"Solitary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... us, an old and faithful vassal, who at the present moment is enjoying solitary confinement in another part of the fortress. We reached the castle grounds, where a group of Spanish 'militares' were seated. We gave them the 'Buenas tardes:' they returned our salute, and their chief, who was no less a personage than the commandant of the ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... perceptible change. If Julia did still nurture any remnants of her moody cares, she had at least the kindness of keeping them to herself, and to suffer alone. More than once, still, she was seen returning from her solitary excursions with gloomy eye and clouded brow; but she shook off these equivocal dispositions as soon as she found herself again in the family ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... drains and out-houses." Hodgson says: "These animals dwell in forests or detached woods and copses, whence they wander freely into the open country by day (occasionally at least) as well as by night. They are solitary and single wanderers, even the pair seldom being seen together, and they feed promiscuously upon small animals, birds' eggs, snakes, frogs, insects, besides some fruits or roots. In the Terai a low caste of woodmen, ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... an irregular-lobed perianth adnate to the bractlet and a rudimentary ovary. Anthers erect, with short filaments, two-celled; dehiscent longitudinally. Pistillate flowers bracted with a three to five, normally four-lobed calyx and sometimes with petals. Ovule solitary, erect, styles two, stigmatic along the inner surface. Fruit a bony nut, incompletely two to four-celled. Seed large, two to four-lobed, ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... his bag. And, again, any person within hearing of the alarm that he had raised, some hours afterwards, might have put the bag back, while he was recovering himself in Mrs. Wagner's room. Who could have been near enough to hear the alarm? Somebody in the empty bedrooms above? Or somebody in the solitary offices below? If a theft had really been committed, the one likely object of it would be the key of the desk. This pointed to the probability that the alarm had reached the ears of the thief in the offices. Was there any person in the house, ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... death. But a moment's observation showed the wide-awake sentinel that the seeming bear was really a gigantic Indian, enclosed in a bear-skin, in which, disguised, he had been able to approach and shoot the preceding sentinels. Putnam had solved the mystery of the solitary post. The sentinels on that outpost ceased, from that ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... faith that there was coal in that mountain. He made a picture of himself living there a hermit in a shanty by the tunnel, digging away with solitary pick and wheelbarrow, day after day and year after year, until he grew gray and aged, and was known in all that region as the old man of the mountain. Perhaps some day—he felt it must be so some day—he should ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... where this river, after running south, takes an easterly direction. The author of the diary notes, that from a place one march and a half before reaching the Kerulen, a very large mountain was visible to the north-east, and at its foot a solitary high and pointed hillock, covered with stones. The author says, that the sovereigns of the house of Yuan used to be buried near this hill. It may therefore be plausibly supposed that the tombs of the Mongol Khans were near the Kerulen, and that ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... him with wonder, with a movement of irrepressible homage. Thirty years of unbroken solitary labour for one end, one cause! In our hurried fragmentary life, a purpose of this tenacity, this power of realising itself, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... conduct him across the yard. Intensely preoccupied with what he meant to do as soon as the music paused, he was somewhat hazy, but when he perceived that he was being led in the direction of a girl, sitting solitary under one of the maple-trees, the sudden shock of ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... a green plain around which rise the first steps of the immense amphitheatre of the Alps, a little castled city enthroned on a solitary hill watches since a thousand years the eternal and ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... volley down at random, they took to their heels and fled. The British vigorously pushed their way up, and were soon on level ground. Long before daylight 4,828 British troops stood upon the Heights of Abraham, commanding the city from the West. One solitary cannon had been toilsomely dragged up the ravine. It was destined to do good service against the French troops, and to carry a message of death to their commander, ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind, but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron which Providence ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue Thy solitary way? ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... Southern England in a district new to us. We arrived on a Saturday, and next morning after breakfast went out for a long walk. Turning into the first path across the fields on leaving the village, we came eventually to an oak wood, which was like an open forest, very wild and solitary. In half an hour's walk among the old oaks and underwood we saw no sign of human occupancy, and heard nothing but the woodland birds. We heard, and then saw, the cuckoo for the first time that season, though it was but April the fourth. But the cuckoo was early that spring ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... their feelings according to their various natures. The first they met, a solitary youth, was frankly terrified. He hastened ashore, the water fairly cascading from his paddle, and, squatting behind the bushes, peered through at them like an animal. The next pair stood their ground, clinging to an ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... now, my soul yearns over you with a love too deep for utterance. I know that you were born to avenge your wrongs and mine, to aid by your baby fingers in lifting the load of injustice and libel that has so long borne me down. You are the one solitary comfort in all the wide earth, and but for you I should have given up the struggle ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... meeting Zwingli declared that he regarded preaching as his chief business. First of all, the people must be taught to understand the Holy Scriptures. So it had been in ancient times. But now nothing was heard, except solitary extracts, and even these in a foreign language. He did not pass by the remark, that the church thus orders it, but appealed on the contrary to its oldest statutes, and proved clearly the modern origin and ruinous consequences ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... would so like to think her innocent, and he tried so hard to do it, that he succeeded in part, though frequently as the days passed on, and he sat at his post in the House, listening to some tiresome speech, or took his solitary walk toward Arlington Heights, a pang of something like jealousy and dread that all had not been open and fair between himself and his wife cut like a knife through his heart, and almost stopped his breath. The short session was wearing to a close, and he was glad of it, for ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... five seasons I had called these hunting-grounds my own, and during that time had seen perhaps about the same number of specimens of this royal species, always in the course of the vernal migration. The present year the first comer was observed on the 15th—solitary and, except for an occasional monosyllable, silent. Only one more straggler, I assumed. But on the following morning I saw four others, all of them males in full plumage, and two of them in song. To one of these I attended for some time. According to my notes "he sang beautifully, ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... a solitary inn in Russian Poland, near the Prussian frontier, kept by a Jew named Herszlik, part of whose occupation is to smuggle emigrants for America by night across the border. Besides emigrants and Herszlik are present an old beggar man and his wife or 'doxy', a ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... over the city today and again threw bombs. It arrived at six in the evening. The psychological effect on Paris has been incalculable. Yesterday's Taube went virtually unobserved; it did not seem to need explanation, and its visit could be interpreted as a freakish exploit—the solitary one of its kind. The attack of another Taube today put an entirely different face upon the matter. Nothing better could have been calculated to disquiet the French. They have always considered themselves kings of the air and have felt that, whatever ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... reminding me of her great ancestor, 'the father of chemistry and uncle to the earl of Cork'! I stepped into my job carriage at the hour of ten, and, all alone by myself, as the song says, 'to Eden took my solitary way.' What added to my fears and doubts and hopes and embarrassments was a note from my noble hostess received at the moment of departure: 'Everybody has been invited expressly to meet the Wild Irish Girl; so she must bring her Irish harp. M.C.O.' ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... going, and a quarter of a mile farther on stopped before a great house of a dull and time-worn yellow, where, in the corresponding front window of the upper chambers, two women sat, each in her own solitary state, binding shoes. These were the Miller twins. Sophy saw him as he opened the side gate and went along her path to the back of the house. She rose, tossed her work on the table, and ran into an overlooking chamber to watch him. ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... hundred miles from your lordship's admired seat in the county of Buckingham. It is said that this nobleman, amidst a thousand curiosities with which his gardens abounded, had the unaccountable whim of placing a kind of artificial hermit in one of its wildest and most solitary recesses. This hermit it seems was celebrated through the whole neighbourhood, for his ingenuity in the carving of tobacco-stoppers, and a variety of other accomplishments. Some of the peasants even mistook him for a conjuror. If I might ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... terrors. There was no danger of wild animals or of snakes, for the stampede of the previous day had probably driven every living thing miles away, with the solitary exception of ants, which, in armies ten thousand strong, attacked the trespassers. By morning several houses had been erected, and the arrival of freight trains loaded with provisions not only enabled thoughtful caterers ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... he had had another night out, Baden-Powell started off for solitary exercise in the mountains, his purpose being to "investigate some signs I had noted two days before of an impi camped in a new place," and to select a position for the building of a fort to command the Matopos. Returning to camp he drew his design and plan for the ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... the fire remained a secret from everyone: the house was solitary, and the snowstorm so violent that nobody had met the two women on the deserted road. Vaninka was sure of her maid. Her secret then had perished with Ivan. But now remorse took the place of fear: the young girl who was so ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... question that his case is a hard one, but I am afraid that it is inseparable from a state of war. It is not only not a solitary instance among the French and American prisoners, but, unless we were prepared to adopt the system of releasing all others of the same description, we should find that the number who might justly complain of undue partiality to this ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... their appearance: the harassing cough, the hectic cheek, the deep-settled pain in the side, the failing breath. Against these dread forerunners it was vain long to contend; and the poor child had to remain at home in her solitary sick-chamber, while the loving sister toiled harder than ever to provide, if possible, the means of comfort and restoration to health. All the world knows the ending of such a hopeless strife as this. It is sometimes the will of Heaven that the ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... and the next he carried up water to keep his garden green. After that the fear of solitude quite passed from him, for he was so busy all day long that at night he had much ado to fight off the demon of sleep, which Saint Arsenius the Abbot has denounced as the chief foe of the solitary. His memory kept good store of prayers and litanies, besides long passages from the Mass and other offices, and he marked the hours of his day by different acts of devotion. On Sundays and feast days, when the wind was set his way, he could hear the church bells from his ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... regarding their coming and going, but knowledge on many of the points involved is incomplete. It is only of recent years that the nest of the Solitary Sandpiper has been found, and yet this is a very common bird in the eastern United States in certain seasons. Where is the scientist who can yet tell us in what country the common Chimney Swift {63} ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... close behind them, hidden from my view, Is my own lowly cottage, where my babe 225 And my babe's mother dwell in peace! With light And quickened footsteps thitherward I tend, Remembering thee, O green and silent dell! And grateful, that by nature's quietness And solitary musings, all my heart 230 Is softened, and made worthy to indulge Love, and the thoughts that yearn for ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... occasion to suggest any radical changes in the financial policy of the Government. Ours is almost, if not absolutely, the solitary power of Christendom having a surplus revenue drawn immediately from imposts on commerce, and therefore measured by the spontaneous enterprise and national prosperity of the country, with such indirect relation to agriculture, manufactures, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... information. Search had for a long time been fruitlessly made for the old hunter, until at length, Norman and Hector Mackintosh, when on an exploring expedition, had discovered on a tree-covered hill, overlooking a calm lake, a solitary grave. Over it had been placed, in regular order, a pile of huge logs, cut by an Indian axe. Searching further, they found in a hut hard by, a hump-backed Indian, life apparently ...
— The Frontier Fort - Stirring Times in the N-West Territory of British America • W. H. G. Kingston
... history of America, from the time when it first [108] became apparent that the occupancy of the country was the object of the whites, up to the present period, is there perhaps to be found a solitary instance, in which an attempt, made by the English to effect a settlement in a wilderness claimed by the Natives, was not succeeded by immediate acts of hostility on the part of the latter. Every advance of the kind was regarded by them, as tending to effect their expulsion from a country, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... lies nine leagues away; Along its solitary shore Of craggy rock and sandy bay, No sound but ocean's roar, Save where the bold wild sea-bird makes her home, Her shrill cry ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... thought that Jerry Strann was a solitary like his brother. When he went out for a frolic the young men of the community gathered around him, for Jerry paid all scores and the red-eye flowed in his path like wine before the coming of Bacchus; where Jerry went there was never ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... groaning homeward as well. Suddenly, thin and brassy, out of the distance came the sound of a steam whistle; and when it was again silent the hum of the thresher had ceased. From a field by the roadside, a solitary prairie-rooster gave once, twice, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... creatures, perfect forms, Limbed and full-grown. Out of the ground uprose, As from his lair, the wild beast, where he wons In forest wild, in thicket, brake, or den; Among the trees in pairs they rose, they walked; The cattle in the fields and meadows green; Those rare and solitary; these in flocks Pasturing at once, and in broad herds upsprung. The grassy clods now calved; now half appears The tawny lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts—then springs, as broke from bonds, And rampant shakes his brinded ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... willing that the Princess Sophia, being his sister, should be publicly punished or openly disgraced in any way, so it was decreed that she should retire to a certain convent, situated in a solitary place a little way out of town, where she could be closely watched and guarded. Sophia was extremely unwilling to obey this decree, and she would not go to the convent of her own accord. The commander of the Guards was thereupon directed to send a body of armed men to convey her there, with ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... than as they really are. The "Marine Artist," for example, with his canvas slung from davits and the entire furniture of his studio of extremely nautical design, was a purely fanciful conception. The "Pot-Boiler," spending his days in painting one solitary subject over and over again ad infinitum, comes nearer to life, though his portrait again is an exaggerated fancy rather than a study from life. One feels, nevertheless, that if there be indeed such an individual as the pot-boiler in existence, ...
— Frank Reynolds, R.I. • A.E. Johnson
... people by their vitality can retain that freshness of spirit all their life long. I remember how a friend of R. L. Stevenson told me, that Stevenson, when alone in London, desperately ill, and on the eve of a solitary voyage, came to see him; he himself was going to start on a journey the following day, and had to visit the lumber-room to get out his trunks; Stevenson begged to be allowed to accompany him, and, sitting on a broken chair, evolved out of the drifted accumulations of the ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... yawned visible, but this lady's strength had been too little tried for her to lack absolute faith in it. So, out of deep silences, the two leapt to speech and immediately subsided to the depths again: as on a sultry summer's day fishes flash their tails in the sunlight and leave a solitary circle widening ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... With the solitary and not very brilliant exception of the Embankment, there isn't a street in London where one could take a stranger to admire the architecture. Compare that record with the new Boulevards in Antwerp, where almost every house is worth serious study: or with the ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... this canto are among the most famous in the poem. In a few words they commemorate one of the domestic tragedies which were only too familiar in mediaeval Italy. Passing through the crowd, they fall in, as evening is drawing on, with a solitary shade, who replies to Virgil's inquiry for the best road by asking whence they come. At the answer, "Mantua," the shade springs up, and reveals himself as the famous warrior-poet of that city, Sordello. The affectionate ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... tiger blood by an openly proud smile and a swing of the brilliantly striped skirt. The handsomest men and women possible, elaborately dressed, shone beside tiers of the sweetest bunches of pale violets, or a solitary boy, so beautiful that his human splendor scintillated, small as he was, sat in the pose and apparel that the world knows through pictures, and which pigment can never well render any more than it can catch the power of a sunset or an American ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... of pronouncing French was somewhat painful to listen to. Voltaire would probably have failed to recognise his solitary lyric if he had heard it read by Mr. Matier. But if the poet had discovered that the verses were his own and had got over his shudder at a mangling of French sounds worse than the worst he can have heard at Potsdam from the courtiers of Frederick William, he would probably have ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... various charitable works in which the brethren were engaged, such as the rescue of travellers lost in the snow, or the burial of the many victims murdered on or near the Pass of Dariel by the bands of fierce mountain robbers and assassins, that at certain seasons infest that solitary region. Making the best of his way to the fortress of Passanaur, he there joined a party of adventurous Russian climbers who had just successfully accomplished the assent of Mount Kazbek, and in their company proceeded through the rugged Aragua valley to Tiflis, which he ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... more persons than one take part are far superior in this respect to those of a solitary nature. They require a give and take, a matching of wits, a feeling of rivalry, and at the same ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... turn to nod now, for his meaning was plain. If the Boers saw me, my chances of escape were gone; while if by ill-luck they caught night of him, the probability was that they would not trouble themselves about a solitary Kaffir. ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... what he knew, which, as a matter of fact, did not amount to much. Then he took his leave, and rode home in the cool of the evening—a solitary, brooding man, who had missed his way somehow early on the road of life, and lacked perhaps the strength of mind to ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... Conde exclaimed loudly against this brazen violation of all the promises of safety by which he had been lured on when urged to go to Orleans. The only answer he received was his committal to absolutely solitary confinement and the withdrawal of his servants. The King of Navarre vainly asked to have his brother's custody confided to him; he obtained nothing but a coarse refusal; and he himself, separated from his escort, was kept under ocular supervision in ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Plin. Hist. Natur. iii. 5. To confirm our idea, we may observe, that for a long time Mount Caelius was a grove of oaks, and Mount Viminal was overrun with osiers; that, in the fourth century, the Aventine was a vacant and solitary retirement; that, till the time of Augustus, the Esquiline was an unwholesome burying-ground; and that the numerous inequalities, remarked by the ancients in the Quirinal, sufficiently prove that it was not covered with buildings. Of the seven hills, the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... that the sale of the laborer can be only a source of profit once, while his labor may be a source of constant and increasing profit, and we shall hear no more of their killing the hen which may lay so many golden eggs, for the sake only of a solitary and final prize." ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... presence of another's wife the tender emotions of a Hebrew were silent. Hur's consort must be made aware that he, Joshua, no longer cherished any love for her. Even in his solitary hours, he had wholly ceased ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... were a gregarious animal, but I'm not. I'm shy and solitary and hard to get acquainted with. And it takes time to make friends. Besides, in making friends you also make enemies, and one enemy can do you more harm than all your friends can do you good. Then too, friends take up too much time. ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... up the coach, "we must practice the new signals like wild fire. There's mustn't be a single slip not a solitary break in our game with Tottenville. And that game will begin at ...
— The High School Captain of the Team - Dick & Co. Leading the Athletic Vanguard • H. Irving Hancock
... assumptions of ungiven powers have been in the detail. The bank-law, the treaty-doctrine, the sedition-act, alien-act, the undertaking to change the State laws of evidence in the State courts by certain parts of the stamp-act, &c. &c. have been solitary, inconsequential, timid things, in comparison with the audacious, barefaced, and sweeping pretension to a system of law for the United States, without the adoption of their legislature, and so infinitely beyond their power ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... thoughts, as he retraced his solitary way towards Wyllys-Roof, were partly sad, they were not all gloomy. Wisdom does not lessen our enjoyment of one real blessing of life; she merely teaches us to distinguish the false from the true, and she even increases our happiness amid the evils and sorrows against ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... venture, the "Sumter," was bought, equipped and put into commission at the end of April; and in the course of a few weeks she ran out of New Orleans, in command of Raphael Semmes, and the stars and bars were floating solitary, but defiant, over the seas. The history of her cruise, the terror she spread among the enemy's shipping, and the paralysis she sent to the very heart of his commerce, are too well known to need repetition here. Badly-built craft as she was for such a service, she was still ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... from her depart, I go lyke one that, having lost the field, Is prisoner led away with heavy hart, Despoyld of warlike armes and knowen shield. So doe I now my self a prisoner yield To sorrow and to solitary paine, From presence of my dearest deare exylde, Long-while alone in languor to remaine. There let no thought of ioy, or pleasure vaine, Dare to approch, that may my solace breed; Bet sudden* dumps**, and drery sad disdayne Of all worlds gladnesse, more my ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... which ran out conveniently into the stream. There he brought his fair burden to dry land, but he could find no signs of life in her; he was in despair, when he caught sight of a trodden path leading among the bushes. Again he caught her up in his arms, hurried forward, and presently reached a solitary cottage. There he found kind, good people—a young married couple; the misfortunes and the dangers explained themselves instantly; every remedy he could think of was instantly applied; a bright fire blazed up; woolen blankets were spread ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... only Christians in Palestine that wear turbans habitually. And all over the landscape dominated the beautiful green hills, fresh with the morning dew, a dew so thick that I had what I had not expected, a real morning bath. I was soaked quite wet by the time I returned from my solitary stroll. I had a capital breakfast, for which we supplied the solids, and our host the coffee. Butter is a luxury which we neither expected nor got. Hebron, none the less, seemed to me a Paradise, and I applauded the legend that locates Adam and ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... against him; I could promise him that most certainly. While I was thinking over this, I heard a footstep on the companion stairs, and a moment later the Inspector made his appearance. His astonishment at finding us alone, reading a letter by the light of one solitary candle, was unmistakable, for he said, as he came towards us and sat down, "Why, how's this? Where ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... the object of his mission without perpetrating, as he thought, any disastrous blunder, Mr. Sapp brought the interview to a close with a few commonplace remarks, and hurried away to enjoy in solitary self-communion the ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... it. The serene adherence of one charming and experienced woman to an authority which he had rejected, the almost equally serene indifference on the part of the other to the revelation he held as absolute and final, troubled Julius. Small wonder then, that early, after a solitary breakfast, he retired upon the society of the odd volumes cluttering the shelves of the Long Gallery, that he sorted, arranged, catalogued, grateful for that dulling of thought which mechanical ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... mother-tongue. Books there were, German books, but of a dulness, a distance from the actual interests of the warm, various, coloured life around and within him, to us hardly conceivable. There was more entertainment in the natural train of his own solitary thoughts, humoured and rightly attuned by pleasant visible objects, than in all the books he had hunted through so carefully for that all-searching intellectual light, of which a passing gleam of interest ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... plainly seen. Her pictures are to be found in galleries in Rome, Florence, Vienna, Munich, and England; many are also in private collections. She painted several portraits of herself; one in the Uffizi, at Florence, is very pleasing. She represents herself seated in a solitary landscape, with a portfolio in one hand and a pencil in the other. She has an air of perfect unconsciousness, as if she thought of her work only. Her etchings are much valued, and sell for large prices. Many of her pictures were engraved by Bartolozzi, and good prints of them are rare. On one of ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... lost in the wilds of darkest Deanery. Such is not the case. Though I have wandered disconsolately about my childhood haunts and camped out despondently under the fruitful pear-tree in our back yard, which, so far as I can remember, has never boasted of a single solitary pear, I am by no means lost. In fact, I am really beginning to feel quite at home. But how I miss you! Living in a 'Graceless' world is a cross even to a person of my excellent ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... of a rambling but familiar step clunking along the wooden sidewalk of Clay Street. The latch on the front gate clicked, and as Jeff poked his nose out of the front door he heard, down the aisle of trees that bordered the gravel walk, the voice of his master uplifted in solitary song. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... constructed 1812-21 on the plans of Howard and Bentham, so that each of its 1100 cells were visible from the governor's room, was used for solitary confinement preparatory to penal servitude, and as a convict prison until ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of some smaller fish of the cetaceous kind, as it rose to the surface to inhale the atmosphere. In no quarter of the heavens was any thing visible; not even a star was peeping out, to cheer the solitude and silence of that solitary place. The men were nodding on the thwarts and our young sailor was about to relinquish his design as fruitless, when suddenly a noise was heard, at no great distance from the spot where they lay. It was one of those sounds which would have been inexplicable to any but a seaman, ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... and are broken in several places by deep nitches which extend back from the river several hundred yards, their bluffs being so steep that it is impossible to ascend them; in this bottom there stand tree solitary trees near one of which the indians formed a large simicircular camp of dressed buffaloe skins and invited us to partake of their shelter which Drewyer and myself accepted and the Fieldses lay near the fire in front of the sheter. with the assistance of ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... mother a good-night kiss every evening, he used to carry the icy feeling of the embrace into the world of dreams. One day in passing a half-open door he had caught sight of a maidservant washing herself, and that was the solitary recollection which had in any way troubled his peace of mind from the days of puberty till the time of marriage. Afterward he had found his wife strictly obedient to her conjugal duties but had himself felt ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... solitary meal, and I was glad when it was over and the bell rang for first school. There at least I should have the society of the sympathetic Sadgrove, who, as I knew, felt as sore as I ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... morning in a study of the approaches to the castle, and if possible devise some means by which he could inspect it unobserved at closer range. Daylight found him perched in a crevice of rock among some trees, through the leaves of which he could clearly see the distant mass of stone which rose in solitary dignity, an island above the mists of the valley, a grim relic of an age when such a situation meant ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... "harshly" of the United States it was nothing to the way he had talked of the British Empire. Although at moments he saw in imagination the romance of the fact that England had acquired an Empire "absentmindedly" through Englishmen with the solitary spirit of adventure and discovery, yet he had an unfortunate habit of abusing the Dominions. They were the "suburbs" of England (a curious phrase from the man who found suburbs "intoxicating"); we could not learn from them as we could ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... The most remarkable are the Passages des Panoramas, Jouffroy, Verdean, Vivienne, Colbert, Choiseul, Delorine du Saumon, &c. The first of these are the most brilliant and are perhaps not excelled or even equaled by any other in the world, with the solitary exception of Passage des Victor Emanuel of Milan, in Italy. Some ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... finally sealed up for judgment? How will you then stand the reading of your autobiography? Read over any page now, peruse the life of any day, and ask, Has this been the life of one who believes there is a God to whom he is responsible? Point out one solitary proof, and such as you think Christ will accept, in all these twelve chapters of the past year, of a heart which loved God, or had one mark of a sincere though an imperfect follower of Jesus Christ. And if you cannot do so, will ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... eleven o'clock when Isaacson found himself sitting in a small, rude cafe that was hidden in the very bowels of Cairo. Through winding alleys they had reached it—alleys full of painted ladies, alleys gleaming with the lights shed from solitary candles set within entries tinted mauve, and blue, and scarlet, or placed half-way up narrow flights of whitewashed stairs. And in these winding alleys, mingled with human cries, and laughter, and murmured invitations, and barterings, and refusals, there had been music ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... certain. If it were done at all it must be done at once while there were many about. If he waited until things were quiet his solitary figure would ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... night. The wind was howling through the pines, and driving the snow in dense clouds from the highway leading through, the forest. There was no sound, save that of the winter's gale, and the trees groaning beneath its power. A solitary light, twinkling as a star through the dark woods, was shedding its beams on this desolate scene. It proceeded from a small house near the main road, where the forest-keeper had peacefully lived with his wife for more than twenty years. ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... newspaper, cramming in between my own free thoughts and a column of figures which had come to an amicable compromise but for them. Their noise ended, one of them, as I said, accompanies me home, lest I should be solitary for a moment; he at length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go, mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication; knock at the door, in comes Mr. ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... say! Can you not return within nature's pale even if you have gone beyond it? One thing that I will not allow is that you should go and shut yourself up in that solitary little house of yours, where you madden yourself by brooding over the fall of your faith. Come and spend your time with us, so that we may again give you some taste ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Later, over his solitary dinner, he suddenly decided to run up to Winton the next day. He would not wire them, he would rather like to take ...
— The S. W. F. Club • Caroline E. Jacobs
... and upright person, fearing God and studious in his art, although solitary beyond measure; wherefore he well deserved to be honourably celebrated by his fellow-citizens of Siena, who have always won great praise by their attention to noble studies and to poetry, with verses both in Latin and ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... system generally followed in your establishment, that of advancing boats and lines to the fishermen?-Yes, whenever it is needed. There are solitary cases where men buy their own boats, having money laid past; but that ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... lay: Then, lest the sire should find them there, Sped by wild paths away. They fled and left him there alone By longing love possessed; And with a heart no more his own He roamed about distressed. The aged saint came home, to find The hermit boy distraught, Revolving in his troubled mind One solitary thought. "Why dost thou not, my son," he cried, "Thy due obeisance pay? Why do I see thee in the tide Of whelming thought to-day? A devotee should never wear A mien so sad and strange. Come, quickly, dearest child, declare ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... will leave you to flog, and lacerate, and plunder, and destroy the millions of hapless wretches already within your grasp. If you will no longer agitate the subject, we will not." There is no sense, no principle, no force in such an issue. Not a solitary slaveholder will I allow to enjoy repose on any other condition than instantly ceasing to be one. Not a single slave will I leave in his chains, on any conditions, or under any circumstances. I will not try to make as good a bargain for the Lord ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... ploughed fields stood bare and brown in the autumnal sun—when the fig trees lost their leaves, and their white branches took on that peculiarly gaunt appearance which characterises them as soon as the wintry winds begin to blow—a solitary traveller plodded wearily across the Lombardy plains, asking, as he went, for the road that would lead him to the village and monastery of ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... all things are transient like flowers. You will look lightly upon the three springs and regard the blush of the peach and the green of the willow as of no avail. You will beat out the fire of splendour, and treat solitary retirement as genial! What is it that you say about the delicate peaches in the heavens (marriage) being excellent, and the petals of the almond in the clouds being plentiful (children)? Let him who has after all seen one of them, (really a mortal being) ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Ollie went to school as usual, only instead of having a long solitary walk, they each had the other's company, which they found very pleasant. The girls at school were quite astonished to hear that they were ...
— The Wreck • Anonymous
... you are giving very candid evidence; but you ought to tell if there is any foundation for the statement that the men had been refused employment because they had carried their custom elsewhere?-I am only aware of one solitary case. ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... ready, cans of alki in their solitary hands, the three things that had once been men hesitated, as if of old habit, and next betrayed ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... disappointed when she first opened the letter, but ere long she bethought herself of the directions she had received to hold such notes to the fire, and accordingly she watched, waiting even till the next day before she could have free and solitary access to either of the two fires in the house, those in the hall ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it was a solitary man-servant, something between a groom and a gardener. He was so deaf that the more business-like assumed him to be dumb; while the more penetrating declared him to be half-witted. A gaunt, red-haired labourer, with a dogged jaw and chin, but quite blank blue eyes, ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... frozen landscape—the deep, wintry peace of the vast, snow-bound Nor'West. A light breeze murmured over the crisping snow, and moaned amongst the pines in the timber-lined spurs of the foothills. High overhead in the sunny, dazzling blue vault of heaven a huge solitary hawk slowly circled with wide-spread, motionless wings, uttering intermittently its querulous, ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... digging little holes through the bark to encourage the settlement of insects. The regular rings of such perforations which one may see in almost any apple-orchard seem to give some probability to this theory. Almost every season a solitary quail visits us, and, unseen among the currant bushes, alls Bob White, Bob White, as if he were playing at hide-and-seek with that imaginary being. A rarer visitant is the turtle-dove, whose pleasant coo (something like the muffled crow of a cock from a coop covered with snow) I have ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... dark, and the dimly lighted street was profoundly still, with the heavy and brooding stillness that comes upon village streets after nine and is to be found nowhere else in the world. Judith did not seem depressed by it. Somewhere on a side street solitary footsteps echoed hollow through the silence, and she listened intently, but they came no nearer, and presently died away. She fumbled excitedly with her key, threw open the door, and groped her way across the unlighted hall. She encountered the telephone table prematurely, ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... The stores and offices, with closed doors, were deserted and still. A solitary policeman on the corner appeared to be meditating, indifferent to his surroundings. The few pedestrians to be seen moved leisurely and appeared as though in a mood for reflective thought and quiet interest in the welfare of their fellows. The hurrying, scrambling, jostling, rushing ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... globe was insufficient for us all—and the courtier who is always watching the countenance of his prince in the hope of catching a gracious smile—can have very little conception. I have not only retired from all public employments, but am retiring within myself and shall be able to view the solitary walk, and tread the paths of private life with heartfelt satisfaction. Envious of none, I am determined to be pleased with all; and this, my dear friend, being the order of my march, I shall move gently down the stream of life until I sleep ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... in Venice, years ago, I walked the hospice with a Spanish monk, A solitary cloistered in high thoughts, The great Loyola, whom I reckoned then A mere refurbisher of faded creeds, Expert to edge anew the arms of faith, As who should say, a Galenist, resolved To hold the walls of dogma against fact, Experience, ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... Hebrew, according as she found the Syllables which she was to repeat in any one of those learned Languages. Hudibras, in Ridicule of this false kind of Wit, has described Bruin bewailing the Loss of his Bear to a solitary Eccho, who is of great used to the Poet in several Disticks, as she does not only repeat after him, but helps out his Verse, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... "Becomes solitary, does he?" said Lefevre. "Yes; intelligent, impulsive persons like him, that live at high pressure, often have black moods." That was not quite what he meant, but it was ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... country as cheerless as its misty northern sky; great estates, much of them in pasture or fallow; an extremely thin population; the entire labouring class under the yoke of serfage; stretches of land attached to solitary ill-built farmhouses; in short, a monotony, a dead stillness, spreading over the whole country, an absence of life and activity that quite overcame my spirits. The home of the Mecklenburg noble, who weighs like a load on his peasants instead of improving ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... ridge contains little hills standing singly. One of them is the highest in the neighbourhood and is crowned by a solitary pine. This hill, together with two others, is the property of the gospodarz[1] The gospodarstwo is like a hermitage; it is a long way from the village and still farther ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... fellow-student had left the university and entered the service, in a position involving little responsibility. He had, in his own words, got on to the building of the Church of our Saviour, though, of course, he knew nothing whatever of architecture. Strange to say, this one solitary friend of Aratov's, by name Kupfer, a German, so far Russianised that he did not know one word of German, and even fell foul of 'the Germans,' this friend had apparently nothing in common with him. He was a black-haired, red-cheeked young ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... signal for assistance thrown out from the solitary spar the Plover had yet standing; and the Lee and Haughty, which were anchored below the first barrier and busily engaged with the batteries on the left bank, at once weighed and ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... swift wings ere he could think; but in another instant he reminded himself. This was not an awful apparition, but a real thing, wondrous and unaccountable enough in its reality. It was Anvil Rock—a great, solitary rock—rising abruptly from the reckless loam of a level country, and lifting its single peak, rudely shaped like a blacksmith's anvil, straight up toward the clouds. It was already serving as a landmark in the wilderness, and must continue so to serve all that portion of Kentucky, ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... extent of four times the amount of the forfeiture; two days' confinement at hard labor for $1 of forfeited pay; one day's solitary confinement on bread and water diet for two days' confinement at hard labor or for $1 of forfeited pay: Provided, That a noncommissioned officer not sentenced to reduction shall not be subject to confinement: And provided, That solitary confinement shall ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... all our actions and passions should be commensurate with the rule of reason: another order is in relation to the rule of the Divine Law, whereby man should be directed in all things: and if man were by nature a solitary animal, this twofold order would suffice. But since man is naturally a civic and social animal, as is proved in Polit. i, 2, hence a third order is necessary, whereby man is directed in relation to other men among whom he has to dwell. Of these orders the second ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... I saw a solitary figure, rifle in hand, approaching the camp, whom I recognized as Maysotta, accompanied by her dog Keokuk. I hastened to meet her, and told her of my anxiety at ...
— In the Rocky Mountains - A Tale of Adventure • W. H. G. Kingston |
