"Retrospect" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Tresilian and the other judges; and, with the approbation of the present judges, declared the answers for which these magistrates had been impeached to be just and legal:[****] and they carried so far their retrospect as to reverse, on the petition of Lord Spenser, earl of Glocester, the attainder pronounced against the two Spensers in the reign of Edward II.[*****] The ancient history of England is nothing but a catalogue of reversals: every thing is in fluctuation and movement: ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... paused, smiling as if in retrospect, and kept looking into the fire and turning about in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... all the world military, our non-military antecedents. We bore the hallmark of fifty years of neutral aloofness, of fifty years of indifference to the business of national defense. What makes the situation amusing as a retrospect is the fact that we were traveling on third-class military passes, as befitted our rank as eleve-pilotes and soldiers ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... recognize in these disturbances of industry the first and incoherent phase of the great movement which ended in the establishment of the modern industrial system with all its social consequences. This is all so plain in the retrospect that a child can understand it, but not being prophets, we of that day had no clear idea what was happening to us. What we did see was that industrially the country was in a very queer way. The relation ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... in the retrospect to think of old Blackie at a distribution of prizes to school-children in a town of the West some years before his death. During the chairman's opening remarks the merry old man continued to whistle ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... with a hoop-stick." Actually given or only meditated, the whole of these twenty Readings—meaning the entire collection of the identical marked copies used by the Novelist himself on both sides of the Atlantic—have, for the verification of this retrospect, been placed for the time being in the writer's possession. Selecting from among them those merely which are familiar to the public, from their having been actually produced, he here proposes cursorily to glance one by one through ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... no artificial utterance. He had clearly interrupted himself to indulge in this sad retrospect. He then points a moral from Mrs. Nickleby, who, he says, could not conceive the idea of anyone dwelling on such thoughts in secret. I have always had a notion that this worthy lady's incongruities and rambling methods were suggested by ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... accusing conscience to keep happiness at a distance. She remembers that she burst asunder the bonds of duty, that she caused the death of a fond parent; while I, through Heaven's mercy, have never been subject to the temptation to create for myself a retrospect so dreadful." ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... for instance a direct experience of art, the which no professional critic may possess. And it includes as well a direct knowledge of life, sharpened in the retrospect of that devotion to the living which is peculiarly the artist's. For what is the critic after all, but an "artistic" individual somehow impeded from satisfying his esthetic emotion and his need of esthetic form in the gross and stubborn ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... White Ladies Road, Black Boy Hill, and is carried on apart altogether from any trade or business, it may be well, in view of connecting links with the past being rapidly effaced in the march of modern progress, to take an historical retrospect of this local post office so far as evidence is forthcoming, and thus endeavour to put on record the traditions of the past. It would appear, then, according to the earliest evidence obtainable, that Mr. W. Newman had the appointment of postman and town letter receiver conferred upon him in 1827, ...
— The King's Post • R. C. Tombs
... judgment and the nicest foresight of domestic needs. It is sufficient to say that I do not know a house apparently more commodiously arranged than this, which was planned and built with utmost precipitation, and in the very heyday of a most tempestuous youth. In one thing only, upon a retrospect at this day of the whole case, there may appear to have been some imprudence, viz. that timber being then at a most unprecedented high price, it is probable that the building cost seven or eight hundred ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... no satisfaction in Mr. Hale's book, nor in the state of things that made it necessary for him to give the whole matter the go-by. If the public mind had retained its fanatical credulity, or if Mather's own share in the delusion of 1692 had been agreeable in the retrospect, it cannot be doubted that it would have afforded THE GREAT THEME, of his great book. All the strange learning, passionate eloquence, and extravagant painting, of its author, would have been lavished upon it; and we should have had another separate Book, ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... of his pursuers and retreated to his own fastnesses. Soon the approach of night brought the siege operations to an end. Metellus drew off his men and led them back to camp after a day's experience that did not leave a pleasant retrospect behind it. Warned by its incidents that the cavalry should be posted nearer to the camp, he began the work of the following day by disposing the whole of this force over that quarter of the ground on ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... ambitions remained to him, built himself a shepherd's hut in a valley of the Wiltshire Downs, and planned out his memoirs in three stout volumes. He believed that he had reached that stage in life where retrospect is all. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... of the pamphlet is perhaps more knotty and powerful than the first. Milton's well-known retrospect of what he had seen in Italy, with his reminiscence of Galileo, occurs here. But his drift has now been made sufficiently apparent; and we shall best discharge what remains of our duty by presenting certain pieces of autobiographical ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... composition. Yet it may serve as a text for the last remark I have to offer. To Pepys I think I have been amply just; to the others, to Burns, Thoreau, Whitman, Charles of Orleans, even Villon, I have found myself in the retrospect ever too grudging of praise, ever too disrespectful in manner. It is not easy to see why I should have been most liberal to the man of least pretensions. Perhaps some cowardice withheld me from the proper ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the Seven Years' war (I may be permitted to take this retrospect, I hope, since it is the fashion, and those who differ with me in opinions go much farther back than I do), let the French royalists and emigrants recollect the confiscation of property and barbarity exercised by Marshall ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... year permitted an unmarried woman to wear. It seemed to her that Siddall was still more costly and elegant-looking than before, though this may have been due to the fact that he always created an impression that in the retrospect of memory seemed exaggerated. It seemed impossible that anyone could be so clean, so polished and scoured, so groomed and tailored, so bedecked, so high-heeled and loftily coiffed. His mean little countenance with its grotesquely waxed mustache and imperial ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... such things in the world as Home Rule, Obstruction, Newmarket Lowther, and Brummagem Joe. And all the time here were we, who could be his sons, grinding our hearts in despair—in futile anger—in melancholy retrospect. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... days, before Mr. McAlpine cam'," replied his friend, giving himself up to the joys of retrospect. "Yer faither used to say the Glen was jist like the Garden o' Eden until the serpent cam', an' it wes the tavern. Ah mind when yon Eerish crew from the Flats cam' up here to Pete Nash's tavern, an' ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... not," said Lyra flatteringly. "Well, Annie, what do you think of our little evening at Mrs. Munger's in the dim retrospect? Poor Ralph! What did the doctor say about him?" She listened with so keen a relish for the report of Putney's sayings that Annie felt as if she had been turning the affair into comedy for Lyra's amusement. "Oh dear, ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... Lescott, because a guest and wounded, was given a small room aside. Samson, however, shared his quarters in order to perform any service that an injured man might require. It had been a full and unusual day for the painter, and its incidents crowded in on him in retrospect and drove off the possibility of sleep. Samson, too, seemed wakeful, and in the isolation of the dark room the two men fell into conversation, which almost lasted out the night. Samson went into the confessional. This was the first ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... slowly left the room, regarding me as he went in such a manner, that I could not fail recognising him: and here, my friend, I must lay aside every particle of self-love and vanity ere I can make you a complete confession; the retrospect of my life brings many events, of which the remembrance is indeed painful to me, and only the solemn promise I am under to conceal nothing restrains me from consigning many particulars to oblivion. I am once more about to incur the chance of drawing down ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... the present season indicates that home interest in the sport is on the increase. But the chief thriving-place of native American cricket is conceded to be Philadelphia, and it will be interesting, perhaps, to take a retrospect of the progress of the game ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... In a retrospect of my six years as a Member of the House of Representatives, I can see, and will freely admit, that my chief fault was my intense partisanship. This grew out of a conscientious feeling that the repeal of the Missouri ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... respectable, disrespect, inspection, speculate, special, especial, species, specify, specimen, spice, suspicion, conspicuous, despise, despite, spite; (2) specter, spectrum, spectroscope, prospector, prospectus, introspection, retrospect, circumspectly, conspectus, perspective, specie, specification, specious, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... whirl and confusion of events. Personally at the time, in traversing this battlefield, I was slightly horrified at first, but chiefly conscious only of the frightful odour of mortality. It is on thinking the thing over in retrospect and with cold blood that the real sense of horror begins to creep into one's soul. Such is the so-called "ennobling influence of war"! As I went over this grim battlefield, with all its tragic sights, I reflected bitterly on the triumph ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... must await years of growth. Confidence in each other had not yet replaced fear and suspicion. That the first attempt to come into a union could have been a success, that a sacrifice to the god Provincialism could have been avoided, seems in retrospect impossible. ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... blank about those last minutes. In less than an hour after my escape I struck the highway, but it was an hour which in the retrospect unrolls itself into unquiet years. I was dimly conscious of scrambling through a ditch and coming to a ghostly white road. The schimmel swung to the right, and the next I knew some one had taken my bridle and was speaking ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... that lingered for a moment over our heads, might seem even to muse and hesitate, and then sullenly passed away into distant quarters. It is noticeable that a danger which approaches, but wheels away,—which threatens, but finally forbears to strike,—is more interesting by much on a distant retrospect than the danger which accomplishes its mission. The Alpine precipice, down which many pilgrims have fallen, is passed without much attention; but that precipice, within one inch of which a traveller has passed unconsciously ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... or a cruel woman ... she was very kind and loved her son with a long clutching love ... but her life with her husband had contained so many disturbances of comfortable courses, thrilling enough at the time, but terrifying when viewed in retrospect, that her nature, inclined to quiet, fixed ways and to acceptance, with slight resistance, of whatever came to her, made all the efforts that were possible to it to keep her life and her son's life in peace. She hated ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... this retrospect, I could not but ask myself with stirrings of the most genuine wonder, whether he could possess this intimate knowledge of all the great families of Europe! It was as if he had spent a part of his life in making special study of the history ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... of the Smells— London Smells! What a world of retrospect his tyranny compels! In the silence of the night How we muse on the old plight Of Kensington,—a Dismal Swamp, and lone! Still the old Swamp-Demon floats O'er the City, as our throats Have long known. And the people—ah, the people— Though as high as a church ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 1, 1890 • Various
... unbuttoned his gloves, there passed through Trysdale's mind a swift, scarifying retrospect of the last few hours. It seemed that in his nostrils was still the scent of the flowers that had been banked in odorous masses about the church, and in his ears the lowpitched hum of a thousand well-bred voices, the rustle ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... a custom can be observed of peculiar significance and friendliness; everybody can help to prepare the feast, decorate the house with flowers, and save the bride from those tearful moments which come with any retrospect. All should try to make the scene a merry one, for there is no other reason for ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... could have had no application to the strange combinations of untoward circumstance that were now rising up with such deadly rapidity in every quarter of the horizon, like vast sombre banks of impenetrable cloud. Prudence in new cases, as has been somewhere said, can do nothing on grounds of retrospect. The work of the Constituent was doomed by the very nature of things. Their assumption that the Revolution was made, while all France was still torn by fierce and unappeasable disputes as to seignorial rights, was one of the most ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... smokestack and out the other, the glass in one window had been shattered to bits and in various other places damage had been wrought. But they had recovered the Follow Me, and that, viewing the affair in retrospect, had been something of an achievement. Everyone, even Tom by now, was more than satisfied at the outcome of their first real adventure. Dinner, delayed as it was and none too palatable by reason of having been prepared for a much earlier ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... If our relation to Jesus Christ were only that 'Once in the end of the ages He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself'; and if we had to look back through lengthening vistas of distance and thickening folds of oblivion, simply to a historical past, in which He was once offered, the retrospect would not have the sweetness in it which it now has. But when we come to this thought that the Christ who was for us is also the Christ in us, and that He is not the Christ for us unless He is the Christ ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... for some seven or eight miles. Here and there the road passed through an open gate as into a farmyard, though there were no adjoining fences to mark these boundaries of some new hacienda or estate. From the highest point there was a pretty retrospect back on Atequisa and the railroad and the broad valley almost to far-off Guadalajara, and ahead, also still far away, Lake Chapala shimmering in the early sunset. Between lay broad, rolling land, rich with flowers and shrubbery, and with much cultivation also, one vast field ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... commend to you The Mask (METHUEN) as a craftsmanlike essay in imaginative realism; ruthlessly candid and self-revealing, but free from that tiresome obsession of the ultra-realists that everything that has ever happened is equally important in retrospect. The narrator, Vanya Gombarov, a Russian Jew, discourses reflectively and detachedly, as it were from behind a mask, to an English artist friend about his early childhood in his own land and the dismal adventures of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... "Sometimes in retrospect of a great book the mind falters, confused by the multitude and yet the harmony of the detail, the strangeness of the frettings, the brooding, musing intelligence that has foreseen, loved, created, elaborated, perfected, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... since it was more difficult to imagine; he was opening the door to go, when he heard himself called back in these words (which, by cutting off from the party that possible ending which had so appalled him, made the party itself seem innocent in retrospect, made Odette's return home a thing no longer inconceivable and terrible, but tender and familiar, a thing that kept close to his side, like a part of his own daily life, in his carriage; a thing that ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... think of this in retrospect it seems that the blind musician stood in some peculiar and significant relation to the more ordinary life about him. But for him, I should probably have omitted to describe my night among the Turks. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... my promise. 'Tis true the story you wished me to give you is more easily communicated by the pen than by the lips. I admit your claim to be acquainted with all the incidents of my life, be they momentous or trivial. I have often told you that the retrospect is very mournful; but that ought not to prevent me from making it, when so useful a purpose as that of thoroughly disclosing to you the character of one, on whom your future happiness is to depend, ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... said the preacher; "its sins and sorrows are irrevocably over; why dwell upon it now? Do not waste the present, with all its opportunities, in a hopeless and helpless retrospect. The worst of us need not despair, much less those who may have been betrayed into sudden error by some moment of unguarded passion. There lies the future before you; onwards then, and forwards! it is yet an innocent, it may be a happy, future. Take ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... struck!" said the Virginian, looking round upon the whole company. He allowed himself a broad smile of retrospect. "To hear 'em talk frawgs at Tulare! Same as other folks talks hawsses or steers or whatever they're raising to sell. Yu'd fall into it yourselves if yu' started the business. Anything a man's bread and ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... was a man again, physically and mentally sound, doing all reverence to the memory of his dead wife—a flawless angel in the retrospect—while finding natural solace in the company of living women who were also young and fair. The living women were much in evidence from the first; nothing but the sea could keep them from trying to ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... but this very imperfection it is which urges us to arise and seek for the Isles of the Immortals. What we lack recalls the fulness. The soul has seen a brighter day than this and a sun which never sets. Hence the retrospect: "Thou has been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, the jasper, the sapphire, emerald .... Thou was upon the holy mountain of God; ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... disappeared in disgrace; and there I sat by my Wife's side, endeavouring to form a retrospect of the year 1999 and of the possibilities of the year 2000; but not quite able to shake of the thoughts suggested by the prattle of my bright little Hexagon. Only a few sands now remained in the half-hour glass. Rousing myself ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... the rapid motions of a long sea voyage. The pleasure of travel, which only exists as a matter of fact in retrospect and seldom in the present, at the instant when it is being experienced, he could fully relish at his ease, without the necessity of fatigue or confusion, here in this cabin whose studied disorder, whose transitory appearance and whose seemingly temporary furnishings corresponded ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... was more unhappy in her solitude than, in her unbending nature, she would avow, observes her faithful friend and chronicler, the record of the last years of her existence too plainly demonstrates. Although she derived consolation in retirement from the retrospect of the part she had played in her prosperity, still there were moments of poignant grief when her very soul groaned within her. She was ambitious, and her ambition had been foiled; she loved irresponsible command, but the time had come ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... genius and energy, and lift our politics to a broader view of the people's essential interests. It is a record of singular variety and singular distinction. But I shall not attempt to review it. It speaks for itself and will be of increasing influence as the years go by. This is not the time for retrospect. It is time, rather, to speak our thoughts and purposes concerning the ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... called upon to give ear, "for the LORD hath spoken!" ... From the sole to the crown,] "there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores.... Your hands are full of blood[28]!" ... About all this hideous retrospect of what was going on at school, Dr. ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... complex; but, whether the sympathies of the reader be for or against the standpoint of the Irish Loyalists, the actual events which make up what may be called the Ulster Movement would be wholly unintelligible without some introductory retrospect. Indeed, to those who set out to judge Irish political conditions without troubling themselves about anything more ancient than their own memory can recall, the most fundamental factor of all—the ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... use. This Germanic horde, which I saw pouring down across Belgium, bound for France, does not in retrospect seem to me a man-made, man-managed thing. It seems more like a great, orderly function of Nature; as ordained and cosmic as the tides of the sea or the sweep of a mighty wind. It is hard to believe that it was ever ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... compositions, in which there is an ironical mixture of the quaint and serious, such as his lines on a picture of Gaspar Poussin, the fine tale of Gualberto, his Description of a Pig, and the Holly-tree, which is an affecting, beautiful, and modest retrospect on his own character. May the aspiration with which it concludes be fulfilled! [11]—But the little he has done of true and sterling excellence, is overloaded by the quantity of indifferent matter which he turns out ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... discover the vast changes that are likely to come as a direct consequence of the present Armageddon, it is necessary to refer in brief retrospect to some of the main causes and features of the great European war. Meanwhile, I think the general feeling amongst all thoughtful men is best expressed in the phrase, "Never again." Never again must we have to face the possibility of such a world-wide catastrophe. Never again must it be possible ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... On a retrospect, among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, including the spectacles of the Southern Cross, the Cloud of Magellan, and the other constellations of the Southern Hemisphere, the glacier leading its blue stream of ice overhanging ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... reminiscence of Mendelssohn. "Anyone can find that out," was the rough-and-ready reply of Brahms. But if Mendelssohn be the prevailing influence in the Scherzo, Schubert has his turn in the Trio. The fourth movement is an Intermezzo, entitled "Rueckblick" (Retrospect). The opening phrase, and indeed the whole of the short movement, carries us back to the picture of the lovers. Some change has taken place: have the lovers grown cold? or has death divided them? The themes ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... ventures to suggest either boots or sandals as an improvement. Had Goethe felt himself at liberty from all restraints of private consideration in composing these Memoirs, can it be doubted that he would have taken his retrospect of this Frankfort inauguration from a different station; from the station of that stern revolution which, within his own time, and partly under his own eyes, had shattered the whole imperial system of thrones, in whose equipage this gay pageant made ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... it may not be considered out of place if, in this retrospect, which is intended, first of all, for my children and grandchildren, I state that a personal fact, which was known to many from other sources, was confirmed to me in one of these conversations: General Grant informing me, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... glorious than ever before." There had been improvement in the candles; the audience was more civilised; the orchestra had been increased; the rushes had been swept from the stage; everything that had been mean was now "all otherwise." The manager possibly had in his mind during this retrospect the condition of the Vere Street Theatre while under his management. The audience possessed an unruly element. 'Prentices and servants filled the gallery; there were citizens and tradesmen in the pit, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... sufficient if we can withdraw at will into the solitudes. The younger Pliny, moralising to his friend Minutius (I should like to think him the progenitor of Aldo Manuccio), describes the delights of seclusion at his villa on the shore of the Adriatic. 'At such a season,' says he, in a retrospect of the day's work, 'one is apt to reflect how much of my life has been lost in trifles! At least it is a reflection that frequently comes across me at Laurentum, after I have been employing myself in my studies, ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... himself free from his cheerless retrospect. There was a thing or two he wanted to get from his desk, and his time was growing very short. He found what he wanted, and then, just as he was about to close the drawer, his eye fell on ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... that heaven is to be one vast lazy retrospect? Why is not eternity to have action and change, yet both like God, compatible with rest and immutability? This earth is but one minor planet of a minor system. Are there no more worlds? Will there not be incident ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... parent when the dear boy of his heart has been for a short time missing, and remembers the pangs of doubt, the apprehension, the painful forebodings, nay, the despair itself into which an absence protracted beyond custom, and not to be accounted for, has thrown him, will be able, from a retrospect of his reflections on such an occasion, to imagine what must have been the danger of this boy, and what the courage he must have had to encounter it—and will, while pondering with admiration upon his fortitude and manliness, tremble for his fate. This writer once asked him if he was ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... of the old man's family who would mourn his loss. The "case," now so nearly finished, appeared, as she reviewed it, quite an ordinary one, all the tiny things that had struck her as odd or arresting seemed trivial in retrospect, unworthy of the attention she had bestowed on them. No doubt everything had grown out of the rather peculiar personality of Sartorius from whom she would soon be dissociated—without regret. She would certainly not continue to work for him, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... to listen to any speech from Polykarp's mother, but her question suggested to him for the first time a rapid retrospect of all that had occurred, and he could not conceal from himself that his suspicions rested on weak grounds. And at the same time he now said to himself, that if indeed Sirona had fled into the desert instead of to the senator's ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to other aspirations the retrospect is more cheerful. Slavery has been entirely abolished, and, with all due respect to Mr. George Curzon, is not going to be re-established under the British flag. The punishment of death, rendered infinitely more impressive, and therefore more deterrent, by its withdrawal ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... the retrospect more distinct to him was the process by which he had become aware that Kate's acquaintance with her was greater than he had gathered. She had written of it in due course as a new and amusing one, and he had written back that he had met ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... her fancy followed Frida in delightful retrospect. Durant said nothing, he sat waiting for her to ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... desirable—or, rather, she shrank from the alternative. When she visualized the North it uprose always in its most threatening presentment, indescribably lonely, the playground of ruthless, elemental forces, terrifying in its vast emptinesses. It appalled her in retrospect, loomed unutterably desolate in ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... or two, on her fide. But without waiting to hear all, he turns abruptly upon Harry Blew, who is seen some paces off. Neither by word, nor gesture, has the sailor yet saluted him. He stands passive, a silent spectator; as Crozier supposes, the greatest criminal on earth. In quick retrospect of what has occurred, and what he has heard from Don Gregorio, how could it ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... and I would have purchased a franc's worth of iodine for almost anybody on earth. Not then. On the contrary, I grew positively low-spirited when, after three more days, the lamentations began to diminish in volume. They were sweet music to my ears, at the time. They are sweeter by far, in retrospect. If only one could extract the same amount of innocent and durable pleasure out of ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... it may not be inopportune to make a break in the record of Cardan's life and work, and to treat in retrospect of that portion of his time which he spent in the composition of his treatises on Arithmetic and Algebra. Ever since 1535 he had been working intermittently at one or other of these, but it would have been impossible to deal coherently ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... severest) cross Thou canst lay upon us we shall regard as only the apparent severity of unutterable and unalterable love. Eternity will unfold how all, all was needed; that nothing else, nothing less, could have done! If not now, at least then, the deliberate verdict on a calm retrospect of ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... not but be a true record of the broad impressions made on the mind of Scott by the marvellous revolutions of his own time in their progress. Feeling how justly in the main that work has preserved those impressions, though gracefully softened and sobered in the retrospect of peaceful and more advanced years, I the less regret that I have it not in my power to quote any letters of his touching the reappearance of Napoleon on the soil of France—the immortal march from Cannes—the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... unconscious that he called her by the familiar name. He was wishing he could have shielded her from all this. Painful as the retrospect might be to her, the recital was far ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... women," broke out the junior Hahn chuckling to himself, as if absorbed in some particularly delightful retrospect. "There is the girl, now, who is to sing as Germania to-night,—and, between you and me, I don't mind telling you that she is rather smitten with me. She is as fine a specimen of a woman as ever trod in two shoes; splendid arms, a neck ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of the Mountain, therefore, it is necessary for us to travel back in retrospect to ancient Roman days. In the first place, however, one word as to its present name that we use to-day, for all are familiar with Vesuvius, but comparatively few, until they visit Naples, have heard mention made of Monte Somma. The name of Vesuvius, then, though strictly ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... my belief that after the passing of this depression, when we can examine it in retrospect, we shall need to consider a number of other questions as to what action may be taken by the Government to remove Possible governmental influences which make for instability and to better organize mitigation of the effect of depression. It is as yet ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of life which are formulated into certain products of art, literature, and criticism." Dealing with only one form of the social phenomenon, with sensualism so far as it appeared to affect contemporary poetry, the writer proceeded with a literary retrospect intended to show that the fair dawn of our English poetry in Chaucer and the Elizabethan dramatists had been overclouded by a portentous darkness, a darkness "vaporous," "miasmic," coming from a "fever-cloud generated ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... there in the desert of wheat had she felt sympathy for him. And now with intelligence and a woman's intuition, barring the old, insidious, dreamy mood, Lenore went over in retrospect all she could remember of that meeting. And the truth made her sharply catch her breath. Dorn had fallen in love with her. Intuition declared that, while her intelligence repudiated it. Stranger than ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... stern, unceasing years of labor on the farm. His tireless energy and his indomitable spirit came back, filling my mind with pictures of his swift and graceful use of axe and scythe, and when I spoke of the early days, he found it difficult to reply—they were so beautiful in retrospect. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... that he had meant neither a rudeness nor a wish to desecrate her reticence, but only an indirect assurance of gratitude to her for suffering him and willingness to serve her within the compass of his poverty-stricken powers. For in retrospect his invitation assumed the proportions of an importunity, an egregious piece of presumption: so that he could have groaned ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... these echoless silences, dust-covered but intrepid. They must now make the ascent of abrupt and massive bluffs. The summit attained, they pause for rest and retrospect. The trail has been obliterated. Every hoof-print in the sands has been erased. The trackless, yellow expanse now assumes alluring miles of colour; the royal purple of the shadows seems like tinted bands ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... a peaceful and grateful retrospect; the brothers all doing so well in their several ways, and such a comfort to their father. Tom, concerning whom she had made the greatest mistake, might be looked upon as rescued by Norman. Aubrey, Margaret said, smiling, was Ethel's ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... thus completed a painful retrospect of the appalling amount of crime committed by the colored population in the District at large, compared with the general mass of the white population, I now consider it my duty to advert more particularly to ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... discovery of different classes of animals in ancient rocks, to enable him to perceive at a glance how gradual has been our progress in tracing back the signs of vertebrata to formations of high antiquity. Such facts may be useful in warning us not to assume too hastily that the point which our retrospect may have reached at the present moment can be regarded as fixing the date of the first introduction of any one class of beings upon ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... read the book of fate, and have seen the forty years' fearful afflictions that were to follow, I certainly should not have rejoiced at this my escape from Glatz. One year's patience might have appeased the irritated monarch, and, taking a retrospect of all that has passed, I now find it would have been a fortunate circumstance, had the good and faithful Schell and I never met, since he also fell into a train of misfortunes, which I shall hereafter ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... head. He leaned back, half closed his eyes, put his finger-tips together, and almost smiled as if something in retrospect pleased ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... interest of the reigning Valois, not the Huguenots only but the rival houses of Guise and Bourbon. The word, the act, from hour to hour through what presented itself at the time as a long-continued season of frivolity, suggested in retrospect alike to friend and foe the close connexion of a mathematical problem. And yet that damning coincidence of date, day and hour apparently so exactly timed, in the famous letter to the Governor of Lyons, by which Charles, the trap being now ready, seems to shut all the doors upon escaping ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... more leisurely survey of things. The hoper's eyes are glued to the distant peak. The attainer of that peak may recover his breath and enjoy a complete panorama of his present achievement and may amuse himself moreover by re-climbing the mountain in retrospect. He has also yonder farther and loftier peak in his eye, which he may now look forward to attacking the week after next; for this little preliminary jaunt is giving him his mountain legs. Hence, while the hoper enjoys only the future, the achiever, if his joy-digesting ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... table before you the works of a Hammond and a Baxter, and reflect how many and how momentous their points of agreement, how few and almost childish the differences, which estranged and irritated these good men. Let us but imagine what their blessed spirits now feel at the retrospect of their earthly frailties, and can we do other than strive to feel as they now feel, not as they once felt? So will it be with the disputes between good men of the present day; and if you have no other reason ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... they, two weeks later, at the retrospect of many an unsuccessful chase from which they had returned—when, after twelve days spent in "jaging" the elephant, they had added only a single pair of tusks to the collection, and these the tusks of a cow-elephant, scarce two feet in length, and ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... judgment. It is said that, immediately upon the retirement of Mr. Fox, while Lord John Cavendish (whose resignation was for a short time delayed by the despatch of some official business) was still a minister, Mr. Burke, with a retrospect to the sweets of office which showed that he had not wholly left hope behind, endeavored to open a negotiation through the medium of Lord John, for the purpose of procuring, by some arrangement, either for himself or his son, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... This retrospect seems necessary before giving a summary of the various efforts to negotiate a peace. About the first open suggestion to that end came from General Robert E. Lee in a letter to President Davis written at Fredericktown, ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... the downtown district was almost deserted, took the crushed letter from his pocket. For a moment he made no attempt to read it, his dark eyes, now that he was free from observation, full of troubled retrospect, fixed on the window at his side. It was not a pleasant thought that it had cost a man his life, nor yet that that life was also the price of his own freedom. True, if there were two men in the city of New York whose crimes merited neither sympathy ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... beloved. Something that Miriam had said, in their final conversation, recurred to her memory, and seemed now to deserve more weight than Hilda had assigned to it, in her horror at the crime just perpetrated. It was not that the deed looked less wicked and terrible in the retrospect; but she asked herself whether there were not other questions to be considered, aside from that single one of Miriam's guilt or innocence; as, for example, whether a close bond of friendship, in ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... quality of the talk was far more manifest in the retrospect than it had been at the time. It had seemed then bold and strange, but not impossible; now in the cold darkness it seemed sacrilegious. And the bishop's share, which was indeed only the weak yielding of ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... to give a value to my recent labours, and my name may be remembered by after generations in Australia, as the first who tried to penetrate to its centre. If I failed in that great object, I have one consolation in the retrospect of my past services. My path amongst savage tribes has been a bloodless one, not but that I have often been placed in situations of risk and danger, when I might have been justified in shedding blood, but I trust I have ever made allowances for ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... a wise man who knows when he is happy and can appreciate the divine bliss of the tangible now. Most of us retrospect or anticipate ...
— The Damsel and the Sage - A Woman's Whimsies • Elinor Glyn
... me, overwhelmed and defeated me. I bent my head; I felt a shame, a degradation as though I should have crept into some shadow and hidden.... I would not mention this were it not that afterwards, in retrospect, the moment seemed to me an omen. After all, life is not always to ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... perhaps, a good deal to you; even its sorrows, in the retrospect, were good in their way; they meant something. And you look forward to happier things in the future; it will be a long and on the whole a successful future perhaps. Think of the variety and the opportunity which this great, multiform, ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... retrospect Stuart began to wonder at his host's strange behavior until of idle speculation suspicion was born, but as to that circumstance ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... breathed. The words above quoted are an example, and 'Chester,' it is said, was frequently heard from every fife in the New England ranks. The spirit of the Revolution was also manifest in his 'Lamentation over Boston,' his 'Retrospect,' his 'Independence,' his 'Columbia,' and ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... not been realized. Our hope of settling a township, to be represented in Parliament by one of our own people, was now forever blasted. I remembered too, that many of the colonists had been unjustly incited against my course; but in the retrospect my heart did not condemn me. Errors many, no doubt I had committed; but I was grateful, when reviewing the whole ground, for a conscience void of offence toward God and man; and I finally took my leave of all, craving the choicest blessings of Heaven to rest upon ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... with the recruits in a short time. Those Indios, only caught the other day, had gone swinging past in double quick time, like bersaglieri; they looked well fed, too, and had whole uniforms. "Uniforms!" he repeated with a half-smile of pity. A look of grim retrospect stole over his piercing, steady eyes. It had been otherwise in his time when men fought against tyranny, in the forests of Brazil, or on the plains of Uruguay, starving on half-raw beef without salt, half naked, with often only a knife tied to a stick for a ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... hardly an appreciable interval between the time of the desertion of her artists and the thunder of assault at her door, but in that space there passed before Amaryllis that useless retrospect which is death's recapitulation of the life it means to take. And out of that long procession, she singled one conviction which made the step of the Roman on her threshold welcome. It was an old, old moral, so old that it had never had weight with her, who believed ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... apart, and practically an extinct species: we need not pause to study its methods. In his fictitious plays, with two notable exceptions, it was Shakespeare's constant practice to bring the whole action within the frame of the picture, opening at such a point that no retrospect should be necessary, beyond what could be conveyed in a few casual words. The exceptions are The Tempest and Hamlet, to which we ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... active service one happens upon experiences that, though they make no immediate impression, become more prominent than the most dramatic events, when the period is past and can be viewed in retrospect. Sub-consciousness, wiser than the surface brain, penetrates to the inner sanctuary of true values, photographs something typical of war's many aspects, places the negative in the dark room of memory, and fades into inertia until again called upon to act as arbiter ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... to her would have been the time following the dawn of her own drama. A man in her place would have "looked up" the past—would even have consulted old newspapers. It remained remarkable indeed that in her long contact with the partner of her retrospect no accident had lighted a train; but there was no arguing about that; the accident had in fact come: it had simply been that security had prevailed. She had taken what Hague had given her, and her blankness in ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... minds To vaster issues. So to live is heaven: To make undying music in the world, Breathing a beauteous order that controls With growing sway the growing life of man. So we inherit that sweet purity For which we struggled, failed, and agonized With widening retrospect that bred despair. Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued, A vicious parent shaming still its child, Poor anxious penitence, is quick dissolved; Its discords quenched by meeting harmonies, Die in the large and charitable air. And all our rarer, better, truer self, That sobbed religiously ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... the story, until Fenton and I had made sure if there were anything golden about the mountain, except its name. If we were doomed to disappointment I could then give the tale a humorous turn, easier to do in retrospect than anticipation. Now, when in blinding light of noon we pointed out, in an impersonal manner, to all who cared to see, the pyramid-field of Meroee, it seemed strange to think that no heart but Anthony's and mine beat the faster. The sun was so hot that most people, blinking dazedly, retired behind ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... in mystical retrospect, beginning in vein of prologue: over mysterious murmuring strings, long sustained notes of the reed and horn in octave descent are mingled with a soft carillon of horns and trumpets in the call of the Scherzo. In broad swing ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... consequence of what Godwin expressly denounces, punishment for murder. "I conceived it to be in the highest degree absurd and iniquitous, to cut off a man qualified for the most essential and extensive utility, merely out of retrospect to an act which, whatever were its merits, could not be retrieved." Then a new element is imported into the train of causation, Caleb's insatiable curiosity, and the strife begins between these well-matched antagonists, the man of wealth and station utilizing ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... Corot, or an Aubert dips the pencil in the glowing sky, and transfers its hues to the canvas; so that, in after time, our souls are gladdened by some retrospect, which makes life dearer ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... meeting of the Conference. Remarks of the leading representative of a Catholic power, on the correspondence between the Vatican and the Netherlands Government which had been presented to the Conference. Retrospect of the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... a general retrospect, finally, of the effects produced by stimulus of light, we find that there is not a single phenomenon in the responses, normal or abnormal, exhibited by the retina which has not its counterpart in the sensitive cell constructed of ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... Howell, and in 1668 the death of Davenant opened the situation of poet-laureate. These two offices, with a salary of L200 paid quarterly, and the celebrated annual butt of canary, were conferred upon Dryden 18th August 1670.[29] The grant bore a retrospect to the term after Davenant's demise, and is declared to be to "John Dryden, master of arts, in consideration of his many acceptable services theretofore done to his present Majesty, and from an observation of his learning and eminent abilities, and his great skill ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... it is further urged that in historical retrospect, and in the light of evolution, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in the course of man's development from a savage and barbaric condition all manner of ills—bloodshed, slavery, etc.—have been necessary stages; may not, then, sin be claimed as constituting ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... an interesting task to compose a catalogue raisonne of Antinous statues and basreliefs, and to discuss the question of their mythological references. This is, however, not the place for such an inquiry. And yet I cannot quit Antinous without some retrospect upon the most important of his portraits. Among the simple busts, by far the finest, to my thinking, are the colossal head of the Louvre, and the ivy-crowned bronze at Naples. The latter is not only flawless in its execution, but is animated with a pensive beauty of expression. The ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... of sulphurous lake, No need of fiery coal, But only that crowd of human kind Who wanted pity and dole— In everlasting retrospect— Will ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... our great experiment is in itself a sufficient cause for gratitude, on account of the happiness it has actually conferred and the example it has unanswerably given But to me, my fellow-citizens, looking forward to the far-distant future with ardent prayers and confiding hopes, this retrospect presents a ground for still deeper delight. It impresses on my mind a firm belief that the perpetuity of our institutions depends upon ourselves; that if we maintain the principles on which they were established they are destined to confer their benefits ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... must still go on in laying these enormities before men's eyes, and let them answer for going on in their practice.[5] My province is much larger than at first sight men would imagine, and I shall lose no part of my jurisdiction, which extends not only to futurity, but also is retrospect to things past; and the behaviour of persons who have long ago acted their parts, is as much liable to my examination, as that of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... or home of a slave. They had not his habitual patience; and he saw that they were little likely to attain it; but they daily manifested qualities and powers—enterprise, forecast, and aspiration of various kinds, adorning their youth with a promise which made their father sigh at the retrospect of his own. He was amused, at the same time, to see in them symptoms of a boyish vanity, to which he had either not been prone, or which he had early extinguished. He detected in each the secret eagerness with which they looked forward to displaying their military ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... in the horrible throes of seasickness, had performed a radical operation for acute mastoiditis. There had been no facilities. The whole thing had been in the last degree makeshift. The half-trained stewardess had held his instruments ready for him, and the sea-sickness, comic in retrospect, had weighed heavily against Mr. Fletcher's chance of seeing land again. Nevertheless, the eminent New York surgeon, consulted at the first opportunity, had pronounced the operation a neat ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... character; one, finally, whose writings and whose life have happily concurred in winning for him general respect, esteem, and confidence. Then, in a sort of autobiography which Zschokke published a few years back, (Selbstschau, it is entitled—Self-retrospect,) there occurs the following passage, which I translate and give at length, from its marvellous interest, from its unquestioned fidelity, from the complete and irresistible evidence it affords that the phenomenon, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... But it is only now, in the retrospect of years, that I have any sense of triumph; for I had won the supremacy with small effort, comparatively,—with the small effort required of him who sees the conditions of a situation clearly, and, instead of trying to combat or to change ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... heat—these must I have or perish, and, but for the timely refuge of this thrice-blessed apothecary's shop, I might have left this retrospect unwritten! ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... conceived in the spirit of sincerity. Such is my design. It is given to the public with a perfect freedom from all party influence; with a total avoidance of all personality; with that calmness of retrospect which best becomes one who has no desire to share in the passions of the world; and with that wish of the French almanack-maker, which lies at the bottom of many a bulkier enterprise ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... considerations, Mr. Gladstone is far from assuming that they are conclusive upon the whole case; in dealing with which the government has hardly ever at any of its stages been furnished sufficiently with those means of judgment which rational men usually require. It may be that, on a retrospect, many errors will appear to have been committed. There are many reproaches, from the most opposite quarters, to which it might be difficult to supply a conclusive answer. Among them, and perhaps amongst the most difficult, as far as Mr. Gladstone ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... goodwill, and to the impressive effect of his preaching and teaching upon the people of the city.[12] Vadian, the Humanist and reformer of St. Gall, too, in spite of his disapproval of some of Denck's ideas, speaking of him in retrospect after his death, called him "a most gifted youth, possessed of all excellencies." But his teaching was too strange and unusual to be allowed currency even in free Strasbourg. After being granted a public discussion he was ordered to leave the city forthwith. During a short stay in Worms, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... that if hereafter the spirit of her husband could know anything of the troubles of his mortal life, could ever look back to the things which he had done in the flesh, then would he certainly know the truth, and all suspicion would be at an end. And if not, if there was to be no such retrospect, what did it matter now, for these few last hours before the coil should be shaken off, and all doubt and all sorrow should be at an end? But the wife, who was soon to be a widow, yearned to be acquitted in this world by him to whom her guilt ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... composed a poem, of fifteen hundred lines, entitled "Mahomet, or the Hegira," and performed the extraordinary mental effort of retaining the whole on his memory, at the period being unable to write. "The Retrospect," a poem of more matured power, was announced in 1824. At the recommendation of friends, having proceeded to Edinburgh to seek the counsel of men of letters, he submitted the MS. of his poem to Professor Wilson, Dr M'Crie, Mr ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Brook Farm as an Arcadia, for such in effect was the intention, and such is the retrospect to those who recall the hope from which it sprang.... The curious visitors who came to see poetry in practice saw with dismay hard work on every side, plain houses and simple fare, and a routine with little aesthetic aspect. Individual whims in dress ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... A calm retrospect of the reform movement, culminating in the acts of 1832, compels us to see how little the course of politics is guided by reason, and how much by circumstances. Every argument employed in that and the preceding year possessed equal force at the end of ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... the cares and pleasures of the world has been often recommended as useful to repentance. This at least is evident, that every one retires, whenever ratiocination and recollection are required on other occasions; and surely the retrospect of life, the disentanglement of actions complicated with innumerable circumstances, and diffused in various relations, the discovery of the primary movements of the heart, and the extirpation of lusts and appetites deeply rooted and widely spread, may ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... late reverend and venerable DR. MILLER of New Jersey, then an active minister of the Presbyterian church in this city, published here, in two large octavo volumes, the First Part of A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, containing a Sketch of the Revolutions and Improvements in Science, Arts and Literature, during that Period. Six other volumes were contemplated, to cover grounds since occupied by the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... wigwam, obliterating, in its ruthless, intrusive, advent, that lingering relic of the picturesque aspect of Indian life—a relic that, with its emblems and inner garniture of war, bids a scion of the race indulge a prideful retrospect of his sometime grandeur, and pristine might; that has power to invoke stirring recollections of a momentous and a thrilling past; to re-animate and summon before him the shadowy figures of his redoubtable sires, and re-enact their lofty deeds: ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... reconstruct his conception of the narrative, and may even re-read the entire passage through which the secret has been withheld from him. But in the theatre, the spectators cannot stop the play while they reconstruct in retrospect their judgment of a situation; and therefore, in the drama, a moment of surprise should be carefully led up to by anticipatory suggestion. Before Lady Macbeth is disclosed walking in her sleep, her doctor and her waiting-gentlewoman are sent on to tell the audience of her "slumbery agitation." ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... could have been given him the night of Mrs. Plume's unconscious escapade? The major well remembered that his demijohn had grown suddenly light, and that he had found himself surprisingly heavy, dull, and drowsy. The retrospect added to his gloom and depression. Byrne had not reoccupied his old room at Plume's, now that madame and Elise were once more under the major's roof, and even in extending the customary invitation, Plume felt confident that Byrne could not and should not ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... hindrance is want of rest; my nocturnal complaints grow less troublesome towards morning; and I am tempted to repair the deficiencies of the night[423].' Alas! how hard would it be if this indulgence were to be imputed to a sick man as a crime. In his retrospect on the following Easter-Eve, he says, 'When I review the last year, I am able to recollect so little done, that shame and sorrow, though perhaps too weakly, come upon me.' Had he been judging of any one ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... looked into sweet eyes and talked of Italian airs, when his future appeared all a succession of bright scenery and joyous acts, without any provision for a drop-curtain. And as my ear listened, and my mind wandered in this happy retrospect, my every faculty seemed exalted, and, without any thought upon the matter, I ground points upon my pins so fine, so regular and smooth, that they would have pierced with ease the leather of a boot, or slipped among, without abrasion, the finest ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... thoughtful man ever came to the end of his life, and had time and a little space of calm from which to look back upon it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what he had done unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect, and made him feel that he had played the man. That alone seems to him the real measure of himself, the real standard of his manhood. And so men grow by having responsibility laid upon them, the burden of other people's business. Their powers are put out at interest, and they ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... the self-renunciation of affection, there comes a spontaneous adjustment of various wills; and not an innocent pleasure is lost, not a pure taste offended, nor a peculiar temper unconsidered; and every day has its silent achievements of wisdom, and every night its retrospect of piety and love; and the tranquil thoughts, that in the evening meditation come down with the starlight, seem like the serenade of angels, bringing in melody the peace of God! Wherever this picture is realized, it is not by microscopic solicitude of spirit, but by ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... we enter into the particulars of this adventure, let us take a retrospect of the amours of his Royal Highness, prior to the declaration of his marriage, and particularly of what immediately preceded this declaration. It is allowable sometimes to drop the thread of a narrative, when real facts, not generally known, give such ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the storekeeper, it does not take very long before he accumulates a burden greater than he can carry. When he begins to totter he tries to pass some of the load over to others, and it is usually the storekeepers who are willing to assist him to the limit if his assets are in good retrospect. And what could be a greater security than a whole mountain full of gold? So the storekeepers assumed a large portion of the Too Sure Man's burden. And their loads became heavier and heavier. One day a company came along, attracted by the noise that had been made, and bonded the ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... On the other hand, many things happen to us in the way of pleasure and pain which we do not connect with any prior activity of our own. They are mere accidents so far as we are concerned. There is no before or after to such experience; no retrospect nor outlook, and consequently no meaning. We get nothing which may be carried over to foresee what is likely to happen next, and no gain in ability to adjust ourselves to what is coming—no added control. Only by courtesy can such an experience ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... In a historical retrospect greater and more revolutionary changes are seen to have occurred during the nineteenth century than in any century preceding. In these changes no department of thought and activity has failed to share, and theological thought has been quite as much affected as scientific ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... retrospect, in all conscience, to which we had just listened, and the prophetic utterance wherewith it had been wound up, while powerfully suggestive of a highly novel and picturesque experience in store for us, was certainly not attractive enough to cause us to look forward to its fulfilment with undisturbed ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... four in the afternoon. It seemed to me that nowhere in all the world was life so joyous and blithe and worth while as in "old New York"; nowhere were the theatres so attractive, nowhere such restaurants. Even, in retrospect, the subway looked alluring, and as for the Fifth Avenue stages they were too beautiful for words. Ah, what a builder of unreal things a spell of homesickness may become if one gives ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... a minute. Lady Kilmarny had said it would not be many weeks before the Turnours went to England. There, if Miss Paget (who seemed extremely nice by contrast and in retrospect) were still of the same mind, I might find a good home. If not, she was as kind as she was queer, and would help me look further. So I replied that I would accept the fifty francs, and would do my ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... This dame, who seemed more merry than refined, hailed me, seized me, and tried to seat me in her lap; a jolly and coarse old girl from whom, in my hour of sentiment, I fled with craven shrinking: to whom, upon a retrospect, I do more justice. The two lepers (both women) sat in the midst of their visitors, even the children (to my grief) touching them freely; the elder chatting at intervals—the girl in the same black weed and bowed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... falls," said Mrs. Wilfer, "shall I say into a reverie, or shall I say into a retrospect? on a day ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various |
