generation, through the periods of Arabian and medieval science, through Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Laplace, and Herschel, down to the present time. ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... clearing was full of swimming grayness, and between the woman's screams, the woods crackled. Each time Dlorus spoke, her screech was like that of an animal in the woods, and round about them crept such sinister echoes that Milt kept wanting to look back over his shoulder. ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... we consider the short space of time that the American industry has required for its development, as compared to the decades, almost centuries, to which some of the great European silk centers can look back, the fact is neither ...
— Theory Of Silk Weaving • Arnold Wolfensberger
... about the car, while she passes her hand through her lover's arm: "Oh, I do HATE to leave it. Farewell, you dear, kind, good, lovely car! May you never have another accident!" She kisses her hand to the car, upon which they both look back as ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... when I look back on this period of my life—life! death, rather I should say, for it was a moral death—I am quite unable to comprehend the motives that led me to take such a course. My eyes were not blinded. I must have ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... earlier years, to what he had done and suffered, and to the honours so long withheld, and now so brilliantly conferred—and the patriotic fervour which pervaded his whole address—carried along with him not only the applauses, but the hearts of the whole assemblage. Lord Eglinton may well look back with pride and satisfaction to the proceedings of that day; for he has secured the affections of thousands who ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... her soft, clear paleness. And my father Jacques sitting by the fire, his chin in his hand, still as a carved image, looking at her with his heart in his eyes. That is the way I think of them oftenest, Melody, my dear, as I look back to the days long ago; this is the way I mostly see my father and mother, Jacques and Marie De Arthenay, a faithful ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... cross and to rule; but the sailor, in his accomplishments and in his defects, began then to depart, or to be evolutionized into something entirely different. I am bound to admit that in the main the better has survived, but, now that such hairs as I have are gray, I may be permitted to look back somewhat wistfully and affectionately on that which I remember a half-century ago; perhaps to sympathize with the seamen of the period, who saw themselves swamped out of sight and influence among the vast numbers required by the sudden seven or eight fold expansion ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... too, of the future. There have been fifty magical years when you look back,—years of discovery, of perfection in art and invention, of nations making rapid strides, of Africa illumined by explorers, of Japan coming to the front when hardly fifty years have elapsed since she first opened ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... to be sure! Come along!" But at a little distance he turned once more to look back. The chauffeur had mounted to his place, the delivery boy was upon his feet again, little the worse for his tumble, and the knot of bystanders had begun to disperse, but it seemed to Ste. Marie that the young woman in the ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... it is a very important matter this eating, a man's fortune depends on his dinner. I should have been as rich as Croesus if I could only have eaten what I liked all my time; I am sure I should, now I come to look back. ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... initiation of the savage into humanity? However far we look back into history the phaenomenon is identical among all people who have shaken off the slavery of the animal state, the love of appearance, the inclination for dress ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... new sense of community with the past comes to us again and again on every hand when to-day we look back to the records of the past. I chance to take down the Epistles of Erasmus, and turn to the letters which the great Humanist of Rotterdam wrote from Cambridge and London four hundred years ago when young Henry VIII had just suddenly (in 1514) plunged into war. ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... exclaimed Brigit; "that we should understand each other and stand close by each other. I am not on the edge of a precipice—I am at the bottom of it already!" Her eyes had grown calm from the mere force of sadness. "You mustn't ask me to look back," she added: "you mustn't ask me to choose again. A simple, quiet life is out of the question now. I have to ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... they had, traveling slowly and hesitantly, gone more than a hundred feet from their plane. They kept it in sight by constantly turning to look back. It was now several feet above them. No telling what might happen to them at any moment, and the plane was an avenue ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... other was Nicholas Cruger's—and plantations of cane, whose yield in sugar, molasses, and rum never failed him. He was not a pleasing man in his family, and did not extend the hospitality of its roof to Alexander with a spontaneous warmth. His own children were married, and he did not look back upon the era of mischievous boys with sufficient enthusiasm to prompt him to adopt another. He yielded to his wife's voluble supplications because domestic harmony was necessary to his content, and Mistress Mitchell had her ways of upsetting it. Alexander was immediately too busy with his ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... home-grown supplies of food, remained intractable, and the extent of land devoted to the cultivation of corn crops, instead of expanding, diminished in a marked degree. British farmers of long experience look back to 1874 as the last of the really good years, and consider that the palmy days of British agriculture began to dwindle at about that time. The shadow of the approaching depression had already fallen upon the land before the year 1875 had run its course, and the outlook became ominous as ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... enabling me to leave the ambling yahoos of the sowars far behind. Beautiful mirages sometimes appear in the distance —lakes of water, waving groves of palms, and lovely castles; and often, when far enough ahead, I can look back, and see the grotesque figures of the khan, the mirza, and the mudbake apparently riding through ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... he cried, with a peal of laughter. "I should think I do think it. What's to prevent us? Nothing! You've suffered enough, my poor girl. But all that you have gone through has to be forgotten, and you are never to look back again." ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... to have passed through between the Macgillicuddy's Reeks and the purple mountain; something to see water like spun silver flinging itself from the mountain top in leaps to the valley below, to struggle up and up to the highest point of the gap and look back at the serpentine road winding in and out beside small still lakes through the valley far below. Of course we look into the Black Lough where St. Patrick imprisoned the last snake. Of course we had pointed out to us the top of Mangerton, and were told ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... the arms of her mother gave her opportunity to look back over the stream they had just crossed, while the attention of her ...
— The Young Ranchers - or Fighting the Sioux • Edward S. Ellis
... thought," he said to me at last, "to go light-heartedly away—and yet I can do even that! I have heard something, I can hardly say what, which tells me to go forward, not to hanker, not to look back—and which tells me best of all that it would be almost like treachery to wish the Father back again. It is better so! I say this," he went on, "not with resignation, not with a mild desire to make the best of a bad business, but with a serene certainty that it is not a bad ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... mottled. For just before them were two of those boys whom he feared!—as if they had sprung from a seam in the sidewalk! They were staring at the taxicab. They were looking at Johnnie (who stole a nervous look back). Now ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... With his limited income and his habits, he could not hope to marry, even if Bessie would have joined her young life with his matured one, which he doubted, and, with a great pang of regret he left her in the old Stoneleigh garden and did not dare look back at her, sitting there with the troubled look on her face, because he was leaving, lest he should turn back and, taking her in his arms, say the words he ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... your children? It is a plain question and therefore I ask it. In the tenth chapter of Jeremiah God says He will pour out His fury upon the families that call not upon His name. O parents! when you are dead and gone, and the moss is covering the inscription of the tombstones will your children look back and think of father and mother at family prayer? Will they take the old family Bible and open it and see the mark of tears of contrition and tears of consoling promise wept by eyes long before gone ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... sent for the medicine for me. I took it and followed your directions as near as I could; the first week I could not see much of any change—the second week I could see that I was improving some, the third week I could look back and see that I had gained considerable. I could sleep better; the bloating in my bowels did not trouble me so bad; my stomach did not distress me so much and I could eat different kinds of food and my digestion seemed to be improving fast; and by using your Special ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce |
