"Solitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... disgust, just as he was congratulating himself upon having gained his end and secured a tete-a-tete that, with luck, might last for hours, he was coolly told to run along and amuse himself while she fished in solitude. ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... after ridge, and peak upon peak, all bathed in the Indian haze of the Tropics, and dreamy to look upon. Still valleys, leagues away, reposed in the deep shadows of the mountains; and here and there, waterfalls lifted up their voices in the solitude. High above all, and central, the "Marling-spike" lifted its finger. Upon the hillsides, small groups of bullocks were seen; some quietly browsing; others slowly winding into ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... also, his princess had recovered from her disappointment. Maybe she had been married off to some nobody of Portugal, or France, or Austria, for state reasons, and had entered on the usual loveless life of royalty. Or she may have beguiled her maidenly solitude by drinking much wine of Oporto, Madeira, and Xeres with her dinner, thereby acquiring that amplitude of girth, that ruddiness of countenance, and that polish of nose, which add so little to romance. At all events, we hear nothing more ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... and dreads death because she does not know that there is another world. She is not happy enough to do without those whom she scorns, and must therefore seek diversion in the conversation of stupid people, preferring anything to solitude; this refers to the time when her best friends are no more and when she herself is out of her former milieu); she was too old, or lived too long; ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... great birds her surroundings seemed to lose their only element of active and conscious life. The brooding sunlit evening became oppressive, so that in the space of a moment Damaris passed from solitude, which is stimulating, to loneliness, which is only sad. Meanwhile the shadow cast by the ilex trees had grown sensibly longer, softer in outline, more transparent and finely intangible in tone, and the reek of the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... merely putting out your hand and letting it lose itself behind that white wall; note the curious creamy smoothness of the water, hypercritically denying as it were, any suggestion of danger; and, above all, the strange solitude and remoteness from the world, as it can be found only on the highest mountain tops; and the experience may acquire, in its uncanny mingling of repose and terror, a flavour of such concentrated poignancy and delight as to contrast sharply with the blind ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... these conservative gentlemen alone in the churches? How sombre they would look with the flowers, feathers, bright ribbons and shawls all gone—black coats only kneeling and standing—and with the deep-toned organ swelling up, the solemn bass voice heard only in awful solitude; not one soprano note to rise above the low, dull wail to fill the arched roof with triumphant melody! One such experiment from Maine to California would bring these bigoted ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... his shoulder. 'He's there still; he's fond of solitude. And, Carin, my dear, don't give your hand when you are meeting or parting with ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a vague gray aloofness which chimed with his spirit, a sober austerity as of a stricken whale,—a mother-whale surely, for was not her young one there at her nose,—fled here to heal her wound perchance, and desirous only of solitude. ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... upon it, no less than the destinies of both of them. If Robert Seymour had gone by to finish his cigar in solitude, why then this story would have had a very different ending; or, rather, who can say how it might have ended? The dread, foredoomed event with which that night was big would have come to its awful birth leaving certain words unspoken. Violent separation must ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... unconsciously smoothed it out again. The instinct to be alone had possessed him like a prayer, and at times our prayers have a trick of finding an answer in a way we do not expect. The solitariness he desired had come upon him. He forgot he was not alone, and the truest solitude is the isolation of the spirit when the material world slips from us, and in the presence of the eternal a man is set face to face with his own soul. So he stood, the paper shaking in his shaking hands, ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... — N. seclusion, privacy; retirement; reclusion, recess; snugness &c. adj.; delitescence[obs3]; rustication, rus in urbe[Lat]; solitude; solitariness &c. (singleness) 87; isolation; loneliness &c. adj.; estrangement from the world, voluntary exile; aloofness. cell, hermitage; convent &c. 1000; sanctum sanctorum[Lat]. depopulation, desertion, desolation; wilderness ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... people who wrote them; biographies, autobiographies, and any scrap of anecdote about authors and their methods she eagerly devoured. Life as they had lived it, not as they had observed and imagined it, seemed all-important to her; and as she read and thought, sitting alone in the charmed solitude of her secret chamber, her self-respect grew. Her mind, which had run riot, fancy-fed with languorous dreams in the days when it was unoccupied and undisciplined, came steadily more and more under control, and grew ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... keep right on. And this he did, though of course not at top speed, the pumas not being a race of long-winded runners like the wolves. In an hour or two he reached a rocky and precipitous ridge, quite impassable to men except by day. This he scaled with ease, and at the top, in the high solitude, felt safe enough to rest a little while. Then he made his way down the long, ragged western slopes, and at daybreak came into a wild valley of woods ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... so blinded by the incessant sun glare he could no longer bear the glitter of that horrible ocean of sand. It was noon now—noon, and he had been riding steadily seven hours. The thought brought his blurred eyes again to the horizon. Where could he be, the man he sought in the heart of this solitude? Surely he should be here by now, if he had left the water-hole at dawn. Could he have gone the longer route, south to the Fork? The possibility of such a thing seared through him like a hot iron, driving the dulness ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... yours, sir. My young lady, Miss King, whose humble dwelling is the adjoining house, seeing that you are living in solitude, has sent me with this fruit and tea ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... nearly level with the surface; but Cardozo was now persuaded to change his seat. The sun set, the quick twilight passed, and the moon soon after began to glimmer through the thick canopy of foliage. The prospect of being swamped in this hideous solitude was by no means pleasant, although I calculated on the chance of swimming to a tree and finding a nice snug place in the fork of some large bough wherein ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... peaceful, and she was glad of the solitude. All day long she had felt the need of it; and all day long it had been denied her. She had been decorating under Miss Whalley's superintendence, and the task had been no light one. Save for the fact that she had gone in Mrs. ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... incontinently throws itself at her feet, and worships Beauty in her person. Each of the few married ladies round invites the stranger to come and stop with her, after a bit, and to lighten her heavy load of solitude, and her craving for a companion of her own sex. And Miss Ada finds it impossible to refuse these invitations; and so the district entraps her, and keeps her ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... shiver. He had the repugnance of the healthy-minded man of affairs from any form of meddling with what he vaguely thought of as the occult; but in that remote, grim solitude he could ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... less than complete. We marvel at the exhibitions of skill displayed by the maimed, but we feel no envy. We may not be able to duplicate their achievements, but we feel that we have ample compensation in the normal use of our members. We know instinctively that, in the solitude of their meditations, they must experience poignant regrets that they are not as other people, and that they must pass through life ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... terraces, statues, alleys, and groves slept in the luminous dancing air. All the normal stir and movement of the Garden seemed to have passed to-day into the leaping and intermingling curves of the fountains; the few figures passing and repassing hardly disturbed the general impression of heat and solitude. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had heard their shout of triumph when they had destroyed the mountain lioness and it made him very angry, for he hated any noise or disturbance; his name, Nikoochis, which means solitude, ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... terrible that she should have written it. For it admitted that his letter had made her very happy; she was not quite sure that she had not written "very, very happy," and wished it were to write again. But here in the solitude of her own chamber she could kiss Reuben's letter, and could rest it against her hot cheek in an ecstasy of fluttering congratulations. How he looked, how he walked, how he talked, how he smiled, how he played! How ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... occupied his mind and distracted his thoughts, and when he was tired of walking aimlessly about amongst the moving crowd, when he saw the foot passengers becoming more scarce, and the pavements less crowded, the fear of solitude and silence drove him into some large cafe full of drinkers and of light. He went there like flies go to a candle, and he used to sit down at one of the little round tables, and ask for a bock[1], which he ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... shut himself up from the light of day, and from all commerce with his servants: he even refused, during three days, all food and sustenance [x]: the courtiers, apprehending dangerous effects from his despair, were at last obliged to break in upon his solitude; and they employed every topic of consolation, induced him to accept of nourishment, and occupied his leisure in taking precautions against the consequences which he so justly apprehended from the murder of the primate. [FN [w] Ypod. Neust. p. 447. M. ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... nature—neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... father on a raft, which bore the family and all their possessions to the shore of Indiana; and, child as he was, he gave help as they toiled through dense forests to the interior of Spencer county. There, in the land of free labor, he grew up in a log-cabin, with the solemn solitude for his teacher in his meditative hours. Of Asiatic literature he knew only the Bible; of Greek, Latin, and mediaeval, no more than the translation of Aesop's Fables; of English, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. The traditions of George Fox and William Penn passed to him ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... commenced assailing me worse than ever, and my fair hopes abandoned me—for life and death, sir, are both lodged in a woman's heart, and some find the one and some the other. Once more I was visited by that midnight sighing, by that speechless moaning, by those voices that terrified my solitude and pursued me sleeping and waking, and I began to drink and ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... the Palace—-"Bah! it can't be proved...." But still, if he were even arrested, and Hogarth got to hear of his presence about the Court—that would spoil all. He listened: all that part of the house a settled solitude, the servants themselves sitting shivah; and back he ran, seized upon the little old body, not now stiff, rigor mortis having passed, saw that the sheet was unstained, and snatched her away out to the ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... we not feel you near In hours of danger, solitude, and pain, Cheering the darkness, drying off the tear And turning loss ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger. I divert his senses by other objects of sense; I trace another course for his spirits by which I distract them ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... the 5th century B.C., born a Hindu, of an intensely contemplative nature, the son of a king, who did everything in his power to tempt him from a religious life, from which, however, in his contemplation of the vanity of existence, nothing could detain him; retired into solitude at the age of 30, as Sakyamuni, i. e. solitary of the Sakyas, his tribe; consulted religious books, could get no good out of them, till, by-and-by, he abstracted himself more and more from everything external, when at the end of ten ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... that this was the most barbaric and outlandish people that they had passed through on the whole expedition, and the furthest removed from the Hellenic customs, doing in a crowd precisely what other people would prefer to do in solitude, and when alone behaving exactly as others would behave in company, talking to themselves and laughing at their own expense, standing still and then again capering about, wherever they might chance to be, without rhyme or reason, as if their sole business were to show ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... The island is not more than half a mile long, with a very irregular coast. The other end of it, you see, is pretty well wooded. We stayed here for three days, sleeping in our boat; and so far as solitude is concerned, we might as well have been on a desert island in the midst of the Pacific. Now I propose that we do the same thing, and stay for three days, or three weeks, or as long as you please. This is the ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... you to cheer it. Whatever opportunity of duty or of service lies in the path before you is God's own messenger. Meet it like the messenger of a king! So meet every duty, every opportunity. Find them, make them, for yourself. Live no longer in solitude but in brotherhood. So shall the very spirit of God dwell in you; so in his service shall you ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... breathes the sighings of some city swain—there the fish-hawk built his solitary nest, on some dry tree that overlooked his watery domain. The timid deer fed undisturbed along those shores now hallowed by the lover's moonlight walk, and printed by the slender foot of beauty; and a savage solitude extended over those happy regions, where now are reared the stately towers of the Joneses, the Schermerhornes, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... I think I envy liberty as little as they do, to any other nation. But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... their altars. He meditates his murders without any misgivings, he perpetrates them without any emotions of pity, and he recalls them without any feeling of remorse. They trouble not his dreams, nor does their recollection ever cause him inquietude in darkness, in solitude or in the hour ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... many districts of the interior, and, as the decade neared its end, a large minority of the natives were being brought under the influence of Christianity. The tribal wars were dying down. Partly, this was a peace of exhaustion, in some districts of solitude; partly, it was the outcome of the havoc wrought by the musket, and the growing fear thereof. Nearly all the tribes had now obtained firearms. A war had ceased to be an agreeable shooting-party for some one ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... of those who accept it not? To be as they are. Is any discontented with being alone? let him be in solitude. Is any discontented with his parents? let him be a bad son, and lament. Is any discontented with his children? let him be a bad father.—"Throw him into prision!"—What prision?—Where he is already: for he is there against his will; and wherever ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... majority of his set, Adrien Leroy was never lonely; indeed, solitude to him was a pleasure, and one—the only one—which was difficult to obtain. Endued with a fine intellect and highly cultivated mind, even at college he had succeeded in studying when his companions had spent their time in "ragging," and ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... in barn and cellar for another lonely winter—so my husband expresses it; though I assure you it is not lonely for lack of numbers, but he is doubtless expressing the feeling many of us have experienced of solitude in the midst of a ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... course of time that Cruttendon took to painting orchards; had therefore to live in Kent; and must, one would think, see through apple blossom by this time, since his wife, for whose sake he did it, eloped with a novelist; but no; Cruttendon still paints orchards, savagely, in solitude. Then Jinny Carslake, after her affair with Lefanu the American painter, frequented Indian philosophers, and now you find her in pensions in Italy cherishing a little jeweller's box containing ordinary ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... wizened heart of the old miser, so that, almost unwittingly, he is softened by the tender memories of childhood, warmed by sympathy for those who struggle and suffer, and appalled by the prospect of his own ultimate desolation and black solitude. Then the episodes: the scenes to which these ghostly visitants convey Scrooge; the story of his earlier years as shown in vision; the household of the Cratchits, and poor little crippled Tiny Tim; the party given by Scrooge's nephew; nay, before all these, the terrible interview ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... unwholesome fen where he had no neighbours but a few rude shepherds. His dwelling was singularly well situated for a contraband traffic in French wares. Cargoes of Lyons silk and Valenciennes lace sufficient to load thirty packhorses had repeatedly been landed in that dismal solitude without attracting notice. But, since the Revolution, Hunt had discovered that of all cargoes a cargo of traitors paid best. His lonely abode became the resort of men of high consideration, Earls and Barons, Knights and Doctors of Divinity. Some of them lodged many days ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Holland succeeded before long in getting her brother out of the way, and releasing them from their painful imprisonment. The streets of Upton were hushed in utter solitude and silence as they walked through them, speechless and heavy-hearted; those streets which, on the morrow, were to have been crowded with groups of his people, eager to welcome him home. They passed the church, lit up with the moonlight, clear enough to ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... I have always been more woman than artist. He always put the theatre first. He lived in it, he died in it. He had none of my bourgeois qualities—the love of being in love, the love of a home, the dislike of solitude. I have always thought it hard to find my inferiors. He was sure of his high place. In some ways he was far simpler than I. He would talk, for instance, in such an ignorant way to painters and musicians that I blushed for him. But was ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... and mice, and, at last, upon each other's corpses, he sat in his royal robes, and gave away the lands of Edwin and Morcar to his liegemen. And thus, like the Romans, from whom he derived both his strategy and his civilization, he "made a solitude and ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... smoked a cigar pensively, leaning against the low wall that overlooks the pigeon-shooters' enclosure, the railway station and the foreshore. He was alone, as always. That a man who, since the great folly of his life, had obstinately cultivated solitude should make holiday in Monte Carlo, of all places, is paradoxical enough; but in truth the crowd around the tables, the diners at the hotel, the pigeon-shooters, the whole cosmopolitan gathering of idle rich and predatory poor, ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... lamp was put out and Idol and Diamond were left to darkness and solitude. In the vaulted room, at the entrance to the winding way that led to the cavern, Ducie's eyes were again bandaged. Then up the twenty-two stone stairs, and so into the carpeted room above, where was ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... of shells, compared with which all flowers of Earth are mere attempts at colour! She listens to choirs of angels, joining worthily with them in the celestial chaunt! and when the hearts of both are elevated by the anthem strain, she kneels in solitude and prays for him in words that rise to Heaven, a grateful and ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... sorry; but you promised to leave every thing to me, and be obedient and submissive.' 'So I will, father; you know best, and I will do just as you say.' So Samuel sat down upon the log, and his father went away. He was a little terrified by the solitude, and the darkness, and the roaring of the water; but he trusted to his father, ...
— Caleb in the Country • Jacob Abbott
... solitude to study the hard riddle of her shattered imagination of Alvan. The fragments would not suffer joining, they assailed her in huge heaps; and she did not ask herself whether she had ever known him, but what ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... rations, a skillet and a few other utensils hanging from the branches of a neighboring tree, a whitened buffalo's skull for a metate, a smouldering fire,—this little spot, with its surrounding fence shutting out the solitude, is the herder's palace, schloss, villa, town-and country-house. "Seguro," says Juan, as he lights a brown cigarette and quenches the yellow fuse in an empty cartridge-shell, "man wants but little here below." They ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... solitude of her room before the disturber arrives," volunteered Elfreda. "She'll ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... within the shadow of the cave, trying to reflect what he should next do, but his mind was in a state of confusion. He could not sufficiently collect his thoughts to arrive at any determination. Neptune lay by his side, occasionally licking his hand, trying to amuse him. He felt the solitude to which he was doomed trying in the extreme. The only human being on the island beside himself, was, as far as he could tell, young Hargrave, whom he had despised and hated, and who seemed in no way disposed to forget the mutual ill-feeling which had so long existed, or to show him any ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... Christ changed his whole career, transformed his character, convinced him that Jesus was the Messiah, and that salvation can only be obtained by faith in Him—that is, by a devoted adherence to His Person and His teaching. After preaching Christ in Damascus, he retired into the keen air and inspiring solitude of the Arabian desert. {120} During this period the outline of his creed seems to have grown clear and definite. It afterwards expanded and developed, as truly as youth passes into manhood, but there is no evidence for any material alteration having taken place after his return from Arabia. Many ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... number of acquaintances, but had not encouraged any of them to disturb her solitude. The long and tiresome meal dealt with, she had fled to the nook I have mentioned, and, with an Egyptian cigarette between her lips, lay back watching, from the perfumed darkness, the ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... existence of a river. We continued to march all day through a country untrodden before by an European foot. Save that a melancholy crow now and then flew croaking overhead, or a kangaroo was seen to bound at a distance, the picture of solitude was complete and undisturbed. At four o'clock in the afternoon we halted near a small pond of water, where we took up our residence for the night, lighted a fire, and prepared to cook our supper-that was to broil over a couple of ramrods a few slices of salt pork, and a crow which we ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... beautifully describes his situation here: 'I sat down on a bank, such as a writer of romance might have delighted to feign. I had, indeed, no trees to whisper over my head; but a clear rivulet streamed at my feet. The day was calm, the air soft, and all was rudeness, silence, and solitude. Before me, and on either side, were high hills, which, by hindering the eye from ranging, forced the mind to find entertainment for itself. Whether I spent the hour well, I know not: for here I first conceived the thought of this narration.' The Critical ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... enormous columns. Here we made out a cave, above which was a grassy declivity sloping upwards towards the summit. Though it is at the very mouth of the Clyde, its great height causes it to be seen at a distance, preventing it being dangerous to vessels bound to Glasgow. Any person inclined to solitude might take up his abode there, and live without leaving it, as it is inhabited by numerous flocks of sea-fowl, with goats and rabbits; while nettles, and a variety of hardy plants, grow in the interstices of the rocks. I asked Dick if he would like to remain ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... more than enough pressing work on his desk to fill the clear hour that remained to him before he had to start for home. But he didn't mean to do it. He didn't mean to do anything except drink down thirstily the sixty minutes of pure solitude that were before him; to let his mind run free from the clutch of circumstance. That hour had become a habit with him lately, like—he smiled at the comparison—like taking a drug. When something happened that forced him to forego it, he felt cheated—irrationally ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... pondering over an explanation of these singularities, a sound fell upon his ear, that produced within him a feeling of joy. It was the hoof-stroke of a horse, breaking upon the profound solitude. It came from behind him; and betokened that some horseman was approaching in his rear, though still invisible on account of a turning in the road, which the young traveller had ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... well in places, but there is a strength in cold roast chicken, plum puffs, and cream-cheese, that will, or did in this case, sweep everything before it; and, after making a very hearty meal, the midshipman almost wished that he had Ram there to talk to as a humble companion in that weary solitude. ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... their dome-shaped stone kiln to cover itself with the green velvet and lace of lichen and vine. The man who was stooping over the water, cleaning trout for his supper, had found it so and made it his own one time in his wandering quest for solitude. The kiln now boasted a chimney, a door, and one wide window that looked away over the stream's next plunge, over other mountains and valleys to far horizons of the world of men. This was the hermitage to which he brought his fagged-out nerves from the cormorant ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... a page to examples of how the right, then the left, and finally both hands, are to be treated. Kullak furthermore writes: "Or, if one will, he may also betake himself in fancy to a still, green, dusky forest, and listen in profound solitude to the mysterious rustling and whispering of the foliage. What, indeed, despite the algebraic character of the tone-language, may not a lively fancy conjure out of, or, rather, into, this etude! But one thing is to be held ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... long through the longitude and rectitude of many of her streets without the encounter of a single face: the place, as a whole, is by no means as lively as Pompeii, where there are always strangers; perhaps the only cities in the world worthy to compete with Ferrara in point of agreeable solitude are Mantua and Herculaneum. It is the newer part of the town—the modern quarter built before Boston was settled or Ohio was known—which is loneliest; and whatever motion and cheerfulness are still felt in Ferrara linger fondly about the ancient holds of life—about the street ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... kept their word. Year after year King Agenor sat in the solitude of his beautiful palace, listening in vain for their returning footsteps, hoping to hear the familiar voice of the queen, and the cheerful talk of his sons and their playfellow Thasus, entering the door together, and the sweet, childish accents of little Europa in the midst of them. But so long ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... notions of scenic illusion. The hope of his boyhood was to become a preacher, but this pious aspiration was brought to naught by the offer of free tuition in an academy which the duke had started at his Castle Solitude near Stuttgart. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... one of the principal originators of the first Pacific telegraph, and on the formation of the company he was made its first president. The location of the line, and its construction through the immense territory—then in great part a vast solitude—between Chicago and San Francisco, were left mainly to his unaided judgment and energy, and here again those qualities converted a hazardous experiment into a brilliant success. Mr. Wade remained president of the ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... He soon grew tired of solitude even in that beautiful scenery, (36) the pleasures of the retirement (8) which he had once pined for, and (36) leisure which he could use to no good purpose, (a) (30) being (15) restless ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... stars. Should they go on, or back? This was far above the benches of wash-gravel. Going up one of the nameless peaks, they stepped out on a ledge and viewed the white, silent mountain-world. Marmots stabbed the lonely solitude with echoing whistle. Wind came up from the valley in the sibilant sigh of a sea. It was doubtful if even Indians had ever hunted this ground. The game was so tame, it did not know enough to be afraid. The ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... from all eyes above, and had actually planted a seat on another shelf with so much security, that both Mildred and her mother often visited it in company. During the young man's recent absence, the poor girl, indeed, had passed much of her time there, weeping and suffering in solitude. To this seat, Dutton never ventured; the descent, though well protected with ropes, requiring greater steadiness of foot and head than intemperance had left him. Once or twice, Wycherly had induced Mildred to pass an hour with him alone in this romantic place, and some ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... dreary sand, and in the far distance were hills covered with snow and dotted with stunted pine, and bleak and forbidding, though not tenantless. In the foreground, close to the turbid waters which washed this frozen almost solitude, a great, gaunt wolf sat with his head uplifted to the lowering skies, and so well had the artist caught the creature's attitude, that looking upon it one could almost seem to hear the mournful but murderous howl and ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... mountain stream rushed by the lower corner of his farm, and its wild music sang him to sleep when he spent the night in the hills. He furnished his "summer residence" with a few simple necessities so that he could live there a number of days at a time. He minded not the solitude. The wild odorous verdure of the hills, the cool breezes, the song of the distant streams, the call of the birds, all seemed to harmonize with his own feelings at that time. He had a good kerosene lamp, and at nights when he was not too tired, ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... This is true of matter, but yet more true of that life, superior to all others, which we call holiness; it was in prayer that Francis found the spiritual strength which he needed; he therefore sought for silence and solitude. If he knew how to do battle in the midst of men in order to win them to the faith, he loved, as Celano says, to fly away like a bird going to make its ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... attacked, vilified, and denounced by the vilest of men in the vilest of manners. Sometimes, sitting alone by himself, blind and powerless, very battleworn and sad, this old man at the end of his life must have suffered in the solitude of his soul a grief almost intolerable. But he became more human and more lovable in these last years ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... Thomas from his dominions, who then went to a city called Malapur or Meliapour, on the coast of the dominions of Narsinga, and was followed by the Christians of Coulan, and even by many of the idolaters. He is said to have retired into a solitude in the mountains, where he died, and whence his body was removed for interment in a vault of the church he had built at Coulan. This church is now deserted and entirely overgrown with trees and bushes, and is kept by ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... lip, forehead, and eye of every one of them. They are, in their way, as full of incident, and some of them every bit as romantic; only they want the uninhabited island, and the charm, that has bewitched the world, of the striking solitary situation." Defoe died in poverty and solitude—"alone with his glory." It is perhaps not uncurious to note that in the same month of the same year, 1731, on {3} April 8th, "Mrs. Elizabeth Cromwell, daughter of Richard Cromwell, the Protector, and granddaughter of Oliver Cromwell, died at her house in Bedford Row, in the eighty-second ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... a curious sensation to be there in that awful solitude, thinking of my past adventures, and wondering what the next day might bring forth. I wanted to sleep and rest, so as to rise refreshed when the doctor called me two hours after midnight, when I was to relieve guard; but sleep would not come, and I lay fidgeting about, wondering how it was possible ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... not, however, reply with its usual brightness to the mellow salute of evening. Wearied and shaken by the long, rough ride, and depressed by the heavy solitude, he hated and almost feared the task which every step brought nearer. As the house rose higher and higher against the red sky, and grew darker, and as the sullen roar of blood-hounds (terrors of the neighborhood) roused the slow echoes of the crags, the lawyer was almost fain to turn his horse's ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... casts before him is huge enough to darken all this fair land. Others, in sentimental style, talk of the immense debt of gratitude which we owe to England. And what is the amount of this debt? Why, truly, it is the same that the young lion owes to the dam, which has brought it forth on the solitude of the mountain, or left it amid the winds ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... the day was gradually growing warmer. I decided to take a walk in the lovely Bruhl before looking up Ander. There I ordered a lunch in the garden of the beautifully situated inn, and enjoyed an extremely refreshing hour of complete solitude. The wild birds had already ceased singing, but I shared my meal with an army of sparrows, which assumed alarming proportions. As I fed them with bread- crumbs, they finally became so tame that they settled in swarms on the table in front of me to seize their booty. I was reminded of the ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... the task was completed; and the little island bore within its bosom wealth sufficient to buy an earldom. The silence of the dreary solitude sealed the secret; and there was no man who might discover it, other than those who laid the chests in their earthly hiding place. The moon gave testimony to the hidden treasure, and bore its silent witness through the many decades ...
— Money Island • Andrew Jackson Howell, Jr.
... the pretty round table, sweet with the fragrance of hyacinths in a big Swansea bowl, and bright with silver and glass, Anstice owned inwardly to a feeling of pleasure at his position. Although as a rule he loved his solitude, welcomed the silence of the old panelled house he had taken in Littlefield, and shunned those of his kind who had no direct need of his services, there were times when his self-sought loneliness weighed heavily upon his spirit, ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... first step, that great "emptying out" step, there can be no following. There He is the Lone Man, unapproachable in the moral splendour of His solitude. But from the time when He came in amongst us as Jesus, our Brother, the typical Son of man, He was marking out afresh the original road for our feet. This was the foundation trait in His character. ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... a perfect solitude. There was not a breath of life besides their own in this gorgeous valley of desolation. The ragged, crumbling battlements, and the loftier points of harder rock, would not have furnished subsistence ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... the refined and magnanimous character of the author. Thus prepared, and aided by her own keen discernment, she immediately detected his choice talents, his rare vein of sentiment, his abiding hunger for affection. Ballanche was a philosopher of solitude, a poet and priest of humanity, spending his days far from the crowd and uproar of the world, his proper haunt the summits of the loftiest minds, the mysterious cradle of the destinies of society. His soul was an "AEolian harp," through which the ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... modern times, bears the marks of having been formed in the court. If, for instance, in Scotland, the lower ranks, the labouring classes, like those of France, had transplanted the fictitious manners of the higher classes into the innocence of their cottage, or the sequestered solitude of their vallies—where, under such a state of things, could there ever have arisen such gifted spirits as Burns, or Ramsay, or Ferguson? and where should we have found, that truth, that beauty, that genuine nature, in the lives and manners ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... herself unseen, and it is certain that there is more in her mind than now appears, and though she seems so full of the new excitement of making friends with Kate Croy there must be some preoccupation beneath; and then, in a flash, these are the troubles that engage her in solitude, that have ached in her mind, and yet there has never been a single direct allusion to them. Skirting round and round them, giving one brief sight of her in eloquent circumstances, then displaying the all but untroubled surface of her thought on this side and that, the author has encompassed ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... green hills on which the eyes of so many a captive have gazed so wistfully in vain; but in their own mountain home again they shall listen to the murmurs of the great Atlantic; they shall go forth, and inhale the freshness of the morning air together; 'they shall be free of mountain solitude;' they will be encompassed with the loftiest images of liberty upon every side; and if time shall have stolen its suppleness from the father's knee, or impaired the firmness of his tread, he shall ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... The solitude of sentry-duty evidently comes to him as something of a relief. "It may," he says, "be all that is melancholy if the night is bad and the winter wind moans through the pines"; but it also "brings moments of exaltation, if the cloud-banks roll back, if the moonlight breaks over the windless hills, ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... from the south, following lines of latitude, went into Kentucky and Tennessee. The great west, with its vast prairies and plains, was not then accessible. Had it been so, the forests of Ohio might have been left in solitude for many years to come. During all this period, which we may properly call the pioneer stage, the settlers had no market for their produce, except to supply the demand of incoming immigrants. Grain and fruit would not bear the expense of transportation. The only way to obtain ready ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... Flora thought, solitude would be a luxury and Mrs. Ready away—and she answered, carelessly, "We must be content with ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... singular hobby, searching for things of the spirit by those devious ways he had heard about from time to time, a little mad probably into the bargain. The name Skale sounded to him big, yet he somehow pictured to himself an ascetic-faced man of small stature pursuing in solitude some impossible ideal. It all attracted him hugely with its promise of out-of-the-way adventure. In his own phrase it "might lead to something," and the hints about "experiments in sound" set chords trembling in him that had not vibrated since the days of ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... paintings, its statues and its silence, the light—itself silent and indefinite—awakened painful thoughts in him as to the vanity of bolts and guards and walls. And then, in the dead of night, in the silence and solitude of a strange bedroom, a sensation of unbearable fear swept ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... affectionately round me, and a voice murmured, "My dear Sarah, why did you not go, too? You are so delicate. Will you be able to bear the solitude without the dear child?" ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... the Zunamenie Church, passed through the shops in the Rejestwenskoi district, drove the sledge out on to the frozen Neva, and halted in the middle of the river, in front of the deserted church of Ste. Madeleine. There, protected by the solitude and darkness, hidden behind the black mass of his sledge, he began to break the ice, which was fifteen inches thick, with his pick. When he had made a large enough hole, he searched the body of Foedor, took all the money he had about him, and slipped ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... grown almost dark, but still Torarin could see Solberga church and the wide plain around it, which was sheltered by broad wooded heights to landward and by bare, rounded rocks toward the sea. As he drove on in solitude over the vast white plain, he felt he was a wretched little worm, while from the dark forests and the mountain wastes came troops of great monsters and trolls of every kind venturing into the open country on the fall of darkness. And in the whole great plain there was none other ...
— The Treasure • Selma Lagerlof
... moral strain of the old insoluble conflict between "fixed fate" and "free will" was heightened by the physical loneliness of the colonists. Each soul must fight its own unaided, unending battle. In that moral solitude, as in the physical solitude of the settlers upon the far northwestern prairies of a later epoch, many a mind snapped. Unnatural tension was succeeded by unnatural crimes. But for the stronger intellects ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... out? She lay the whole day stretched out upon her sofa, her eyes wide open, silent, and sighing, not responding to Marietta's loving words by a glance, or a movement of the eyelash. Marietta proposed to assemble her friends, but she affirmed that society was more wearisome than solitude. ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... began to be anxious about it, and to fear lest we had entered into a cul-de-sac. The perpendicular walls rendered any deviation in our path impossible; above us, the trees crossed their branches and almost hid the sky. No bird enlivened the solitude with its song, and ferns were so abundant that it seemed as if we had lighted upon some corner of the primitive world; as if to render the resemblance more complete, the reptiles scarcely fled at our approach, and obliged us to use ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... few pale-stemmed birches and somber firs formed, as it were, a rampart between the poor, climbing meadows and the waste of gorse and fern, and we two beneath them seemed utterly alone in the moorland solitude. ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... the first time in her life she owned a human being. A former joy in the possession of a devoted dog who did tricks was as nothing to this rapture. It was splendid. She owned him. Whenever she had a desire for his company—which was often, as solitude at Monte Carlo is more depressing than Zora had realized—she sent a page boy, in the true quality of his name of chasseur, to hunt down the quarry and bring him back. He would, therefore, be awakened at unearthly hours, at three o'clock ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... be where you will— Do what you will; unquestioned, unobserved, Enjoy, refrain; silence and solitude, The better part which such like spirits choose, We will provide; only be you our master, And we your servants, for a few short ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... appearance of one of the birds as it swung round in the air opposite a terrace of houses, and dropped in the stream to fish, not twenty yards from the road. As the heron is naturally among the shyest of all waterside birds, and seeks solitude above all things, these visits show that the quantity of fish in the lower river must be great, and also that the London herons, now never shot at, are losing their inbred dislike of houses and humanity. Their footprints have been found on the mud opposite a creek in Hammersmith, round which ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... had seen him at this moment of the opening of our story, they might have held that Wisdom was justified of her children. For now in the solitude of his splendid office, of a sudden Sir Robert's mask seemed to fall from him. His face broke up like ice beneath a thaw. He rose from his table and began to walk up and down the room. He talked to ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... bleached skeleton, mutely proclaiming the sun as overlord, while over all, around and about and within this throbbing furnace, there seemed to lurk a voice, a voice of but a softly lisped word—solitude. ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... only one example, when the hour of sleep has struck for men, you have retired to your hole, surrounded by the darkness, the silence and the formidable solitude of the night. All is sleep in the master's house. You feel yourself very small and weak in the presence of the mystery. You know that the gloom is peopled with foes who hover and lie in wait. You suspect the trees, the passing wind ...
— Our Friend the Dog • Maurice Maeterlinck
... that the vandal who first applied the flippant "twinkle" to them may not be driven melancholy-mad by their reproachful eyes. I noticed again the mystic charm of space that imparts a sense of individual solitude to each integer of the densest constellation, involving the smallest star with immeasurable loneliness. Something of this calm and solitude crept over me, and I dozed in my gloomy cavern. When I awoke the full moon was rising. Seen from my window, it had an indescribably ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... two lives that had known only the long dark shadows, only the deep solitude and solemnity of the forest. Like tall weeds that sometimes shoot up in dark and unfrequented places, and that put forth strange, sweet flowers, these two lives had sprung up there, put forth after their fashion the best that is in man, and then ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... engaged in the twilight, we heard faintly, from far down the stream, what sounded like two strokes of a woodchopper's axe, echoing dully through the grim solitude. We are wont to liken many sounds, heard at a distance in the forest, to the stroke of an axe because they resemble each other under those circumstances, and that is the one we commonly hear there. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... floated down the great river. Five years previously, heartsick and utterly careless of life, I had plunged into the trackless wilderness stretching in almost unbroken virginity to north and east, desiring merely to be left alone, that I might in solitude fight out my first grim battle with despair, saying to myself in all bitterness of soul that never again would I turn face to southward or enter the boundaries of Louisiana Province. During those years, beyond reach of news and the tongue of gossip, I wandered aimlessly from village to village, ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... dragged on into the afternoon and evening. Some of the men crouched alone in their quarters, facing in solitude the impending ordeal; others conversed together in low tones debating how they would choose their method of escape. Bill Witt, true to his inherent optimism, ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... you have no intention of a quite immediate move, and we can speak farther of it." I readily consented to do whatever seemed feasible to help him out of his difficulties, which existed, however, as I perceived, much more in his own mind than in actual fact. I thought a brief holiday in the solitude within which I was then located would probably be helpful in restoring a tranquil condition of mind, and as his brother, Mr. Scott, Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, and other friends in London, were of a similar opinion, efforts were made to induce him to undertake ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... hut the patient's eyes also gleamed, but with a different light. The forced inaction, the solitude, the wearying monotony of lying still, to one accustomed to a life full of incident and action, was more than trying; but when, as was the case with Durham, there was urgent and engrossing work to be done, the ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... strange out-setting, and I noted that both Mrs. Eversley and her daughter seemed sad at bidding good-bye to the spot where they had dwelt in utter solitude and peace for so many years; where one of them, indeed, had been born and grown up to womanhood. However, I kept on talking to distract their thoughts, and at ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... Occasionally the island winds like a snake through a wilderness of naked granite boulders, round and slippery, and barely high enough out of the water to afford a foundation for a few fishermen's huts, which from time to time break the monotony of their solitude. Sometimes the channel opens out into broad lakes, apparently hemmed in on all sides by pine-covered cliffs; then passing between a series of frightful crags, upthrown, as it were, out of the water by some ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... learned treatises and search into the sciences. Below they never descend, unless for their dinner and supper, so that the essence of their heads do not descend to the stomachs and liver. Only very seldom, and that as a cure for the ills of solitude, do they have converse with women. On certain days Hoh goes up to them and deliberates with them concerning the matters which he has lately investigated for the benefit of the State and all the ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... mother Earth, Weak and defenceless, man crept forth, And on mis-tempered solitude Of unploughed field and unclipped wood Gazed rudely; when; with brutes, he fed On acorns, and his stony bed In dark, unwholesome caverns found, No skill was then to tame the ground, No help came then from him above— ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... the graceful festoons of liana and moss imparted an imposing scene of vastness and tropical beauty. In such places the ground was clean and springy to the footfall and the impression of a splendid solitude was such as one feels in a great deserted cathedral. At times we crossed matted and snaky-looking little streams that trickled through the decaying vegetation, where the feet of countless elephants had worn deep holes far down in the mud. Then, after ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... symptom of impatience, but adjusted their clothes and hurried on. Others, still a numerous class, were restless in their movements, had flushed faces, and talked and gesticulated to themselves, as if feeling in solitude on account of the very denseness of the company around. When impeded in their progress, these people suddenly ceased muttering, but re-doubled their gesticulations, and awaited, with an absent and overdone smile upon the lips, the course of the persons ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... thoughts on which the mind habitually nourishes itself impart their own peculiar colouring to the mental and moral constitution. On your thoughts, when you are alone, when you wander through the fields, or by the roadside, or sit at your work in useful hours of solitude, depends very much the spirit you are of when you again enter into society. If, for instance, you think over the trials of temper which you are inevitably exposed to during the day as indications of the unkindness of your fellow-creatures, you will not fail to exaggerate mere trifles into serious ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... real pot-hunter's harvest of wild ducks, which we'll pick and dress and freeze for winter use. I'm taking the breast-feathers for my pillows and Whinstane Sandy is taking what's left for a sleeping-bag—from which I am led to infer that he's still reconciled to a winter of solitude. Struthers, I know, could tell him of a warmer bag than that, lined with downier feathers from the pinions of Eros. But, as I've said before, Fate, being ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... Year reviving old Desires, The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires, Where the White Hand of Moses on the Bough Puts out, and Jesus from ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... last, speaking almost in a whisper. Surely this was the sweet goddess herself, and I the wondering shepherd on Mount Ida's solitude. ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... defiled by the presence of a mother so abominably wicked. There was not a single town in which she was allowed to stay; there was not an inn of all the many upon that road where the host did not shun the contagion of her presence. And indeed she preferred to trust herself to solitude and to darkness rather than to any city or hostelry. And now," said Cicero, turning to the woman, who was probably sitting in court, "does she think that we do not all know her schemes, her intrigues, ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... she stretched out her right hand and laid it on the stone, and spake aloud: O Earth, thou and thy first children, I crave of you that he may come back now at once and loving me. And her voice sounded strange and unkent to her in that solitude, and she rued it that she ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... trailing away through silence and the night, had a tone of supernatural sweetness. When it had quite faded Kano stared on, for a long time, into the fragrant solitude. Stars were out now by thousands, a gold mosaic set into a high purple dome. Off to the south a wide blur of artificial light hung above the city, the visible expression, as it were, of the low, human roar of life, audible even in this sheltered nook. To the north, almost it seemed within touch ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... out in all directions, fed by the mountain streams, and among the central heights the wonderful natural amphitheatres known as Cirques stand in majestic solitude. The Cirque of Gavarnie—the best known—possesses on a bright day in spring such a charm, in its snowy imperial splendour, as the Alps would fail to surpass. In scenes where a lake adds such wonderful effect, Switzerland is quite supreme; we know of no view in the Pyrenees, of a comparable nature, ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... stolen a few days from anxious business in order to accompany me from Boulogne through Touraine and Guienne had left me at Toulouse; another friend whom I had arranged to pick up at Avignon on his way from Monte Carlo was unexpectedly delayed. I was therefore condemned to a period of solitude somewhat irksome to a man of a gregarious temperament. At first, for company's sake, I sat in front by my chauffeur, McKeogh. But McKeogh, an atheistical Scotch mechanic with his soul in his cylinders, being as communicative as ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... 1624, at Drayton, in Leicestershire, and was the son of a weaver, a pious and virtuous man, who gave him a religious education. Being apprenticed to a grazier, he was employed in keeping sheep—an occupation, the silence and solitude of which were well calculated to nurse his naturally enthusiastic feelings. When he was about nineteen, he believed himself to have received a divine command to forsake all, renounce society, and dedicate his existence to the service of religion. For five years, he accordingly led a ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... comfort to me that I have had a room to myself so far on this campaign. I find the communal spirit is not in me. The noisy meals, the heavy bowls of soup, the piles of labelled dinner-napkins, give me an unexpected feeling of oppressive seclusion and solitude, and only when I get away by myself do I feel that ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... and his father, following, turned the key upon him, and left him to solitude and his ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... the cross. But, carried onward by an ardent love of the cross, whose treasures he more and more discovered as he advanced in the dignity and functions of the sacred ministry, he resolved to establish in the wood adjoining his convent a kind of solitude, where, after the manner of the ancient Fathers of the Desert, he might devote himself entirely to grayer and penitential austerities, and give to the Church an illustrious and profitable example of the sacerdotal spirit exercised in a perfect degree. There was found ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... that gives us a thought on which I can but touch now, that the steadfast contemplation of the ascended Christ, who has gone to the Father, having finished His work, is the sovereign antidote against all sense of separation and solitude, the sovereign power by which we may face a hostile world, the sovereign cure for every sorrow. If we could live in the light of the great triumphant, ascended Lord, then, Oh, how small would the babble of the world ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... proud and stubborn beyond belief, because hate begetteth hate and evil—evil, so came I to consort and make fellowship with pirates and the like rogues and to endure much of harms and dangers as battle, shipwreck, prison and solitude; until God (of His infinite mercy) brought me forth a better man therefor and, in some sense, a more worthy. All of the which I have fully and faithfully recorded for such as shall trouble to read this ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... fire was that afternoon made in the parlor, and Ethelyn solicited to come down, Mrs. Markham, who carried the invitation, urging that a change would do her good, as it was not always good to stay in one place. But Ethelyn preferred the solitude of her own chamber, and though she thanked her mother-in-law for her thoughtfulness, she declined going down, and Mrs. Markham had made her fire for nothing. Not even Melinda came to enjoy it, for she was in Camden, visiting a schoolmate; and so the day passed drearily enough ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... carried on by Mr. Jefferson Briley, whose two-seated covered wagon was usually much too large for the demands of business. Both the Sanscrit Pond and North Kilby people were stayers-at-home, and Mr. Briley often made his seven-mile journey in entire solitude, except for the limp leather mail-bag, which he held firmly to the floor of the carriage with his heavily shod left foot. The mail-bag had almost a personality to him, born of long association. Mr. Briley was a meek and timid-looking body, but he held a warlike ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... peril, And steeped in bitter infamy to the lips. More need was there I should be innocent, More need that I should be most true and kind, 115 And much more need that there should be found one To share remorse and scorn and solitude, And all the ills that wait on those who do The tasks of ruin in the world of life. He fled, and I ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... was gloomy and fond of solitude, "ever conscious," he says, "of a peculiar heaviness within me, and at times of a strange sensation of fear, which occasionally amounted to horror, and for which I could assign no real cause whatever." Of this earliest period he tells a characteristic story of drawing strange lines in the ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... of the town the air of solitude and languor is still more conspicuous. In the great square, or by the side of the promenade—if the town is fortunate enough to have one—cows or horses may be seen grazing tranquilly, without being at ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... tongue there were words of adoration, not fastidious and carefully chosen, but simple, elemental words such as a farmhand might blunder out in the deep shadow of a lane, after dark. But he held them back. He would wait until after they had dined together and all round them there were silence and solitude. He drove still more slowly in order to give the two Japanese servants time to carry out his instructions and remove themselves. That cottage, which he had bought on the spur of the moment, fitted out with elaborate care ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... the fells clear from base to top, their green or reddish sides marked with white farms or bold clumps of fir; with the blackness of scattered yews, landmarks through generations; or the purple-grey of the emerging limestone. Fresh, lonely, cheerful—a land at once of mountain solitude, and of a long-settled, long-humanised life—it breathed kindly on this penitent, anxious woman; it seemed ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... discovered every detail of this prank. It is at such times as these that I regret ever having undertaken the charge of three such unruly boys. It is only the high regard in which I hold your father that makes it tolerable. I hope you will take advantage of your solitude to review thoroughly ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... such place, I mean. One might do worse, don't you think so? There must be at least two centuries of solitude under those yew-trees. Shouldn't ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... for the statesman. He had never learned how essential it is for any one who undertakes public business, and desires to deal with mankind, to avoid above all things that self-will, which, as Plato says, belongs to the family of solitude; and to pursue, above all things, that capacity so generally ridiculed, of submission to ill-treatment. Marcius, straightforward and direct, stand together, and come in to their assistance. The assembly ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... A great solitude had indeed fallen on the old king. His wife was still guarded as a prisoner. Two of his sons had died traitors to their father. A third was in open rebellion. All his daughters were in far-off lands, and one of them was soon to die. Only one son remained to him ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... heart—the heart is unconquer'd still— A host in its solitude! Quenchless the spirit, though fetter'd the will, Of that warrior unsubdued; His soul, like an arrow from rocky ground, Shall fiercely and proudly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... hand of sister or son to cool his fevered brow or close his glazing eyes. Faithful to the last to that which had been the great work of his life, he wrote these words with dying hand: "All I can add in my solitude is, may heaven's rich blessings come down on every one who would help to heal this open sore of the world!" Why was it that in the ten years after Livingstone's death, Africa made greater advancement ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... and it would be a charitable act to take pity on my solitude," she said. "My husband is dining at your ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... moved through what seemed an uninhabited territory. No Indian village crowned the hills above the streams; they encountered no roving bands; no solitary hunter met them; nowhere was there sign of human life. If their enemies were upon their track, they knew it not—perfect peace, perfect solitude seemed to encompass them. Still the Indian was vigilant; covering their trail with unimaginable ingenuity, taking advantage of every running stream, every stony hillside, building a fire only in some hidden hollow or fold of ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... upon it, which, strangely modified as gusts of wind agitated the surface, occasionally assumed the shape of monsters. So I stood on the Alpine elevation, and looked now on the gay distant river, and now at the dark granite-encircled lake close beside me in the lone solitude, and I thought of my brother and myself. I am no moraliser; but the gay and rapid river and the dark and silent lake, were, of a verity, no bad emblems ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... the farm-house lay some offices for the storing of produce and implements; and behind these there was a little green, with an old arbor, now visited by no one, as, from the new arrangement of the buildings, it lay too far from the garden. In this solitude Elfrida delighted most; and it occurred to nobody to interrupt her here, so that frequently her parents did not see her for half a day. One afternoon her mother chanced to be in these buildings, seeking for some lost ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... whether thou appearest in the shape of a cigar, or diest away in sweet perfume enshrined in the meerschaum bowl; I love thee with more than woman's love! Thou art a companion to me in solitude. I can talk and reason with thee, avoiding loud and obstreperous argument. Thou art a friend to me when in trouble, for thou advisest in silence, and consolest with thy calm influence ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... thou alone: with one glad voice Let all thy sister States rejoice: Let Freedom, in whatever clime She waits with sleepless eye her time, Shouting from cave and mountain wood Make glad her desert solitude, While they who hunt her, quail with fear; The New World's chain lies ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... sight. Here he turned, and steered first to the west, then to the north. In 77 deg. 31' N.L. and 86 deg. E.L. from Greenwich he discovered and circumnavigated a new island, which was named "Ensamheten" (Solitude). The island was free of snow, but not overgrown with grass. The animals that were seen were some bears and bearded seals, terns, fulmars, ivory gulls, flocks of black guillemots, and a "bird with a rounded tail and long bill," probably some wader. On the north-east ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... tuberculosis 'shelter,' where a patient in hopeless condition comes with a special nurse to die. I don't want a nurse, and I'm not going to die. Tubercles don't touch me—they don't flourish on my soil. So this solitude just suits me. If I were at the 'Plaza' I should have to ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... knew how to flash a new light into the picture out of his own experience. He spoke of the combat with self, and of the wrestling with dark spirits in solitude. He spoke of the demons that men had worshipped for centuries in the wilderness, and whose malice they invoked against the stranger who ventured into the gloomy forest. Gods, they called them, and told strange tales of their dwelling among the impenetrable ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... preach; my hearers fled from me, or sought my life. In all India, finally, there was not a place in which I could find peace or safety—not even among the outcasts, for, though fallen, they were still believers in Brahm. In my extremity, I looked for a solitude in which to hide from all but God. I followed the Ganges to its source, far up in the Himalayas. When I entered the pass at Hurdwar, where the river, in unstained purity, leaps to its course through ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... a man—nay, any one such journey must be more valuable to a man—than a visit to Niagara. At Niagara there is that fall of waters alone. But that fall is more graceful than Giotto's tower, more noble than the Apollo. The peaks of the Alps are not so astounding in their solitude. The valleys of the Blue Mountains in Jamaica are less green. The finished glaze of life in Paris is less invariable; and the full tide of trade round the Bank of England is ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... billiards, and smoked and drank till the usual hours of the night had come. He was not a man who liked such things. He had not become what he was by passing his earlier years after this fashion. But his misery required excitement, and, billiards, with tobacco, were better than the desolation of solitude. ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... Further, it is written (Matt. 18:20): "Where there are two or three gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them." But nothing can be better than the fellowship of Christ. Therefore it would seem better to live in community than in solitude. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas |
